A Bend in the River - V.S. Naipaul [117]
I allowed him to send me home to the flat in the middle of the afternoon; he said he would close up. He didn’t go to his family afterwards, as was his custom. He came to the flat and discreetly let me know that he was there, and staying. I heard him tiptoeing about. There was no need for that, but the attention comforted me; and on that bed, where from time to time I caught some faint scent from the day before (no, that day itself), I began to sleep.
Time moved in jerks. Whenever I awakened I was confused. Neither the afternoon light nor the noisy darkness seemed right. So the second night passed. And the telephone didn’t ring and I didn’t telephone. In the morning Metty brought me coffee.
I went to Mahesh and Shoba’s for lunch: it seemed to me that I had been to Bigburger and received that invitation a long time ago.
The flat, with its curtains drawn to keep out the glare, with its nice Persian carpets and brass, and all its other fussy little pieces, was as I remembered it. It was a silent lunch, not especially a lunch of reunion or reconciliation. We didn’t talk about recent events. The topic of property values—at one time Mahesh’s favourite topic, but now depressing to everybody—didn’t come up. When we did talk, it was about what we were eating.
Towards the end Shoba asked about Yvette. It was the first time she had done so. I gave her some idea of how things were. She said, “I’m sorry. Something like that may not happen to you again for twenty years.” And after all that I had thought about Shoba, her conventional ways and her malice, I was amazed by her sympathy and wisdom.
Mahesh cleared the table and prepared the Nescafé—so far I had seen no servant. Shoba pulled one set of curtains apart a little, to let in more light. She sat, in the extra light, on the modern settee—shiny tubular metal frame, chunky padded armrests—and asked me to sit beside her. “Here, Salim.”
She looked carefully at me while I sat down. Then, lifting her head a little, she showed me her profile and said, “Do you see anything on my face?”
I didn’t understand the question.
She said, “Salim!” and turned her face full to me, keeping it lifted, fixing her eyes on mine. “Am I still badly disfigured? Look around my eyes and my left cheek. Especially the left cheek. What do you see?”
Mahesh had set down the cups of coffee on the low table and was standing beside me, looking with me. He said, “Salim can’t see anything.”
Shoba said, “Let him speak for himself. Look at my left eye. Look at the skin below the eye, and on the cheekbone.” And she held her face up, as though posing for a head on a coin.
Looking hard, looking for what she wanted me to find, I saw that what I had thought of as the colour of fatigue or illness below her eye was also in parts a very slight staining of the skin, a faint lividness on her pale skin, just noticeable on the left cheekbone. And having seen it, after having not seen it, I couldn’t help seeing it; and I saw it as the disfigurement she took it to be. She saw that I saw. She went sad, resigned.
Mahesh said, “It isn’t so bad now. You made him see it.”
Shoba said, “When I told my family that I was going to live with Mahesh, my brothers threatened to throw acid on my face. You could say that has come to pass. When my father died they sent me a cable. I took that as a sign that they wanted me to go back home for the ceremonies. It was a terrible way to go back —my father dead, the country in such a state, the Africans being so awful. I saw everybody on the edge of a precipice. But I couldn’t tell them that. When you asked them what they were going to do, they would pretend that it was all all right, there was nothing to worry about. And you would have to pretend with them. Why are we like that?
“One morning I don’t know what possessed me. There was this Sindhi girl who had studied in England—as she said—and had set up a hairdresser’s shop. The sun is very bright in the highlands there, and I