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 nam?” 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 vell 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.