The In-Between World of Vikram Lall (26 page)

Momentous political changes had recently taken place in Tanganyika. These had followed the independence of Zanzibar and the bloody and communist-inspired coup less than a month later that sent shivers throughout East Africa. That revolution on the small and torpid isle was the flash that signalled a new and tense reality in our region; the shape of politics, and of much else, in East Africa was never the same again. Our lives would be forever affected, because we had caught the interest of the world’s great powers and become pawns in their ongoing cold war. Tanganyika and Zanzibar became Tanzania, and while the old dream of an East African Federation still merited passing mention, its truth had disappeared like vapour in the harsh sunlight of Dar es Salaam, and we were left with three countries more at odds than ever before. The rhetoric in Tanzania was
increasingly anti-imperialist; in Kenya, anticommunist. As a Kenyan in Dar I could hardly escape the occasional taunt or jibe, from friend or fanatic socialist, especially since my style of dressing tended to the formal and easily identified me as a Nairobi boy. Nevertheless, in its essence Dar es Salaam was not much altered; I grew fond of it and tried to hide my origins as best as I could.

I was not—in my father’s words and much to his delight—a head-cracking intellectual at university. I was pursuing a somewhat dull degree in commerce—a field of study that stigmatized an Asian because it described his traditional occupation in the region and his caricatured role of exploiter, but that did not deter me. University for me was simply a transition, into what I was not quite sure, though Papa, I knew, had a chair and table vacant and ready for me in his office. Mother would have wished me to become something grand, a surgeon or a “barrister,” but I had no inclinations to such greatness and had never shone as a student. I also disliked politics—a hot topic in those times. Politics confused me; large abstract ideas bewildered me; and—what was definitely incorrect in newly independent Africa—I had no clear sense of the antagonists, of the right side and the wrong side.

From what deep source came my parents’ reaction to Deepa’s involvement with Njoroge was bluntly revealed to me when I myself became the subject of communal prejudice in Dar es Salaam. I was one of about thirty Asian students on “the hill,” that is, at the university, most of whom I got to know reasonably well in a short time. Among them I had come across a kindred soul, a girl called Yasmin with whom I became close. She was in the English department and like me somewhat reserved in her ways. She was short, to match me, and quite fair, with long hair falling in a single braid down her back. I still picture her with a sheaf of notes and a book or two in the crook of her left arm, the soft smile of greeting on her face dimpling her cheeks and slightly furrowing her brow as we
meet. How are you? she would greet me, with a high inflection on the last word. We spoke in English and a bit of Hindi, though I was learning some Gujarati and Cutchi. She was rather pious and attended the college Shamsi mosque regularly in the evenings; I would wait for her outside this mosque, whose members met in one of the seminar rooms, and when she came out we walked to the dining hall together for supper, past a gauntlet of very pregnant stares. I had been to her house on the way to someplace else, once, and on another occasion for Sunday luncheon. I knew that her parents, although courteous and hospitable on the surface, were intensely against their daughter hitching up with me, a Hindu Punjabi; her two brothers were brief to the point of rudeness—because I was “par-comm,” an outsider, and apparently exploiting their sister’s naïvete. One afternoon we went to see a film together, it was
Fun in Acapulco
starring Elvis Presley, and when during intermission I went out to the lobby to get us Cokes, whom should I see but one of the brothers jostling ahead of me in the mad crush for drinks; he had a seat by himself, strategically located two rows behind us. But despite the opposition, Yasmin and I continued spending time together, to what end we couldn’t yet say—perhaps simply to tempt fate.

I think she liked the foreigner in me—the pardesi of Hindi films, of which we saw several, together. There was a part of her that evidently sought to escape beyond the restrictive bounds of her community. It did not deter her that I did not belong to her faith. Once, very discreetly and nervously—lest we be observed by a jealous brother—we entered the confines of a Hindu temple, which rather delighted her, and she did puja in front of the image of Krishna. On another occasion she took me inside a mosque in town belonging to her sect; to my surprise I found it very similar in arrangement to the Arya Samaj temple which my parents sometimes attended.

Dar es Salaam in those days was the site of frequent and endless public demonstrations and parades which all students were required by the government to attend, and Yasmin and I often went to them together. We marched against the timid and placative British attitude toward the minority white government in Rhodesia and watched as the more radical students tore down the Union Jack from the embassy mast; we marched against the Americans, after the government announced it had obtained proof of an American plot to overthrow it, in collaboration with the hated Portuguese who ruled Mozambique to the south (the Americans claimed the papers were Chinese forgeries). We stood in the hot sun among the thousands on Uhuru Street to welcome the motorcade of Chinese premier Chou en Lai, and we dutifully waved our red Chinese flags at the visitor, chanting his name. The premier had said elsewhere that Africa was “ripe for revolution,” and so he had been made aware that he was not welcome in Kenya. As the slight-figured and, at the time, quite alien-looking premier passed before us, in his grey collarless suit, waving limply at the crowd, I thought for one amazing instant that I had glimpsed, across the street, a too-familiar face: Mahesh Uncle. I even mentioned this remarkable vision to Yasmin, then dismissed it. But late that night there came a gentle but persistent knocking on my door. Standing outside, looking a little furtive and with a wan smile on his face, was Uncle himself. He wanted to spend the night in my room.

It will come eventually either to a hangman’s noose or a garland for your Mahesh, Papa had said a few times in frustration to my mother; he couldn’t have known how remarkably close his prediction would turn out to be. During our first two years in Nairobi my uncle came to see us three times, over weekends, one of which was during the Holi festival. But his
presence had become awkward in our home. The flat in which we lived was less spacious than the house in Nakuru, and our financial capacity much straitened. He was not my object of adulation in the way he had been before. But Uncle’s fortunes changed in the most dramatic fashion. First, one day my Rakesh Uncle, Papa’s cousin who worked in the Post Office, came home as bearer of grim news. Apparently all letters sent to the Indian High Commissioner Appa Pant received routine screening; one of his recent correspondents had turned out to be Mahesh Verma from Elburgon.

What did my brother-in-law write to that desi busybody? Papa asked crisply.

The High Commissioner was by reputation a former Indian prince who had been specially picked by Pandit Nehru to represent India in Kenya; but his activities, which included consorting with radical Asians and Africans, among them Kikuyu, embarrassed many Asians who had vowed undying support to Queen and Empire.

The ullu-ka-patha Mahesh wrote a long letter saying why independence is a good thing for Africans, said Rakesh Uncle. He said India should give recognition to Mau Mau and assist them. Now your brother-in-law is on the suspect list. Warn him, Ashok. We could all catch trouble.

The next few days Mother tried frantically to contact her brother over the phone, but to no avail, the phone lines to Elburgon were down. In Nakuru, neither my grandparents nor our friends the Molabuxes had seen him for weeks. The fear in our home now was that Mahesh Uncle had already been detained. In the midst of this worry, however, Mother received a phone call, from no less a person than High Commissioner Appa Pant.

Are you Mahesh Verma’s sister, Mr. Pant asked. My mother answered, yes she was. Her brother worked in the Resham Singh Sawmills near Elburgon, north west of Nakuru; no he did not like the job very much, he was a university graduate after all, but the Asians would not hire him in their schools or
businesses; he could not even get married to a decent girl in the whole of Kenya.

The High Commissioner laughed and said, I have received a letter from a common friend in New Delhi. I will try to help him.

Inquiries by the Molabuxes meanwhile brought the news that Mahesh Uncle was safe. Less than a month later he received a registered letter offering him a job as English master at the prestigious Devonshire School in Nairobi. And it was at Appa Pant’s house on Second Parklands Avenue that he met the politician Okello Okello, whose entourage he would join. Both had strong Marxist leanings. It was there too that he met the woman he married, Kamala, one of the four daughters of Vasant Dev, a lawyer who had defended Okello in his trial for sedition at Kisumu.

My uncle was now flying in high circles. At independence, Okello became Minister for Home Affairs, and my uncle left his teacher’s job to become his advisor. In the current political climate, following Zanzibar’s revolution, it seemed that the only friends the communists had in Kenya were Okello and his entourage. My choice of Dar es Salaam, friendly to communists, as the place to go for university had thrilled Mahesh Uncle. But between us there remained that brief embarrassed look, that dropping of eyes, the silence. I could never completely explain this chill inside me. I did not judge him, he who once had been so dear to me, so tender toward me; even in later years he would never miss the opportunity to embrace me, ask how I was doing. In my mind, however, he had become too tightly bound with the horrors of Nakuru: the wrongful accusation and disappearance of Amini, the ghastly butchery of the Bruces, the detention and death of Mwangi, who I’ve always believed was innocent—all that which remained still raw inside me, not negotiated yet for a piece of realistic wisdom about the world, a personal philosophy of life.

One morning I took Njoroge to see my uncle at Okello Okello’s constituency office on Victoria Street. The talk naturally came to politics, and very soon Mahesh Uncle—a little
plumper than he had been in Nakuru, his beard and hair trimmer but greying, his black-framed glasses thicker—had energetically brushed aside Njoroge’s open-eyed optimism about the future of the nation.

Njoroge, Njoroge, look around you, said my uncle. Don’t you see who’s got the prime property now, the lion’s share of the Kenya Highlands previously owned by the whites? Why, it’s the Old Man and his cronies, some of whom even collaborated with the British! Who’s getting fat on the land? Mau Mau are now languishing in prison—because they dare to ask, Where is the land we fought for?

It was the first time I heard the articulation of this argument, that the country was stolen away by an elite, and a traitorous elite at that. This charge has become a constant subtheme in our country’s recent history. In time Njoroge too would come under its sway, but that lunch hour as we emerged into busy Victoria Street by the crowded bus stop, the buses grinding their gears before lurching away down toward the river and back up on to Ngara, Parklands, and High Ridge, leaving behind disappointed groaning African and Asian women in the wake of exhaust fumes, as we walked off to the Supreme nearby to meet Deepa for vegetarian thalis, we dismissed my uncle’s rantings. I reminded Njo of how Uncle would be the first to take offence during our Sunday family meals, kicking his chair back as he sprang to his feet, fists raised to take on my father’s brothers for the sake of his radical politics. Njoroge and I laughed at that memory, doorway to many others that united us as friends.

I’ve come to spend the night with my nephew, do you have space in your fine abode for your uncle?

We embraced. Why, Uncle, come in, I said. Then: Are you in Dar to meet Premier Chou en Lai?

He smiled, as if I had made a joke, and shook his head. Just to observe the feast, he said, which we in Kenya have been so unjustly denied. I wish Premier Chou could have
come and drummed some revolutionary sense into Kenyans.

All he had on him was a small overnight case and his favourite jute shoulder bag that I remembered so well. He sat down on my bed, glanced around the room briefly. Obviously he himself did not want to be observed in Dar, or he would have been in a hotel. I said nothing.

I saw you in town, on the street, waving a flag. A girl was with you—you must have seen me too.

Yes, but I couldn’t believe it was truly you. I thought it was the Dar es Salaam heat getting to me.

He laughed.

It was a hot night, and he was famished. He drank a glass of water, then the two of us changed into shorts and took off into the night for the banda down the street, which served tea and snacks practically round the clock, a godsend for students. On the way we passed a man roasting meat, and the smell was strong.

Do you eat meat nowadays? he asked softly.