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Nazruddin is the charismatic businessman who originally sells Salim the shop in the town at the bend in the river. Growing up, Nazruddin was something of a mentor to Salim, who admired Nazruddin’s worldliness, business savvy, and seeming penchant for good luck. Nazruddin, for his part, had business interests across Africa, but remained close to Salim’s community for potential suitors for his daughters, seeing Salim as one of them. He sells Salim the shop when he moves his family to Uganda, where he has a lucrative cotton-ginning business. Nazruddin is endlessly enthusiastic, seemingly blessed with the ability to always land on his feet. When Salim goes to stay with Nazruddin in London to fulfill his unspoken engagement to Nazruddin’s daughter Kareisha, Salim is surprised to learn that his subsequent business ventures have been characterized by manipulation and bad luck. After the uprising in Uganda, Nazruddin moved his family to Canada, where he was scammed trying to invest in oil, and then in a movie theater. In London he bought property at the market peak on Gloucester Road where many other Arabs live, but was forced to charge high rent and was embattled with squatters and tenants refusing to pay. Nazruddin is for the most part comfortably retired in England by the time Salim visits, but his experiences lead him to believe his luck has run out, and cause him to grow distrustful of his own people and to question if there is any real place in the modern world for the Arab.
Nazruddin Quotes in A Bend in the River
The A Bend in the River quotes below are all either spoken by Nazruddin or refer to Nazruddin . 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 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.
Related Characters:
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Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 15
Quotes
“What place is there in the world for people like that? There are so many of them… What happens to these people? Where do they go? How do they live? Do they go back home? Do they have homes to go back to? You’ve talked a lot, Salim, about those girls from East Africa in the tobacco kiosks, selling cigarettes at all hours of the night… You say they don’t have a future and that they don’t even know where they are. I wonder whether that isn’t their luck. They expect to be bored, to do what they do. The people I’ve been talking about have expectations and they know they’re lost in London… The area is full of them, coming to the centre because it is all they know about and because they think it’s smart, and trying to make something out of nothing. You can’t blame them. They’re doing what they see the big people doing.”
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Nazruddin Quotes in A Bend in the River
The A Bend in the River quotes below are all either spoken by Nazruddin or refer to Nazruddin . 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 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.
Related Characters:
Page Number and Citation:
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 15
Quotes
“What place is there in the world for people like that? There are so many of them… What happens to these people? Where do they go? How do they live? Do they go back home? Do they have homes to go back to? You’ve talked a lot, Salim, about those girls from East Africa in the tobacco kiosks, selling cigarettes at all hours of the night… You say they don’t have a future and that they don’t even know where they are. I wonder whether that isn’t their luck. They expect to be bored, to do what they do. The people I’ve been talking about have expectations and they know they’re lost in London… The area is full of them, coming to the centre because it is all they know about and because they think it’s smart, and trying to make something out of nothing. You can’t blame them. They’re doing what they see the big people doing.”
