Dance of the Jakaranda

by Peter Kimani

  He walked stealthily toward the edge of the fence and stretched two strands of the barbed wire to create a gap in between. He crouched through the hole but one tong of the wire clung to his clothes. As he tried to extricate himself, the sentry appeared to wake up. Babu froze. The sentry glanced around before he fell right back to sleep. Babu gently unhitched himself from the wire and crouched a few meters away for several moments before fleeing into the darkness—and freedom.

  He knew he had to keep off the railway or any other white settlements. They were scattered all over, and many of them bore names of English counties where their new owners were presumably from: Devon, Surrey, Brooke, Sheffield, Anglia, Redhill. All of them bore the word Estate to invoke their new owners’ desire for perpetuity; estates were legal entities that were meant to outlive their owners. What were these places named before the arrival of the whites, Babu asked himself for the umpteenth time, and how do locals feel about the new names? Babu was constantly surprised that the hinterland was already heavily populated by whites. It was another country away from the railway line that changed terrain every few miles.

  Here, there were paddocks of rolling hills where merino sheep bleated or locked horns, while the foolish ones trooped after their leaders, their white coats standing out against the endless stretches of green; there, coffee bushes in straight lines spread out at calculated intervals, the bushes trimmed into circular shapes that looked like bobs of neat hair. Walking farther down where the temperature was cooler, there were the tea estates, blocks of neat green ringed by patches of red earth where walkways demarcated one section from another.

  Babu had a sudden revelation. He had seen similar enterprises in Punjab—what was pending here was the means to ship away what the land could produce. That’s where he and the others came in—they were there to lay the rail to transport the crops to the coast.

  This was the turning point in Babu’s life, one that, unknown to him, established links with local seers like Me Katilili and Kioni, who foresaw the train as a beast whose belly would require communal feeding for an eternity, accurately presaging the years of colonialism that lay ahead. It was in that walk through the bush that Babu made a silent vow to do something. What, exactly, he didn’t know. He just knew he had to do something about the white domination taking root before his very eyes.

  In that moment he realized whites and blacks had not been subjected to the so-called sex parade. In McDonald’s mind, crimes of different natures were consigned to different races. And only Asians were capable of crimes of passion, the sort that he had been plunged into. His thoughts turned to Reverend Turnbull and he wondered what was in it for him. Although the man had declared his interests in the matter as both scholarly and spiritual, Babu suspected this was a cover-up for a far more sinister intent. Who knows, he could have been the one who fathered Seneiya’s baby, Babu laughed to himself.

  Babu walked at a modest pace so as not to appear too anxious to depart from the land, or too rushed to get to his next destination. He did not even have a destination yet; he just needed to open up a reasonable distance between himself and the railway builders, particularly the white supervisors who were likely to betray him to McDonald. He was therefore walking in the opposite direction of the railhead.

  Along the way, he picked enough wild fruit to eat and save for dinner, and slept close to a stream where he bathed and drank to his fill, before setting off at dawn to repeat the process. By the end of the third day, he encountered Mujibhai, an Indian farmer who had jumped off the moving train, as all deserters called their flight. Mujibhai wore a turban and had his mustache curled at the edges so that he looked like a catfish. He welcomed Babu heartily, but tensed when he heard his full story. He said he feared McDonald would boycott his crop if he knew he was hosting an outlaw.

  “Obviously, tat be too big a market to lose for no good reason, no?” Mujibhai posed. “It’s not tat am chasing away a good friend and eweryting. It just won’t look good and eweryting. You know tis tings, my friend.”

  “Yes, I do,” Babu said with a tinge of sarcasm, which Mujibhai did not seem to notice.

  “You know, we Indians came here to look for money and eweryting,” Mujibhai added. “And if I had found it on the Indian Ocean, I voulda made about-turn and head right back to India. So to come here and not make someting is a bit foolish . . .”

  Babu sought refuge at the next farm. Chetan was another Indian farmer and he grew French beans. Babu volunteered his labor to earn his keep but said nothing about his work situation. Chetan said he was afraid what other Jains would say about him hosting a Muslim.

  So Babu was elated when the next farmer turned out to be a Muslim, also from Punjab, and whose name was Nazir. He took Babu in. Babu marveled at nature’s ways. The seeds from a rotten tomato that Nazir had squeezed onto fertile ground, and then had shielded using mulch from dried grass, had grown into a sizable crop.

  Babu’s hands and feet were soon blistered, although he made nothing from his labors other than a cup of sorghum porridge every morning and spinach and roti for lunch and dinner. On a good day, Nazir got ghee and lentils at the market where he sold his tomatoes. Babu would have waited for the tomatoes to mature but his stay was interrupted.

  “My friend . . . you know, I didn’t realize you are a Sunni Muslim, and not a Shia like me,” Nazir said to him. “You know, we may be away from home and everything but our values have not changed. Sunnis and Shias are like water and oil: they don’t mix . . .”

  Yet again, Babu was beside himself. The Jains, the Patels, the Hindus, and the Muslims may have left India, but India had not left them. They had taken with them the caste systems and prejudices from their villages, so they may as well have never traveled.

  It was in that moment of despair that Babu crossed paths with Karim, his old friend from the shipwrecked dhow they’d arrived on from India. Since the shipwreck, they had hardly seen each other, losing contact through the years of the railway construction since they had been deployed to different departments. While Babu had been sent ahead of the pack, surveying and mapping the possible train routes, Karim was among those deployed to maintain and repair trams that were used to test the rail once it was laid.

  Karim had put on a little weight, and he appeared to be in good cheer. When Babu calmly explained his predicament, Karim laughed so long and loud that his eyes teared. When he calmed down, he said, even as a fresh bout of mirth bubbled, “My good friend, you are the master of shipwrecks. First you were stranded at sea. Now you are stranded on dry land.”

  “At least I can’t drown on dry land.” Babu chuckled at his own joke. “I just can’t help myself. Forces of nature are totally beyond my control.”

  “You are absolutely correct,” Karim teased. “It’s hard to control a call of nature, especially the sort regulated by a zipper.”

  “I certainly do control my zip,” Babu replied defensively.

  “My good friend, tell that to the birds,” Karim said with a smile. “But listen. You arrived in the nick of time. I’m about to jump ship, or is it the train, but I’m not sure where I’m going. All I know is that I have to get going. If you want to join me . . .”

  Babu thanked him for the offer, but explained that he would have to lie low for a while, until the heat died down. But they promised to look for each other.

  Babu decided to hibernate for a season, his next abode being a cave that locals called ngurunga ya itugi, because solid rocks stood erect like flagpoles at its mouth. He had left Punjab a young technician only four years earlier; now he was a caveman. That’s what the British do to you, he thought bitterly.

  For some reason, Babu was cheered to find that the spring emanating from the cave fed into other springs downhill that drained into the massive lake where the flamingos had made a home nine months earlier. He was even more elated to come across the tree stump where he had sat to remove the prick on his foot. What he found intriguing and pleasing at the same time was that the sharp-edged tuber tha
t had pricked him to extract eight drops of blood had grown into a massive crop.

  It was the first sisal crop in the colony; its seed had been dropped accidentally by settlers headed farther up in the Rift Valley where an entire crop had failed due to harsh climatic conditions. And the wild seed that had fallen off in the bush had found easy nurture and grown without any human intervention. The plant now stood a meter high, with broad, sword-shaped leaves that jutted in every direction. The plant looked like an upturned star and was ringed by tiny suckers that Babu knew from his recent vegetable and tomato cultivation were the seeds.

  As Babu knelt to begin planting some of the seeds using the machete he had picked up at his last outpost, he thought about the range of tasks one could not complete satisfactorily without kneeling: a man earnest in prayer, a thief picking a lock, a man in copulation. In all those instances, there is some expectation of a reward, some yield from the toils. Through his labors, Babu lazily wondered about Ahmad and whether he had managed to inform Fatima what had befallen him. But his mind would immediately get absorbed in the work at hand. He did not care that this crop did not bear any visible fruit; he was only intrigued by its majesty and size.

  He cleared a small patch and gingerly sliced off the sisal suckers and transferred them there. He planted the suckers at intervals, using his steps to measure because he had no other equipment. He returned to the mother plant days later and found new suckers sprouting. He cut these too and transferred them to a new patch he had cleared. Babu’s instinct was that something of value could be harnessed out of that crop, but he did not know how or what.

  He did this for the next month, rising every morning from the cave to attend to his mysterious plant, watering the seedlings in the morning before going to forage in the forest for something to eat. By the end of two months living by the lake—and the fourth month since he gone on the run—he had put an acre under sisal cultivation.

  * * *

  Chief Lonana’s daughter Seneiya delivered at the end of the third month of Babu’s disappearance. She gave birth to a baby girl with the bluest of eyes and broadest of grins, as if to mock the gloomy circumstances of her arrival. She was named Rehema Salim, her surname picked from Babu’s name. Were it not that she was exiting the loins of a black mother, one would have thought she was a white child; it was as if the mother had served as mere vessel for her conception and delivery, much the same way train wagons would be used to ferry goods that they had played no role in creating.

  Chief Lonana took one look at the child and declared they had the wrong man. It had been proven that the coolie was not the one who had broken the leg of his goat and they would have to start looking elsewhere.

  When Ahmad heard about the blue-eyed baby, he realized it would be his opportunity to deliver some good news to Babu. But fate had a way of disrupting his plans. Although Ahmad had lied to Patterson when he’d said he had to go to Mombasa to dispatch a crucial telegram home, his words returned to haunt him when a telegram arrived from Mombasa on the train that very day. It was from Fatima, and the black blocks of ink read: COUSIN ABDUL, WELCOME TO THE FAMILY. I’M WAITING EXPECTANTLY.

  HOUSE OF DARKNESS

  16

  Hadithi Hadithi! Paukwa? This is an invocation to confirm that the reader is still there, lest one is tired of being dragged through the crooked jogs of history, trying to untangle mysteries that never quite unfurl. There is the story of the horn that stands on the mantelpiece of Babu’s house in Nakuru, the one that Babu remembers when he convulses about the past; tied to it is the curse of the sea. Then there’s the story of the betrothal, the one that involved Rajan, although he wasn’t privy to it; there is also the story of the virgin bride; and now, the mother of them all, the messenger sent to the convey news of a man’s illegitimate child, but who only returned with news of his illicit affair that had produced a child.

  So let’s end this pregnant wait and reveal the succinct truth, some of which will elude Babu the rest of his life. Just as the task of the consummation of his marriage fell to Ahmad, not Babu, Ahmad would similarly be the first man to know how Fatima came into the possession of the horn that stills the sea spirits, and which was linked to the two questions about her virginity and the miraculous healing of her legs.

  When Babu and Fatima were aboard the MV Salama on their maiden trip to the British East Africa Protectorate, and the vessel went into a spin on their seventh day at sea, flipping around until everyone collapsed in fits of dizziness, Fatima feared she would not survive the trip. In the heat of the moment, when the vessel dipped and drank water to its fill, chugging back and forth as though hiccuping from the effect, and Babu hurled insults at Nahodha—who then returned with a curse—not knowing his young wife was present and listening, Fatima, frightened, cold, and lonely, sobbed for the rest of the journey, her crammed legs numb from the salty warm waters of the Indian Ocean.

  When Fatima learned that Babu had turned to a native girl for comfort while she waited for his return to surprise him with the good news about her ability to walk again, she was determined to repay him in kind, an eye for an eye, a man for a woman, a baby for a baby. The news that she was carrying Ahmad’s baby took three months to reach Ahmad, by which time Babu’s baby saga had taken a new twist. Babu had been exonerated, but he did not know about it. And Ahmad, the man who was about to relay the news to him, cut his trip short after discovering news about Fatima’s own pregnancy. For how does a man look another in the eye and say: My friend, when you sent me to see your wife, I gave it to her like nobody’s business and now she is heavy with my child. Call it our child. But you are off the hook over the chief’s daughter. It has come to light that you only did the deed but left no seed . . .

  So Ahmad waited a few more weeks before he mustered enough courage to face Babu. By that time, he was coveting something else in Babu’s possession which would solidify his ties to the family for the long haul.

  17

  Rajan and Mariam’s disappearance coincided with the onset of the season of anomie. Strange things were rumored to be happening in different corners of the land and one did not know what to believe and what to discount. Gathenji the butcher gained a new name—he became Gathenji Rumas because his greetings to customers started and ended with: “Have you heard the rumor . . . ?” There were rumors on just about everything. Some unspeakable things had reportedly happened to Indians of Ruiru, a township about three hours east of Nakuru. Then there was the rumor of the white man who painted himself black, a humiliation that was reportedly supervised by naked men dancing under a bright torch, faces dripping with ocher and chalk and holding roosters that crowed at every nudge.

  The rooster was a symbol that made sense of everything: it was the symbol of the leading political party. But what spurred Gathenji and other Nakuru residents to indulge in the rumors more intently was the one circulating about Rajan and his disappearance from the Jakaranda.

  Gathenji narrated the Ruiru incident as follows: The new leader, Big Man, had made an impromptu visit there, on what was called a “meet the people” tour. This meant stopping at trading centers where elderly women did dust-raising dances, digging in their heels in their syncopated steps and swinging their hips—whose outlines were enhanced by sisal kilts. In moments of inspiration, Big Man would leave his car and join in the jig, swinging his fly whisk or stroking his beard to show he appreciated their efforts. He would address the crowd for a few minutes, usually from the open roof of his limousine, urging the people to welcome and support serikali ya Mwafrika, the black man’s government. He would then ride on to the next destination.

  According to Gathenji’s narrative, things had initially gone smoothly at several stops along the way for Big Man and his convoy. The security detail included soldiers, regular policemen in pith helmets, teargas, and other weapons such as truncheons—or manogore, as Gathenji called them because they had the power to relax tense muscles if applied properly—as well as heavy clubs that the locals called mathiukure be
cause they were known for their ability to crack open human skulls with a single strike. The clubs also came in handy when bringing down locked doors.

  Big Man’s heavy security detail was understandable. Although Gathenji did not know it, there were many enemies of serikali ya Mwafrika. The new republics of Togo and Dahomey, or what’s known today as Benin, had already tasted the bitter fruit of a coup and their French masters were back at the helm, saying they had realized their mistake in leaving the continent too early. There were rumors that something was cooking in Ghana as well, because the British were not too happy with what Kwame Nkrumah was doing—barking, they said, like a mad dog about African unity, after they had spent decades dividing the continent. But Gathenji’s reasoning for Big Man’s need for a large security detail was more simple: he had been hit with rotten eggs at a few public rallies, so he was not taking any chances.

  The heavy security, Gathenji said he had heard, was also an affirmation of what many had suspected, and what Big Man had persistently denied: that he was the spiritual and political leader of the group known as Kiama kia Rukungu—Party of the Dust—which rampaged farms in the Rift Valley, harassing white farmers.

  So, many Indian traders, ambivalent about the new black leader, decided there was no need to feign adulation toward a man they did not quite trust, and whose attitude toward foreigners was suspect. They opted to keep their shops open and wait for customers instead of attending his “meet the people” tour.

  “You know how these Indian are,” Gathenji said. “I heard a rumor that they keep their money under their mattresses, so they can’t risk venturing out and leaving their treasures unattended.”

  But it wasn’t just Indians who chose to ignore Big Man’s tour. Although Gathenji did not know it, other locals in Ruiru skipped the fête as well, so that Big Man’s entourage found only a hefty old man in tight khaki shorts and shirt selling bananas by the roadside, likewise using a whisk to ward off flies as goats nibbled at the peels that had been thrown at his feet. Big Man was instantly drawn to this man who seemed to be nearly the same age, but when the goats bleated and one of them issued a trail of droppings, Big Man thought the locals were staging a farce to mock him, especially when the goats began shitting. With the blink of an eye, the old man in khaki was lifted juu juu by Big Man’s security detail, and when they put him down, the vendor seemed to have been punctured—his nose was runny, his eyes teary, even his ears perspired, and a small patch of his pants looked wet. He was saved by his goats when they started nibbling at the uniformed men.