A Bend in the River: Part Two

Mahesh, broaching a new idea, liked to be mysterious.

Mahesh did more than that. He pulled off a coup. He continued to consult catalogues, fill in coupons, write off for further information; and at last he found the package he had been looking for, the thing he could import whole and use as a short-cut to business and money. He got the Bigburger franchise for our town.

Photographs of this State Domain—and of others like it in other parts of the country—began to appear in those magazines about Africa that were published in Europe but subsidized by governments like ours.

Under the rule of our new President the miracle had occurred: Africans had become modern men who built in concrete and glass and sat in cushioned chairs covered in imitation velvet. It was like a curious fulfilment of Father Huismans's prophecy about the retreat of African Africa, and the success of the European graft.

Visitors were encouraged, from the cités and shanty towns, from the surrounding villages.

But one afternoon, when I went to the flat after closing the shop, I saw her on the pavement outside, standing among the dusty hummocks of wild grass near the side entrance to our back yard.

He lost the brightness and gaiety of the servant who knows that he will be looked after, that others will decide for him; and he lost what went with that brightness—the indifference to what had just happened, the ability to forget, the readiness for every new day.

His family, though new on the coast, had outstripped us all; and even their low beginnings—the grandfather who was a railway labourer, then a market money-lender—had become (from the way people spoke) a little sacred, part of their wonderful story.

There was the river, with a stretch of broken promenade near the docks.

As we drove to the Domain—the intervening area, once empty, now filling up with the shacks of new arrivals from the villages: shacks which, in Indar's company, I seemed to be seeing for the first time: the red ground between the shacks stained with rivulets of black or grey-green filth, maize and cassava planted in every free space—as we drove, Indar said, "How long did you say you've been living here?"

In spite of everything, I had thought of the town as a real town; I saw it now as an agglomeration of shack settlements.

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.

With our cynicism, created by years of insecurity, how did we look on men?

I had remembered them as little tricksters, pertinacious but foolish, with only a kind of village cunning; and I had assumed that for them studying meant only cramming.

There was a ritual I went through whenever I had to clear a difficult consignment through the customs. I filled in the declaration form, folded it over five hundred francs, and handed it to the official in charge.

Raymond said, “It made a pleasant background. If I look a little troubled, it is because just now, in that room, I became very dejected. I began to wonder, as I’ve often wondered, whether the truth ever gets known. The idea isn’t new, but there are times when it becomes especially painful. I feel that everything one does is just going to waste.”

He’s disciplined the army and brought peace to this land of many peoples. It is possible once again to traverse the country from one end to the other—something the colonial power thought it alone had brought about. And what is most remarkable is that it’s been done without coercion, and entirely with the consent of the people.

Raymond said, “I don’t know about that. It is a stick. It is a chief's stick. It is like a mace or a mitre. I don’t think we have to fall into the error of looking for African mysteries everywhere."

“I have recently had occasion to look through all the President’s speeches. Now, what an interesting publication that would make! Not the speeches in their entirety, which inevitably deal with many passing issues. But selections. The essential thoughts."

Has any ruler attempted to give sanctity to the bush of Africa? This act of piety is something that brings tears to the eyes. Can you imagine the humiliations of an African hotel maid in colonial times? No amount of piety can make up for that. But piety is all we have to offer.

As I was sitting with you I had an idea of a possible solution to a problem that was beginning to appear quite intractable.

We have no idea of the value posterity will place on the events we attempt to chronicle. We have no idea where the continent is going.

The evening that had excited me had enervated and depressed him; he had become irritable as soon as we had left Yvette’s house.

For some time the boys of my year at the university had been talking of jobs and interviews. The more precocious ones had even been talking about the interview expenses various companies paid.

The bus took me down the Strand and dropped me at the curve of the Aldwych, and I crossed the road to the building that had been pointed out to me as India House. How could I have missed it, with all the Indian motifs on the outside wall?

He knocked, opened; and with his hunched gait, his prepared cringe, disappeared.

These thoughts surprised and pained me. They were more than heretical. They destroyed what remained of my faith in the way the world was ordered.

He held them one by one against his chest, giving the black man an anxious open-mouthed smile every time, and then looking down at what he was showing, so that, with his head bowed over his drawings, and with the cringe that was already there, he looked like a man doing penance, displaying one sin after another.

I began to understand at the same time that my anguish about being a man adrift was false, that for me that dream of home and security was nothing more than a dream of isolation, anachronistic and stupid and very feeble.

We have nothing. We solace ourselves with that idea of the great men of our tribe, the Gandhi and the Nehru....

It was a bohemian life, and it was attractive at first. Then it became depressing.

And Yvette, whenever I saw her, in harsher electric light or ordinary daylight, confounded me again and again, so different from what I remembered.

The change from the Domain to the shanty settlements outside—with their scattered plantings of maize, their runnels of filth and mounds of sifted rubbish—jarred more on me than on him.

Rustic manners, forest manners, in a setting not of the forest.

He had conscientiously used the forbidden words—monsieur, madame; he had spread a tablecloth.

My own nervousness was soothed; my mood was buoyant: I would leave the steamer with Yvette.

And yet that face, of rage, still seemed close to a smile; and those slanting eyes, half closed above the small cup of coffee which she was holding at the level of her mouth, were quite demure.

“You live your life. A stranger appears. He is an encumbrance. You don't need him. But the encumbrance can become a habit."

And that evening when she gave a party and wore her Margit Brandt blouse began to appear like an aberration.

I had visions of beggary and decrepitude: the man not of Africa lost in Africa, no longer with the strength or purpose to hold his own, and with less claim to anything than the ragged, half-starved old drunks from the villages who wandered about the square, eyeing the food stalls, cadging mouthfuls of beer...