It was the month of bush fires, smoky skies, black hills, fleeing animals; the season of haze and hawks.
With all my love lost, I lay in the bedroom alone where we had slept together, staring at the long-nosed stains on the ceiling, goblins with the voices of the yelling Canadians upstairs. I was sorrowful without Yomo and her laughter. Naipaul – Vidia, as I now called him – was kind, but kindness was not enough. I needed a more intimate friend or else no one at all, just the consolation of the African landscape, which was a reminder to me that life goes on.
It was the season when Africans set fire to the bush, believing the blaze to be helpful to next year’s crops. I set off for the north, drove almost to the Sudan, and walked among the elephant palms to the shriek and twang of the same insects the people ate there; then I drove on to Arua, in West Nile province, on the Congo border, with its scowling purplish Kakwa people, of whom the chief of staff of the Uganda Army, Idi Amin, was the stereotype.
Hawks hovered above the grass fires and swooped down on the mice and snakes and other small creatures that were roused and panicked by the flames. There were hawks all over the smoky sky. Something about the wildfires and the hovering birds and the scuttling mice spoke to me of sex and its consequences.
At Kitgum, in the far north, I hiked in a hot wind, sinking in sand to my ankles, kicking at dead leaves to scatter the snakes. Each night in the village where I stayed a toothless old woman squatted on the dirt floor of a hut and sang a lewd song in an ululating voice. ‘She is beautiful and has a neck like a swan, but she has stroked the spear of every man in the district’ was the way her song was translated for me. It was coarse and upsetting, but this hidden corner of Africa was peaceful for being hot and remote. Black water tumbled over Karuma Falls. To justify my trip to my department head, I traveled southwest and slipped between the Mountains of the Moon and visited schools at Bundibugyo, where Yomo and I had planned to lose ourselves in the bush. One night after rain I went outside and found thirsty children licking raindrops off my car.
Hawks, bush fires, heat, envious songs, and desperate children: so far, not much consolation on this safari.
A sign reading Very Big Lion was nailed to a tree near Mityana, where I stopped on my way back to Kampala. Another sign said Good News – To See A Very Big Lion – It eats 50 lbs of Meat Daily. A coastal Swahili man with gray eyes in a grubby skullcap asked me for a shilling and then showed me the lion.
‘Simba! Simba!’
Covered with flies, the lion lay in a pen made of corrugated iron, thrown up in a clearing near the road. The man in the skullcap made the beast growl by poking it with the skinned and bloody leg of a dead animal, a gazelle’s perhaps. The lion thrashed but could not seize the meat in its yellow stumps of teeth. I looked into the lion’s eyes and saw the sort of lonely torment that I felt.
‘Bwana. Mumpa cigara.’
Within a week the lion had escaped and killed six villagers and was finally shot by the Mityana district game warden. All that violence for the lion’s being in a pen. I saw a link between that hunger and the animal’s captivity – that appetite, that denial. I tried to write a story about it, but there was no story, only the incident.
‘Someday you will use it,’ Vidia said, though he said he disliked animal stories. He told me that when he was my age, working on his first book, a man had told him to read Hemingway’s story ‘Hills Like White Elephants.’
I said, ‘For anyone who lives in Africa – for me, at any rate – Hemingway is unreadable.’
‘Nevertheless, I read the story immediately it was recommended to me.’
Vidia was still helping me with my essay on cowardice, frowning over it, the tenth version. He said that it was improving but that it would be better if I cut it by half. I nodded but doubted that I would.
He said, ‘I know when I make comments on it you listen and get very tired.’
That was exactly how I felt.
‘It’s normal. But this is an important statement – how you feel about Vietnam, how you feel about your life. You must get it right.’
The problem was language, he said. He was passionate on the subject of misapplied words and meaningless mystification. I had lived too long in a place where the wrong words were used. Africans called Kampala a city. But it was not a city. ‘“University” is a misleading word for this crummy place, and is this a government?’ The teaching was not teaching, these were not real academics, the daily newspaper, the Uganda Argus, contained no news. ‘This is all fraudulent!’ The writing by credulous well-wishers about African literature had corrupted the language. He emphasized that I must pay close attention to the words I used and evaluate how they worked. Putting his fastidious finger on the page, Vidia made me justify each word in the essay. ‘Why “fat”?’ ‘Why “hapless”?’ ‘Don’t use words for effect,’ he said. ‘Tell the truth.’
‘I have said before that writing is like sleight of hand. You simply mention a chair and it’s shadowy. You say it’s stained with wedding saffron and suddenly the chair is there, visible.’
This was spoken at his house, which smelled of fresh cement and red floor wax and new paint; the sun streaming through the windows that had no curtains; the house he hated, within earshot of the noise from the brick-and-thatch servants’ quarters.
‘And that is not music. Listen to the bitches!’
Sometimes students brought him their work. He did not encourage them, but he allowed them. He saw the occasional lecturer. Sometimes he was asked a question about literature or the world.
I was present when he told a man with a serious inquiry, ‘I can’t answer that. I would need written notice of that question.’
After the man left, Vidia said, ‘That’s what he wanted to hear, you know. He didn’t really want me to answer his question.’
A female student brought him an essay. She had come to his house because he refused to hold classes.
‘Your essay is hopeless,’ he said. He chose a few examples to illustrate how bad it was, and then he said, ‘But you have lovely handwriting. Where did you learn to write like that?’
Another student, celebrated as a rising Ugandan poet by Hallsmith, sent Vidia a poem, entitled ‘A New Nation Reborn,’ and showed up some days later at Vidia’s house wearing his crimson student’s gown. These gowns, introduced by the same English vice-chancellors who had contrived Makerere’s Latin motto – Pro Futuro Aedificamus, We Build for the Future – mimicked those worn by Oxford students. The young poet gathered his gown like an older woman taking a seat at a doctor’s office. He said, ‘Have you read my poem?’
‘Yes, I’ve read it.’ Vidia paused, tapped a cigarette, and said nothing for a long while. ‘I have been wondering about it.’
‘It is about tubbulence.’
‘Really.’ Vidia found the boy’s eyes and fixed them with his weary stare. He said, ‘Don’t write any more poems. I really don’t think you should. Your gifts lie in some other direction. A story, perhaps. Now, promise me you won’t write any more poems.’
The boy shook his head and made the promise in a halting voice. He went away baffled and dejected.
‘Did you see how relieved he was?’ Vidia said. ‘He was glad I told him that.’
Vidia rubbed his hands and disposed of other students in the same fashion. I was surprised when he agreed to be the judge of a university literary competition, but he carried out his duties his own way. He insisted that there be only one prize, called Third Prize, because the entries were so bad there could be no first and second prizes.
‘Make it absolutely clear that this is Third Prize,’ he told the people in the English Department.
Some of the members objected to this.
Vidia said, ‘You are trying to give the African an importance he does not deserve. Your expectations are misguided. Turn away and nothing will happen. It’s the language again. Obote is just another chief. You call these politicians? They are just witch doctors.’
When the term ‘Third Prize’ was converted to ‘The Prize,’ Vidia smiled and said, ‘Blackwash.’
‘The Africans who carry books around are the ones who scare me, man,’ he said around that time.
He was dimly aware of, but not impressed by, some of the distinguished men and women who were living in Kampala or doing research at the university. An anthropologist, Victor Turner, was then at Makerere. You would not have known that this small, soft-spoken man with the diffidence of a librarian had spent years in mud huts on the upper Zambezi and on the Mongu floodplain and written pioneering studies of the Lozi people of Barotseland. Colin Turnbull had studied the Mbuti Pygmies. In the course of illustrating his encyclopedic studies of the mammals and birds of East Africa, Jonathan Kingdon, a painter and naturalist, had discovered at least two new species of mammal and several birds that had never been described. Michael Adams, a friend and contemporary of David Hockney’s, was our Gauguin. Colin Leakey, son of Louis Leakey, was our botanist. Rajat Neogy, the editor and founder of Transition, published Wole Soyinka, Chinua Achebe, and Nadine Gordimer.
‘What should I think about Africa?’ Vidia demanded of an anthropology professor one day.
‘Mr Naipaul, I don’t think it’s a good idea to have too many opinions about Africa,’ the man said. ‘If you do, you miss too much that’s really important.’
‘Really.’
Later, walking back to his house, Vidia said, ‘Foolish man. He refuses to see the corruption. He accepts the lies.’
But he blamed himself, saying he should never have come, should not have accepted money from the Farfield Foundation. ‘Don’t ever accept money from a foundation,’ he said. ‘It will ruin you. There are strings attached to all money you don’t earn yourself.’
This mistake in coming to Uganda inspired him, he said, to write an essay about all the rules he had made for himself and how disastrous it had been when he had broken one.
‘Every time I’ve broken one of my own rules I have regretted it. Like this … Maka-ray-ray. Or the weak and oppressed. They’re terrible, man. They’ve got to be kicked.’ He kicked a stone. ‘Like that.’
His own behavior alarmed him.
‘This is turning me into a racialist, for God’s sake. What a dreary, boring thing to be.’
Until I met Vidia, I had never known a person who recognized no one as his equal. He’s a Brahmin, the local Indians said: all Brahmins are fussy like that. Early on, seeing me solicit directions from a villager, he stood silently by, listening to the flow of Swahili, and then said, ‘You talk to these people so easily.’
I told him I had made a point of learning the language. People told the truth in their own language. They were nervous or inaccurate or more easily mendacious in a second language.
‘I don’t mean that,’ he said.
What did he mean? Perhaps that I spoke to them at all, and that I listened. His manner made him an impossible colleague but a natural bwana and employer of servants. He said I was too easy on my staff. ‘Your housegirl is an idler.’ My cook, he said, was dirty. My gardener was a drunk.
‘Your gardener is a drunk too,’ I said, unwittingly indulging in the asinine debate between bwanas: my Africans are better than your Africans.
‘Only on Sundays. A servant has a right to get drunk on Sundays. You have no right to criticize him for that, Paul.’
One of his pleasures was in taking his houseboy, Andrew, to the market and buying him half a pound of fried locusts and watching the man devour them, the dark mafuta grease smearing his cheeks.
‘Good, eh, Andrew? Delicious, eh? Mazoori, eh?’
‘Ndio, bwana. Mzuri sana.’
‘You see, Paul. The occasional treat. The occasional reprimand. Works wonders. He’s frightfully happy now.’
He complained that we were out of touch in Uganda. I said that we got the London newspapers on Sundays.
‘Bring me the English papers this Sunday,’ he said. ‘We will read them and then go for a walk.’
But he was in a foul mood when I arrived. I knew the reason: Sunday was the day when African families congregated outdoors. There was music, laughter, singing, fooling. ‘Bongos.’ I thought the London papers might help.
‘If there’s nothing about me in those papers, I am not interested in reading them,’ he said in a sharp voice.
‘Vidia,’ Pat said, chastising him with his name.
‘All right, let’s go for that fucking walk.’
His fluctuating temperament fascinated me, because it was so unusual, even self-destructive. Expatriates in Africa were generally even-tempered, and the farther into the bush you found them, the more serene they were. In Africa, nitpickers were those people by the side of the road plucking at someone’s louse-ridden head. The expression described no one else. So it was strange to find someone losing his temper, almost constantly on the boil. Such people never lasted. Vidia was especially fanatical in the matter of timekeeping.
‘Come at seven,’ he said to me one day, inviting me to dinner.
I took this to mean drinks at seven and then dinner. I showed up casually at seven-fifteen and found him at the table with Pat. Pat looked embarrassed; Vidia said nothing. He ignored me. He was eating quickly, like someone who was himself late. He was gobbling prawns.
‘We’ve finished the first course,’ he finally said. His mouth was full, to put me in the wrong and make a point. ‘You’re late.’
His obsession with punctuality governed his relationships. I was lucky in having merely been reprimanded for my lateness; the usual penalty was rejection: ‘He was late. I wouldn’t see him.’ An African painter I knew ran out of gas on his way to an appointment with Vidia and, having to walk the rest of the way, arrived half an hour late. Vidia sent him away.
‘The oldest excuse in the book, man. “I ran out of petrol.” All the lies!’
He began to rant more often, which was now most of the time. He stopped working. He grew morose.
One day, all he wrote was the word ‘The’ on a piece of paper, nothing more. He showed it to me. It was large and very dark. ‘It took me seven hours to write that.’ He smiled insanely at it, a grin of satisfaction, as if to say, See what they made me do! He looked crazy, but he said he was sad. The problem was his house. The noise was also an assault. ‘Those bitches!’ He hated the smells – cooking fires, rotting vegetation, human odors. ‘No one washes. Is soap expensive here?’
There had always been a note of humor in his rage, but today he was not joking. He looked older, angrier, insulted, trapped. He was miserable.
‘I had to take to my bed,’ he said.
In her gentle, trembly, imploring voice, Pat said, ‘We’ve heard of a hotel …’
The hotel was outside the town of Eldoret, in the highlands – the White Highlands, as they were still known then – of western Kenya: a wooded refuge in the middle of the plateau. It was called the Kaptagat Arms and was run by a man known as the Major, who was noted for his rudeness. He was an Englishman, a retired army officer, Sandhurst trained, who had spent his military career in India. He was in his late sixties and very gruff. Stories about him circulated in Uganda, emphasizing that the Kaptagat Arms was a place to avoid. The most recent story, one I told Vidia, concerned a woman faculty member who had asked the Major for a Pimm’s Cup in the hotel bar. The Major had said, ‘We don’t serve that muck. Now get out,’ and showed the woman the door. Woman-hating was a recurring theme in the Major’s rudeness.
Vidia had told me he loathed colorful characters. He hated clowns, comedians, yakkers, virtuosos, village explainers, and hollow jokesters, vapidly Pickwickian, who spent their lives monologuing in country pubs. He felt insulted by their insincerity and foolishness. Buffoonery caused in him a deepening depression. Yet he liked my story about the Major for its rough justice. The woman in question he had singled out as an infy. Pimm’s No. I Cup was an infy drink.
‘One of these suburban drinks,’ Vidia said.
I was apprehensive. It seemed to me that the Major was the sort of colorful character who would either antagonize Vidia or lower his spirits. He had told me of a fistfight he’d had in a London restaurant once with just such a presumptuous person. It was hard to imagine this tiny man provoked to physical violence. But he never lied, so I believed him.
The three of us, Vidia, Pat, and I, went to the Kaptagat together. It was a long drive. First the Jinja Road out of Kampala, with its sugar estates and clouds of butterflies that settled on the road and posed a skidding hazard at the curve near Iganga. Then Jinja itself, the cotton mills, and Owen Falls – the headwaters of the Nile – and the conical hill outside Tororo where a dangerous leopard was said to live. Near the Kenyan frontier and the customs post, we came to the end of the paved road. Eighty miles of dusty, stony road had to be traversed, and on it, outside Bungoma, which was just some Indian shops and a bicycle mender, we saw six or seven naked boys with white-powdered bodies running along the road, having just ‘danced,’ as Africans said, meaning they were initiates in a circumcision ceremony. Their white faces were ghostlike. Farther on, seeing the sign Beware of Fallen Rocks, Vidia muttered the words to himself, liking the sign for its precise language.
After we left Eldoret and its single gas station, we traveled north down narrow red clay roads, past corn fields, following wooden arrow-shaped signs saying To the Kaptagat Arms. We found the place in the early afternoon. It was utterly silent and abandoned-looking: no guests, no cars, only flitting birds and a few Kikuyu gardeners working in the flower beds. The hotel had one story, a converted farmhouse with an added wing of single rooms that looked out on the flower garden.
‘Hello?’ I said. ‘Jambo.’
No one answered. Inside in the reception area there were Indian artifacts on shelves – Benares brassware, carved ivory, wall hangings, some baskets – as well as the sort of paraphernalia found in English country pubs: horse brasses, pewter tankards, tarnished trophies, old blurred photographs of anglers struggling to hold prize fish upright, hunting horns, ribbons, and the sort of fluted glass that offered a yard of ale. There were mounted racks of gazelles and oryx and kudu. There was a shoulder mount of a zebra on one wall and a zebra skin on the floor. The most ominously impressive object was a large, dusty tiger skin nailed to one whole wall, where it sprawled disemboweled in an arrested growl.
I rang a tinkly bell that was propped on the gold-stamped leather of the reception book and blotter, whereupon a tall craggy figure marched out from the back office. His posture was crooked and peevish. He had white hair and a deeply lined chain smoker’s face and a burning butt between his fingers. Undeniably the Major, he looked cross, with an English scowl that meant ‘nothing impresses me.’ Staring with puzzled, just-interrupted eyes, he stuck his chin out and said, ‘Yes, what is it?’
‘We’ve just driven from Uganda,’ Vidia said.
‘Shocking road. But we do get quite a few people from that side.’
‘We are inquiring about your hotel,’ Vidia went on. ‘We’d like to have lunch and look around.’
‘Give me a moment to get sorted out,’ the Major said. ‘Have a shufti at the garden. I’ll give you a shout when we’re ready to seat you. What was the name?’
‘Naipaul.’
‘Are you the writer?’
It was an inspired response. The heavens opened. A trumpet sounded, flocks of doves soared, and all the malaikas, the choirs of black angels, in the skies of western Kenya burst into song.
‘Yes,’ Vidia said, stammering with satisfaction. ‘Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes.’
He was home, welcomed, at ease, in his own element, in the presence of a reader, happier than I had ever seen him.
‘And what can I do for you?’
The Major had to repeat the question. He was speaking to me. I was lurking near the tiger skin, feeling awkward, but also wondering how you managed to kill one of these enormous creatures without making a mark or leaving scars.
‘I am with them,’ I said. ‘And I am looking for the bullet hole in this thing.’
‘You won’t find it,’ the Major said. ‘I shot him in the eye.’
The big glass eyes of the tiger stared like a martyr’s into the room with its ridiculous curios.
‘How did you find us?’ the Major asked.
‘I had a vibration,’ Vidia said.
Over lunch in the dining room, where we were the only diners, the Major was attentive. He said that business was terrible and that he planned to sell the place. He was breezy and somewhat stoical, as though fighting a rear-guard action and about to announce his surrender. He pulled the cork from a bottle of wine. ‘This is an Australian hock.’
‘But this is awfully good,’ Vidia said, examining the label as he worked his lips together.
‘Try some of that sherry sauce in your soup. Joshua will be right back with your entrées,’ the Major said, marching away.
Pat had begun to cry. She sobbed miserably and said she could not eat. It was the thought of the hotel’s closing, she said. All the flowers, all the order and neatness, all the hope. And they were shutting up shop.
‘Oh my, Vidia, look,’ she said, and gestured towards a waiter. ‘His poor shoes.’
There was something pathetic in the shoes. They were broken, without laces, the counters crushed, the tongues missing, the heels worn. They seemed to represent battered, tortured feet. The sight of the shoes reduced Pat to tears once again. Each time she saw the man wearing them, she began to sob. I did not tell her that Africans got such shoes second- and third-hand. Used to being barefoot, the Africans who owned them rarely found that they conformed to their misshapen feet; the shoes, like the torn shirts and torn shorts they wore, were often merely symbolic.
‘Don’t be sad, Patsy,’ Vidia said. ‘He’ll be all right. He’ll go back to his village. He’ll have his bananas and his bongos. He’ll be frightfully happy.’
Later, the Major said that after India’s independence, he had followed some other Anglo-Indians in coming to East Africa. Kenya, for its good climate, had been a choice destination. Tanzania was regarded as a rough place, difficult to farm, full of Bolshie Africans in Mao suits. Uganda was black, an agglomeration of incoherent kingdoms with bad roads. In any case, the Major had come reluctantly. He had liked India. Africa was all right, but Africans infuriated him. His Swahili was just a stern litany of orders and commands, and I saw something rather strict, even domineering about him, a coldness, and a defiant cynicism. He embodied the worst of the settler severity and the woman-hating mateship of the officers’ mess.
Ignoring her tears, the Major took a dislike to Pat from the first, and afterwards he sometimes mimicked her to me – clumsy, overstated mimicry that betrayed a kind of rancor. To him she was the bibi, the memsahib, the whiner, but for Vidia’s sake he was polite to her. Vidia used the old-fashioned-sounding word ‘pathic’ to describe the Major. I had never heard the word before. Vidia said English prostitutes used it, which seemed a curious attribution and an even more questionable authority. Oh, tarts said it, did they? I took it to mean that the Major was bent. Vidia’s more particular word ‘bugger’ was never uttered here at the Kaptagat Arms.
They talked of India: the beauty of Punjabi Muslims, the ferocity of Sikhs, the plains of Uttar Pradesh, the Englishness of hill stations, polo at the Poona Club. The Major had been posted all over. He said to Vidia, ‘I could tell you some smashing stories. I am sure you’d be able to use them.’
‘No, not me,’ Vidia said. ‘You must write them yourself.’
Over the years, I heard him give that same advice to everyone who offered him a story to write. He could not write their stories; it was for them to do. When they protested that they could not write, Vidia said, ‘If your story is as good as you say, you’ll write it.’
The Major was also a reader and had admired Vidia’s book An Area of Darkness. Soon after we arrived, I saw him reading Graham Greene’s The Comedians, which had just been published in Britain.
‘What do you think of it?’ I asked.
‘Characters called Smith and Jones and Brown. That’s no bloody good. What should I think of it?’
He did not like Americans, he said. He made no secret of his contempt for me. I had a sissy way with the sherry sauce. ‘Yanks!’ he cried, and then told long, implausible stories. Once, the Major said, while in the United States on a military errand, he had ordered a slice of ham in an officers’ club. Unbidden, an American officer at the table had spooned a dollop of marmalade on the ham and said, ‘That’ll make it taste a whole lot better’ – spoken in one of the Major’s cruelly inaccurate accents.
‘Bloody Yanks,’ the Major said. ‘I couldn’t eat it.’
With minor variations, he told me the same story four times. I did not mind. I felt that this casual abuse would give Vidia a perspective on an American’s life among these English settlers in Africa.
Vidia found a room in the hotel he liked. He negotiated a weekly rate, and soon he and Pat moved in. The idea was that Vidia would finish writing his novel there, and it was at the Kaptagat Arms that he told me its title, The Mimic Men. Pat did some writing too. She kept a diary. She also had literary ambitions – she wanted to write a play – but she seldom discussed her plans, always deferring to Vidia. From time to time she broke into helpless blubbing, either as the result of a disagreement or simply because of some sorrowful sight – broken shoes, a snotty-nosed child, a woman bereft, a gardener laboring on his knees. Often her tears roused me. I did not know why, but her weeping made me want to hold her and fondle her breasts.
There were no other guests at the Kaptagat Arms. The Major had several mild-mannered Labrador retrievers, which nuzzled our legs, their tongues lolling, hoping to be scratched. Some British teachers from a nearby prep school came to the bar most nights and got drunk.
‘That silly Jewess,’ a male teacher shrieked one night.
Vidia said to avoid them. ‘Infies.’
He understood the Major, he said. The Major’s Indian Army nickname had been ‘Bunny.’ The poor man was tormented by passion and frustration. Clearly, he was a very sensitive soul, Vidia said. ‘Look at those eyes.’ (To me, the Major’s blue eyes seemed cold and depthless.) The Major had a feeling for India, which was a mark of his sensibilities. He had heart. He was a good soldier and respected his men. He understood the culture. He was intelligent. He had brought this sense of order to Africa, where, imparting skills, building an institution, he was in a way running a miniature colony of his own.
Vidia, suspecting that the Major found him to be a puzzle, seemed to look for ways to make himself more puzzling. Yet Vidia had such simple, inflexible rules that, if they were strictly followed, he was happy. For example, Vidia’s vegetarianism caused a dilemma in the kitchen. Omelets were a frequent solution. ‘I have had to buy more cookery books,’ the Major told me.
I visited Vidia whenever I could, at first for weekends and then for weeks at a time. The Kaptagat routine was quite different from my life in Kampala, and I grew to like playing bar billiards and eating steamed chocolate pudding, putting sherry in my soup and walking the Major’s dogs.
What occupied me – though I never spoke of it – was my own novel. It was understood that my writing consultations with Vidia were just about over. My cowardice essay was nearly done. ‘I think it’s an important statement,’ Vidia said, ‘though you might have revealed too much of yourself.’ I had moved on. I did not say what I was doing. Anyway, no one asked. I was the Sorcerer’s Apprentice.
‘My narrator has something to say about that,’ Vidia would say in the middle of a conversation, and it was often as simple as a reference to the fluctuating price of land. He was close to all his characters – he quoted them, and he often quoted the narrator, who was a wise, if world-weary, forty-year-old with opinions on politics and oppression, friendship and money. Vidia was happy with his novel’s progress now that he was the resident of this comfortable hotel. All his needs were seen to. He had rusticated himself and was looked after by the Major and his Kikuyu servants, whom in Kenyan fashion he had begun to call ‘Cukes.’
Pat said, ‘Amin asked, “What work does the bwana do in his room all day?” I told him that your work is like praying. So he has to be very quiet.’
‘“The bwana is praying,”’ Vidia said. ‘Yes. It’s true. I’m glad you put it that way.’
He had started the novel in a hotel in the southeast London district of Blackheath, having deliberately checked in to find atmosphere and enter the mood of his narrator, who was a temporary hotel resident writing a novel-memoir. It was appropriate that he was finishing the book in another hotel. He said many times, ‘My narrator likes hotels. I like hotels.’ He enjoyed the attention he received, the tidy rooms, the staff toiling away, the illusion that this was a manor and he was the lord. And such conditions were perfect for the writing of a book.
‘This is an important book,’ he said of his novel. ‘These things have never been said.’
It’s just a book, I thought. It amazed me that he could talk about his work so admiringly and with such fondness. But I also thought: I want to feel that respect about something I have written. I want to value it. I want to have that confidence. I want to invest all my intellect and my effort in it. I want to be rewarded.
‘Patsy objects to something I wrote,’ Vidia said over dinner one night. ‘Patsy doesn’t want me to say “wise old coon.”’
‘Oh, Vidia,’ Pat said, and her eyes became moist.
‘Patsy wants me to say “wise old negro.”’
They both seemed awful to me, but I could tell from Pat’s anger and the argument that ensued – more tears at the dinner table – that she would prevail.
He worked on an Olivetti portable, one of those lightweight flat machines that seemed modern to me and that went chick-chick-chick. I used an old black Remington that clacked loudly when I typed, going fika-fika-fika.
‘I love to sit in the garden and hear you both typing,’ Pat said.
In the bar one night Vidia said, ‘How do you spell “areola”?’
I thought he was saying ‘aureole’ and began to spell it, but he said no. He asked the Major for a dictionary and found the word.
‘Isn’t it a nipple?’ asked the Major.
‘It’s the portion that surrounds the nipple,’ answered Vidia.
While they talked, I looked up the word ‘pathic,’ but it was not in the Major’s small student dictionary, which must have belonged to one of the Kikuyu staff.
‘Is that for your book?’ the Major was asking Vidia.
‘My narrator mentions it, yes.’
‘I must read this book.’
Pat smiled at this but said nothing. She had a smooth pale face, a slightly jutting jaw, and a pendulous lower lip that made her seem thoughtful, on the point of speaking. She was shy, she spoke sweetly, she was modest and always polite. I was careful never to swear in her presence. I had seen how the word ‘fuck’ upset her when spoken by a man in the Kaptagat bar. I did not want to ask myself why her reaction stirred me.
In the garden, beyond the hedge of purplish bougainvillea, she read, she wrote in her diary, always looking lonely and somewhat embarrassed, as though she were obviously waiting, keeping an appointment with someone who would never show up. She was small and demure and shapely. I give her a chaste kiss at night.
‘Keep Pat company,’ Vidia would say. He was wholly occupied with his book.
I wondered what his words meant and wanted them to be less ambiguous, or for her to take the initiative. I was twenty-four and still missed Yomo badly, although in Kampala I sometimes took women home from the Gardenia bar.
Pat and I drove to nearby villages or to Eldoret, where there was a post office. We went for walks. It was not unusual to stumble across an African couple rutting, or a boy chasing a girl through a field, or to hear, as we did one day, shrieks of pleasure from a corn field. This sort of thing roused me. Pat appeared not to notice, as a well-bred woman will avert her eyes from two dogs copulating in the road. She was friendly and receptive but always polite. Was her politeness her way of keeping her distance?
Wooing was unknown to me. I did not know anything about the rituals of English courtship. I had so far, in the four years I had lived in Africa, made love only to African women. That sex had liberated me and given me a habit of straightforwardness. Once I asked an American woman in Kampala if she was interested in having sex. She said, ‘You’ll have to be a little subtler than that,’ and when I attempted subtlety – though I knew it was too late – she confessed that she was a virgin. I was so shocked at her innocence I lectured her, warning her to be more careful. We were all dogs here, I said.
‘Come home with me. I want to make love to you,’ I would say, but the statement was even blunter and without euphemism in Chichewa or Swahili. It was as unambiguous as describing the insertion of a cork in a bottle, but wasn’t that better?
‘Mimi nyama, wewe kisu’ usually worked when I said it with a smile. I am the meat, you are the knife.
‘No,’ one woman laughed. ‘You are the knife, I am the meat.’
‘Sisi nyama mbili,’ I said. We’re both meat.
Sometimes no words were necessary. Just being alone with a woman in Africa meant that you had complete freedom. She might not say ‘Let’s do it,’ she might make no sound at all. Her silence or her smile meant yes. I had lived what I felt was a repressed life in the United States. It was a relief that no negotiation was necessary. If I met a woman I liked, I soon mentioned sex. It seemed to me, and nearly always to the woman, that what was being proposed was no more serious, or lengthy, than a game of cards.
‘I have given up sex,’ Vidia had said to me. The statement strangely teased me. I regarded Pat in light of that disclosure and saw both timidity and hunger and a hint of frail susceptibility that only made her more desirable.
We went for walks and were often together, yet I could not find the words to broach this subject. I had no technique and I knew straightforwardness would not work. She was simply too polite and circumspect for me to speak bluntly to her. I wished that she would help me, either by frankly putting me off or encouraging me. Her politeness was like the reaction of a coquette, and perversely that attracted me as much as her delicate face and pale damp eyes and lovely hair – only thirty-three, and yet her hair was silver-gray, another provocation.
She caught me staring at her one day and she became self-conscious. ‘My clothes have shrunk so,’ she explained, and tugged with her tiny fingers. Tight slacks, tight blouse, and her pretty lips. This never went further than my lingering gaze, but my feelings of desire for his wife made me guiltily hearty towards Vidia whenever Pat and I returned to the hotel from a walk or a ride. I would not know until much later that in the novel he was writing, Vidia’s Indian narrator-hero’s English wife, who somewhat resembled Pat (a whole page was devoted to the pleasures of her breasts), has an affair with a young American. The narrator looks on; the American who cuckolds him is ‘slightly too hearty towards me, who felt nothing but paternally towards him.’
Eldoret had a noisy bar on a back street called the Highlands. In spite of the music there were not many people inside, and most of them were women from that area, very dark, from the lakeshore town of Kisumu. I went to the Highlands one night after dropping Pat at the hotel. I took a seat at a table and saw an African woman nearby smiling at me. Her face gleamed like iron in the badly lighted bar.
‘Mumpa cigara.’
I gave her one and asked in Swahili, ‘Do you want a drink?’
‘Yes. If you buy it, I want a pombe,’ the woman said, and joined me.
‘So what are you doing?’ I asked.
‘I have been waiting for you,’ she said.
This is how it should always be, I thought, because I knew that it would not be a question of if or when, but merely of finding a quiet place afterwards where we would not be disturbed.
The car the Naipauls had acquired before leaving Kampala, the tan Peugeot, was a popular model in East Africa; it was used as a bush taxi because of its solid suspension and reliable engine. Their driver’s name was Aggrey. His English was poor. He often told me in Swahili what he wished to communicate to the bwana. When, as frequently happened, Vidia was annoyed with him, he pleaded with me to explain why the bwana was angry. I was never privy to Vidia’s petulance, and it could last for days at a time, like the master–servant fury in a Russian novel. While it was in progress, Vidia drove the car himself and made Aggrey sit in the back seat. It was a cruel reversal of roles, and as Vidia was an erratic driver – he had never before owned a car – it was a peculiarly humiliating punishment for the driver to be turned into a passenger, stuck in the traditional bwana’s seat while the bwana blunderingly chauffeured him.
To Vidia, all of East Africa was a single maddening place, but anyone who lived there knew it was three distinct countries. Uganda Protectorate had had a peaceful transition to independence. Tanzania, perversely ideological, was a Maoist experiment throughout the sixties: the leaders wore Mao suits and parroted Chinese slogans, and in return for this flattery (the Cultural Revolution had just begun) the Chinese began building a railway that would connect Dar es Salaam with Zambia. Kenya was a cranky tribalistic place with polarized political parties and deep regional and ethnic resentments. The Mau Mau conflict, still fresh in people’s memories, had been violent and divisive, full of rumors of ritual murder and blood ceremonies and cannibalism. Kenya had been a battleground and was now presided over by the sly and sententious old warrior Jomo Kenyatta, who regularly extorted money from foreign governments and Indian businessmen. The governments played along, but sometimes businessmen jibbed and refused to pay up.
Six Indian businessmen who refused to pay were deported from Kenya while Vidia was at the Kaptagat Arms. Vidia inquired and discovered what we had known all along, that Indians in Nairobi had helped lead the Kenyan struggle for independence. They had been discriminated against by the British, barred from living in certain areas, forbidden to grow cash crops, and kept out of clubs. After uhuru (independence) they were treated shabbily by Kenyatta’s government. Now some were being thrown out.
Vidia was visibly a muhindi, an Indian. Even he said that he had gone several shades darker in the equatorial sun. His bush hat and walking stick were a poor disguise. He was now living in a country where a muhindi was unwelcome. ‘Bloody Asian’ was one of the less offensive ways Africans in Kenya referred to Indians, and muhindi was what the Kaptagat’s servants called Vidia when they spoke among themselves.
Tough-minded, Vidia reacted in much the same way as he had in Uganda. Whenever he met Indians in Kenya, he challenged them, demanding to know their backup plans in case of trouble. He called it ‘crunch time.’ ‘Very well then,’ he would say after the first pleasantries, ‘what are you going to do when crunch time comes?’ He urged them to leave for India or Britain and to take their money with them – to teach the Africans a lesson. He quoted the Gita. He said, ‘You must act.’ But they smiled uneasily and said that he did not understand. He decided that Pat and I should go with him to Nairobi to discuss this matter with the Indian high commissioner and the U S ambassador.
‘Do you remember what I told you?’ he said to me as we drove through the Rift Valley (Beware of Fallen Rocks) toward Nairobi. ‘Hate the oppressor, but always fear the oppressed.’
I recognized the tone of voice from the main character in his novel in progress. It was also often Vidia’s own tone of voice. Vidia and his hero agreed on most things, it seemed. They even used the same expressions, or ‘locutions,’ as they called them: ‘latterly,’ ‘crunch time,’ ‘some little time.’
‘I have been contemplating this visit to Nairobi for some little time,’ Vidia said. ‘Yes. Some little time.’
Nearer the Rift Valley escarpment we saw a sign saying Hussain Co. Ltd. Sheepskin Coats for Sale. Vidia said he wanted to see them, though I suspected he merely wished to lecture Mr Hussain. The coats were cheap. They were thick and bulky. Mr Hussain took our measurements and said he would make the coats to order. He would send them in a month or so.
‘And what are you going to do when the crunch comes?’ Vidia said to Mr Hussain after we paid our money.
‘I have plan,’ Mr Hussain said, wagging his head ambiguously.
When we were back on the road Vidia said, ‘He was lying, of course,’ and then, ‘I wonder if I can bring it off?’
He was speaking of the sheepskin coat.
‘Of course you can,’ Pat said from the back seat, always the encouraging spouse.
‘Perhaps in Scotland,’ Vidia said.
There were giraffes in the distance, crossing the valley, and a herd of grazing zebra and clusters of gazelles.
‘Frosty weather. Snow. I can see that coat being useful. But I don’t know whether I can bring it off. I don’t think I’m big enough in the shoulders.’ After a moment he said, ‘Paul, you must come to London. Meet real people. Bring your sheepskin.’
Nairobi was a small town with wide streets and a colonial air. ‘Mimicry,’ Vidia said, but he liked the Norfolk Hotel, its cleanness, its comfort. He quoted his narrator on the subject of hotels. After we checked in, he said he had the address of a Nigerian man here in Nairobi who had access to the Kenyans. At first Vidia wondered if it might be too much trouble – Pat had already decided to stay behind in the hotel room – but then he grew curious. It was always this curiosity that overcame his reluctance. The Nigerian at the very least would have a West African point of view. His name was Muhammed, and he was a Hausa, from the north of his country. He met us at the door of his apartment wearing a blue pinstriped double-breasted suit. Vidia introduced himself.
‘Jolly good,’ Muhammed said. He led us to a room with a large bookcase and offered us tea.
‘That would be very nice,’ Vidia said.
‘What about some music?’
There were stacks of record albums on one shelf.
‘No music. No music.’
‘Jolly good.’
While we drank tea, Muhammed spoke with Vidia about the persecution of Indians in Nairobi, but instead of interrogating him, Vidia grew laconic and impatient. I just looked at the books. I saw Tropic of Cancer, Tropic of Capricorn, The Kama Sutra, Naked Lunch, Lolita, Lollipop Lady, A Manual for Lovers, and others – variations on a theme.
Vidia was rising. ‘We must go.’
Muhammed, stopped in midsentence, said, ‘Jolly good.’
In the car, Vidia said he was disgusted.
‘What’s wrong?’
He made a nauseated face at Muhammed’s building and said, ‘Masturbator!’
It took him a while to calm down, but when his mood eased I said, ‘I have to see Tom Hopkinson.’
‘Hopkinson? The chap who was editor of Picture Post? He’s in Bongo-Wongo?’
‘Yes. Want to come?’
‘One has no interest.’
I dropped Vidia at the hotel and spent the afternoon with Tom Hopkinson. He was a well-known editor and journalist, and his highly successful Picture Post had been Britain’s answer to Life magazine. Hopkinson, in vigorous semi-retirement, ran the Institute of Journalism in Nairobi. It was my hope that he would come to Kampala and speak about freedom of the press at a conference I was trying to organize. A tall, thin, white-haired man, he was friendly and straightforward and clearly a Londoner: wearing a tie and long trousers and black shoes, he was overdressed for Kenya. We talked about novels – he had published two. He said he was too busy to give the lecture, but I suspected the rumors of violence in Uganda put him off. Most people in Kenya regarded Uganda as the bush.
‘Tell me, tell me, tell me,’ Vidia said that evening in the Norfolk’s bar. He said nothing else, but I knew it was his way of asking about Hopkinson.
‘He’s writing a novel,’ I said.
‘Oh, God.’
‘It’s his third.’
‘Oh, God.’
‘He spoiled the first two, he said. He rushed them. He said he was not going to rush this one.’
Vidia gagged on his tea and released great lungfuls of laughter, his smoker’s laugh that was so fruity and echoey.
‘He’s just playing with art.’
‘He was a friend of George Orwell,’ I said.
‘One has been compared to Orwell,’ Vidia said. ‘It is not much of a compliment, is it?’
The Indian high commissioner in Nairobi, Prem Bhatia, gave a dinner party for Vidia. Now, as at the Kaptagat, I saw a contented Vidia: a respected visitor in the house of a man who admired his work. This role of guest of honor calmed Vidia and made him portentous and unfunny and overformal, and at the table he became orotund.
‘One has been contemplating for some little time …’
Bhatia had been a distinguished journalist in India. He had lively talkative teenage children and the sort of ambassadorial household that was like a real family. It was not a stuffy party. Two dining tables had been set up in the courtyard of the residence for the Kenyan, Indian, and English guests. Vidia and his host sat at a head table.
As an elderly Sikh servant in a red turban poured wine, Bhatia followed him and said, ‘Now do enjoy your wine, but be very careful of the glasses. They cost five guineas each. I had them sent from London.’
Hearing this, one of the Englishmen picked up his wine, drank it down, and flung the glass over his shoulder at the courtyard wall. The glass made a soft watery smash as it hit the flag-stones.
There was a sudden hush. Bhatia kept smiling and said nothing. The Englishman laughed crazily – he might have been drunk. His wife, her head down, was whispering.
‘Infy.’ It was spoken loudly from the head table.
After the party, when all the guests had gone and the servants had withdrawn, Vidia talked in his pompous visiting-elder-statesman manner, which was also the tone of his narrator, whom he had told me was a politician. The subject was the Indians who had been deported.
‘This is disgraceful,’ Vidia said. ‘How are you planning to respond?’
‘We’ve lodged a very strong protest,’ Bhatia said.
‘You must do more than that,’ Vidia said. ‘India is a big, powerful country. It is a major power.’
‘Of course –’
‘Remind the Africans of that. Latterly, the Africans have behaved as though they were dealing with just another shabby little country. Latterly –’
‘I’ve sent a letter.’
‘Send a gunboat.’
‘A gunboat?’
‘A punitive mission.’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘Shell Mombasa.’
‘Who would do this?’
‘The Indian Navy,’ Vidia said. ‘One has thought about this extensively. Send the Indian Navy on maneuvers off the Kenyan coast. Anchor off Mombasa – a fleet of ships. Remind them that India is a formidable country. Shell Mombasa.’
The high commissioner was frowning.
‘Punish them,’ Vidia said. ‘When Mombasa is in flames they will think twice about persecuting Indians here. Aren’t there fuel depots in Mombasa? Yes, they will leave the Indians alone for some little time.’
The following noon we were having drinks by the pool at the residence of the American ambassador, William Attwood. Vidia was in the midst of his punitive-mission speech when, without prelude, a large, smiling, familiar-looking African appeared. He said he wished to consult with the ambassador. They went into the house.
‘He’s asking for money, of course,’ Vidia said. ‘What else would he want? And did you see how fat he is? He’s just another thug.’
After ten minutes the ambassador returned. He said the man was Tom Mboya, a leading politician and government minister.
‘Mah-boya,’ Vidia said.
‘Very impressive man,’ Attwood said. ‘Mboya’s going to be the next president of Kenya.’
Vidia simply stared. He was thinking, Fat thug.
Mboya never became president. Within a few years he was murdered by his political enemies.
The ambassador’s wife joined us for lunch while Vidia continued describing the maneuvers in a possible punitive mission. The rant may have made the ambassador nervous, for, passing the sugar tongs to his wife, he bobbled them and dropped them. They skittered toward the edge of the pool and fell in.
‘Never mind,’ Attwood said.
We stared as the silver thing swayed downward and settled into the deep end of the pool.
Vidia said, ‘Do you have a bathing costume that would fit me?’
‘Lots in the changing room there,’ said Attwood. ‘We keep them for visitors.’
Vidia excused himself and was back in a few minutes wearing a blue bathing suit. Without a word he dived neatly in and propelled himself to the bottom – eight feet or so – and brought up the dripping sugar tongs, which he handed over. While the ambassador was still marveling at his athleticism, Vidia changed his clothes, and lunch resumed.
It was a reminder of his island childhood. He had been brought up near water and was clearly a wonderful swimmer – I could see it in the way he had launched himself off the edge of the pool, diving with hardly a splash, going deep without apparent effort. At that moment I saw him as a skinny child, diving off a splintery pier in Trinidad, in view of the anchored cruise ships. All his pomposity had fallen away and he had become graceful, a child of the islands.
The ambassador thanked us for coming.
‘I think he needed to hear that,’ Vidia said of his proposal to shell Mombasa and set it aflame. ‘Did you notice how attentive he was? He at least realizes there is a problem. I know your people can do something.’
Over the next few days, in Nairobi’s Indian restaurants and shops, Vidia demanded to know what the Indians would do when they were expelled. They had no future in Africa, he said. They had to make plans for crunch time now.
‘Yet one has a vibration that the Indians won’t rise to the occasion,’ he said to me.
Passing Khannum’s Fancy Goods shop on Queen’s Road, Pat said she wanted to buy a few yards of printed cloth to use as a dust cover for a table in the room at the Kaptagat. Vidia and I waited on the verandah, where a small Indian girl of about seven or eight was sitting on a wooden bench being fanned by her African ayah. The girl wore a pink sari and long Punjabi bloomers and had the prim look of a child on her way to a party.
‘Jina lako nani?’ I said to the girl, asking her name in Swahili.
The ayah smiled and nudged her gently, a tender gesture that made the girl recoil and scowl at the servant in a bratty way. Vidia sighed – perhaps because I was speaking Swahili, perhaps because of the little-princess look of the skinny girl in her partygoing sari.
‘Wewe najua Kiswahili?’ I asked. Did she speak Swahili?
The ayah made the soft tooth-sucking cluck with pursed lips that meant yes in East Africa, but no sooner had she sounded this cluck – answering for the girl – than her mistress, silly little toto, scowled again and folded her arms.
‘I am knowing wery veil how to speak Inglis!’ she said.
‘What a horrible child,’ Vidia said, looking away. ‘People are always writing magazine pieces about children – parents and children. They are foolish. I have no children. My publisher, André Deutsch, has no children. My editor has no children. It has been a conscious decision. People say, “You’d have lovely children” – the Indian-English thing. I do not want children. I do not want to read about children. I do not want to see them.’
Watching Vidia, the little girl seemed to understand that she was being insulted. Her large eyes had darkened with anger, and as she looked up at the man maligning her, Pat came out of the shop and said, ‘Hello. What a sweet little girl. What’s your name?’
‘Nadira.’
I might have misheard. She spoke just as we were stepping off the verandah into the sunshine, but at the sound of her sharp voice, like the squawk of a mechanical toy, the three of us glanced back – Pat smiling, Vidia frowning in contempt. I was shaking my head, thinking, Wahindi!
Time is so strange in its logic and revelation. The little girl would go to Pakistan, and after thirty years passed (and Pat lay dying in a spruced-up cottage that was at that Nairobi moment tumbledown and lived in by a pair of elderly Wiltshire peasants) Vidia would meet the girl again, now grown up and divorced, never guessing where he had first seen her – nor would she – and fall in love.
How were we to know that little girl being fanned on the Nairobi verandah by her African ayah would be the future Lady Naipaul?
Back at the Kaptagat Arms, Vidia resumed his novel. He was also reading a Victorian account of travels in West Africa in which he came across the expression ‘our sable brethren.’ He began using the expression, building sentences with his other favorite phrases: ‘For some little time, our sable brethren …’
Before I left for Uganda he asked me, ‘So what are our sable brethren up to in Kampy, eh?’
There were rumors of trouble in Uganda, though nothing to do with Indians. I said, ‘People say there’s going to be a showdown between Obote and the Kabaka.’
‘One will watch from here,’ he said. ‘Eh, Patsy? Latterly, one has begun to think that one’s returning to Uganda would be completely foolish. Anyway, we were thinking of spending some little time in Tanganyika.’
The country had changed its name to Tanzania five years before, at independence, but Vidia went on using its colonial name, as he did Ghana’s, always calling Ghana the Gold Coast. When he saw that using these names enraged Africans he did it even more, teasing them. He pretended not to know the new names, and when he was angrily corrected, he said ‘Really’ and expressed effusive thanks.
From Dar es Salaam he reported ‘extensive buggery’ and asked for news.
The news was bad in Uganda. This was in late May 1966, during the confrontation between the prime minister and the Kabaka – King Freddy. One Sunday four of the king’s important chiefs were arrested on charges of sedition. Because they were so closely linked to the king, the chiefs’ subjects, their villagers, became a mob and stoned the police. Early the next morning the Uganda Special Forces, commanded by Idi Amin, launched an attack on the Kabaka’s palace at Lubiri.
All day there was fighting – the sound of cannon fire and automatic rifles firing in stuttering enfilade, raking the bamboo pickets of the stockade. From my office desk at Makerere I could see smoke rising from Lubiri. The shooting was continuous. In late afternoon there were still gunshots, and much darker smoke – the fires had taken hold.
‘The Kabaka is holding them off with a machine gun,’ my colleague Kwesiga said.
No one knew what was happening, though.
‘Whose side are you on?’ I asked him.
Kwesiga was of the Chiga tribe from the Rwanda border, a despised people who practiced wife inheritance – passing the widow on to the dead husband’s brother – which was based on a curious marriage ceremony that involved the bride’s urinating on the clasped hands of the groom and all his brothers. One of the wedding-night rituals required the bride to fight the husband, and should he prove weak – for she was expected to struggle hard – his elder brother was allowed to take charge, and subdue and ravish the woman while the groom looked on. Kwesiga was being summoned to take his recently widowed sister-in-law as one of his wives.
‘I am an emotional socialist,’ he said. ‘But Freddy is a good king.’
In the evening the explosions were louder – mortars, perhaps. And flames were visible where during the day there had been smoke. At last the palace was captured, but when Amin and his men rushed inside, the Kabaka was not there. The clumsy siege of this wood and bamboo palace had taken an entire day and had not accomplished its objective. The Kabaka had escaped to Burundi – dressed as a bar girl, one rumor went.
That was the first night of a curfew. It was illegal to be out of the house from seven in the evening until six in the morning. It was still light at seven, so confinement in bright daylight seemed strange. The enforced captivity and severe censorship also produced many rumors, often conflicting and violent-sounding: stories of arson and beatings and killings, the murder of Indians, cannibal tales and incidents of vandalism, humiliation of expatriates at roadblocks. The Uganda Army was said to be wild – furious that they had failed to capture the king. When darkness came, the gunfire started. I collected rumors in my specially begun curfew notebook.
Besides King Freddy, Kabaka of Buganda, there were three other kings. Sir William Wilberforce Nadiope, a fat little man noted for his bizarre robes and blustery speech, was Kyabazinga of Busoga. The Omukama of Toro was a twenty-year-old Mutoro named Patrick, whose sister Princess Elizabeth was a Vogue model. The Omugabe of Ankole was a cattle owner. When the Kabaka fell, the other kings caved in and went quietly, and the government commandeered their palaces – though ‘palace’ was a misnomer for what were actually comically lopsided houses.
The curfew was a period of intense confusion and fear. There was widespread drunkenness too, which added to the atmosphere of insanity. People boasted of their boozing. No one worked. The urgency about drinking was marked, because the bars closed at six P.M. in order to allow people time to get home. Food was scarce because the trucks from the coast were held up at the Ugandan frontier. Matches became unobtainable, no one knew why. There was much petty crime: robberies, looting, a settling of scores. People traveled in convoys if they were headed upcountry. Mail was suspended for a week. The distant gunfire continued, pok-pok-pok, until dawn.
The curfew was for me an extraordinary event; it was also the perfect excuse. I did no teaching. I got on with my novel. I spent the day collecting rumors – always violent, always of massacres. Indians often figured in them. My curfew notebook thickened and I considered writing a book like Camus’s The Plague, describing the deterioration of a city during a siege and curfew.
I realized that in time of war or anarchy people lived out their fantasies. There were many fights, but just as many love affairs. Scores were settled because the police were not a presence – the army was in charge, but its roadblocks were used for intimidation and robbery and, if the rumors were true, killings. Roadblocks were always manned by the most thuggish and rapacious soldiers. Most were from the far north, from a minority tribe noted for its ferocity.
I carried my curfew notebook to the Staff Club. Each rumor had a date, a time, a place.
‘What is the point of that?’ one colleague asked.
I said, ‘I want to calculate how many miles an hour a rumor travels.’
The breakdown of order had its excitements. People became reckless and slightly crazed. A Muganda man committed suicide after an atrocity in his village. His friends and family were summoned over the radio.
‘He has hanged himself,’ the announcer said.
My own fantasies took the form of being a real writer and writing all day. I had two books on the burner: my novel and this detailed curfew journal. In the late afternoon I hurried into town and got drunk as quickly as I could. I was energized by the tumult and the noise, which would, I knew, stop dead at seven, when we had to be indoors.
‘Can you come home with me?’ I asked when I saw a woman I liked.
Sometimes, without my asking, a woman would say, ‘Take me home with you,’ because it was more pleasant to be stuck in a large house than in a small hut in a turbulent township.
Boredom was the cause of all sorts of unruly behavior, and the streets were always littered with broken glass. I enjoyed the drama, the release from the routine, and found it a period of stimulating turmoil.
One day, hurrying home with a woman in my car, worrying about beating the curfew, I took a side road and a bat crashed against my windshield. It was a large fruit bat, and my thought was that it could have broken the windshield. I stopped the car, and before I knew what I was doing I began stomping on the bat, killing the injured creature. The woman in the car was screaming, ‘Let’s go!’ The curfew was changing me, too.
Vidia was shocked by it. The curfew seemed to confirm his fears of African anarchy – casual violence and a climate of fear. From a distance it must have looked awful. He wrote from the Kaptagat Arms saying that he was just about through with his novel and that as soon as the curfew was over, and law and order was restored, he would return to Kampala.
And, ‘May I use your spare room?’
I was just a young man in Africa, trying to make my life. He was one of the strangest men I had ever met, and absolutely the most difficult. He was almost unlovable. He was contradictory, he quizzed me incessantly, he challenged everything I said, he demanded attention, he could be petty, he uttered heresies about Africa, he fussed, he mocked, he made his innocent wife cry, he had impossible standards, he was self-important, he was obsessive on the subject of his health. He hated children, music, and dogs. But he was also brilliant, and passionate in his convictions, and to be with him, as a friend or fellow writer, I had always to be at my best.
I said, ‘Of course.’