The In-Between World of Vikram Lall (43 page)

But
you
sent me, I said, I was merely following your orders!

That was before the South African papers got wind of the meeting—you must not have been prudent, my friend.

And I thought you were only kicking me down the stairs back to Railways.

You cannot be seen in government, Vic. I must disavow you.

Just like that? Sacked, for obeying an order? My ticket was authorized by you! Oletunde himself came and briefed me!

The Old Man wants this; it’s for your own good. His orders, specific. And you are not to discuss the matter in public.

And then as I sat lost in hopeless contemplation behind the closed doors of his office, Paul Nderi said to me, So what will you do now?

I don’t know—

Join your father—I have a property in Eastleigh you could manage. And I could send you other business too.

I shook my head and wondered if he had despised me all along. His occasional jeer I had thought was simply a mannerism, but I had earned his trust and therefore surely deserved his respect. Rose gave me a smile as I passed her desk on my way out, then abruptly she got up, came around, and gave me a kiss on the cheek. Take it easy, she said, squeezing my hand. Paul Nderi, standing at his doorway, watched me leave.

I received a nod from the giant Sam Karimi and proceeded to enter the office of the President. He was sitting behind his desk, in a brown striped suit, looking rather formal.

My father, he said softly in a rasp, meaning in his own way, My son. How are you keeping? Sit down. Keti kidogo.

I sat and answered appropriately, My father, I have been keeping well…having just returned from government business in London.

You liked it—this London?

It is a great city, my father.

A great city, yes—from where they ruled us. I spent many years there, in university. I liked it too, this London.

I had asked for a meeting with him, following my dismissal by Nderi, and had very quickly been granted this audience. There was a query in the blunt, momentary gaze he turned toward me now, with that tiny enigma of a smile located only on the lips. He was not in a good mood.

That was bad business, Lall-jee, he said, talking with our enemies in London. And now they have made it public—

My father, I was ordered—

You were ordered. So you want me to fire one of my ministers for making a blunder. How will that look? Ministers are like wives, they do not get sacked. But you…

I did not answer, and he said, waving a hand, Go, Lall-jee. I cannot help you.

Yes, my father, I said, deeply shocked by the abrupt dismissal, its casual cruelty, and prepared to stand up and depart.

Our eyes met, and he seemed to take pity on me; his look softened and he said in that low grainy voice, Remember, sometimes it is better to have sipped the beer than to have eaten your bellyful from the pot. Your place is not in government. Go. And if you have any shida, Lall-jee, come and see me. Any time. Unasikia?

Yes, my father. I have brought this offering from my in-laws, if you will be kind enough to accept it—they are your admirers and have benefited from your wise rule.

It was a jewellery set and he accepted it.

My in-laws the Javeris begged me to join them in their business, but I declined. I would spend my mornings around the house, then visit a few places around town, and return home to play with the children. I took an interest in gardening. Shobha found me an annoyance at home, nagging at me that a man’s place was out in the city working. As if I didn’t know. Sometimes I went out to meet my parents. I did not know what to do with my life. I debated going overseas, even emigrating. I was depressed. There was nobody I could talk to. My wife assumed I had done something wrong to fall so easily out of favour. Neither Deepa nor Njoroge was in a position to sympathize; they did not know of my secret assignment under Nderi. I had been, simply put, dropped—because I was the convenient scapegoat, the disposable outsider, and my usefulness had run out. It was as well that Sophia had not arrived in town since my return from London, for I would have made poor company. My stutter, which I had developed in childhood and learned to master, was back in force, and the irritant it was I could see on the faces around me. One day after a bitter quarrel with my wife, in which I did not lose the opportunity to accuse her of stealing my private possessions, I called up Jim and asked him if I could hitch a ride with him to Nakuru, where he had told me he was going, when we met a few days before in town.

I left home for the period of a month, an abandonment that my children and wife never forgave. Where I headed was not arbitrary, I knew exactly where I was going. I did not even pause to ask myself, why there. I was heeding a call, from somewhere so deep inside me, I did not understand it.

After treating Jim and Gerald and their girlfriends to drinks and dinner at the Nakuru Club, whose old colonial ambience delighted them, I quietly took a goods train on the Solai branch line the next morning and asked the driver to drop me at Jamieson. Yes, he told me, the old couple, the white woman and the African man, still lived there. He let me ride in his cabin, and as I watched the red earth pass beneath us, and the dense forest up ahead, and the green hills to my right where monkeys frolicked in the tree branches, and the odd gang of half-dressed children who had stopped on the paths to watch us, as the driver hummed “Onward Christian Soldiers” while adjusting his controls, and the engine went clackety-clack on the rails, I told myself how desperately I loved this country that somehow could not quite accept me. Was there really something prohibitively negative in me, and in those like me, with our alien forbidding skins off which the soul of Africa simply slipped away?

The driver blew his whistle, slowed down as we approached the deserted broken-down village, and with a big grin watched me jump down onto a mound of grass and rubble; then the train went along its way.

The old couple had seen the train, waited for it as they sometimes did, and as I stood up, dusted myself and came around the old dilapidated station and down the ridge toward them, they stared at me in stupefaction. They were attired similarly in ragged shorts and shirt; Janice had on a straw hat and looked rather red. I told them who I was, and Mungai nodded his head slowly a couple of times with a look of what I assumed was recognition. He opened his mouth, but said nothing. I told the couple this was not an official visit. I had
tired of city life and come to spend a few days in the quiet of their surroundings, if they did not mind.

They stared a moment longer at me, then at the duffel bag in my hand.

Come along then, said Janice and led the way.

We would sit outside at night by the fire, often in silence; the couple would later retire to the inner room and I would stay outside, throwing dried branches into the fire, watching the moon go down behind the trees. The stars and planets shone brilliantly, tracing, I imagined, their wide elliptic orbits in the firmament, itself rotating against the earth. This equilibrium, this rhythm, was called the music of the spheres, I remembered being taught, and was the inspiration behind all the music in the world, and a reflection of the cycles of our lives. Did I perceive cycles in my own life? Yes, in the end of childhood and the onset of the middle years, the birth of children and the aging of parents. Many years later I would look at this same firmament from another part of the world, on cool, clear nights…and feel connected to this place. The only disturbance in the night now was the sound of wild dogs fighting over scraps at the dump, a safe distance of a few hundred yards away. I slept on a child’s broken-down cot in the veranda, which was in front of the house and enclosed but three-quarters of the way up. I was afraid my first few nights there; as I closed my eyes I comforted myself with the thought that all the animals in the forest were doing the same, except for the wild dogs and the owls. I was woken up every morning by the shrill cry of a kite. And as I peered out at the cool blue slice of morning sky visible outside from where I lay on the cot, I could just discern the pale, white, and now fading sparkles of the stars. There would be the smell of wood burning; the light thump of footsteps on the earth somewhere; the call of the rooster.

I went out hunting with Mungai, a spear in my hand, but the weapon was for form and only rudimentary protection, I did not know how to use it. We came away with a small deer
once and a rabbit another time. The former was roasted and the latter went into a stew. But our main diet was ugali or rice, with beans or spinach.

One balmy afternoon after a rainfall, while the three of us were playing cards on the veranda, there came loud trumpeting from behind the house, not far away, and the sound as if of a hundred warriors stamping their feet. Janice looked up impatiently and said, Oh those ruddy tembos again. We all raced to the back of the house.

It seemed that people in a nearby village had cleared some of the woods in their vicinity to make space for a football field and rally ground. In the process, they had encroached upon the route of an elephant herd. The elephants in their confusion had changed their route several times, sometimes stomping through cultivation. The grey beasts were waiting in a group at the far end of the couple’s plot, as if conferring before beginning their mischief, and the three of us wailed like banshees, beat on ancient four-gallon tin cans and aluminum sufuriyas in order to distract or dissuade them, but to no avail. Slowly they traipsed into the cornfield, covering its entire area, and trumpeting joyfully—so it seemed—they systematically and thoroughly uprooted it, before ambling their slow deliberate way to find their lost route.

You big devils, muttered Janice tearfully after them, you should try and work for your dinner sometimes.

The next few days we spent repairing the damage done by the tembos.

Every afternoon I went to the graves in the backyard and watered the wildflowers growing there.

This is Janice’s story, which she told me one day:

One October night after attending a meeting in the local school to plan the town’s Christmas festivities, she had gone for drinks to the home of some friends, a couple of miles away. Her husband John and their two sons were at home and asleep. The year was 1950 and she was forty years old. The two boys were eight and ten. When she returned she was met
by three of the servants who were standing outside the house; they looked frightened, one of them began weeping. Fretfully they took her to the chillingly quiet aftermath of a bloodbath in her home. It looked like a setting in a tragic drama before the heroine arrives on the scene and tears out her hair. Robbers had attacked and killed, and everything of value had been taken from the house. She did not know if any of the servants had been involved in the crime, she did not care. There was nothing to go back for to England, and she simply stayed where her husband and her children were buried. This was where she too desired to be buried.

She confessed to the indescribable grief which caused her to be admitted to the Nakuru European Hospital. There were pressures on her to return to England thereafter, more so after the abandonment of the area by the other Europeans during the Mau Mau period, and the closing of the station. She stayed on, a ghost in the house, which slowly began to come apart around her. One day Mungai, a former clerk at the station who had kindly helped her cope with daily routines, brought his things and moved in with her. He too was alone and far from home.

I watched them together, he sitting on the ground like me, she on a three-legged low stool. There was a quiet, gentle intimacy between them, and also a deep difference they did not pretend to bridge. For example, she would apply fork and knife to pick at a sizeable bone, even though her prematurely wrinkled skin, the frazzled, curly hair, and the gnarled hands hardly bespoke daintiness.

What brings you here, they asked. I was betrayed by my father, I said cynically at first. More seriously, I told them I had been deeply impressed by this place when I first saw it. It drew me perhaps because of the tragedy of the murdered children, which touched me in a way I could not consistently explain. It spoke to something deep inside me.

Once a week, on Saturday, the train would pass, going north to Solai and the next afternoon it would return on its way back to Nakuru.

One day, a month after my arrival in Jamieson, Dilip walked up to the backyard where we were sitting after our midday meal. He had come by car, with a companion, through a back route. It was not hard to find me. An inquiry in Nakuru had revealed that I had bagged a ride on the Solai train. Furthermore I had already spoken to him more than once about this mysteriously affecting place.

I said my goodbyes to Janice and Mungai, full of foreboding that one day I was sure to be back.

When I reached home the next day, my wife greeted me with a smile and a cup of tea; my box of memorabilia was on my bed, with the missing picture of Annie and me back inside it.

Thus Shobha declared her truce with me, having been scared witless by the prospect that she had become an abandoned wife or even a widow. Still, she had to tell me, as the chappatis kept coming on my vegetarian plate from the kitchen, where the cook baked them, I smell meat on you—I hope you will not mind if I keep my distance from you for a few days. My children, Ami and Sita, hovered around me all the time and I was moved by their attention to me, their dependence on my own attention and my love. I had never thought of them as insecure or needy; so orderly had been their lives and so complete a control had Shobha on their existence, with the aid of two efficient nannies and an expensive nursery school, that I had sometimes felt myself superfluous to their lives. But it seemed that the uncertainty and acrimony at home after my dismissal by Nderi, followed by my sudden mysterious exit about which their mother had no answer but an anxious look, had considerably unsettled them. They had been unhappy.