A Bend in the River - V.S. Naipaul [81]
But that wasn’t so now. I could no longer envy his style or his stylishness. I saw it as his only asset. I felt protective towards him. I felt that since that evening at Yvette’s—the evening which had lifted me up but cast him down—we had exchanged roles. I no longer looked on him as my guide; he was the man who needed to be led by the hand.
That perhaps was the secret of his social success which I had envied. My wish—which must have been like the wish of the people in London he had told me about, who had made room for him—was to clear away the aggressiveness and the depression
t hat choked the tenderness I knew was there. I was protective towards him and towards his stylishness, his exaggerations, his delusions. I wished to keep all those from hurt. It saddened me that in a little while he would have to leave, to carry on with his lecturer’s duties elsewhere. That was what, from his story, I judged him to be—a lecturer, as uncertain of his future in this role as he had been in his previous roles.
The only friends in the town I had introduced him to were Shoba and Mahesh. They were the only people I thought he would have had something in common with. But that hadn’t worked. There was suspicion on both sides. These three people were in many ways alike—renegades, concerned with their personal beauty, finding in that beauty the easiest form of dignity. Each saw the other as another version of himself; and they were like people—Shoba and Mahesh on one side, Indar on the other—sniffing out the falseness in one another.
At lunch in their flat one day—a good lunch: they had gone to a lot of trouble: silver and brass polished, the curtains drawn to keep out the glare, the three-stemmed standard lamp lighting up the Persian carpet on the wall—Shoba asked Indar, “Is there any money in what you do?” Indar had said, “I get by.” But outside, in the sunlight and red dust, he raged. As we drove back to the Domain, his home, he said, “Your friends don’t know who I am or what I’ve done. They don’t even know where I’ve been.” He wasn’t referring to his travels; he meant they hadn’t appreciated the kind of battles he had fought. “Tell them that my value is the value I place on myself. There is no reason why it couldn’t be fifty thousand dollars a year, a hundred thousand dollars a year.”
That was his mood as his time at the Domain came to an end. He was more easily irritated and depressed. But for me, even during those racing days, the Domain remained a place of possibility. I was looking for a repeat of the evening I had had—the mood of the Joan Baez songs, reading lamps and African mats on the floor, a disturbing woman in black slacks, a walk to the rapids below a moon and drifting cloud. It began to feel like fantasy; I kept it secret from Indar. And Yvette, whenever I saw her, in harsher electric light or ordinary daylight, confounded me again and again, so different from what I remembered.
The days passed; the polytechnic term was over. Indar said goodbye abruptly one afternoon, like a man who didn’t want to make too much fuss about a goodbye; he didn’t want me to see him off. And I felt that the Domain, and the life there, had been closed to me forever.
Ferdinand too was going away. He was going to the capital to take up his administrative cadetship. And it was Ferdinand whom I went to see off on the steamer at the end of the term. The hyacinths of the river, floating on: during the days of the rebellion they had spoken of blood; on heavy afternoons of heat and glitter they had spoken of experience without savour; white in moonlight, they had matched the mood of a particular evening. Now, lilac on bright green, they spoke of something over, other people moving on.
The steamer had arrived the previous afternoon with its passenger barge in tow.