prawns.
âWeâve finished the first course,â he finally said. His mouth was full, to put me in the wrong and make a point. âYouâre late.â
His obsession with punctuality governed his relationships. I was lucky in having merely been reprimanded for my lateness; the usual penalty was rejection: âHe was late. I wouldnât see him.â An African painter I knew ran out of gas on his way to an appointment with Vidia and, having to walk the rest of the way, arrived half an hour late. Vidia sent him away.
âThe oldest excuse in the book, man. âI ran out of petrol.â All the lies!â
He began to rant more often, which was now most of the time. He stopped working. He grew morose.
One day, all he wrote was the word âTheâ on a piece of paper, nothing more. He showed it to me. It was large and very dark. âIt took me seven hours to write that.â He smiled insanely at it, a grin of satisfaction, as if to say, See what they made me do! He looked crazy, but he said he was sad. The problem was his house. The noise was also an assault. âThose bitches!â He hated the smellsâcooking fires, rotting vegetation, human odors. âNo one washes. Is soap expensive here?â
There had always been a note of humor in his rage, but today he was not joking. He looked older, angrier, insulted, trapped. He was miserable.
âI had to take to my bed,â he said.
In her gentle, trembly, imploring voice, Pat said, âWeâve heard of a hotel...â
Â
The hotel was outside the town of Eldoret, in the highlandsâthe White Highlands, as they were still known thenâof western Kenya: a wooded refuge in the middle of the plateau. It was called the Kaptagat Arms and was run by a man known as the Major, who was noted for his rudeness. He was an Englishman, a retired army officer, Sandhurst trained, who had spent his military career in India. He was in his late sixties and very gruff. Stories about him circulated in Uganda, emphasizing that the Kaptagat Arms was a place to avoid.
The most recent story, one I told Vidia, concerned a woman faculty member who had asked the Major for a Pimmâs Cup in the hotel bar. The Major had said, âWe donât serve that muck. Now get out,â and showed the woman the door. Woman-hating was a recurring theme in the Majorâs rudeness.
Vidia had told me he loathed colorful characters. He hated clowns, comedians, yakkers, virtuosos, village explainers, and hollow jokesters, vapidly Pickwickian, who spent their lives monologuing in country pubs. He felt insulted by their insincerity and foolishness. Buffoonery caused in him a deepening depression. Yet he liked my story about the Major for its rough justice. The woman in question he had singled out as an infy. Pimmâs No. 1 Cup was an infy drink.
âOne of these suburban drinks,â Vidia said.
I was apprehensive. It seemed to me that the Major was the sort of colorful character who would either antagonize Vidia or lower his spirits. He had told me of a fistfight heâd had in a London restaurant once with just such a presumptuous person. It was hard to imagine this tiny man provoked to physical violence. But he never lied, so I believed him.
The three of us, Vidia, Pat, and I, went to the Kaptagat together. It was a long drive. First the Jinja Road out of Kampala, with its sugar estates and clouds of butterflies that settled on the road and posed a skidding hazard at the curve near Iganga. Then Jinja itself, the cotton mills, and Owen Fallsâthe headwaters of the Nileâand the conical hill outside Tororo where a dangerous leopard was said to live. Near the Kenyan frontier and the customs post, we came to the end of the paved road. Eighty miles of dusty, stony road had to be traversed, and on it, outside Bungoma, which was just some Indian shops and a bicycle mender, we saw six or seven naked boys with white-powdered bodies