The In-Between World of Vikram Lall (10 page)

Look, said Mother, watching the Europeans, even when they are taunted they look so composed.

You talk like our father, Mahesh Uncle scolded, and she laughed.

She was very happy and playful that day. She watched the beginning of the match (the Asian side batted first) before going off to Dada and Dadi’s to help with arrangements for the family meal. When the match broke for lunch, we all crowded into our grandparents’ flat and ate on the floor. After the lunch the males returned to the match. Just before the official tea
break, our family met at the restaurant, crowding round two tables, and consumed bhajias, kachori, and bhel puri, with hot tea to scald the tongues already burning with spices (as was customary), and topped that all off with the miraculous kulfi. No water in that kulfi, no colouring, all cream with almonds and pista, saffron and sugar. And, as Papa typically wise-cracked, a swipe of salty sweat from the brow of the half-naked, hairy, Brahmin kandhoi-chef.

The cricket match was won by the Nakuru Club, which was saved from defeat by the batting of the man from Middlesex, who scored sixty-odd runs. The Asians left the Club with cries of Foul! and We’ll show them next year!

SIX.

The sun shone gloriously but without a thought for how much the land could bear, and only reluctantly, it seemed, did it go down to retire each night, during which interim no cloud dared come close to bring relief to the earth. And so the drought continued. Daytime heat was unrelenting, the streets and roads were dry, the grass was parched and yellow, the corn and wheat stalks in the farms were limp and red with dust. The weather map of Kenya in the newspaper showed the same feature from Moyale to Nairobi, Lake Victoria to the Indian Ocean, Turkanaland to the border with Tanganyika: an open circle for a cloudless sunny sky. The weather charts we drew in school had gone from cheerful blue and sunny to a mindless white and yellow. The rains would not come. Meanwhile Papa and Om Uncle and all the other traders in town were getting anxious, because their credits to the European farmers kept
increasing and their own creditors in Nairobi were on their backs. Indian shops went bankrupt when their European clients could not pay.

But not to worry, said Mr. Bruce as his servant Kihika carried away another box of groceries to the truck. Mrs. Bruce’s father, who was a wealthy man, had extended them a loan. And the Farmers’ Association’s insurance payments were small but regular. And once the rains came, as surely they would…

Still, Papa said, if you could kindly make a payment forthcoming soon…my creditors won’t wait.

Mr. Bruce turned red. All eyes were upon him, including those of the children, who were always in the shop prior to the departure of the Bruces, sipping soft drinks. Slowly he took his cheque book from his breast pocket and briskly wrote out a cheque.

There, Mr. Lall—for the time being.

Mr. Bruce was a big man who always wore a brown suede vest and a matching, worn-out, floppy hat. I would stare in wonder at his gigantic black boots, into which were tucked his pants. He was a gregarious sort. His wife seemed to send him for the groceries whenever the balance on their credit had become embarrassingly high. But this was to Papa’s advantage, because he found it easier to ask the husband for payments than the wife.

No money, but they won’t give up the most expensive items on their budget, said Mother. That smelly cheese, for instance—I am certain we are losing money on it. And I can’t even tell the good part from the rotten part sometimes. I swear that I could have thrown up over it and they would not have told the difference.

Papa looked up, surprised, and she blushed, saying, Have their purchases gone down at all?

Somewhat. The Molabuxes have stopped extending credit on drinks, Papa said musingly.

We should do the same for groceries.

Can you deny them food?

The food they eat, we can’t even afford.

But the Bruces had become friendly and familiar to us and Mother’s attitude to them had softened. Mrs. Bruce was a gardener, and she had recently given Mother a rose cutting from a variety she was breeding for the annual Nakuru Show later that year. The flower was expected to be orange and she had tentatively called it Borneo Rose, for want of a better name. It was a cross between two South African varieties. Mr. Bruce had suggested My Kenya Beauty, she told Mother, but that was a more likely name for a thoroughbred and hardly something you would call a rose. She herself preferred a name that would commemorate the Queen’s coronation.

When Mrs. Bruce brought the rose cutting over to our house, it was Sunday around noon and cooking was in progress full swing throughout the development. The first thing she said as Mother met her on the porch was, What a wonderful smell!

Mother beamed. Everybody’s cooking at this hour, she explained. And they are making the best meal of the week. That aroma comes from hot ghee and spices.

It’s delicious, observed Mrs. Bruce.

One day you and your family should come and have luncheon with us, Mother told her.

Why, thank you.

Bill and Annie had come with their mother, and all three were in their Sunday best. They came inside and we all sat properly in the sitting room, arrayed in a circle and looking at each other a little nervously. This was the first time any European had come inside our house, and everything in sight of the visitors possessed an extra shine and sparkle that day, from the linoleum on the floor to the plastic flowers in their Indian brass vases and the glass on the framed reproductions of a charging bull elephant and a herd of zebra. As we waited for the servant to bring around the soft drinks and the eatables, Papa and Mrs. Bruce began to discuss the weather. If it didn’t rain for another month, Mrs. Bruce said, their well would go dry. Papa said he understood that the flamingos on
the lake were fewer this year, and that at the temples and mosques prayers were being offered for rainfall to come soon. Indeed, said Mrs. Bruce, looking surprised. Papa told her he had read that the Americans had developed the technology for making rain, now if that technology were available in places like Kenya…

I recall that Annie looked scrubbed and radiant that day, her cheeks were the pink of peaches. She wore a constant, shy smile and had on a polka-dot pinafore and two ribbons in her hair. Mother was so taken by her angelic look that she caressed her cheek and chin in the Indian way and asked her if she took music lessons; she herself had taken a bit of sitar and singing in India—though (she turned to explain to Mrs. Bruce) she had not been able to find an Indian music teacher in Nakuru yet.

To everyone’s surprise, Annie responded with a few words sung softly but in a very high voice.

You sing beautifully, Mother exclaimed. What is that? How lovely! What a voice you have!

It’s from choir, Mrs. Bruce said, they had choir practice this morning after church.

Oh, can they sing us something?

Yes, give us a show, Papa said. He seemed to hover in a limbo between his boisterous self and the respectful Indian, while also under the watchful eye of Mother.

Can you sing something, darlings? Mrs. Bruce asked her children. Something short?

Annie stood up but Bill declined with a face.

Laudate dominum…omnes gentes,
she sang in a high, clear voice, completely unselfconscious, her face transformed by concentration. A few lines followed by long amens. Mother stared open-mouthed and in tears.

That was an Annie so different from the one I knew, an Annie I could have known better. Do I now imagine that she looked at me for a sign when she finished the last, long amen?

When we went outside to plant the cutting, Mwangi was called to do the job. He ambled over from the back, barefoot and in shorts, and with a small shovel lovingly spaded out the red earth in the flower bed under our front windows and placed the stem in the hole, which he filled up tightly again. He went to another part of the garden and brought over manured soil and sprinkled it at the site of the new transplant. He stood up and said to Mrs. Bruce, Don’t worry, Mama, this will become a beautiful plant. He placed one hand on his chest and briefly bowed his head, one gardener to another. When he had watered the cutting, he brought two champeli flowers and placed one each on Deepa’s and Annie’s hair, inadvertently dropping from his hand a few grains of sand on their heads. Bill, Njoroge, and I had started kicking around a ball.

It was Papa who named Mrs. Bruce’s rose, on Coronation Day.

King George, the thin-faced, quiet-looking monarch, had died early in the previous year and we had a beautiful new queen. She could be seen everywhere, in the photographs at the railway station and in every classroom in school, on the postage stamps, the coins, and the notes. She came on in the cinema before the movie started, riding her horse outside Buckingham Palace, the Union Jack flying fiercely behind her, and we stood up in silent accompaniment to the ode to her nobility and grace, lines that we would never be able to forget. How proud we were to be her subjects then, to belong to the mighty empire. Only Mahesh Uncle scoffed at her stupidity and uselessness, after which an enraged Papa one day called him a “blardy communist,” and said, Good thing your Joseph Stalin is now dead!

What made Queen Elizabeth more special was that she had been visiting Kenya when she received news of her father’s death and became queen.

The newspaper on Coronation Day carried a full-length picture of her in gown and crown, with the caption: God Bless
Our Glorious Queen. In the morning there was a march-past in town, of the police and the army, which included awesome-yet smart-looking members of the Lancashire Fusiliers, who had come especially to Kenya to hunt the Mau Mau, and the Boy Scouts and Girl Guides, the Brownies and Cubs. A jubilant public lined the streets wearing badges, waving flags, and throwing confetti at the soldiers.

Later, Papa sat in the living room with his ears glued to the radio, listening to the BBC’s live commentary on the ceremonies taking place in London at Westminster Abbey. Papa gave his own running commentary for the benefit of Mother, who was going about her chores and didn’t seem much interested. But she would pause to ask him an indulging question now and then, so he would not feel he was talking to the walls, and Deepa did likewise.

Deepa: What’s an ampulla?

Papa: Shhh, listen—she’s coming, the Queen is coming—eh, Sheila, listen—

BBC: The young Queen looks stunningly beautiful as she approaches the church from the western door in a simple gown yet lacking no elegance, weighing with all the frills and train—

Mother (as she approached): What colour gown?

Papa put a finger to his lips. Mother came and stood behind him, running her fingers through his hair.

Deepa: What’s a mitre?

Papa: How would I know? Shush!

BBC:…where the procession of archbishops and bishops awaits…. O Jerusalem, Jerusalem…Sirs I here present unto you Queen Elizabeth, your undoubted Queen—

Papa: Wah! Undoubted Queen, of all the British Empire…

Mother: Yes, the fruit of all her karma…

BBC: Madam, is Your Majesty willing to take the Oath? I am willing…. Will you solemnly swear to govern…the United Kingdom…the Union of South Africa…Canada…and all your Possessions and other Territories…

Papa: That’s us, you and me…Kenya, Uganda,
Tanganyika…Gold Coast, Nigeria…and…and Sarawak, and Borneo and Malaya and Hong Kong…

Mother: And they call us only possessions—no name even?

Papa: Be quiet, now listen.

BBC (the Queen, in a low voice): I solemnly promise so to do…I will…. All this I promise to do…

Papa wiped a tear from his eyes. This makes you happy to be alive, he said solemnly, looking up to Mother, who stood over him and caressed his hair once again.

When we reach our hundred years, Papa said to Mother, we’ll recall this moment proudly…

Mahesh Uncle, who was visiting and had come upon the scene, stared through his black-framed glasses, mouth agape, too confounded for words.

BBC: And God save the Queen!

Papa: And God save our Glorious Queen Elizabeth!

It was then that inspiration struck Papa and he came up with a name for Mrs. Bruce’s rose: Call it Beautiful Elizabeth for our Queen, he said. And so it was.

It being Tuesday, Papa was on Home Guard duty that night, and as usual he left after giving Mother many reminders and instructions. But this time Mahesh Uncle was around and the situation seemed less worrisome. Papa even told Mahesh Uncle about the location of his gun, just in case. Deepa and I went to our rooms, leaving my mother and her brother in the sitting room to talk in low voices. Later in the evening Deepa would be picked up and taken to my parents’ room and Mahesh Uncle would sleep in her bed. Neither I nor Deepa could sleep well when Papa was out at night. At Deepa’s insistence the two adults came to sit at the dining table, which was closer to the bedrooms. Their voices were reassuring, their conversation as always intriguing and mysterious, about faraway places and events.

I could have made it in the diplomatic service, Mahesh Uncle said, if only I had stayed in Delhi…an assignment in a small country, Bulgaria or Albania…or even Kenya…
What do I have here, managing a sawmill in the jungle, the Mau Mau hovering outside the gates…