The In-Between World of Vikram Lall

by M G Vassanji

  It will come eventually either to a hangman’s noose or a garland for your Mahesh, Papa had said a few times in frustration to my mother; he couldn’t have known how remarkably close his prediction would turn out to be. During our first two years in Nairobi my uncle came to see us three times, over weekends, one of which was during the Holi festival. But his presence had become awkward in our home. The flat in which we lived was less spacious than the house in Nakuru, and our financial capacity much straitened. He was not my object of adulation in the way he had been before. But Uncle’s fortunes changed in the most dramatic fashion. First, one day my Rakesh Uncle, Papa’s cousin who worked in the Post Office, came home as bearer of grim news. Apparently all letters sent to the Indian High Commissioner Appa Pant received routine screening; one of his recent correspondents had turned out to be Mahesh Verma from Elburgon.

  What did my brother-in-law write to that desi busybody? Papa asked crisply.

  The High Commissioner was by reputation a former Indian prince who had been specially picked by Pandit Nehru to represent India in Kenya; but his activities, which included consorting with radical Asians and Africans, among them Kikuyu, embarrassed many Asians who had vowed undying support to Queen and Empire.

  The ullu-ka-patha Mahesh wrote a long letter saying why independence is a good thing for Africans, said Rakesh Uncle. He said India should give recognition to Mau Mau and assist them. Now your brother-in-law is on the suspect list. Warn him, Ashok. We could all catch trouble.

  The next few days Mother tried frantically to contact her brother over the phone, but to no avail, the phone lines to Elburgon were down. In Nakuru, neither my grandparents nor our friends the Molabuxes had seen him for weeks. The fear in our home now was that Mahesh Uncle had already been detained. In the midst of this worry, however, Mother received a phone call, from no less a person than High Commissioner Appa Pant.

  Are you Mahesh Verma’s sister, Mr. Pant asked. My mother answered, yes she was. Her brother worked in the Resham Singh Sawmills near Elburgon, north west of Nakuru; no he did not like the job very much, he was a university graduate after all, but the Asians would not hire him in their schools or businesses; he could not even get married to a decent girl in the whole of Kenya.

  The High Commissioner laughed and said, I have received a letter from a common friend in New Delhi. I will try to help him.

  Inquiries by the Molabuxes meanwhile brought the news that Mahesh Uncle was safe. Less than a month later he received a registered letter offering him a job as English master at the prestigious Devonshire School in Nairobi. And it was at Appa Pant’s house on Second Parklands Avenue that he met the politician Okello Okello, whose entourage he would join. Both had strong Marxist leanings. It was there too that he met the woman he married, Kamala, one of the four daughters of Vasant Dev, a lawyer who had defended Okello in his trial for sedition at Kisumu.

  My uncle was now flying in high circles. At independence, Okello became Minister for Home Affairs, and my uncle left his teacher’s job to become his advisor. In the current political climate, following Zanzibar’s revolution, it seemed that the only friends the communists had in Kenya were Okello and his entourage. My choice of Dar es Salaam, friendly to communists, as the place to go for university had thrilled Mahesh Uncle. But between us there remained that brief embarrassed look, that dropping of eyes, the silence. I could never completely explain this chill inside me. I did not judge him, he who once had been so dear to me, so tender toward me; even in later years he would never miss the opportunity to embrace me, ask how I was doing. In my mind, however, he had become too tightly bound with the horrors of Nakuru: the wrongful accusation and disappearance of Amini, the ghastly butchery of the Bruces, the detention and death of Mwangi, who I’ve always believed was innocent—all that which remained still raw inside me, not negotiated yet for a piece of realistic wisdom about the world, a personal philosophy of life.

  One morning I took Njoroge to see my uncle at Okello Okello’s constituency office on Victoria Street. The talk naturally came to politics, and very soon Mahesh Uncle—a little plumper than he had been in Nakuru, his beard and hair trimmer but greying, his black-framed glasses thicker—had energetically brushed aside Njoroge’s open-eyed optimism about the future of the nation.

  Njoroge, Njoroge, look around you, said my uncle. Don’t you see who’s got the prime property now, the lion’s share of the Kenya Highlands previously owned by the whites? Why, it’s the Old Man and his cronies, some of whom even collaborated with the British! Who’s getting fat on the land? Mau Mau are now languishing in prison—because they dare to ask, Where is the land we fought for?

  It was the first time I heard the articulation of this argument, that the country was stolen away by an elite, and a traitorous elite at that. This charge has become a constant subtheme in our country’s recent history. In time Njoroge too would come under its sway, but that lunch hour as we emerged into busy Victoria Street by the crowded bus stop, the buses grinding their gears before lurching away down toward the river and back up on to Ngara, Parklands, and High Ridge, leaving behind disappointed groaning African and Asian women in the wake of exhaust fumes, as we walked off to the Supreme nearby to meet Deepa for vegetarian thalis, we dismissed my uncle’s rantings. I reminded Njo of how Uncle would be the first to take offence during our Sunday family meals, kicking his chair back as he sprang to his feet, fists raised to take on my father’s brothers for the sake of his radical politics. Njoroge and I laughed at that memory, doorway to many others that united us as friends.

  I’ve come to spend the night with my nephew, do you have space in your fine abode for your uncle?

  We embraced. Why, Uncle, come in, I said. Then: Are you in Dar to meet Premier Chou en Lai?

  He smiled, as if I had made a joke, and shook his head. Just to observe the feast, he said, which we in Kenya have been so unjustly denied. I wish Premier Chou could have come and drummed some revolutionary sense into Kenyans.

  All he had on him was a small overnight case and his favourite jute shoulder bag that I remembered so well. He sat down on my bed, glanced around the room briefly. Obviously he himself did not want to be observed in Dar, or he would have been in a hotel. I said nothing.

  I saw you in town, on the street, waving a flag. A girl was with you—you must have seen me too.

  Yes, but I couldn’t believe it was truly you. I thought it was the Dar es Salaam heat getting to me.

  He laughed.

  It was a hot night, and he was famished. He drank a glass of water, then the two of us changed into shorts and took off into the night for the banda down the street, which served tea and snacks practically round the clock, a godsend for students. On the way we passed a man roasting meat, and the smell was strong.

  Do you eat meat nowadays? he asked softly.

  Sometimes, I hesitated. Chicken preferably. But not much…Do you?

  He nodded. I had to fight my qualms and acquire the taste. You can’t be in Kenya politics and not eat meat.

  Although he did not mean it that way, the statement sounded rather ominous. He described his first time with meat, at a dinner party in Eldoret, when he discovered on his plate a shank of goat in a generous helping of plantain. His neighbour at the table watched him enviously with his prize, and he had no choice but to pretend to attack it with relish. He had expected to retch up the contents of his stomach before the night was out, like a sick hyena, he said, but he survived and learned.

  I did not tell him about my first time, the open land behind our house in Nakuru, the holy mugumo tree, the ritually sacrificed meat, and Njoroge. My first taste of meat was probably rotten, a pinch from the spilled-out intestine of a goat or a sheep. He watched me, went back to his omelette and bread. Later we had maandazi and chai. He lit a cigarette. He mused about his youth in Peshawar, his quarrels with his father. Grandfather Verma, he informed me, was ailing. This was something my mother had not yet told me.

  If he dies, I’ll have to return
to India—for a couple of weeks, he said.

  Why don’t you go before—see him before he dies, I mean?

  He stared at me, in the way he had of lowering his head and looking at you from below, and grinned. His hair was dusty and his salt-and-pepper beard unruly, and he looked a bit wild in the dim light of the tea kiosk outside which we sat, at a small, rickety wooden table.

  I will, he said. Thanks Vic, for telling me my duty. I will go and see him. You know what? I will even make up with him. My father and I had deep differences, as you no doubt know.

  He watched me for my response and I nodded.

  One day I’ll tell you about it, he said. It’s a painful story.

  We became very close that night.

  He had reached out to take my hand, and now said, Vic, Vic…bété…why did you stop loving me?

  I did not answer and he turned thoughtful. We were the only customers at the banda. A smell of woodsmoke filled the air as the owner rearranged his fire, perhaps ready to shut it out for a few hours and catch a nap before the morning rush. In the distance, two students called out to each other. Perhaps they were drunk.

  Uncle said, I supported Mau Mau, and they took your friends’ lives…that family of four…but I did not condone all actions they took. And all of the fighters were not like that—so brutal. You know that, Vic. Only a handful of Europeans died, while Africans died in the thousands. They suffered. They lost their lands. Should I have stayed neutral, or supported the British?

  It’s all right, Uncle, I said, squeezing his hand.

  I wish I had told him what I had seen that morning at the sawmill: my father’s missing gun in his hand, his ride into the woods with provisions and gun for Mau Mau fighters. I wish we had discussed Mwangi, shared our grief, for I am sure he regretted that impulsive theft that turned out so costly; I had never seen him look happy following the incident. I wish I had spoken, and therefore also exorcised myself from that past. This was my only chance; I did not take it. Instead we stood up, waving ahsanté to the tea seller, and walked back, our arms round each other’s shoulders, Indian style, drunk on nothing else but tea and emotion.

  Before we went to sleep, we spoke briefly of Deepa.

  What exactly is going on, according to you, he asked.

  They want to marry, but Mother won’t have it. And I think she’ll have her way.

  He nodded.

  What do you think—about the affair, I asked.

  I think it’s a wonderful thing, he said. If my daughters Sarojini or Natasha were to do it, I would approve. But your mother won’t let it happen. I’ve spoken to her. Our people are not ready for it, what can we do?

  Early the next morning I accompanied him to the bus station. And that’s how he left for Nairobi.

  My leg is in a cast and I find myself propped up in a chair and staring out the glass back door of this house rather like the hero of an old Hitchcock film—except that what I look at is the empty expanse of frozen lake before me as I delve into the memories inside my head. I had a rather nasty slip on the back steps. Unable to move, I thought I would freeze to death in the cold, no one in sight to rescue me. I found the situation distinctly funny: vilified by the press from Nairobi to Cape Town, hit men and the Attorney General in my home town perhaps still on the lookout for me, the World Bank demanding details of the government’s dealings with me, here I was out all alone in the Canadian winter, dying in the snow. I started to laugh hysterically, silently, even as tears from the pain and the cold streamed down my face. Perhaps in this ironical situation I had found my fitting end, worth embracing happily. A freezing death is not painful, I’ve been told, except during the first minutes.

  A half hour after my fall, as if hallucinating in my dazed, semiconscious state, I caught the barking and yelping of dogs, and high, rollicking children’s voices, and glimpses of bright yellow and blue and red leaping like pennants in front of my eyes. The two neighbour kids like angels had appeared to my rescue.

  Next of kin? asked the receptionist at the hospital. I gave the name Seema Chatterjee, and immediately happy faces bloomed all around me, and I was in the tender care of several friendly women, until Seema herself arrived and brought me home. She’ll spend a few nights here, she says, until I am mobile.

  Of all my characters she likes Mahesh Uncle best, he is her hero. But she once said of him: How typically Punjabi! Fight first, ask questions later! She is intrigued by his relationship with his father, my Grandfather Verma the police inspector, whom I had once overheard my uncle describe to my mother as a “traitor.” She says there is information she could access through the Internet about the role of the Indian police in India’s long independence struggle. I am intrigued, as much by her curiosity as by what she will uncover regarding my maternal grandfather.

  SEVENTEEN.

  Dilip wrote to Deepa, as he had promised he would, and she replied. His letters came regularly, reaching her every two weeks on a Tuesday, having arrived by the London post and been sorted over the weekend. Over Diwali he slipped in a thin gold chain with his letter, and another time a pressed flower. There was nothing embarrassing or overbearing in his approach, nothing unsuitable or not meant also for the eyes and ears of my parents. He was proper, always the gentleman. He wrote about how he had spent his time since he last wrote, having visited a cricket or football match or a play at the West End, and sometimes he mentioned a girl or two of his acquaintance at the university, in an attempt to tease her and perhaps my mother too. To both my parents he was the ideal suitor for their daughter, whose impulsiveness and quickness of temper, whose undue extroversion they watched anxiously lest these excesses spill over and poison the golden matrimonial prospect unfolding like a boon from the gods.

  Njoroge too wrote to her, of course, letters in a humorous vein signed “Bugsy” and also not unintended for my parents’ attention. They found his posturing awkward and disconcerting. His secret love letters to her, however, were frantic and frequent, delivered by a messenger in school.

  He missed her desperately, and he found the secrecy unbearable. He had no one to talk to about this love in his life and sometimes, reflecting on it all by himself, away from his many friends, away from the heated political debates and the literary gatherings Makerere University was famous for, he even doubted his ability to nurture it. Perhaps he was deluding himself with it. He wasn’t even sure at times what level of intimacy to adopt with this alien girl. Wasn’t she still a child? And yet how easy she found it to handle the situation!

  Doubts and fears assailed him like hostile spirits as he lay awake in his bed at night: how would he convince her family to relent, permit him to marry their daughter; if they didn’t, would he have the strength to defy them, whom he loved and respected? It was not going to be easy at all. And later still, how would his African friends treat her, when they could still recall bitterly the past racism of her people? How would her own people treat her…

  Perhaps, he wrote in dejection once, we should call it off. I know your Indians too well, they will never allow their daughter to marry an African. It’s no good, my Deepa, don’t you see? I’ve become an African terrorist for your parents, who once loved me so much. I sometimes wonder how it is even possible that we’ve come this far, from our respective ends, that we are able even to talk so intimately, share so many thoughts. The most wonderful thing about us is that we’ve learnt, we’ve discovered a new terrain in human relationship, a new trait of the heart that proclaims that we can get as close to another human as to become one in body and spirit—no matter how different the details of our birth! Do you see this?

  How can you say that! came her reply to him. How can you have doubts! If you stop loving me I will die! Let’s run away to London, she pleaded, that’s what Indian girls do to marry outside their community or religion. You’re right, they will never relent!

  He answered categorically, No, Deepa. This is a historical moment for Kenya, for East Africa, don’t you see? It’s a time for Africa finally
to become great in the world! We have arrived. I have to be here, you have to be here, to witness that greatness; to make it possible, my dear. I have a role to play in that future, I feel it in my very bones—how can we run away to seek refuge in the arms of our former colonial masters?

  In panic, she drove to the General Post Office one night, soon after receiving this letter, and from one of the bank of phone booths on the sidewalk outside she called him and apologized: I am sorry, Njo, how could I have been so thoughtless, to ask you to run away from Kenya for my sake?

  She was in tears. They had trapped themselves into a corner of hopeless despair and pessimism, and she was suffering. He had misjudged her strength: their secret, forbidden love was exacting a pitiless daily toll from her life. Her pent-up passions cried out for release, yet at home she had to put on a complete performance to deny her true self. The good humour with which she bore my parents’ awful hints and jokes about her “romance” with Dilip; her self-control at the increasingly presumptuous attentions of the Sharmas; the charming, mature girl she tried to become, only so that Mother and Papa would bend her way, but which made them believe she was finally acquiescing to theirs; all this, and she wanted to scream out to the world, But it is Njoroge I will marry! Don’t you see? Let me live my life! She stayed up late nights to read and reread his letters and to write to him with matching passion. Mother was ever watchful, not completely taken in by the show of compliance, and she would sometimes tap on Deepa’s door with an anxious Soyi ho na? Are you sleeping, beti? Just finished reading, Mama, I’m going to sleep now, Deepa would reply. His correspondence she carefully rolled up and concealed in a cardboard tube, which she inserted into one of the hollow metal legs of her bed; and she was careful not to leave any guilty impressions of her love on the writing pad.

  Outside on Kenyatta Avenue, the only pedestrians were the sidewalk prostitutes, bargaining with tourists in taxis, and the occasional straggler drifting homeward. In her phone booth, she did her best to keep her eyes away from curious stares.