A Bend in the River - V.S. Naipaul [59]
He said he had been in the town for a couple of days and was going to stay for a few months. Had he come up by the steamer? He said, “You’re crazy. Cooped up with river Africans for seven days? I flew up.”
Metty said, “I wouldn’t go anywhere by the steamer. They tell me it’s horrible. And it’s even worse on the barge, with the latrines and the people cooking and eating everywhere. It’s horrible-horrible, they tell me.”
I asked Indar where he was staying: it had occurred to me that I should make the gesture of offering him hospitality. Was he staying at the van der Weyden?
This was the question he was waiting to be asked. He said in a soft and unassuming voice, “I’m staying at the State Domain. I have a house there. I’m a guest of the government.”
And Metty behaved more graciously than I. Metty slapped the desk and said, “Indar!”
I said, “The Big Man invited you?”
He began to scale it down. “Not exactly. I have my own outfit. I am attached to the polytechnic for a term. Do you know it?”
“I know someone there. A student.”
Indar behaved as though I had interrupted him; as though— although I lived in the place, and he had just arrived—I was trespassing, and had no right to know a student at the polytechnic.
I said, “His mother’s a marchande, one of my customers.”
That was better. He said, “You must come and meet some of the other people there. You may not like what’s going on. But you mustn’t pretend it isn’t happening. You mustn’t make that mistake again.”
I wanted to say: “I live here. I have lived through quite a lot in the last six years.” But I didn’t say that. I played up to his vanity. He had his own idea of the kind of man I was—and indeed he had caught me in my shop, at my ancestral business. He had his own idea of who he was and what he had done, the distance he had put between himself and the rest of us.
His vanity didn’t irritate me. I found I was relishing it, in the way that years before, on the coast, as a child, I had relished Nazruddin’s stories of his luck and of the delights of life here, in the colonial town. I hadn’t slapped the desk like Metty, but I was impressed by what I saw of Indar. And it was a relief to put aside the dissatisfactions he made me feel, to forget about being caught out, and to give him a straight admiration for what he had made of himself—for his London clothes and the privilege they spoke of, his travelling, his house in the Domain, his position at the polytechnic.
To give him admiration, to appear not to be competing or resisting, was to put him at his ease. As we chatted over our Nescafe, as Metty exclaimed from time to time, expressing in his servant’s manner the admiration which his master also felt, Indar’s edginess wore off. He became gentle, full of manners, concerned. At the end of the morning I felt I had at last made a friend of my kind. And I badly needed such a friend.
And far from being his host and guide, I became the man who was led about. It wasn’t all that absurd. I had so little to show him. All the key points of the town I knew could be shown in a couple of hours, as I discovered when I drove him around later that morning.
There was the river, with a stretch of broken promenade near the docks. There were the docks themselves; the repair yards with open corrugated-iron sheds full of rusting pieces of machinery; and some way downriver the ruined cathedral, beautifully overgrown and looking antique, like something in Europe—but you could only look from the road, because the bush was too thick and the site was famous for its snakes. There were the scuffed squares with their defaced and statueless pedestals; the official buildings from the colonial time in avenues lined with palmiste trees; the lycée, with the decaying masks in the gun room (but that bored Indar); the van der Weyden and Mahesh’s Bigburger place, which were hardly things to show