The In-Between World of Vikram Lall (4 page)

Mr. Innes, whose wife and daughter were slaughtered that Saturday, was a big, gruff, red-haired and-whiskered bully of a man, who always refused to serve Mahesh Uncle at Innes and McGeorge. Hey you, son of a coolie—he would bark briskly and harshly as soon as my uncle pushed through the glass doors. Out! Go back to cowland, Bengalee bastard! Undaunted by the insult, Mahesh Uncle would return on another day, always ostensibly intending to buy a tube of Colgate, which he could have bought for half the price from an Indian merchant, and which he didn’t use anyway, patriot that he was, preferring the traditional charcoal concoction that went by the name of Monkey Brand. My Punjabi mother, though, was offended specifically by the description “Bengalee” applied to her brother: But you are not dark-skinned, how
dare
he call you a Bengali!

When our new friends the Bruce children entered our lives, Mahesh Uncle was no longer living with us. He had come as a teacher to the Indian school in Nakuru, but his indiscretions soon lost him the job. Finally Dadaji, through some contact, found him the post of manager of the Resham Singh Sawmills near Njoro, some twenty miles away.

As Mrs. Bruce drove off from our parking lot that day of the Innes murders, she almost ran over Mahesh Uncle, who had to jump aside. He often came to spend weekends with us, a mill lorry dropping him off on Saturday and picking him up on Sunday. He had gone to our home and missed us, then walked up to the store. He too had heard of the gruesome incident.

They’ll never learn, Mahesh Uncle said, looking in the direction of the pickup which had just barely avoided hitting him. Arrogant bastards, even as the forest fighters pick them off one by one…and they say they don’t understand why they are hated.

Must you now go and support those heinous murderers, my father muttered in irritation. Mahesh Uncle did not reply but looked away to meet my mother’s smile of greeting.

The dog had been hacked on the head with a panga, though he was still breathing when found, lying on his side on the back stoop. The front door was unlocked but shut; the back door hung wide open. One servant had the day off, the other had disappeared. Laundry was hanging out for drying. The lunch awaiting Henry Innes when he came upon the scene of carnage was macaroni casserole, with fruit and custard for dessert. Mrs. Innes, forty years old, was discovered in the sitting room where she had died from her wounds, one of them a blow to the neck. She was Kenya-born, and her husband had come to the country some ten years earlier. Their eleven-year-old girl, Maggie, was in her shorts when the attack occurred; she had run up to her bedroom in terror, where she was followed and met her end.

For the remainder of that day, right into the late evening when in Nakuru’s residential areas doors were fastened and alarms checked, the talk at home and over the phone and with neighbours was about nothing else but the Innes murders. The following day’s Sunday papers brought all the details and important opinions. There was a boxed message from the Governor of Kenya, Sir Evelyn Baring, on the front page and a quote from Mrs. Innes’s father in England. There were calls for the Governor to resign for not being firm on terrorists. Special Branch officers were photographed in the wooded area outside the Innes house. Clara Innes, it was reported, had been an indefatigable community worker, a tireless dogsbody at the RSPCA and the annual flower show.

The Mau Mau are devils, I said, echoing my mother. Her term was “daityas” from mythology. Krishna had slain many daityas, even as a child. Rama had slain the ten-headed Ravana, and Mau Mau were like that wily daitya, changing shapes at will in the forest, impossible to defeat.

Njoroge and I were sitting in the backyard, having finished with our toy spear, bow and arrow, and gun. All were gifts, made for us from wood and string by Njoroge’s grandfather Mwangi. We always took strict turns on who was to be Indian and who cowboy, who cop and who robber. We never played Mau Mau and Special Branch. It was one of those times when, after involved play and play-acting, we sat beside each other and felt close. Perhaps our play provoked questions about our lives that we then felt the need to share but simply couldn’t. I do recall that his being different, in features, in status, was not far from my consciousness. I was also aware that he was more from Africa than I was. He was African, I was Asian. His black skin was matte, his woolly hair impossibly alien. I was smaller, with pointed elvish ears, my skin annoyingly “medium,” as I described it then, neither one (white) nor the other (black).

Yes, said Njoroge, in response to my observation, they are brave devils.

Brave, sure, brave—I said, not to be outdone in bravado—a daylight attack too, and the Europeans carry guns!

It was close to the time of our Sunday family lunch at home, and all my uncles, aunties, and cousins had already gathered, with our dada and dadi. Smells of hot ghee and spices filled the air in the backyards, ginger and garlic and chicken from one house, saffron and onion from another, fresh phulki chappatis and daal from yet another. Lilting melodies and sad lyrics from Saigal, Hemant Kumar, and Talat filled the air, courtesy of KBC’s Hindustani service on the shortwave. One song, a favourite among kids, went,

O darling little children, what do you hold in your fists? In our fists
(sing the beggar children in chorus)
we hold our fates!

Soon the songs would give way to the one o’clock news delivered in depressingly funereal tones. Whatever the news, it always sounded tragic. African music played in some of the servant houses. In one song, in Swahili, the singer lamented being sent to Bulawayo to the diamond mines.

Deepa came running out from our house and hurriedly sat down beside us, on her haunches.

Mrs. Innes was brave, wasn’t she? Deepa must have heard a snatch of our conversation, probably from the French window above our heads.

She died, Njoroge said.

I don’t want to die, Deepa said. I don’t want to be a hundred.

In her mind, at that time, to die meant to reach exactly a hundred years.

Njoroge’s grandfather Mwangi called him from their flat, a neighbour’s servant quarter, and our friend stood up to go. Deepa took a few steps to follow him, then stopped. He turned, smiled, and waved briefly.

Out in the distance, on the spit of land needling the giant lake, Joseph’s gone fishing with two young friends he has found, a girl of ten and a boy of eight from the neighbourhood. If he catches anything large enough he’ll bring it back for the barbecue. Sometimes he shows off to his young friends a few deft moves of soccer, and other kids from the few houses nearby come scampering down to join in the play. It is the boy who reminds me of Annie—the innocence with which he runs his hand up and down Joseph’s arm, for instance, to feel the black skin, is so reminiscent of my friend from long ago. It has occurred to me—how can it not?—that my picture of my past
could well have, like the stories of my grandfather, acquired the patina of nostalgia, become idealized. But then, I have to convince myself, perhaps a greater and conscious discipline and the practice of writing mitigate that danger. I do carry my album of photos with me and my acquired newspaper cuttings and other assorted material, and there is always Deepa to check facts with. Still, what can ultimately withstand the cruel treachery of time, even as one tries to undermine it?

Joseph too has an obsession with the past, that of his people, the Kikuyu. Many peoples in East Africa resisted the European colonization, but they had early on been subdued by the superiority of rifles against arrows and spears. It was the Kikuyu, at least a large section of the tribe, who organized a systematic guerrilla war that struck large terror among the settlers. And it was the Kikuyu who paid the harsh price of British countermeasures and settler rage.

We may need their methods, Joseph says to me once, with a sparkle in his eyes and all the earnestness of his age, speaking of the Mau Mau. Even these days, right now, my people are being oppressed, they are being driven from their homes and butchered. But we will fight back—with guns, not machetes!

He is referring to the recent occurrences of ethnic violence back home, in which the victims have been the Kikuyu of the Nakuru region, whose ancestors were immigrants from across the Aberdares. The youth of his people, he assures me, are now ready to take on their enemies. But the government, as I well know, itself implicated in condoning the ethnic violence, has always been nervous and vigilant about new breeds of militants inspired by those heroes of the past.

Violence and civil war lead nowhere, Joseph, I tell him. Nobody wins. We all lose.

I don’t think I sound convincing. We exchange looks, and turn away from each other to face the lake lying still in the dark.

THREE.

Sunday silence, a ripened equatorial afternoon sated and senseless in the heat, and suddenly an abrupt whine and growl of trucks, and a thunder of many army boots ominous outside, proceeding at a pace in the gullies between the buildings; a halt and a prolonged shuffle sounding like the rains. A woman’s rising query quickly chokes into a brief but painful scream. And then gruff, hectoring African voices call out, pitching venom and terror and rude, electrifying authority, right there, behind the houses, in the backyards.

Kikuyu!

Out, you hyenas!

Hands in the air!

Tokeni nje! Sasa hivi!

All Africans, come out!

And-if-any-of-you-fancies-hiding-away-inside, surely he is my meat…and I will eat his brains and wear his skin.

The last taunt muttered by the sinister Corporal Boniface, a jowly Idi Amin of a man, Grimm giant known to all.

And a theme emergent: a command or two uttered in high-pitched English accents, followed by the murmur of two like voices chatting casually.

Here they come again for the poor Kikuyu, Dada muttered from his armchair, opening his eyes but otherwise not stirring, just as Mother and Papa came hurrying out of their room. Mother looked flushed and soft, deliciously dishevelled, as she always did when she took a nap in the afternoon; she was still arranging her kameez, and I went to stand close to her.

A police raid, looks like, she said irritably. What Mau Mau can they expect to find here in this location?

The police regularly raided the Indian residential areas, expecting to find Mau Mau hiding among the servants.

It’s good they are vigilant, na, Papa replied.

Mahesh Uncle, who had earlier gone to my room to rest, was already out the back door and audible. My parents headed that way, followed by me, and Grandfather reluctantly got up on his feet also to go witness the clamorous proceedings outside. Dadi had gone to the Molabux household three doors down, to visit her friend Sakina-dadi, as she always did after the Sunday family meal.

She must be asleep, Mother answered when Papa inquired about Deepa. Let her be.

Outside, in our backyard, Njoroge stood wide-eyed, looking lost and nervous, a hare petrified before the hounds, praying for the earth to swallow him up right there under his feet, or my family to somehow do something for him.

Hide somewhere quickly, child, Mahesh Uncle admonished just as a European police inspector started coming toward us, in the company of an askari.