A Bend in the River - V.S. Naipaul [0]
NONFICTION
Between Father and Son: Family Letters
Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples
India: A Million Mutinies Now
A Turn in the South
Finding the Center
Among the Believers
The Return of Eva Perón (with The Killings in Trinidad)
India: A Wounded Civilization
The Overcrowded Barracoon
The Loss of El Dorado
An Area of Darkness
The Middle Passage
FICTION
Half a Life
A Way in the World
The Enigma of Arrival
A Bend in the River
Guerrillas
In a Free State
A Flag on the Island*
The Mimic Men
Mr. Stone and the Knights Companion*
A House for Mr. Biswas
Miguel Street
The Suffrage of Elvira*
The Mystic Masseur
*Published in an omnibus edition
entitled The Nightwatchman’s Occurrence Book
Vintage International Edition, March 1989
Copyright © 1979 by V.S. Naipaul
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions.
Published in the United States by Random House, Inc., New York.
Originally published by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, in May 1979.
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Naipaul, Vidiadhar Surajprasad.
A bend in the river.
I. Title.
PZ4.N155Be 1980 [PR9272.9.N32] 823′.9′14 79-22317
eISBN: 978-0-307-77658-7
13579D86420
v3.1
Contents
Cover
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Part One - The Second Rebellion
Part Two - The New Domain
Part Three - The Big Man
Part Four - Battle
About the Author
ONE
The Second Rebellion
1
The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.
Nazruddin, who had sold me the shop cheap, didn’t think I would have it easy when I took over. The country, like others in Africa, had had its troubles after independence. The town in the interior, at the bend in the great river, had almost ceased to exist; and Nazruddin said I would have to start from the beginning.
I drove up from the coast in my Peugeot. That isn’t the kind of drive you can do nowadays in Africa—from the east coast right through to the centre. Too many of the places on the way have closed down or are full of blood. And even at that time, when the roads were more or less open, the drive took me over a week.
It wasn’t only the sand drifts and the mud and the narrow, winding, broken roads up in the mountains. There was all that business at the frontier posts, all that haggling in the forest outside wooden huts that flew strange flags. I had to talk myself and my Peugeot past the men with guns—just to drive through bush and more bush. And then I had to talk even harder, and shed a few more bank notes and give away more of my tinned food, to get myself—and the Peugeot—out of the places I had talked us into.
Some of these palavers could take half a day. The top man would ask for something quite ridiculous—two or three thousand dollars. I would say no. He would go into his hut, as though there was nothing more to say; I would hang around outside, because there was nothing else for me to do. Then after an hour or two I would go inside the hut, or he would come outside, and we would settle for two or three dollars. It was as Nazruddin had said, when I asked him about visas and he had said that bank notes were better. “You can always get into those places. What is hard is to get out. That is a private fight. Everybody has to find his own way.”
As I got deeper into Africa—the scrub, the desert, the rocky climb up to the mountains, the lakes, the rain in the afternoons, the mud, and then, on the other, wetter side of the mountains, the fern forests and the gorilla forests—as I got deeper I thought: But this is madness. I am going in the wrong direction. There can’t be a new life at the end of this.
But I drove on. Each day’s drive was like an achievement; each day’s achievement made it harder for me to turn back. And I couldn’t help thinking that that was how it was in the old days with the slaves. They had made the same journey, but of course on foot and in the opposite direction, from the centre of the continent