A Bend in the River - V.S. Naipaul [26]
Mahesh said, “The boy said you were sending him to America or Canada to do his studies.”
“What am I sending him to study?”
“Business administration. So he can take over his mother’s business. Build it up.”
“Build it up! Buying a gross of razor blades and selling them one by one to fishermen.”
“I knew he was only trying to compromise you with your friends.”
Simple magic: if you say something about a man to his friends, you might get the man to do what you say he is going to do.
I said, “Ferdinand’s an African.”
When I next saw Ferdinand I said, “My friend Mahesh has been telling me that you are going to America to study business administration. Have you told your mother?”
He didn’t understand irony. This version of the story caught him unprepared, and he had nothing to say.
I said, “Ferdinand, you mustn’t go around telling people things that aren’t true. What do you mean by business administration?”
He said, “Bookkeeping, typing, shorthand. What you do.”
“I don’t do shorthand. And that’s not business administration. That’s a secretarial course. You don’t have to go to America or Canada to do that. You can do that right here. I am sure there are places in the capital. And when the time comes you’ll find you want to do more than that.”
He didn’t like what I said. His eyes began to go bright with humiliation and anger. But I didn’t stay for that. It was with Metty, and not me, that he had to settle accounts, if there were accounts to be settled.
He had found me as I was leaving to play squash at the Hellenic Club. Canvas shoes, shorts, racket, towel around my neck—it was like old times on the coast. I left the sitting room and stood in the passage, to give him the chance to leave, so that I could lock up. But he stayed in the sitting room, doubtless waiting for Metty.
I went out to the staircase landing. It was one of our days without electricity. The smoke from charcoal braziers and other open fires rose blue among the imported ornamental trees—cassia, breadfruit, frangipani, flamboyant—and gave a touch of the forest village to a residential area where, as I had heard, in the old days neither Africans nor Asians were permitted to live. I knew the trees from the coast. I suppose they had been imported there as well; but I associated them with the coast and home, another life. The same trees here looked artificial to me, like the town itself. They were familiar, but they reminded me where I was.
I heard no more about Ferdinand’s studies abroad, and soon he even dropped the bright-young-lycée-man pose. He began trying out something new. There was no more of that standing against the wall with crossed legs, no more walking around the trestle table and lifting and dropping things, no more of that serious conversation.
He came in now with a set face, his expression stern and closed. He held his head up and moved slowly. When he sat on the couch in the sitting room, he slumped so far down that sometimes his back was on the seat of the coach. He was languid, bored. He looked without seeing; he was ready to listen, but couldn’t be bothered to talk himself—that was the impression he tried to give. I didn’t know what to make of this new character of Ferdinand’s, and it was only from certain things that Metty said that I understood what Ferdinand was aiming at.
During the course of the term there had come to the lyc