Dance of the Jakaranda

by Peter Kimani

  Eventually exhausted by his fruitless search, Rajan returned to his routine at the Jakaranda of drinking and eating and performing.

  The Jakaranda wasn’t just home to Rajan’s personal melodrama; the atmosphere of the hotel was also spiced up by the butcher Gathenji’s own spectacle—his tools of trade a sharp cleaver, acerbic wit, and swift feet, which were unfailingly thrust in ill-fitting flip-flops, the big toes nosing the ground for any trouble. Picture the man in what was once a white dust coat faded brown with oil and dirt, a fleshy face grinning at an impatient customer, one hand caressing the carcass, the other gently tearing the strips of flesh as though it hurt the animal to cut it up.

  “Choma, chemsha, au tumbukiza?” Gathenji would ask, pausing to look at the customer. “My friend,” he would continue, “let me tell you, undo kwo undo. If you want this for a roast then you need a little fat. Just a little fat to help it sizzle,” he would explain, the knife slicing through a hump the color of bad milk. He would meticulously gather the meat and the chops of hump and drop them on the scale with the violence of Moses crashing the clay tablets on Mount Sinai. The scale would perform a jerky dance before the meter rested on the exact weight requested. Gathenji would tap the metal lid to ensure the weights were right, then flash a toothy grin at the waiting customer. “Sawa sawa?” he would ask, piercing a metal rod through the pieces of meat, rolling them into a parcel before throwing it over his shoulder so that the bundle landed on the kitchen table with a soft thud. “Hiyo ni choma!” he would then shout, indicating that the meat was for roasting.

  “How do you manage such accuracy?” a puzzled customer would pose, while handing Gathenji the money.

  “My friend, let me tell you. Undo kwo undo. One by one. I’m the meat master,” Gathenji would reply with a hint of pride as he retrieved the change—the hundred-shilling notes in the right breast pocket, fifties in the left, the mashilingi in the left side of his trousers, the twenties in the right. All other big notes were stashed deep inside Gathenji’s layers of clothes, in a pocket sewn in his coat that he called kabangue, which meant he would rather die than part with its contents.

  As the meat roasted, Gathenji would march around to different customers, complete with his chef’s hat, like an admiral inspecting a guard of honor, and gently place a chopping board bearing sizzling meat on the table to placate some enraged customer who had been waiting for hours.

  “This is kionjo. Just to whet the appetite as the meat cooks,” he would say. Hungry patrons would grab the pieces faster than they were cut, and praise the butcher for a great job. And wait.

  But when the meat they’d ordered was done, bewildered revelers would form a line at the butchery demanding their pound of flesh, for Gathenji seldom sold them the requested weights. Since the area was generally poorly lit, and drunks often dimmed their eyes as alcohol took effect, none of them ever noticed the thin, colorless string attached to the scales. No one ever wondered why Gathenji always wore flip-flops, which allowed easy pull of the string using his toes. Those who had been shortchanged threatened not just to go after Gathenji’s kabangue but his throat as well. More often than not, the disputes tended to boil over and spill onto the music stage, ending in a fragile truce that would hold until Gathenji delivered the entrails, the only conciliatory dish available, but itself a subject of constant conflict.

  “This offal is not equivalent to the meat you stole from us,” someone charged one evening.

  “Who said I stole meat from anyone?” Gathenji demanded, meat cleaver in hand, the naked lightbulb dancing above his head. There was a tense silence. Someone coughed nervously. Gathenji relaxed and dropped the cleaver and walked clumsily toward the complaining party, his large belly protruding, the flaps of his dust coat swishing like a duck’s tail.

  “One of these days, we are going to roast that belly of yours,” someone declared, eliciting laughter.

  “It would roast well in its own fat,” another remarked.

  “My friend, let me tell you. Undo kwo undo. The Bible says one eats where one works. I eat from the sweat of my brow. We have a saying that when someone is full, he should cover his stomach. But if there is a hungry man, that I shall feed.”

  “So what happened to our meat?” the voice that had accused Gathenji of theft insisted.

  “My friend, let me tell you. Undo kwo undo,” Gathenji returned confidently. “Did you not hear of the fool who quarreled with the fire for consuming his meat? Or do you think fire eats vines and mikengeria?”

  “Wee, barman, give Gathenji a Tusker,” someone shouted. “Give him a drink. He has spoken like ten elders!”

  And so, this type of dispute over meat and offal would be resolved with glasses of beer followed by: “Waiter, give us another round. And don’t let Gathenji thirst. Hey, Gathenji, give us another kilo and a half. And don’t let too much heat eat away the juicy parts. Give it some bones too!”

  From his counter, Gathenji would shout: “Hey! Let the Indian Raj play us some music to seal the deal!” Era and Rajan and the rest of the band would have no choice but to oblige.

  Such distractions kept Rajan’s mind off the kissing stranger, and his angst subsided; he quietly wondered if it was the revelers’ ability to endure that allowed them to bear his musical privations. But he still felt, without being able to explain it, that the kissing stranger knew him. That’s why she had kissed him in that dark corridor. And even after he’d given up searching, he could not forget her.

  Then one day she returned. Just like that. Rajan was onstage at the Jakaranda, stretching out a hand to fish a pretty girl from the audience, when he detected the unmistakable sweet, spicy perfume. Like a bee drawn to a flowering plant, he leaped offstage and strode over to the table where he believed the scent was wafting from. He found himself standing within a foot of a stunning young woman. Even in the waning light, she was quite a presence. She sat ramrod straight, with long, lush black hair that reached her waist. When she rose to greet Rajan, he saw how her tiny waist supported massive hips, or as Gathenji the butcher liked to say, she carried her hips and her neighbors’. And when she moved, no matter how gently, her erect breasts shook lightly; her skin appeared to change from brown to white and back, as the oscillating lights did their dance around her.

  3

  In 1902, shortly after Master’s Monument to Love had been built, Sally did make a trip to Nakuru, and experienced firsthand how the town got its name. As she hoisted a leg up to board the carriage which had been sent to fetch her, a cheeky whirlwind, ngoma cia aka—or the female demons, as locals called it—picked up pace and swished her skirt this way and that, before knocking her hat off. When Sally bent to pick up the hat, the wind blew her long, flared skirt up and over her head, exposing her hindquarters that resembled a Maasai goat’s—if you ignored the cream drawers that resembled her light skin.

  The African servants who had been sent to fetch her had the good sense to flee for dear life, fearing they might somehow be implicated in the ignominy. While they may not have conspired with nature to embarrass the English woman, seeing her nakedness carried with it a tinge of violation. After all, muthungu and God were one and the same. That’s the story locals liked sharing while devouring mounds of food, although the connection between the whirlwind and Sally’s naked truth and her rejection of Master, as most still called McDonald, was never quite stated outright.

  But in a land where myth and history often intersected, what happened to the woman of England is uncertain. What’s more certain is that McDonald vowed he would never speak to another woman after Sally rejected him—for the second time.

  * * *

  The first time Sally left McDonald was preceded by a confrontation in South Africa, his last station before his British East Africa Protectorate posting. It was early morning. He had returned home unannounced to retrieve a diary he had forgotten. He had left Sally in bed, perhaps staring into space, picking her nose, or doing those things that most housewives did before they could summon up
their energies to rise and face another day.

  For Sally, there was nothing to face, save for the sun that she shielded herself from by wearing a sombrero as she cut flowers from her lawns maintained by a full-time gardener, hands gloved against the prick of rosebush thorns. One could tell the progress of Sally’s day from the trail of cups. The cup beside the bed was for the early-morning tea, taken in her nightdress, feet thrust in frog-shaped warmers, while leafing through a magazine bearing big images of thoroughbred dogs. The cup by the window was for the ten o’clock tea, consumed behind dark glasses or drawn curtains while admiring Table Mountain. The cup at the dining table was for the prelunch drink, consumed with a slice of lightly buttered whole wheat bread. The jar of butter was a locus of vicious warfare between Sally and McDonald: he liked the butter surface smooth and gentle; she liked to use the blunt edge of the knife, leaving ugly marks. To McDonald, this reflected the tangled mess of Sally’s life that he was fated to deal with. Smoothing out the butter became one of the many chores in his daily routine.

  The cup by the balcony was for four o’clock tea, taken with biscuits or fruit. This trail of teacups wouldn’t be collected by their servant until Sally went out for her evening walk because she did not like her solitude to be interrupted. Solitude was the reason she gave for postponing motherhood.

  “I can’t handle children,” she said earnestly. “Running noses and wet bums I can, but not the cries from toothless gums.”

  McDonald had long taken note of the trail of cups but voiced no concern. Like the wise soldier he considered himself to be, he had learned to pick his battles wisely. So on that fateful morning, afraid to disturb Sally’s peace, he sneaked quietly into the house to collect his diary. He was tiptoeing out when he heard a moan from the bedroom. He paused and cocked his head. He heard another moan. It sounded like pleasure, and he doubted that Sally could have derived that from the big-eared thoroughbreds in her magazines. He made his way to the bedroom door, silently opened it, and entered. Sally’s face was not burrowed in some magazine as he suspected; actually, he couldn’t even see her face—the view was blocked by the back of a head he found eerily familiar.

  He could see that it was a man’s neck, sinewy from his present labors and engaged enough in his task at hand not to sense McDonald’s presence. McDonald realized it was his black gardener; he had seen the man strike a similar pose as he worked—fondling soil to pick out a weed or pruning the bushes. Now he devoted similar attention to this chore, and for a while, neither the man nor Sally noticed McDonald. When Sally finally did, and screamed, the black man thought she was screaming because of something he had done, so he continued on. It was only when McDonald dropped his diary, his trembling hands unable to hold anything, that the man realized the intrusion. Where does a man hit another to inflict the most pain, without injuring one’s ego that the invader’s very presence under his roof seeks to quash? McDonald appeared hypnotized by the puzzle, much the same way vermin are dazzled by the sudden burst of light when emerging from a crack in the furniture. McDonald’s soldierly instinct was to cut off the offending organ, but he had no idea what he’d do with it. A soldier had to envision a whole operation before setting forth. Should he throw it to the dogs? Keep it as a memento? He didn’t even have a weapon in hand. Perhaps he could use his teeth, but that would intimate a certain rage. He wasn’t a savage. Yet.

  He obviously did not approve of the man’s presence in his bed, but his training taught him to keep emotions out of his work. That’s why guns had been invented—to create distance between assailants and their victims. He tried to catch a leg, but the man was as slippery as a fish. He noted how feminine the man’s shin felt, bereft of hair or scars. McDonald was determined to leave a lasting mark.

  He dashed out of the bedroom to retrieve a weapon from his bag in the sitting room, but quickly remembered it was in his rickshaw waiting outside. He was losing crucial time, so he sprinted back to the bedroom, only to find that the man had disappeared out the window. Sally had gathered herself and was sitting on the edge of the bed, downcast.

  For several long moments, he glared at her, trembling with anger as well as the fear of what he was contemplating. He slapped Sally once, and being a soldierly slap, it left a buzzing sound in her ear.

  When he was confounded, as he was then, words utterly failed him. And when he finally spoke, it was neither a personal rebuke nor a remonstration. “Even if you have to do these things, don’t you want to be respectful of the law?” McDonald glared, before walking away. It was a useful reminder that under the apartheid laws in South Africa, miscegenation was outlawed, so Indians, blacks, whites, and coloreds were prohibited from mating outside their own races. While the statement conveyed McDonald’s allegiance to the law, it was also his way of saying: You can do what you want to do, but surely not with blacks.

  The incident was not discussed any further; they were giving each other what Nakuru folks liked to call “nil by mouth.” Neither uttered a word to the other, McDonald humiliated into silence because there was no way he could broach the topic without raising doubts about his abilities as a man. After all, his wife had not been caught stealing food or clothing; she had steered her servant, her black servant, away from the flower beds to her own bed, to perform a role that McDonald had either failed to do or had not performed to her satisfaction. Sally, on her part, remained silent because she had lost hearing in one ear and was too upset to talk anyway.

  So McDonald had seen his posting in the new colony of British East Africa as an escape from personal turmoil and humiliation. Perhaps he and Sally would even have another shot at their troubled marriage.

  I shall be the lieutenant of the entire province, he had written to her. With a dozen servants at my disposal so even when I cough, one is likely to check if I had called for him . . .

  Sally’s response had been terse: Even if you were the governor, I’m not going anywhere with you, now or in the future.

  Sally, whose rich background and royal roots had been a permanent source of ridicule from McDonald’s peers, said she would remain in England for the rest of her life. He then prevailed upon her not to file for divorce—to give them a bit of time to review things.

  McDonald then resolved to do what he knew best: work hard and earn a decoration for his service to Great Britain. Sally would be proud of him, he mused to himself, perhaps she’d even harken his word. If he was knighted, he would be a man of title, just like her father. That’s what motivated him to go to East Africa—to head the project that even his bosses in London admitted was a little insane. Its London architects called it the Lunatic Express, wondering where the rail would start and where it would end, for nothing of value was to be found in the African wilds. But it had to be done, and McDonald had fully committed himself to the idea that the construction of a railroad across the African hinterland was his route to self-affirmation and validation. But soon after he arrived in the marshes that grew into Nakuru town, few locals believed he was anything but completely nuts.

  * * *

  Ian Edward McDonald’s Years of Solitude—as his four-year seclusion came to be known in Nakuru lore—far surpassed the few hours that Reverend Turnbull was reportedly in the belly of the iron beast, and, if one were to allow his mythical parallel, the three days Jonah spent in the belly of the whale. And even the forty days and nights that Jesus spent in the wilderness. But where myth and history often intersect, and the past often collides with the present, it is imperative to clarify the circumstances surrounding McDonald’s house and Sally, the woman for whom it was built. For one cannot talk about the Indian singer Rajan, the love slave, without talking about the original ngombo ya wendo, since the two narratives both start and end at the place: the house that McDonald built—set between a hot spring and a cool lake—which ultimately became a site of unseemly arguments and simmering loves. To absorb the full story, one must turn back the hands of time and think about the dry savanna where only stunted acacia stands, their spiky h
ands thrown up in surrender against the harsh sun. That was McDonald’s inheritance of loss, the bittersweet consolation for the coveted peerage from the Queen of England that had fallen through the bureaucratic cracks between London and its colonial outpost of Mombasa.

  So, as was typical of McDonald, he ignored any signs to the contrary and continued dreaming that another future was possible for him and Sally. He saw the virgin territory and trembled with lust. He would conquer nature and assert his control, make something out of it for himself and, in the process, leave his mark on the world. He had been to different territories in the colony where locals had adopted names of missionaries who had ventured there, and remembering them, he felt a clog in his throat, for long after those men of God were gone, memories of their life would linger. There was Kabarnet, named for Reverend Barnett who had pitched a tent in Nandiland. Or one could point at Kirigiti in Kikuyuland, where the Brits’ love for cricket had earned them immortality in the name of the place.

  Above all else, McDonald wanted to please Sally, estranged from him since the incident in South Africa, and for the entire duration of the railway construction. He would prove he had been worthy of her love.

  So, soon after his discharge was confirmed, and London reaffirmed that the coveted title for his service to the empire had been erroneously replaced with a deed to a piece of earth he neither desired nor needed, McDonald wrote to Sally. His first letter went unanswered. And the second, and the third, and the fourth. She answered his seventh letter, clarifying that she had been prompted to respond not by his persistence, which she remarked was a sign of foolishness—a wise man has many ways of sending a message, she said—but because the last letter had arrived on her birthday. Any meanness of spirit wasn’t permissible on her special day.

  Sally said she would think about the visit, which to him meant his request had been considered favorably. He knew Sally was not the thinking type; she acted on impulse, so any claim that she was thinking things through was, in fact, an affirmation that she had already made her decision. Her final letter with confirmation of dates and itinerary arrived six months later. She would be visiting in another six months. She then added: