The In-Between World of Vikram Lall (8 page)

I would climb on your back and you would take me around, Mahesh began.

On all fours like a horse—hut-hut-hut-chalo!

From room to room and even to the neighbour’s—you must have scraped your knees from that ordeal.

She smiled, said: And you held on to me by my pigtail.

They were silent for a while. Then she murmured: How I remember that house, each and every corner in it, every crack on the wall, I can take you to the spot where the ceiling leaked
during monsoon, where the floor was broken under the dining table, the chip on the seventh step—

And I can take you through the streets of Peshawar blind-folded—the halwai where we bought jelebi, the police station where Father locked me up, the dhaba where the Congress youth would meet for strategy. I can name for you all the attendants who served at that dhaba. We’ll never see those streets again. All that madness, cutting up a country in two—that’s the British for you: divide and rule.

But we asked for Partition.

Who?

The Hindus and Muslims.

Not all of them. Just the rich and privileged, misleading the others.

They were silent again. Mother looked up toward the rooms where Papa had gone a few minutes ago, in case he needed her. Then she said, Do you remember when Ma died?

He looked vacantly at her, nodded. Father took me to the pyre when he lighted the fire. Her soul has flown away, he said, it’s only the empty body. She’ll come back in a new body. I rather preferred the old body. How would I recognize the new one, I used to ask him.

I remember, she said. I had to be with you even as I knew she was in pain and dying, and her sisters had gathered around…

After a pause, my mother looked at him and said quickly, Mahesh Bhaiya, why didn’t you make up with him—poor Father—

He
was the one who cast me out! He arrested me, his own son, he put me in prison!

Not you alone, and that was his
job.

Fine job. Working for the British. And there was that other thing too, in 1946, after the world war.

That was also his job.

He was a traitor.

Don’t
say
that, Mahesh! It was his job, his duty. He was a police inspector. If he had not kept the law—

If who had not kept the law? Papa said, walking in, having just had a wash, smelling of hair oil. He pulled me gently by the ear from where I sat, at the door, looking outside at the road, and said, My spy will tell me, won’t you?

Meanwhile Mother pretended the tears were not glistening in her eyes and gave us all a smile.

Grandfather Verma a traitor! Mahesh Uncle in jail! Now
that
was food for the imagination…but that life was far away in India and in the past.
My
life was so ordinary!

There was a framed photo of Grandfather Verma, from the chest up, on one of the walls in the house. He seemed to be in some kind of uniform, police I assumed; he had a large forehead and a thin moustache, and there was a trace of a smile on his lips. He looked rather like the police superintendents of the Indian movies of the fifties and sixties, someone who could have been the movie idol Dev Anand’s superior officer. He sent us cards for Diwali and New Year, with little notes that began, How are you, my little ones? And we in turn wrote short letters to him guided by Mother. After that overheard partial revelation from Mahesh Uncle, I looked upon the photo of Grandfather Verma with some respect. He was my past and there was a mystery about him, which I would find out as I grew up, when the time came for me to know.

I remember another ritual of my father’s. It was a frightening one, performed once or twice a month, late on a Sunday night. Very suddenly, a little after nine o’clock just as the news ended, as if at a whim he would go over to the front door, pull aside the drape on it, and stare outside for a minute or so. By this time Mother would be extremely nervous. Slowly Papa would undo one of the locks. Then, purposefully he went to his and Mother’s bedroom and brought out his revolver, a rather large and ugly, dull black thing inside a brown holster, and a small cardboard box of ammunition. He also had with him a yellow piece of paper, a pamphlet on which he placed the gun and ammo on the dining table. He would pick up the gun and,
facing away from us all, hold it up in his hand. Then he would walk to the door, open it wide into the dark night. He would take a step outside.

Hé Rabba! Mother would exclaim, holding us close to her. Don’t shoot into someone’s house!

I won’t, I’m aiming to the side. I have to check it, na…

Don’t shoot at anybody!

As if I would. And who would be out at this time? I’m aiming high, anyway.

We would hear a loud report that went tearing into the silence of the night, and then another one, even as the first one still echoed somewhere far away. He would come in, blowing the smoke off the gun, catching our frightened eyes and looking a little sheepish. The gun has to be checked, you see, he would explain, placing it on the table, on the yellow pamphlet. With the weapon now inert in front of us, Deepa and I taking sneaky, quick reaches to feel its grey metallic heft, Mother brought glasses of milk for us all.

We all knew the pamphlet well, another government warning. This one had a drawing of a devilish black man with large eyes and open mouth, leaping out of the yellow page, under the caption: The Mau Mau want your gun! There were instructions on safeguarding the weapon. Do not leave it in the car when you step out for shopping, one of them said. Papa always kept it locked in the drawer of his bedside table and took it out, it seemed, only for this practice ritual.

Muzee, why do the Mau Mau kill little children? I once asked Mwangi.

I don’t know why I asked him this. Perhaps because he had a gravity about him, and an honesty, and he was an African and a Kikuyu.

They are evil and mad, those who kill children, he told me firmly.

I have never understood the full implication of those words. Mwangi often confounded me.

There is a nip in the night air outside, a reminder that autumn waits around the corner. If you look hard during the day, you might even spot a telltale traitor yellow leaf among the green foliage. The night is moonless, thickly dark, rendered more so by the shadows of the trees and hedges; the stars above, though, look cheerful as diamonds, if I permit myself a nursery-rhyme image. The luminous hour-marks of my watch shine no less brightly. It is close to eleven. I step back inside this lakeside house, a hallmark of lonely luxury—and so extremely desolate compared with the bustling, peopled household of my childhood—to await Deepa’s phone call. In the sunken living room, Joseph watches television, with a bag of chips and a can of soda. Before he arrived I wisely had a satellite dish installed. He likes to watch soccer—football, we used to call it—and a Kenyan player recently drafted into one of the English teams thrills him no end. Perhaps here, in the first world, he can be corrupted away from his brash and dangerous idealism, I tell myself—but then hard on the heels of that thought comes the quick and cynical reminder: corruption has been my recent forte, hasn’t it.

The hour turns and the phone rings. Joseph looks up as I pick it up at the kitchen table. Deepa wants to know how the two of us are getting along here, in our Canadian retreat. We are doing fine, I reply, and how is she? Her son Shyam, she tells me, might shift to Washington, DC—he is a resident epidemiologist in Rochester—and she will then have to decide what to do. Her worry, though, is Joseph.

Vikram?

Yes.

Look after him, please, Bhaiya.

He’s all right. Don’t worry.

Keep talking to him. Make him understand that his education is the only important thing, it is not to be sacrificed for anything silly like politics—

I’ll try, Deepa. I can only tell him what he allows me to say to him.

Vikram?

Yes.

He’s like my son.

I know that. I’ll do the best I can.

Rakhi day is coming, Bhaiya, I’ll send you something.

I’ll look forward to it, Sister.

FIVE.

There are wonderful moments sometimes—a splash of colour, the sweet taste of icy kulfi on a Sunday afternoon, the feel of hot steam on the face and arms from a gasping locomotive—that stand out purely in themselves, sparkles of childhood memory scattered loosely in the consciousness. They need not tell a story, yet moments lead from one to another in this tapestry that is one’s life; and so we feel bound, unhappy adults, to look past and around those glimmer points in our desperate search for nuance and completeness, for coherence and meaning.

Be that as it may, the following is one delightful moment that often twinkles before my mind’s eye.

One afternoon after school I was sitting at the dining table, hunched over homework, when suddenly a commotion erupted outside. There was the sound of drumming and
chanting and servants running in the alleyways, heading toward the front. I raced to the sitting room; the door was wide open and I ran through it, and came upon a most amazing spectacle in progress.

About twenty Masai youths were performing a traditional war dance outside the Molabux residence, three doors down from ours. A crowd had rapidly gathered on both sides of our street, to watch and marvel and comment—such happy idleness never before having been witnessed by me in our area. The dancers—tall and supple, the skin dark brown, the long hair plaited, combed back, and dyed red, multicoloured beads at the neck, the wrists, the arms, the pierced earlobes stuffed with more decoration, the red wool shawls only partially covering the torsos and waists—were arrayed in a line. They swayed to and fro and thumped the ground with their feet, to the rhythm of song and drum. Every now and then, suddenly and all together, they sprung high into the air, their bodies erect, their spears glinting, their teeth flashing in friendly smiles. Splashes of red and dark brown and white leapt up at the blue sky out of the dust. A small gang of Masai women of assorted ages provided the treble accompaniment from under a tree in what seemed a rather dispassionate manner compared with the vigorous and joyful displays of their men.

All this while Sakina Molabux, the dark, wizened matriarch of her house, stood motionless at her doorway, watching the performance intently, as if it were for her benefit. As indeed it was. Her husband Juma Molabux stood quietly beside her.

After a while, some of the Kikuyu and the Luo among the spectators joined in, with their own dances but not as expertly, and the performance soon wound down. There followed a solemn shaking of hands by the towering Masai with whoever stepped forward. They did this in three stages, first the normal clasping of hands, then a rotation of the hands so the two thumbs met and embraced, and then a twist back to the hand clasp before release. Two police Land Rovers had appeared on
the street but were not intrusive. From somewhere, two men on stilts came tottering up, with white-painted faces and ostrich feathers around their heads. Coca-Cola was served to the performers, brought out from the back of the Molabux house in two crates.

It turned out that the Masai were in town to rehearse for festivities being organized by the government. Coronation Day was almost upon us, and Empire Day would soon follow.

But that afternoon as I watched these tall red-clothed men in amazement and clapped my hands to cheer them and mingled with the crowd to do the weird handshake and drew in their strange odour just for the heck of it, I was still too young to understand the full import of their performance outside our house. Since then I have wondered about it, about Sakina-dadi standing at her doorway taking it in. She was a full Masai whose wedding to Juma Molabux my own dadaji had gone to witness. In what manner would the drumbeat, the dance, have brought back her youth? Did she ever yearn for the simplicity and open life of the grasslands? Or, like the wife she was expected to be, had she easily given up thinking of that past, relishing her privileged urban status and her wealth? Did she ever stop worshipping the God Ngai of her childhood, did the spirits of the trees and the forests and the grasslands haunt her? The sour note of that moment came when Saeed Molabux angrily stormed past his mother and father and drove off noisily in his car. He obviously didn’t think much of his Masai heritage. I would learn that Saeed had an elder brother who had disappeared, had in fact gone back to his maternal origins to become a Masai moran, and had that afternoon, following rehearsal at the football ground, brought his friends to perform for his mother.