The Limits of the World

by Jennifer Acker

  “I’m stuck,” he said. “I don’t how to keep going.”

  “It’s very hard to help you if I can’t read what you’re working on.” She sighed. “Send me an email from Kenya if you want. I will read it. Have a good trip.” She stood to usher him out.

  He was grateful for her support; her interest did buoy him. But she was unpredictable. In one moment she told him about her father and her own attempts to be a painter—and then, with a regretful, suspicious expression, she stopped and changed course. Encouraged him to speak, then cut him off.

  The light coming into the guest room grew cloudy now, and Sunil pulled the bedcovers around him. Began to crawl back underneath them.

  “Sunil, I’m talking to you,” Amy said. “Didn’t you hear me? There are people outside. What are they doing?”

  “Love, get away from the window and get dressed. People can see you. Did you sleep there, standing up?”

  “What? No. There’s a girl—no, a family, hanging wet clothes on a line. Drawing water from the well.”

  “Servants are a fact of life here. Even poor families have them.”

  “They’re not black. They’re Indian.”

  Sunil got out of bed. “You must mean the neighbors.”

  “I don’t mean the neighbors. I mean those people down there. Are they related to you?”

  A row of buildings huddled against the wall at the back of what he assumed was his aunt’s property. The thrown-together houses were made of corrugated tin, patches rusting. Electrical wires crisscrossed above. A girl, eight or ten, maybe younger, whipped clothes in the air, then clipped their corners to a line.

  “My god,” he said. “Sarada Aunty is a slumlord.”

  “They don’t even have running water back there.”

  “How can you tell?”

  She pointed to the hand pump, to the girl now raising and lowering it. Of course. He’d seen it but not known what it was. He knew nothing about the real world.

  “It’s pretty bleak. We just ignore them?”

  Sunil shrugged. He was trying to be more like most people, people who said it was healthier to laugh at the absurd and ignore unfairness that you can’t change. But suppressing anger was always hard for him, extremely so when it was justified.

  “What were you thinking about just now, before looking out the window? Your face was all tied up.”

  “Lieberman,” he said.

  “The professor of your ethics seminar?”

  “I met with her before I left.”

  “I thought James was your advisor.”

  “He is. But she … she was trying to help me make progress.”

  “Do you need her help?”

  “No. An old genius who ignores me is who I deserve.”

  Amy wanted to point out that’s not what she asked. Sunil saw it on her face, but they were late for breakfast.

  When Sarada heard them opening the cupboards, she sprang into the room like a rabbit. “You slept so late, it’s nine o’clock!” She inserted her body between Sunil and the cupboard. “You’re the guests. Sit down. No cereal today, something hot. Alice will make you tea and pancakes.”

  Alice, smooth-faced, head wrapped in parakeet green, shuffled in moments later carrying a teapot and steaming brown discs. They ate quickly, something deliciously sweet and nutty in the batter, maybe coconut.

  After they ate, Sunil heard his aunt telling Amy the sightseeing plans. Sarada was carefully dressed in a blue sari, her hair up. A small diamond stud in her nose. She was taller than his mother and more bustling, used to bossing around employees and his horde of cousins.

  “What’s the rat pack?” Amy whispered when Sarada had left the room.

  “The what?”

  “That’s where we’re going tomorrow. First stop today is a temple. Swamisomething.”

  Sunil smiled and tapped his ear. “She said ‘giraffe park.’”

  “No!”

  “Yes.”

  Amy sighed. “What if on the last day I’m still just nodding and smiling?”

  “That would be a miracle,” Sunil said.

  On the stairs, they ran into his parents. “Good, you’re wearing the sweater!” Urmila said. “It is too cold here.”

  “Today, you see the city,” Premchand said. “Very interesting place. The natives, the colonials, the temples.”

  It was both odd and funny to see his father play up the city he’d fled as a tourist destination.

  “When was the last time you were here?” Amy asked.

  “Oh, it must have been—”

  “Eighty-nine,” Urmila said. “These doctors are so busy.”

  Premchand nodded vaguely. He said, “Darling, Anupbhai is expecting us.”

  His mother turned to Amy and said, “Did my son tell you these names we have for mother’s brother, father’s sister, mother’s brother’s wife?”

  Sunil said, “But I don’t know them. Growing up everyone was just ‘Aunty’ and ‘Uncle.’”

  “So now both of you can go to school and learn Gujarati lessons!” his mother said brightly.

  Sunil was surprised, impressed. He gave in. “What time does class start?”

  “Oh, the hours are long.” His mother laughed. “You know even I am learning every day?”

  10.

  [01 h: 52 m]

  Tipe tipe saraver banthai, kankre paar banthai (Drop by drop the oceans are filled, stone by stone the mountains are built.)

  That’s a saying from the old days, from India. I always think of it when I remember my father and all those poor men building the Lunatic Express. Tie by tie, mile by mile.

  When it was finished, he needed work. He stayed with the locos for a while, carrying bags for travelers—something I did, too, when I was young. Other men became Babus, stationmasters. By then there were of course railroads in India, also built and maintained by the British. But many of our people were from small villages where they didn’t have these beasts, and they fell in love with the locos. The opportunities along the rail stretched far inside the country, along the trails of the early traders. We built towns at Voi, Tsavo, Kibwezi, Thika, Nyeri, Naivasha, Nakuru, Kisumu, all of these names so foreign on our tongues.

  In these places I have met dukawallahs selling this calico, Amerikani, plus handkerchiefs, hurricane lamps, cooking pots, tea, condensed milk, sugar biscuits. Fundis built scorching forges to make metal things for the settlers who were so helpless on their own. The early traders had established the caravan paths into the interior, and we conquered those roads. It was like India there. Everybody used the rupee. We had Indian postal service and Indian laws. We were the clerks and managers. We worked seven days. At home, the fire was always burning for the women to boil water, wash the clothes, stir the dal. You children, you don’t know how hard it is to build up something where before there was only bush.

  We traded with the Africans. We clothed their naked bodies and gave them the tools to become civilized. You, Amerikana, you can think of conquering the Wild West, the explorers lifting up the natives. We were the first to buy what they grew and made, maize and millet and beans; sesame, chilies, groundnuts, ghee, beeswax, hides, and skins. And cotton, so much cotton! We brought the white puffballs from the fields to the ginneries. Built mills with water power to grind the maize. And wagons! Imagine! We introduced this crude vehicle to the interior, showing Africans how to carry goods and mail. Roads were thick with our carts and donkeys.

  It would have been easy to dismiss the natives. Easy and foolish. Because they were acquisitive, wanting everything the whites had. The tools, the calico, things their people could not find even in their dreams. All along the rail, we built dukas of wattle and daub stocked with goods from Europe and India. We started small, but it did not take long. We’d survived the lions. And with each year, the Saurashtra faded more and more in our
minds. We faced forward, faced the blood drinkers, who relied on us for cowrie shells.

  I have seen with my own eyes these savages eat their meat raw. Some have teeth filed down to sharp points. For clothes, they used to wear a single shred of zebra. My father was embarrassed to tell me about the women, but I have seen their hanging teats. I know some men who found them irresistible.

  Fortunately, the mixing of races has not been the story of our people here.

  By the time your grandmother arrived, we were setting ourselves up at the 327th iron mile, Nairobi. Just a swamp the British decided to make railway headquarters. Plague struck five times in the first two decades. Bodies piled so high on the wagons, the dead faces bubbling green. Denied the healthy Highlands, we were given the most unhygienic place to live. They had ten thousand miles. We had thirty-two! They told us where to live, where to set up shops. Whites thought we were dirty and carried disease, but they had put us in a bog already thick with mosquitos.

  I was born in 1910, the third child, but the first to survive.

  [02 h: 13 m]

  The British were enthusiastic about us in the beginning. Indian settlement was encouraged. They saw a place for us, you see. They praised how we got by on the tiniest of profits. We were very thrifty and satisfied with a comparatively low standard of living, they said. What did they know? I found these old words in the library, where Gopal used to drop me on a Saturday, before my ankles swelled and those tubes in my heart got thick.

  Soon we outnumbered the whites. We could have squashed them if we were not a peaceful people. If we had in mind upheaval and casting out like the natives would do a few decades later. But we preferred to invest in ourselves. Turmoil would not have served us in early years. After the first big war, the schools for Indians grew. At first we had to fund them ourselves—not my family, but the rich ones. Then the government began to invest, and finally I could attend one or two years. Already I knew reading and writing, mathematics enough. But I was too old to be spared from the shop. My comfort was that our children would have educations. By the time your youngest uncles were attending, schooling was compulsory for Asian boys.

  Whites came down to the bazaars to buy supplies for the farm and for safari—water cans, tents, boots, puttees. Bapuji helped outfit Sir Winston Churchill, the story goes. It sounded so marvelous to me as a child, before I was old enough to see how terrifying this country really is. How the same tree that shades you during the day houses poison snakes at night.

  The colonials were the ones with guns, the ones who hunted, who carried weapons to protect themselves from animals and their own servants. And yet the white ladies thought we, simple shopkeepers and clerks, were a threat. They were so frightened they cabled the Queen for assistance fighting the “terrible Asiatic menace”! This is 1920, 1921, after we won the war, Asians helping Britain fight the Germans. And some of these European ladies are too strong. Probably you know about the Danish lady who tried to grow coffee here, who shot a lion herself, but I am talking about the snobbish ladies who sent their houseboys into the shops, as if we might close the door behind them and do something terrible.

  We tried for the Highlands for years, organizing petitions, writing papers. Jeevanjee traveled to London to make our case to the imperial government. He tried to get us representation. Indian associations traveled even to Delhi and showed that all British subjects were not treated equally.

  The British lied all the time. They tried to tell us that the Africans were against us and wanted to keep the Indians out, to keep more of us from coming to this country. This was not true. Africans who knew us, liked us. They said that next to missionaries, we were their best friends. We were between two fires. If we are nice to the natives, the whites think we are dangerous. If we are aloof, the natives say we are doing nothing to help their country.

  I was sorry to see the natives lose their land. Then they could not be farmers, and business was beyond them. But as Churchill said, no man has a right to be idle—and the African native is no exception.

  In the end, we were kept off the land and out of government. We got a few council seats but the end result was a continuation of the past, the same disabilities. I remember one letter from the East African Standard: Mr. Indian, don’t ask for more than is good for you. Be a good boy; sit on your proper rung of the Empire ladder and we shall all pull together very well.

  Honestly, I did not follow all the ins and outs. The men advocating to resolve the Indian Question were good men, but it was a lost cause. The colonials were never going to give in.

  Did we all agree, all the Asians? It is a good question. No, I suppose we did not. We are so many different kinds, and it is not always easy for Hindu, Jain, Ismaili, et cetera to see the same side.

  What I know is that since I was three, I worked in the bazaars, and by twenty I partnered with an uncle to start a shop. One classmate became my supplier, another my accountant, a third my banker.

  They say it is capital that turns a town into a city, and we possessed it. We suffered through the big depression in the thirties, but with education we became professionals. We began to build and operate on a larger scale—sisal, sawmills, construction—everything at a higher level. We held tight together, worshiped our own way. When my father died, he knew his escape from the lions had not been in vain.

  11.

  Along one wall of Gopal’s shop was an old, dark chest of drawers. Urmila had always believed it came from India, but now she doubted: how would Bapuji have had the money? Everything in their apartment growing up had come dented and bruised from the bazaar.

  Next to their River Road shop—a narrow storefront of matches, soap, occasional spices—had been Valjee shoemakers. Way in the back, they had an old gramophone that Urmila had twirled to when no one was looking. By the time Sunil was in middle school, Gopal had moved the shop to a new location. There, Americans and Europeans poured in for souvenirs, asking about the materials, the tribes, the artisans. That’s what they’d called the natives—artisans.

  These tourists had inspired Urmila to open her own African bazaar, because she knew what buyers wanted: authenticity. To keep a connection with the real place they had been. She understood. She had bought her beautiful chain of ivory elephants in India. There was nothing shallow about a souvenir.

  The hard part, she’d learned, was creating desire when her buyers had never been to Africa. She was selling exotic trinkets, not mementos, and Columbus shoppers had fewer worldly desires than she’d counted on. Perhaps she could market herself better, but first she had to settle her problem with the supplier.

  The men had arrived on time and courteously shaken hands, but Urmila did not trust the look of them. They were fat from cheating honest, unsuspecting clients like her. Their English was very good, though, which made them look superior and put the lie to Urmila’s excuse for needing Gopal here to translate her poor Swahili. She was like a little girl whose father was looking over her shoulder. But it would have been unwise, she told herself, to meet alone with two strange African men. You never knew what could happen.

  The president of Habari Exports asked how he could help her. He stood upright, regal, with his palms clasped in front like a politician.

  Urmila thrust forward the fractured halves of a candlestick she had carried from Columbus. “This is sloppiness. What will you do for me?”

  The president took the halves and turned them over slowly.

  “There, there, and there,” she said, pointing to the cracks.

  “I am very sorry to see this, madam,” the president said. “But with all due respect, without seeing the full contents of the box we cannot verify the rest of the broken items.”

  She crossed her arms, bangles rattling. She had worn her nice jewelry and Western clothes. “You are expecting me to bring the whole box so many thousands of miles to prove I am not lying? This is absurd!” Her brother shot her a warning look. But
she had seen Gopal act exactly this way.

  “I am appreciating your circumstances, Madam. I do not say you are fabricating. I am communicating to you the difficulty of lack of evidence. You are an important customer and because we want to continue business I say we will send you the next order free of shipping charge, a considerable savings. What do you say?”

  “I say nonsense!” It was because she was a woman. They would not treat a man with so little respect. She sensed there was some solution hovering just outside her line of vision, some lightbulb of understanding that, if she were a man, would now illuminate. But she turned and turned and could not see it.

  What she resented even more than their discrimination, though, was her brother’s failure to defend her. Gopal, too, had grown fat and smug. He still smoked heavily, and she could smell the afterburn of his cigarettes on his breath. The shop itself smelled of old tobacco and burned plastic, as if there were frequent electrical fires. If this were America, the process would be simple. She would make a complaint, and her money would be returned.

  She asked her brother in Gujarati, in supplication, “What do you advise me to do?”

  “Try what you said to me on the phone. Threaten to take your business elsewhere.”

  She hated feeling weak, being stared down by a man with beady rhino eyes. So she put to him her ultimatum.

  The president’s son looked eager for resolution, tired of wasting his time. He wore a dark suit, sweat-stained under the arms. But the father was slow thinking; he weighed his options in his fleshy hands. After some moments, he said No, he could not refund as she wished. The son appeared surprised, but he said nothing.

  She managed to stay put until they left the store. Then she fled to the street, into a crushing tide of chatter, laughter, music, matatus. It smelled of garbage, damp asphalt, and rank human perfume.

  Clutching her purse under her arm, she walked blindly for several blocks. She had no idea where she was. On the way here, they’d driven past the old Duke of Gloucester School, where Premchand had graduated, but now, standing at the corner trying to hold her ground against the surge, she wasn’t sure. The sidewalk was crumbling, and cars skirted around the choked traffic to graze her side. The sun reflected off a tall glass tower on the corner. She looked down to see that she was standing on a heap of banana peels.