A Bend in the River - V.S. Naipaul [1]
When I arrived I found that Nazruddin hadn’t lied. The place had had its troubles: the town at the bend in the river was more than half destroyed. What had been the European suburb near the rapids had been burnt down, and bush had grown over the ruins; it was hard to distinguish what had been gardens from what had been streets. The official and commercial area near the dock and customs house survived, and some residential streets in the centre. But there wasn’t much else. Even the African cités were inhabited only in corners, and in decay elsewhere, with many of the low, box-like concrete houses in pale blue or pale green abandoned, hung with quick-growing, quick-dying tropical vines, mattings of brown and green.
Nazruddin’s shop was in a market square in the commercial area. It smelt of rats and was full of dung, but it was intact. I had bought Nazruddin’s stock—but there was none of that. I had also bought the goodwill—but that was meaningless, because so many of the Africans had gone back to the bush, to the safety of their villages, which lay up hidden and difficult creeks.
After my anxiety to arrive, there was little for me to do. But I was not alone. There were other traders, other foreigners; some of them had been there right through the troubles. I waited with them. The peace held. People began coming back to the town; the cité yards filled up. People began needing the goods which we could supply. And slowly business started up again.
Zabeth was among the earliest of my regular customers. She was a marchande—not a market woman, but a retailer in a small way. She belonged to a fishing community, almost a little tribe, and every month or so she came from her village to the town to buy her goods wholesale.
From me she bought pencils and copybooks, razor blades, syringes, soap and toothpaste and toothbrushes, cloth, plastic toys, iron pots and aluminum pans, enamel plates and basins. These were some of the simple things Zabeth’s fisherfolk needed from the outside world, and had been doing without during the troubles. Not essentials, not luxuries; but things that made ordinary life easier. The people here had many skills; they could get by on their own. They tanned leather, wove cloth, worked iron; they hollowed out large tree trunks into boats and smaller ones into kitchen mortars. But to people looking for a large vessel that wouldn’t taint water and food, and wouldn’t leak, imagine what a blessing an enamel basin was!
Zabeth knew exactly what the people of her village needed and how much they would be able or willing to pay for it. Traders on the coast (including my own father) used to say—especially when they were consoling themselves for some bad purchase—that everything eventually had its buyer. That wasn’t so here. People were interested in new things—like the syringes, which were a surprise to me—and even modern things; but their tastes had set around the first examples of these things that they had accepted. They trusted a particular design, a particular trademark. It was useless for me to try to “sell” anything to Zabeth; I had to stick as far as possible to familiar stock. It made for dull business, but it avoided complications. And it helped to make Zabeth the good and direct businesswoman that, unusually for an African, she was.
She didn’t know how to read and write. She carried her complicated shopping list in her head and she remembered what she had paid for things on previous occasions. She never asked for credit—she hated the idea. She paid in cash,