The In-Between World of Vikram Lall (2 page)

He paid her no attention but shook Njoroge’s and my hands solemnly, saying, William—call me Bill, and pleased to meet you.

We shook hands wordlessly, then I pointed to my friend and said hesitantly: Njoroge.

That day Deepa and I stopped calling Njoroge by his English name. And I believe he also stopped using it for himself.

Now he in his turn pointed at me and said: Vic—Vikram.

Well then—jolly good, Bill said. Let’s give those two girls a ride—

He wore shorts of grey wool, with a rather fine blue checked shirt. His hair, like that of his sister, was a light brown. And both wore black shoes and white socks. The girl was in red overalls, and two ribbons of a like colour tied her hair in clumps at the back. We drove the two girls with speed right up to the line of shops, as they hung on, clutching for dear life, screaming with joy.

The boy and girl came every alternate week like clockwork, and we awaited them with anticipation, for they represented
something out of the ordinary and exotic, and Bill was always imaginative and original in his play and Njoroge and I learned much from him. Sometimes we were a Spitfire raining bullets on enemies, other times a racing car, or an Empire Airways plane, or the
Titanic
or the
QE2
, or the SS
Bombay
, the boat that regularly plied the ocean between Bombay and Mombasa.

They had rather refined accents, their language sharp and crystalline and musical, beside which ours seemed a crude approximation, for we had learned it in school and knew it to be the language of power and distinction but could never speak it their way. Their clothes were smart; their mannerisms so relaxed. But these barriers of class and prestige were not so inviolable or cruel at our level, and we did become friends. Mrs. Bruce would drop them off at our shop first thing before going off for her other chores on the main street, and return an hour or so later.

Njoroge and Deepa continued to have that closeness, their bond of protector and dependent; I deferred to Bill, because he was a little older, and also because he simply was a leader in our midst.

And the girl?—her name was Annie, and I came to think I was in love with her, and she with me. Ours was a natural pairing. We found each other like magnets, and we could watch the world together with laughter in our eyes.

And so when flight captain William Bruce went bang-banging in his Spitfire, shooting down Germans or Japs or Eyeties as he self-propelled with his feet, and went tumbling over, the handcart dragging him ignominiously in the dust like a fallen charioteer, who should catch my eye than Annie, wrinkling her nose a few times in an expression of bemusement and glee, which I returned with a wide grin, before we rushed to Bill’s rescue and clucked appropriately at the grazed knees. And when the fisherman Njoroge, at Bill’s instigation, took Deepa out in his boat, Bill serenading with a mock guitar, Annie had slipped her arm casually in mine and we stood behind watching. So many such moments I could recall, gentle
as dewdrops, transient and illusory like sunbeams; charming as a butterfly’s dance round a flower.

Much of my life has been a recalling of her; my Annie. Each remembered moment, each fresh thought like a bead in a rosary. How old would she be now, I’ve asked myself countless times, and provided an answer. Now she would be in her early fifties. What would she look like, what would her life have been like, would we have kept up that friendship. Would she still sing. Who could have guessed her fate, that darling of a privileged family, that bundle brimming with life and future and charm?…I go on and on.

My sister Deepa has always considered this proclivity of mine something of a sickness; Njoroge thought likewise, but showed some understanding of it. I do not deny the affliction. I never imposed it on those around me, I carried it like a private ache of no consequence to anyone but myself. Only lately have I admitted the obvious, that I let it deform me, freeze the essential core in me, so that for a large part of my adult life I remained detached from almost everything around me, explaining away this coldness as the result of a stoic, even mystical temperament.

She had freckles on her arms, and a few—exactly three, as I imagine it—on one side of her nose. And sometimes when she wore a dress her knickers might show, at which my sister would blink her eyelashes or look away in an almost unconscious response that I couldn’t help noticing. She was a burden to Bill, who either ignored her pleas or paid extravagant attention to her. She brought her dolls over sometimes, when Deepa and she would disappear, before tiring eventually and emerging to play with us boys. Once the servant, Kihika, had to walk around with Annie’s teddy bear in his hands so it could watch her play. This was evidently the aftermath of a recent tantrum. She, driven around in the cart by the rest of us, looking happily at my face, the tears now dry on hers; Kihika keeping pace, in his vest and tweeds, a tender smile on his face. It
is a scene carved vividly in the brain, because it would return so often to tease and to torment.

One bright afternoon Mrs. Bruce stayed away an unusually long time, and my parents wondered whether someone should be sent to look for her. Lunch hour was passing, Alidina Greengrocers and Arnauti’s Café were already shuttered, Lakshmi Sweets was lifeless. Finally she arrived, two hours late, just when in a corner of the parking lot Bill, acting the part of a Special Branch inspector, toting a toy pistol he had brought along that morning, was administering a loyalty oath to the “uncovered” and “repenting” Mau Mau terrorist Njoroge, assisted by his faithful sergeant Vic and watched by an amused Kihika and the two girls. Bill’s other, outstretched hand profferred a chocolate as prize for the renunciation.

I shall be loyal to the Queen of all of the British Empire, Njoroge was mumbling,…and the dominions…I renounce the Mau Mau and the oath I have taken…if I give help to the terrorists may I die…

Mrs. Bruce had come out of the pickup and was walking toward us; suddenly she let out a terrifying shriek: Willie! Stop it at once! At once!

She had come to a trembling halt a few yards away; she uttered something inaudible and raised a hand to her forehead, closed her eyes. Kihika hurried over to steady her: Polé, mama, they got tired waiting, it’s only a game. Ni muchezo.

She went with him to our shop, she sat down and accepted a glass of cold water. Tears were running down her face.

I am sorry, Mrs. Bruce, said Papa. We all know him and will pray for him in his sorrow…

All of us children had gathered around in the shop and stood watching.

The cause of Mrs. Bruce’s grief was a piece of news she had received during her visit to the shops downtown, news that my parents had also apparently received in the meantime. Just over an hour ago, Mr. Innes, the manager of the chemists
Innes and McGeorge, upon returning home from work, had discovered his wife and daughter hacked to death by the Mau Mau.

That was the closest that the killings had come to us.

Out in the distance, across the waters of Lake Ontario, the dim glow is the city of Rochester, I’ve been told, where Deepa now resides. The waves of this vast lake before us, under the midsummer night sky, produce a steady murmur, invoking for me the immensity of time and space, mocking the trivial rhythms of an ordinary human life and its perishable concerns. Yet that life is all we have and is perhaps more than we think it is, for we continue in each other, as the arrival of my young visitor reminds me.

One of the cats suddenly nuzzles strongly against my leg, then just as abruptly ceases, vanishing somewhere; I think it’s the black one, Zambo, for whom this is the most but essential intimacy he’ll allow.

Oh, he’s gone, I mutter sheepishly, having reached out too late to stroke the cat.

There he goes, says Joseph, with a nod toward my back.

My young visitor has a surprisingly deep voice; his tall thin body with long black face rises like a silhouette before me in the dark. I’m still not sure why he agreed to come, what can he find here to interest and to keep him? He will start university in September, in Toronto. Meanwhile we are to be each other’s soulmates, as per instructions from Deepa, who has sent him to me to cool off. He had become involved in student activism back home in Kenya, a tempting and hazardous preoccupation, so I understand Deepa’s concern for him. You are his family there, Vic, said Deepa over the phone, drum some practical advice into him. Be his anchor when he needs you.

I’ll try, sis, I replied. A young man like that wants to do his own bidding, he is not going to heed the cautionary advice of
some middle-aged Asian man. Especially someone like me. I am the notoriously corrupt, the evil Vic Lall, remember?

Don’t give yourself airs, she said. Besides, he’ll do you good.

Which balances the equation, I surmise. Joseph has his instructions too. When he arrived yesterday, when I picked him up at the train station in Korrenburg, he was respectful but reserved. We have yet to break that reserve, behind which may hide all his suspicion and distrust of me. What does he know, think of me?

He has been away from home a month now, and from what I understand, he left just in time to escape the clutches of the police following a large riot. He must hide a lot of anger too, at his world.

I remember the day he was born, Joseph, twenty-three years ago, a tiny wrinkled baby in the arms of his mother Mary, not quite black but, surprisingly to me, brown. I had gone to visit his mother in hospital, with my own three-year-old son in tow. The two of us stood together in rapt admiration. The years of the Mau Mau disturbances were long over; what were once termed terrorists were now called freedom fighters, and in the seventies, in Nairobi, we had daring robberies to occupy our minds, and political assassinations. Once in a while a former freedom fighter would emerge from the forests, or publish a memoir, aided by a foreign scholar. The happy scene in the hospital room that afternoon, though, belied a painful reality, for the boy’s father, my friend Njoroge, was not there.

That is the bond between us, Joseph and me, I realize, whatever else he may think about me. I knew his father.

TWO.

My father fussed over Mrs. Bruce, that afternoon of the attack on the Inneses, and was unwilling to let her go home alone, insisting that he call Mr. Bruce to take her away. She protested it was not necessary, evidently annoyed at the attention he pressed upon her, which he didn’t seem to see, rather abjectly ingratiating himself further. I simply
cannot
, Mrs. Bruce, let you go. There are terrorists about, and a European lady alone on the road with her two children…She had been seated on the stuffed chair across from his desk and given a glass of water; he himself had come around and stood before her, effectively blocking the aisle leading out from the store. Crates of tinned and bottled eatables stood piled waist-high on either side of him. Finally, after a few of my mother’s veiled remarks and annoyed signals, Papa relented, and Mrs. Bruce walked away stiffly to her vehicle with her two children close
beside her, Kihika following faithfully behind. When they had gone, Mother scolded Papa, Why do you have to be so craven in front of her, they don’t care one cent for us. To which he said, Our children play with her children. Came the reply, So what, are they doing us a favour? Why didn’t you offer to drive her home, then?

That last remark was unusually sarcastic; he looked at her, surprised, but didn’t say a word.

Mother did not like Mrs. Bruce; she would look peevishly from behind the sanctuary of our shop window whenever the white woman came and dropped off her kids and servant and drove away to finish other business in town. But Mother was from India and not as intimidated by the angrez-log (as she called the Europeans) as Papa was; and her younger brother, our Mahesh Uncle, was an outspoken local radical whom, although he made her nervous by his ways, she also quite admired. Still, it did surprise me that my mother would feel so hostile toward the mother of our two European playmates.

We have been Africans for three generations, not counting my own children. Family legend has it that one of the rails on the railway line just outside the Nakuru station has engraved upon it my paternal grandfather’s name, Anand Lal Peshawari, in Punjabi script—and many another rail of the line has inscribed upon it the name and birthplace of an Indian labourer. I don’t know if such rails ever existed, with Punjabi signatures upon them, but myth is more powerful than factual evidence, and in its way surely far truer. We always believed in the story, in our home. Our particular rail, according to my dada, was the one laid just before the signal box, outside the station. He had used acid and a nib of steel wire to etch his name. There was many a time during a visit to the station when we would stare in the direction of that rail, if not directly at it, in that very significant knowledge central to our existence.