by M G Vassanji
We crossed the river at a shallows, stepping on a path of large smooth and slippery rocks, and began a long climb up the other side. The constable, my guide, was tall and bony, with an oscillating, camel-like gait; intermittently he would look back at me and smile. He had the proud but kindly look that came from knowing he was assisting someone in dire need. We were on a sparse, desperate terrain, an unfriendly no man’s land connecting two parts of our city, a poor Indian and a poor African quarter. It was strewn with sticks and whorls and pellets and splatters of human turd, and dark bottles of beer and home brew, and carpets of yellow and white cigarette stubs; pages of newspapers flew about, yesterday’s news idly skimming the ground; we passed by stenches of urine and alcohol-spiked vomit, a mountain of rotting rubbish attacked by dogs, and at the end of our path, a heap of condoms like dead white worms in a patch of dead grass. And finally the grey street bordering the valley we had crossed.
We walked awhile then turned into one of a bunch of smaller streets. It contained dilapidated settlements along its length, interspersed with makeshift beauty salons and hotels. On one such street, beside a carpentry shop exhibiting garish red-varnished furniture up to the edge of the road, we came to Our Kimathi Hotel, Bar and Dancing Club, the name painted on a board above the door and also, more prominently, on the wall beside it. All three of us went in. The lobby was so dark that, walking in from outside, suddenly and for a few moments I was totally blinded. Gradually a young man with parted hair and wearing a jacket became visible behind the counter. A few women sat around, one walked out stylishly in high heels, wearing a cloud of perfume. I could well imagine what the dancing at this club was in aid of.
Do you have an Indian girl staying here, I asked with a beating heart, uncertain whether to hope for a yes or a no.
Bhaiya…, she called out softly behind me.
She was at a table in the far end of the room with a bottle of Fanta, looking small and sad and lost.
She came forward and I took her in my arms. Sis, what hell you’ve put us through.
She had made friends with a female street vendor outside her school and asked her to recommend a place to stay. The hotel keeper had given her a room in the knowledge that she would eventually bring in a profit. I paid him a handsome three hundred shillings, well deserved because he had not harassed my sister, and we left in a taxi.
I stayed a few days at home after I brought Deepa back from her little exile, so I could be with her during her transition back to normal life. I let Njoroge know she was safe, and I wrote a letter thanking CI Soames for his assistance; I even spoke to him on the phone. But the sister I brought home was not the happy, exuberant girl of before; some vampire had sucked all the joy, the life out of her. All her movements were now carefully subdued, as expected of a woman; no longer would she dash off to the phone or the door or the car, share a joke with a waiter, tell jokes at family gatherings, argue with the men.
When I returned to university in Dar es Salaam, I had missed more than two weeks of classes, and my exams were at hand. But nothing seemed important after what I had recently experienced. Yasmin was deeply shocked by the news I brought with me. It was difficult for her to accept that the spunk (as she had described it to me before, with admiration) and defiance she had seen in Deepa could have been so completely crushed.
I always knew that if either could be convinced to break their romance up, it would be he, she said.
Why do you say that?
I got to know her, didn’t I, she replied, with a wise, knowing nod. Njoroge was much too nice and reasonable—he could be convinced.
Before I left for the holidays, we promised to write regularly to each other. I promised her also that I would invite her to come to Nairobi; she could come with a friend or a cousin, and I would show them around Kenya.
It was summer in England, and Dilip came home, and he and Deepa went out regularly on dates; their engagement was announced on July 4, a day I remember because after the ceremonies the three of us all went to a fete organized by the United States Information Services in Uhuru Park. Dilip knew that she had come to him on the rebound, and from her looks and manner also that she had suffered terrible unhappiness. Always the gentleman, he showed patience and understanding. It was Deepa he wanted, above all the other girls Meena Auntie paraded before him. I never got to know him intimately, I wish I had. I think of him now as a tragic figure, in the way a second best in love always is, gnawed at constantly by that fact. But then, at that time, I didn’t see that in him. We all watched a lot of cricket that holiday, because he had been recruited into the Asian Gymkhana team, and in his ducks he cut a dashing figure, striding to the crease, or fielding in slip, his thick dark hair ruffled by the wind. I once heard Meena Auntie say, at the cricket field: He could have the Nawab of Pataudi’s sister if he wanted!
Njoroge phoned one Sunday at our home and spoke to Deepa. They had a lengthy chat, during which Mother remained on the edge of her seat, her eyes wide with anxiety. We had just finished lunch, and Dilip too was present. Deepa gave a gurgle of laughter once and Mother’s fork fell on her plate; otherwise our table had become quiet. Then Deepa returned from the phone and announced: He’s getting married. She looked happy, that was the wonder of it.
Njoroge’s wedding ceremony took place at All Saints’ Cathedral on a Saturday morning in September. The bride, Mary, was a lovely Kikuyu girl, a student at the university and daughter of Njoroge’s boss, cabinet minister Joseph Kamau. Deepa, Dilip and I went to pick the present which Papa had suggested and bought, a Queen Anne chair from Mutter and Oswald, and the three of us attended the reception on the terrace of the New Stanley, where among the guests, though briefly, was the President of the country, Mzee Kenyatta. As the stocky Old Man, in a black suit and beaded cap and surrounded by a small retinue, made his entrance at the far distance from where we were sitting, Deepa’s eyes briefly met mine, then turned away.
Deepa and Dilip married December of that year and she went to live with him in England.
I was now quite alone in my life. For by this time I too had accepted the inevitable, the unhappy resolution to a relationship that I was unable to consummate.
Earlier in the year, after the holidays, on the first day of term at Dar es Salaam, I set out to look for Yasmin, taking a route we had often walked together. It led out of the women’s dining hall and I expected she and I would have lunch together. I was looking forward to seeing her again. When I saw her, from a distance, she was standing chatting with someone. Her single long braid was flipped forward, in front of her, and in the crook of one arm, characteristically, were a couple of books. She was smiling. Her companion I recognized as a Dar boy from her own community. Her fleeting, guilty glance in my direction as I approached them made me lose a step; slowly I arrived, and with a slight blush she introduced the boy to me. It was more than evident to me that the two had hitched up in the holidays, during which I had written her but one letter.
I was saddened considerably by my loss. I realized then that I had lost a chance as good as I would get for real happiness. But I could hardly regret that outcome or be too surprised by it. Although we had belonged so much together, that spark of love for which I had so long waited had refused to ignite in me. I was unable to make my commitment to her, while she had been under constant pressure from her people to find someone of her own kind. She did well for herself, ultimately, for I was to understand over the years that she was a happily married woman, who ended up, like Aruna Auntie and many others, in Toronto.
I had a nightmare recently. Joseph appeared, a tall and bony caricature of himself, wearing dreadlocks and a bright yellow shirt. Pointing a long accusing finger, he said: You stole the country from us! All of you! Instead of waiting to be enlightened—whom was he speaking to?—I opened my mouth to defend myself. But no words would come out, however hard I tried. It was as if I was caught at the start of an endless stutter. Seema appeared on the scene at this point, a detective-woman with white hair, and
apparently sitting in a rocking chair, in her lap an open book or a piece of knitting. She looked at me with a demented smile and mouthed voicelessly something I couldn’t quite catch.
I woke up in a sweat and angry at myself.
Easter is here, but the long-promised spring is yet to arrive. All looks dead outside, the lake grey, the sky cloudy, the trees barren. I have reached a stage in my recollections when I often wonder, considering my existence here, if there was a certain moment in my life, a single turn I took, which determined that I would end up precisely here, now. I was never much for predestination, you see.
PART 3.
The Years of Betrayal.
TWENTY-ONE.
In a thick cloud of clinging hot steam in the early morning chill of the Kenya Highlands, the 5607 “injun,” as the Sardarji engineer calls his locomotive, pulls off under the watchful eyes of Kijabe station crew and soon arrives at the lip of the Great Rift Valley—the expanse of grassland stretching vastly before us in the mist down below, virgin as God created it, endless and endless until the Red Sea, as Papa would describe it to my childhood wonderment. Beside me stands Dadaji, shaky on his feet, clutching my arm as he too looks down at the valley, which we descend at a slow ten miles per hour, his eyes glazed with grim nostalgia. This is the route he toiled on sixty-five years ago with fellow Punjabi labourers, here he lost the tip of his pinky finger as the rails were laid down one after the other on the muddy slopes during March rains. Down we come, and pick up pace, whistling steaming racing ecstatically on the flatland toward Naivasha—the deep green Aberdares looming to our right, beyond which lie the Kikuyu highlands from where Mwangi had arrived once, and on our left at the foot of solitary, nipple-shaped Mount Longonot stretch the dusty Masai plains where once Dada witnessed his friend Juma Molabux’s wedding with the Masai girl who would become our Sakina-dadi. A weak old man now, Dadaji walks with the aid of a stick, one eye near sightless; he gazes at the plains knowing perhaps that this could be his last look down at them. As he stands lost in thought on the gleaming footplate of the locomotive, the downy white hair on his small head blowing softly in the wind, I am snatched by a true and rare sense of pride and accomplishment; this trip is a treat from me, Vikram Lall, newly hired at the Ministry of Transport, Nairobi; it is my gift for a grandfather who would take me to watch the trains on Sundays, and whose name is supposedly etched in wriggly Punjabi script on one of these rails he helped to lay down.
This is definitely the last voyage out of the 5607 “Sir George,” yet another steam locomotive fated for the ignominous scrap heap, to be replaced by a newfangled diesel engine. And so it is also the last voyage home on the engine footplate of Sardarji Hardev Singh, native of Nakuru. The occasion is momentous, both engine and driver have a long history in the Railways. Sardarji Singh is silent and contemplative, like my Dadaji; his father like him had been an engine driver. The 5607 was brought to Kenya in 1949 from Burma, where a fierce guerrilla war had rendered the “bechari”—Sardarji said—useless and forlorn. It was, famously, an articulated locomotive of the Garratt type, made in Manchester, wheel arrangment 4-8-4+4-8-4 in the jargon, the heaviest most powerful locomotive in East Africa when purchased; the design, with the boiler and cabin suspended on pivots between the fuel bunker and water tank, was one specially adapted for use in the British Empire, to go up and down the winding routes of its colonies, on steep gradients and narrow gauges.
Stuck crudely with glue in front of Hardev Singh, among the brass handles and knobs and the many twitching monitor needles is a wrinkled picture of Guru Nanak, right hand raised in a blessing, and a smaller one of grinning elephant-faced Ganesh. We pull into Nakuru to a clamour of welcome shouts and clapping and the careless clanging of a bell. Dadaji is helped, almost carried, down to the ground; I leap out, then the engineer. His wife, a big woman in white salwar and shirt, steps forward, pulls the dupatta tighter round her hair and puts a garland round his neck, saying with a shy smile, Wahe Guru di mehar! You reached safely. For good measure she garlands Dadaji. And then she and the other Punjabi women present shower the 5607 “Sir George” with rice, anoint its sweating crimson-painted iron body with orange paste, accompanying the process with a cheerful though discordant song that I surmise is about a gaja, an elephant. Tearfully, Sardarji goes down on his knees, joins his hands, and bows farewell to the 5607.
Thus the marking of time passed, one generation yielding to the next—with grace and thanks, some nostalgia, some sentimentality, why not. But it belied the reality elsewhere, this last voyage of the 5607 and the farewell ceremony in Nakuru station, it was time out from the practical, real world around us. In this new decade of the 1970s which had just set in, when I found employment that would alter my life in previously unthinkable ways, our times were actually turbulent and reckless, in a manner I can only describe from a personal point of view and in hindsight. But I make no moral judgement on the time or its people, I am quick to add, I am hardly in a position to do so.
Independence had brought an abundance of opportunities, the British and the Europeans vacating lucrative farms and businesses and well-paying jobs, foreign aid and loans promising contracts and kickbacks; this was a time to make it, once and for all, as a family, as a clan, as a tribe—the stakes were mountain-high. And this in the tinderbox cold-war climate of the period, foreign governments peddling influence, bribes, arms. Many of the newly powerful had never been in close proximity to such authority before, such organization, such influence, such access to wealth as had become possible. From pit-latrine to palace, was how one foreign journalist crassly described these changes in fortune; he was quickly deported. But his fault was more his limited imagination; if I say that by the end of that decade it would be possible for a politician to own real estate on the French Riviera or interests in Manhattan, I would be closer to the truth. Money and power were all around me, the one dizzying and glamorous, the other intimidating and coercive, and the two often went together.
In the first-class cabins of Hardev Singh’s train that day were a team of West German engineers, whom we dropped off at Naivasha; they were out to survey the tracks and the lie of the land for which they wished to supply a new generation of diesel locomotives. The Americans, the Canadians, the Japanese, and the British also desired to do the same, all promising long-term loans for our young nation to make its purchases.
How Nairobi had changed by then. Among its Asian communities a devastation had taken place. Half the stores on River Road had new, African owners; from the remaining Asian shops you would catch the vacant looks of owners expecting any time someone to walk in with an official writ ordering them to vacate the premises and hit the footpaths.
In 1968, the British government, apparently in a bid to preserve the authentic nature of British society, hastened a bill to curb the flow of British Asians from Kenya. A date was set beyond which they would lose the right to enter Britain as its citizens. Their applications for Kenyan citizenship had been held up or were no longer accepted, and as noncitizens they could not work or do business. A mass migration began, as thousands took to the planes almost overnight, to beat the British deadline.
The Nairobi sky reverberated with airplanes leaving at all hours, where previously only one or two would leave for Europe on overnight flights. At the airport, overflowing with passengers and well-wishers, the GSU, the dreaded General Security Unit normally used against rioting students and rowdy strikers, was sent for crowd control. There had descended a sort of numbness upon the city we knew, the Little London of old. So many friends and acquaintances left; families were torn apart; stores which had been landmarks for decades vanished, personalities who had been fixtures in our social lives departed. Property values in Asian Eastleigh, the Punjabi haven, had plummeted. Previously arrogant men, regulars at the fashionable clubs, were reduced to quivering, stammering victims, begging my father, Please accept the keys to my property, Mr. Lall, whatever price you can fetch for it, Mr. Lall, will be acceptable, and send the money to
such and such a bank account, in Southall, Brixton, Greenwich. Meanwhile if you can advance some cash for tickets and such…
One morning Papa came to his office to learn a piece of news that crushed his spirit, at least for a time. His friendly assistant, Mrs. Burton, had left for London the previous night, having transferred to her own account there twenty thousand pounds, which he had entrusted her to deposit into an absent client’s account, also in London. He spent much of the day at his bank trying to place a hold on the transfer; but the misappropriation had taken place a few days before and the cheque, which had carelessly been made out to cash, had gone through. Papa came home in the evening tearful and still incredulous. She had been such a friend and so solicitous to the plight of the Asians; she had wholeheartedly condemned the British government and was a fount of helpful information for Papa’s departing clients, who would arrive in London to greetings from hostile demonstrators and a blistering winter.
Mother’s look of gloating when he told her the news was a sight to behold, a portrait of the cold-hearted contempt she had developed for him. This was the darkest time of their relationship, and it was painful to watch. Having observed Papa and Mrs. Burton in the office, I knew there was nothing sexual between them. She had been merely an ornament for him, a happy, carefree diversion, and perhaps a fantasy. He and Mother had continued to drift apart. After Deepa’s departure Mother had become even more religious, attending the exclusive gatherings of the most devout women at the Arya Samaj temple Saturday mornings, where they would sit around a tape recorder on the floor and sing along bhajans with it, declaring their devotion to Lord Krishna. Papa had simply lived his life at work, where there was friendly and smart Mrs. Burton, and at his club, in the company of cronies and whisky. But that evening he had, in a sense, come home to her, hoping for comfort and reconciliation. She replied only with taunts.