A Bend in the River - V.S. Naipaul [60]
Without knowing it, and thinking all the time that we were keeping our heads down and being wise and protecting our interests, we had become like the Africans the President ruled. We were people who felt only the weight of the President’s power. The Domain had been created by the President; for reasons of his own he had called certain foreigners to live there. For us that was enough; it wasn’t for us to question or look too closely.
Sometimes, after Ferdinand had come to the town to see his mother during one of her shopping trips, I had driven him back to his hostel in the Domain. What I saw then was all that I knew, until Indar became my guide.
It was as Indar had said. He had a house in the Domain and he was a guest of the government. His house was carpeted and furnished showroom style—twelve hand-carved dining chairs, upholstered chairs in fringed synthetic velvet in two colours in the sitting room, lamps, tables, air conditioners everywhere. The air conditioners were necessary. The Domain houses, naked in levelled land, were like grander concrete boxes, with roofs that didn’t project at all, so that at any hour of a bright day one wall, or two, got the full force of the sun. With the house there was also a boy, in the Domain servant costume—white shorts, white shirt and a white jacket de boy (instead of the apron of colonial days). It was the Domain style for people in Indar’s position. The style was the President’s. It was he who had decided on the costumes for the boys.
And in the strange world of the Domain Indar appeared to be well regarded. Part of this regard was due to the “outfit” to which he belonged. He couldn’t quite explain to me what the outfit was that sent him on African tours—or I might have been too naïve to understand. But a number of people on the Domain seemed to belong to outfits that were as mysterious; and they looked upon Indar not as a man of our community or a refugee from the coast, but as one of themselves. It was all a little extraordinary to me.
These were the new-style foreigners whom we, in the town, had seen arriving for some time past. We had seen them putting on African clothes; we had noticed their gaiety, so unlike our own caution; their happiness with everything they found. And we had considered them parasites and half dangerous, serving some hidden cause of the President’s, people we had to be careful with.
But now, being with them in the Domain, which in every way was their resort, and being admitted so easily to their life, their world of bungalows and air conditioners and holiday ease, catching in their educated talk the names of famous cities, I swung the other way and began to see how shut in and shabby and stagnant we in the town would have seemed to them. I began to get some sense of the social excitements of life on the Domain, of people associating in a new way, being more open, less concerned with enemies and danger, more ready to be interested and entertained, looking for the human worth of the other man. On the Domain they had their own way of talking about people and events; they were in touch with the world. To be with them was to have a sense of adventure.
I thought of my own life and Metty’s; of Shoba and Mahesh and their overheated privacy; of the Italians and Greeks—especially the Greeks—bottled up and tense with their family concerns and their nervousness of Africa and Africans. There was hardly anything new there. So to travel those few miles between the town and the Domain was always to make some adjustment, to assume a new attitude, and each time almost to see another country. I was ashamed of myself for the new judgments I found myself making on my friends Shoba and Mahesh, who had done so much for me for so many years, and with whom I had felt so safe. But I couldn’t help those thoughts. I was tilting the other way, to the life of the Domain, as I saw it in the company of Indar.
I was aware, in the Domain, that I belonged to the other world. When I met people with Indar I found I had little to say. There were times when I thought that