Sir Vidia's Shadow Read Free Page B

point he made a reference to “my companion,” but that only confused the issue. “Companion” could not have been more ambiguous, and it also looked like deliberate concealment.
    â€œYou are still reading that book, Jules!” Yomo made his name sound like “Jewels.” She was stretched out on the couch, an odalisque, knees apart, touching herself, deliberately trying to shock him.
    â€œI like it, so I’m reading it slowly.”
    â€œCome over here and bring your friend and give me a baby.”
    She said no more than that, but the way she said it and stroked herself did shock him, and tempted him. He loved her for being able to speak directly to his body, and she seldom failed to get a hook into his guts.
    So life went on. Yomo waited for him to finish work and they were together the rest of the time. She laughed at the Ugandans for being primitive. They stared at her with bloodshot eyes. Julian wrote poems and worked on his novel and took George Orwell’s and U. V. Pradesh’s essays as his models for nonfiction. On weekends he gathered up Yomo and they headed into the bush.
    â€œAlways the bush,” she said.
    â€œI like the bush.”
    Every morning he was in Kampala, he had coffee in the Senior Common Room. All the lecturers and staff sat there in shorts and knee socks, like a lot of big boys, yakking. He read the
Argus
—now he was a peruser and student of the Court Proceedings. He drank coffee. He read his mail. In a country where telephones were rare and unreliable and no one phoned overseas, the arrival of the mail was an important event.
    One day, a man named Haji Hallsmith sat heavily on the sofa next to Julian in the Senior Common Room. The exertion was intended to call attention to himself. His proper name was Alan, but he had converted to Islam in order to marry a Punjabi. The young woman’s brothers had objected, given Hallsmith a severe beating, and spirited the woman away, and all that remained of the adventure was the religion and his nickname, though he had not gone on the haj.
    His face fattening with mockery, his eyes glassy, Hallsmith leaned towards Julian, who could see that he was drunk, could smell it too, the tang of
waragi
, banana gin.
    â€œWhat’s in that cup?” Julian said.
    Hallsmith laughed. He had probably been on a bender and was still drunk from the previous night, drinking coffee now to prepare himself for a class. He was a lecturer in the English Department.
    â€œJust coffee.”
    â€œYou’ve been drinking more than coffee,” Julian said. “I think
waragi, mingi sana
.”
    â€œSo what?” Hallsmith said with a drunkard’s truculence.
    â€œIsn’t that against your religion?”
    â€œDrinking is sanctioned, except during prayers!” Hallsmith shouted.
    Perhaps from the effort of summoning the strength to speak, he belched and brought up a mouthful of air, more banana stink.
    â€œDo you know about U. V. Pradesh coming?” he asked.
    Julian said that he didn’t but that he was pleased. He was more excited than he let on, not merely because he had just read
Mother India
, but because he had never met such an esteemed writer, one of the powerful priestly figures whom he thought about all the time.
    The larger world was elsewhere, and the little town and university were seldom visited. Occasionally experts flew in—the Pygmy specialist, the cautious economist, the elderly architect, the agitated musicologist; never a poet, never a novelist.
    People from beyond Africa were welcome. The expatriates needed company, for they had no society. They needed visitors and witnesses to bring them news of the outer world, to listen to their stories—because the expatriates were sick of listening to each other, irritated more by the sameness of the stories than the lies and liberties in them—and most of all they needed strangers to measure themselves against.
    â€œI’ve