A Bend in the River - V.S. Naipaul [37]
Shoba said, “I should have been at home this week. My father is sick. Did I tell you, Salim? I should have been with him. And it is his birthday.”
Mahesh’s eyes hopped about the table. Spoiling the effect of the words that I had found so wise, he said, “We’ll carry on. It will be all right. The new President’s not a fool. He isn’t just going to stay in his house like the last man, and do nothing.”
She said, “Carry on, carry on. That’s all I’ve been doing. That’s how I’ve spent my life. That’s how I’ve lived in this place, among Africans. Is that a life, Salim?”
She looked at her plate, not at me. And I said nothing.
Shoba said, “I’ve wasted my life, Salim. You don’t know how I’ve wasted my life. You don’t know how I live in fear in this place. You don’t know how frightened I was when I heard about you, when I heard that a stranger had come to the town. I’ve got to be frightened of everybody, you know.” Her eyes twitched. She stopped eating, and pressed her cheekbones with the tips of her fingers, as though pressing away a nervous pain. “I come from a well-to-do family, a rich family. You know that. My family had plans for me. But then I met Mahesh. He used to own a motorcycle shop. Something terrible happened. I slept with him almost as soon as I met him. You know us and our ways well enough to know that that was a terrible thing for me to do. But it was terrible for me in another way as well. I didn’t want to get to know anybody else after that. That has been my curse. Why aren’t you eating, Salim? Eat, eat. We must carry on.”
Mahesh’s lips came together nervously, and he looked a little foolish. At the same time his eyes brightened at the praise contained in the complaining words; yet he and Shoba had been together for nearly ten years.
“My family beat up Mahesh terribly. But that just made me more determined. My brothers threatened to throw acid on me. They were serious. They also threatened to kill Mahesh. That was why we came here. I watched for my brothers every day. I still do. I wait for them. You know that with families like ours certain things are no joke. And then, Salim, while we were here, something worse happened. Mahesh said one day that I was stupid to be watching out for my brothers. He said, ‘Your brothers wouldn’t come all the way here. They’ll send somebody else.’ ”
Mahesh said, “That was a joke.”
“No, that wasn’t a joke. That was true. Anybody could come here—they could send anybody. It doesn’t have to be an Asian. It could be a Belgian or a Greek or any European. It could be an African. How am I to know?”
She did all the talking at lunch, and Mahesh let her; he seemed to have handled this kind of situation before. Afterwards I drove him back to the centre of the town—he said he didn’t want to take his car in. His nervousness disappeared as soon as we left Shoba. He didn’t seem embarrassed by what Shoba had said about their life together, and made no comment about it.
He said, as we drove through the dusty red streets, “Shoba exaggerates. Things are not as bad as she believes. The new man’s no fool. The steamer came in this morning with the white men. You didn’t know? Go across to the van der Weyden and you’ll see a few of them. The new man might be a maid’s son. But he’s going to hold it together. He’s going to use this to put a lot of people in their place. Go to the van der Weyden. It will give you an idea of what things were like after independence.”
Mahesh was right. The steamer had arrived; I had a glimpse of it when we drove by the docks. It hadn’t hooted and I hadn’t looked for it earlier. Low-decked, flat-bottomed, it was