A Bend in the River - V.S. Naipaul [58]
I felt he had spoken the words before, or had gone over them in his mind. I thought: He fights to keep his style. He’s probably suffered more than the rest of us.
We sat, the three of us, drinking Nescafe. And I thought the moment beautiful.
Still, the conversation had so far been one-sided. He knew everything about me; I knew nothing about his recent life. When I had first arrived in the town I had noticed that for most people conversation meant answering questions about themselves; they seldom asked you about yourself; they had been cut off for too long. I didn’t want Indar to feel that way about me. And I really wanted to know about him. So, a little awkwardly, I began to ask.
He said he had been in the town for a couple of days and was going to stay for a few months. Had he come up by the steamer? He said, “You’re crazy. Cooped up with river Africans for seven days? I flew up.”
Metty said, “I wouldn’t go anywhere by the steamer. They tell me it’s horrible. And it’s even worse on the barge, with the latrines and the people cooking and eating everywhere. It’s horrible-horrible, they tell me.”
I asked Indar where he was staying: it had occurred to me that I should make the gesture of offering him hospitality. Was he staying at the van der Weyden?
This was the question he was waiting to be asked. He said in a soft and unassuming voice, “I’m staying at the State Domain. I have a house there. I’m a guest of the government.”
And Metty behaved more graciously than I. Metty slapped the desk and said, “Indar!”
I said, “The Big Man invited you?”
He began to scale it down. “Not exactly. I have my own outfit. I am attached to the polytechnic for a term. Do you know it?”
“I know someone there. A student.”
Indar behaved as though I had interrupted him; as though— although I lived in the place, and he had just arrived—I was trespassing, and had no right to know a student at the polytechnic.
I said, “His mother’s a marchande, one of my customers.”
That was better. He said, “You must come and meet some of the other people there. You may not like what’s going on. But you mustn’t pretend it isn’t happening. You mustn’t make that mistake again.”
I wanted to say: “I live here. I have lived through quite a lot in the last six years.” But I didn’t say that. I played up to his vanity. He had his own idea of the kind of man I was—and indeed he had caught me in my shop, at my ancestral business. He had his own idea of who he was and what he had done, the distance he had put between himself and the rest of us.
His vanity didn’t irritate me. I found I was relishing it, in the way that years before, on the coast, as a child, I had relished Nazruddin’s stories of his luck and of the delights of life here, in the colonial town. I hadn’t slapped the desk like Metty, but I was impressed by what I saw of Indar. And it was a relief to put aside the dissatisfactions he made me feel, to forget about being caught out, and to give him a straight admiration for what he had made of himself—for his London clothes and the privilege they spoke of, his travelling, his house in the Domain, his position at the polytechnic.
To give him admiration, to appear not to be competing or resisting, was to put him at his ease. As we chatted over our Nescafe, as Metty exclaimed from time to time, expressing in his servant’s manner the admiration