A Bend in the River - V.S. Naipaul [61]
And in the strange world of the Domain Indar appeared to be well regarded. Part of this regard was due to the “outfit” to which he belonged. He couldn’t quite explain to me what the outfit was that sent him on African tours—or I might have been too naïve to understand. But a number of people on the Domain seemed to belong to outfits that were as mysterious; and they looked upon Indar not as a man of our community or a refugee from the coast, but as one of themselves. It was all a little extraordinary to me.
These were the new-style foreigners whom we, in the town, had seen arriving for some time past. We had seen them putting on African clothes; we had noticed their gaiety, so unlike our own caution; their happiness with everything they found. And we had considered them parasites and half dangerous, serving some hidden cause of the President’s, people we had to be careful with.
But now, being with them in the Domain, which in every way was their resort, and being admitted so easily to their life, their world of bungalows and air conditioners and holiday ease, catching in their educated talk the names of famous cities, I swung the other way and began to see how shut in and shabby and stagnant we in the town would have seemed to them. I began to get some sense of the social excitements of life on the Domain, of people associating in a new way, being more open, less concerned with enemies and danger, more ready to be interested and entertained, looking for the human worth of the other man. On the Domain they had their own way of talking about people and events; they were in touch with the world. To be with them was to have a sense of adventure.
I thought of my own life and Metty’s; of Shoba and Mahesh and their overheated privacy; of the Italians and Greeks—especially the Greeks—bottled up and tense with their family concerns and their nervousness of Africa and Africans. There was hardly anything new there. So to travel those few miles between the town and the Domain was always to make some adjustment, to assume a new attitude, and each time almost to see another country. I was ashamed of myself for the new judgments I found myself making on my friends Shoba and Mahesh, who had done so much for me for so many years, and with whom I had felt so safe. But I couldn’t help those thoughts. I was tilting the other way, to the life of the Domain, as I saw it in the company of Indar.
I was aware, in the Domain, that I belonged to the other world. When I met people with Indar I found I had little to say. There were times when I thought that I might be letting him down. But there seemed to be no such thought in his head. He introduced me round as a friend of his family’s from the coast, a member of his community. He didn’t only want me to witness his success with the people of the Domain; he seemed to want me to share it as well. It was his way of rewarding me for my admiration, and I saw a delicacy in him that I had never seen on the coast. His manners were like a form of consideration; and however small the occasion, his manners never failed. They were the manners of an impresario, a little bit. But it was also his old family style; it was as though he had needed security and admiration to bring it out again. In the artificiality of the Domain he had found his perfect setting.
We in the town could offer Indar nothing like the regard and the social excitements he enjoyed at the Domain; we could scarcely appreciate what he enjoyed there. With our cynicism, created by years of insecurity, how did we look on men? We judged the salesmen in the van der Weyden by the companies they represented, their ability to offer us concessions. Knowing such