Dance of the Jakaranda

by Peter Kimani

  “The baby has greeted its father!” one woman ululated, and the others joined in.

  Babu cringed. The baby, created through the exchange of bodily fluids, was reminding him of its origin. How vulgar, he thought as he handed the baby back without uttering a word, then walked out.

  * * *

  Babu felt that the cold treatment he had received in his own house was the height of madharau. Actually, he corrected himself, it was Fatima’s house. It did not feel like his home at all, although he had paid its rent without fail for the past four years.

  Babu was also perturbed that the black horn, the totem of Nahodha’s curse, had been used in Fatima’s house—on her newborn baby. What was happening to his life? he wondered.

  Babu was so lost in thought that he failed to hear his name being called; it wasn’t until someone tapped his shoulder and told him someone was calling him that he realized it was Fatima. She was chasing after him, clumsily holding a leso around her belly.

  “Where are you going?” she asked plaintively.

  “I don’t know,” he said, which was very true.

  “Are you coming back?” It felt like the plea of a child, seeking the reassurance from a parent that she was not being abandoned.

  “I don’t know,” he responded, shrugging.

  “We need to, to—talk . . .”

  “No,” he replied firmly. “We don’t.”

  “Okay,” Fatima said with equal firmness, though she didn’t leave. “The women have come to help me. They know . . . know nothing . . . about us.”

  Babu started moving away.

  “Wait!” Fatima commanded.

  He stopped.

  She walked over to him, gingerly unfolding a knot at the tip of her sarong. It was a clod of rupees. She gave it to him. “I have been honest,” she said, looking him in the eye. “These are the savings from my duka. I set it up when my legs healed. I did not tell you because you never asked. But you kept the money coming. I kept it growing. I have my duka and now you have something to start a business of your own with.” Fatima turned and started walking away.

  “Wait!” Babu called out. “I want to ask you something.”

  “Let me ask you first.”

  “No, I asked first.”

  “You said you didn’t want to talk.”

  “Now I do.”

  “No you don’t!”

  “Yes I do.”

  “No you don’t!”

  “Okay, you go first . . .”

  Neither of them was smiling but the tension between them had dissipated.

  “Why do you dress this way?” Fatima asked.

  “Because I am now a sadhu,” Babu smiled. “Or I aspire to be one.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Well, maybe, maybe not.”

  “Is that why you didn’t . . .”

  “Didn’t?”

  “Do it . . . ?”

  “Do what?”

  “Abstain.”

  “What?”

  “Since our wedding day.”

  Babu was silent.

  “Do you still do it?”

  “What?” Babu asked cautiously.

  “Abstain.”

  “Maybe,” Babu sighed.

  “What about . . . about . . . the other problem?”

  “What?”

  “The other woman.”

  “Which one?”

  “So, they are that many?”

  Silence.

  “The chief’s daughter.”

  “I-I got many, many—”

  “Women?”

  “Problems.”

  “I should help you.”

  Silence.

  “That woman,” Fatima waved toward her house, “can help you.”

  Silence.

  “She is the traditional healer who restored my legs.”

  “What’s she doing to—to you?”

  “It’s the baby.”

  “Baby?”

  “Protective charm. She did that to my duka as well. Exorcised the bad spirits before I opened the shop. She did the same to me when I told her about Nahodha’s curse. She has very strong medicine.”

  “Yes, I can see that,” Babu conceded.

  “She has given me the black horn for keeps. She says I should use it when trouble blows my way.”

  “Blow me away then!”

  “Don’t tempt me . . .”

  * * *

  The 120 rupees Babu received from Fatima was nearly equivalent to the amount he had been sending her every year. And it was more than he would have received had he completed his contract with the railway. Moreover, she had managed to save money while still keeping her duka well stocked.

  So, in spite of everything, their parting was amicable, their initially frosty relations having thawed somewhat. Fatima said she would stay on in Mombasa and regain her health after the childbirth; Babu would return to Nakuru and explore business opportunities to invest the money in. He felt as though he was being paid for his silence. From the two uneventful trips to Mombasa—uneventful in the sense that no one had bothered him—Babu was growing more confident that the authorities had either forgotten about him or were no longer interested in him. In any case, since he was not interested in pursuing any labor-related claim against the railway authorities, he thought he could comfortably settle back in and get immersed in fruitful work.

  He did—by building the first white rondavel in the place, which would grow into Nakuru town before other workers arrived and put up their structures, thereby turning it into a proper settlement in only a few months. Farther afield, he established the first duka in the place, which would become Nakuru’s commercial district. Fatima gave the business a great boost when she arrived six months later, throwing her energies and insights into the project. By the end of 1903, they had opened one more duka in Molo.

  * * *

  Over the years, Babu established an enviable business empire. The secret to his business, which he ran side by side with Fatima, was simple: he would travel across the Rift Valley buying food from white farmers and delivering it to the African markets. He was the bridge between the two races. Over time, the small duka that he had founded with Fatima’s fund grew into a wholesale outlet that served Nakuru and adjoining towns.

  In spite of his immense success, Babu remained down-to-earth, resisting overtures to join private clubs initiated by the Indian business community in Nakuru and beyond. Part of his reason for staying away was to avoid men from his past, such as Ahmad, who he once encountered at the funeral of a former railway worker. Ahmad had turned ash-gray when he saw Babu, before melting into the crowd. Babu had not seen him since Ahmad had swindled him with his sisal plants, and he did not want to see him again. He would keep away.

  He lived a hermetic life, taking a packed lunch from home which he ate in between meeting with customers at the shop. That was actually part of his business success: the reliability of his shop remaining open, no matter what. He opened early and closed late. African businessmen who joined the trade had very different work ethics. Lunchtime meant closing to dash to the nearby eateries for nyama choma, washed down with a beer or two. And seldom did those who started imbibing ever return to work, postponing the reopening to the following day. When they did, battling a hangover from the previous night, they would start by restocking what had been depleted the previous day. It was due to these dynamics that Babu remained ahead of his competition.

  Fatima stayed faithfully beside him, tactfully directing the business without getting in the way. Everybody thought them a perfect couple, and from the outside, they truly were. At home, it was a different story. Each observed the other’s space, never crossing the no-man’s-land that Fatima’s son Rashid had defined in their bed, and which was maintained even after he grew up and moved to his own room and eventually out of the house. But in 1922, Fatima sensed something was distracting Babu. He would leave the shop early and disappear for hours on end.

  That was the year that Babu joined th
e labor movement in the colony, and when trade unionist Harry Thuku was arrested, Babu was among those who organized the protests demanding his release.

  But it was in the 1950s that Babu, by then a business magnate in the colony, contributed immensely to the liberation struggle. Using locals as conduits, he donated significant sums of money to Kiama kia Rukungu. And when he diversified his business and ventured into printing, he clandestinely published leaflets warning whites to vacate the Rift Valley. He became the freedom fighters’ elder statesman, the father of the nation, or as they referred to him, Guka, meaning grandfather.

  21

  As it was in the beginning, when the train delivered to Nakuru the men who founded the township and shaped its future, so it was in the end, when the train also delivered their children to Mombasa to confront their secret past. And when the past meets the present, or to use the metaphor of the railroad, the trains intersect without the intervention of the stationmaster, it is likely to be a messy affair. And the triumvirate of Reverend Turnbull, McDonald, and Babu, whose life threads had run parallel to each other for decades, would finally come together. McDonald was the last man standing; Babu lay in bed for the third day, still weighed down by the history that he had sought to escape for sixty years; Reverend Turnbull, who preached about renouncing bodily temptations to save the soul, had been cut down by the lone fighter from Kiama kia Rukungu ten years earlier, in 1953.

  Yet, it still confounds that the unraveling of those sixty years of history was heralded by a momentary clash in the dark between Rajan and Mariam on the staircase of the Jakaranda, producing sparks that would illuminate a history that had eluded their forebears, and herald their common heritage. In Nakuru lore, the term they use to explain such phenomena, like the coincidental meeting of strangers who later discover they are somewhat related, is damu zinavutana. Blood tugging toward the direction of its kin, much the same way gravity pulls objects toward the earth. Mariam’s blood was pulling toward Rajan’s.

  Rajan inadvertently found himself sucked into a vortex of history he hardly understood. All he knew was that he was helplessly besotted with Mariam, so he had run after her as Babu whimpered on the floor like an old dog. Babu had spent years running away from Fatima; Rajan spent months chasing Mariam.

  * * *

  Unbeknownst to Rajan, Mariam was the daughter of the girl Reverend Turnbull had adopted and raised as his own; the girl whose mother was Chief Lonana’s daughter Seneiya. And the preacher had adequately prepared by envisioning a future without him and had left instructions on what should happen after his demise. He had bequeathed to his family, comprising his adopted daughter Rehema, as well as Rehema’s daughter Mariam, a parcel he deposited in a vault of the Mombasa branch of the Bank of England, which was to be opened by Mariam or her mother Rehema. The only condition was that Mariam had to be at least eighteen years old to access it. Only months after writing his will, Reverend Turnbull was dead.

  The timing of Reverend Turnbull’s edict about the opening of the vault was rather apt. One might call it serendipity; others would call it divinatory insight—for 1963, the year that Mariam turned eighteen, was also the year the independent nation of Kenya was born. As though to test Mariam’s competence in dealing with the affairs of her complex heritage, Mariam’s mother Rehema had also recently died. That was when a grief-stricken Mariam, on the verge of losing her sanity, had set out for Nakuru from Ndundori with a rather foolish proposition: to venture to a place she had never been and to kiss a stranger. This might sound arrogant and foolish, but as it turned out, Mariam’s instinct, like a magnet that pulls metal from a pile of trash, was pulling her toward her secret heritage.

  So after that initial kiss in the dark with the stranger, Mariam had returned home with her two wishes fulfilled. As her mother’s only child, and Rehema being a single parent, Mariam became the custodian of the family history when her mother died, and received all the family letters, including the one bequeathing her the parcel in a vault in Mombasa left by her grandfather, Reverend Turnbull. Mariam had planned on spending one night in Nakuru before taking the train to Mombasa, as the service was only available on Tuesdays and Thursdays. That’s when she made her second trip to the Jakaranda and had her encounter with the man she would come to know as Rajan, reigniting the fire that her first kiss had lit in him. She had allowed the passions to consume her, reasoning, rather sensibly, that keeping the parcel in Mombasa for a few more days would make no difference since it had been waiting there for ten years.

  Once again, her wisdom had prevailed, for Mariam’s reunion with Rajan climaxed with Rajan taking her to meet his grandfather. Babu’s meltdown upon hearing who Mariam’s mother was only hastened her resolve to set forth for Mombasa and try to establish why the simple mention of her origins had elicited such a strong reaction. She fled Babu’s home in tears, uncertain how to reassure his family that she had done nothing other than invoke the name of her mother, as Babu had requested; Rajan followed in hot pursuit, trying to catch up with her without knowing where she was going, or even why. He just wanted to be with her, seated beside her, parallel like the train tracks.

  Mariam reached the train station ahead of Rajan and purchased a one-way ticket to Mombasa. Rajan caught up with her soon enough, as the train honked to announce its departure. Not knowing Mariam’s destination, Rajan simply asked for a ticket to the end of the rail. The attendant, not humored by his philosophical quip, simply punched Mombasa as the last destination and issued the ticket. Mariam was already on board; Rajan scampered after her.

  “Don’t you know the rules, young man?” the ticket inspector scoffed, pointing Rajan toward the cabin for Indians.

  Mariam, with her milky skin, was dispatched to the cabin for whites. So there they were, in the belly of the beast, gliding on the rail that their forebears had laid with their bare hands, going to confront a past that would reorganize their compartmentalized lives, or foster a collision from which none would ever be the same again.

  They stood side by side for a reasonable portion of the journey, blowing kisses through the glass partitions that divided the cabins, giggling and laughing like little children. Before long, both exhausted, they gestured that they needed to get some rest and slumped back into their seats. Rajan felt somewhat conflicted about the trip, gnawed by memories of his grandfather on all fours, shouting for somebody to blow the horn, yet unwilling to blame the girl sitting across from him.

  The train trip felt rather surreal, hurtling through landmarks featured in Rajan’s songs, mostly from his grandfather’s narratives. Rajan noticed the small mounds of earth that dotted the track. They were graves of men who had fallen by the wayside, and of whom Babu had said nothing in his recollections. At Mtito Andei, the train halted long enough for Rajan to step out and read the bronze plaque on a phallus-shaped monument at the station.

  In Memory of 5,000 Men Who Laid Their Lives to Lay This Rail, it announced, the tiny letters below that listed the names of the deceased dancing in the sun, bequeathing them new life. Muted in the neat scrolls of the letters were the cries of grief that their families had unleashed upon receiving news of their demise, the message often delivered by a worker, sometimes years after the tragedy. For others, it was the sudden end of money dispatched every month that presaged their loss. Where a family was lucky, they would receive an urn bearing the ashes, or even a bone salvaged from the savage attack of a lion, wrapped in the clothes the deceased had last worn.

  Not all deaths were violent: the prickly bites of mosquitoes or tsetse flies deflated life and sapped energy from their victims like a punctured tire. Before long, they were no more. Rajan was disturbed by the find, as well as Babu’s silence on the casualties of the railway. Perhaps it was his grandfather’s way of coping with the pain, Rajan thought, as this revelation led him to ponder what other traumas the old man had borne in silence.

  Rajan flashed back to a long-forgotten memory when he had been about six and had seen Babu in pain. The year was 1947 and
although Rajan did not know it, Babu had plucked hairs from his pate and thrown them into the fire, where they did their zigzag death-dance. And Rajan watched as Babu wept over the partition of his home region of Punjab, which had been split up between the newly established states of India and Pakistan.

  Returning his thoughts to the present, Rajan wandered to the window and peered outside. When he was younger, he used to rush to the window of their house and watch the train hurtle down the valley. It always filled him with wonder to see a passenger by the window, absorbed by the landscape or simply lost in thought. He would wave excitedly and was elated when someone waved back. There was a strange fulfillment about being able to connect with another human being who he did not know. As the years passed, Rajan outgrew the habit but still enjoyed watching the train snake down the valley every week.

  When he discovered Babu’s old surveying equipment in the attic, all of which was in perfect working order, Rajan would climb up onto the roof of their house and pick out pretty faces by the train windows, focusing the lenses on his objects of desire until the train went out of view. He would zoom in on the images, pulling people who were a mile away to within an arm’s length.

  Long after the train was gone, Rajan would recall those images from his memory vault and wonder: What was the story of those strangers? Where were they going and why? Now, on the train himself, he wondered if a man or woman he had never met would notice his own face by the window, and if the memory of him would linger long enough to nudge their consciousness and wonder years later who he was, and where he was going. None of them would know that he himself did not even know where he was going, or why.

  He looked across the cabin; Mariam was awake. He waved at her. She waved back, smiling, but a frown soon creased her face. She was thinking about the parcel she was about to receive, wondering how her knowledge of her past would reshape her future.