by M G Vassanji
The one who picked me up to bring me inside the cabin one day was called Tembo. He was a Goan, brown as cinnamon, and was called Tembo to mock his extreme thinness. If he ate more ghee he would make engineer, eh, Tembo? the Sardarji engineer teased. Osnu andar aanta deyo, he said to my two companions, with a gesture toward me, Dekhan ta deyo, Let him come inside and see, these days who’s interested in trains, it’s all aeroplanes for the little guys. And so, as I clambered up, the two old men pushed me along, and Tembo the fireman, teeth gleaming like pearls, pulled me into the cabin.
Young man, began the Sardarji in English as I stood gaping inside. You are inside the injuneer’s cabin, from where the whole train is controlled. Kadi esa vekhya hai? The train-brain, ye…es, this is the brain of the train. And I am the brain of this brain. Brain-brain—ha-ha!
No, I shook my head, I had not seen anything like this train-brain before. I was in a magical gleaming enclosure of wood and brass, with a dozen little wheels and myriad gauges with quivering black needles that told of the current state of this giant locomotive. It was made in England, as a small brass plate in the centre of the front panel indicated, giving also the name of the company responsible. Sardarji pulled a green knob a couple of times and invited me to look out his window at the puffs of steam emerging from several parts of the engine where the release valves were located. I grinned and waved at bystanders. I pulled the chord and made the train whistle. Everywhere I touched and smudged, the brass or glass or wood was carefully wiped with a rag by sweat-streaming, smiling Tembo.
There was nothing more impressive for me in the world. Bill could go and become a fighter pilot chasing enemies when he grew up, Njoroge could become Moses to his people; I would be an engineer of locomotives, racing the length and breadth of the country, from Mombasa to Nairobi, through Nakuru and all the way to Kisumu or Kampala, and then back again, from Indian Ocean to Lake Victoria on that steady rhythm—a-jeeka-jeeka…grunt, grunt…a-jeeka-jeeka…grunt, grunt…a-jeeka-jeeka-jeeka-jeeka-jeeka-jeeka—on the railway line that my grandfather and Juma-dada and Ghalib and Buleh Shah and the other old folk had left their homes in Punjab to build.
As I emerged from the locomotive and waved back at the Sardarji, he blew a short whistle for me. And, mischievously, he released a giant puff of steam that drenched me and all the others watching him in admiration.
That was engine number 5812 of the East African Railways. A 4-8-4 + 4-8-4 Garratt locomotive, as Papa called it when I described it to him, the numbers designating the configuration of its wheels. He too had loved trains and knew about them. Dadaji would take his entire family to the railway station when they were young, and Papa and his brothers too recalled the shrouds of wet steam released by a grinning Sardarji engineer.
Another Sunday afternoon, and again there was a train on the platform, this time eerily filled with hundreds of grim, black faces—Kikuyu men, women, and children, looking out through the windows, silent as ghosts, some with their passes and tax receipts in a metal box worn around their necks with a chain, on their way to their reserved areas, pushed out by the travails of the Emergency. Hoo-ooo, the whistle blew, the Sardarji from his engine seat picked up in his arm the tablet in its tennis racquet-shaped holder—which gave him the go-ahead to enter the next section of track—and the black faces in the third-class windows lurched forward, to where?
To Embu, Nyeri, Karatina, Othaya, all the towns of the Kikuyu reservation. Does the British government think, Dada muttered, that by shunting these people away they will disappear and the problems go away?
In such a way did reminders of the Emergency spring up, suddenly, when least expected—it was as if in the midst of a happy, technicolour family movie some black-and-white footage had slipped in, grim, unhappy, and foreboding.
The taste of kulfi on a Sunday afternoon—sweet and rich as childhood—nothing else will quite capture its texture, its flavour, that perfect frozen blend of green and yellow that melted in your mouth and lingered and lingered. The Sunday that comes to mind was unusual. The family get-together was at Dada and Dadi’s so we could go to see the much-publicized annual cricket match between the Nakuru Club and the Asian XI. My grandparents lived in a flat above Bombay Sweets, a small restaurant with tube lights and glass-topped tables and oil-painted grease-glazed walls, whose glorious savouries and sweets—laid out in kaleidoscopic heaps on the counters—were renowned throughout the country, and even beyond, in Uganda, Tanganyika, and Belgian Congo. Across from this eatery was a long and high grey wall, beyond which was the posh, exclusive Nakuru Club. Nonwhites were not permitted in the club, but on special occasions such as this one, an area of the pavilion was set aside for the Asians. The Europeans, dressed smartly in white, the ladies wearing hats, sat in the wide, open, raised veranda of the clubhouse or outside on the grass where tables had been laid out. African waiters moved about wearing long, white kanzus, green sashes across their fronts, and green fezzes. This annual cricket match was always controversial, which made its appeal to the Asian spectators all the greater. This time, even before the toss, it was discovered by the Europeans that one of the Asian players had actually come all the way from Mombasa to assist the local side. He was promptly dismissed. News spread among the Asian crowd that a traitor had betrayed their Spartan side arrayed against a rich club. In response, the Asians objected to a Club player who was visiting from Middlesex county in England; the man was said to have emigrated, and the objection was not allowed. Asian youths heckled the decision.
Look, said Mother, watching the Europeans, even when they are taunted they look so composed.
You talk like our father, Mahesh Uncle scolded, and she laughed.
She was very happy and playful that day. She watched the beginning of the match (the Asian side batted first) before going off to Dada and Dadi’s to help with arrangements for the family meal. When the match broke for lunch, we all crowded into our grandparents’ flat and ate on the floor. After the lunch the males returned to the match. Just before the official tea break, our family met at the restaurant, crowding round two tables, and consumed bhajias, kachori, and bhel puri, with hot tea to scald the tongues already burning with spices (as was customary), and topped that all off with the miraculous kulfi. No water in that kulfi, no colouring, all cream with almonds and pista, saffron and sugar. And, as Papa typically wise-cracked, a swipe of salty sweat from the brow of the half-naked, hairy, Brahmin kandhoi-chef.
The cricket match was won by the Nakuru Club, which was saved from defeat by the batting of the man from Middlesex, who scored sixty-odd runs. The Asians left the Club with cries of Foul! and We’ll show them next year!
SIX.
The sun shone gloriously but without a thought for how much the land could bear, and only reluctantly, it seemed, did it go down to retire each night, during which interim no cloud dared come close to bring relief to the earth. And so the drought continued. Daytime heat was unrelenting, the streets and roads were dry, the grass was parched and yellow, the corn and wheat stalks in the farms were limp and red with dust. The weather map of Kenya in the newspaper showed the same feature from Moyale to Nairobi, Lake Victoria to the Indian Ocean, Turkanaland to the border with Tanganyika: an open circle for a cloudless sunny sky. The weather charts we drew in school had gone from cheerful blue and sunny to a mindless white and yellow. The rains would not come. Meanwhile Papa and Om Uncle and all the other traders in town were getting anxious, because their credits to the European farmers kept increasing and their own creditors in Nairobi were on their backs. Indian shops went bankrupt when their European clients could not pay.
But not to worry, said Mr. Bruce as his servant Kihika carried away another box of groceries to the truck. Mrs. Bruce’s father, who was a wealthy man, had extended them a loan. And the Farmers’ Association’s insurance payments were small but regular. And once the rains came, as surely they would…
Still, Papa said, if you could kindly make a payment forthcoming soon…my creditors won’t wait.
Mr. Bruce turned red. All eyes were upon him, including those of the children, who were always in the shop prior to the departure of the Bruces, sipping soft drinks. Slowly he took his cheque book from his breast pocket and briskly wrote out a cheque.
There, Mr. Lall—for the time being.
Mr. Bruce was a big man who always wore a brown suede vest and a matching, worn-out, floppy hat. I would stare in wonder at his gigantic black boots, into which were tucked his pants. He was a gregarious sort. His wife seemed to send him for the groceries whenever the balance on their credit had become embarrassingly high. But this was to Papa’s advantage, because he found it easier to ask the husband for payments than the wife.
No money, but they won’t give up the most expensive items on their budget, said Mother. That smelly cheese, for instance—I am certain we are losing money on it. And I can’t even tell the good part from the rotten part sometimes. I swear that I could have thrown up over it and they would not have told the difference.
Papa looked up, surprised, and she blushed, saying, Have their purchases gone down at all?
Somewhat. The Molabuxes have stopped extending credit on drinks, Papa said musingly.
We should do the same for groceries.
Can you deny them food?
The food they eat, we can’t even afford.
But the Bruces had become friendly and familiar to us and Mother’s attitude to them had softened. Mrs. Bruce was a gardener, and she had recently given Mother a rose cutting from a variety she was breeding for the annual Nakuru Show later that year. The flower was expected to be orange and she had tentatively called it Borneo Rose, for want of a better name. It was a cross between two South African varieties. Mr. Bruce had suggested My Kenya Beauty, she told Mother, but that was a more likely name for a thoroughbred and hardly something you would call a rose. She herself preferred a name that would commemorate the Queen’s coronation.
When Mrs. Bruce brought the rose cutting over to our house, it was Sunday around noon and cooking was in progress full swing throughout the development. The first thing she said as Mother met her on the porch was, What a wonderful smell!
Mother beamed. Everybody’s cooking at this hour, she explained. And they are making the best meal of the week. That aroma comes from hot ghee and spices.
It’s delicious, observed Mrs. Bruce.
One day you and your family should come and have luncheon with us, Mother told her.
Why, thank you.
Bill and Annie had come with their mother, and all three were in their Sunday best. They came inside and we all sat properly in the sitting room, arrayed in a circle and looking at each other a little nervously. This was the first time any European had come inside our house, and everything in sight of the visitors possessed an extra shine and sparkle that day, from the linoleum on the floor to the plastic flowers in their Indian brass vases and the glass on the framed reproductions of a charging bull elephant and a herd of zebra. As we waited for the servant to bring around the soft drinks and the eatables, Papa and Mrs. Bruce began to discuss the weather. If it didn’t rain for another month, Mrs. Bruce said, their well would go dry. Papa said he understood that the flamingos on the lake were fewer this year, and that at the temples and mosques prayers were being offered for rainfall to come soon. Indeed, said Mrs. Bruce, looking surprised. Papa told her he had read that the Americans had developed the technology for making rain, now if that technology were available in places like Kenya…
I recall that Annie looked scrubbed and radiant that day, her cheeks were the pink of peaches. She wore a constant, shy smile and had on a polka-dot pinafore and two ribbons in her hair. Mother was so taken by her angelic look that she caressed her cheek and chin in the Indian way and asked her if she took music lessons; she herself had taken a bit of sitar and singing in India—though (she turned to explain to Mrs. Bruce) she had not been able to find an Indian music teacher in Nakuru yet.
To everyone’s surprise, Annie responded with a few words sung softly but in a very high voice.
You sing beautifully, Mother exclaimed. What is that? How lovely! What a voice you have!
It’s from choir, Mrs. Bruce said, they had choir practice this morning after church.
Oh, can they sing us something?
Yes, give us a show, Papa said. He seemed to hover in a limbo between his boisterous self and the respectful Indian, while also under the watchful eye of Mother.
Can you sing something, darlings? Mrs. Bruce asked her children. Something short?
Annie stood up but Bill declined with a face.
Laudate dominum…omnes gentes, she sang in a high, clear voice, completely unselfconscious, her face transformed by concentration. A few lines followed by long amens. Mother stared open-mouthed and in tears.
That was an Annie so different from the one I knew, an Annie I could have known better. Do I now imagine that she looked at me for a sign when she finished the last, long amen?
When we went outside to plant the cutting, Mwangi was called to do the job. He ambled over from the back, barefoot and in shorts, and with a small shovel lovingly spaded out the red earth in the flower bed under our front windows and placed the stem in the hole, which he filled up tightly again. He went to another part of the garden and brought over manured soil and sprinkled it at the site of the new transplant. He stood up and said to Mrs. Bruce, Don’t worry, Mama, this will become a beautiful plant. He placed one hand on his chest and briefly bowed his head, one gardener to another. When he had watered the cutting, he brought two champeli flowers and placed one each on Deepa’s and Annie’s hair, inadvertently dropping from his hand a few grains of sand on their heads. Bill, Njoroge, and I had started kicking around a ball.
It was Papa who named Mrs. Bruce’s rose, on Coronation Day.
King George, the thin-faced, quiet-looking monarch, had died early in the previous year and we had a beautiful new queen. She could be seen everywhere, in the photographs at the railway station and in every classroom in school, on the postage stamps, the coins, and the notes. She came on in the cinema before the movie started, riding her horse outside Buckingham Palace, the Union Jack flying fiercely behind her, and we stood up in silent accompaniment to the ode to her nobility and grace, lines that we would never be able to forget. How proud we were to be her subjects then, to belong to the mighty empire. Only Mahesh Uncle scoffed at her stupidity and uselessness, after which an enraged Papa one day called him a “blardy communist,” and said, Good thing your Joseph Stalin is now dead!
What made Queen Elizabeth more special was that she had been visiting Kenya when she received news of her father’s death and became queen.
The newspaper on Coronation Day carried a full-length picture of her in gown and crown, with the caption: God Bless Our Glorious Queen. In the morning there was a march-past in town, of the police and the army, which included awesome-yet smart-looking members of the Lancashire Fusiliers, who had come especially to Kenya to hunt the Mau Mau, and the Boy Scouts and Girl Guides, the Brownies and Cubs. A jubilant public lined the streets wearing badges, waving flags, and throwing confetti at the soldiers.
Later, Papa sat in the living room with his ears glued to the radio, listening to the BBC’s live commentary on the ceremonies taking place in London at Westminster Abbey. Papa gave his own running commentary for the benefit of Mother, who was going about her chores and didn’t seem much interested. But she would pause to ask him an indulging question now and then, so he would not feel he was talking to the walls, and Deepa did likewise.
Deepa: What’s an ampulla?
Papa: Shhh, listen—she’s coming, the Queen is coming—eh, Sheila, listen—
BBC: The young Queen looks stunningly beautiful as she approaches the church from the western door in a simple gown yet lacking no elegance, weighing with all the frills and train—
Mother (as she approached): What colour gown?
Papa put a finger to his lips. Mother came and stood behind him, runnin
g her fingers through his hair.
Deepa: What’s a mitre?
Papa: How would I know? Shush!
BBC:…where the procession of archbishops and bishops awaits…. O Jerusalem, Jerusalem…Sirs I here present unto you Queen Elizabeth, your undoubted Queen—
Papa: Wah! Undoubted Queen, of all the British Empire…
Mother: Yes, the fruit of all her karma…
BBC: Madam, is Your Majesty willing to take the Oath? I am willing…. Will you solemnly swear to govern…the United Kingdom…the Union of South Africa…Canada…and all your Possessions and other Territories…
Papa: That’s us, you and me…Kenya, Uganda, Tanganyika…Gold Coast, Nigeria…and…and Sarawak, and Borneo and Malaya and Hong Kong…
Mother: And they call us only possessions—no name even?
Papa: Be quiet, now listen.
BBC (the Queen, in a low voice): I solemnly promise so to do…I will…. All this I promise to do…
Papa wiped a tear from his eyes. This makes you happy to be alive, he said solemnly, looking up to Mother, who stood over him and caressed his hair once again.
When we reach our hundred years, Papa said to Mother, we’ll recall this moment proudly…
Mahesh Uncle, who was visiting and had come upon the scene, stared through his black-framed glasses, mouth agape, too confounded for words.
BBC: And God save the Queen!
Papa: And God save our Glorious Queen Elizabeth!
It was then that inspiration struck Papa and he came up with a name for Mrs. Bruce’s rose: Call it Beautiful Elizabeth for our Queen, he said. And so it was.
It being Tuesday, Papa was on Home Guard duty that night, and as usual he left after giving Mother many reminders and instructions. But this time Mahesh Uncle was around and the situation seemed less worrisome. Papa even told Mahesh Uncle about the location of his gun, just in case. Deepa and I went to our rooms, leaving my mother and her brother in the sitting room to talk in low voices. Later in the evening Deepa would be picked up and taken to my parents’ room and Mahesh Uncle would sleep in her bed. Neither I nor Deepa could sleep well when Papa was out at night. At Deepa’s insistence the two adults came to sit at the dining table, which was closer to the bedrooms. Their voices were reassuring, their conversation as always intriguing and mysterious, about faraway places and events.
