by Peter Kimani
Since the workers were paid by the yard, they toiled hard to cover the assigned distance, sparing little time to catch their breath or break wind. Babu knew every little detail of the track like the back of his hairy hand. He knew the spot where a dry branch broke off a mukinduri tree and workmen fell over each other in flight, and he laughed at their folly. He could point to the spot where a man stood on a rock in the Athi River and collapsed as his legs disappeared in a river of blood, his anguished cry only coming in bubbles as the crocodile’s nostrils flared for breath. Babu knew the sudden dip where Abdullah the donkey rider broke his leg.
He could point to the site where his assistant, Ahmad, found a dry log riven with ants, which came to life when he hauled the python on his back. It missed Ahmad’s head by inches, but when Ahmad flung it off, it crashed into the tripod that had been set up as Patterson opened fire—four bullets that all missed the target but grazed the tripod—leaving scratches that Ahmad felt every day as he set up his equipment, reminding him of his great escape, but also of the danger that lurked. Babu could point to the tree that Muchoki the workman had climbed to escape a buffalo after he had come upon it with his scythe; Babu had watched the animal wet its tail and swish it this way and that to spray urine on Muchoki, hoping the irritation would make him fall off the low branch.
Still, that did not stop the men from earning an honest day’s wage. There were yards to be covered, and there was Patterson with his crooked gait verifying the distances crossed. Not even the strike of a hammer on a thumb would deter a worker from pounding again. And when an ankle gave way from a fall down an escarpment, its owner kept walking, perhaps a little less springy, maybe a lot more cautious, but determined still.
Their jungle-green tents had grown threadbare; what once provided a cool shade was now like a shredded palm leaf, offering more relief from the rustle of the wind than shielding against the sun. The workmen’s black boots were worn out, and most walked barefoot, the cracks in their heels deep enough to hide a rupee coin. But the rhythms of men crushing stone went on uninterrupted, as did the swish of the scythe nipping vegetation with every swing. Within no time, one hundred feet would open where thorns and thistles had existed since God had created the world, and other men would follow closely with makarai full of crushed stone, which was spread out over the space where the rail would lie.
Carpenters followed with their saws and wood, pencils slotted behind their ears. They would mark where to cut, and the saw would hum its ceaseless song, the pitch different for every man. A saw in the hands of an impatient man squeaked and wailed. More often than not, the saw would break, and a replacement would be delivered, almost always accompanied by a slap from Patterson—because words didn’t come as fast—plus a surcharge on the carpenter’s account. Patient and skillful artisans, however, had very different outcomes. They would commune with the timber, starting with smelling to assess its maturity, then knocking the piece along the grains to check for defects. Then they would wet their forefingers and point where the pencil had drawn so that the shavings would not screech with dryness but soak in the moisture. The pitch of the saw would remain even until the cutting was midway, when the tool would acquire a deeper tone—the sound muted by the long distance covered, and the remaining distance still to be completed. The homestretch brought yet another tone that carried the relief of separation of the waste from the useful timber, and the carpenter’s celebration of the successful completion of the task.
There were distinctive sounds that came at certain hours of the day: the muted wails of knives or machetes on file; the clang of pots that announced it was lunchtime, when black, white, and brown workers would cross the train tracks to their respective kitchens. Just like the rails that remained separate—in spite of their common interests—the workers of different colors kept to different kitchens for lunch and dinner.
Once they had eaten their fill, some would lie on the grass, tummies distended like spiders carrying eggs, and count the daystars. Some would follow a sparrow in flight, and marvel at its gymnastics before it was joined by more birds, each trying to outdo the others. A few would somersault, others would stay still, and the dozing worker would wonder if his eyes were playing tricks on him. He would wonder if the clouds had stopped running to watch the birds, or if the birds had stopped flying to watch the clouds, as they appeared to toss and turn before scuttling in different directions.
Some workers lay with their eyes shut, listening to dull pains in their limbs, the nudges of tightness in the small of their backs. They would try to determine the moment they may have injured themselves, but their minds yielded nothing concrete. A short, sharp bleep would interrupt their reveries as Patterson blew his whistle to indicate the end of lunch break. The men would resume their toils and the tools would converse again in their own language.
Babu listened to these sounds as he worked, the only noise from his tools being the clank of his tripod as he set the telescope, after which he stood to the side as Ahmad noted the measurements and set the surveying coordinates. The two would then place the beacons on the exact positions where the rail would be laid. They would further mark the span of the railway so that all encumbrances were cleared. A metal bar would be sunk and a mix of cement and sand would follow to solidify the base, cast around the bar smoothly and carefully. That, too, was called a beacon, and when Ahmad saw a woman who he liked, he would say to Babu: “Yala, my bhai. Me vant to place a beacon in there!” Ahmad said he wanted to leave a trail of women who could make a line from the coast to Lake Victoria—“vith a big-eared kid at ewery station,” he would add with a big smile.
It was his way of provoking a reaction from Babu, whose passive tendencies toward local women evoked both mystery and contempt from Ahmad. In one breath, he would sneer at “Imam Babu” because of his pious deportment, and in another, praise his silence as synonymous with still waters that run deep. Babu paid scant attention to Ahmad’s monologues. He blazed the trail, walking ahead of those who cleared the way when the grass was still silvery with dew, when the mounds of dung from wild animals were still warm and vapory.
The only women the workers encountered were those who brought firewood to sell to Patterson for cooking needs, or to run the steam engine. When Patterson was not at the station, Indian workers teased the local girls a lot, and some would steal into the bushes with them. Many moons later, some girl would return with a child strapped on her back.
“Have you seen him?” the girl, practically a child, would ask the first Indian she met.
“Seen who?”
“The father of my child,” the girl-child would answer. “I know he works here.”
“Is that so? What’s his name?”
“Patel,” she would say, eyes brimming with hope.
“There are two hundred men here called Patel. Don’t tell me you . . .”
“I’m not a bad woman.” The girl would start crying.
“You must have enjoyed, I tell you, two hundred Patels!”
Humiliated, the girl and her baby would head back the way they had come, the prospects of making Patel take responsibility fizzling before her eyes. If Patterson was at the station when such a girl arrived, he would gather all the workers and ask her to identify the man.
An interrogation between Patterson—through an interpreter—and those girls went along these lines:
“Was it an Indian or an African?”
“It was a white man.”
“How white? You mean British or Indian?”
“Yes, that one.”
“Which one between the two? British or Indian?”
“British Indian.”
“You mean it was a joint effort? Both at the same time? A Briton and an Indian?”
“Britain, India, all same to me,” the girl would maintain. “They all have long noses and big ears.”
Patterson’s stutter, as well as the unwieldy nature of the conversation, would compel him to organize an identification parade featuring Indians on
ly. He did not bother with Africans, for they were hardly ever implicated by the girls. Neither were the British men. He said the British men were not capable of deflowering dirty local girls—“It’s against the B-Bri-tish way of li-ife.”
But Indians looked the same to those girls. They couldn’t even distinguish between white and brown. “They all have long noses and big ears,” was all they would say.
Ahmad was never picked, although he swore to Babu to have deflowered some of the girls who returned with children in tow. But again, he would add, he could be mistaken, as all Africans looked the same to him.
“A thief has forty days,” Babu reminded him. “At least I’m proud to display my paper trail,” he would say, and flash a wand of pay slips that said he was a British subject from the colony of Punjab hired as a surveyor for twenty-four rupees a month for three years. Half his earnings went to Fatima who was still in Mombasa, five hundred miles away. A quarter of the pay went to his parents in Punjab. He lived on the other quarter.
* * *
It was impossible to predict what lay ahead of the workers as they slowly progressed forward, but Babu’s puzzle that day in 1900 came from above and not from the ground in front of him. He knew breaking from his work would make him lose momentum and run the risk of losing a few rupees in Patterson’s rickety march. But curiosity got the better of him. He had always been a curious lad, and his deep gray eyes were still filled with wonder. At the age of twenty-two, Babu may have rightfully invoked the words of that wise man from across the seas: Like all great travelers, I have seen more than I remember, and I remember more than I have seen.
He fished a black polythene bag from the cart drawn by a donkey tethered nearby and shook off the peppery sands that had accumulated from the years of trekking. He looked through the opaque paper but saw nothing, not even the faintest hint of the sun’s presence in the sky.
“Bhai, this is darkness at noon,” he mumbled to no one in particular.
Ahmad, who was setting surveying equipment nearby, asked without looking: “Boss, vot are you saying?”
Babu strode to where Ahmad was squatting and tilted the telescope from its clamp on the tripod, directed it toward the sky, and peered up.
By this time, Ahmad was following his gaze, and Babu could hear his muffled exclamations as he tried to make sense of the spectacle unfolding in the skies. There was pitch darkness. The sun had given way to darkness without resistance; no struggle at all to shine for a few more minutes, no softening of the light to signal it was cooling off. Just a sudden gush and poof, the light went off. That was the mystery that drew Babu to the shores of East Africa. He had read in school of the European explorers who spent decades on expeditions cruising down massive rivers without sources, or mountains that spewed lava, hot as jehannum’s fire, yet were capped with snow, and forests where the sun never penetrated. He was enthralled by the prospects of venturing there, and Africa did not disappoint. Here he was, in a marshland with only a bunch of trees, but the sun had been snatched away by darkness at noon.
After a while, Babu noticed some movements. The skies cleared somewhat but the sun was still invisible. He saw the silhouetted forms that appeared like flying ducks, though their necks were elongated like a snake’s. But the forms in the sky also had long, spindly legs. Did these flying snakes have legs? He wondered if these were overgrown chickens, oversized hawks, or what.
“Achi bhai,” he mumbled. “Bhai, can you see this?” He turned to Ahmad.
But Ahmad was already in full flight, as were the other workers who had noticed the specter in the sky, all of whom were shouting with the full volume of their lungs: “Alhamdulillah! Siku ya kiama imefika! Alhamdulillah! Alhamdulillah! Siku ya kiama!”
The flying forms were leaving a hole in the dark sky that permitted a shaft of light to pour through, blinding those who looked up. The combined wing flapping and the hissing from the flying creatures grew to a roar as they descended and the full sun returned, bright and blinding, and the workers did not know whether to shut their eyes from the sun or struggle to watch the clearing canopy. The flying forms crashed into a nearby water mass, their splash producing one of the loudest bangs ever heard in that part of the world. By now, every worker had abandoned what he was doing and taken off, not quite certain where he was going, or even what he was running from. Mules kicked their tethers to freedom. A traction engine derailed. Patterson fired in the air in panic. The only people who were left behind were the three men whose legs had been crushed by heavy steel dropped by their fleeing colleagues, but even they managed to crawl the one mile to the assembly point, watching a spectacle totally out of this world.
The strange creatures, with wings flapped open for balance, fluttered soundlessly in the breeze, amazingly effortlessly, without crashing into others. They glided on the lake’s surface, their webbed feet slicing the thinnest film of water whose iridescence flashed like the flip of mirror toward sun. They dived in, coiling their necks at awkward angles to scoop algae, before repeating their aerial displays and feeding afresh. Those that had eaten to their fill flew to the head of the spring pouring into the lake. Once the spring water hit the foot of the rock beneath, it yielded a steady flow of steam that cast the entire area in a misty wrap. All this while the cooing and squeaking and the hissing from the pink-colored flamingos rose and fell with the harmony of a philharmonic orchestra.
For decades to come, Babu would narrate this story to explain his decision to settle in Nakuru. He simply followed the instincts of the alien birds, he would tell friends and family, and repeated it so many times that when Rajan was young and begged for a story, he would provide the caveat: “But not the flamingo story, Baba . . .”
The other version of the events of that day of darkness that Babu told with equal regularity was that he pricked his right foot during the pandemonium as workers fled to safety and limped off without stopping, for he too feared the end of the world was nigh. When the commotion died down, Babu removed his right shoe and examined his foot.
There were four drops of blood on his sock. Ahmad grabbed Babu’s foot and squeezed it. Four more drops oozed out and lingered on the surface of the black land momentarily, before merging into a fudge of nothingness.
A bit of thorn was still lodged in the sole of the boot, which Ahmad expertly wedged out using another thorn.
“Bhai, you should become a cobbler.”
“Boss, your wish be my command. If cobbler you vant me, cobbler I be!”
Ahmad was a small man, only twenty-five, with thinning hair already. He was also from Punjab although he insisted on speaking in English. He had traveled to Bombay earlier on assignment, which is where he was recruited to work on the Lunatic Express—to join men of lucid mind and free will who had given up their lives and submitted to wanderlust, and discovered rather late in the day that they had gone too far to turn back, in part because they had no way of retracing their steps.
Babu sat on the freshly cut tree trunk and considered the sock soaked in blood. His body had yielded eight drops of blood. His people said bad blood did not survive the day; it had to be spilled. Ahmad appeared to read his mind when he walked over and said: “I’m not super . . . superstition, boss . . .”
“You mean superstitious?”
“Yes, tat one! Tat super ting! You know, bhai, you lucky, bossman, you go to school. You go to school to learn to speak like vite man. Te ting is, someone be trying to derail you from tis journey. Someone or someting be telling you: Alight from tis Lunatic Express.”
“Bhai,” Babu said, lowering his voice, “are you telling your boss to abscond?”
“Tat be te last ting on my small mind, bossman.”
Ahmad walked as Babu limped the one mile back to their camp. In the melee, their donkey had gone missing but the telescope was still hoisted where Ahmad had set the tripod.
“Let’s go,” Babu said when they heard Patterson’s whistle commanding his gang back to base. He saw Ahmad was stifling laughter. “Wha
t’s the matter?” he asked with mild annoyance.
Ahmad pointed at Babu’s backside. The fresh sap from the stump had left a round outline on his threadbare pants. “Someone or someting make mark of Nakuru on bossman.Someone be telling you someting . . .”
“Take that off.” Babu pointed at the telescope while trying to wipe the sap from his pants.
Ahmad peered through the telescope. “Vot is tis, boss?”
“What is what?” Babu said, growing more irritated.
“Come see for youself, boss.”
Babu’s version of what followed was that using the telescope, he panned through the plains and caught a group of white men in sombreros, flitting around like butterflies against the brown background of the savanna. They were demarcating land, he could tell, because they were placing planks to note the boundaries.
That was all true. The segment that he edited out in future narratives of the events of that day of darkness was that he also saw, in the frame of his telescope, six young women. They were coming in his direction to sell firewood, he could tell from the loads on their backs, as others had done at every other station along the way. The local women walked naked save for a tiny cloth that covered the area between their loins. Men wore a piece of cloth knotted on the shoulder that served as shirt and pants. He zoomed in on one woman with a pretty face and watched her generous behind swirl gently, like a record playing on a gramophone.