by Peter Kimani
“What’s going on?” Rajan asked. “Where are we going?”
“No need to argue, young man,” Babu replied calmly. “We’ll talk on our way to Ndundori. You are going to become a fine teacher.”
“Where, when, why?” Rajan was frantic as Murage pushed him into the car.
Once inside the vehicle, Babu said calmly: “If American children can travel halfway across the world to serve as volunteers, what’s the excuse for an Indian boy wasting his youth in funny occupations like producing sounds imitating the train?”
“I felt like I was being banished from the land,” Rajan told Mariam that day. “I was angry at my grandfather. Angry that I had to leave all my friends without a proper farewell. Angry that I was being forced into serving my country as a teacher in some far-off location.”
With the emergency laws still in place, the land was desolate and they encountered very few people along the way, most of them security agents—middle-aged men in khaki shorts, their long, ashy legs resembling marabou storks, their homemade guns lethal beaks.
When they reached Ndundori, Babu directed Murage toward a dirt road that led to a modest one-story wooden house ringed by eucalyptus trees. It was eerily silent and Rajan asked, with panic in his voice, if this was the school he’d be teaching at.
Babu smiled and explained, “This is the home of the Karims. They have a small business here. When Indians crave homemade roti or samosa or biryani, this is where they come. So you will be lucky to eat home-cooked meals every day.”
Rajan said nothing, so Babu went on: “I want you to know my friend and his family. You know the story of our dhow being shipwrecked on our way here to build the railroad. Karim was on that dhow. These are good people. We were like family when we were young . . . Yes, I was once young,” Babu chuckled. “And Karim has a granddaughter just about your age. Actually, you two knew each other when you were smaller.”
Rajan shrugged and said nothing. This was too much information. In any case, why should he care about an Indian family in the middle of nowhere? All he needed was to return home and carry on with his life.
No sooner had the engine turned off than a little balding man emerged, with a big smile that Rajan found irritating.
“Karim, my good man,” Babu greeted. They embraced, then paused to examine each other.
“You don’t look a day older than the last time I saw you,” Karim said. “The gods have been kind to you.”
“We are not complaining,” Babu replied. “You are looking hale.” He glanced across the compound; it hadn’t changed much over the past few decades.
“And this must be Mr. Rajan,” Karim enthused. “You know, I first saw you when you were like this.” He bridged his open palms as if rocking a baby in his arms. “Now you are taller than me,” he added, standing beside Rajan to compare heights.
Rajan said nothing.
Two tiny windows creaked open simultaneously, as Karim’s chubby-faced wife Abdia appeared. Upstairs, Leila, their granddaughter, peeked through the lace curtains to spy on the goings-on below. Instantly, Rajan took a dislike to them. He vowed to himself to keep away from these nosy women.
Babu waved at the woman in the duka.
“Abdia, come greet our guests,” Karim called out to his wife. “You too, Leila,” he waved to his granddaughter, whose silhouette was visible through the curtains.
As the two women made their way toward the men, Rajan shuffled uncomfortably. Karim and Babu spoke in Punjabi, which Rajan barely understood. Abdia joined in the conversation. Murage made for the woods to pass water, leaving Rajan and Leila standing awkwardly, eyeing each other suspiciously.
“Get to know each other,” Abdia pressed. “Leila, ask him where he goes to school.”
Leila did as told, but Rajan answered gruffly, “I don’t!”
“You don’t go to school?”
“No!”
Rajan walked a little farther away from their grandparents. Leila got the message and followed him.
“How come?”
“How come what?”
“You don’t go to school?”
“Well . . . I do.”
“Really?”
“I’m joining a new school.”
“Really? You must be excited!”
Rajan sized her up. She was an excitable little girl, he thought. Not more than fifteen years old. “I’m not a student anymore,” he said with a hint of arrogance. “I’m going to be a teacher.”
Leila was wide-eyed. “You mean you’re the guy my grandfather talked about?”
Rajan was about to respond when Babu called them back. “I don’t have the whole day, but you two will have plenty of time to get to know each other.”
Abdia winked at her husband, who cleared his throat and smiled.
“All right, all right. Mr. Rajan, now that you have another home away from home, I’m sure Leila would be happy to show you around . . .”
There wasn’t much to see in the sparsely furnished rooms that Leila rushed through before escorting him to one with a foldable safari bed tucked in a corner.
“This is your room,” Leila said. “Remind me to get you some sheets.”
They heard Babu calling again and Rajan rushed out.
“You need to get your luggage out of the car, young man. What shall I tell your granny when I return?”
Rajan shrugged and said nothing.
“The schoolmaster expects you tomorrow. Get some rest, do some reading, get ready.”
Rajan nodded.
He neither rested nor prepared for school. He just sat, dumbfounded by the turn of events. Had anyone told him he would have encountered half of what he had in the preceding twelve hours, he would have thought it a cruel joke. He cast a look around the room. The Karim household was noisy. Abdia spoke like a sewing machine, Karim smiled day and night. Leila sat cross-legged and giggled at Indian songs blasting from her transistor radio. When Karim and Abdia weren’t looking, Leila rolled her eyes at Rajan.
Dinner was served in this chaos, and it wasn’t long before Rajan excused himself. Leila offered to get his bedsheets, and as he made his way to his room, tired to the bone, she tried to trip him. He pretended not to notice, so when she delivered the sheets, she rolled her eyes and stuck out her tongue. Rajan laughed quietly and bid her goodnight.
* * *
The school comprised a block of mud-and-wattle rondavels with grass-thatched roofs. A small party was hosted in Rajan’s honor by a dozen other teachers. The schoolmaster was short and mustachioed, with his hair parted in the middle in a style called a “lorry” because the gulf was wide enough for a truck to drive through.
“We are honored and privileged to have you here,” the schoolmaster said in a quivering voice because he had never been so close to an Indian.
The children stared openly at Rajan. “Haiya, muthungu! Muthungu!” those streaming into classes after break time screamed, alerting their friends to come and see a white man. It appeared that a few hours on the road had turned his brown skin white.
Rajan volunteered to teach history, but the diminutive schoolmaster had other ideas. “Why don’t you teach English? The children think you are a white man!”
* * *
There were about twenty kids in the class, three or four sharing a desk so that each had to give way for the other to write or else they’d elbow each other.
“Good morning, class,” Rajan smiled on that first day.
“Good morning, madam!” the class returned.
Rajan took no offense, correctly guessing that the previous teacher had been a woman. “Boys are males, girls are females,” he started, pointing randomly to different pupils. “Tell us, are you a male or a female?”
Several boys said they were females while a number of girls said they were males, eliciting lots of laughter from their classmates.
In the second week of Rajan’s posting, Leila arrived at the school one afternoon. “My mother said an Indian boy must miss samosa and masa
la tea, so she made some especially for you,” she gushed.
Rajan nodded his appreciation, silently wondering if the treat couldn’t have been served at home. He invited Leila into the humble staff room and poured the steaming tea into the only cup available. All the other teachers were in class.
“Karibu,” he invited her to partake of the tea.
“You go first,” Leila returned.
“No, you first.”
“I asked first.”
“I am your host.”
“I made the tea!”
“I thought you said your mother did.”
“She and I did.”
“So who did what?”
“She made it. I listened to her. She said a cup of tea is like love: it is sweeter when shared.”
Rajan blushed. What did this child know about love?
“Do you agree with that?”
“What?”
“The idea of love as a cup of tea,” Leila said with a grin.
“I thought your mother was talking about you, not me.”
“But now here we are. With a cup of tea to share.”
“Why?” Rajan responded cautiously.
“Because you have only one cup . . .”
They ended up taking sips from the cup while quietly giggling. Despite his initial misgivings, Rajan realized he enjoyed Leila’s company immensely, and he continued to in the weeks that followed. What Rajan liked the most were their evening walks. Sometimes they played games along the way that occasionally ended up in Rajan’s room. Once, as they wrestled on his bed, Rajan came to the sudden realization that Leila’s childlike frame was developing into womanhood. She had sizable breasts that she hid under large sweaters. She became aware of his discovery when Rajan loosened his grip and gently stroked her face. Just as they were about to kiss, Abdia’s voice filtered into the room: “Leeeeiiiiilllaaaa!”
Leila rushed out of the room without a word, and what followed was a crackle of violent Punjabi inflexions finished off with the whack of a slap.
That night, Rajan remained holed up in his room and skipped dinner, awash with the shame of being caught fooling around with Leila. He also started taking long walks through the village after school just to avoid being confronted by Abdia. At school, he drifted from hour to hour, day to day, still without any clarity as to what could have prompted his grandfather to consign him to the wilderness. The other teachers were all older than he was, and at first, a few invited him to their homes, but Rajan declined all the offers. It was in this period that he started reading the books that Babu had given him: Mahatma Gandhi’s The Story of My Experiments with Truth, Booker T. Washington’s My Larger Education, Jomo Kenyatta’s Facing Mount Kenya, and Kwame Nkrumah’s I Speak of Freedom.
During one of his solitary walks, he met a young boy around five or six years old. The boy spoke nonstop in Kikuyu, while holding a bowl of porridge that he sipped between bouts of mucousy sniffles. The kid’s khaki uniform implied he went to the school Rajan taught at, but Rajan could not tell him apart from the other three hundred pupils. As the boy continued with his Kikuyu monologue, Rajan just nodded and smiled and kept walking along.
One day, the boy followed Rajan to Karim and Abdia’s home, bearing a gift of chapati rolled in a paper torn from his math book. On another day, he brought a liter of milk in a soda bottle; another, an egg cracked open in a minor accident along the way. After a few weeks, Rajan realized he could not only understand the boy perfectly, but could even engage in short conversations. Leila sulked at Rajan’s new subject of affection. Abdia and Karim totally ignored the boy. By the end of the term, Rajan was fluent in Kikuyu.
* * *
“My grandfather wanted me to give something back to society. Instead, I gained something. A language that made me a proper Kenyan,” Rajan told Mariam that night. “He was smiling from ear to ear when he came to fetch me at the end of the term. He did not say what he was happy about, but he seemed proud that I had survived, and as a bonus had acquired a new language. So the trip to Ndundori was a preparation of sorts for what lay ahead . . .”
“How do you mean?”
“If I didn’t speak any local language, I feel like my art wouldn’t be as authentic. I would just be another muhindi.”
“Why do you say that?”
“I am Indian, am I not?”
“What does that mean?”
“I don’t know,” he shrugged. “My skin color has . . .” He paused. “At least in the past it had political implications. Whites at the top, Indians after them, then Arabs, and finally Africans. That’s political privilege.”
“What’s changed now?”
“We are waiting to see, but with independence, Africans will be at the top.”
“And . . . ?”
“I don’t know. Indians in the middle? Whites at the bottom?”
“What do your friends say?”
“Which friends?”
“Your bandmates.”
“Era, of course, has been my friend since I was five or six years old. We don’t have political conversations. He’s simply my friend.”
“Does he feel the same way?”
“How do you mean?”
“Does he consider you his friend without condition?”
“Absolutely.”
“Then what’s this pressure about speaking local languages?”
“You got me wrong, it’s not about my friends; it’s about myself. I want to be more than just an Indian. I want to be a Kenyan immersed in other cultures.”
“I can’t believe this,” Mariam said softly, shaking her head.
“Why? I’m telling you the truth.”
“I’m not questioning the facts of your story. I just can’t believe you went to my village. I grew up right next to that school!” she exclaimed. “As a matter of fact, my foster family started the school.”
“Really!? Then you must meet my grandfather, he surely knows your family.”
“I said foster family.”
“What’s the difference, it’s still your family!”
“Not quite. That’s why the word foster comes first.”
“Which means?”
“They are a family of sorts.”
“A family of sorts. My goodness, where did you learn to speak like that! Seriously, though, who is your real family?”
“I wish I knew!”
“You can’t be serious.”
“Yes, I am. I don’t know and I don’t care. Well, I do care, but I don’t know.”
“Which makes you . . . ?”
“Mkosa kabila.”
“Be serious.”
“I am. I have no tribe.” After a moment, Mariam added, “I have no family.”
Rajan peered intently at her. She looked like a cross between an Arab and Indian, or Caucasian and African. Or a mix of all four. “Come to think of it, what’s your race?”
“What does it matter?”
“It doesn’t really . . .”
“Exactly. It shouldn’t bother you. But I’m bothered about this Leila girl. What happened to her?”
“When? Before or after?”
“You mean you did it!?”
“I meant before my trip or after my trip.”
“Stop being clever. Did you do it or not?”
“What do you think?”
“You tell me!”
“Why should that—to use your own word—bother you?”
“It doesn’t, I’m just—just curious.”
“Okay, let me tell you what I found most curious. Leila’s mother gave my grandfather the impression that Leila and I were tight. Yet while I was there she did everything she could to keep us apart.”
“That is weird,” Mariam conceded. “Still, it doesn’t answer my question!”
“I have no question to answer,” Rajan declared.
* * *
Babu had noticed the erratic hours that Rajan was keeping, barely sitting for more than a few moments at a time, and had remarked
to his wife Fatima, “I think he has woman problems. He is behaving as though he has ants in his bum.”
Fatima cleared her throat. “I have also noticed his restlessness.”
“Rajan has been spending a lot of time over there,” Babu went on, looking out the window toward Era’s family home. “See? Those are his footprints. I think they even made a hole in the fence.” He gestured toward the hedge where Era had first met Rajan, which was now a towering mass of foliage that completely blocked the view of the other side. On the lower part of the fence was the hole that Rajan used to sneak through.
“Young people have to go through these stages, don’t they?” Fatima said calmly.
“I’m not saying they shouldn’t,” Babu replied defensively. “Everybody has to learn these life matters his own way.” He paused for a moment but Fatima said nothing. “I should have told him,” Babu said finally, then sighed as though the admission lifted a weight off his chest. “I should have told him.”
“I told you, but what does the proverb say? A woman’s prophecy is always taken lightly until it comes to pass.”
“There is nothing to prophesize about. Nothing has happened.”
“You don’t know that for sure,” Fatima countered.
“I know.”
“You just said you think he has woman problems,” she reminded Babu.
“I said I suspect he does. But that’s not the end of the world.”
“It could end many things . . .”
“We still have time to tell him, don’t we?”
“You have to tell him soon. He needs to know before it’s too late.”
“It’s never too late.”
“That’s what you’ve been saying all these years,” Fatima said, a hint of irritation creeping in. “Do you know the kind of reputation we would have if he broke off the engagement?”
“Just let the young man be,” Babu said, leaning back in his seat.
“If you don’t tell him, I will!” Fatima threatened.
“I meant to tell him three years ago when he came of age. But things have been difficult with the emergency.”
Fatima walked to the window where Babu had stood moments earlier. “Things will be even more difficult if he doesn’t know. He needs to know so that his heart may be at peace.”
“Who says his heart is not at peace?”
