conversations.from: human
conversations.value: a plot for a book about Salim, President, African entitled A Bend in the River
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: A Bend in the River: Set in an unnamed African country after independence, the book is narrated by Salim, an ethnically Indian Muslim and a shopkeeper in a small, growing city in the country\'s remote interior.\nSalim observes the rapid changes in Africa with an outsider\'s distance.\nSalim, the protagonist, grows up in the Indian community of traders on the east coast of Africa.\nFeeling insecure about his future in East Africa, he buys a business from Nazruddin in a town at "a bend in the river" in the heart of Africa.\nWhen he moves there, he finds the town decrepit, a "ghost town", its former European suburb reclaimed by the bush, and many of its European vestiges ruined in a "rage" by the locals in response to their suppression and humiliation during the colonial times.\nOld tribal distinctions have become important again.\nSalim trades in what people in the villages need, pencils and paper, pots and pans, various household utensils.\nSoon he is joined by his assistant Metty who comes from a family of house slaves his family had maintained in the east.\nOne of his steady customers is Zabeth, a "marchande" from a village and a magician, too.\nZabeth has a son, Ferdinand, from a man of another tribe, and asks Salim to help him get educated.\nFerdinand attends the local lycée that is run by Father Huismans, a Belgian priest who collects African masks and considered a "lover of Africa".\nLife in the town is slowly improving.\nSalim\'s decision to move there gets vindicated when he learns that the Indian community on the East coast is getting persecuted.\nBut he feels not secure either.\nMetty says of the local Africans ".\nthey are malins", "because they lived with the knowledge of men as prey".\nA local rebellion breaks out, and the Indian merchants live in fear.\nSoon white mercenaries appear and restore order.\nAfter peace has returned Father Huismans goes on a trip.\nHe is killed by unknown assailants and nobody cares.\nAfterwards, his collection of African masks is denounced as affront to African religion.\nAn American visitor pillages most of it and ships it home –"The richest products of the forest".\nThe town now develops becoming what it always was, a trading center for the region.\nGovernment agencies spring up.\nEuropean salesmen and visitors arrive.\nSalim\'s friends Mahesh and Shoba become successful with their new Bigburger franchise.\nThe new army arrives – "poachers of ivory and thieves of gold".\nThe portrait of the President – "the Big Man" – is displayed everywhere.\nA new section of town is built, the "State Domain", to showcase the President\'s vision of a new Africa.\nYet buildings are shoddy, tractors of the agricultural center never go to work, and much of it falls quickly into some disrepair, – Salim calls it a "hoax".\nThe Domain is soon converted into a university and conference center.\nSalim is visited by Indar who grew up with him on the East coast, then went to England to study and now has become a lecturer at the new institution.\nHe takes Salim to a party in the Domain to meet Yvette and Raymond.\nRaymond had been the advisor and mentor of the President.\nAlthough in charge of the Domain, he finds himself now outside of the center of power.\nLoyal to the President, he continues to write for him hoping to be recalled to the capital.\nSalim whose experience with women has been limited to prostitutes is intrigued by Yvette, Raymond\'s much younger wife.\nLater, after Indar departs with the steamer, Salim and Yvette enter an adulterous affair, right under Raymond\'s eyes.\nEventually, the liaison breaks down, Salim hitting her and spitting on her, between the legs.\nRaymond\'s attempts to please the Big Man are not successful, instead the President publishes "a very small, brief book of thoughts, Maximes, two or three thoughts to each page, each thought about four or five lines long".\nLike others Salim is forced to buy a stack for distribution.\nThe local youth group displeases the President and is denounced in one of his propaganda speeches.\nAs a result unrest grows, corruption and extortions become more prevalent, and a "Liberation Army" forms in the underground.\nThey reject the President, his cult of the black Madonna, his vision of Africa, and want to return to the "truthful laws" of the ancestors.\nSalim looks for a way out.\nHe travels to London where he meets Nazruddin.\nNazruddin after having sold his business to Salim, had first moved to Uganda, left it because of persecution, moved then to Canada, left it because of its capitalistic rapaciousness, and finally landed in London becoming a landlord.\nHe bemoans the lack of security for honest businessmen, – there is no safe place.\nSalim becomes engaged to his daughter, but soon leaves returning to his place in Africa.\nUpon arrival he learns that he has been expropriated, the President\'s new program of "Radicalization" has transferred his business to a local.\nThéotime, a "state trustee", is ignorant and lazy and retains Salim as manager and chauffeur.\nSalim recognizes that all is lost.\nHe had hidden some ivory on his property, but betrayed by Metty, is found out and put in jail.\nHe is presented to the commissioner, now Ferdinand, who has moved up in the administration after his training in the capital.\nFerdinand tells him that there is no safety, no hope, and everybody is in fear of his life.\n"We\'re all going to hell, and every man knows this in his bones.\nWe\'re being killed.\nNothing has any meaning".\nHe sets Salim free telling him to leave the country.\nSalim takes the last steamer before the President arrives at the town to supervise an execution of a yet-to-be-determined victim.\nDuring the night, there is a battle on the ship, as rebels try to kidnap it.\nThe attack is repelled, but the attached barge, full of Africans, is snapped loose and drifts down the river.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Reverse the sentences.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: \nThe attack is repelled, but the attached barge, full of Africans, is snapped loose and drifts down the river..\nDuring the night, there is a battle on the ship, as rebels try to kidnap it.\nSalim takes the last steamer before the President arrives at the town to supervise an execution of a yet-to-be-determined victim.\nHe sets Salim free telling him to leave the country.\nNothing has any meaning".\nWe\'re being killed.\n"We\'re all going to hell, and every man knows this in his bones.\nFerdinand tells him that there is no safety, no hope, and everybody is in fear of his life.\nHe is presented to the commissioner, now Ferdinand, who has moved up in the administration after his training in the capital.\nHe had hidden some ivory on his property, but betrayed by Metty, is found out and put in jail.\nSalim recognizes that all is lost.\nThéotime, a "state trustee", is ignorant and lazy and retains Salim as manager and chauffeur.\nUpon arrival he learns that he has been expropriated, the President\'s new program of "Radicalization" has transferred his business to a local.\nSalim becomes engaged to his daughter, but soon leaves returning to his place in Africa.\nHe bemoans the lack of security for honest businessmen, – there is no safe place.\nNazruddin after having sold his business to Salim, had first moved to Uganda, left it because of persecution, moved then to Canada, left it because of its capitalistic rapaciousness, and finally landed in London becoming a landlord.\nHe travels to London where he meets Nazruddin.\nSalim looks for a way out.\nThey reject the President, his cult of the black Madonna, his vision of Africa, and want to return to the "truthful laws" of the ancestors.\nAs a result unrest grows, corruption and extortions become more prevalent, and a "Liberation Army" forms in the underground.\nThe local youth group displeases the President and is denounced in one of his propaganda speeches.\nLike others Salim is forced to buy a stack for distribution.\nRaymond\'s attempts to please the Big Man are not successful, instead the President publishes "a very small, brief book of thoughts, Maximes, two or three thoughts to each page, each thought about four or five lines long".\nEventually, the liaison breaks down, Salim hitting her and spitting on her, between the legs.\nLater, after Indar departs with the steamer, Salim and Yvette enter an adulterous affair, right under Raymond\'s eyes.\nSalim whose experience with women has been limited to prostitutes is intrigued by Yvette, Raymond\'s much younger wife.\nLoyal to the President, he continues to write for him hoping to be recalled to the capital.\nAlthough in charge of the Domain, he finds himself now outside of the center of power.\nRaymond had been the advisor and mentor of the President.\nHe takes Salim to a party in the Domain to meet Yvette and Raymond.\nSalim is visited by Indar who grew up with him on the East coast, then went to England to study and now has become a lecturer at the new institution.\nThe Domain is soon converted into a university and conference center.\nYet buildings are shoddy, tractors of the agricultural center never go to work, and much of it falls quickly into some disrepair, – Salim calls it a "hoax".\nA new section of town is built, the "State Domain", to showcase the President\'s vision of a new Africa.\nThe portrait of the President – "the Big Man" – is displayed everywhere.\nThe new army arrives – "poachers of ivory and thieves of gold".\nSalim\'s friends Mahesh and Shoba become successful with their new Bigburger franchise.\nEuropean salesmen and visitors arrive.\nGovernment agencies spring up.\nThe town now develops becoming what it always was, a trading center for the region.\nAn American visitor pillages most of it and ships it home –"The richest products of the forest".\nAfterwards, his collection of African masks is denounced as affront to African religion.\nHe is killed by unknown assailants and nobody cares.\nAfter peace has returned Father Huismans goes on a trip.\nSoon white mercenaries appear and restore order.\nA local rebellion breaks out, and the Indian merchants live in fear.\nthey are malins", "because they lived with the knowledge of men as prey".\nMetty says of the local Africans ".\nBut he feels not secure either.\nSalim\'s decision to move there gets vindicated when he learns that the Indian community on the East coast is getting persecuted.\nLife in the town is slowly improving.\nFerdinand attends the local lycée that is run by Father Huismans, a Belgian priest who collects African masks and considered a "lover of Africa".\nZabeth has a son, Ferdinand, from a man of another tribe, and asks Salim to help him get educated.\nOne of his steady customers is Zabeth, a "marchande" from a village and a magician, too.\nSoon he is joined by his assistant Metty who comes from a family of house slaves his family had maintained in the east.\nSalim trades in what people in the villages need, pencils and paper, pots and pans, various household utensils.\nOld tribal distinctions have become important again.\nWhen he moves there, he finds the town decrepit, a "ghost town", its former European suburb reclaimed by the bush, and many of its European vestiges ruined in a "rage" by the locals in response to their suppression and humiliation during the colonial times.\nFeeling insecure about his future in East Africa, he buys a business from Nazruddin in a town at "a bend in the river" in the heart of Africa.\nSalim, the protagonist, grows up in the Indian community of traders on the east coast of Africa.\nSalim observes the rapid changes in Africa with an outsider\'s distance.A Bend in the River: Set in an unnamed African country after independence, the book is narrated by Salim, an ethnically Indian Muslim and a shopkeeper in a small, growing city in the country\'s remote interior
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: the first five paragraphs for this book
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: A Bend in the River
  She put on her skirt and shoes, and through the door that she left open she swung out into the passage. No pause, no hesitation: I heard her pattering down the staircase—what a sound now! The bed, where nothing had occurred, was in a mess—for the first time, after she had been: I had had the last of that housewifely service. There were the marks of her head on the pillow, the gathers in the sheet from her movements: things now rare, indescribably precious to me, those relics in cloth that would go so soon. I lay down where she had lain, to get her smell.
  He stood about for a little, then he went to his room. But I knew that he was waiting and watching. All the back of my swollen hand was aching; my little finger felt dead. The skin was blue-black in parts—that too now a relic.
  Never closer, never more like a wife, than at this moment. It was easier to talk on the telephone. And when that was over, I began to watch through the night, waiting for daylight and another telephone call. Metty was sleeping. He had left the door of his room open, and I heard his breathing.
  There came a moment, with the coming of the light, when suddenly the night became part of the past. The brush strokes on the white-painted window panes began to show, and at that time, out of my great pain, I had an illumination. It didn't come in words; the words I attempted to fit to it were confused and caused the illumination itself to vanish. It seemed to me that men were born only to grow old, to live out their span, to acquire experience. Men lived to acquire experience; the quality of the experience was immaterial; pleasure and pain—and above all, pain—had no meaning; to possess pain was as meaningless as to chase pleasure. And even when the illumination vanished, became as thin and half nonsensical as a dream, I remembered that I had had it, that knowledge about the illusion of pain.
  The light brightened through the white-painted windows. The disturbed room changed its character. It seemed to have become stale. The only true relic was now my aching hand, though if I had looked I would have found a hair or two from her head. I dressed, went downstairs and, giving up the idea of a morning walk, began to drive about the awakening town. I felt refreshed by the colours; I thought this early morning drive was something I should have done more often.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: five more paragraphs. Start with the sentence 'After we landed we were told to leave the airplane'.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: After we landed we were told to leave the airplane. We went to the small building at the edge of the airfield, and while we were there we saw the airplane turn, taxi, and fly away. It was needed for some Presidential service; it would come back when it had done that service. We had to wait. It was only about ten. Until about noon, while the heat built up, we were restless. Then we settled down—all of us, even the whisky drinkers—to wait.
  We were in the middle of bush. Bush surrounded the cleared area of the airfield. Far away, a special density about the trees marked the course of the river. The airplane had shown how complex it was, how easy it would be to get lost, to waste hours paddling up channels that took you away from the main river. Not many miles from the river, people would be living in villages more or less as they had lived for centuries. Less than forty-eight hours before, I had been in the overtrampled Gloucester Road, where the world met. Now, for hours, I had been staring at bush. How many miles separated me from the capital, from my own town? How long would it take to do the distance by land or by water? How many weeks, how many months, and against what dangers?
  It clouded over. The clouds grew dark and the bush grew dark. The sky began to jump with lightning and thunder; and then the rain and the wind came, driving us in from the verandah of the little building. It rained and stormed. The bush vanished in the rain. It was rain like this that fed these forests, that caused the grass and bright green weeds around the airfield building to grow so high. The rain slackened, the clouds lifted a little. The bush revealed itself again, one line of trees behind another, the nearer trees darker, the further trees fading line by line into the grey colour of the sky.
  The sun came out and glittered on the tall, wet grass. The asphalt steamed, and for a while I watched that. Later in the afternoon one half of the sky went black, while the other half stayed light. The storm that began with vivid lightning in the black half then spread to us and it became dark and chill and very damp. The forest had become a place of gloom. There was no excitement in this second storm.
  One of the African passengers, an elderly man, appeared with a grey felt hat and a blue bathrobe of towelling material over his suit. No one paid him too much attention. I just noted his oddity, and thought: He's using a foreign thing in his own way. And something like that went through my head when a barefooted man turned up wearing a fireman's helmet with the transparent plastic visor pulled down. He was an old man with a shrunken face; his brown shorts and grey check shirt were ragged and soaked through. I thought: He's found a ready-made dancing mask. He went from table to table, checking the beer bottles. When he decided that a bottle was worth emptying he raised the visor of his mask and drank.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: the last five paragraphs
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: We left at about midday. The passenger barge was not towed behind these days—that was now considered a colonial practice. Instead, the barge was lashed to the forward part of the steamer. The town was soon past. But for some miles that bank, though overgrown, still showed where in colonial days people had laid out estates and built great houses.
  After the morning heat it had turned stormy, and in the silver storm light the overgrown, bushy bank was brilliant green against the black sky. Below this brilliant green the earth was bright red. The wind blew, and ruffled away reflections from the river surface near the bank. But the rain that followed didn't last long; we sailed out of it. Soon we were moving through real forest. Every now and then we passed a village, and market dugouts poled out to meet us. It was like that all through the heavy afternoon.
  The sky hazed over, and the sinking sun showed orange and was reflected in a broken golden line in the muddy water. Then we sailed into a golden glow. There was a village ahead—you could tell from the dugouts in the distance. In this light the silhouettes of the dugouts and the people in them were blurred, not sharp. But these dugouts, when we came to them, had no produce to sell. They were desperate only to be tied up to the steamer. They were in flight from the riverbanks. They jammed and jostled against the sides of the steamer and the barge, and many were swamped. Water hyacinths pushed up in the narrow space between the steamer and the barge. We went on. Darkness fell.
  It was in this darkness that abruptly, with many loud noises, we stopped. There were shouts from the barge, the dugouts with us, and from many parts of the steamer. Young men with guns had boarded the steamer and tried to take her over. But they had failed; one young man was bleeding on the bridge above us. The fat man, the captain, remained in charge of his vessel. We learned that later.
  At the time what we saw was the steamer searchlight, playing on the riverbank, playing on the passenger barge, which had snapped loose and was drifting at an angle through the water hyacinths at the edge of the river. The searchlight lit up the barge passengers, who, behind bars and wire guards, as yet scarcely seemed to understand that they were adrift. Then there were gunshots. The searchlight was turned off; the barge was no longer to be seen. The steamer started up again and moved without lights down the river, away from the area of battle. The air would have been full of moths and flying insects. The searchlight, while it was on, had shown thousands, white in the white light.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Delete the last sentence.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: We left at about midday. The passenger barge was not towed behind these days—that was now considered a colonial practice. Instead, the barge was lashed to the forward part of the steamer. The town was soon past. But for some miles that bank, though overgrown, still showed where in colonial days people had laid out estates and built great houses.
  After the morning heat it had turned stormy, and in the silver storm light the overgrown, bushy bank was brilliant green against the black sky. Below this brilliant green the earth was bright red. The wind blew, and ruffled away reflections from the river surface near the bank. But the rain that followed didn't last long; we sailed out of it. Soon we were moving through real forest. Every now and then we passed a village, and market dugouts poled out to meet us. It was like that all through the heavy afternoon.
  The sky hazed over, and the sinking sun showed orange and was reflected in a broken golden line in the muddy water. Then we sailed into a golden glow. There was a village ahead—you could tell from the dugouts in the distance. In this light the silhouettes of the dugouts and the people in them were blurred, not sharp. But these dugouts, when we came to them, had no produce to sell. They were desperate only to be tied up to the steamer. They were in flight from the riverbanks. They jammed and jostled against the sides of the steamer and the barge, and many were swamped. Water hyacinths pushed up in the narrow space between the steamer and the barge. We went on. Darkness fell.
  It was in this darkness that abruptly, with many loud noises, we stopped. There were shouts from the barge, the dugouts with us, and from many parts of the steamer. Young men with guns had boarded the steamer and tried to take her over. But they had failed; one young man was bleeding on the bridge above us. The fat man, the captain, remained in charge of his vessel. We learned that later.
  At the time what we saw was the steamer searchlight, playing on the riverbank, playing on the passenger barge, which had snapped loose and was drifting at an angle through the water hyacinths at the edge of the river. The searchlight lit up the barge passengers, who, behind bars and wire guards, as yet scarcely seemed to understand that they were adrift. Then there were gunshots. The searchlight was turned off; the barge was no longer to be seen. The steamer started up again and moved without lights down the river, away from the area of battle. The air would have been full of moths and flying insects.