The Masque of Africa_ Glimpses of African Belief - By V. S. Naipaul Page 0,54

children. His grandfather had about fifty, but things were different in those days.

Nobody in the court could understand why Laila refused to be comforted, and continued to make a fuss, threatening the harmony of the harem; many of the women said that the white woman had been unhinged by the English books she had read and the convent education she had received. And Laila was cast into the very pit of despair when her parents made it clear that they couldn’t support her; she had expected them at least to understand.

The second marriage went ahead, without reference, it seemed, to Laila. She felt shut out of her own marriage. She felt that her humiliation was complete. She felt mocked by the past. She began to think of withdrawing from the ruler, having no intimate contact with him. It was hard for her to decide; there was a part of her that thought everything could still be made all right. When that idea faded, she discovered that she was pregnant again.

Now began a strange time for her, living alone with the mess of harem life, the rivalries and quarrels, the hatreds, the constant tension. She was protected to some extent by her solitude, her ambition for something beyond the harem, which the others couldn’t even begin to suspect. Within that solitude she discovered a cause: she became determined to spare her daughter what she had gone through.

Her second child was a son. They wanted to take him away. She let them. She covered her face when she nursed the boy. The boy grew up. Thereafter she let the years pass.

The idea that she might do something to save Mona never left her. It gave her a kind of solace, though—living within the walls of the harem, a kind of prisoner—she had no idea what she might do for her daughter. But she felt that because she wished it so much, she would one day be shown a way.

For a year or two a relation of the ruler had been appearing in the harem. He was a doctor from Dubai in the Persian Gulf, a man of mixed Arab and African family. He had become one of the physicians of the ruler. (In the old days the ruler would go to London for his check-up, to Harley Street or the Cromwell hospital; but prices in London were going up and up, and this London jaunt was now too expensive, especially as the ruler was required by his style to travel with an entourage.)

The doctor enchanted the women of the harem with stories of the wonders of Dubai, of grass and gardens being made to grow in the desert, of aeroplanes constantly flying in and out from all points of the globe, of hotels being built next to the ocean.

Laila loved his stories. She liked his clothes. They brought back her old dreams of a world outside. When he discovered that she could read, he brought her English-language newspapers from Dubai and other places. He, for his part, appeared to be more interested in Laila than was correct. People noticed and talked. She was disturbed. She didn’t feel she could at this stage of her life handle more enmity. And if someone in the harem hadn’t said one day, “This doctor is more interested in Mona than in anybody else,” Laila might never have noticed. She studied the doctor when he next came. She saw that he was, indeed, interested in Mona. She wondered that she had missed it. And then she saw the hand of God in the arrival of the stranger from Dubai. She pushed Mona towards the doctor. In time he asked for the girl’s hand.

Perhaps it wasn’t the best arrangement in the world. Laila had no idea what life in Dubai would be like for Mona, but she saw the hand of God in it.

Mona had heard her mother’s stories many times. Laila’s suffering, and the harem life she had known, had hardened Mona, prepared her for whatever might come her way. She was better able to withstand the shock of the doctor’s second wife, and it did come; and the further shock of the third. She never told her mother.

CHAPTER 3

Men Possessed

A LARGE part of the contemporary West African state of Ghana belonged to the kingdom of the Ashanti. The Ashanti kingdom was huge. An old English map shows the area of “Ashanti authority” as about four hundred miles wide and two hundred miles high. On this old