A Bend in the River - V.S. Naipaul [15]
He turned up at the flat one evening in one of Daulat’s trucks, not long after I had got the letters saying that he had been sent. And my heart went out to him: he looked so altered, so tired and frightened. He was still living with the shock of events on the coast; and he hadn’t liked the journey across Africa at all.
He had done the first half of the journey by the railway, which travelled at an average speed of ten miles an hour. Then he had transferred to buses and finally to Daulat’s trucks: in spite of wars, bad roads and worn-out vehicles, Daulat, a man of our community, maintained a trucking service between our town and the eastern frontier. Daulat’s drivers helped the boy past the various officials. But the mixed-race man about town from the coast was still African enough to be unsettled by his passage through the strange tribes of the interior. He couldn’t bring himself to eat their food, and he hadn’t eaten for days. Without knowing it, he had made in reverse the journey which some of his ancestors had made a century or more before.
He threw himself into my arms, converting the Muslim embrace into a child’s clinging. I patted him on the back, and he took this as a signal to scream the place down. Right away, between screams and bawls, he began telling me about the killings he had seen in the market at home.
I didn’t take in all that he was saying. I was worried about the neighbours, and trying to get him to tone down the screaming, trying to get him to understand that that kind of showing-off slave behaviour (which it partly was) was all right on the coast, but that people here wouldn’t understand. He was beginning to go on a little bit, too, about the savagery of the kafar, the Africans, behaving as though my flat was the family compound and he could shout anything he wanted about people outside. And all the time Daulat’s friendly African loader was coming up the external staircase with luggage—not much, but in many small, awkward pieces: a few bundles, a wickerwork laundry basket, some cardboard boxes.
I broke away from the bawling boy—to pay attention was to encourage him—and I dealt with the loader, walking out with him to the street to tip him. The bawling in the flat upstairs died down, as I had expected; solitude and the strangeness of the flat were having their effect; and when I went back up I refused to hear any more from the boy until he had had something to eat.
He became quiet and correct, and while I prepared some baked beans and cheese on toast he brought out, from his bundles and boxes, the things that had been sent me by my family. Ginger and sauces and spices from my mother. Two family photographs from my father, and a wall print on cheap paper of one of our holy places in Gujarat, showing it as a modern place, though: the artist had put in motorcars and motorbikes and bicycles and even trains pell-mell in the surrounding streets. It was my father’s way of saying that, modern as I was, I would return to the faith.
“I was in the market, Salim,” the boy said, after he had eaten. “At first I thought it was just a quarrel around Mian’s stall. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. They were behaving as though knives didn’t cut, as though people weren’t made of flesh. I couldn’t believe it. At the end it was as if a pack of dogs had got into a butcher’s stall. I saw arms and legs bleeding and lying about. Just like that. They were still there the next day, those arms and legs.”
I tried to stop him. I didn’t want to hear more. But it wasn’t easy to stop him. He went on about those cut-off arms and legs that belonged to people we had known since we were children. It was terrible, what he had seen. But I was also beginning to feel that he was trying to excite himself to cry a little bit more after