‘The job is done, isn’t it?’
•
Daybreak found Sango and Nekam at the lorry station. Knowing how ‘fast’ the lorry service could be from the Eastern Greens, Sango made sure that the driver of Jikan Transport would stop in the village near the convent where Elina was. It would be a good opportunity to see her.
While the lorry was being loaded up with passengers, dried fish, yams and oil, Nekam talked of his ambitions to see the country progress as a whole till it took its place in the front rank of self-governing countries within the British Commonwealth. There was still a lot to be done, but this crisis was only the beginning of national unity.
‘Keep up the struggle, Sango. We workers at this end will never give up.’
Sango had listened to this kind of serious talk once before: that bright day when he had been at an identical motor station, and his father, an old man, now no more, had come to see him off. The hairy Nekam was less gentle, more full of fire.
The lorry horned. ‘That’s the signal to go aboard, Nekam. Thank you for your hospitality. You’ve made me see the whole business from the inside as a real reporter should. I’d like you to be a little patient. I’m sure the National Committee for Justice which the politicians have formed will do something. The bereaved will get full social compensation. And when the Commission of Inquiry arrives from Britain, I hope I shall be here again to listen to the evidence.’
Nekam stood back, while Sango walked towards the lorry and took a seat in the second class – a little partition shielded from the driver. He sat with his knees bunched up, counting the miles between him and the village where Elina was.
The lorry backed away and there stood Nekam under a tree, his arm raised. Sango waved back. It had taken a national disaster of the magnitude of shooting down twenty-one unarmed men to bring together leaders from north, east and west, to make the country realize as never before where its real destiny lay. What catastrophe, Sango wondered, would crystallize for him the direction of his own life? Soon – perhaps in another twelve months – he might be called upon to marry Elina; certainly his mother would insist on this to protect him from the gold-digging women of the city. But would he be ready?
A fat woman sitting on his right sighed. He turned and looked at her face, radiant and attractive. Before the lorry had moved three miles, she was fast asleep, using Sango’s back as a pillow.
When the lorry at last pulled up at the little village, Sango found that his second-class seat had been worth having after all. The other passengers in the third class were covered from head to foot in red dust.
•
The convent was beautifully situated: about a mile or two from the main motor-road, it overlooked an arm of the river. Sango walked across the village and beyond the market-place till he was well out in the woods. Peace and quiet such as he could never dream of, were here in the scented air, and the music of unseen birds. It was incredible, this idealized setting which had been chosen for a convent. Less than a hundred miles from the scene of death, desolation and the shattering of amities, yet this place stubbornly refused to see the evil in the world, talked only of the good and the pure. The sadness came when the girls graduated, as Elina would. Then rude shocks were theirs in the words, thoughts and deeds of the outside world.
Sango’s steps were already becoming reluctant. He knew before the gate swung back and admitted him that some purification treatment must be meted out to him before he could dream of being worthy of Elina.
; One of the girls led him round the beautifully kept lawns to the waiting-room, where she showed him a school bench and told him to wait. It was siesta time, she explained, and Elina must not be disturbed. Sango, confronted with pictures of the Madonna and Child, the Sacred Heart of Jesus radiating mercy to sinners like himself, saw no hope of his own salvation. He knelt down suddenly and made the sign of the cross.
At that moment he vowed to spend the rest of his life doing good, and cared nothing for the fact that the lorry-driver up at the village had told him as he poured palm-wine into his drinking horn: ‘Don’ keep long.’
It took some time before a delicate rustle startled Sango out of his reverie. The Mother Superior, for she it must be, in her whites and black hood, clear-skinned and graceful in her old age, came into the little waiting room.
‘You sent a letter some time ago from the coal city? It is an awkward time to come, for the girls are at rest.’
Sango could see numerous heads peering into the room from dormitory windows. Such a commotion did a male visitor cause in a girls’ establishment.
He said, ‘Yes, Mother Superior.’
‘But I’ll treat this as a special case, since you live so far away.’ Once again she questioned him about his name, religion, and occupation. She talked at length about Elina and, sweeping up her robe to avoid dust, she walked gently down the steps. Sango looked into the dormitory windows: the heads had vanished.
•
Elina was a tall girl, quick-smiling, but somewhat gawky in appearance. Looking at her as she hung timidly on the arm of the head-girl who led her in, Sango felt his heart contract with pain and disillusionment. Pure she must be, innocent, a virgin no doubt; but one whom Sango could never see himself desiring. He smiled back at her, hoping she could not by some mysterious means fathom his thoughts. He cursed himself for his city background which had taught him to appreciate the voluptuous, the sensual, the sophisticated in woman. Elina was none of these. What did he want for a wife, anyway? A whore? Perhaps not; but he knew what he did not want. This must be the most awkward moment of his life. He was tongue-tied, and the presence of a chaperone choked back any warmth he might have shown.
On the other hand this was a beautiful moment, full of significance for them both. He was the man from the city who would one day be her husband. She was the pure girl, brought up according to the laws of God and the Church, unadulterated and therefore totally ignorant of the realities of life, looking forward to a life divine with him. Could anything be more impossible, he asked himself?
How the interview ended he never could tell, but he found himself walking back across the village to the impatient lorry, now on the point of departing without him. Now something had gone out of his life’s purpose. As an ideal, unseen and alive only in his imagination, Elina had been an incentive. But now he felt that urge gone. He was alone with no idealized plan. And there was his weakness for the city woman with no restraining factor, nothing to check his lasciviousness. Whatever happened he was determined that his mother must not know of his disappointment.
If only this lorry journey were ten times as long, he would have time to work it all out before returning to the city.
PART TWO
When all doors are closed
9