The In-Between World of Vikram Lall (29 page)

But I will meet her? my sister asked.

Of course you will.

Do her people know about you?

Yes.

And? They like you?

I don’t think so. Nobody in Dar likes to see me walking around with a Shamsi girl. So you see, Sis, it’s not just our mother and father, it’s what we Asians are, even with each other. And if you think about it, others in this whole wide world are not much better.

I know, even in America, with those riots and marches.

Yasmin’s neighbourhood had actually turned more hostile toward me in recent days. I couldn’t help the feeling when I was there that I was constantly being watched. Once while we were walking together on Upanga Road, beside the low brick wall outside her mosque, I had the distinct impression that a car had passed us a few times. She saw me staring after it but didn’t say a word. And then only the previous Friday evening,
having dropped her off at her home, as I came strolling down the same road headed for the bus stop, a partly eaten mango came flying at me from the shadows, grazing and soiling the front of my shirt, accompanied by the pejorative epithet, Banyani-dengu!

I have often recalled that scene on suburban Upanga Road: a gentle evening breeze blowing, wafting in the salty smell of the ocean, which was a mere five minutes’ walk away down a side road; a faint whiff of incense; a few cars on the road; and a distant chorus of singing voices floating out the upper windows of that imposing prayer house a hundred yards away. A few stragglers, well dressed, hurrying toward it, through the gates and into the garden. And then from behind the hedge close to me, that filthy missile, that vile invective.

That afternoon President Julius Nyerere was addressing the students; it had taken a lot of inveigling with university authorities to be excused from attending the public meeting so I could meet my sister. Yasmin of course had to go. And Njoroge, who had arrived earlier in the day unbeknownst to me, was also there, and by coincidence briefly met my “special” friend Yasmin.

Njoroge and Deepa were together three days; they spent time on the campus mostly, but they took the bus to town one day and strolled on the main avenue, walked into restaurants, and later visited a nightclub. They held hands, they danced together. They were stared at, of course. But nobody knew her in Dar; she was doubly a foreigner. As a Punjabi she did not have a community here; and in her clothes, her speech, the accented Swahili she spoke, she was so very obviously a Nairobi girl—westernized, fashionable, and presumably free in her ways. And so, except for a few poisoned arrows from the loafers who hung around the Odeon, an area best avoided in dubious situations, she was not harassed.

What bliss to be loved, and to love in kind. I never experienced that, but then I have saved myself from that aching
shadow that always dogs such ecstatic reaches. There was no doubt in my mind that Deepa and Njoroge’s declaration of their hand in the open, in Dar, would eventually make news in Nairobi—the two cities did talk, after all. And so a council of war was called for.

Deepa liked that term:

Yes, Bhaiya, a council of war, that’s what we need—how to
proceed
now, how to convince the mai-baap to
relent
. We don’t live in the Stone Age anymore.

I looked from Deepa to Njoroge. He was sitting sideways at my desk; my sister and I sat facing him in our chairs, across my sloping coffee table—fashioned by the carpenter who worked next to the tea kiosk down the road when he was undoubtedly drunk. Beside me, as I also recall, was the three-legged low stool with a zebra-skin saddle-top—such items were not banned then—with a newspaper upon it, looking much as it does stooped in my presence now, thousands of miles away and decades later, bringing them both close to me in my memory, closer than she actually is across the lake in Rochester fretting about his son…

Suppose our mother doesn’t come around, I said. Then what?

She will. She has to. If she doesn’t, then…we just…elope.

I turned to Njoroge.

She will come around, he said confidently. She must. I will go and speak to her myself. I will go and present myself to her. What do you see wrong in me, I will ask her. What harm can come to your daughter if she marries me? I have a bright future. I can become a permanent secretary or a minister some day, our country has a great future. And intermarriage is inevitable.

And suppose—

Suppose she doesn’t like the idea of half-breeds, I thought, suppose she wants to be able to speak to her grandchildren in her own tongue, in Punjabi or Hindi, and she doesn’t want to be the talk of the Indian community in the whole of East Africa and be subjected to the contempt of other women, who will say
she has a pukka kalu for a damad; suppose she wants to be able to hold her head up high in temple in front of these women, and to take her daughter and her family to Delhi to see her father and feel no shame…

You talk to her, Bhaiya, my sister said to me. Take a stand in my favour, for God’s sake, Vic, she pleaded.

I turned red under that look, those large black beseeching eyes with just a hint of reprimand in them.

I will talk to her, I said.

We agreed on a plan of action. As soon as the college term ended, in May, we would all meet in Nairobi and coordinate our moves. I would first speak firmly to both my parents. Mahesh Uncle would be prevailed upon to speak to Mother. Then Njoroge would come and meet them. He would bring a granny along, some elderly and utterly respectable Kikuyu relative, and also the Minister for Land Settlement. My parents could not but be convinced. The minister would promise to have the wedding of their daughter blessed by the Old Man, Mzee Kenyatta himself.

How could that not work? We celebrated by giving a multiracial party in my dormitory that night.

Deepa and Yasmin hit it off straight away like long-lost cousins. Yasmin was charmed by Deepa’s mercurial nature and Nairobi mannerisms, and touched by the present my sister had brought for her, a skirt and top. Nairobi fashions were always prized in Dar. Nairobi was still little London. I saw them once walking hand in hand discussing something and laughing; for some reason I imagined that they were talking about Njoroge and me. One afternoon the two went off to the city together and returned, having had tea at Yasmin’s house.

I love your sister, so, Yasmin said to me later in that typical manner of speech that sweetly echoed her Cutchi inflections.

We were out on a walk in the evening, on the campus grounds, and we had allowed Njoroge and Deepa to take the lead. We must have been a sight to behold for the curious
onlooker, examples of flouted conventions, but it was a late hour and sparsely lighted where we were; not many people were about.

Oh yes? I replied. She likes you a lot too, I can attest to that.

She is so lively, so full of
spunk
! But it takes a lot of courage, what she’s up to, nuh?

We had slowed to a stop, a momentary unconscious one, and I flicked her pigtail affectionately, met her flashing black eyes and her tight-lipped smile. What she herself was up to, with me, I could have told her, required no less courage than my sister’s. This was the moment, we both knew, when we could have sealed our relationship and our future together. She was waiting for me only to take that first step. I pulled away, and we strolled on.

On the Friday evening, Njoroge having left the previous day, Deepa and I had just walked Yasmin home after a movie and were strolling back along Upanga Road for our ride back to campus, promised by a young Canadian professor. It was a quiet night, the lights in the windows and open doors of the row houses just visible over the hedges, faint strains of western pop or Indian music drifting to the ears, a voice or two calling out in the distance. We had spoken about Yasmin, how much Deepa liked her; my sister was certain Mother too would like her, regardless of her faith and background. We agreed that Mother needed understanding and care, emotionally warm but fragile as she had always been; and we agreed that Mrs. Burton was a passing phase and harmless, over whom Papa was fawning in his typical manner as he had sometimes done over Mrs. Bruce in Nakuru. The reminiscence made us laugh, turn thoughtful. It was one of those moments of absolute closeness, rare, ephemeral, whose fullness of emotion sends a chill down your spine, and you wonder if you will ever be able to reproduce it, if it will ever seem as real and intense as you want to remember it.

Bhaiya, do you think of Annie often?

I replied slowly, after a pause, I guess somehow she’s always there at the back of the mind. It’s hard to explain.

She was such a sweet girl. She meant a lot to you, I know.

I don’t know, Sis. We were so young then. But somehow I never got over her. It was the killing, the horror and suddenness of it, how unreal it was, like a nightmare.

Deepa put her arm through mine, asked softly: Do you think Njoroge’s grandfather—Mwangi—had anything to do with it, Vic? I am sometimes frightened by the thought.

I don’t think so, Deepa. Do you remember how he would put flowers in your hair…and once he put a champeli in hers too, that day she and Bill and their mother came to visit us and brought that rose plant? And she sang that Latin song from her choir?
Laudate dominum, laudate dominum…
I have never forgotten it. Sometimes it just keeps playing in my mind, over and over. Like a record that’s broken…

I felt a tremor in my sister’s arm.

Before us, at the intersection, the mosque stood towering in all its grandeur, outlined in a brilliant series of decorative light bulbs in honour of some celebration; its clock tolled the half-hour at ten-thirty. A dog barked somewhere, and in perverse reply came the sound of a bicycle bell. The image of old Mwangi was floating in my mind, of him tending the garden patiently, when suddenly a terrifying, unearthly squeal came from the shadows, followed by a hoot. My sister and I froze in our tracks. Oh God, Oh Rabba, she whispered, digging her fingers into my arm. Out leapt before us six youths, howling like wild dogs, gesturing like demons, mouthing all manner of obscenities; they surrounded us. I took hold of Deepa’s hand and made a dash for it in the direction we had come, only to meet a leering Elvis face, shirt open, pants crotch-tight, wielding a tree branch. I lurched sideways, ran forward, to no avail. We should have screamed, but terror froze our throats. Backwards, sideways, forwards again, and our paths were blocked in a horrifying checkmate and what awaited was only
the kill. But then at the intersection appeared a white Mercedes; it turned left onto the main road, swerved left again toward the gate where we stood trapped, and the six scampered away into the dark like cockroaches. The man at the wheel was a local millionaire, Mr. Bapu; he rolled down a window and asked us who we were and what was the matter. We explained our predicament, and he told us to spend the night in his house, he would have us driven to the campus the next morning.

There was no doubt in my mind, from the obscenities I had heard—in a mixture of Cutchi and Swahili, that Tanzanian specialty—and the faces I had seen—that buck-toothed horse, the curly-haired half-caste chotara—that our attackers had known me, and most likely seen my sister before. I, a Nairobi Punjabi Hindu, was dating one of their girls; to make matters worse, I had a sister who was going out in the open with an African. When men develop contempt for a woman, the vilest, filthiest language escapes their lips. All night I smarted from those insults. Deepa was close to hysteria and I spent the night in the same room with her.

The next morning Mr. Bapu drove us in his white Mercedes to the campus, but not before a lavish breakfast and a tour of his quite wonderful garden, which he obviously had a hand in tending, though there was an elderly gardener with whom he chatted amiably. Mr. Bapu cut for Deepa a red rose. On the way he hummed a tune, some sort of bhajan, which we could not quite figure out, but it seemed completely out of key and Deepa and I had a job keeping up straight faces.

I realize that my contempt for those nocturnal attackers has not waned a bit; I have called them names, but this is how I have always recalled them and that terror-filled eternity that must actually have been two or three minutes. Mahesh Uncle comes to mind: when we were little he once said to us, in his typical manner, Henh, henh—see how memory makes monkeys out of our enemies, as one of my teachers used to say. And what does it make out of our friends, Uncle? we asked. He
said, It gives them a tint of rose, or it saves them in amber—do you know what amber is, children?

Mr. Bapu, whom we never saw again, is preserved in amber.

Seema doesn’t spend the night here anymore, now that I can move about quite nimbly with support. She does visit sometimes after work and we have dinner together. She brought some information recently about Inspector Verma, my mother’s father. In 1942 a trial had taken place in Peshawar of some captured officers of the Indian National Army; the INA, under Subhas Chandra Bose, had taken up sides with the Japanese against the British. Many of its members were deserters from the Indian Army. In that trial, of among other people the well-known Colonel Jamal Khan, my grandfather had been a prosecutor. All INA men were found guilty and handed out death sentences, which, however, were never carried out.