A Bend in the River - V.S. Naipaul [103]
I had done better than that. What (using Nazruddin’s scale) I had bought at two I had taken over the years to twenty. But now, with Noimon’s departure, it had dropped to fifteen.
Noimon’s departure marked the end of our boom, the end of confidence. We all knew that. But at the Hellenic Club—where only a fortnight before, throwing dust in our eyes, Noimon had been talking in his usual practical way about improving the swimming pool—we put a brave face on things.
I heard it said that Noimon had sold up only for the sake of his children’s education; it was also said that he had been pressured by his wife (Noimon was rumoured to have a second, half-African family). And then it began to be said that Noimon would regret his decision. Copper was copper, the boom was going to go on, and while the Big Man was in charge, everything would keep on running smoothly. Besides, though Australia and Europe and North America were nice places to visit, life there wasn’t as rosy as some people thought—and Noimon, after a lifetime in Africa, was going to find that out pretty soon. We lived better where we were, with servants and swimming pools, luxuries that only millionaires had in those other places.
It was a lot of nonsense. But they had to say what they said, though that point about the swimming pools was especially stupid, because in spite of the foreign technicians our water supply system had broken down. The town had grown too fast, and too many people were still coming in; in the shanty towns the emergency standpipes used to run all day long; and water was now rationed everywhere. Some of the swimming pools—and we didn’t have so many—had been drained. In some the filtering machinery had simply been turned off—economy or inexperience—and those pools had become choked with brilliant green algae and wilder growths, and looked like poisonous forest ponds. But the swimming pools existed, whatever their condition, and people could talk about them as they did because here we liked the idea of the swimming pool better than the thing itself. Even when the pools worked they hadn’t been used much; it was as if we hadn’t yet learned to fit this bothersome luxury into our day-to-day life.
I reported the Hellenic Club chatter back to Mahesh, expecting him to share my attitude or at least to see the joke, bad as the joke was for us.
But Mahesh didn’t see the joke. He, too, made the point about the superior quality of our life in the town.
He said, “I’m glad Noimon has gone. Let him get a taste of the good life out there. I hope he relishes it. Shoba has some Ismaili friends in London. They’re having a very nice taste of the life over there. It isn’t all Harrods. They’ve written to Shoba. Ask her. She will tell you about her London friends. What they call a big house over there would be like a joke to us here. You’ve seen the salesmen at the van der Weyden. That’s expenses. Ask them how they live back home. None of them live as well as I live here.”
I thought later that it was the “I” in Mahesh’s last sentence that offended me. Mahesh could have put it better. That “I” gave me a glimpse of what had enraged Indar about his lunch with Mahesh and Shoba. Indar had said: “They don’t know who I am or what I’ve done. They don’t even know where I’ve been.” He had seen what I hadn’t seen: it was news to me that Mahesh thought he was living “well.” in the way he meant.
I hadn’t noticed any great change in his style. He and Shoba still lived in their concrete flat with the sitting room full of shiny things. But Mahesh wasn’t joking. Standing in his nice clothes by his imported coffee machine in his franchise-given shop, he really thought he was something, successful and complete, really