They ate goat and rice and kale at polished wooden tables on a verandah overlooking spindly bushes and shiny-barked trees. Purity, their waitress, poured their beers and inquired what they’d seen. “Very good,” she said, approvingly. “You are counting to the Big Five.”
The light turned from lemon to mango to orange to disappeared. The temperature dropped and the staff closed the windows. “The sun does set fast in this country,” Sunil said.
Amy smiled and speared papaya with her fork. There were still circles under her eyes, but Sunil thought they were beginning to fade.
After dinner they joined Kioko and the other men drinking Tuskers at the bar. “You are discovering our Mara nightlife,” Kioko said. He had a driver’s soft body, with a paunch, and a broad genial face trained for tourism. He smiled when he was being looked at, but when he thought no one was paying attention, his expression slackened. Kioko was Kikuyu, from central Kenya. He had been married twice and had eight children. In between safaris, he drove six hours each way to spend one night with his family. “It is little better now,” he said. “The government put tourism money into the roads. Before, the drive is eight or ten hours.”
The wind rustled the trees. Somewhere out in the dark, wooden things banged together.
A white South African named Rawley introduced himself. With his receding hairline and tanned skin, he looked the part of the weathered, irascible guide. They asked if business was good and he said it was, had picked up after the slump following the embassy attacks. “My father was in the safari game. I inherited his little enterprise.”
“Took around Teddy Roosevelt?” Amy said.
Sunil was relieved to hear teasing and casualness returned to her voice.
“If that were true, I’d be older than the Ngama Hills, but we did have a few royals. The King of Monaco after he married your Grace Kelly. She was a beaut.” Then Rawley said, “Honeymooning?”
Amy nodded. “And visiting family.”
Sunil wondered why she had added that, just as the previous week was easing away.
“Hindu or Muslim?”
“Jain.”
“Gujarati?”
Sunil nodded.
“Your people did well for themselves with their dukas.”
“Commerce is a cultural imperative.”
“Nah,” Rawley said. “People think the Indians in this country have some kind of mercantile gift or money lust, but it’s because they weren’t allowed to own land. A lot of the imported laborers had been farmers in the mother country, but the Brits kept them out of the Highlands. Then proceeded to bugger it up.”
Amy leaned forward, tugged the sleeves of her pullover up to her elbows. Her hair lit yellow in the bar’s low light. With an easy, forthright smile, she said, “What do you know about man-eating lions, Rawley?”
The guide lit a cigarette and circulated the pack. One match flare after another, as if each lighting depended on the one before.
“It was about a hundred years ago,” Rawley said, “while they were building the Uganda Railroad. The Lunatic Express. There were these maneless beasts with an appetite for brown flesh. For all flesh really, but the Asians and the Africans were most exposed.”
Sunil shook his head. “People think you’ll believe anything if you say it happened in Africa.”
“This is true, mate. There’s the DNA evidence to prove it. Happened in Tsavo, east of here. The coolies went on strike until the lions were shot. The beasts were stuffed and sent to Chicago. The Field Museum.” He took a long drag. “You don’t have to believe me, it’s all been written about. Patterson was the colonel overseeing the crew that got mauled. The hunt went on for months. All kinds of elaborate traps and ruses. One poor English bastard was devoured inside his railway car.” He chuckled. “Does it make you feel lucky to be alive, friend? Could have been your great-grandaddy inside those jaws.”
“Then he wouldn’t have been my great-grandaddy.”
“He’s a hard one, your man,” Rawley said to Amy, gesturing with his red-tipped cigarette.
“Single minded,” she said, the trace of a grimace on her watermelon mouth.
“The Brits were so damn broke after building that railroad they had to find a way to make the country pay for it. That’s when the fun really started. Ask these gentlemen.” Rawley gestured to the bar, where Kioko had smoked his cigarette down to a glowing stub and the Maasai bartender stood alert but silent.
Sunil looked at Rawley and saw he was the kind of man who’d had success with older women as a teenager and coasted ever since. He was not so attractive now. Classic blue eyes, but one of them drooped, and his neck skin sagged. He wore his khaki safari uniform with the sleeves loosely rolled.
“We’ve got an early drive,” Sunil said. But Amy waved her beer at him; she wasn’t finished. She was beginning to settle in and enjoy herself.
But Sunil was tired. “You can stay.” He was through listening to campfire yarns, to people telling him stories. The point was to be here alone with his wife, to make new memories.
“No, I’m done. Let’s go back.” On the path, she said, “You thought I wanted to stay there and listen to Rawley by myself?”
“You started asking him questions.”
“Weren’t you curious?”
“That guy doesn’t know anything.”
“More than we do. He’s lived here his whole life.”
“This is our honeymoon. You said you needed a break. So let’s not go around asking strange men to dig up anecdotes that explain my character.”
“Is that what you think?” She stopped walking and stared at him. “That lion story is just that. A great story. I didn’t ask for details as a roundabout way of asking for an explanation of you. You, I understand just fine.”
Sunil felt a hole opening up in front of him. If he wasn’t careful, he was going to fall in.
Amy skirted ahead and jammed the key into the lock, entered without waiting for him, and went straight into the bathroom. She brushed her teeth and changed her clothes with the door closed, emerging in enormous flannel pants.
“Where’d those come from?”
“They might be Ajay’s. Sarada gave them to me for the cold nights.” Her voice wavered despite her efforts to control it, and her face had that furious flatness. Anger made her thinner, two-dimensional. When his own fury rose, it spread through him as something thickening, strengthening, the muscle that filled out his skin and bones. Amy had always been afraid of her anger, but these days—this trip—she appeared to be drawing it closer.
She stood still, deciding something, then said, “You know what I told your mother yesterday? That I’d rescued you. So melodramatic, but I meant it. At the time I meant from her.”
The hole sealed up. But behind him gaped a new one. A chasm so vast he couldn’t see it all at once, caught only glimpses of its rapid expansion over his shoulder. Carefully he said, “Tell me what happened.”
His mother wanted them to have an Indian wedding. In Nairobi. A sari for Amy, a ceremony with fire, all the relatives and friends. “At first it was fine—friendly, generous even. But before I could even consider it, she said that our marriage would never be recognized. She didn’t even give me a chance. Just accused me of stealing you. She said I’d always be a stranger, that she wished I hadn’t come.” Amy released her hair from barrettes, roughly tugging knotted strands of hair out of her scalp. “I tried to tell you. I asked you to help me, to stay with me. I was losing my shit. But you didn’t. Maybe you really couldn’t, I don’t know.
“Sunil, what are you doing? I’m talking to you.”
Sunil was rummaging in their suitcase. He knew his mother couldn’t be trusted, but he’d chosen to ignore the signs. He was so stupid! Why hadn’t he stayed with Amy when she asked? “What was she thinking?” He was fuming. He would fix it. It couldn’t wait. “Sarada Aun
ty gave us a phone. For emergencies.”
Watch your step. You don’t know where the hole is.
“Stop it.” Amy grabbed his arm. Her fingers pulsed through his skin. “I’d rather spend the night alone in a cow-dung Maasai hut than here with you if you turn that phone on. It’s not worth it. Talking to her will only take you away from here. Put that fucking phone away.”
Later, after apologizing, after make-up sex, after lying awake together and listening to the wind, Sunil said, “Can I tell you a story? It’s about my mom. Just tell me if you don’t want to hear any more about her.”
“You know I always like more data,” she said. She turned on her side to listen. “Tell me.”
It was spring break, he said. He’d come home from school to see the Replacements in one of their last concerts before they broke up for good. “You know how much their music meant to me, right?” She said that she did. The songs pulled him apart and stuck him back together in a way that somehow felt better for the breaking.
The afternoon after the concert he’d woken up late. His mother had stayed home from the store to visit with him, and they ate fresh samosas while he told her about the concert. “She was patient. It was a rare moment—I was telling her about my life and she actually seemed interested. Like when we used to talk about bowling, the plots of TV shows. Stupid stuff, but things we shared those years when my dad was traveling. Actually, the store was a plot we hatched together when she was taking business classes at the community college.” At the end of lunch, his mother asked him if he’d take out the daughter of a family friend. “I said yes. She gave me money, and I took this girl Priyanka out to eat. We had a really boring conversation about people we knew in common, and then I brought her home.” Afterward he’d met up with the same friends he’d gone to the concert with. Song by song, they relived it. “But when I got home, my mom was waiting up. I guess Priyanka’s mother had called to talk about the evening, and they’d decided that I’d been rude. I thought it was clear we’d gone out as a favor to our parents, but maybe I was wrong. Maybe Priyanka had expected something else. We got into a big fight. I stormed out and took their car. I heard this awful crunch when I pulled out of the garage. I looked long enough to see that it wasn’t somebody’s dog and took off. Drove around for a couple hours.”
It turned out that he’d crushed a big jewelry shipment, items for the store. He felt bad, but she hadn’t let him explain.
“She thought I broke her things on purpose. I didn’t, but I let her think I did.” He paused, a grim understanding spreading through him. “We’re a lot alike, aren’t we?” He’d always known he shared his mother’s temperament, but the similarities now felt drawn in sharp relief.
Amy’s lips were maintained in a straight line, her eyebrows raised, agreeing with him without saying anything.
“The difference is that I have philosophy. I can articulate reasons that make me feel justified.”
Amy finished the thought for him. “What you usually say in moments like this one is that either your mother doesn’t see the wrong, which is stupidity, or that she does wrong things knowingly, which makes her a bad person.”
He laughed with bitter pleasure. “Exactly! You nailed it. I’m just going to hand my dissertation over to you.”
“Ha ha. That’s all you, buddy.” She sat up against the headboard. “But seriously, you know I think that’s the wrong way to approach your family—most of the time. Yes, your mother can be incredibly overbearing to the point of being offensive—I’ve seen that firsthand now—but I think the two of you could reconcile somewhat, could appreciate each other more than you do.”
“You mean should. Should reconcile.”
“What do you think?” she said.
Outside, the wind picked up, and goosebumps raced up his legs. He imagined them wearing aviator goggles out on the Mara tomorrow.
Soon Amy was asleep, but Sunil lay awake, cracked open to the night. He was bothered by what she had said. And he knew of only one way to discharge the unease. Gingerly, he slipped out of bed and made his way to the front desk where Purity, showing no surprise or reaction on her face, led him to a computer. His email was brief. It neatly laid out a dilemma for the moral realist, a crucial step in advancing his view. On the short walk back to the hut, a strong wind whisked over him. Inside, supposedly protected, he heard a branch scrape the bark of the tent walls, and something crunched the gravel. Then a sound like a mother shushing a baby, followed by a noise so startling and so near he leapt. He’d never heard such a sound, yet it echoed danger in a primal part of his mind. A yowl, a growl, a crunch. Amy didn’t wake up. Shaking with cold, Sunil found another piece of his uncle’s clothing and pulled the shirt over his head, his wrists bare below the too-short sleeves. He shuffled along the wall, straining his ears and listening until nearly dawn. He felt painfully aware of his body, of his thin, falsely protective skin. His thudding heart, the soft loops of his gut, and his vulnerable, curled-under toes. His nerves seemed to cause a separation between mind and body.
He finally fell asleep just minutes before the wake-up knock at five-thirty, when he opened the door to find a tray of hot water, tea bags, hard-boiled eggs, and sweet, dry toast. He was ravenous.
They were deep in the Mara, two hundred miles from Nairobi. They did not know that Sunil’s father was dead.
It could have happened anywhere—even in America—but it hadn’t. It had happened here. His father had not told anyone where the couple was staying, which camp, and their phone remained securely, protectively off. Sunil had not made his angry call.
No one but the askari had seen Premchand leave. The last man to hear him speak was the groundnut seller who’d happily taken his American dollars.
All this Sunil and Amy would learn on their return.
Their van jolted up and down as they drove directly into the sunrise, the wheels at the mercy of the hardened ruts. The land rolled and they rode the wave. The grassland stretched in all directions. His eyes followed the earth to the thin place where it met the sky, and his gaze lifted him up and out of his body, then deposited him to the side of where he was standing moments before.
He still felt diffuse, sore, and vulnerable. His mind and body had yet not reconciled.
The sun blazed and spotlit the hulking figures before them. Behemoth shadows like nightmares.
“I’ve never been so close, not even at the zoo,” Amy whispered. They were standing with their heads and shoulders out the rooftop window. Now Amy leaned toward the huge forms, magnetized.
The preposterous herd grazed and swayed side to side among silvery shrubs. Kioko counted off. Twelve. He halted the van. The elephants roved closer. The upward-arching tusks made their massive down-hanging trunks all the stranger. What Sunil had thought were shrubs were actually trees. His sense of scale was false, unreliable. Everything was larger, more looming than it appeared. Baby elephants walked at their mother’s shoulders, every part absurd. And yet they sauntered. Reaching out to grasp leaves and branches, stuffing the harvest into their maws.
“And how do you say elephant in Swahili?” Kioko said, keeping up their lessons. “Over there we have punda, swara, nyati, kigoni. Remember all these things?”
“Aliens,” Amy said. “Beautiful, incredible aliens.” Their elbows rested on the roof, their hands shading their eyes.
“It’s true. They’re beyond belief,” Sunil said, looked at her slyly. “That’s what incredible means.”
She rolled her eyes in just the exasperated way he was trying to provoke, and this one powerful look reinstated him in his body. She made him feel at home in one of the most bizarre places on earth. He had married her. He needed her. Almost would not be the description of his life.
He would master the past tense. He would make progress. Sunil closed his eyes and let his lids warm and melt. On the inside darkness, he saw acacia trees and the stripes of zebras.
Step back, look around, take it in. You’ll never have the chance again.
When the Maasai warriors lined up to perform the lion-killing dance, they carried the oblong leather shields and tall spears like the ones that had littered the basement of his house as a kid. Sunil had known, but never really believed, that what his mother sold came from a specific place, where real people lived. He suspected she didn’t believe it either, that she ordered the goods from a central warehouse, knowing only vaguely who made them and where. The stories she told her customers were generic, idealized, crafted to ensnare passersby.
This was the last place he’d expected to be reminded of his mother, though of course it should have been obvious from the start.
The young warriors were barefoot. Some heads were shaved; others had long plaits. Some wore faded Western shorts and shirts, others were bare-chested. Their skin all the same espresso. They circled, spears in hand, sinewy bodies urging an arrhythmic, skipping gait. They sang, rich vibrating tones, both high and deep, so it sounded like two pitches from the same throat. Then the singing paused, and from deep within emerged rumbles. Threats and roars.
Paul, the village chief’s son and their guide, told them, as he ushered them to the gift shop—a ring of dung huts around a bare patch of dirt—that the women here used no birth control and bore up to fifteen children.
As they handled and released the beaded necklaces, the zebra tail flyswatters, the circular knives that tightly fit a wrist (used how?), Amy said, “Was that a statement of poverty or pride?”
“Good question. Virtue out of necessity?”
Amy could not help viewing the village through public health lenses. The children, she had pointed out, bore clusters of flies in their eyes. Their bellies were swollen, feet and hands riddled with scabies. But unlike the poor in Nairobi, and in the US, the Maasai displayed strong white teeth, which she supposed was the benefit of a low-sugar diet. These were the fiercest individuals on the planet. What were they to make of these lives?
The Limits of the World Page 17