The In-Between World of Vikram Lall (41 page)

Paul scoffed at my reservations: He is our father. If you think your uncle has been treated unfairly, you should tell him. He expects that. Give him a chance to do something for you. He will like that.

I wrote a long and careful letter to Mzee. Your Excellency may not be aware, I wrote, that my family’s service to the nation did not begin with me. I informed him that my grandfather had worked on the construction of the railways. I described my uncle’s activities, first in India with the Congress during the independence struggle there, and later in Nakuru, supporting the freedom fighters. He had married the daughter of a nationalist lawyer who had defended many Kenyan nationalists in their fight for independence, including some members of the present cabinet. Surely such a man deserved better treatment from the country of his adoption where the rest of his family had deep roots?

Within days I was summoned to the State House, and spent an hour sweating in the VIP reception room. This was my second visit to see the President here, though I had met him at a few public functions by now.

Finally I was escorted to the small annex outside his
office, where the bald giant Sam Karimi sat at the little table, with a pad, a pencil, a newspaper, and a phone, his upper body rising up like a tower behind it; Karimi stood up and opened the President’s door for me. The door shut behind me and Mzee himself stood up, from a couch at the far end where he had apparently been relaxing with a sheaf of papers. He was in a short-sleeved bush shirt that day, and he shuffled a few small steps in his sandals—his gout often bothered him—breathing heavily with the effort.

How are you, Awaa, I said and went towards him in alarm. There were rumours that he had a heart condition too.

Ndimwega, he replied softly, I am well for an old goat. And you?—you look well too.

He eyed me, put his hand on my arm, pumped it; he had a firm grip this way, though when he shook hands, I had noticed the previous time, it was rather soft. He held my letter in his other hand.

You have a shida, and you have written to me, he said.

Yes, my father—

Is this how you speak to your father, he growled, like this—eti with a letter? Na cheti kama hicho—
Excellencee
! he scorned, brandishing the letter with contempt.

I’m sorry, my father, I was embarrassed. Niliona haya, I said in the Swahili I had learned in Tanzania.

Nyinyi wahindi wenye adabu, kwa kweli, lakini…. You Indians are brought up well, but a letter is not the way. But now—sasa—it is done. Go. Tell your uncle to get on the plane and not do foolish things here in Kenya. Look what his friend Double-O has done to our Kenya.

How could one not think of this as sheer munificence—at least for the times and the mores involved? He was like a father, and his faults, his reputed acquisitiveness, his quirks we—those of us who loved him—saw as those belonging to a father and an elder. Yet he had been seen by the colonial government as having directed killers, having inspired and encouraged the butchery of hundreds if not thousands, and there were those who had
loved him in the past but now called him a partly senile but ruthless dictator who would stop at nothing—including giving the nod to the assassination of Pio Pinto, a Marxist activist, and of the popular politician Tom Mboya. It was whispered that he was so afraid of losing power that he had resorted to calling for secret oaths of allegiance from his Kikuyu compatriots; busloads of people apparently had been taken to his home in Gatundu to swear allegiance.

But that day it was I who initiated the oath: I promise he will not do anything foolish, I said, and I added, I swear I will always keep your trust, Mzee.

I bowed my head, and he gave me his hand to accept my oath of allegiance.

What drove me to make that strong gesture? It was the power and charisma of the man and my willingness to serve him. I wanted to come closer to him. That moment I was totally under his spell. I fear I could have done anything for him.

Somewhat embarrassed and with apologies, I brought out three photographs of him and a copy of his famous book on the Kikuyu people, which Shobha had asked me to have autographed. He obliged with a laugh, just as Sam Karimi opened the door to escort me out.

So, what gift did you take for our father? asked Nderi a few days later in the office. It’s our custom, isn’t it yours?

Yes, but—

It had never occurred to me to take a gift for the President. Evidently I had blundered in the matter of a simple protocol. Red-faced, I promised my boss I would send something. But what does one give the Father of the Nation? I hit upon the idea of a diamond-and-gold jewellery set from my in-laws’ shop.

My in-laws, businessmen to their nail-tips, wouldn’t hear of payment for the exorbitantly expensive set, thus compensating me for the advice they constantly sought from me and my influence in government, which they might use yet. I took the present to the State House, where I asked to see Karimi, who came out and took it from me with a perfunctory nod. A
few days later I received a card of thanks, saying, In appreciation for your services, and signed Jomo Kenyatta, which was mounted, framed in gilt, and hung prominently in our living room by my wife.

I have taken you from that…that railway office, said Paul contemptuously, to the corridors of power and the sanctum sanctorum of this nation. You should be thankful to me.

I am, I said. What do you want me to do?

Was he expecting a gift?

No, no, no, don’t give me diamonds, he scoffed, reading my mind.

You are welcome to go to my in-laws, I said, you know they’ll give you a handsome discount for any purchase.

Because they will be shitting in their pants worrying I will have their licences revoked. But I believe I will buy a present for Mrs. Nderi from them, one is overdue, I think. Yes, a present is definitely overdue to the wife…

Presents were moving around in Nairobi like offerings, redeeming sins and buying indulgences.

Shobha: You were seen in the company of a white woman downtown.

What do you mean,
I was seen
. I am seen with all kinds of people, that’s my job.

You were seen entering the Hotel 680—

Where Paul Nderi the minister was waiting for me—

And you came out
four hours later
! My brother saw you!

As I saw him. Paul was there with me—

Your Paul Nderi gave a lecture this afternoon at the Lumumba Institute, where he was booed again by the students…So you feel the need to seek sexual comforts from white prostitutes—

That woman is not a prostitute, I retorted. And very uncharacteristically I muttered a crudity about my wife’s sexual reticence, to which she replied very archly another crudity that I would never have believed of her. We never
resorted to such language again. And we never touched in bed after that.

No doubt Sophia was a hooker, though of an expensive and exclusive (I flatter myself) variety. She had come to me in the first instance, two years before, as an offer of a bribe, but I didn’t know that then. In the months in which we saw each other again, I did pay for many of her expenses. But we had something magical between us, as we had already recognized two years before: we could talk, and we could laugh together. She liked to sing when she took a bath in the hotel room I rented for her, from Italian opera or something utterly frivolous like “Che sera sera” or “Never on Sunday.” She told me about herself—her family’s small farm in a village outside of Naples, her brothers and sisters, her schooling, her job as hostess with Alitalia, which she had obtained when a bunch of girls from her class had sent their photos to the company offices. She had been taken off the Rome-Nairobi route soon after we broke up, and was now very happy to be back—in Africa, with me. She had liked Boston, where she had flown to in the last year, and Montreal. Her father had fought in Ethiopia with Mussolini’s army, been captured by the British, and become a POW in Kenya, building roads and working on a pyrethrum farm. He had told her many stories of the beautiful wild country where he had spent two years as a prisoner of the British.

More than the sex—which came near the end of our meetings, and was brief but satisfying—there was our friendship. There were entire weeks when I did not see her because her route had suddenly changed; I would receive the odd postcard from her (“But what am I doing in Benghazi?” “Cape Town—how beautiful but sad.”) in my office, to let me know that she had not forgotten me. Then she would reappear. Shobha and I did not talk about this affair following our argument. I was discreet, and my family life remained unchanged.

One weekend afternoon as I was searching through my socks drawer I discovered that the old chocolate box which
contained some of my memorabilia had been gone through. There was no photo of Annie inside—that small iron frame with the picture of me and her, play-acting Rama and Sita one Diwali week in the car park of the shopping centre in Nakuru, was missing. In despair I looked everywhere I could think of where I might have placed it, but to no avail. I was certain Shobha had taken it. This was her way of wounding me. She walked in while I was frantically searching, met my eye, pointedly said nothing. How had she known what that photo in the box meant to me, had I inadvertently revealed that? Or had my mother or my sister talked about my childhood hurt and obsession? The thought that I would never look on that face again profoundly saddened me. I was a grown man with a wife and family, whose safety and well-being were my constant concerns; I had a mistress; and yet it seemed to me that the cruelest thing had been done to me in the wilfull removal of that childhood picture from my private box.

I rather liked my wife, and there were moments when I loved her, for her silky, singsong Gujarati voice, and her kind ministrations, and her brilliance. Love takes many forms, and I have confessed to no passion. I don’t think she disliked or hated me either; there was an element of condescension perhaps, for the fact that I was a mere middleman, a dalal as she called it, an agent of others. But she believed in the sanctity of the family and the home, which remained a contented one. There were outings with our children Ami and Sita, there were the large extended family gatherings on Sundays, there were the films.

Mahesh Uncle arrived with his family amid much fanfare and emotion. As soon as he came off the steps from the airplane, wearing a white kurta-pyjama, he threw three kisses into the air, in three directions, and went down on his knees and kissed the ground. Airport workers and fellow passengers watched him in amazement, no doubt taking him for an Indian guru. Obviously he had lost none of his dramatic flair. Papa mut
tered, That is our Mahesh Bhaiya all right. Mahesh Uncle had always kept him on edge, and now here he was again. But Papa had also admitted a few times to missing my uncle. The two families, ours and his in-laws’, had been allowed the privilege to stand on the tarmac to watch the arrival. Uncle with his family got on the shuttle bus, which zipped over the short distance and brought them among us. There were shouts and cries of joy. Deepa’s two children ran out and put garlands round Uncle and his wife; tears were shed; a shower of rice was thrown, and ladoos were handed out. It was around noon, and the sun was pleasantly hot. It was five years since Mahesh Uncle had left from this same airport, and the years had altered him. He was fat, and his beard had turned partly grey. We shook hands and he gave me a long and large hug. You’re a big man now, Vic—I understand you arranged all this within a day? Not quite, I told him. He spoke more slowly than before, his entire manner seemed more composed and deliberate. He was preoccupied with his family.

This visit, however, was not a permanent return. When Mother joyously cabled him that he was now free to return to Kenya, he had sent his reply: Wonderful! But then he wrote a long letter saying that much had changed, and he realized there was little he could do in Kenya now; he was not sure if his children would be able to adjust to another move. They had become Indians. It would be best if he brought his family for a visit first. And here they were, overjoyed but uncertain. The country had changed and not only had Uncle been warned not to get involved with Okello, Okello himself did not seem to have use for him. There was nobody from Okello’s office to greet him at the airport, though there was a face lurking in the background that definitely bore the look of Special Branch.

Mahesh Uncle decided he could not return to live in Kenya. His departure with his family, after a festive and hectic three weeks, during which none of us slept much, was as emotional as the arrival had been. In all those days the two of us never found an intimate moment together. It seemed to me
that in the swirl of his domesticity, his sansaar as he called it jocularly, he had found a certain happiness, in which the past had no place.

But once, there was a fleeting, embarrassed exchange of looks between us, when something got uttered at one of those noisy gatherings…and it was that past, I figure, unable to resist sending its unhappy signal from its subterranean home.

You see, Paul Nderi derided me when he learnt of my uncle’s return to India, you people have your feet planted in both countries, and when one place gets too hot for you, you flee to the other.

I felt provoked enough to retort,

Wasn’t my uncle denied entry to Kenya even when his wife’s family had been in the country eighty years, and didn’t he plead for years for a permit? It’s rather that “we people,” as you call us, don’t have a place anywhere, not even where we call home.

This was one of the few times I let my anger get the better of me. But Paul had only mouthed a sentiment common to many of our politicians, that Asians did not really belong, they were inherently disloyal. Such statements we had learned to grin and bear, the occasional but inevitable ill wind.

Hmm, Paul said, taken aback at my outburst. You do make a point, Vikram Lall…though I’m not sure it’s the same point your Asian brothers would make.

Mahesh Uncle went back to his job as principal of a private school in a hill station outside of Delhi. I never saw him again.