The In-Between World of Vikram Lall (27 page)

Sometimes, I hesitated. Chicken preferably. But not much…Do
you
?

He nodded. I had to fight my qualms and acquire the taste. You can’t be in Kenya politics and not eat meat.

Although he did not mean it that way, the statement sounded rather ominous. He described his first time with meat, at a dinner party in Eldoret, when he discovered on his plate a shank of goat in a generous helping of plantain. His neighbour at the table watched him enviously with his prize, and he had no choice but to pretend to attack it with relish. He had expected to retch up the contents of his stomach before the night was out, like a sick hyena, he said, but he survived and learned.

I did not tell him about my first time, the open land behind our house in Nakuru, the holy mugumo tree, the ritually sacrificed meat, and Njoroge. My first taste of meat was probably rotten, a pinch from the spilled-out intestine of a goat or a sheep. He watched me, went back to his omelette and bread. Later we had maandazi and chai. He lit a cigarette. He mused
about his youth in Peshawar, his quarrels with his father. Grandfather Verma, he informed me, was ailing. This was something my mother had not yet told me.

If he dies, I’ll have to return to India—for a couple of weeks, he said.

Why don’t you go before—see him before he dies, I mean?

He stared at me, in the way he had of lowering his head and looking at you from below, and grinned. His hair was dusty and his salt-and-pepper beard unruly, and he looked a bit wild in the dim light of the tea kiosk outside which we sat, at a small, rickety wooden table.

I will, he said. Thanks Vic, for telling me my duty. I will go and see him. You know what? I will even make up with him. My father and I had deep differences, as you no doubt know.

He watched me for my response and I nodded.

One day I’ll tell you about it, he said. It’s a painful story.

We became very close that night.

He had reached out to take my hand, and now said, Vic, Vic…bété…why did you stop loving me?

I did not answer and he turned thoughtful. We were the only customers at the banda. A smell of woodsmoke filled the air as the owner rearranged his fire, perhaps ready to shut it out for a few hours and catch a nap before the morning rush. In the distance, two students called out to each other. Perhaps they were drunk.

Uncle said, I supported Mau Mau, and they took your friends’ lives…that family of four…but I did not condone all actions they took. And all of the fighters were not like that—so brutal. You know that, Vic. Only a handful of Europeans died, while Africans died in the thousands. They suffered. They lost their lands. Should I have stayed neutral, or supported the British?

It’s all right, Uncle, I said, squeezing his hand.

I wish I had told him what I had seen that morning at the sawmill: my father’s missing gun in his hand, his ride into the woods with provisions and gun for Mau Mau fighters. I wish we
had discussed Mwangi, shared our grief, for I am sure he regretted that impulsive theft that turned out so costly; I had never seen him look happy following the incident. I wish I had spoken, and therefore also exorcised myself from that past. This was my only chance; I did not take it. Instead we stood up, waving ahsanté to the tea seller, and walked back, our arms round each other’s shoulders, Indian style, drunk on nothing else but tea and emotion.

Before we went to sleep, we spoke briefly of Deepa.

What exactly is going on, according to you, he asked.

They want to marry, but Mother won’t have it. And I think she’ll have her way.

He nodded.

What do
you
think—about the affair, I asked.

I think it’s a wonderful thing, he said. If my daughters Sarojini or Natasha were to do it, I would approve. But your mother won’t let it happen. I’ve spoken to her. Our people are not ready for it, what can we do?

Early the next morning I accompanied him to the bus station. And that’s how he left for Nairobi.

My leg is in a cast and I find myself propped up in a chair and staring out the glass back door of this house rather like the hero of an old Hitchcock film—except that what I look at is the empty expanse of frozen lake before me as I delve into the memories inside my head. I had a rather nasty slip on the back steps. Unable to move, I thought I would freeze to death in the cold, no one in sight to rescue me. I found the situation distinctly funny: vilified by the press from Nairobi to Cape Town, hit men and the Attorney General in my home town perhaps still on the lookout for me, the World Bank demanding details of the government’s dealings with me, here I was out all alone in the Canadian winter, dying in the snow. I started to laugh hysterically, silently, even as tears from the
pain and the cold streamed down my face. Perhaps in this ironical situation I had found my fitting end, worth embracing happily. A freezing death is not painful, I’ve been told, except during the first minutes.

A half hour after my fall, as if hallucinating in my dazed, semiconscious state, I caught the barking and yelping of dogs, and high, rollicking children’s voices, and glimpses of bright yellow and blue and red leaping like pennants in front of my eyes. The two neighbour kids like angels had appeared to my rescue.

Next of kin? asked the receptionist at the hospital. I gave the name Seema Chatterjee, and immediately happy faces bloomed all around me, and I was in the tender care of several friendly women, until Seema herself arrived and brought me home. She’ll spend a few nights here, she says, until I am mobile.

Of all my characters she likes Mahesh Uncle best, he is her hero. But she once said of him: How typically Punjabi! Fight first, ask questions later! She is intrigued by his relationship with his father, my Grandfather Verma the police inspector, whom I had once overheard my uncle describe to my mother as a “traitor.” She says there is information she could access through the Internet about the role of the Indian police in India’s long independence struggle. I am intrigued, as much by her curiosity as by what she will uncover regarding my maternal grandfather.

SEVENTEEN.

Dilip wrote to Deepa, as he had promised he would, and she replied. His letters came regularly, reaching her every two weeks on a Tuesday, having arrived by the London post and been sorted over the weekend. Over Diwali he slipped in a thin gold chain with his letter, and another time a pressed flower. There was nothing embarrassing or overbearing in his approach, nothing unsuitable or not meant also for the eyes and ears of my parents. He was proper, always the gentleman. He wrote about how he had spent his time since he last wrote, having visited a cricket or football match or a play at the West End, and sometimes he mentioned a girl or two of his acquaintance at the university, in an attempt to tease her and perhaps my mother too. To both my parents he was the ideal suitor for their daughter, whose impulsiveness and quickness of temper, whose undue extroversion they watched anxiously lest these
excesses spill over and poison the golden matrimonial prospect unfolding like a boon from the gods.

Njoroge too wrote to her, of course, letters in a humorous vein signed “Bugsy” and also not unintended for my parents’ attention. They found his posturing awkward and disconcerting. His secret love letters to her, however, were frantic and frequent, delivered by a messenger in school.

He missed her desperately, and he found the secrecy unbearable. He had no one to talk to about this love in his life and sometimes, reflecting on it all by himself, away from his many friends, away from the heated political debates and the literary gatherings Makerere University was famous for, he even doubted his ability to nurture it. Perhaps he was deluding himself with it. He wasn’t even sure at times what level of intimacy to adopt with this alien girl. Wasn’t she still a child? And yet how easy she found it to handle the situation!

Doubts and fears assailed him like hostile spirits as he lay awake in his bed at night: how would he convince her family to relent, permit him to marry their daughter; if they didn’t, would he have the strength to defy them, whom he loved and respected? It was not going to be easy at all. And later still, how would his African friends treat her, when they could still recall bitterly the past racism of her people? How would her own people treat her…

Perhaps, he wrote in dejection once, we should call it off. I know your Indians too well, they will never allow their daughter to marry an African. It’s no good, my Deepa, don’t you see? I’ve become an African terrorist for your parents, who once loved me so much. I sometimes wonder how it is even possible that we’ve come this far, from our respective ends, that we are able even to talk so intimately, share so many thoughts. The most wonderful thing about us is that we’ve learnt, we’ve discovered a new terrain in human relationship, a new trait of the heart that proclaims that we can get as close to another human as to become one in body and spirit—no matter how different the details of our birth! Do you see this?

How can you say that! came her reply to him. How can you have doubts! If you stop loving me I will die! Let’s run away to London, she pleaded, that’s what Indian girls do to marry outside their community or religion. You’re right, they will never relent!

He answered categorically, No, Deepa. This is a historical moment for Kenya, for East Africa, don’t you see? It’s a time for Africa finally to become great in the world! We have arrived. I have to be here, you have to be here, to witness that greatness; to make it
possible,
my dear. I have a role to play in that future, I feel it in my very bones—how can we run away to seek refuge in the arms of our former colonial masters?

In panic, she drove to the General Post Office one night, soon after receiving this letter, and from one of the bank of phone booths on the sidewalk outside she called him and apologized: I am sorry, Njo, how could I have been so thoughtless, to ask you to run away from Kenya for my sake?

She was in tears. They had trapped themselves into a corner of hopeless despair and pessimism, and she was suffering. He had misjudged her strength: their secret, forbidden love was exacting a pitiless daily toll from her life. Her pent-up passions cried out for release, yet at home she had to put on a complete performance to deny her true self. The good humour with which she bore my parents’ awful hints and jokes about her “romance” with Dilip; her self-control at the increasingly presumptuous attentions of the Sharmas; the charming, mature girl she tried to become, only so that Mother and Papa would bend her way, but which made them believe she was finally acquiescing to theirs; all this, and she wanted to scream out to the world, But it is Njoroge I will marry! Don’t you see? Let me live my life! She stayed up late nights to read and reread his letters and to write to him with matching passion. Mother was ever watchful, not completely taken in by the show of compliance, and she would sometimes tap on Deepa’s door with an anxious Soyi ho na? Are you sleeping, beti? Just finished reading, Mama, I’m going to sleep now, Deepa would
reply. His correspondence she carefully rolled up and concealed in a cardboard tube, which she inserted into one of the hollow metal legs of her bed; and she was careful not to leave any guilty impressions of her love on the writing pad.

Outside on Kenyatta Avenue, the only pedestrians were the sidewalk prostitutes, bargaining with tourists in taxis, and the occasional straggler drifting homeward. In her phone booth, she did her best to keep her eyes away from curious stares.

It’s all right, Njoroge told her on the phone, I would escape anywhere in the world with you—if it worked; but it wouldn’t…do you see that, darling? You also don’t want to run away from everything you love?

She agreed. You’re right, Njo…let’s wait then as we planned.

I love you, Deep, he said as they hung up.

But a worry tugged at her: Why was he so reasonable, not burning up like her?

It was nine o’clock and my parents had grown frantic with worry. Finally, in an act of desperation, Papa and a neighbour took off in the latter’s car to comb the plausible streets of Nairobi to look for Deepa. The sparsely lit suburbs of Nairobi take on an eerie look at night, but much to their relief the two men saw her near Forest Road, racing back home in the family car, and they turned around and followed. Papa and Deepa walked in together, he severely scolding her; she would not explain where she had been, instead went to her room and locked herself in. What made her come out finally was my telephone call that night; she broke down over the phone, saying, Vic, they are tormenting me, Mama and Papa, they are destroying my life!