And just when I had digested that sadness about Metty and the past, someone from the past turned up. He walked into the shop one morning, Metty leading him in, Metty calling out in high excitement, “Salim! Salim!”
It was Indar, the man who had first brought out my panic on the coast, confronted me—after that game of squash in the squash court of his big house—with my own fears about our future, and had sent me away from his house with a vision of disaster. He had given me the idea of flight. He had gone to England, to his university; I had fled here.
And I felt now, as Metty led him in, that he had caught me out again, sitting at my desk in the shop, with my goods spread out on the floor, as they had always been, and with my shelves full of cheap cloth and oilcloth and batteries and exercise books.
He said, “I heard some years ago in London that you were here. I wondered what you were doing.” His expression was cool, balanced between irritation and a sneer, and it seemed to say that he didn’t have to ask now, and that he wasn’t surprised by what he had found.
It had happened so quickly. When Metty came running in saying, “Salim! Salim! Guess who’s here,” I had at once had an idea that it would be someone we had both known in the old days. I thought it would be Nazruddin, or some member of my family, some brother-in-law or nephew. And I had thought: But I can’t cope. The life here is no longer the old life. I cannot accept this responsibility. I don’t want to run a hospital.
Expecting, then, someone who was about to make a claim on me in the name of family and community and religion, and preparing a face and an attitude for that person, I was dismayed to find Metty leading Indar into the shop, Metty beside himself with joy, not pretending now, but for that moment delighted to recreate something of the old days, being the man in touch with great families. And from being myself the man full of complaint, the man who was going to pour out his melancholy in harsh advice to a new arrival who was perhaps already half crushed—“There is no place for you here. There is no place here for the homeless. Find somewhere else”—from being that kind of man, I had to be the opposite. I had to be the man who was doing well and more than well, the man whose drab shop concealed some bigger operation that made millions. I had to be the man who had planned it all, who had come to the destroyed town at the bend in the river because he had foreseen the rich future.
I couldn’t be any other way with Indar. He had always made me feel so backward. His family, though new on the coast, had outstripped us all; and even their low beginnings—the grandfather who was a railway labourer, then a market money-lender—had become (from the way people spoke) a little sacred, part of their wonderful story. They invested adventurously and spent money well; their way of living was much finer than ours; and there was their unusual passion for games and physical exercise. I had always thought of them as “modern” people, with a style quite different from ours. You get used to differences like that; they can even begin to appear natural.
When we had played squash that afternoon, and Indar had told me he was going to England to a university, I hadn’t felt resentful or jealous of him for what he was doing. Going abroad, the university—that was part of his style, what might have been expected. My unhappiness was the unhappiness of a man who felt left behind, unprepared for what was coming. And my resentment of him had to do with the insecurity he had made me feel. He had said, “We’re washed up here, you know.” The words were true; I knew they were true. But I disliked him for speaking them: he had spoken as someone who had foreseen it all and had made his dispositions.
Eight years had passed since that day. What he had said would happen had happened. His family had lost a lot; they had lost their house; they (who had added the name of the town on the coast to their family name) had scattered, like my own family. Yet now, as he came into the shop, it seemed that the distance between us had remained the same.
There was London in his clothes, the trousers, the striped cotton shirt, the way his hair was cut, his shoes (oxblood in colour, thin-soled but sturdy, a little too narrow at the toes). And I—well, I was in my shop, with the red dirt road and the market square outside. I had waited so long, endured so much, changed; yet to him I hadn’t changed at all.
So far I had remained sitting. As I stood up I had a little twinge of fear. It came to me that he had reappeared only to bring me bad news. And all I could find to say was: “What brings you to the back of beyond?”
He said, “I wouldn’t say that. You are where it’s at.”
“ ‘Where it’s at’?”
“Where big things are happening. Otherwise I wouldn’t be here.”
That was a relief. At least he wasn’t giving me my marching orders again, without telling me where to go.
Metty all this while was smiling at Indar and swinging his head from side to side, saying, “Indar! Indar!” And it was Metty who remembered our duty as hosts. He said, “You would like some coffee, Indar?” As though we were on the coast, in the family shop, and he just had to step down the lane to Noor’s stall and bring back the little brass cups of sweet and muddy coffee on a heavy brass tray. No coffee like that here; only Nescafe, made in the Ivory Coast, and served in big china cups. Not the same kind of drink: you couldn’t chat over it, sighing at each hot sweet sip.
Indar said, “That would be very nice, Ali.”
I said, “His name here is Metty. It means ‘half-caste.’ ”
“You let them call you that, Ali?”
“African people, Indar. Kafar. You know what they give.”
I said, “Don’t believe him. He loves it. It makes him a great hit with the girls. Ali’s a big family man now. He’s lost.”
Metty, going to the storeroom to boil the water for the Nescafe, said, “Salim, Salim. Don’t let me down too much.”
Indar said, “He was lost a long time ago. Have you heard from Nazruddin? I saw him in Uganda a few weeks ago.”
“What’s it like out there now?”
“Settling down. For how long is another matter. Not one bloody paper has spoken up for the king. Did you know that? When it comes to Africa, people don’t want to know or they have their principles. Nobody cares a damn about the people who live in the place.”
“But you do a lot of travelling.”
“It’s my business. How are things with you here?”
“It’s been very good since the rebellion. The place is booming. Property is fantastic. Land is two hundred francs a square foot in some parts now.”
Indar didn’t look impressed—but the shop wasn’t an impressive place. I felt, too, I had run on a little bit and was doing the opposite of what I intended to do with Indar. Wishing to let him know that his assumptions about me were wrong, I was in fact acting out the character he saw me as. I was talking the way I had heard traders in the town talk, and even saying the things they said.
I said, attempting another kind of language, “It’s a specialized business. A sophisticated market would be easier in some ways. But here you can’t follow your personal likes and dislikes. You have to know exactly what is needed. And of course there are the agencies. That’s where the real money is.”
Indar said, “Yes, yes. The agencies. It’s like old times for you, Salim.”
I let that pass. But I decided to tone the whole thing down. I said, “I don’t know how long it’s going to last, though.”
“It will last as long as your President wants it to last. And no one can tell how long that will be. He’s a strange man. He seems to be doing nothing at all, and then he can act like a surgeon. Cutting away some part he doesn’t like.”
“That’s how he settled the old army. It was terrible, Indar. He sent a message to Colonel Yenyi telling him to stay at the barracks and to welcome the commander of the mercenaries. So he stayed on the steps in full uniform, and when they arrived he began to walk to the gate. They shot him as he walked. And everybody with him.”
“It saved your bacon, though. I have something for you, by the way. I went to see your
father and mother before I came here.”
“You went home?” But I dreaded hearing about it from him.
He said, “Oh, I’ve been there a few times since the great events. It isn’t so bad. You remember our house? They’ve painted it in the party colours. It’s some kind of party building now. Your mother gave me a bottle of coconut chutney. It isn’t for you alone. It is for Ali and you. She made that clear.” And to Metty, coming back then with the jug of hot water and the cups and the tin of Nescafe and the condensed milk, he said, “Ma sent you some coconut chutney, Ali.”
Metty said, “Chutney, coconut chutney. The food here is horrible, Indar.”
We sat all three around the desk, stirring coffee and water and condensed milk together.
Indar said, “I didn’t want to go back. Not the first time. I didn’t think my heart could stand it. But the airplane is a wonderful thing. You are still in one place when you arrive at the other. The airplane is faster than the heart. You arrive quickly and you leave quickly. You don’t grieve too much. And there is something else about the airplane. You can go back many times to the same place. And something strange happens if you go back often enough. You stop grieving for the past. You see that the past is something in your mind alone, that it doesn’t exist in real life. You trample on the past, you crush it. In the beginning it is like trampling on a garden. In the end you are just walking on ground. That is the way we have to learn to live now. The past is here.” He touched his heart. “It isn’t there.” And he pointed at the dusty road.
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 which his master also felt, Indar’s edginess wore off. He became gentle, full of manners, concerned. At the end of the morning I felt I had at last made a friend of my kind. And I badly needed such a friend.
And far from being his host and guide, I became the man who was led about. It wasn’t all that absurd. I had so little to show him. All the key points of the town I knew could be shown in a couple of hours, as I discovered when I drove him around later that morning.
There was the river, with a stretch of broken promenade near the docks. There were the docks themselves; the repair yards with open corrugated-iron sheds full of rusting pieces of machinery; and some way downriver the ruined cathedral, beautifully overgrown and looking antique, like something in Europe—but you could only look from the road, because the bush was too thick and the site was famous for its snakes. There were the scuffed squares with their defaced and statueless pedestals; the official buildings from the colonial time in avenues lined with palmiste trees; the lycée, with the decaying masks in the gun room (but that bored Indar); the van der Weyden and Mahesh’s Bigburger place, which were hardly things to show to a man who had been to Europe.
There were the cités and the squatters’ settlements (some of them I was driving into for the first time) with their hills of rubbish, their corrugated dusty lanes, and a lot of old tires lying in the dust. To me the rubbish hills and the tires were features of the cités and shanty towns. The spidery little children that we had here did wonderful somersaults off those tires, running, jumping on the tires, and then springing high in the air. But it was nearly noon. There were no children doing somersaults when we drove by; and I realized that (after a monument with nothing on it, and pedestals without statues) I was literally just showing Indar a lot of rubbish. I cut short the tour at that point. The rapids and the fishermen’s village—that had been incorporated into the State Domain; that he had already seen.
As we drove to the Domain—the intervening area, once empty, now filling up with the shacks of new arrivals from the villages: shacks which, in Indar’s company, I seemed to be seeing for the first time: the red ground between the shacks stained with rivulets of black or grey-green filth, maize and cassava planted in every free space—as we drove, Indar said, “How long did you say you’ve been living here?”
“Six years.”
“And you’ve shown me everything?”
What hadn’t I shown him? A few interiors of shops and houses and flats, the Hellenic Club—and the bars. But I wouldn’t have shown him the bars. And really, looking at the place with his eyes, I was amazed at the little I had been living with. And I had stopped seeing so much. In spite of everything, I had thought of the town as a real town; I saw it now as an agglomeration of shack settlements. I thought I had been resisting the place. But I had only been living blind—like the people I knew, from whom in my heart of hearts I had thought myself different.
I hadn’t liked it when Indar had suggested that I was living like our community in the old days, not paying attention to what was going on. But he wasn’t so far wrong. He was talking about the Domain; and for us in the town the Domain had
remained only a source of contracts. We knew little of the life there, and we hadn’t wanted to find out. We saw the Domain as part of the waste and foolishness of the country. But more importantly, we saw it as part of the President’s politics; and we didn’t want to become entangled with that.
We were aware of the new foreigners on the periphery of our town. They were not like the engineers and salesmen and artisans we knew, and we were a little nervous of them. The Domain people were like tourists, but they were not spenders—everything was found for them on the Domain. They were not interested in us; and we, thinking of them as protected people, looked upon them as people separate from the true life of the place, and for this reason not quite real, not as real as ourselves.
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.