A Bend in the River - V.S. Naipaul [45]
There was money in agencies. The simpler the product, the simpler and better the business. It was a different kind of business from the retail trade. Electric batteries, for instance—I bought and sold quantities long before they arrived; I didn’t have to handle them physically or even see them. It was like dealing in words alone, ideas on paper; it was like a form of play—until one day you were notified that the batteries had arrived, and you went to the customs warehouse and saw that they existed, that workmen somewhere had actually made the things. Such useful things, such necessary things—they would have been acceptable in a plain brown-paper casing; but the people who had made them had gone to the extra trouble of giving them pretty labels, with tempting slogans. Trade, goods! What a mystery! We couldn’t make the things we dealt in; we hardly understood their principles. Money alone had brought these magical things to us deep in the bush, and we dealt in them so casually!
Salesmen from the capital, Europeans most of them, preferring to fly up now rather than spend seven days on the steamer coming up and five going down, began to stay at the van der Weyden, and they gave a little variety to our social life. In the Hellenic Club, in the bars, they brought at last that touch of Europe and the big city—the atmosphere in which, from his stories, I had imagined Nazruddin living here.
Mahesh, with his shop just across the road from the van der Weyden, saw the comings and goings, and his excitement led him into a series of little business ventures. It was strange about Mahesh. He was always on the lookout for the big break, but he could spend weeks on things that were quite petty.
He acquired at one time a machine for cutting out or engraving letters and numbers, and he acquired a stack of the very tough plastic plates on which the numbers or letters were to be engraved. His idea was to supply nameplates to the town. He practised at home; Shoba said the noise was terrible. Mahesh, in his flat and in his shop, showed off the practice nameplates as though it was he, rather than the machine, that had made the beautiful letters. The modernity and precision—and, above all, the “manufactured” look of the plates—really excited him, and he was sure it would excite everybody else as well.
He had bought the equipment from a salesman who had stayed at the van der Weyden. And it was typical of Mahesh’s casual approach to business that when it came to getting engraving orders, he could only think of crossing the road back to the van der Weyden—reversing the trip of the salesman who had sold him the equipment. He had pinned all his hopes on the van der Weyden. He was going to redo the room numbers, all the Hommes and Dames signs, and he was going to affix descriptive plates on almost every door downstairs. The van der Weyden alone was going to keep him busy for weeks and pay back for the machine. But the van der Weyden owners (a middle-aged Italian couple who kept themselves in the background and hid behind their African front men) didn’t want to play. And not many of us felt the need to have our names on triangular sections of wood on our desks. So that idea was dropped; that tool was forgotten.
Mahesh, broaching a new idea, liked to be mysterious. The time, for instance, he wanted to import a machine from Japan for cutting little flat wood sticks and spoons for ice cream, he didn’t say so right out. He began by offering me a sample spoon in a paper wrapper which the salesman had given him. I looked at the little shoe-shaped