The In-Between World of Vikram Lall (49 page)

But why, Deepa? I asked her. Why murder…something so extreme?

To keep his family intact, she said.

I could not imagine Dilip hiring gunmen to commit murder, let alone knowing how to do so in our city, and in secret. The police attitude to the case had always suggested a political assassination. But Njoroge was a minor figure and quickly forgotten in the tumultuous wake of J.M. Kariuki’s murder, and the persistent, titillating rumour of our President’s possible hand in it. I had gone to see Mzee immediately following that event, somewhat cravenly bearing good wishes from the business community. I managed to see him again only once in the years that followed, this time with some investors from India who needed political backing. He had looked extremely frail and rumours were rife of his impending death. There were even rumours of a plot to assassinate him, so as to snatch the succession. I could not in any case have broached with him the subject of my friend’s murder—why would I do that unless I thought he might know something about it? It was unwise to leave such an impression. I recall the sinister Sam Karimi’s eyes following me out that last time I left the Old Man’s office.

Now, a decade later, I began my own quiet inquiries regarding Njoroge’s end. I could do that because I was in good standing with members of the new regime; furthermore, Sam Karimi had been retired. What I learnt finally I had to buy at a steep price from a former captain of the Special Branch who was made known to me by my contacts. It turned out that Dilip had actually been approached with a proposition. He was in the habit of playing tennis Thursday evenings at the Muthaiga Club, following which he sat down at the bar for a lemonade. This time a club member from another table walked over and joined him. He was a large, imposing man, none other than Mathu of the GSU. The two other men at the table he had left were Sam Karimi and the captain, now my informant. Mathu put a snapshot before Dilip on the table and said, in effect: Your wife is having an affair with an African, who also happens to be disloyal to the country. This is what we
want you to do. Or else the story with revealing photos will be splashed all over the
Daily Nation
. Dilip obliged. The next day the captain collected the keys from Dilip and handed them over to the assassins.

Poor Dilip, I’ve always thought. Poor all of us; poor children, as Mother once said when Njoroge left us that day in Nakuru, taken away by the two European ladies.

Mother died six months after Dilip. Deepa’s widowhood had devastated her. This was not just because of Deepa’s loss but also for the shadow that her widowhood cast upon her, the shadow it turned her into. It was Deepa’s luck, Mother said to me a few times, it’s what was written, the karma your sister brought with her to this world. Mother could not have forgotten, and she saw the look in my eyes to remind her that she had been the most forceful agent of that destiny, the karma that joined Deepa with Dilip. Njoroge died early too, she would end such exchanges, as if to comfort herself with the thought that Deepa could not have avoided tragedy. I came to believe that my mother was ultimately sorry for causing Deepa the unbearable pain that almost took her away from us, the unhappiness from which we all knew my sister never recovered. For by the time Dilip died the world had changed and interracial marriage did not appear as offensive as before. Mother suffered from the last stages of her illness for about three months, during which Papa was always by her side, and my sister and I spent all our free time with her. We had moved Mother’s puja objects to a table in her room, and the Indian gods looked upon her from their home in the Himalayas as she lay in bed. I want you to have my Shri Rama, she told me, he always meant something special to you. Shri Rama and Sita, she smiled.

Mother left behind a broken and disoriented Papa, who carried the desperate demeanour, it seemed to me, of a sailor lost at sea without a compass or a destination; thereafter he was a resigned man who would say his innings had run out.
He seemed to possess none of his former authority, his endearing certainty, that cockiness with which he had visited Grandfather Verma to ask for his daughter’s hand, or asked his own father whether he had had a Masai girlfriend once.

One day Deepa told me that she had received overtures from parties willing to buy her portion of the shares of Mermaid Chemicals and had decided to sell and go to the United States, where she could be close to her children. She had observed a man in the city who, she was sure, was one of the assailants who had come into her shop and shot Njoroge. She was frightened. I encouraged her to go, telling her I would visit her regularly.

I remember one cold midnight bidding her farewell at the airport and thinking, The world as I knew it has now totally ended.

You had nothing to do with the murder, Seema says, why did you blame yourself the other night?

I suppose there is the burden of surviving a friend who died so young…and pure.

Before us is that maligned photo of grief-stricken Deepa, Njoroge’s head on her blood-soaked lap. His open eyes look up at her, send a chill through me. He had warned me once to be careful of changing political tides; a few weeks later here he was, riddled with bullets, in a scene screaming out with the agony of broken promise.

We have sat through an evening, Seema and I, looking at pictures, discussing memories. Balmy night breezes waft in through the screen door, carrying strains of distant music, laughter from a late party. The time she spends with me, I realize, cuts into her contributions to the cultural life of little Korrenburg.

He had striking eyes, Seema says.

And forehead, which his son inherits from him, I add.

She looks at me thoughtfully, then replies to my silent query, It’s a pity you and Joseph never came close.

Like father and son, as Deepa hoped? I would like to sound hard and cynical, but fail, I think, as I go on to explain, No…too much history, too much of the past stood between us.

I recall the morning last August when he left to begin his studies in Toronto. Seema, who was to drive him there, was in her car. As we shook hands at the door, I reminded him to call on me for anything he might need. Remember, I said, you are like a son to me and—

I saw him recoil momentarily, felt his hand go tense. We nodded our goodbyes to each other.

I was deeply humiliated at this instinctive rejection. I had believed I deserved to be acknowledged as a concerned adult, a friend of his father, and therefore a father. You should have known better, I chided myself as I closed the door. You are still an Asian.

Quite suddenly I desperately need this woman who is my friend, not just to talk to, but to be close to, to be one with. I beseech Seema with my eyes—perhaps I am drunk—and I take her hand as she gets up to leave and I hold it. I pull her back down. She stays the night.

THIRTY-ONE.

The days are long and warm; the air fragrant with the smell of grass and leaves and earth, the squirrels seem tireless, the birds are clamorous every morning, and spring bulbs in cheerful bright artificial rows have put their gaudy but no less authentic signatures on the season. It’s the heavenly, joyful spring and summer that lull you, Seema told me once—explaining herself, her immigrant life—that keep you here until you are suddenly trapped by the winter months and anxiously await the next spring and summer—which have never failed so far, let me tell you; and so the years pass and before you know it you’ve lived here decades and unwillingly, unwittingly, belong.

Belong
, I echoed her word and asked myself, Can I too learn to belong here?

But now the night is still and we sit this side of the screen door, this side of the dark, over a bottle of wine, listening to the
murmur of the waves on the lake, the rustling of the new leaves on the trees, contemplating the future.

She sits with me on the long settee, my confessor, leaning back at the other end, her two small feet on my thighs, as if to ensure I stay put. She has on a shalwar-kameez in soft warm colours, her perfume is nice, and she has a ring on one of her middle toes. I never paid attention to these little details about her before.

Do I belong here—in this wonderful country where the seasons are orderly, days go past smoothly one after another? This cold moderation should after all be conducive to my dispassion? No. I feel strongly the stir of the forest inside me; I hear the call of the red earth, and the silent plains of the Rift Valley through which runs the railway that my people built, and the bustle of River Road; I long for the harsh, familiar caress of the hot sun.

I feel the press of her feet upon me, sense the deep gaze from that soft round Indian face gauging my thoughts. She says, You’ve gone away, haven’t you, Vikram Lall. You are truly a cold man.

I’m sorry. It’s time for me to face my accusers, I tell her.

She pauses to gather this in, then says: And get your name off the List of Shame?

I’m not sure if she’s being sarcastic.

That List of Shame has long intrigued her. It does sound so dramatically damning. It counts me the most corrupt man in our country, itself ranked one of the most corrupt nations in the world. What does that make of me? During the first months of our knowing each other, this stigma stood like a wall between us. Aided by Joseph and the raucous headlines of the Nairobi papers, she made me into an evil genius, but then quickly and with touching honesty revised that judgement. I am actually quite the simpleton. I long believed that mine were crimes of circumstance, of finding oneself in a situation and simply going along with the way of the world. I’ve
convinced myself now that this excuse is not good enough; as she put it so graphically and forcefully, That’s what many of the killers in Rwanda would also say. Thank your stars you did not find yourself there during the genocide, going along, as you say. But I would never kill, I objected, to which: There are different ways of killing, Mr. Lall.

I did not have the heart to risk a quarrel; but then perhaps I had no quarrel to pick. I recalled Kihika, how uncompromising I was in my judgement of him, as a young man. Now Joseph was my judge.

The Gemstone Scandal, now synonymous with me and my activities, was what put me on that shaming list. But that arrangement of business deals was not even my idea. It simply fell into place like a fortuitous hand at poker. All we had to do, my partners and I, was to pick up the cards and play.

One day a man came to visit my brother-in-law Chand, at the Javeris’ retail shop on Kenyatta Avenue, bringing with him a number of items, beginning with a sample of earth in a metal box. Jewellers entertain a lot of mysterious business propositions, very few of which pan out. The visitor, made comfortable in the confines of Chand’s inner office, threw his soil sample into a strainer and poured upon it a solvent, apparently a new product from America; he let the liquid drain away into a bowl. Chand saw in the glistening wet residue in the strainer a generous sprinkling of blue gems. Tanzanite, the man pronounced drily, an expert stating the evident. Tanzanite was the recently discovered rock much touted as the gem of the future. Chand, no fool in the matter of precious stones, knew that the gem turned blue only after heat treatment. The visitor’s dramatic demonstration was obviously a con. The man claimed to offer a small but lucrative Tanzanite mine for private sale on behalf of some unnamed local bigwig. A meeting was held of the Javeri brothers and myself; we were all of one mind: Let’s get hold of the mine; dud or not, it will come in handy one day.