by Iman Verjee
He begged, ‘If you can tell me how, perhaps I can go back. Perhaps I will remember…’
‘I’m so sorry for the both of you.’ She extracted her hands from his too-tight grasp. ‘I’ll do whatever it is I can to help relieve you of this burden.’
Her words snapped him out of his trance. He wiped his face with his sleeve, composed himself, and when he spoke he sounded like the man she had first met. ‘Yes, Esther is your burden now because you are family.’ He thundered up the stairs. ‘You tell her to stay away from me, you hear? I’ve had enough of that woman. All she does is carry around ghosts and I don’t want to be reminded, is that clear? I don’t want to be reminded of any of it.’
33
‘Eh-ma!’ Pooja clutched her head, digging her fingernails into the soft flesh of her temples. ‘No, no, you stupid girl!’
Leena tugged at her hair, the short strands escaping her grasp easily. She looked down at her empty hand, momentarily surprised. ‘You don’t like it?’
‘Like it?’ screeched Pooja. ‘What makes you think I would want my daughter to look like a little boy?’
‘You’re being overdramatic, Ma.’ Leena went to the mirror, turned her head left and right. Slanted up her chin and cast her gaze downward, under wavering lids.
‘The first time you cut it, I said, Okay, it’s not so bad, it’s liveable, not too short but no shorter! And now…’ Pooja gestured at her daughter with a scowl of disgust. ‘Uh-ruh-ruh. Who will marry you now, when you are looking like that?’
Leena’s black hair, so enviously full, had been thinned down to wispy layers and grazed the bottom of her pointed chin, swept to the right in a long wave. Leena pushed up the bob and then, worried the continuous fussing would ruin it, patted it back down again.
‘It’s fashionable, which is why you don’t like it,’ she told her mother. ‘Besides, when I go to England—’
‘Just because you’re going abroad for studies doesn’t mean you have to change yourself.’
Leena was in her last year of high school and, along with most of her classmates, was looking at universities in England to continue her education. On this, Pooja supported her whole-heartedly – had wanted Jai to do the same thing four years earlier but the boy had been adamant about staying in Nairobi.
‘But you’re so clever!’ Pooja had exclaimed in dismay. ‘No one will know that. They’ll think you weren’t accepted into any schools in England, that you settled for second rate. No one goes to the universities here.’
‘No one you know goes to the universities here,’ he had corrected her.
‘Exactly my point. Why attend Nairobi University when you have an opportunity to go abroad?’
‘I don’t want to waste three years of my life in a country I’ll never return to after I’m done studying. I want to be here, to grow here. Besides, University of Nairobi is a reputable school.’
‘I don’t care what kind of school it is,’ Pooja had protested. ‘It’ll never be as good as the schools in England. Here, all they do is go on strike for this thing or that, and all the classes are taught by kharias!’ She drew the last word into a wail and grabbed her son’s arm imploringly. ‘Please, Jai. Now is not the time for your big ideas.’
‘I’ve already received admission. If you aren’t going to support me then I’ll get a job and pay for it myself.’
‘What has happened to you? To be so disobedient to the people who raised you, who feed and house you – where would you be without us?’
But of course, it would not have been right to turn her back on her son and so she had asked for what she always did in such situations with Jai: a compromise. ‘You do your first degree here, okay,’ she said. ‘But then I want you to go and study in the UK for your Masters. You must do that, Jai. These things matter.’
‘Matter when? When I’m looking for a wife?’
‘All my friends’ children are getting such degrees.’ Pooja ignored his jibe. ‘In a few years time, it will be the normal thing.’
All she was able to think of was how people would whisper about her son, how differently they would perceive him now. He would be viewed as less than the other men in their community, less educated and desirable – too old-fashioned.
Leena, on the other hand, was itching to go. University of Birmingham, Cardiff University, LSE, Nottingham University – the brochures of these places littered her room and she would spend hours losing herself in their glossy dreams, examining with dim longing the spacious lecture halls and the promises of romances waiting to be had. Nairobi was already far behind her.
‘I want to go to Manchester,’ she had told her parents.
Pooja pulled a face. She knew that one.
‘Full of racists,’ a woman from the compound had told her; her son had just returned from his fresher year there and had asked her, the first day back, to buy him some bleaching cream.
‘They call me a curry muncher, Mum!’ he had wailed. ‘If I could just look more like them, things might be a bit easier for me…’ he went on, drowning in his homesickness and inadequacy, clinging to her like a child.
‘Forget that,’ another woman had interjected. ‘Do you know what our children get up to in those cities? Nightclubs, bars, lining up in their short-short skirts and high heels. They drink and smoke, forget how to respect their elders, forget everything we have taught them!’ Suddenly caught out, the woman hurried to add, ‘Not my Shivani, of course, but she knows girls like that.’
So Pooja had crossed Manchester University off her daughter’s list. ‘Don’t you trick me, young lady,’ she warned, wagging her finger. ‘I’ve heard all the stories about Freshing Week.’
‘It’s Fresher’s Week, Ma.’
‘Freshing, Fresher’s, same, same. You’ll go anywhere you want in London – LSE, King’s College, City University – but you’ll stay with your uncle and that’s the only way you will go.’ Pooja had been adamant and the girl relented, so unlike her fighting brother.
Pooja wanted to make sure that her daughter wouldn’t get up to any silly mischief over there. No gorah boyfriends or back tattoos, coming home and sneaking cigarettes in the garden because she had gone wild over her freedom. Liberty was overrated, Pooja had decided long ago. Much better to live simply, in an orderly fashion, otherwise things became too messy, impossible to sort through, and it was easy to get lost and never find your way out.
Idly playing with the uneven edges of Leena’s haircut, trying to capture the sleek strands, she said, ‘You don’t have to worry about this. It’ll grow out in time. No harm done.’
Pooja settled back on the couch, watching her daughter fiddle and pout in the mirror. Such a lovely looking girl – petite and dramatically featured, the adolescent awkwardness almost completely faded out.
‘Keep your shoulders down, stand up straight,’ she reminded Leena and watched as the girl pulled herself up.
Pooja closed her eyes contentedly. It was silly to concern oneself with such things. Overall, she was extremely satisfied with how her daughter’s life had turned out. It was exactly the way she had planned it.
Across town, in the petrol-filled atmosphere of an overcrowded garage, a matatu glistened with a fresh coat of fuchsia paint. Soon it would dry and Michael used these few moments to sit down – hold his heavy head between his hands.
He had been commissioned to do the artwork on the bus but he was distracted. He hadn’t thought about her in many months, and even now it wasn’t the image of the twelve-year-old girl who occupied the crevices of his mind but rather the strictly structured, filled-out version that had fallen out of Jai’s school bag last week. Picking it up, Michael had wondered how seven years had passed since he had seen her.
He liked the way she looked in the photo. Unlike most of the Indian girls he came across on campus, her hair didn’t fall into the dip of her back, or wasn’t twisted around in a thick plait; it was much shorter, skimming her shoulders and making her seem too modern, as if she b
elonged someplace else. He grinned, remembering the day she had adamantly refused to come out and play after her mother had forced almond oil into her scalp.
In Jai’s picture, she had been wearing a white T-shirt and it made her hair appear darker, gleaming almost blue in some parts. She had tucked it behind her ear so that whoever had taken the picture had captured the glint of a gold stud, the sudden protrusion of a cheekbone – a knifelike structure that had not been there when he had known her. Though she was different, he discovered within her expression the same hot-headedness and determination of the young girl so long ago and he missed her with such intensity, everything else dulled in comparison.
He had only a few seconds to trail his hand over the image before Jai had returned from the bathroom and he quickly stuck it back into the rucksack’s front pocket. Michael had hidden his face in his textbook, a vain attempt to push her from his mind.
Yet her loveliness had carved a permanent home in his every thought so that whenever he shut his eyes, there she was – chin in palm, one shoulder bare and exposed.
A voice came up behind him. ‘Don’t tell me you’re still thinking about that bitch.’
Without moving, Michael said, ‘Don’t talk about her that way, Jackie.’
‘What shall I call her then? Racist? Cruel? A betrayer?’ She had come to stand beside him.
‘Stop it,’ he said, more seriously. ‘She’s none of those things and you don’t even know her.’
‘And you think you do?’ Jackie retorted. ‘You spent two months with her almost seven years ago.’
‘You’re right – we were just children. I don’t even think of those days any more.’
It was the truth. In the past seven years, though she had passed through his mind occasionally when he came across something to remind him of that perpetual summer, he hadn’t been consumed by her memory. But after having seen that photo, being jolted by the reminder that she did in fact exist and had grown to be so exactly how he had pictured, she clung to him and he couldn’t shake her.
‘What do you want, Jackie?’ he said, changing the subject.
‘I need some doh. There’s a concert at Carnivore and all my friends are going but I’m broke.’
‘Shouldn’t you be studying for exams?’
‘Please, Mike.’
He slipped off the stool and went back to the bus, tested the pink paint. ‘What about your mother?’
‘She’s been gone since Tuesday. It’s the usual story. The guy is back in her life and, as always, she takes off running like no one else matters.’
‘I’m sorry, Jackie,’ he said, glad he had decided to stay in Nairobi despite his mother moving to Eldoret in the last year of his high school.
‘Your grandmother’s cousin, Mama Itanya, says she cannot look after the house any longer,’ Angela had told him. ‘She needs someone to come and work the shamba with her.’ They had shared a look of understanding. ‘I’m tired of this place and I want to leave.’ Being dismissed from the Kohlis house had hurt Angela more than she cared to share. ‘I’m tired of working every day of the week and I want something that’s my own.’
‘I got accepted into Nairobi University and I want to go.’
Angela had been overjoyed. ‘Eldoret isn’t that far,’ she assured him. ‘We can visit each other all the time. And someone needs to look after Jackie.’
With his cousin watching him eagerly, Michael pulled out five hundred shillings. It was difficult to part with the money, because paying school fees, and for food and more than his share of rent, was proving almost impossible. But she looked so eager that he couldn’t refuse her.
‘Thank you, thank you!’ She pushed the notes quickly into the back pocket of her glued-on jeans and then turned back to the matatu, which he had begun working on once more. ‘What are you supposed to be designing?’
‘A new American girl-group called Destiny’s Child.’ He brought out the spray-paint gun. ‘The driver said they’re all true African women and I have to portray them as such, which to him means their boobs hanging tastefully out with asses the size of a politician’s holiday house.’
Jackie giggled. ‘All the men will be fighting to ride in it.’ She climbed into the bus, even though he kept asking her not to. ‘It’s even got disco lights and a TV!’
Recently, due to a boom in the matatu industry, many of the nine-seater vans that had been used in the tourism sector were being bought by investors and converted into PSVs. The owners then hired artists to do the designing; these requests were often cultural or political, carrying some social satire, and it was the chance to take part in these traveling stories that had drawn Michael to his current job. He had not signed up to design the exaggerated curves on singers and movie stars and it annoyed him today more than ever.
Jackie was about to leave but detecting a mild sorrow in his face, she stopped. ‘What’s the matter, cuzo?’
Seeing Leena’s face so unexpectedly had affected him more than he would have liked. He felt the memory of her pulsing in his gut, filling him with a desperate need to see her again. ‘I feel like I should be doing something – not this. Something important.’
Jackie put her arm around his waist, leaning her head against his shoulder. ‘This is only temporary, Mike. Just to get you through school.’
‘But Jai and I, we had all these plans.’ His voice tapered.
‘All your life, you’ve been living in that boy’s shadow,’ Jackie said.
‘That’s not his fault.’
‘I never said it was.’ She suddenly seemed very wise and he grinned ruefully at her. ‘You don’t have to wait for him, you know,’ she said. ‘He’s your friend but you can’t put everything on hold while he’s doing what he wants. You also matter.’
‘I don’t know where to start.’
Jackie gestured to the bus. ‘You have great talent, cuzo. Where else to begin but there?’
34
Steven was a mini celebrity on campus. He couldn’t walk ten minutes without being stopped for a high-five, a small chat from someone asking his advice or just an awe-struck student, claiming to have seen him on the KTN nine o’clock news.
‘You’re my inspiration,’ they would tell him gravely.
‘My woman is in love with you, jama! Tell me your tricks, Stevie.’
‘How does one go about joining the protests? It looks like fun,’ said a girl twisting her dreads around her finger.
‘It’s not supposed to be fun,’ Steven would reply, as serious as ever. ‘Our future is not a game.’
And she had apologized profusely, more infatuated with him than before.
‘Don’t you get tired of it? These people never leave you alone,’ Jai asked him once.
‘I’m their leader. They voted for me, put their trust in me.’ Steven said it in that deceivingly patient way he had – one always felt slightly disparaged afterward. ‘They look up to me, have granted me the humble responsibility of giving them answers. Wouldn’t it be insulting if I were to say that I was tired of them?’ It was posed as a question but the tilt of Steven’s head was arrogant.
‘Steven!’ Ivy was moving quickly toward them, clutching the straps of her backpack, her glasses having fallen half-way down her nose.
‘What is it?’ Steven didn’t hide his annoyance at having been interrupted.
Despite threatening to leave the union in the last meeting, Ivy had stayed on, though Steven had grown deaf to her hopeful quips and suggestions, sometimes even taking an idea she had put forward and presenting it as his own. Without waiting for a reply he turned to Jai and said, with clicking, urgent fingers, ‘Grab a marker and get this poster done. The background can be a picture of Anthony…’
‘Anthony has returned to campus,’ Ivy told them. ‘He wants to meet with you.’
‘When?’ he asked, his voice sharp with sudden attentiveness.
‘This morning.’
‘And you waited until afternoon to tell me?’
‘Just tell me where he is.’
‘In his dorm room. You remember the number—’
Steven waved her away. ‘Let’s go and meet him,’ he said to Jai.
‘I have a class right now. Perhaps you should take Ivy with you.’
A rigid silence. ‘If you aren’t serious about this, I’ll find someone else to help me.’
A discomfort settling in his stomach, Jai said, ‘I suppose I can miss one class.’
As they left, Jai heard the whisper, sharp and malicious, directed at Ivy. ‘Get your act together, woman. You’re becoming useless.’
To a person meeting him for the first time, Anthony wrongfully evoked an overwhelming sense of pity. Hard boned and slightly tremulous, he had a too-thin face crowded by gigantic features – the kind one found on a helpless animal. A swollen eye and freshly bruised upper lip were souvenirs from his recent stay in jail, and he had pupils so large that when Jai looked into them he was met with a liquescent, almost hypnotic darkness.
Anthony was sitting on the floor as they entered the room, leaning against the back of his single bed, in the process of lighting a joint. He looked up with a sibilant puff as the two boys squinted through the muddy cloud. ‘Close the door behind you.’
The room was small and overcrowded. The only space not littered with clothes, books and cans of food was the desk facing the wall. It remained empty and pristine, as if it had just recently been polished.
Unlike most of the people Jai had recently met, Anthony did not rise to quickly shake their hands, did not release a string of silly flatteries expressing his gratitude at Steven’s visit. Instead, he shut his eyes and disappeared into his own pleasure.
Jai sat at the desk while Steven remained standing. He appeared so different then, the usual rigidity of his stance collapsing, eyes darting and a mouth that moved in frozen, silent words as if it wasn’t just a place to sit that he was searching for. He seemed paralyzed in the middle of the room until Anthony opened his eyes and said, ‘There’s a space on the bed over there,’ and, finally released, Steven sank down gratefully.