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.”