The In-Between World of Vikram Lall

by M G Vassanji

  She will. She has to. If she doesn’t, then…we just…elope.

  I turned to Njoroge.

  She will come around, he said confidently. She must. I will go and speak to her myself. I will go and present myself to her. What do you see wrong in me, I will ask her. What harm can come to your daughter if she marries me? I have a bright future. I can become a permanent secretary or a minister some day, our country has a great future. And intermarriage is inevitable.

  And suppose—

  Suppose she doesn’t like the idea of half-breeds, I thought, suppose she wants to be able to speak to her grandchildren in her own tongue, in Punjabi or Hindi, and she doesn’t want to be the talk of the Indian community in the whole of East Africa and be subjected to the contempt of other women, who will say she has a pukka kalu for a damad; suppose she wants to be able to hold her head up high in temple in front of these women, and to take her daughter and her family to Delhi to see her father and feel no shame…

  You talk to her, Bhaiya, my sister said to me. Take a stand in my favour, for God’s sake, Vic, she pleaded.

  I turned red under that look, those large black beseeching eyes with just a hint of reprimand in them.

  I will talk to her, I said.

  We agreed on a plan of action. As soon as the college term ended, in May, we would all meet in Nairobi and coordinate our moves. I would first speak firmly to both my parents. Mahesh Uncle would be prevailed upon to speak to Mother. Then Njoroge would come and meet them. He would bring a granny along, some elderly and utterly respectable Kikuyu relative, and also the Minister for Land Settlement. My parents could not but be convinced. The minister would promise to have the wedding of their daughter blessed by the Old Man, Mzee Kenyatta himself.

  How could that not work? We celebrated by giving a multiracial party in my dormitory that night.

  Deepa and Yasmin hit it off straight away like long-lost cousins. Yasmin was charmed by Deepa’s mercurial nature and Nairobi mannerisms, and touched by the present my sister had brought for her, a skirt and top. Nairobi fashions were always prized in Dar. Nairobi was still little London. I saw them once walking hand in hand discussing something and laughing; for some reason I imagined that they were talking about Njoroge and me. One afternoon the two went off to the city together and returned, having had tea at Yasmin’s house.

  I love your sister, so, Yasmin said to me later in that typical manner of speech that sweetly echoed her Cutchi inflections.

  We were out on a walk in the evening, on the campus grounds, and we had allowed Njoroge and Deepa to take the lead. We must have been a sight to behold for the curious onlooker, examples of flouted conventions, but it was a late hour and sparsely lighted where we were; not many people were about.

  Oh yes? I replied. She likes you a lot too, I can attest to that.

  She is so lively, so full of spunk! But it takes a lot of courage, what she’s up to, nuh?

  We had slowed to a stop, a momentary unconscious one, and I flicked her pigtail affectionately, met her flashing black eyes and her tight-lipped smile. What she herself was up to, with me, I could have told her, required no less courage than my sister’s. This was the moment, we both knew, when we could have sealed our relationship and our future together. She was waiting for me only to take that first step. I pulled away, and we strolled on.

  On the Friday evening, Njoroge having left the previous day, Deepa and I had just walked Yasmin home after a movie and were strolling back along Upanga Road for our ride back to campus, promised by a young Canadian professor. It was a quiet night, the lights in the windows and open doors of the row houses just visible over the hedges, faint strains of western pop or Indian music drifting to the ears, a voice or two calling out in the distance. We had spoken about Yasmin, how much Deepa liked her; my sister was certain Mother too would like her, regardless of her faith and background. We agreed that Mother needed understanding and care, emotionally warm but fragile as she had always been; and we agreed that Mrs. Burton was a passing phase and harmless, over whom Papa was fawning in his typical manner as he had sometimes done over Mrs. Bruce in Nakuru. The reminiscence made us laugh, turn thoughtful. It was one of those moments of absolute closeness, rare, ephemeral, whose fullness of emotion sends a chill down your spine, and you wonder if you will ever be able to reproduce it, if it will ever seem as real and intense as you want to remember it.

  Bhaiya, do you think of Annie often?

  I replied slowly, after a pause, I guess somehow she’s always there at the back of the mind. It’s hard to explain.

  She was such a sweet girl. She meant a lot to you, I know.

  I don’t know, Sis. We were so young then. But somehow I never got over her. It was the killing, the horror and suddenness of it, how unreal it was, like a nightmare.

  Deepa put her arm through mine, asked softly: Do you think Njoroge’s grandfather—Mwangi—had anything to do with it, Vic? I am sometimes frightened by the thought.

  I don’t think so, Deepa. Do you remember how he would put flowers in your hair…and once he put a champeli in hers too, that day she and Bill and their mother came to visit us and brought that rose plant? And she sang that Latin song from her choir? Laudate dominum, laudate dominum… I have never forgotten it. Sometimes it just keeps playing in my mind, over and over. Like a record that’s broken…

  I felt a tremor in my sister’s arm.

  Before us, at the intersection, the mosque stood towering in all its grandeur, outlined in a brilliant series of decorative light bulbs in honour of some celebration; its clock tolled the half-hour at ten-thirty. A dog barked somewhere, and in perverse reply came the sound of a bicycle bell. The image of old Mwangi was floating in my mind, of him tending the garden patiently, when suddenly a terrifying, unearthly squeal came from the shadows, followed by a hoot. My sister and I froze in our tracks. Oh God, Oh Rabba, she whispered, digging her fingers into my arm. Out leapt before us six youths, howling like wild dogs, gesturing like demons, mouthing all manner of obscenities; they surrounded us. I took hold of Deepa’s hand and made a dash for it in the direction we had come, only to meet a leering Elvis face, shirt open, pants crotch-tight, wielding a tree branch. I lurched sideways, ran forward, to no avail. We should have screamed, but terror froze our throats. Backwards, sideways, forwards again, and our paths were blocked in a horrifying checkmate and what awaited was only the kill. But then at the intersection appeared a white Mercedes; it turned left onto the main road, swerved left again toward the gate where we stood trapped, and the six scampered away into the dark like cockroaches. The man at the wheel was a local millionaire, Mr. Bapu; he rolled down a window and asked us who we were and what was the matter. We explained our predicament, and he told us to spend the night in his house, he would have us driven to the campus the next morning.

  There was no doubt in my mind, from the obscenities I had heard—in a mixture of Cutchi and Swahili, that Tanzanian specialty—and the faces I had seen—that buck-toothed horse, the curly-haired half-caste chotara—that our attackers had known me, and most likely seen my sister before. I, a Nairobi Punjabi Hindu, was dating one of their girls; to make matters worse, I had a sister who was going out in the open with an African. When men develop contempt for a woman, the vilest, filthiest language escapes their lips. All night I smarted from those insults. Deepa was close to hysteria and I spent the night in the same room with her.

  The next morning Mr. Bapu drove us in his white Mercedes to the campus, but not before a lavish breakfast and a tour of his quite wonderful garden, which he obviously had a hand in tending, though there was an elderly gardener with whom he chatted amiably. Mr. Bapu cut for Deepa a red rose. On the way he hummed a tune, some sort of bhajan, which we could not quite figure out, but it seemed completely out of key and Deepa and I had a job keeping up straight faces.

  I realize that my contempt for those nocturnal attackers has not waned a bit; I have called them names, but this is how I have always recalled them and that terror-
filled eternity that must actually have been two or three minutes. Mahesh Uncle comes to mind: when we were little he once said to us, in his typical manner, Henh, henh—see how memory makes monkeys out of our enemies, as one of my teachers used to say. And what does it make out of our friends, Uncle? we asked. He said, It gives them a tint of rose, or it saves them in amber—do you know what amber is, children?

  Mr. Bapu, whom we never saw again, is preserved in amber.

  Seema doesn’t spend the night here anymore, now that I can move about quite nimbly with support. She does visit sometimes after work and we have dinner together. She brought some information recently about Inspector Verma, my mother’s father. In 1942 a trial had taken place in Peshawar of some captured officers of the Indian National Army; the INA, under Subhas Chandra Bose, had taken up sides with the Japanese against the British. Many of its members were deserters from the Indian Army. In that trial, of among other people the well-known Colonel Jamal Khan, my grandfather had been a prosecutor. All INA men were found guilty and handed out death sentences, which, however, were never carried out.

  There are books on this famous trial, Seema tells me, but I am not interested. She has stories about the heroic deeds of Colonel Jamal Khan and his men, stories about blowing up bridges and gymkhanas in far-flung places and about thrilling ambushes of British troops. Jamal Khan, like Bose, she tells me proudly, was a Bengali. There is a street in Calcutta named after him; the airport is named after the redoubtable Bose.

  This trial is what I assume my uncle referred to when he would remind my mother about their father’s traitorous deed. Mahesh Uncle had promised me a full revelation about himself and his father; but as fate would have it, we never had a chance to regain the intimacy of that night in Dar when he made that promise.

  I wish I had known Grandfather Verma better. Every year he would send us Diwali and birthday cards from Delhi, where he ended up, and we would write to him occasionally. There was always the anticipation in me and my sister of meeting him one day. I wonder now why he didn’t come to see us himself; perhaps, as for many old people, the thought of dying somewhere away from his homeland daunted him; perhaps he was waiting for an invitation from Mahesh Uncle. Traditional propriety certainly demanded that if he came he stay with his son. Lately he had moved to an ashram, a retiree commune run by a swami, and sometimes he sent Mother little snippets of Vedantic philosophy whose abstractions more often than not only puzzled her. She was a practical, emotional person. When she tried them on my father he would become irritated; Deepa and I found them distant and amusing. In Nakuru my nanaji’s photo had been prominent in our home; high on a wall, he looked imposing to my young eyes, in his police uniform and with his smart military moustache and combed-back hair. In Nairobi he hung in the dimly lit corridor outside the bedrooms, faded and barely noticed.

  Joseph visited last week. He had changed his hair, now it was gathered in small knots spread out over the head, a startling style that rather ominously reminded me of a famous picture of Mau Mau leader General China at his trial, a police constable standing on either side of him. I did not make a comment and understood that he is still very much involved with the MuKenya Patriots, the self-styled Sons of Mau Mau. Seema took him skating once; he wore a hat and was spared the stares he would inevitably have attracted.

  One late sleepless night, as I sat watching the darkness outside at the back of the house, my infirm legs propped in front of me on a stool, he kindly brought me some herbal tea. As he stood up over me, having put down the tray, and I looked up to thank him, I discerned more clearly than ever before the shadow of his father upon that long face, its high forehead. And (credit this to too much whisky late at night) the spectre of Deepa wafted across the waters of the lake and came to stand beside him.

  NINETEEN.

  The short rains had come and that year’s East African Safari motor rally was more gruelling than ever; of the seventy-nine cars that started out, eleven finished, arriving in Nairobi mud-splattered and beaten up in every way. Taking the same plane as Deepa back to Nairobi that Monday morning was the ace rally driver Mohindra Singh, known to Papa through their common club. His Peugeot had skidded and hit a tree, avoiding an obstruction on the road planted by thrill-seeking villagers; it was later savaged by an angry rhino while parked, but fortunately while Singh and his codriver were not inside it. Yet here he was in the waiting lounge, cheerful and chirpy as a parrot, anxious to get back to civilization, as he put it. The Daily Nation had a front-page picture of this year’s winning Safari team, the chubby, blonde Erikson brothers of Sweden, reclined on the bonnet of their Saab, sharing champagne from their silver trophy cup. They hate each other, Mohindra Singh confided to us about the Swedes, but they make good partners.

  Deepa was in excellent company it seemed and I prepared to leave.

  The omens looked good for her heart’s wish to come true that bright Dar es Salaam morning, the warm air redolent of salt and sea, the sun already broiling hot. The charismatic Kenya minister Tom Mboya, at a public meeting in Nairobi on Sunday, had called intermarriage a good thing for racial harmony. Njoroge knew Mboya distantly, Mahesh Uncle knew him even better, through Okello Okello. And this morning’s paper reported that Carl Erikson, the younger of the Safari-winning brothers, had announced his engagement to a Swahili beauty queen from the coast. All these, signs of our galloping times that our parents could hardly ignore.

  I waved goodbye to Deepa as she boarded the shuttle bus; she wore her blue school blazer over white slacks, and brown leather sandals; an East African Airways bag was slung over a shoulder. Beside her towered the beaming, pot-bellied Mohindra Singh in crimson turban, obviously flattered by her company. I was happy for her, and felt almost certain now that she would get her way. I was filled with admiration for her. I thought that she and Njoroge would be an example and inspiration for what was possible in our new society…We were young still.

  Less than three weeks later Njoroge suddenly arrived in Nairobi, to be interviewed by the Ministry of Land Settlement for a permanent job to follow his graduation in a few months. This was the same ministry where he had worked during the holidays. Full of excitement, the morning of his arrival he drove to our home in a borrowed car, looking forward to the delightful surprise he would surely see on Deepa’s lovely face. It was Sunday. Deepa, seeing him through the window, rushed out joyfully to the driveway to greet him; Mother watched them. The lovers came inside, sat side by side on the living room sofa, and quite innocently let slip out the secret that they had met earlier that month in Dar.

  Njoroge of course had lunch before he left.

  You children have broken my heart, Mother wailed at me that night when I called.

  Mother, I lied, Njoroge’s visit to Dar was simply a coincidence! After all, I did invite you to come with Deepa?

  Then why did you keep his visit a secret from me? You encouraged them, Vikram—you, her brother, who should have known better. How am I going to explain to Meena-ji? She already suspects—

  Suspects what, Mother? And surely you have to respect Deepa’s wish to—

  What wish? There’s no wish without parents’ approval! We shall see about this, you will see what I am made of, you two.

  What are you saying, Mother?

  She hung up the phone.

  What would she do now? Fortunately Dilip was not around for her to arrange a rush engagement. There was still a month to go to the end of term, which was when the three of us had decided to begin our moves to win her over. We could only bide our time meanwhile and treat her with utmost consideration.

  Fate, however, had in mind another course of events, which it had already set in motion.

  The next morning Papa returned less than an hour after he had left for work, with a telegram from New Delhi. Grandfather Verma had died. Mother collapsed on the floor immediately she heard the news. Thereupon, having been helped to the high-backed chair in the living room, for several hours she sat motionless, staring vacantly ahead of h
er, tears forming intermittent streams down her face. Papa dared not leave the house until Deepa came home from school. Finally at around four in the afternoon Mother went and took a bath, and she put on her new, purple sari and her wedding jewellry. She lit a candle in front of her father’s framed photograph, which she had brought from its place on the wall to the coffee table, and sat staring at it for half the night. She had not spoken a word since the news came of her father’s death. Meanwhile Papa had had a phone message sent from Okello’s Nairobi office to Mahesh Uncle in Moscow.

  The following morning Njoroge came to pay his condolences just as Mother was preparing to leave for temple. With Deepa not around he thought this would be a good opportunity to meet Mother face to face, even if nothing else was said. If he had been a minute late, she would have missed him. But they met, and that meeting changed everything. That’s why Deepa for many years afterwards would blame fate and so cynically condemn God—they conspired to the very last minute to betray her.

  Mother listened to Njoroge’s sympathies with a blank face at the door, where she met him, and she formally thanked him for his concern. She was on her way to the temple, she told him, But come in, she said and took him inside the house and bade him sit. Tea was brought for him. It became clear that her father was not on her mind right then, as she stood over him, and Njoroge knew he was trapped. Looking him sternly in the eye, Mother issued a command: William, Njoroge, I forbid you to see my daughter in the way you have been seeing her. You have been like a son to us, she is your sister.

  But Mother, he began.

  No. No, I say. I have no one in the world except my brother and my children. I want you to understand that. I have lost my home in Pakistan. I have no cousins or uncles or aunts, no parents. At least let me have a normal family, where I can see my grandchildren grow up as Indians, as Hindus. I had dreams too, of children and grandchildren—whom I can understand, can speak to…and bring up in our ways. I have nothing against Africans. But we are different. You are a brother to my son and daughter, you are their best friend. But a husband for Deepa—no, Njoroge.