“‘The message of the Gita,’ I said to him, ‘is action.’”
“It’s just as bad for him to go as to stay here,” Pat said.
“Action. He’s got to take action. These people”—Naipaul was gesturing at the little shops and the people on the verandah, who were baffled by the gesticulating Hindi in the bush hat in my car—“will be dead unless they read the Gita and take action.”
“No, no!” Pat Naipaul cried out from the back seat. “How can you say that?”
A growling in my guts told me that a quarrel was starting. I had never been in the presence of a husband and wife having an unself-conscious quarrel. I felt fearful and helpless.
“They should forget England. The bitches will lie to them. India is the answer. It is a real country. A big country. They make things in India. Steel. Paper. Cloth. They publish books. What do they make here? Nothing, or some rubbish that no one wants, while the infies tell them how wonderful it all is.”
“It would be worse for them in India. You’ve seen it,” Pat said with passion, and she seemed to be sobbing. “They’d be licking the shoes of those horrible people.”
Coolly facing forward, Naipaul said, “You always take that simple senseless path.”
“India would destroy them,” Pat said, and I could see in the rear-view mirror that she was wiping tears from her eyes and trying to speak.
“I was offering him a real solution,” Naipaul said.
Pat replied, but her weeping made it difficult for her to speak, and while she faltered, saying how unfair he was, Naipaul became calm, rational, colder, and did not give an inch.
“Stop chuntering, Patsy. You’re just chuntering, and you have no idea of what you’re talking about.”
The tears kept rolling down Pat’s cheeks, and though she dabbed at her face she could not stanch the flow. There were tears on her pretty protruding lips. I was shocked, but there was something in her tear-stained face and her posture that aroused me.
“I think we’ve done this,” Naipaul said, tapping the cigarette pack.
After I took them home, I told Yomo about the Naipauls’ argument. She said, “Did he smack her?”
“No. Just talked, very coldly.”
Yomo laughed. “Just talked!” She was not shocked in the least. She shrugged, pulled me to the sofa, and said, “I want to give you a bath.”
The next afternoon, in the blazing sun, Naipaul and I were on the sports field again, being watched by urchins from the mud huts in the grove of trees beyond the field’s perimeter. They jeered at the perspiring runners — it was so odd for them to see white people run or sweat or suffer. They mimicked the movements of the cricketers. I ran around the track while Naipaul flung cricket balls at a batsman. Naipaul seemed to know what he was doing. He knew cricket lore. He had told me it was a fair game — that it was more than a game, it was a whole way of thinking. “There is no sadder sound of collapse than hearing a wicket fall,” he said. “The best aspect of cricket is that no one really wins.”
He did not say anything about the argument with his wife until we were on our way into town afterwards for tea and cakes. He lit a cigarette and faced away from me, looking out the window — the same posture as the day before, the same time of day, the sun at the same angle, him smoking, me driving.
“I hate rowing in public,” he said, and nothing more.
At the teashop I had chocolate cake, he had cucumber sandwiches.
“These are cooling, but you need your cake. The body knows.”
He clutched the empty teacup.
“They warm the cups at the Lake Victoria in Entebbe. That’s nice. But not here.” He poured the milk, he poured the tea, he added sugar, he stirred, he sipped. “We’re moving into our house tomorrow. Do you know those houses?”
“Behind the Art Department, yes.”
“They’re pretty crummy.”
He was more restless than usual. When he had gone without sleep his eyes became hooded and Asiatic. He looked that way today. He began talking about the Kabaka again, asking questions. People in Uganda, even expatriates, seldom mentioned him. He was an institution, a fixture, a symbol. No one ever saw him.
I said, “He is fairly invisible, but people say that he knows what’s going on. He has his own prime minister, the Katikiro, and even his own parliament, the Lukiko. He takes an interest in things.”
“He has taken no interest in me,” Naipaul said.
I smiled to show my incomprehension. Why should the Kabaka, the king of Buganda, even be aware of Naipaul’s existence? The Kabaka was forty-two, handsome, androgynous, aloof, a drinker, the ruler of almost two million people. He had been a thorn in the flesh of the British. He was a thorn in Obote’s flesh. The Kingdom of Buganda belonged to him.
“I sent a little note to the palace. I had a letter of introduction. He hasn’t replied. Not a word.”
What a good thing it was that we were alone. Any local person overhearing him go on about not receiving an invitation from this king would have found the complaint absurd. And a more delicate aspect was that the Kabaka was never discussed in public; his name was not spoken. It was bad form to do so if you happened to be in the presence of one of his subjects, and politically unwise if you were in the presence of one of his enemies.
“He has other things on his mind,” I said.
Naipaul chewed his cucumber sandwich and faced me, as though challenging me to give him one good reason why the Kabaka could not reply to the note informing him that V.S. Naipaul had arrived in Kampala.
“They want to kill him,” I said, lowering my voice in this crowded Kampala teashop. “Obote wants to overthrow him.”
This was news to Naipaul, who I felt had mistakenly lumped the king together with the clapped-out maharajahs and sultans he had come across in India — men down on their luck, feeling wronged and dispossessed, grateful for a sympathetic hearing. The Kabaka was strange but he was vital, and he had a palace guard and a whole armory of weapons.
“It’s not a good idea to talk about him,” I said.
“Excellent. I have no intention of doing so. I have lost all interest in him.”
Leaving the teashop, we bumped into Pippa Broadhurst, a lecturer in history, who had been at Hallsmith’s party. A feminist, hating the prison of marriage, the jailer husband, the life sentence, clucking “I am a human being too,” Pippa had found in the smoky bowl of the Ngorongoro crater in Tanzania a hospitable manyatta (village) and had had a brief affair with a spear-carrying moran (warrior) of the Masai people — another blood drinker, like Dudney’s Karamojong missus. The upshot was Flora, a brown long-legged daughter, with whom Pippa went everywhere. The warrior was still in his thornbush kraal in Masailand.
“Hello, Vidia,” said Pippa. “And congratulations. I understand Mr. Bwogo’s found you a house.”
“The house is pretty crummy.”
“Everyone gets those houses,” Pippa said, snatching at Flora.
“I’m not everyone,” Vidia said.
The house, one of a dozen just like it, was newly built and raw-looking, set on a hot, rubbly slope of baked earth above a brick warren of ruinous servants’ quarters. The afternoon sun struck the house and heated it and made it stink of risen dust. The small brick buildings down the slope, too close together, were jammed with squatters and relatives, and I could hear music and chatter coming from the area of woodsmoke. Cooking fires and laughter: it was life lived outdoors, people eating and cooking and washing themselves. The clank of buckets and basins and the plop of slopping water reached me as I tapped on the front door.
“Come in,” Naipaul called in an irritated voice.