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Shoba
Mahesh is an eager entrepreneur and the husband of Shoba. The couple are some of Salim’s first real friends in town. Mahesh is also ethnically Indian but has lived in Africa his whole life. He was a motorcycle mechanic when he met Shoba, and their relationship and subsequent marriage were scandalous, as her family is high class. Shoba remains the shining symbol of success to Mahesh, and the pair are collectively obsessed with maintaining the appearance of wealth through clothing and lifestyle, despite living and working in the town. Mahesh fixates on get-rich-quick schemes—particularly through the proprietary ownership or monopolization of simple machines, which continue to fascinate and entrance him—and is generally an over-zealous businessman. This tendency is at its most acute during the town’s economic boom, during which time Mahesh pursues a myriad of failed business ventures, even looping Salim into a smuggling scheme for ivory and gold. Eventually, Mahesh finds success owning a branch of the Bigburger franchise in town, where he deputizes their house servant Idlephonse as a manager. Mahesh always insists in times of hardship that one must “carry on,” but the inherently limited nature of this mindset ultimately traps him and Shoba into their circumstances within the town. By the end of the novel, it is revealed that Mahesh had sold his business to a small company partially owned by Idlephonse months before nationalization and has been working for his former servant ever since.
Mahesh Quotes in A Bend in the River
The A Bend in the River quotes below are all either spoken by Mahesh or refer to Mahesh . For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
Chapter 13
Quotes
I didn’t know where I could go on to. I didn’t think—after what I had seen of Indar and other people in the Domain—that I had the talent or the skills to survive in another country […] My panic grew, and my guilt, and my feeling that I was provoking my own destruction […] I began to question myself. Was I possessed by Yvette? Or was I—like Mahesh […] possessed by myself, the man I thought I was with Yvette? [...] She gave me the idea of my manliness I had grown to need. Wasn’t my attachment to her an attachment to that idea? And oddly involved with this idea of myself, and myself and Yvette, was the town itself—the flat, the house in the Domain, the way both our lives were arranged, the absence of a community, the isolation in which we both lived.
Related Characters:
Page Number and Citation:
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 14
Quotes
Their obsession was with more than a skin blemish. They had cut themselves off. Once they were supported by their idea of their high traditions […] now they were empty in Africa, and unprotected, with nothing to fall back on. They had begun to rot. I was like them. Unless I acted now, my fate would be like theirs. That constant questioning of mirrors and eyes; compelling others to look for the blemish that kept you in hiding; lunacy in a small room. I decided to rejoin the world […] I wrote to Nazruddin that I was coming to London […] When no other choice was left to me, when family and community hardly existed, when duty hardly had a meaning, and there were no safe houses.
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Mahesh Quotes in A Bend in the River
The A Bend in the River quotes below are all either spoken by Mahesh or refer to Mahesh . For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
Chapter 13
Quotes
I didn’t know where I could go on to. I didn’t think—after what I had seen of Indar and other people in the Domain—that I had the talent or the skills to survive in another country […] My panic grew, and my guilt, and my feeling that I was provoking my own destruction […] I began to question myself. Was I possessed by Yvette? Or was I—like Mahesh […] possessed by myself, the man I thought I was with Yvette? [...] She gave me the idea of my manliness I had grown to need. Wasn’t my attachment to her an attachment to that idea? And oddly involved with this idea of myself, and myself and Yvette, was the town itself—the flat, the house in the Domain, the way both our lives were arranged, the absence of a community, the isolation in which we both lived.
Related Characters:
Page Number and Citation:
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 14
Quotes
Their obsession was with more than a skin blemish. They had cut themselves off. Once they were supported by their idea of their high traditions […] now they were empty in Africa, and unprotected, with nothing to fall back on. They had begun to rot. I was like them. Unless I acted now, my fate would be like theirs. That constant questioning of mirrors and eyes; compelling others to look for the blemish that kept you in hiding; lunacy in a small room. I decided to rejoin the world […] I wrote to Nazruddin that I was coming to London […] When no other choice was left to me, when family and community hardly existed, when duty hardly had a meaning, and there were no safe houses.
