A Bend in the River Read online

  Shoba and Mahesh were the people I felt closest to, and I soon thought of them as friends. They had a shop in what ought to have been a prime commercial position, opposite the van der Weyden Hotel. Like me, they were migrants from the east and refugees from their own community. They were an extraordinarily good-looking couple; it was strange, in our town, to find people so careful of their dress and appearance. But they had lived too long apart from their fellows and had forgotten how to be curious about them. Like many isolated people, they were wrapped up in themselves and not too interested in the world outside. And this beautiful couple had their days of tension. Shoba, the lady, was vain and neurotic. Mahesh, the simpler partner, could be in a state of anxiety about her.

  That was my life in Nazruddin’s town. I had wanted to break away and make a fresh start. But there are degrees in everything, and I felt burdened by the bareness of my days. My life was unconstricted, but narrower than it had ever been; the solitude of my evenings was like an ache. I didn’t think I had the resources to last. My comfort was that I had lost little, except time; I could always move on—though where, I didn’t yet know. And then I found I couldn’t move. I had to stay.

  What I had feared would happen on the coast came to pass. There was an uprising; and the Arabs—men almost as African as their servants—had been finally laid low.

  I first heard the news from my friends Shoba and Mahesh, who had got it from the radio—that expatriate habit of listening to the BBC news was something I had not yet got into. We treated the news as a secret, as something that had to be kept from the local people; this was one occasion when we were glad there was no local newspaper.

  Then newspapers from Europe and the United States came to various people in the town and were passed around; and it was extraordinary to me that some of the newspapers could have found good words for the butchery on the coast. But people are like that about places in which they aren’t really interested and where they don’t have to live. Some papers spoke of the end of feudalism and the dawn of a new age. But what had happened was not new. People who had grown feeble had been physically destroyed. That, in Africa, was not new; it was the oldest law of the land.

  Letters eventually came from the coast—in a batch—from members of my family. They were cautiously written, but their message was plain. There was no place for us on the coast; our life there was over. The family was scattering. Only old people would stay on in our family compound—a quieter life there, at last. The family servants, burdensome to the end, refusing to go away, insisting on their slave status even at this time of revolution, were being split up among the family. And one of the points of the letters was that I had to take my share.

  It was not for me to choose whom I wanted; apparently I had already been chosen by someone. One of the boys or young men from the servant houses wanted to get as far away from the coast as possible, and he had been firm about being sent “to stay with Salim.” The boy said he had always had “a special liking for Salim,” and he had made such a fuss that they had decided to send him to me. I could imagine the scene. I could imagine the screaming and the stamping and the sulking. That was how the servants got their way in our house; they could be worse than children. My father, not realising what other people in the family had written, simply said in his letter that he and my mother had decided to send someone to look after me—he meant, of course, that he was sending me a boy to look after and feed.

  I couldn’t say no: the boy was on his way. That this boy had “a special liking” for me was news to me. A better reason for his choice of me was that I was just three or four years older than he was, unmarried, and more likely to put up with his wandering ways. He had always been a wanderer. We had sent him to the Koranic school when he was small, but he was always running off somewhere else, in spite of beatings by his mother. (And how he screamed in the quarters, and how his mother shouted—both of them overdoing the drama, trying to get as much attention as possible from the rest of the compound!) He was nobody’s idea of a house servant. With bed and board always provided, he was more a man about town, friendly and unreliable and full of friends, always willing, always offering to help, and never doing a quarter of what he promised.

  He turned up at the flat one evening in one of Daulat’s trucks, not long after I had got the letters saying that he had been sent. And my heart went out to him: he looked so altered, so tired and frightened. He was still living with the shock of events on the coast; and he hadn’t liked the journey across Africa at all.

  He had done the first half of the journey by the railway, which travelled at an average speed of ten miles an hour. Then he had transferred to buses and finally to Daulat’s trucks: in spite of wars, bad roads and worn-out vehicles, Daulat, a man of our community, maintained a trucking service between our town and the eastern frontier. Daulat’s drivers helped the boy past the various officials. But the mixed-race man about town from the coast was still African enough to be unsettled by his passage through the strange tribes of the interior. He couldn’t bring himself to eat their food, and he hadn’t eaten for days. Without knowing it, he had made in reverse the journey which some of his ancestors had made a century or more before.

  He threw himself into my arms, converting the Muslim embrace into a child’s clinging. I patted him on the back, and he took this as a signal to scream the place down. Right away, between screams and bawls, he began telling me about the killings he had seen in the market at home.

  I didn’t take in all that he was saying. I was worried about the neighbours, and trying to get him to tone down the screaming, trying to get him to understand that that kind of showing-off slave behaviour (which it partly was) was all right on the coast, but that people here wouldn’t understand. He was beginning to go on a little bit, too, about the savagery of the kafar, the Africans, behaving as though my flat was the family compound and he could shout anything he wanted about people outside. And all the time Daulat’s friendly African loader was coming up the external staircase with luggage—not much, but in many small, awkward pieces: a few bundles, a wickerwork laundry basket, some cardboard boxes.

  I broke away from the bawling boy—to pay attention was to encourage him—and I dealt with the loader, walking out with him to the street to tip him. The bawling in the flat upstairs died down, as I had expected; solitude and the strangeness of the flat were having their effect; and when I went back up I refused to hear any more from the boy until he had had something to eat.

  He became quiet and correct, and while I prepared some baked beans and cheese on toast he brought out, from his bundles and boxes, the things that had been sent me by my family. Ginger and sauces and spices from my mother. Two family photographs from my father, and a wall print on cheap paper of one of our holy places in Gujarat, showing it as a modern place, though: the artist had put in motorcars and motorbikes and bicycles and even trains pell-mell in the surrounding streets. It was my father’s way of saying that, modern as I was, I would return to the faith.

  “I was in the market, Salim,” the boy said, after he had eaten. “At first I thought it was just a quarrel around Mian’s stall. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. They were behaving as though knives didn’t cut, as though people weren’t made of flesh. I couldn’t believe it. At the end it was as if a pack of dogs had got into a butcher’s stall. I saw arms and legs bleeding and lying about. Just like that. They were still there the next day, those arms and legs.”

  I tried to stop him. I didn’t want to hear more. But it wasn’t easy to stop him. He went on about those cut-off arms and legs that belonged to people we had known since we were children. It was terrible, what he had seen. But I was also beginning to feel that he was trying to excite himself to cry a little bit more after he had stopped wanting to cry. I felt that it worried him to find that from time to time he was forgetting, and thinking of other things. He seemed to be wanting to thrill himself again and again; and this disturbed me.

  In a few days, though, he thawed o
ut. And the events of the coast were never spoken of again. He settled down more easily than I expected. I had expected him to go sulky and withdrawn; I had thought, especially after his unhappy journey, that he would have hated our backward town. But he liked it; and he liked it because he was himself liked, in a way he hadn’t been before.

  Physically he was quite different from the local people. He was taller, more muscular, looser and more energetic in his movements. He was admired. The local women, with their usual free ways, made no secret of finding him desirable—calling out to him in the street, and stopping and staring with wicked, half-smiling (and slightly crossed) eyes that appeared to say: “Consider this a joke, and laugh. Or take it seriously.” My own way of looking at him changed. He ceased to be one of the boys from the servant houses. I saw what the local people saw; in my own eyes he became more handsome and distinctive. To the local people he wasn’t quite an African, and he aroused no tribal uneasiness; he was an exotic with African connections whom they wanted to claim. He flourished. He picked up the local language fast, and he even got a new name.

  At home we had called him Ali or—when we wanted to suggest the special wild and unreliable nature of this Ali—Ali-wa (“Ali! Ali! But where is this Ali-wa?”). He rejected his name now. He preferred to be called Metty, which was what the local people called him. It was some time before I understood that it wasn’t a real name, that it was just the French word métis, someone of mixed race. But that wasn’t how I used it. To me it was only a name: Metty.

  Here, as on the coast, Metty was a wanderer. He had the bedroom just across the passage from the kitchen; it was the first door on the right as you came in from the landing of the external staircase. I often heard him coming in late at night. That was the freedom he had come to me for. But the Metty who enjoyed that freedom was a different person from the boy who had arrived bawling and screaming, with the manners of the servant house. He had quickly shed those manners; he had developed a new idea of his worth. He became useful in the shop; and in the flat, his wandering habits—which I had dreaded—kept his presence light. But he was always there, and in the town he was like one of my own. He lessened my solitude and made the empty months more bearable—months of waiting for trade to start up again. As, very slowly, it was beginning to do.

  We fell into the routine of morning coffee at the flat, shop, separate lunches, shop, separate evenings. Man and master sometimes met, as equals with equal needs, in the dark little bars that began to appear in our town, signs of reawakening life: rough little cells with roofs of corrugated iron, no ceilings, concrete walls painted dark blue or green, red concrete floors.

  In one such place Metty put the seal on our new relationship one evening. When I entered I saw him dancing fantastically—slim-waisted, narrow-hipped, wonderfully made. He stopped as soon as he saw me—his servant’s instinct. But then he bowed and made a show of welcoming me as though he owned the place. He said, in the French accent he had picked up, “I must do nothing indecent in front of the patron.” And that was precisely what he went on to do.

  So he learned to assert himself. But there were no strains between us. And he became, increasingly, an asset. He became my customs clerk. He was always good with the customers and won me and the shop much goodwill. As an exotic, a licensed man, he was the only person in the town who would risk making a joke with Zabeth, the marchande who was also a sorceress.

  That was how it was with us, as the town came to life again, as the steamers started to come up again from the capital, once a week, then twice a week, as people began coming back from the villages to the cités in the town, as trade grew and my business, which had stood for so long at zero, climbed (to use Nazruddin’s scale of ten) back up to two, and even gave me glimpses of four.

  3

  Zabeth, as a magician or sorceress, kept herself from men.

  But it hadn’t always been so; Zabeth hadn’t always been a magician. She had a son. She spoke of him sometimes to me, but she spoke of him as part of a life she had put behind her. She made that son seem so far away that I thought the boy might be dead. Then one day she brought him to the shop.

  He was about fifteen or sixteen, and already quite big, taller and heavier than the men of our region, whose average height was about five feet. His skin was perfectly black, with nothing of his mother’s copper colour; his face was longer and more firmly modelled; and from what Zabeth said I gathered that the boy’s father came from one of the tribes of the south.

  The boy’s father was a trader. As a trader, he had travelled about the country during the miraculous peace of the colonial time, when men could, if they wished, pay little attention to tribal boundaries. That was how, during his travels, he and Zabeth had met; it was from this trader that Zabeth had picked up her trading skills. At independence, tribal boundaries had become important again, and travel was not as safe as it had been. The man from the south had gone back to his tribal land, taking the son he had had by Zabeth. A father could always claim his child; there were any number of folk sayings that expressed this almost universal African law. And Ferdinand—that was the name of the boy—had spent the last few years away from his mother. He had gone to school in the south, in one of the mining towns, and had been there through all the troubles that had come after independence, especially the long secessionist war.

  Now for some reason—perhaps because the father had died, or had married again and wished to get rid of Ferdinand, or simply because Zabeth had wished it—Ferdinand had been sent back to his mother. He was a stranger in the land. But no one here could be without a tribe; and Ferdinand, again according to tribal custom, had been received into his mother’s tribe.

  Zabeth had decided to send Ferdinand to the lycée in our town. That had been cleaned up and got going again. It was a solid two-story, two-courtyard stone building in the colonial-official style, with wide verandahs upstairs and downstairs. Squatters had taken over the downstairs part, cooking on fire stones in the verandah and throwing out their rubbish onto the courtyards and grounds. Strange rubbish, not the tins and paper and boxes and other containers you would expect in a town, but a finer kind of waste—shells and bones and ashes, burnt sacking—which made the middens look like grey-black mounds of sifted earth.

  The lawns and gardens had been scuffed away. But the bougainvillaea had grown wild, choking the tall palmiste trees, tumbling over the lycée wall, and climbing up the square pillars of the main gate to twine about the decorative metal arch where, in letters of metal, was still the lycée motto: Semper Aliquid Novi. The squatters, timid and half-starved, had moved out as soon as they had been asked. Some doors and windows and shutters had been replaced, the plumbing repaired, the place painted, the rubbish on the grounds carted away, the grounds asphalted over; and in the building which I had thought of as a ruin there had begun to appear the white faces of the teachers.

  It was as a lycée boy that Ferdinand came to the shop. He wore the regulation white shirt and short white trousers. It was a simple but distinctive costume; and—though the short trousers were a little absurd on someone so big—the costume was important both to Ferdinand and to Zabeth. Zabeth lived a purely African life; for her only Africa was real. But for Ferdinand she wished something else. I saw no contradiction; it seemed to me natural that someone like Zabeth, living such a hard life, should want something better for her son. This better life lay outside the timeless ways of village and river. It lay in education and the acquiring of new skills; and for Zabeth, as for many Africans of her generation, education was something only foreigners could give.

  Ferdinand was to be a boarder at the lycée. Zabeth had brought him to the shop that morning to introduce him to me. She wanted me to keep an eye on him in the strange town and take him under my protection. If Zabeth chose me for this job, it wasn’t only because I was a business associate she had grown to trust. It was also because I was a foreigner, and English-speaking as well, someone from whom Ferdinand could learn manners and the ways of the ou
tside world. I was someone with whom Ferdinand could practise.

  The tall boy was quiet and respectful. But I had the feeling that that would last only while his mother was around. There was something distant and slightly mocking in his eyes. He seemed to be humouring the mother he had only just got to know. She was a village woman; and he, after all, had lived in a mining town in the south, where he must have seen foreigners a good deal more stylish than myself. I didn’t imagine him having the respect for my shop that his mother had. It was a concrete barn, with the shoddy goods spread all over the floor (but I knew where everything was). No one could think of it as a modern place; and it wasn’t as brightly painted as some of the Greek shops.

  I said, for Ferdinand’s benefit as well as Zabeth’s, “Ferdinand’s a big boy, Beth. He can look after himself without me.”

  “No, no, Mis’ Salim. Fer’nand will come to you. You beat him whenever you want.”

  There was little likelihood of that. But it was only a way of speaking. I smiled at Ferdinand and he smiled at me, pulling back the corners of his mouth. The smile made me notice the neatness of his mouth and the sharp-cut quality of the rest of his features. In his face I felt I could see the starting point of certain kinds of African masks, in which features were simplified and strengthened; and, with memories of those masks, I thought I saw a special distinction in his features. The idea came to me that I was looking at Ferdinand with the eyes of an African, and that was how I always looked at him. It was the effect on me of his face, which I saw then and later as one of great power.