by Iman Verjee
For days after the incident, the world took on a watery shapelessness. Emptiness blocked her mind – black shadows and the dirt-stench of wet tobacco, the cherub cheeks of her Winnie-the-Pooh teddy bear. After she was released from the hospital, she had to throw the toy away because she couldn’t look at it without being sick, haunted by the dead-bead eyes that held an infinite reflection of that moment. It had angered her that she couldn’t keep something that had once meant so much to her, that she had been forced out of her room and into Jai’s. Every morning she awoke to find that her body had receded a little further from her, her eyes growing so heavy with shame that she could no longer look at people when they addressed her.
Men scared her. She hated the women, especially when they said, ‘It’s not your fault. It’s them – those dirty, dirty kharias,’ because they didn’t understand that shifting the blame didn’t change the fact that it had happened, only made it more real. She was broken and damaged now and not in the mysterious, romantic kind of way, but rather in the way that made people uncomfortable and nervous. Pooja’s words were all that filled her head in those next few months. Who was going to marry her now?
She insisted that they keep the lights on permanently in the garden and she watched out of the window, tracking every sound and shape.
‘You need to get away from there now,’ her father would say.
‘Leena, eat something. You must stay strong.’ The pinched voice of her mother.
‘You’re safe with us. Nothing is going to hurt you any more.’ Her brother’s protective reassurings.
Their words made her feel like a stranger. For how could they possibly begin to understand what had happened to her and where could she start to explain it? After the rape, conversations became merry-go-rounds.
‘You know, it’s normal to feel that way after what happened.’
‘You should rest. You’ve been through something terrible.’
‘He’s a horrible man and he shouldn’t have done that to you.’
‘Done what, Ma?’ It was a week after the incident when her frustrations finally broke through, over flakes of dried toast crusted with strawberry jam.
Pooja had stopped talking, her hands clutching desperately at her chuni.
Leena’s voice was loud and unwavering as she repeated, ‘What did he do, Ma?’
Her mother had shifted in her chair, tapping, smoothing, fussing with the tablecloth. ‘Come on, eat something.’
‘Not until you say it.’
‘I know you’re angry, sweetheart.’
‘Just say it.’ Leena gripped the edge of the island, furiously batting away her trepidation.
‘He hurt you—’
‘He raped me.’
Tears sprung to Pooja’s eyes and Leena scraped back her stool, appalled that she had been waiting for that exact reaction.
‘That’s what happened so let’s not hide from it.’ Leena had thrown down her fork and fled to the bathroom, where she had kneeled over the toilet just in time.
She heard the three of them talking in the living room one evening, thinking she was asleep.
‘Of course Betty was involved in this,’ Pooja was saying. ‘You give and give to these people and they just take advantage whenever they can.’
‘You don’t know for sure that she was, Ma,’ Jai had interrupted.
‘Who else could have let those men in? Led them straight to my jewelry?’ Her voice had cracked. ‘To my daughter?’
Raj’s always-steady voice. ‘It’ll be okay. She can take the next year off university and we will get her the help she needs.’
Though Leena came into the room quietly, they all heard her and turned with their cheeks aflame from having been caught planning her life without her. ‘Classes start in two weeks and I want to go back.’
‘I don’t think that’s a good idea,’ her brother interjected.
She was more adamant than they had ever seen her. ‘It’s what I need to get better. Don’t you want that for me?’
‘Of course we do,’ whispered Pooja, distraught.
‘Then let me go. I can’t stay here any more.’ She looked out into the fast-approaching night, thought of all the things it concealed within its inky shade and said, with contempt in her voice, ‘It’s the ugliest place in the world.’
46
In the small border town of Busia, two women and one suitcase hitched a ride with a driver of one of the cylindrical oil tankers waiting on the busy highway to cross into Uganda. It had two-and-a-half seats upfront and Betty was pressed between her cousin and a man who smelled of drying paint and grease. Packed in so tightly, the artificial dust of the air conditioning smearing her face, she felt especially suffocated after the five-hour-long bus ride from Nairobi – during which she had spent the majority of her time hiding her sorrow from Esther.
With a splitting heart, Betty had watched as the city she loved fell away behind her, its large houses, tall buildings and purposeful people folding into dirt-red roads scattered through with cheap motels, kiosks and barefoot children playing. Past the lush green coffee-growing town of Meru, which sat up in the northern slopes of Mount Kenya, and winding through the narrow lanes up toward the Great Rift Valley. They had stopped at the viewpoint there and were given a five-minute break to stretch their legs.
While Esther had gone straight to one of the curio shops to talk to the selling women, in the hope of receiving a hot cup of tea and something to eat, Betty had stayed at the observation point, her hands upon the flimsy, zebra-patterned barrier, watching out. It was a gray morning and the fickle weather had hidden the low hills of Mount Longonot but still allowed her an impressive view of the valley below. Looking upon the dipping crater, she had felt so insignificant in the midst of so much history and had quickly retreated, wondering what she was doing so far away from home.
Once back on the bus, she had consoled herself by admitting that she would have never been able to live with Jeffery, after all that he had done, but that didn’t mean she didn’t feel a sickening plunge every time she thought of him coming home to their note on the kitchen table – so cruelly evasive. Esther had insisted on being the one to write it, a manic grin upon her face, the bumpy pink tip of her tongue peering out between her lips, saying, ‘You cannot imagine how long I have been waiting for this very day, cousin.’
Betty had agreed to Esther’s plan because after the incident at the Kohlis’ house, Nairobi had changed overnight. It became dirty to her, and her mistakes followed her around like spiteful ghosts, haunting everything she did. She knew that if she wanted to be happy again, she would have to leave its busyness – its chaos and wonder – behind.
‘Can I climb the ladder and sit on top of this tank?’ Esther asked the driver and her voice, childishly silly, broke through Betty’s thoughts.
‘Are you crazy, Mama?’ the man shook his head. ‘You’ll fall right off.’
Esther patted the torn seat, stuck her finger into a hole where sponge stuffing was springing out. Greenish-gray flecks littered her skirt as she picked at it. ‘This will have to do, then.’
Just before they crossed over the border, Betty allowed herself to think of Jeffery one last time, to wonder what he was doing. She felt an expanding sense of loss in leaving him behind because she knew that in another life, which wasn’t his, things between them would have been different. She wondered if he would search for her and it gave her a small pleasure to think that perhaps he might, if only for a little while. As if she could read her cousin’s mind, Esther rolled down the window.
‘Wave goodbye to Kenya, Betty. Soon we will cross that border and he won’t be able to hurt us any longer.’
The truck jerked forward, the strong vibrations of its engines rising up and spreading through the bottom of her seat and although she was tempted to look back, she couldn’t bear to. She tried to reassure herself that, soon, it would be over. That in a few minutes she would be in a new country and beginning a fresh life an
d everything that she loved, had been comforted and injured by, would become nothing but fading beauties, half-formed images that she would eventually have trouble knowing. In a little while, she comforted herself, it would be like none of it had ever existed at all.
He had come home to a dark and cool house, the promise of rain lingering, and failed to see the note waiting for him on the kitchen table. He called out for them, listening within the creaking house for their sounds.
‘Betty? Esther?’ He had gone quickly up the stairs and pushed open the bedroom door – ‘Where is everyone?’ – before coming to a startled, dismayed halt.
The cupboard doors swung aggressively in the wind coming through a forgotten window and he rushed to it, catching it between movements. All of Esther’s belongings – her bible, the old pictures she kept of David, the tub of Vaseline she used every evening on her skin – were gone.
In a confused tumble of thoughts, Jeffery tried to recall if Betty had any other family or friends she might have gone to; he struggled to remember where exactly upcountry her home was, but he had largely ignored her in those early days and so his mind stayed blank, stiff with dread.
He tore away the remainders of the room, left them scattered over the floor as he tripped downstairs once more and came to a stumbling stop right at the chair, blinking down at the open-faced piece of paper.
Jeffery,
We’ve climbed the ladder and you will never find us.
He squinted down at the writing, the incoherent ramblings of a mad woman – Esther, no doubt. What ladder? His first, clenching thought was that they had jumped out of the window and that the ladder was an implication that they had climbed up into heaven. He dashed to the window and, panting, leaned out. Spotless tarmac pavement. He was almost disappointed.
What ladder? He slumped down on a chair, whiskey and glass in hand, automatically pouring out a neat, amber shot. Time had once again turned on him. One minute, he had had three women and in the next, he was alone with a tricky note and empty cupboards. You will never find us. What ladder? You will never find us. He threw the sentences around in his mind but they only became more jumbled, more idiotic, and he knew that had been the point of writing it that way. Esther may have gone but she still wanted him to suffer.
He crumpled the letter and pushed it into his glass, which was still a quarter full of whiskey. The alcohol flooded the paper, its stiffness slowly collapsing until their secret taunts were nothing but smoky ribbons of ink, escaping the note and staining his drink black.
Part Five
2007
47
It’s too late in the year for jacarandas but they line the highways and small side streets in full bloom anyway, their fallen flowers creating a glossy, periwinkle carpet. The five-lobe petals make quiet pop-popping sounds as tires speed over them, bursting apart and releasing their honey stickiness into the air. It seems ill-mannered to Michael that such brightness should exist while the country is falling apart at its seams, a violet taunt of all the things they could have had and all the things they chose instead.
Earlier that week, a woman and her two-year-old daughter were found dead in Tana River county beside a watering hole. In that baking corner of Kenya, they had been hacked to death with a panga and Michael thinks of the pictures he had been sent there to take to accompany a newspaper article. He had captured the shot from the waist down – his own effort to give her one last dignity. She had been holding her daughter’s hand, a small girl with unusually clean feet because she was being carried when they were struck.
At first, the killings hardly garnered any attention. Ethnic violence was rife in that former coast province where conflict over water and farmland was high. But then, a few weeks later, eleven more people were dead, an inkling of a more serious, wider issue.
Such is the method of crude politics, the article that went with the picture had read. Ensure that your tribe is in the majority – so that in Tana River Delta, this violent competition to ensure that their main man gets governorship looks an awful lot like ethnic cleansing.
It is death more than anything that reminds him of his own weakness when it comes to Leena. Perhaps it is the intensity of emotion it brings with it or the jarring reminder that one day, his chances with her will run out.
‘You need to leave it alone now, cuzo,’ Jackie had said after catching him with the painting. She had pushed it back behind the many others, ensuring that it was wrapped tightly away, and led him from it. ‘There are some things we have to move on from otherwise we will waste away from wanting them so badly.’
Nairobi is a sly town. It is so small that run-ins with people one is trying to avoid are a common occurrence, yet it is segmented enough to keep two searching individuals apart. It has been almost three weeks since Michael last saw Leena at the police station and he is restless and irritable, though unsurprised.
The city was designed to keep people apart, European from African, African from Asian, Asian from European. Each group had been assigned their selective pockets and even though, after independence, those boundaries had grown more precarious, that feeling of division had been hard, if not impossible, to shake.
So when they stumble across each other at a bar one Saturday night, it is confusing for both of them. He isn’t sure which one of them is in the wrong place and she knows his face but is having some difficulty recalling where she last saw it.
‘You’re here,’ is all he manages to say.
‘I am.’ She has been drinking and he is handsome in a comforting way, so she smiles and leans against the cushioned wall outside the bar. When he looks beyond her into the low intensity, blue-lit space, he sees a group of people watching them. They are perched on cream chairs and whisper to each other without taking their eyes off him. Michael realizes that he is the one who is out of place.
‘Your friends are worrying about you.’
She follows his gaze, satisfied with herself. ‘Let them.’
They laugh softly together until the shared pleasure is used up. She is exactly how he remembers yet not the same at all. The round face and amber eyes, the misplaced dimple that is like a dent in her cheekbone, the wide stretch of smile with its narrow fleet of teeth. Her hair is long once more, falling in a steady wave over a single shoulder. Seeing Leena in the flesh makes him grow tired of the image he heaves around – he wants to know her this way, this real way, and understands that once he leaves this place, the memories he has of her will no longer be enough.
‘That’s where I know you from.’ She snaps her painted nails and takes a sip of her drink. When she speaks again, her words are fueled by vodka. He thrills in it, for how grown up she has become. ‘It was at the police station.’
His mouth runs dry and he looks around for a waitress. As he does so, she leans in, so small that she is forced to stand on her tiptoes.
She winks and he realizes that she is teasing him. ‘You’re the one who did all the art.’
‘Don’t say it too loudly – you never know who is listening.’
‘I’ve been thinking about you.’ It spills from her mouth after another sip of her drink.
The words take him aback, warm him with pleasure though he should have expected it – she has always been so bold. It infuses him with the same confidence.
‘Actually, we met before the police station.’
Parallel lines of confusion appear around her mouth. ‘But I’ve just got back from London.’
Placing her drained glass on an empty table, she shoots her eyes uncertainly back toward her friends, who are gesturing her over. He catches her wrist lightly, a throb of blood beneath his thumb. ‘It’s me – Michael.’
He watches with some amusement the stages her expression passes through. A pulse of familiarity, doubt, remembering, and then she laughs – a girlish, short tinkle. ‘It really is you.’
It is difficult to decipher what she is thinking; her eyes are charcoal, darkened by the
poor lighting. He cannot tell if she is glad to see him or just enjoying the unexpected resurfacing of her past.
‘How come you never told me who you were at the police station?’
He grins wryly. ‘Being in the position I was in, can you blame me?’
She wants to hug him, feels an insistent, rope-like tug drawing her forward. ‘It’s not at all like the boy I remember to get into such trouble.’
Michael straightens out his ribbed sweater, more gray now than black, and is suddenly overly conscious. ‘It’s been a very long time since then.’
Agreeing with him, she asks about his mother. ‘She took such good care of us when we were younger.’
‘She lives in Eldoret now,’ he tells her. ‘We have a house there.’
‘What about you?’ The old habit in her hands has stirred and they move animatedly along with her words. He is glad to see that there are some parts of her that have remained unchanged.
‘I’m a photographer.’
The impressed glint in her eye churns his stomach with pleasure. But then he asks about her and her answers are vague and her body stiffens, shrinks away. She has picked up her empty glass and is playing with it idly. Her lack of willing responses means that they run out of conversation quickly and she looks back at her group – they are calling out for her once more.
‘I should go,’ she finally tells him.
Cursing his weakness, Michael says, ‘It was wonderful to see you.’
She is watching him with that old, keen expression. Her mouth puckers slightly as it always used to when she was concentrating hard on a problem. ‘Maybe I can give you my phone number?’
He smiles.
She had always been the braver one.
The early part of the next week passes in a mild, thrumming panic. Somehow, the bar napkin she scrawled her number on keeps finding its way back to his unfolding fingers until he has it memorized – is even able to pick out an individual digit and know where in the order it belongs.