A Bend in the River - V.S. Naipaul [127]
“So at the end of the dinner Indar was in a state. He thought about the cheap hotels he had looked at, and as he was going down in the elevator he had a wild panic. He thought he was going to pass out. But he got outside all right, and there he calmed down. He had got a simple idea. The idea was that it was time for him to go home, to get away.
“And that’s how it has been with him. From time to time that is all he knows, that it is time for him to go home. There is some dream village in his head. In between he does the lowest kind of job. He knows he is equipped for better things, but he doesn’t want to do them. I believe he enjoys being told he can do better. We’ve given up now. He doesn’t want to risk anything again. The idea of sacrifice is safer, and he likes the act. But you will see for yourself, when you come back.”
Kareisha, talking about Indar, touched me more than she knew. That idea of going home, of leaving, the idea of the other place—I had lived with it in various forms for many years. In Africa it had always been with me. In London, in my hotel room, I had allowed it on some nights to take me over. It was a deception. I saw now that it comforted only to weaken and destroy.
That illumination I held on to, about the unity of experience and the illusion of pain, was part of the same way of feeling. We fell into it—people like Indar and myself—because it was the basis of our old way of life. But I had rejected that way of life—and just in time. In spite of the girls in the cigarette kiosks, that way of life no longer existed, in London or Africa. There could be no going back; there was nothing to go back to. We had become what the world outside had made us; we had to live in the world as it existed. The younger Indar was wiser. Use the airplane; trample on the past, as Indar had said he had trampled on the past. Get rid of that idea of the past; make the dream-like scenes of loss ordinary.
That was the mood in which I left London and Kareisha, to go back to Africa, to wind up there, realise as much as I could of what I had. And make a fresh start somewhere else.
I got to Brussels in the late afternoon. The plane for Africa was leaving from there at midnight. I felt afresh the drama of airplane travel: London vanished, Africa to come, Brussels now. I gave myself dinner and went to a bar afterwards, a place with women. All the excitement lay in the idea of the place rather than the place itself. What followed, some time later, was brief and meaningless and reassuring. It didn’t lessen the value of what I had had in Africa: that was no delusion; that remained true. And it removed the special doubt I felt about my engagement to Kareisha, whom I had not yet even kissed.
The woman, naked, unruffled, stood in front of a long mirror and looked at herself. Fat legs, roundish belly, chunky breasts. She said, “I’ve begun to do yoga with a group of friends. We have a teacher. Do you do yoga?”
“I play a lot of squash.”
She paid no attention. “Our teacher says that a man’s psychic fluids can overpower a woman. Our teacher says that after a dangerous encounter a woman can become herself again by clapping her hands hard or by taking a deep breath. Which method do you recommend?”
“Clap your hands.”
She faced me as she might have faced her yoga teacher, drew herself up, half closed her eyes, pulled her outstretched arms back, and brought her hands violently together. At the sound, startling in the over-furnished little room, she opened her eyes, looked surprised, smiled as though she had been joking all along, and said, “Go!” When I was out in the street I took a deep breath, and went straight to the airport to catch the midnight plane.
FOUR
Battle
16
The dawn came suddenly, in the west pale blue, in the east red with thick horizontal bars of black cloud. And for many minutes it was