The In-Between World of Vikram Lall (40 page)

Keep in mind, as they say, you need a long spoon if you sup with the devil.

The devil? You used to worship him once.

Jomo is Moses, Njoroge would say, and he will bring all the cattle home and…

We exchanged a long look, the same scene perhaps going through his head as mine: the two of us leaning against the back wall of our house in Nakuru, or sitting on the pavement, Deepa flying on the swing, singing. Happy, innocent Deepa.

He said: I don’t know what to believe any longer, Vic. The world’s too much beyond our control; we thought we could make a difference to it, we could make Kenya great, make Africa great—and it’s all slipped away, the ideals and the hope…Look what’s happening outside—GSU clubbing down students, one of our best writers detained like a criminal.

He was on his way to Scandinavia for a few months for a training program in land management, and he told me to inquire after his wife, Mary. She has people, but just in case, you know, give her a ring. She will appreciate that.

I said I would call her, touched by the request. I knew that Mary had her own group of friends associated with the Catholic church, which she attended. The two of them lived in a modest government flat in Hurlingham, though they also had a farmhouse near Nyeri. Outside, the city’s business seemed to be proceeding but at a slower pace, ears cocked and eyes watchful for possible trouble from the riots. The danger always was that they could spread to include the jobless and poor. We walked up to Government Road, where we stood and observed the scene, our eyes smarting from the tear gas in the air. Diagonally across the street, next to Jeevanjee Gardens and alarmingly close to where my father’s office was, police trucks and cars were parked and a barrier had been put up, cutting off the university area further ahead. Two senior GSU officials were hurrying up the road beside the police cars. Njoroge and I exchanged a glance; we both knew the big one. His face was in the papers occasionally, whenever there was a disturbance
in the city and the GSU were called; he was former corporal, now Major Boniface, the Grimm Giant as I’ve come to think of him—once the terror of Nakuru Africans, now the bane of university students. We had both noticed how people from our past had a strange way of popping up in the present; CI Soames had retired from the police a couple of years before and had departed for England with a well-publicized and rousing ceremonial farewell at the airport. Kihika, once wanted for the Bruce murders, was a district commissioner in Naivasha.

Give my regards to Deepa, Njoroge said with a sigh as we parted company.

At home my prestige had increased, my wife showing no inhibition in broadcasting that her husband was intimate with the President. Jyare president ne maila, to enu khambu pakaidu. The President put a hand on his shoulder. Like a traditional wife, she never called me by name. My in-laws took to seeking my advice on coming political trends, and on such matters as the loyalty of the army and the health of the President. They had acquired interests in mining semi-precious minerals in both Kenya and Tanzania; there were rumours of gold finds in Tanzania.

The power latent in my new status was brought home to me in the most amazing fashion.

One day a young man, straight from university, it seemed, walked into my father’s office bearing a letter from a city official. The letter stated, You are required to hand over your business to the bearer, Mr. Peter Ogwell.

Papa phoned me.

Just like that—he wants to take over the business, Papa said, utterly distraught. Can you believe it? He thinks it’s easy to do this business? I will have to train him or what?

It was not unheard of for petty politicians—and some not so petty ones—to force out Asians from their businesses through sheer intimidation. Now my father had become such a target.

Papa had stuck doggedly to his trade; property values, especially in Eastleigh, were finally picking up. It was time to recoup his losses due to the Asian Exodus. Many of his clients were the new African landlords in the area, whose properties he managed. He was well respected.

That same afternoon, from Papa’s office, I telephoned Ogwell’s patron. We are citizens of this country, I told him, the business is legal, it cannot be simply taken over. By what authority, may I ask?

I could not keep the nervous edge from my voice; you do not normally take on a politician in our country.

The man actually screamed at me: You cannot talk to me like this, you Indian! I will have you deported tomorrow!

Simple blackmail. But I played through my gambit. I replied calmly, I have recourse to the courts of law and the constitution, to defend my father’s business and his rights.

Brashly, the man replied, You try it, my friend, you will not even reach hundred feet near the court—

I said, In that case I will speak to Mzee himself.

There was no answer; I could hear the earpiece humming its high note, but no human sound emerged. Just as suddenly there was utter silence all around me in the office, among the two secretaries, my dad, and Peter Ogwell, the man who had come with the letter. I could hear the hum of traffic on Government Road half a block away. A bus groaned, and in that interim it seemed so close I wondered why a bus was running in the street below. After less than a minute, I think, the party at the other end put the phone down with a click. Peter Ogwell walked away, never to be seen again.

Arré Vic, Papa said, Budhe sé tum aise-hi baat karsakte ho, just like that you can talk to the President?

I don’t know, Papa, I replied.

I was left profoundly affected. Can such power reside in one man? Was this the only way to get justice for a minority? Then only the well-positioned among them could gain access to it. And the others? The Africans? If you were connected,
through family or communal allegiances, even penniless you were protected and favoured. Otherwise, suspicion and intimidation could make a victim of anyone. Try as a coastal man to open a pub in Nakuru or as a Luo to look for a job in Nyeri. But we Asians were special: we were brown, we were few and frightened and caricatured, and we could be threatened with deportation as aliens even if we had been in the country since the time of Vasco da Gama and before some of the African people had even arrived in the land.

This abhorring of a people, holding them in utter contempt, blaming them for your misfortunes—trying to get rid of them en masse—could and did have other manifestations on our continent. Idi Amin cleansed Uganda of its entire Asian population by deporting them, and many African leaders applauded him. Little did they know what a slippery slope it was from that move toward genocide in Rwanda, and then elsewhere. Now in Nakuru, the place of my childhood, it is the Kikuyu who have become the unwanted exploiter-demons, and on the Internet the MuKenya Patriots vow, if not revenge, then self-defence.

The JQS Tower on Kimathi Street was completed and opened with much fanfare by the President, who called it a credit to our country, an example of the harambee work spirit of its citizens. This skyscraper, said Paul Nderi in his grandiloquent fashion, in his speech following the President’s, was proof that Africa was on the march. Few were wise to the fact that the Minister of Transport was part owner of the tower. It was an impressive monument, one more addition to the handsome phalanx of concrete giants that now dwarfed what remained of the squat grey stone structures of the colony that had housed its banks and showpiece library, its one Woolworths and its modest shops, and given the city its elegant tropical character. Among the first occupants of JQS Tower was Mermaid Chemicals of Dilip and his father, and in a photo opportunity they stood with the President and his ministers.

As I walked back in a thin drizzle from the opening ceremony, on Kenyatta Avenue, outside the Bata Shoe store, to my utter surprise I ran into Sophia.

Vittorio, how nice to see you, she said softly.

Cheating is cheating, says Seema, my confessor. Her visits have become more frequent as the days lengthen, and I have even begun to look forward to them.

Is it? I ask her.

Yes—she catches herself, as if a doubt just intruded upon her mind, then says again, Yes. And she adds, Your sister and Njoroge, and you and Sophia—do you think by any chance you used her as a substitute for little Annie?

I quickly reply, I did not stop to think. Annie was not much in my mind in those days. And I don’t know if Deepa ever really cheated—

I get a stare that says, Meeting Njoroge in secret was cheating, and I suppose it was. But Deepa couldn’t help herself. My whole being lighted up in his presence, Vic, she said to me once, pleading for herself.

TWENTY-SIX.

Njoroge stayed six months in Sweden and Norway, the last three of which Mary went to spend with him. We met less frequently after he arrived, and curiously there was less to say to each other. He had taken a leave of absence from his ministry and was assistant to the radical politician J.M. Kariuki, champion of the poor and a critic of the government. I sensed that Njoroge did not think much of my work for Nderi, the nature of which he probably had found out from his own boss and their dissident circle. Occasionally, during mid-morning breaks, I ran into him at the Kenya Coffee House; he would be with people, and he would wave or come over and join me. Usually I went alone there, for some private time out of the office, and perhaps also because I hoped to see him. There remained that bond between us; we would linger with each other over the low coffee tables of that establishment, at times
in silence, and when we parted it was always with a feeling, in me at least, of loss, a sense that we seemed to be irrevocably drifting apart. I noticed that he had stopped wearing a tie to work. He was on a mission. Once he boasted, I am researching—I am taking account of the personal worths of all the higher-ups in government, all that they own: land in the villages, houses in the city, ranches in the Rift Valley, shares in industries, hotels, pubs, brothels. But keep that between your ears, it’s a secret for now—until we come up with a full exposé. How naïve and earnest he sounded, adding, as he leaned forward hoping to shock me: Do you know, your own boss owns an entire block of Eastleigh, behind Saint Teresa?

And a part of JQS Tower and much else, I said to myself, I wonder when you will find that out…Such knowledge as he divulged left me cold. To me the world was what it was, a far from perfect and a tangled manifold. It was not for me to change this world. Moral judgements, therefore, I shied away from, and this became the secret of my success. As an eight-year-old I had seen my beloved Mahesh Uncle take up a moral cause. He desired a different world and ended up abetting the slaughter of my friend Annie and her family and being responsible for much more. I never recovered from the shock of those events, and I don’t believe he did either. I therefore prefer my place in the middle, watch events run their course. This is easy, being an Asian, it is my natural place.

Mermaid Chemicals had grown into a major industry, with factories in Mombasa and Nakuru, and the Sharmas no longer needed the little Mermaid Chemists on Government Road; but Deepa said
she
needed a shop of her own and so she attended to it, her own private domain, while Meena Auntie applied her talents to managing the staff at the posh main offices in JQS Tower. The shop on Government Road was where I could stop to have a brotherly chat with Deepa sometimes, taking time off from my work; it was also where, on Saturdays, Njoroge made a habit of quietly dropping by. He and Mary now had a daughter—the result apparently of their stress-free stay in
Scandinavia—and he would sometimes, in a bold moment, take them along with him to Deepa’s. I don’t think Mary knew then of that intense past relationship between her husband and this Indian woman that was beginning to awaken, the bitter, yearning ghost that would soon tie a noose around the two of them.

One day, at Mother’s insistence, I spoke to Paul Nderi about Mahesh Uncle, who after four years had still not been granted permission to enter the country as a permanent resident. Paul told me to take my complaint to the Old Man himself. Naturally I was hesitant. How could I take a personal gripe to the President? It was one thing to threaten a bullying small-time politician that I would complain about him to Mzee, but actually to request a personal favour from the Old Man was surely another matter.