The In-Between World of Vikram Lall

by M G Vassanji

  Hé Rabba! Mother would exclaim, holding us close to her. Don’t shoot into someone’s house!

  I won’t, I’m aiming to the side. I have to check it, na…

  Don’t shoot at anybody!

  As if I would. And who would be out at this time? I’m aiming high, anyway.

  We would hear a loud report that went tearing into the silence of the night, and then another one, even as the first one still echoed somewhere far away. He would come in, blowing the smoke off the gun, catching our frightened eyes and looking a little sheepish. The gun has to be checked, you see, he would explain, placing it on the table, on the yellow pamphlet. With the weapon now inert in front of us, Deepa and I taking sneaky, quick reaches to feel its grey metallic heft, Mother brought glasses of milk for us all.

  We all knew the pamphlet well, another government warning. This one had a drawing of a devilish black man with large eyes and open mouth, leaping out of the yellow page, under the caption: The Mau Mau want your gun! There were instructions on safeguarding the weapon. Do not leave it in the car when you step out for shopping, one of them said. Papa always kept it locked in the drawer of his bedside table and took it out, it seemed, only for this practice ritual.

  Muzee, why do the Mau Mau kill little children? I once asked Mwangi.

  I don’t know why I asked him this. Perhaps because he had a gravity about him, and an honesty, and he was an African and a Kikuyu.

  They are evil and mad, those who kill children, he told me firmly.

  I have never understood the full implication of those words. Mwangi often confounded me.

  There is a nip in the night air outside, a reminder that autumn waits around the corner. If you look hard during the day, you might even spot a telltale traitor yellow leaf among the green foliage. The night is moonless, thickly dark, rendered more so by the shadows of the trees and hedges; the stars above, though, look cheerful as diamonds, if I permit myself a nursery-rhyme image. The luminous hour-marks of my watch shine no less brightly. It is close to eleven. I step back inside this lakeside house, a hallmark of lonely luxury—and so extremely desolate compared with the bustling, peopled household of my childhood—to await Deepa’s phone call. In the sunken living room, Joseph watches television, with a bag of chips and a can of soda. Before he arrived I wisely had a satellite dish installed. He likes to watch soccer—football, we used to call it—and a Kenyan player recently drafted into one of the English teams thrills him no end. Perhaps here, in the first world, he can be corrupted away from his brash and dangerous idealism, I tell myself—but then hard on the heels of that thought comes the quick and cynical reminder: corruption has been my recent forte, hasn’t it.

  The hour turns and the phone rings. Joseph looks up as I pick it up at the kitchen table. Deepa wants to know how the two of us are getting along here, in our Canadian retreat. We are doing fine, I reply, and how is she? Her son Shyam, she tells me, might shift to Washington, DC—he is a resident epidemiologist in Rochester—and she will then have to decide what to do. Her worry, though, is Joseph.

  Vikram?

  Yes.

  Look after him, please, Bhaiya.

  He’s all right. Don’t worry.

  Keep talking to him. Make him understand that his education is the only important thing, it is not to be sacrificed for anything silly like politics—

  I’ll try, Deepa. I can only tell him what he allows me to say to him.

  Vikram?

  Yes.

  He’s like my son.

  I know that. I’ll do the best I can.

  Rakhi day is coming, Bhaiya, I’ll send you something.

  I’ll look forward to it, Sister.

  FIVE.

  There are wonderful moments sometimes—a splash of colour, the sweet taste of icy kulfi on a Sunday afternoon, the feel of hot steam on the face and arms from a gasping locomotive—that stand out purely in themselves, sparkles of childhood memory scattered loosely in the consciousness. They need not tell a story, yet moments lead from one to another in this tapestry that is one’s life; and so we feel bound, unhappy adults, to look past and around those glimmer points in our desperate search for nuance and completeness, for coherence and meaning.

  Be that as it may, the following is one delightful moment that often twinkles before my mind’s eye.

  One afternoon after school I was sitting at the dining table, hunched over homework, when suddenly a commotion erupted outside. There was the sound of drumming and chanting and servants running in the alleyways, heading toward the front. I raced to the sitting room; the door was wide open and I ran through it, and came upon a most amazing spectacle in progress.

  About twenty Masai youths were performing a traditional war dance outside the Molabux residence, three doors down from ours. A crowd had rapidly gathered on both sides of our street, to watch and marvel and comment—such happy idleness never before having been witnessed by me in our area. The dancers—tall and supple, the skin dark brown, the long hair plaited, combed back, and dyed red, multicoloured beads at the neck, the wrists, the arms, the pierced earlobes stuffed with more decoration, the red wool shawls only partially covering the torsos and waists—were arrayed in a line. They swayed to and fro and thumped the ground with their feet, to the rhythm of song and drum. Every now and then, suddenly and all together, they sprung high into the air, their bodies erect, their spears glinting, their teeth flashing in friendly smiles. Splashes of red and dark brown and white leapt up at the blue sky out of the dust. A small gang of Masai women of assorted ages provided the treble accompaniment from under a tree in what seemed a rather dispassionate manner compared with the vigorous and joyful displays of their men.

  All this while Sakina Molabux, the dark, wizened matriarch of her house, stood motionless at her doorway, watching the performance intently, as if it were for her benefit. As indeed it was. Her husband Juma Molabux stood quietly beside her.

  After a while, some of the Kikuyu and the Luo among the spectators joined in, with their own dances but not as expertly, and the performance soon wound down. There followed a solemn shaking of hands by the towering Masai with whoever stepped forward. They did this in three stages, first the normal clasping of hands, then a rotation of the hands so the two thumbs met and embraced, and then a twist back to the hand clasp before release. Two police Land Rovers had appeared on the street but were not intrusive. From somewhere, two men on stilts came tottering up, with white-painted faces and ostrich feathers around their heads. Coca-Cola was served to the performers, brought out from the back of the Molabux house in two crates.

  It turned out that the Masai were in town to rehearse for festivities being organized by the government. Coronation Day was almost upon us, and Empire Day would soon follow.

  But that afternoon as I watched these tall red-clothed men in amazement and clapped my hands to cheer them and mingled with the crowd to do the weird handshake and drew in their strange odour just for the heck of it, I was still too young to understand the full import of their performance outside our house. Since then I have wondered about it, about Sakina-dadi standing at her doorway taking it in. She was a full Masai whose wedding to Juma Molabux my own dadaji had gone to witness. In what manner would the drumbeat, the dance, have brought back her youth? Did she ever yearn for the simplicity and open life of the grasslands? Or, like the wife she was expected to be, had she easily given up thinking of that past, relishing her privileged urban status and her wealth? Did she ever stop worshipping the God Ngai of her childhood, did the spirits of the trees and the forests and the grasslands haunt her? The sour note of that moment came when Saeed Molabux angrily stormed past his mother and father and drove off noisily in his car. He obviously didn’t think much of his Masai heritage. I would learn that Saeed had an elder brother who had disappeared, had in fact gone back to his maternal origins to become a Masai moran, and had that afternoon, following rehearsal at the football ground, brought his friends to perform for his mother.

  As the Ma
sai dispersed, walking in the middle of the street in bunches, one of them, a somewhat middle-aged man clutching his bottle of Coca-Cola in one hand and his staff in the other, came toward our house. He wore sandals and had a very slight, almost a shade, of a beard on his chin, and he had a wry little smile on his face. He stood a few feet outside our door and a worried-looking Mother came out. The man bowed to her and asked after her family; she replied politely and anxiously. The man asked after my grandfather Anand Lal, to whom he sent good wishes, and then he strolled off, still with that wry and perhaps even thoughtful smile on his face. My parents, and my grandfather when he came the next time, could make nothing of this incident. But it has often made me wonder about Dadaji.

  We used to laugh at the Masai as kids. We thought of them as dark exotic savages left behind in the Stone Age, with their spears and gourds and half-naked bodies; when one saw them on a street they were to be avoided, for they smelled so. Yet we were also in awe of them, we did not make open fun of them, for they were warriors, they hunted lions with those spears, didn’t they. There was a belief among Indian traders that the Masai could not count; yes, they couldn’t, some of them, not in Swahili, which was alien, and not in the foreign units of feet and inches, years and months, shillings and cents. And it was not only the Indians who disparaged the Masai. Country bus drivers were known not to stop for them, or when they did, to move all the other passengers up front so these red warriors with their odour could sit at the back by themselves.

  Because of my dada and dadi’s close connection to the Molabuxes, I have often seen an affinity between myself and the Masai. I have even fantasized that Dada perhaps sought comfort with a woman of that people, perhaps she had his child and I have cousins in some of the manyattas of the plains. There is no proof anything like this ever happened—and my fantasy has partly to do with desperate need to belong to the land I was born in—but it’s not impossible either. The Indian railway workers were not known for their abstinence; reports of their British overseers, quoted in histories of the railway, attest amply to that. Perhaps that man who came over and spoke to my mother was a connection to the past; he has never been explained. But my grandfather among his family was the picture of calm reserve and propriety, with no hint whatever that he had once been young and without care; the only time I saw that reserve crack was in the presence of his old friend Juma Molabux, when the two went on their walks together. In fact, it did not simply crack then, it burst apart like the shell of an overripe nut to reveal a softer, more nuanced inside.

  On Sunday at noon, when Dada and Dadi arrived for the weekly family get-together, a servant would sometimes come from the Molabuxes with a message for Dada, Would the muzee like to go for a walk later with the other muzee, Juma? Dada usually said yes, and so after the siesta, at about four, the two men met by the road. Dadaji liked to take me along, and I was encouraged to go, it being implicit that this was just in case something untoward happened and a fleet-footed messenger were needed. We were sent off from the house with much fanfare. The sight of two old cronies more than seventy years old going out for a walk together, with a grandson to accompany them, was enough to warm the hearts of all. Even the servants would smile and well-wish, with admiring comments like, He who takes the road truly finds the elephant’s tusk, meaning that these two muzees had come from afar and had finally acquired large families and well-being as their just rewards. I cannot imagine them, always unassuming, dressed simply in white drill pants and plain jackets, ever being the target of attacks. They were both compact in build, Juma-dada somewhat stouter and rounder in the face. I would walk beside them patiently, dutifully, and when not called away by some boyish diversion like climbing upon a rock or throwing a stone at a lizard or vainly chasing a passing car, I watched and listened, enthralled. I did not know of any relationship like these two old men’s, their utter familiarity with each other, their constant chatter followed by a long silence except for the sound of their short breaths and the taps of their walking sticks, and then the sudden effortless resumption of their conversation, as if an engine had simply been allowed to idle awhile and was now back in gear. Their arms would occasionally brush against each other, as they spoke of Chhotu and Motu and Ungan and Ghalib (who had regaled them with poetry around a fire on many a night) and of Buleh Shah (who had the voice of a nightingale), and of such-and-such who had settled in Eldoret, and another who had recently lost his wife in Eastleigh, and so on. I remember Juma-dada chortling one time, and—to my shock—my grandfather breaking into a brief giggle, and then after a short exchange Juma-dada, with a look toward me, saying, But he’s too small.

  During another of these walks the two men suddenly stopped in their tracks and extended their arms toward each other, as if enacting the beginning of an Indian wrestling match or a fight. Then pointing out my anxious face to each other, they laughed and walked on.

  My grandfather as I had known him at home was simply Dadaji, father of my father, a kindly old man with close-cropped white hair who had been born in faraway India in a faraway time, who had a certain past from which he pulled out partly recalled and perhaps exaggerated stories on Sundays when the mood struck him, the dada who after giving the children candies took a nap in the armchair in our sitting room. His mouth would hang partly open, he snored. But on these strolls with Juma-dada another person came out from inside him like a genie. I wished I could understand all that they said. But they spoke in a fluid Punjabi too quick for my ears, and the words and phrases I grasped were often alien to me.

  A short walk away, our street met the perpendicular road, which led first to the shopping centre and then to the Nairobi highway, where it met the railway station. The yellow building of the station, visible in the distance, beckoned like a magnet and every few times the old men succumbed and turned toward it, heedless of the reminders from their families not to go that far, it was quiet that way and not entirely safe on a Sunday. Having decided to walk to the end, they picked up a discernible spring in their step, a purposiveness to their manner; the talk became less, the breathing heavier though steady. We would walk past the car park and up the station steps and through the gate to the platform, check the time by the station clock—presumed unimpeachable—walk up and down, examine the arrivals and departures notices on the blackboard, cross the pedestrian overpass to the other side. The all-important Nairobi–Kisumu and Nairobi–Kampala trains always stopped at Nakuru late at night, and not many people were around on a late Sunday afternoon.

  One day the two men, over an argument about the laying of a rail, stepped down from the platform onto the tracks to take a closer look. First, Grandfather clambered down the ladder, which the two of them had dragged over from somewhere, then Juma-dada followed. They stood down there on the rails discussing the quality of the metal sleepers compared with the wooden ones used elsewhere, and if the fish bolts and plates were the original ones they had fastened, when from the Railway Restaurant (Europeans-only), a man came and angrily bawled us out. What are you doing here? Jao, jao, kambakht! Who gave you permission to come inside? Imbeciles! They climbed back up, apologizing profusely—Sorry huzoor—which made the red-faced man even madder, and I thought he would strike one of them. The station master hurried up and also started apologizing profusely to the white man, then added, These two gentlemen, you see, sir, were coolies who worked on the construction of the railway.

  The white man, I think, seemed to shrink back. He gave a nod and briskly walked away. Grandfather and his chum looked embarrassed, like normally decent schoolboys who had been caught out of bounds and scolded by the headmaster. They had been severely humiliated, and I was close to tears that someone would talk to my dada that way. The station master went inside the restaurant and brought the old guys a bottle of soda each, which they sipped appreciatively through the straws, and an ice cream for me. The return walk was mostly silent. I did not tell a soul about the incident. But the station still beckoned, now and then, tugging at the men’s hearts. That station
master, when he was on duty, always felt obliged to bring something for us from the restaurant. His name was Sidhoo. Not surprisingly, he was well known to my grandfather as the son of a former railway coolie.

  But when a train happened to be in the station, having been delayed for some reason, the three of us would hasten to greet it with boundless joy. I would run ahead, the two curmudgeons following on their delicate legs. I would prowl up and down the platform examining the rolling stock, the mysterious numbers inscribed on them telling a story I could never guess, the EAR insignia on the crimson-coated locomotive. There would be lots of people about, including curious-looking passengers who had no relations in town, and vendors of all sorts. Grandfather and Juma-dada would stroke the locomotive as though it were a pet elephant, and chat up the engineer, usually a Sardarji with bright turban and fierce moustache. He would look down like a monarch from high above the awesome wheels that were bigger than any man, leaning out to watch up and down the length of his immense conveyance. There would be the shouts of workers and the clanking of hammers and spanners, grunts and huffs as the locomotive released great clouds of steam that enveloped its admirers. In the cabin with the engineer would be the fireman stoking the fire through its open grate, his face and bare back streaming with sweat, glowing from the heat.