The In-Between World of Vikram Lall

by M G Vassanji

  A triumphant smile on her face.

  She and Njoroge had declared their love and committed themselves to each other the previous morning. When she revealed that declaration to me—for as I have said she confessed a lot of her secrets to me—I recall a shiver at the back of my neck, a quiver of excitement, of fear for them both. The die had been cast. She did not seem to understand the seriousness of her offence, not to me but to the values of our times and people. We did not marry blacks or whites, or low-castes or Muslims; there were other restrictions, too subtle for us of the younger generation to follow; Hindu Punjabis were the strong preference always. Times were changing, certainly, but Deepa in her typical impulsive way had leaped ahead of them.

  In the morning, Mother, Deepa, and I drove downtown, where we first sat down for coffee, as was becoming the fashionable custom in the city for the nonwhite middle classes. My sister and I enjoyed taking our mother out this way, to draw her out of her frequent low moods, and she enjoyed the outing. She drove us, which also gave her a sense of independence. After sitting with them awhile, having consumed a jam tart, I said I would join Njoroge at the Ismailia one last time before he left. Mother and Deepa had already wished him goodbye the previous day in Papa’s office; they told me to take their warm wishes for him. Mother should have been suspicious; the picture of dutiful Deepa, sitting beside her Mama eating iced cake, declining to see Njoroge one last time on the day of his departure, was as real as any of Scheherazade’s bewitching tales. But Mother had a remarkable knack for deluding herself. She had still not tuned in to the fact that Papa’s call for that first whisky of the evening was now beyond his control; he was turning alcoholic. It had taken her months to realize that there had been a mutual attraction between Aruna Auntie and Papa, when Aruna visited us in Nakuru. Now she had reassured herself that her anxiety about Deepa and Njoroge had been fanciful. And so with a wave at them I left; and gluttonously—because I did not need another snack—I had a tea and potato pakodas with Njoroge, after which I escorted him to Sanamu, a gallery-café not much frequented by Asians, and then went to join Deepa and Mother at the city market, half a block away. With a nod from me, Deepa took off on a pretext (the British Council library) to meet Njoroge in private at the Sanamu, promising to meet us at the parked car in an hour.

  At the café Deepa poured out her heart to Njoroge.

  Njo, she entreated him, having joined him at a discreet table in a niche away from human traffic, I want you to be honest with me.

  Yes, he said, a strained smile wavering upon his face. About what?

  Behind him were a few lithographs of masks created by a local artist. The place, serving locally grown fresh coffee for the benefit of tourists, was well known for good but pricey arts and crafts, and was ridiculed for the price labels still on its serving tables and chairs.

  I want you to tell me if you have someone special—a girlfriend or fiancée—I will understand that—

  Deepa, he said, reaching out to hold her hand across the wobbly cane table and moving forward on the lightweight chair of the same material: Deepa, I have loved you since we were little—you know that. I have thought of you constantly over the last twelve years—only you—even when I was positive you had forgotten me—

  He stopped abruptly, looked questioningly at her.

  Well, I love you too, Njo, I will come out and say it, though girls are not supposed to be so forward. Now where do we go from here.

  She pulled her hand away and placed it with the other on her lap, watched him with a shy smile.

  His heart was pounding. He was nervous, even though he was the African, of the new ruling class. Could this be true, this exotic, gentle girl, this tender heart who hid him under the bed once, away from the eyes of the police, without even a blink; this girl precious to her family and her jealous people…I only hope this is not a dream, he said to himself.

  Your father and mother, he began. They will surely object.

  This is a new Africa, Njo, they’d better not. We are the next generation. They will, of course—but I don’t think for long. I’m stubborn as a mule, Njo, I hope you are strong too. And what about your people?

  There are not that many to speak of. Distant cousins. Friends, yes, they might be disappointed at first—they won’t know how to behave toward an Indian girl…

  They didn’t see insurmountable problems. They walked around the nooks in the café, examining the displays, exclaiming and mocking at the exorbitant tourist prices, and in one such corner, observed by no one save the large Makonde old man hewed roughly from Tanzanian wood and exuding the pungent odours of recent polish, they embraced tightly. He brushed her lips with his, squeezed her hand. They promised to write daily. She told him, I’ll write first and tell you how to write to me. They parted.

  Two days later, Dilip arrived. He was by any standards a catch for any Asian girl. Soft-spoken, well-mannered and-dressed, polished as though arrived from a finishing school. It was my turn now to be the chaperone for him and Deepa, but she turned out to be an ever-elusive eel, slipping out from any circumstance that would put the two of them alone together. And in company she would tease him no end about the girlfriend she had imagined for him. What would your Susan say to this, eating bhajias in such a slum? Would your Susan approve of us eating with our hands like this? She did seem to overdo it, though Dilip didn’t mind. The second day his parents had taken us out for lunch thali at the Supreme, and later that day Mother got wind of Deepa’s silliness.

  The following day the Sharmas were invited for dinner at our home. This was planned by the parents to be the big day, when a large hint would be placed before the boy and girl which they could not avoid.

  Meena-ji says Dilip is a rather mature boy, Mother told Deepa that morning. He’s grown up quickly, especially after living alone in England—

  Yes, he is a bit stuffy though, isn’t he, poor Dilip, bechara, Deepa replied, buttering her toast.

  Well, stuffy is good! Stuffy is character! You’d better not do anything silly now, Deepa. You’ve been far too free and childish in your behaviour, ever since Njoroge arrived. One would think you were trying to impress him. Don’t mention him in front of the Sharmas now—

  What do you have against Njo anyway? All you Asians think is that these African men are after your innocent, virtuous daughters—

  Well, I’m glad at least you’re not planning to marry him—

  I didn’t say that—

  A mighty ruckus broke out. The shockwave of realization finally swept over Mother, the truth about Njoroge and Deepa, which explained Deepa’s strange, giddy behaviour of the last two months, and the previous day’s offending silliness at the Supreme.

  Don’t joke about such things! Mother screamed, almost in tears. It is not a joke, you bad girl—

  Mother! I didn’t say I was marrying him—but if I was, it would be my wish, wouldn’t it? And what’s wrong with it, we don’t live in colonial times anymore, or in your India-desh, this is a new Africa—

  Don’t say that! Mother wailed. She looked devastated, a tragedienne of the Hindi cinema.

  Father came running out from the living room. He had evidently overheard the proceedings but had bided his time.

  Get this in your head, Deepa, he is an African, Papa said. He is not us. Not even in your wildest dream can you marry an African.

  What do you mean? What’s wrong with an African? I am an African. What hypocrisy! And all the nice faces you showed around your Njoroge-William while he was here—

  Mother took a deep breath and replied, There’s nothing wrong with being an African or Asian or European. But they can’t mix. It doesn’t work. Njoroge is like a son to me, you made him a brother, back in Nakuru—

  That’s when you tricked me! Yes you did!

  As if I knew you’d be infatuated with him one day.

  The voice, unable to hide that slightest trace of triumph, gave her away. I knew then what Deepa also at that instant divined; we looked at each other, and
then Deepa screamed at Mother: It was you who hid his letters! Admit it, he wrote the letters from school, and you with your suspicious, scheming, cunning mind destroyed them!

  Well, I was right, wasn’t I, said Mother.

  She began to cry.

  (Mother, you went too far. Why this streak of intolerance, this fear of the unknown, when we were living in such exciting times with only a bright future to think of, if we played our cards right? Is it simply envy of the older for the younger who are so free and ready to break the shackles? Did you ever see Deepa happier than she was those two months?)

  The dinner was quieter than anticipated, my parents having told the Sharmas to hold off on the matchmaking, the time was not ripe yet; the girl was headstrong about going to university first, but she would come around soon enough. Of course, if Dilip found someone else he liked, he had all the blessings from our family.

  But Dilip liked Deepa; he was shown a couple of other girls but declined them. I say, I am not the one for puja and bhajan, all that religious stuff, he explained to us, trying to please Deepa and arouse her jealousy at the same time. He liked her spunk, her freedom. A few times he tried casually to hold her by the arm or hand, but she gently rebuffed him. When he asked her to go out with him one evening, she accepted. But any hopes our families had of making anything out of the date amounted to nothing. She had told Dilip that she had no intention of marrying now.

  One morning when the three of us were sitting at the Ismailia, old Mr. Mithoo at the counter handed me an envelope addressed to me. By some happy foresight, I did not open it at the restaurant but waited until after Dilip had seen us off outside Papa’s office. When I tore open that envelope, there was another one, smaller and unmarked, inside. Opening that, I fished out a letter for Deepa. Njo had taken the precaution not to address her by name, beginning only with Darling—and finishing after three delirious pages composed late on a Kampala night.

  SIXTEEN.

  I returned to the calm haven of my dormitory room in Dar es Salaam. Good old Dar, it was a city that grew upon you, as I am sure it does even now, in a manner Nairobi never could or can. Nairobi has been always an alien city, uneasy home to its inhabitants. It was founded as a way station, after all, a place of convenience, for commerce, and it has retained much of that heartless character. A city I love and yet sometimes feel sorry for.

  I had decided a year earlier to go to university in Dar es Salaam on a whim, to get away from home and be alone, but also to escape from the tensions and bustle of Nairobi, its constant striving and ambition, and experience a place very different and organic in nature. Dar es Salaam was African and Asian, disordered and chaotic, hot and dusty, yet in its essence wonderfully relaxed and self-assured. It had a pace all its own, and in Nairobi we had sometimes called it “the Land of Not-yet.” It was still common to see people barefoot or in flip-flop chappals in the main streets, men in green or red checkered loincloths and white singlets, women in black buibui or colourful khanga, and nobody hurrying to get anywhere soon. Teashops were where people gathered, with radios blaring African or Indian music over the din of raucous conversation. I remember one afternoon, while out on a walk, coming upon a large crowd of Africans and a few Asians gathered tightly under a tree and wondering what could be the matter. Finally there came a murmur, then applause, and a long, distant shout of goal! became audible, and I realized that the men had gathered to listen to a football match on the only radio around. I would never have come upon such a scene in Nairobi.

  In Dar, the Asians seemed to me so much more of the place compared with their cousins in Nairobi. They seemed less well off, but perhaps they were not poorer, simply had a less sophisticated lifestyle. They did not have the Europeans to look up to constantly. There were very few Punjabis, though, most Asians speaking Cutchi and Gujarati, which I couldn’t help but learn, to my future benefit.

  Momentous political changes had recently taken place in Tanganyika. These had followed the independence of Zanzibar and the bloody and communist-inspired coup less than a month later that sent shivers throughout East Africa. That revolution on the small and torpid isle was the flash that signalled a new and tense reality in our region; the shape of politics, and of much else, in East Africa was never the same again. Our lives would be forever affected, because we had caught the interest of the world’s great powers and become pawns in their ongoing cold war. Tanganyika and Zanzibar became Tanzania, and while the old dream of an East African Federation still merited passing mention, its truth had disappeared like vapour in the harsh sunlight of Dar es Salaam, and we were left with three countries more at odds than ever before. The rhetoric in Tanzania was increasingly anti-imperialist; in Kenya, anticommunist. As a Kenyan in Dar I could hardly escape the occasional taunt or jibe, from friend or fanatic socialist, especially since my style of dressing tended to the formal and easily identified me as a Nairobi boy. Nevertheless, in its essence Dar es Salaam was not much altered; I grew fond of it and tried to hide my origins as best as I could.

  I was not—in my father’s words and much to his delight—a head-cracking intellectual at university. I was pursuing a somewhat dull degree in commerce—a field of study that stigmatized an Asian because it described his traditional occupation in the region and his caricatured role of exploiter, but that did not deter me. University for me was simply a transition, into what I was not quite sure, though Papa, I knew, had a chair and table vacant and ready for me in his office. Mother would have wished me to become something grand, a surgeon or a “barrister,” but I had no inclinations to such greatness and had never shone as a student. I also disliked politics—a hot topic in those times. Politics confused me; large abstract ideas bewildered me; and—what was definitely incorrect in newly independent Africa—I had no clear sense of the antagonists, of the right side and the wrong side.

  From what deep source came my parents’ reaction to Deepa’s involvement with Njoroge was bluntly revealed to me when I myself became the subject of communal prejudice in Dar es Salaam. I was one of about thirty Asian students on “the hill,” that is, at the university, most of whom I got to know reasonably well in a short time. Among them I had come across a kindred soul, a girl called Yasmin with whom I became close. She was in the English department and like me somewhat reserved in her ways. She was short, to match me, and quite fair, with long hair falling in a single braid down her back. I still picture her with a sheaf of notes and a book or two in the crook of her left arm, the soft smile of greeting on her face dimpling her cheeks and slightly furrowing her brow as we meet. How are you? she would greet me, with a high inflection on the last word. We spoke in English and a bit of Hindi, though I was learning some Gujarati and Cutchi. She was rather pious and attended the college Shamsi mosque regularly in the evenings; I would wait for her outside this mosque, whose members met in one of the seminar rooms, and when she came out we walked to the dining hall together for supper, past a gauntlet of very pregnant stares. I had been to her house on the way to someplace else, once, and on another occasion for Sunday luncheon. I knew that her parents, although courteous and hospitable on the surface, were intensely against their daughter hitching up with me, a Hindu Punjabi; her two brothers were brief to the point of rudeness—because I was “par-comm,” an outsider, and apparently exploiting their sister’s naïvete. One afternoon we went to see a film together, it was Fun in Acapulco starring Elvis Presley, and when during intermission I went out to the lobby to get us Cokes, whom should I see but one of the brothers jostling ahead of me in the mad crush for drinks; he had a seat by himself, strategically located two rows behind us. But despite the opposition, Yasmin and I continued spending time together, to what end we couldn’t yet say—perhaps simply to tempt fate.

  I think she liked the foreigner in me—the pardesi of Hindi films, of which we saw several, together. There was a part of her that evidently sought to escape beyond the restrictive bounds of her community. It did not deter her that I did not belong to her faith. Once, very dis
creetly and nervously—lest we be observed by a jealous brother—we entered the confines of a Hindu temple, which rather delighted her, and she did puja in front of the image of Krishna. On another occasion she took me inside a mosque in town belonging to her sect; to my surprise I found it very similar in arrangement to the Arya Samaj temple which my parents sometimes attended.

  Dar es Salaam in those days was the site of frequent and endless public demonstrations and parades which all students were required by the government to attend, and Yasmin and I often went to them together. We marched against the timid and placative British attitude toward the minority white government in Rhodesia and watched as the more radical students tore down the Union Jack from the embassy mast; we marched against the Americans, after the government announced it had obtained proof of an American plot to overthrow it, in collaboration with the hated Portuguese who ruled Mozambique to the south (the Americans claimed the papers were Chinese forgeries). We stood in the hot sun among the thousands on Uhuru Street to welcome the motorcade of Chinese premier Chou en Lai, and we dutifully waved our red Chinese flags at the visitor, chanting his name. The premier had said elsewhere that Africa was “ripe for revolution,” and so he had been made aware that he was not welcome in Kenya. As the slight-figured and, at the time, quite alien-looking premier passed before us, in his grey collarless suit, waving limply at the crowd, I thought for one amazing instant that I had glimpsed, across the street, a too-familiar face: Mahesh Uncle. I even mentioned this remarkable vision to Yasmin, then dismissed it. But late that night there came a gentle but persistent knocking on my door. Standing outside, looking a little furtive and with a wan smile on his face, was Uncle himself. He wanted to spend the night in my room.