A bend in the river

Nazruddin hardly wrote. But he was still gathering experience, his mind was still ticking over; and though his letters made me nervous before I opened them, I always read them with pleasure, because over and above his personal news there was always some new general point that Nazniddin wanted to make. We were still so close to our shock about Noimon that I thought, when Metty brought the letter from the post office, that the letter was going to be about Noimon or about the prospects for copper. But it was about Uganda. They were having their problems there too. Things were bad in Uganda, Nazruddin wrote. The army people who had taken over had appeared to be all right at first, but now there were clear signs of tribal and racial troubles. And these troubles weren't just going to blow over. Uganda was beautiful, fertile, easy, without poverty, and with high African traditions. It ought to have had a future, but the problem with Uganda was that it wasn't big enough. The country was now too small for its tribal hatreds. The motorcar and modern roads had made the country too small; there would always be trouble. Every tribe felt more threatened in its territory now than in the days when everybody, including traders from the coast like our grandfathers, went about on foot, and a single trading venture could take up to a year. Africa, going back to its old ways with modern tools, was going to be a difficult place for some time. It was better to read the signs right than to hope that things would work out. So for the third time in his life Nazruddin was thinking of moving and making a fresh start, this time out of Africa, in Canada. "But my luck is running out. I can see it in my hand." The letter, in spite of its disturbing news, was in Nazruddin's old, calm style. It offered no direct advice and made no direct requests. But it was a reminder--as it was intended to be, especially at this time of upheaval for him--of my bargain with Nazruddin, my duty to his family and mine. It deepened my panic. At the same time it strengthened my resolve to stay and do nothing. I replied in the way I have said, outlining our new difficulties in the town. I took some time to reply, and when I did I found myself writing passionately, offering Nazruddin the picture of myself as someone incompetent and helpless, one of his "mathematicians." And nothing that I wrote wasn't true. I was as helpless as I presented myself. I didn't know where I could go on to. I didn't think--after what I had seen of Indar and other people in the Domain--that I had the talent or the skills to survive in another country. And it was as if I had been caught out by my own letter. My panic grew, and my guilt, and my feeling that I was provoking my own destruction. And out of this, out of a life which I felt to be shrinking and which became more obsessed as it shrank, I began to question myself. Was I possessed by Yvette? Or was I--like Mahesh with his new idea of what he was--possessed by myself, the man I thought I was with Yvette? To serve her in the way I did, it was necessary to look outward from myself. Yet it was in this selflessness that my own fulfilment lay; I doubted, after my brothel life, whether I could be a man in that way with any other woman. She gave me the idea of my manliness I had grown to need. Wasn't my attachment to her an attachment to that idea? And oddly involved with this idea of myself, and myself and Yvette, was the town itself--the flat, the house in the Domain, the way both our lives were arranged, the absence of a community, the isolation in which we both lived. In no other place would it be just like this; and perhaps in no other place would our relationship be possible. The question of continuing it in another place never arose. That whole question of another place was something I preferred not to think about. The first time she had come back to the flat after dinner at the house I felt I had been given some idea of her own needs, the needs of an ambitious woman who had married young and come out to the wrong country, cutting herself off. I had never felt I could meet those needs. I had grown to accept, and be excited by, the idea that I was an encumbrance that had become a habit. Perhaps she was for me too. But I had no means of finding out and didn't particularly want to. The isolation that kept me obsessed had become something I saw as necessary. In time it would all go; we would both return to our interrupted lives. That was no tragedy. That certainty of the end--even while the boom slackened and my fifteen dropped to fourteen, and Nazruddin and his uprooted family tried to establish themselves in Canada--was my security.