by Iman Verjee
‘None.’ White foam had formed at the corners of his mouth, his eyes rolling and fluttering shut before he lurched back with a gasp. ‘And. No. Money.’
Raj glanced back at his car. ‘I’ll be back,’ he told the man, dodging the traffic back to his family, knocking urgently on his wife’s window.
‘What are you doing?’ Her relaxed disposition from the afternoon was slowly fading.
‘We have to take him to the hospital.’
‘No, we don’t,’ she replied. ‘Just get back in the car. It’s getting late.’
Raj didn’t have time for an argument. Sticking his hand inside the window he unlocked the door and ushered Pooja out. ‘Get in the back, quickly. I’ll go and get him.’ He gestured for Jai to help him.
Pooja shouted after them, the light-headedness beginning to settle into a throbbing headache. ‘You – Raj Kohli, come back here!’
But he was already away with his son, back on the road and lost in the cacophonic noise of the traffic.
They had never had an African in their car before. Skin cracked open with dryness, rubbing his tongue continuously over his lips and along his inner cheeks. His clothes were old strips of dirty cotton and the soles of his shoes were broken – like flapping, dusty mouths every time he moved his feet. Leena wanted to open a window for his smell to escape but she was squeezed tightly between her mother and Jai.
She recalled Pooja’s constant warnings. You must be careful, most of them are thieves – they robbed my friend Bharti, they hijacked your second cousin, Jiten, and tied him up and stuffed him in the boot for three hours! Those words caused fear to pile up in her because it made it impossible not to see this man as the enemy.
Her father spoke, his soft voice immediately soothing her. ‘We’re almost there.’
‘Where exactly is there?’ Pooja asked pointedly, speaking in Punjabi.
‘We’re taking him to M.P. Shah Hospital.’
Pooja shook her head. ‘Don’t you ever think that other people would also be able to solve these problems if you just let them?’
‘Did you see anyone else stopping for him?’
She talked over her husband. ‘Always having to be the first, always wanting to be the hero.’
‘What would you have me do? Leave him dying in the middle of the road?’
‘And when we get to the hospital? If he has no money, they’ll just let him die there anyway.’
Raj remained silent, unwilling to reveal his full plan to Pooja. Constantly wanting to argue, he thought irritably. The woman was born with difficulty in her blood.
When they reached the hospital, Jai helped his father to carry the man across the parking lot, toward the swinging white doors of Emergency Care. It was difficult and took time, given how heavy and limp the man had become. When they placed him in the plastic chair of the crowded waiting room, the man groaned and his head began to pitch and roll.
‘Let it kill me.’
‘Hush.’ Raj patted his shoulder. ‘You’ll be better soon.’
People in the waiting room had lowered their magazines, watching the scene keenly.
‘Go and tell the receptionist he needs immediate help,’ Raj instructed his son, and as Jai went to speak to the woman behind the desk, Raj slipped three thousand shillings into the man’s limp hand and pressed it shut. ‘This should be enough for you right now.’
‘Thank you, mzee,’ his fingers clutched tightly.
As they made their way back to the car, Raj wrapped his arm around his son’s shoulders and brought him close, whispering, ‘No telling your mother about this, you hear…’
They were watching the nine o’clock news later that night when they were interrupted by the shrill ring of the telephone.
‘Mr Kohli? This is Dr Pattni from…’
‘Yes, yes. How is he?’
‘I’m afraid I don’t know.’
Confusion made his words slow. ‘What do you mean you don’t know?’
‘He left just after you dropped him off.’
‘But he could barely even stand!’ Raj remembered to speak in whispers, gripping the telephone, struggling to understand.
‘The nurse at the front desk told me that he waited for five minutes after you left and then stood up and walked out. No one saw where he went.’
‘Are you saying that he tricked me into thinking he was sick so that I would give him money?’
‘I’ve seen it happen before. It was very kind of you to bring him in.’
Raj swallowed down his building aggression. ‘Thank you for calling.’ He put the phone down and turned to his son, who was standing beside him. ‘You heard that?’
‘Yes.’
‘You know, the people with the kindest hearts are often the ones who get trampled on the most. That doesn’t mean you stop being generous, understood?’ Raj gazed down at the phone, thinking of the man and what Pio might have done and his anger slowly broke apart. He said to Jai, ‘One day, you will be called upon to do the right thing and nothing else will matter except that you do it. African, Indian, Gorah, it doesn’t matter when we are all Kenyans.’
11
The world fell away, shimmered and thinned. The circle of people around her dropped down one by one, folded up like cardboard mannequins to be stashed away. All she could feel was the sturdy, round hardness of the marble pressed against the tip of her index finger, her head filled with the oceanic rush of her breath. Ready. Set.
‘Hurry up and take your shot.’
Go.
The voice distracted her and the marble slipped from her hand, bounced sadly once and rolled a couple of centimeters ahead.
‘You cheated!’ Leena pulled herself up off her knees, starting toward Tag. ‘Do you know how long it took me to set up that shot? I would have hit you, I know I would have.’
Her circle of friends slowly rippled back into existence.
Tag rolled his eyes. Girls. Especially this one. ‘Think what you want.’
She grabbed the marble and stepped back, her arms crossed tightly over her chest as he knelt down, eyebrows sinking forward in concentration. ‘Fine, take your shot. Just remember—’
‘Excuse me?’
It came from behind her, a voice on the wind. One that she didn’t recognize, unsettling her because everything in this closely guarded, gated compound was familiar.
A boy was watching them with eyes that were quiet, dark pools and his hands were curled around the thick, worn-out strap of his satchel. Her mother’s voice came to her. You must be very, very careful of these Africans. They can even use their children to trick you.
‘What are you staring at him like that for?’ Jai came down the steps of their house to stand beside the boy.
‘Didn’t know you had African friends, Jai.’ Tag had set his marble carefully down and had stood up, sneering. The crowd around him tittered nervously, having been taught, as Leena had, to be suspicious of such people.
‘Can I help you?’ Jai asked the boy, ignoring Tag.
‘I’m looking for Angela.’ His English was drawn out and careful, steady despite the whispers around him.
Leena spoke up. ‘You mean our Angela?’
At that, the boy looked at her once more, his face crinkling into a question.
‘Your Angela?’
Jai interrupted, shooting his sister a warning look. ‘Angela Muriuki?’
‘Is she here?’
‘She’s around the back.’ Jai gestured for the boy to follow him.
Tag was down on the pavement again, victory within reach and the boy forgotten. When the last marble was knocked out of the fading dust circle, he threw his hands up in celebration. ‘I win.’
But Leena wasn’t listening. She was too busy staring after her brother, at the boy who walked so lightly beside him – grave and serious, entering into shadows.
Raj heard his daughter come loudly through the door, a shout on her lips. She was so intent on finding Pooja, she failed to see him
leaning on the sill of the open window in the living room, out of which he had been smoking leisurely and watching her play.
The sky was sinking into darkness, opening up its pockets of evening stars – tiny blades of metallic light blurring the edges of all the street objects so that they merged into one large, indistinguishable shadow. As if timed, the yellow lights from the neighboring houses sprung on as people sat down for dinner. Several housemaids emerged from around the verandas, out of their uniforms and in long skirts and cotton blouses, clutching plastic bags full of their belongings. They converged at the main gate, ready to walk home or take matatus together, speaking in rapid, fading tones. Housewives leaned out of doorways to call for their children, releasing cooking smells so that soon the entire compound was alive in the stink of Indian curry staples: cumin, fried red onions and garlic.
To rid himself of the stench, Raj lit another Embassy Light. He was disappointed at the ending of the game outside. It pleased him to watch the children playing, their unrestrained, boisterous nature that knew how to exist only in extremes. When he had been his daughter’s age, all he had known was frenzied joy or the powerful crush of sorrow – anger that moved him to tears or the total stillness of an untroubled mind. There had been no room for a middle ground, no space for those diluted, in-between emotions which, as an adult, he had begun to settle for. Mock feelings, he called them, because they weren’t real, only poor imitations of something true. Under the guise of maturity he had grown shallow and bland, but when he watched his daughter play – saw the permanent crease of irritation across her forehead or heard the tantrum-stamp of her shoes – it stirred within him a sweet recollection, a longing for a simpler time.
He turned from the window and to the small picture that hung on the right wall, swallowed by the busy, floral wallpaper.
‘You never lost that, did you?’ Raj said to Pio Gama Pinto.
The modest Goan man stared back at him with that infamous, wide smile and 1950s bushy haircut, his essence perfectly captured in the sepia-toned newspaper clipping.
When Raj had first come across that photo, he had been sixteen and restless. Two years after independence, the country was awash in so many possibilities that one went hunting for a dream the way they did a lion on safari – as mad and hungry men, greedy for a purpose. He had been rifling through the newspaper in the back room of a family friend’s duka and had paused at the image of a young Asian man hoisted upon the shoulders of his cheering black compatriots; had discovered something within its frozen celebration – a lingering hope that he had struggled to catch hold of before the demanding shop owner barged through the door.
‘What are you doing in my things?’
‘Who is this?’ Raj ignored the man’s annoyance and held up the photo.
‘Baap-re-baap!’ The owner smacked his forehead in exclamation. ‘What rock have you been living under, boy? That’s Pio. Pee-O. Doesn’t your father teach you anything?’
‘What does he do?’ His curiosity made him unashamed of his ignorance.
‘He’s a freedom fighter – helped ship all those dandy-looking white fellows back to Eng-laand.’
That evening, Raj sneaked the picture out of the man’s storage room, folded lovingly in the breast pocket of his shirt. He spent the night locked up in his room, searching within the photograph for an answer to a need he could not identify. There was an arresting air to the man, dressed in a button-down sweater vest and striped tie, his arms thrown out in modest victory. Pio was the only one looking directly into the camera; the faces of the men upon whose shoulders he sat were all upturned.
The following week, Raj hungrily snatched up any information he could gather about the man, whether it was from the old newspapers his mother kept for cleaning and sorting rice, from his father or uncle or any other adult he managed to corner – and discovered that what the old shopkeeper had told him was true. Raj had accidentally stumbled upon one of Kenya’s first freedom fighters, and an Indian one at that.
‘Brave man,’ Raj’s uncle, Dilip, informed him. ‘He returned from India to become involved in the local movement here, even supplied them with weapons. And in the middle of the night, he would put up political posters throughout the city, moving like a superhero. No one could catch him.’
‘Must have been exciting,’ Raj mused.
‘But also very dangerous. See, for all his troubles, Pio was detained in 1954. But you wouldn’t remember – you were only a young boy.’
Raj gripped the plastic covering of the dining table, steam clouds of heat beneath his fingers. ‘For how long?’
‘He was released five years later but do you think that stopped him?’ Dilip Uncle shook his head. ‘Of course not. He continued fighting to set Kenyatta free, and after that was achieved he helped ensure the KANU victory in the 1961 elections.’ His uncle scooped up handfuls of white rice and dal, pausing to contemplate. When he spoke again, flecks of yellow lentils hopped out between his words. ‘I met him once, you know. Ran into him on the street, just like that. So unassuming he was, but very clever. I could tell he was special straight away, just by looking at him.’
‘Take me to meet him.’
At that, Dilip Uncle had howled. Dropped his mouth open so wide that Raj had glimpsed the pinkly quivering tonsils. ‘Uh-reh! He’s a very busy man. Why on earth would he want to meet you?’
So after discovering that Pinto lived in Westlands, Raj rode his bike to the bustling district and parked inside the scratchy lantana bushes crowding the gate, hoping to sight the white Saab motor vehicle the man was known for driving.
Blackened with age, Pinto’s house ran long and low across a tangle of undergrowth and from the doorway to the gate there weaved a narrow driveway of flattened mud. From his position, Raj caught movements in the window and detected faint outlines of a living room, smelled roasted coffee and eggs and his stomach growled.
He was there every day for the next three weeks, an apple in his pocket or an omelette sandwich wrapped in tin foil. One day he took leftover fish curry along with a piece of thick white bread and ate it cold as he learned the man’s routine off by heart, tracked through his scratched toy binoculars.
Breakfast at seven thirty, seated in the kitchen nook surrounded by falling sunlight, Pinto engrossed himself in the newspaper until the sounds of his family distracted him; a wife and three daughters. At their voices, he would fold the paper in his lap and wait as they came up, one by one, for a morning kiss. Pinto would then disappear upstairs and his youngest daughter would come out of the house, bundled up for the chilly morning in a woolen sweater. She would play on the driveway, squat down on her haunches and search for whatever treasure her young mind conjured up, her delighted shouts disturbing the still air.
Some days, Pinto would join her early, dressed for work in an ironed white shirt and pressed trousers, always completed with a button-down sweater vest. His hair would be slicked back and he would pick up his daughter – ‘How about we go for a ride today?’ – and put her in the front seat of his Saab. They would drive the short, winding distance to the gate and back again. Pinto would repeat this several times – sometimes he would keep going until his wife came out looking for him.
‘We’re going to be late.’
And his daughter would be plucked from the car by her nanny, still clinging to her father’s fingers as Pinto’s wife waved goodbye in the rising tire dust, the couple making their way out onto the main street. There Raj would be, huddled behind the itchy leaves of the lantana bush, ducking bees and swatting mosquitoes.
Twenty-one days passed in this manner until, one morning, Raj was digging at an elbow scab and waiting for Pinto to leave at eight thirty, just as he always did, when the car slowed down more than usual. Raj looked up and, to his nervous surprise, saw the driver’s window roll down as it approached his hiding spot. He saw the man he had been watching from a distance for so many days now and was taken aback by how large he was – how real – when not viewed in a newspaper c
lipping or through binoculars.
‘Hello there.’ The voice was unassuming, bouncing with friendliness. An arm extended outward, gesturing for Raj to come closer. But he stayed fixed to the ground and even the greedy mosquitoes pinching his skin were not enough to force him out onto the road. ‘I won’t hurt you. I only want to answer your question.’
Intrigued, Raj took a small step forward. ‘What question?’
‘You must have one,’ replied Pinto, pausing mid-sentence as Raj came the full way out, taking fairy-steps toward the Saab, where he saw that the man was alone. ‘Otherwise you wouldn’t be waiting here every day.’
Pinto was right. The purpose of Raj’s visit had been lost in all the excitement at seeing the man in the flesh, but now as he looked upon the wide-browed young man he remembered it again.
He asked, ‘How did you do it?’
Smiling as if it were a question he was used to, Pinto returned with, ‘What exactly do you mean by it?’
‘How did you become a hero?’
Eyebrows shooting up; this version of the question was new to him, a strange and uncomfortable thought. ‘Who told you I was a hero?’
‘Everyone says so. They say that you’re brave, that you freed us from the Wazungu. That even the Africans trust you.’
Pinto’s index finger tapped against the steering wheel, his face clouded. ‘Is that what you want? To become a hero?’
Raj’s heart picked up its pace as the dream purred inside him. ‘Isn’t that what you do?’
The car turned off, returning the morning to its previous, bird-filled silence. Pinto pushed open the heavy door and his movements were so agile, so practiced at being invisible, that he was on one knee and face level with Raj before the boy knew what was happening. ‘Truth be told,’ Pinto started, ‘we all want to be heroes. We all want to make that difference in that moment of time, to be admired for our bravery and respected for our actions.’