by Peter Kimani
The song climaxed with even heavier drumming that represented the clanging pails, an act Chege the drummer delivered with great drama. He would glide from one drum to another, teasing revelers that the skin drums were not taut enough and needed heating. He would make as though to head toward the butchery, but fans would wave him away, hurling coins onto the drum that Chege accepted with comic deference. It someone offered a note, especially if the giver was a woman, he would direct them to deposit it into the waistband of his pants, his bare chest glistening with sweat.
* * *
Rajan was tongue-tied when he was finally alone with Mariam backstage at the end of the concert.
“Sorry for the late introduction,” Mariam said, finally introducing herself properly. When Rajan stated his name, she smiled sweetly. “Who doesn’t know you . . . ?” she breezed.
Rajan simply stared back, dazzled by the beauty that seemed to radiate out of her every pore. Her face glowed at her every turn, and her circular, silvery earrings danced, oscillating in the darkened space. She was in high heels, and Rajan realized to his horror that she was taller than he. She was so beautiful, he couldn’t imagine her doing any of the ordinary things ordinary folks did, like having a bowel movement. He couldn’t imagine such ugliness from her gorgeous form.
“You are suddenly very quiet,” Mariam whispered.
He wanted to shut his eyes and be serenaded by her cooing voice. His mind was racing through the past few months, when the mere thought of Mariam diminished his hunger pangs and set off such an acute desperation that he feared he was losing his mind. He remembered the many sleepless nights he had agonized about her, and now here she was, in a poorly lit space close to their original point of collision, looking even more lovely than he remembered her. The memory of the kiss resurged with such power that Rajan staggered toward Mariam and pulled her toward him.
“Hey, hey, pole pole,” she protested. “Don’t jump on me as though I’m a stolen bicycle.”
Rajan laughed. “You just can’t imagine how long I have waited for this moment . . .”
“I thought we barely met an hour ago,” Mariam replied.
Rajan stopped himself before blurting about their first kiss in the dark and how it had affected him. He needed to kiss the girl again to confirm she was the one.
“I want to go home,” Mariam said.
“You want me to take you home?”
“That’d be nice,” she smiled.
“Where do you live?”
“Where do you live?”
“You mean my home?”
“Where else do you call home?”
“I am home right now!”
“Stop pulling my leg.”
“I wish I could pull your leg!” Rajan smiled even as a knot of panic congealed in his stomach. Home meant the house of his grandparents, Babu and Fatima. This girl wasn’t possibly thinking he’d take her there on their first night out.
Rajan was suddenly awash with shame. At twenty-one, he still had not moved out, and possibly wouldn’t ever leave home because he was a Punjabi boy. He was bound to live with his grandparents his entire life. He envied his bandmates who all had their private spaces outside the family homes. Era had his small dwelling that was detached from his mother’s house. It wasn’t much, just a tin shack—ten by ten feet, meat paper on the walls, a single bed, and an earthen floor. But Era derived great prestige when he told the other band members: “I have to rush home, I got a bird in the cage . . .”
Rajan could never dream of saying such a thing. The backstage operations at the Jakaranda served to minimize such complications.
He had never taken any girl home to his grandparents, but then again, none had ever expressed such a desire. They seemed content to consummate their lusts backstage. But this was no ordinary girl; he had searched for her for nine months and she wanted to be handled pole pole. She was not a stolen bicycle.
* * *
That night, Rajan and Mariam ended up at Era’s tin shack on the fringes of Lake Nakuru near the kei apple trees and fence that separated Indian from African quarters. The white quarters towered above, close to where McDonald had built his house, the layout of the township forming an unstable triangle, each race on a far end of the lake.
It was at that hedge separating the Indian and African quarters that Era had first encountered Rajan fifteen years earlier. Era was nine; Rajan was six—his small head appearing one day just above the hedge that stood between his family’s house and Era’s.
Era’s principle memory of that first encounter was how Rajan resembled the portrait of Jesus that adorned their living room—only the crown of thorns was not standing on Rajan’s head, it hung around his neck where the hedge reached.
“Maze, umeona mpira?” Rajan’s had asked during that first encounter, his tender voice trilling like a flute.
“Eeeeeehhh?” Era shouted.
“Our cricket ball.”
“Where is it?”
“It just rolled under the fence,” the boy with the thorny garland said. “Have you seen it?”
Era pretended to be looking, although the tiny hard ball was under his heel. “Sioni!” he said in a voice that declared the search over.
“Sawa!” the other boy replied with resignation, and walked away.
Era had hoarded eighteen balls by the time his mother discovered them: tennis balls, cricket balls, and footballs. “I’m not rearing a thief in this house!” she said as she administered a beating over the transgression. “Return them where you got them or else . . .”
Era’s mother left her unspecified threat hanging, but he had a pretty good idea of what would follow. He was the oldest and the only male of her four children, and his mother was determined to make him a good example to his younger siblings. Their father was in a colonial detention, where thousands were being held.
“We may be poor, but we are not thieves,” Era’s mother reminded him. He walked heavily to the fence and hurled the balls over, tears rolling down his face.
The noise of the returning balls drew Rajan back to the fence. He got a glimpse of Era as he disappeared into their mud house and noticed that the older boy had no shoes.
Rajan went back inside and picked out a pair of shoes that he had outgrown and returned to the fence. “Maze! Maze! Maaaaaaaaaazeeeeeeeeeee!” His voice floated in the air.
Era stayed away. Rajan returned to the fence several times that day. He wanted to reciprocate the return of the balls that he and his cousins had been searching for for months, so he decided to dispatch his gift that evening.
The shoes landed on the tin roof where Era’s household was waiting to cook a meal on the open fire. Even from a child’s hurl, the shoes arrived with reasonable force, sending coils of soot tumbling off the roof into the cooking pot.
Initially, Era’s mother did not know what to make of the whole episode. She armed herself with a hefty piece of wood and stepped outside, looking for the offending party. The government had announced a state of emergency and had placed the entire colony under virtual curfew. Communities’ social interactions had been reduced to a whimper and cultural life was disrupted as no one was allowed out before sunup or after darkness. The animals in the wilds were freer. One could not move from one part of the country to another without clearance from the local headman, who derived his authority from the white district officer. And every local had to bear the kipande on his neck like a dog, announcing his name and address. The parallels did not end there; as a dog’s collar attests him to be disease-free through a raft of vaccinations, a kipande around a man’s neck was his proof that he had been cleared by the colonial powers and did not pose a threat to his fellow man.
So everybody kept to themselves unless it was absolutely necessary to travel, making the crashing sound on the roof that much more perplexing. Era’s mother stepped out and was confronted by the sight of two tiny black boots, their surfaces scratched to reveal a brown core.
“Maze! Maze! Chukua viatu mimi nam
pa yeye!” Rajan sang from the fence.
Era’s mother sighed, dropped the piece of wood, and returned inside. “These Indians are full of madharau. If they want to give something, why not do it like a good neighbor? It’s a child who is delivering them . . .”
Era was beside himself with excitement. He had never worn shoes, and the sight of the black boots was overwhelming. But from the look on his mother’s face, he knew he had to employ caution.
“Go!” she urged Era in a savage whisper. “Go pick what has been thrown at you as one hurls stale ugali at a dog. If I see you in those shoes . . .” Once again, she left the threat hanging.
He waited until his mother went to work the following day before trying on the shoes. He dashed outside and got the washbasin—the heavy metal tub feeling light as he carried it, imbued as he was by the joy singing in his heart. He knelt at the water tank and opened the tap, the gentle trickle drumming a soft drone as it filled the basin.
“Don’t dare drain the tank!” Ceeri, Era’s younger sister, shouted.
He turned off the tap and sat on the grass patched unevenly on the red earth and washed his feet, then dried them quickly with a cloth. He was breathless with excitement as he tried on the shoes.
He attempted to squeeze in one foot but it was too wide for the shoe. He hopped into the kitchen and got a spoon, but even that proved futile in forcing the foot in. He used milking jelly to line the back of the shoe and thrust one foot in, then used the same trick on the other foot. But the shoes were so tight he could hardly stand, and he felt like a baby taking its first steps.
Era grudgingly removed the shoes and hid them, hoping to pass them on to a younger sibling when his mother softened. Months later, he couldn’t remember where he’d hidden them, turning Rajan’s generous gift into a terrible waste.
* * *
With Mariam’s return to the Jakaranda, Rajan could have finally and proudly proclaimed: I got a bird in the cage . . . even if the cage was borrowed. But Rajan was still unable to believe his good fortune. He remained hypnotized by her beauty, which shone through the dim light coming from the kerosene tin lamp in Era’s shack—the languid flame throwing shadows from one wall to another. Her eyes had a hint of blue, and they sparkled delightfully when she looked at him.
Upon arrival, Mariam had dumped her two bags on the floor and slumped onto the bed as though she had lived there all her life. Era returned with fresh linen for the bed before excusing himself to join Chege the drummer for the night. The band members were at liberty to arrive at another’s house without warning or explanation. Such was the brotherhood in the band; each understood that these adjustments had to be made to free up room for overnight guests. As the young men liked to say, they were fine even if they slept packed like sardines because sleep resides in the eyes.
Rajan motioned to Mariam to help him make the bed. She held one edge of the sheet and remarked: “I thought I was a guest but I can see I’m the housemaid already!”
Rajan laughed and said nothing.
As Mariam lifted her end of the sheet up, the slight breeze from this movement blew out the lamp’s flame, sending the room into darkness. There was a momentary silence, before they both collapsed onto the bed in a fit of giggles. It was in this state that Rajan received a kiss from Mariam. It bore the unmistakable lavender flavor.
This was followed by the rustle of clothes as Mariam undressed, before snuggling close to kiss Rajan’s neck and face. He undressed reluctantly, waiting for her to prompt him to shake off this or that garment. She was all over him, her warm, wet tongue coursing along his body with the swiftness of a serpent. Rajan remained completely still, paralyzed with fear.
He was trying to reconcile the different visions of Mariam that he had experienced. There was the Mariam lodged in his mind from that first kiss in the dark and the events that followed through the search. Then there was the returned Mariam, easygoing and seemingly at home wherever he took her. And now there was the Mariam in the darkened room, animal naked, her warm breath scorching his skin. When Mariam’s searching tongue reached his navel and coursed farther down, he went limp.
“What’s going on?” she asked calmly.
He said nothing.
“What’s going on, my friend?” she cooed again.
“I don’t know,” Rajan said earnestly.
“Relax, baby . . .” she soothed. “Relaaaax.”
* * *
And relax Rajan did—over the next few days, their naked bodies marked the passage of time. Clandestine meals were sneaked in to the two lovebirds at appropriate intervals from different kitchens. Arrowroots and sweet potatoes from Era’s mother’s kitchen, buttered naan bread and samosas pilfered from Rajan’s grandmother Fatima’s kitchen. Sweetened tea with milk came from both homes. Social mores decreed it was taboo for girls to spend the night at boyfriends’ houses, so it was sacrilegious to spend several nights together.
When Mariam was unable to find the keys to her suitcases, Rajan sneaked home yet again and returned with some of his own jeans and T-shirts. They were a perfect fit.
“Looks like you’ve been keeping my clothes,” Mariam remarked joyfully, slumping back into bed and snuggling closer. It seemed they could live this way for the rest of their lives.
* * *
A day is a long time for anyone whose singular preoccupation is to eat, drink, and sleep. Actually, one should say day and night, for if one spends the day eating and drinking, then he or she is unlikely to be sleeping. Establishments were starting to sprout up in Nakuru, declaring themselves to be day- and nightclubs. One presumed the daytime patrons would be different from the night owls, though that was not necessarily the case—Rajan and Mariam were partying day and night, albeit in the solitude of Era’s house.
By their third straight day together, Rajan trusted Mariam completely. He told her things he had never shared with anyone, not even Era.
There is something curious about humans’ desire to unburden themselves to complete strangers. Perhaps it’s because strangers, like a stream, flow on with their journeys by daybreak, minimizing any prospect for what has been shared being used against them. Or it could be that strangers make no judgment at all. Mariam had proven to be nonjudgmental on that first night when Rajan, overcome with fear, had failed to rise to the occasion. She had simply urged him to relax, and chuckled that she didn’t know anybody who had died from lack of sex, much the same way she had rebuffed Rajan the next morning when he complained she was taking too much sugar in her tea.
“Ever heard of a bee being hospitalized for having too much honey?” she responded.
It was her easygoing nature that encouraged Rajan to share his secrets, despite the fact that she said little about herself and her mysterious locked suitcases. But Rajan felt no qualms about sharing his story. He briefly told her about his search for her, avoiding the embarrassing parts.
“You are a cow, all right,” she swooned. “What you need is a fine milking of the foolishness in you.”
Rajan laughed along with her, and then continued telling her about his life, too fearful that asking questions about hers would drive her away. So he told her about his grandfather Babu and grandmother Fatima, his father Rashid, who had gone to study in England and stayed, his mother Amina eventually joining him.
“He left at the height of the emergency, when I was about ten,” Rajan said of his father. “Now I’m twice as old.”
“Do you miss him?”
Rajan paused and looked at Mariam. “You are the first person to ask me that,” he sighed. “It’s been ten years of solitude. And all Grandpa says when I inquire about my father is: We came in dhows to build the rail, and left in planes.”
“Do you miss him?” Mariam pursued after a brief silence.
“I don’t know.” He shrugged a naked shoulder. “There are times,” he went on after a moment, “that I wonder how my life would have turned out if he had been around.”
Mariam wrapped her arms around him. “Y
ou shall be fine,” she assured in a tone that suggested she was speaking to a child. “We shall be fine . . .”
* * *
It was on their fourth day together that Rajan took her back to the Jakaranda and composed a song for her. Just like that, or as locals would say, Hau hau. Later that night, as he sought to refine the lines, infusing words from local languages, Mariam asked where he’d learned Kikuyu, which was spoken widely across Nakuru but seldom used by Indians. So Rajan told her about the journey that he had taken three years earlier, when he’d turned eighteen.
“I thought it was a joke,” Rajan confessed. “My grandfather was making his usual rail jokes, only this time he said he and I would be taking a road trip the following morning. We came in dhows to lay the rail, so let’s hit the road, he told all of us.”
Babu had surveyed the table where the two dozen friends and family members had assembled to celebrate Rajan’s milestone and said: “This country has been generous to us. It’s a decent thing to return the favor.” He then paused and looked in Rajan’s direction. “I’m passing the baton on to this young man. Now that he’s come of age, it’s his turn to go see the world . . .”
That’s where Babu left it and Rajan thought no further about the issue. But the following morning, he was informed that Babu was waiting, ready to embark on a journey to serve his country. Initially, Rajan thought Babu was bluffing—until he got to the driveway where Murage, the family “boy,” as Fatima liked to call him, was revving the engine.
