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By Root 6108 0

and the men of the new Africa. They made such play with the national flag and the portrait of the President—the two now always going together—that in the beginning I thought, after all that the country had gone through, and all that had happened to them, the officers, all the lucky accidents that had taken them where they had got, in the beginning I thought these new officers stood for a new, constructive pride. But they were simpler. The flag and the President’s portrait were only like their fetishes, the sources of their authority. They didn’t see, these young men, that there was anything to build in their country. As far as they were concerned, it was all there already. They had only to take. They believed that, by being what they were, they had earned the right to take; and the higher the officer, the greater the crookedness—if that word had any meaning.

With their guns and jeeps, these men were poachers of ivory and thieves of gold. Ivory, gold—add slaves, and it would have been like being back in oldest Africa. And these men would have dealt in slaves, if there was still a market. It was to the traders in the town that the army turned when they wished to clear their gold or, more especially, the ivory they had poached. Officials and governments right across the continent were engaged in this ivory trade which they themselves had declared illegal. It made smuggling easy; but I was nervous of getting involved, because a government that breaks its own laws can also easily break you. Your business associate today can be your jailer or worse tomorrow.

But Mahesh didn’t mind. Like a child, as it seemed to me, he accepted all the poisoned sweets that were offered him. But he wasn’t a child; he knew the sweets were poisoned.

He said, “Oh, they will let you down. But if they let you down, you pay up. That is all. In your costing you make allowances for that. You just pay. I don’t think you understand, Salim. And it isn’t an easy thing to understand. It isn’t that there’s no right and wrong here. There’s no right.”

Twice, miraculously interpreting a nonsense telephone call from him as an appeal for help, I had to take away things from his flat.

The first time, one afternoon, after some inconsequential talk from him about tennis and the shoes I had asked for, I drove to his flat and blew my horn. He didn’t come down. He opened a window of his sitting room and shouted down to me in the street, “I’m sending the boy down with the tennis shoes for you. Right, Salim!” And, still standing before the window, he turned and shouted in patois to someone inside. “ ’Phonse! Aoutchikong pour Mis’ Salim!”—aoutchikong, from caoutchouc, the French word for rubber, being patois for canvas shoes. With many people looking on, the boy Ildephonse brought down something roughly wrapped in newspaper. I threw it on the back seat and drove off without hanging around. It turned out, when I examined it later, to be a bundle of foreign bank notes; and it went, as soon as it was dark, into the hole in the ground at the foot of my external staircase. To help Mahesh like this, though, was only to encourage him. The next time I had to bury some ivory. Burying ivory! What age were we living in? What did people want ivory for, apart from carving it—and not too well these days—into cigarette holders and figurines and junk like that?

Still, these deals made Mahesh money, and he acknowledged my help and put me in the way of adding to my little store of gold. He had said that there was no right. It was hard for me to adapt to that; but he managed it beautifully. He was always cool and casual, never ruffled. I had to admire him for it. Though the casualness could lead him into situations that were quite ridiculous.

He said to me one day, with the mysterious, over-innocent manner he put on when he was about to tell about some deal: “You read the foreign papers, Salim. Are you keeping an eye on the copper market? What’s it like?” Well, copper was high. We all knew that; copper was at the bottom of our little boom. He said, “It’s that war the Americans are fighting.