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 work ing 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 nearness, 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.