The In-Between World of Vikram Lall (52 page)

Have you seen him?

Yes, and he’s all right. Roughed up a bit, but what do you expect in detention. They like to use the water hose there, and starvation. His activities in Canada are known to the Special Branch, they want to find out what these MuKenya Patriots are up to in foreign parts—

Can you get him out?

Yes, provided he agrees to stay out of the country for a few years; though the price of freedom, Vic, is steep. A lot of cash. Green.

I’ll pay you the dollars, in cash. But is he agreed to the condition not to return? Does he know it’s I who am springing him?

Yes, and no. For the present he knows that it is his mother who is bailing him out, with the help of friends and family. A few nights of detention and interrogation under water torture have convinced him he doesn’t want to return in a hurry. Did you know his girlfriend was killed in riots last year?

No, I did not know that.

A fleeting image comes to mind, the two of us sharing that house by the lake.

In the middle of the night—we have gone to bed after sitting around the fire telling proverbs—Janice lets out a sharp short scream. A heart-stopping terrifying scream in the still night, as if a small animal has been suddenly caught by a cruel predator and is now in the silence that follows being torn to pieces. The next morning, while Mungai and I sit in the backyard having tea with bread, he confides that Janice has been having nightmares for about a year now. Sometimes sitting by herself she will start to cry. It’s when she remembers her family, he says. Your presence and our talking together brought back memories. Once this happened after she picked up a foreign newspaper that chanced to be flying in the wind right here in this place; how the newspaper came here is a wonder. She had a few troubled nights then.

Have her relations with you altered, I ask.

No, he replies, it’s just that her past life continues to haunt her. It will not be easy to leave those graves behind, but what can be done?

We find ourselves staring at the graves. A full-length one and two small ones. They have been covered with small shards of stone, carefully laid; and I notice something very strange: upon the stone blankets of the smaller graves have been placed a few random-looking objects—a couple of carved animals, a plastic ball, a police whistle…

Mungai says, We care for each other very much.

She happens to be passing by, on her way to throw out old water from a can, and she says, mutters, Yes, that we do.

She is a diffident woman, very British, but of a previous generation. She reminds me of some teachers I had who also never went back home to England.

Five days after my arrival, in the morning we drive to Sarotich, where they visit the market and post office, and I
take my leave and head back to the bustling sansara of Nairobi with a heavy heart.

Craters cover the wounded lawless roads of Eastleigh, once the main Indian quarter of the city, and cars, buses, trucks, and pushcarts negotiate them painstakingly, riskily, one by one. Multitudes swarm these dusty streets, turned out in jeans and shirts, full-length veils with eye slits, head-and-shoulder scarves, long white kanzus and embroidered kofias. Sidewalk stalls add a dizzy brilliance of colour, selling everything from televisions to perfumes and toiletries, clothes and jewellery, furniture and mattresses; tall wooden frames loiter precariously at the street corners, like jugglers on stilts, tossing up in the air every variety and colour of track shoe; qat and bhang and Kalashnikovs too, says the lore, have sellers at this market clamouring with chatter, car horns, and music. In the quieter sidestreets, hair salons vie with bars and tire shops for space and attention. I remember staying with relatives a long time ago as a child of eight, in one of these houses that’s now a bar and perhaps a brothel, and in later years coming with my father to collect rents for his Asian clients. This is a different country now, an alien planet, and the first language is not Punjabi but Somali. It is here that I have come to hide next.

I park the car inside the wide-open gate of an old apartment complex, in a gravelled greenless yard in which a few kids are at play among a couple of broken-down cars. They watch me with curiosity as I look around for a while, discover the staircase at the side of the leftmost building, and slowly go up. There is a screened partition halfway up at a landing, with a door, which I enter to see yet another door, to my right, opening into an apartment rich with the aroma of fresh garlicky chicken pilau. The landing floor is being scrubbed by a cleaning girl and two large cockroaches lie on their backs. I knock
gently on the door and an African woman carrying a child bids me in. Is Ebrahim here? I ask. He’s praying, she says and takes me to an old-style sitting room with gleaming linoleum on the floor, a prominent TV on a table, two armchairs with white knitted lace on the headrests, and a bed. The woman, who is Ebrahim’s wife, turns the TV on for me and leaves the room. A children’s quiz show is on. Soon Ebrahim arrives, a broad, clean-shaven, medium-height Mombasa Arab, with a young bearded cousin in tow. He is friendly in a quiet way and has been expecting me as Victor De Souza. We shake hands, and immediately he invites me to have lunch; in such a household hospitality is not spurned, and bashfully I allow myself two helpings of pilau with kachumbar. The talk at the table is about public safety, the economy, and religion. After the meal, Ebrahim walks me to the apartment he has reserved for my use, a block away, above a shopping centre called the Mogadishu Mall.

The mall has been constructed, using lumber, as an extension and modification of a traditional Nairobi Indian dwelling once occupied by several families. We go past a sweet-smelling hallway full of young and old Somali women selling eastern perfume, into a maze of narrow passageways lined with all sorts of shops and sounding with at least three kinds of music, at the end of which is a staircase leading up to several apartments. The flat allocated to me belongs to one of Ebrahim’s younger brothers; it is exactly at the head of the stairs and consists of two rooms. A window looks out at the noisy street below.

Ebrahim and his brothers are clients of Sohrabji, who represents them in a dispute with a car dealership that happens to be owned by a government minister. Ebrahim says he hopes that after this favour Sohrabji will be induced to hasten his case somewhat; it’s been dragging on for a couple of years at least. I sympathize. He walks to the door and hollers down the stairs. A lanky youth from an electronics stall downstairs comes up. He is Salim, the brother who owns
the apartment. Ebrahim instructs Salim to look after all my needs. Salim bows and shakes hands with me, then the brothers depart, leaving me to myself.

Vic, Vikram my friend, says Sohrabji warmly, how nice to see you after such a long time. He takes my hand and squeezes it. Listen, I would like to take you—when all this is over—to a sensational new Ethiopian restaurant in Hurlingham, a veritable treasure that brings an absolutely original addition to this city’s cuisine…

And I am thinking there is no one as soft-spoken in Nairobi as this Parsee who looks like Mahatma Gandhi but eats and drinks like Falstaff.

He has come to see me at the apartment above the Mogadishu Mall, my first afternoon here. Salim has kindly brought up two teas for us and we sit beside the window facing each other, the clamour from the street down below audible in all its glory.

A far cry from Hilton, eh, Sohrabji says with a naughty smile, putting his cup to his mouth, but you can hide here till doomsday and no one would know. You know my own place is open to you, only it is watched all the time.

He looks anxious for a moment.

Don’t worry, Sohrabji, this is fine here. I am grateful.

He nods, gratified, and says, Joseph is out, and he will be on his way to Toronto in a couple of days. His mother thanks you, and she says one day he will know what you did for him.

His father was the only true friend I had, I tell him.

But did you have to come all the way to Nairobi only for this, Vic?

Sohrabji, I told you to sound out the Anti-Corruption people—

He smiles sheepishly, says,

That I am doing, though I don’t know why you want to bother. You should have stayed out there in the West. In any case, I have spoken to a couple of people already. As I
understand it—and tell me where I’m wrong—you are willing to meet with the Commission and answer questions about some of your business dealings, specifically those related to the so-called Gemstone Scandal. As a goodwill gesture you will dispose of most of your wealth, part to the Commission and part to an approved foundation—and I assume you will keep enough for yourself and also to pay my fees. You have done things unethical but not illegal, and these were done with the approval of public servants. For your troubles you would like the Commission to declare publicly that it has no case against you.

You think they’ll buy that?

One can only hope. It’s a brilliant plan, but. You were the perfect scapegoat, an Indian without a constituency, whom they could hold up and display to the World Bank and the Donors as the crafty alien corruptor of our country. But they never expected you to talk. They cannot charge you without also charging an army of public servants and friends of government. If they prepare indictments, the evidence will disappear. And where do they start with indictments, corruption in this country goes back thirty years, reaches the very top, and even into the ranks of the opposition. Already there are whispers of a truth and reconciliation commission after the next elections—so we can start anew in this beautiful country that’s been run off the tracks.

And you spoke to the businessmen? To Nderi?

To Nderi, yes, and a few others. There’s the rub, Vic. They are scared of being made scapegoats like you, for a condition that’s rampant. I’ve told them they have nothing to fear from you, you are going to focus only on Gemstone, as the Commission requested, about which it knows enough already. I believe they’ll call off the goons; they feel safer with you here, amongst them. They do respect you—you are one of them after all.

From somewhere close by comes a call to prayer—a long, wavering arc of sound rising above the rooftops, a reminder to
the faithful, a call to the Almighty. We find ourselves staring at each other, lost within the spell. How insignificant we seem at this moment, a shady businessman with his clever lawyer, in this hideaway reeking of paint and wood and youthful sweat.

At length, as the call subsides, Sohrabji smiles at me and says: Well.

I follow him downstairs to the street and we walk along the sidewalk market awhile. He pauses at a few places to inspect the goods, reading out designers’ names for my benefit, bargaining with the vendors though not prepared to buy.

You know, he tells me, there are things you can buy here that you would not find downtown or in any of the fancy new malls you see going up in the suburbs. Stuff comes here all the way from the Persian Gulf, by ship and camel, road and railway. My daughter Roshnie will shop only at these stalls—they come here, the teenagers, though it’s not really safe. Do you know, Ebrahim was carjacked only last month? They took him along with them on a spree of robberies, then left him tied to a tree in the woods near Ngong. He was lucky.

Sohrabji takes my cellphone, which I have hardly used, and gives me another, a brand new one, as a precaution. Then he leaves.

It is impossible to believe that the bustling street down below could empty, but it did so, in the course of the night; now dawn’s dull shadows emerge wraithlike from the walls. There comes the muffled chatter of the day’s first newscast over the radio, perhaps from the restaurant down the block; then the sound of a child crying; the smell of fresh bread. The room feels claustrophobic, and there are bedbugs in the mattress, so I have slept only fitfully. I wish Deepa would call, or Seema. But Seema wouldn’t, we parted with a finality that was absolute. She was bitter. The thought of her brings memories of that house by the lake: the pure, cool air, the clear night sky. I wonder if Papa has my new number. I had told him not to call except in an emergency.

I wonder, not for the first time, if I made the right decision, returning. By all the measures of practical common sense that I can summon, it was a foolish decision. But I could not have lived out the rest of my days an escapee from my world. I had to come back and face it—though I still await to emerge safely from this weird underground. Meanwhile I have prevailed upon Sohrabji to act for Joseph, and that has been a good outcome, surely. Ultimately I will have my say; and I will make my peace with my world.

The muezzin’s call to prayer, then the street begins to fill up, the bustle rises to a crescendo and, to paraphrase the idols of my youth, I feel fine. A refreshing morning scene: children in uniforms traipsing off to school. I recall that Saint Teresa’s is here, and the former Indian Primary School. Salim informs me there is a restaurant on a sidestreet a couple of blocks away that is owned by a Somali who returned from Canada. I tell him I will go there later perhaps, but meanwhile I have breakfast at a tea kiosk. For a lark I get a haircut at one of the beauty salons, then, carried away, I buy a kanzu and kofia and wear them like a devout Muslim. I don’t know what is happening to me. In the evening Ebrahim takes me to his home for dinner. We eat by ourselves, the two of us, and the fare is mutton curry, Swahili chappati and rice. Ebrahim tells me that his wife is actually a Luo and theirs was a love marriage. He runs a charitable organization that sends teachers to the north of the country; he also collects sponsorships for the slaughter of goats during Eid. I don’t fancy sponsoring the slaughter of a goat but I tell him I will donate to his charity. We watch TV until late and then he walks me back to my apartment. On the way he says to me casually, How did you manage to fool the National Bank like that? I stare at him, startled, and he says, I know who you are, Vikram Lall of the Gemstone Scandal. But don’t worry, I will not give you away.