by M G Vassanji
One day I knocked and entered his office at four in the afternoon, a time we had earlier prearranged for a meeting, and caught him at his large desk with beautiful Rose Waiyaki on his lap, his hand somewhere up her clothing. She stood up and left the room, ruffled but not without a smile, and he too stood up, part sheepish, part arrogant. Such situations, I told myself, would sooner or later land me in hot water. I was, however, as composed as an English butler, impervious to his master’s indiscretions.
I wish I were as cold as you are, Vic, he said to me. You are quite quite the Frigidaire aren’t you? And I bet you take pride in that.
Smarting, I recalled my hectic deflowering at the hands of the Italian beauty Sophia and said in an affected Jeevish tone, No, I don’t believe so, sir. Only, I prefer to keep things under control.
Yes, you are a cold tilapia, he said emphatically, adding: I on the other hand, much to my own embarrassment sometimes, am white-hot underneath. In any case, I apologize for putting you through that…that…nani, show. But the damned woman is so finger-licking good, you see.
He beckoned for me to sit on the long cane sofa on the far wall across from his large desk, and stepped out of the room, returning a few minutes later wiping his hands in his handkerchief. He came and sat beside me, the cane of the sofa groaning under his bulk, his expensive cologne as strong as ever, and said gravely: I am going to bring you into my confidence, Vic Lall. I am going to give you an important assignment, of vital necessity. Our country is in great danger from the communists, as you no doubt are aware. As you have read in the papers, arms have been discovered now and then in the hands of the opposition, money flows constantly into their coffers, from Moscow and Peking. All they have to do is win an election once—yes—and bingo, we are a one-party socialist state like our neighbour Tanzania to the south—where they have nationalized the banks and the private properties of your Asian brothers, I don’t have to remind you.
This was totally beyond me. Like any ordinary citizen I had read the news reports he mentioned and assumed that, if correct, they would be acted upon by the government. I did not know how they concerned me, specifically. I looked at him expectantly. I realized now that he had placed an attaché case on the coffee table before us, over the strewn copies of current newspapers and magazines. He flicked the two end locks of the attaché case open, flung the top back in a quick motion, and watched for my response.
Stacks of American twenty-dollar bills met my astonished eyes, neatly and exactly fitted in rows into the cavity of the case, and looking strangely unreal—a foreign and very potent object with their dull green colour, their narrow size compared with our own large and flamboyant legal tender.
By now my palms had broken into a cold sweat. Dollars, I said lamely, flatly, inwardly recoiling from them, wondering desperately to myself: Why is he showing me these?
He said softly: these are donations to our party from well-wishers abroad. If the opposition found out, they will yell blue murder, call it bribes—foreign interference, American imperialism. But they are honest-to-God donations from private individuals. I would like you to find your Indian contacts and have them change this money and stash it; like in a bank. You with your brilliant mind will keep track of the account. And when our different constituencies need money for their operations, they will be paid by those Indians. Umefahamu? You understand?
Dumbfounded, I simply gaped back at him. What would have happened if I had refused the assignment? I would have been sacked and warned off. Nothing else, though could one be sure?
I was sworn to secrecy, yet I couldn’t do the job without seeking help; what did I know of Indian merchants who traded in dollars? And so I called up my father and we met at a coffee shop below his office. There I took him into my confidence. He was mortified.
Baap ré, you are not meant for this kind of shady business, this looks dangerous, son.
What could I do, Papa?
He took a long moment, drumming a finger on the glass-topped table, before replying calmly, You can quit your job—but later, in the future. Now you have this attaché case, and you have to get rid of it.
That night after dinner we went and saw Harry Uncle. He immediately understood what was required: Go to Narandas Hansraj first thing tomorrow. I will call him meanwhile and tell him you are coming.
And so Narandas Hansraj, of Muindi Mbingu Street, dealer in curios who came into frequent contact with tourists, became the banker for this foreign currency. He was a short thin man with a small moustache and round glasses—a typical banyani of modest habits, shrewd mind, and accumulating wealth, whom I must have seen a dozen times in the past in his little storefront across from the market, staring out in the way of all such shopkeepers at the world passing by. This was business for him only a shade out of the ordinary.
Don’t worry, bhaisahib, he assured me genially. Fikar nahi, we’ll handle it, discretion guaranteed!
I had made his world a little more exciting.
The beneficiaries of the fund simply had to identify themselves to Narandas, who would have received a prior phone call from me, and money would change hands.
In those days Njoroge and I would meet at the Coffee House on Mama Ngina Street, and Deepa would on occasion join us, coming over from the pharmacy. The three of us worked within ten minutes of each other, in the bustling hub of Nairobi. I sensed that Deepa decided to meet us the first time in order to test herself with Njoroge, and it seemed to me that she could deal with his presence. She had a mature, controlled manner with him now. She was no longer the headstrong girl of before, after all, but a woman in her own right, and married. She sported a Sassoon hairstyle, with short, straight hair at the sides and back, and liked Indian cotton shirts over blue jeans or jean skirts and wooden beads and bangles. She drove a red MG convertible. And yet as they sat across from each other at the low wooden table in the crowded coffee shop humming with business and political têtes-à-têtes, it was impossible not to sense the electricity between them, charged with the memory of that previous relationship; it escaped in the occasional spark in her banter with him. Her repeated assertions of the fickleness of men, or how happy she was, could not go unnoticed by him. Attired like me in the bureaucrat’s grey or blue suit, he would sit straight and upright, watch her with a smile on his long face and a gleam in his eye. I was a little frightened for them. But I knew that my sister was an Indian wife, she would not do anything indiscreet to jeopardize her husband and her children. How carefully she had been held together following that devastation she suffered in love. I would always remain aware of it, in her presence. She had shown exemplary courage and resolve to emerge out of the chaos of a mental breakdown. Njoroge never mentioned that episode, but his pointed avoidance of coming to our home was indication enough that a lot remained unsaid. There was an element of unhappiness in his own marriage. His father-in-law, after a falling out with the ruling party, had been denied a seat in the last elections and was now a plain businessman minus the privileges of office. Mary had had a couple of miscarriages, and they had no children. Therefore when Deepa brought along her family pictures, picked up apparently from the studio down the road, I thought perhaps the scene was contrived to take a stab at him.
I did not tell Njoroge about my assignment from my boss Nderi, even though we became very close in those months. I was leading a carefully orchestrated double life, only for the good of the nation, I had been assured. There was perhaps some truth in this. Occasionally after work we met at the bar of the Nairobi Theatre, across from the Norfolk, and sat on the terrace. This was where, I suppose, student and faculty dissenters from the university down the road also met. Njoroge had become a cautious admirer of Okello Okello and more recently of the member of parliament J.M. Kariuki, a fellow Kikuyu from Nakuru. Influenced by these politicians, Njoroge too was beginning to believe that the freedom movement and the Mau Mau had been betrayed—that ours had become a country of ten millionaires and ten million paupers, as J.M. himself had loudly proclai
med, and those who had collaborated with the colonial police were now in all the high posts and had taken for themselves the best land and opportunities.
We spoke of our childhood days in Nakuru and I apprised him of the recent developments in the town. We had a chance to analyze our strange friendships, among an English boy and girl, an Asian boy and girl, and an African boy, grandson of a gardener suspected of being a Mau Mau by the police. I told him about Mahesh Uncle—how I had seen him with my father’s stolen pistol at the sawmill and then later riding off on horseback with supplies for the forest fighters; how I thought him responsible for our servant Amini’s fate and Mwangi’s arrest and death.
I have never believed Mwangi was a party to that murderous attack on the Bruces, I told him.
He waited a moment, then said: You know he gave Mau Mau oaths.
I was silent, uncomfortable, my heart thudding inside me. Why did he tell me this? I did not want to hear doubts cast upon old Mwangi: my faith in him, his look, his touch, his gentle voice, was absolute.
But giving oaths…that didn’t make you a murderer, I said desperately.
Njoroge sat watching me, then he went on slowly, in an even voice:
Some Mau Mau used to put the body parts of their enemies into the stew they used for their oathing ceremonies. That’s what I heard from a few of the old men I came to meet. I don’t know whether to believe that or not—I understand it, as a binding ritual, and yet I don’t…It’s not the kind of thing we like to talk about. The truth scares us…instead of simply acknowledging us as a part of the cycle of human good and evil. I’ve tried hard to understand Mwangi, and through him, myself. What was he like, my grandfather?
He watched me awhile, musing, then added, Don’t worry, Mzee Mwangi was no murderer. I lived with him, I knew him. I knew everything he did…You know they used to torture their suspects—Lieutenant Soames and his men, especially that Corporal Boniface? They would tie fishing lines around the testicles of their suspects and pull, one man on either side of the victim. My grandfather’s battered body was buried in the police compound. I’ve heard it said that the testicles were missing.
That night I went home and cried. I didn’t know why the tears streamed down my face, uncontrollably, in the darkness of my room. Papa was watching Bonanza in the living room, Mother listening to Indian music on a tape recorder. I suppose it was because I felt my childhood’s years to have been so blighted, in a way I could not fathom. And that evening, with the memories dredged up, the cold carapace of my composure cracked and the tears leaked out in streams.
I don’t intend to be sentimental.
The next time I saw Njoroge he gave me a brown government envelope, stiff with the contents inside.
They were in the court records, Vic. You know the British destroyed many police records before they left. But these—they are the only extant photographs of that attack on the Bruce house—they were in the high court archives. Two servants were brought to trial for the murders, but the case was later withdrawn. These pictures are gruesome, I advise you. But they are for you to destroy and lay to rest. Burn them in the Hindu fashion. They were your friends, Annie and Bill, let’s face it—more than they were mine.
Gentle taunt; echo of a sentiment long harboured. And I the guilty one in the middle, the perilous in-between.
Paul Nderi did not soil his hands handling dollars after that day he passed me the attaché case full of them. He said the party’s well-wishers preferred to send their donations via two Americans who worked in Nairobi, and I was to be the intermediary. They were Jim Perkins and Gerald Cornwall and I met them for the first time one day in a booth of a steakhouse. They were friendly and informal, as Americans tend to be, one lanky and the other somewhat muscular and squat. It amused me that they were always together whenever we met thereafter, perhaps due to a rule in procedure. Each attaché case they gave me contained two hundred thousand dollars. I wondered naturally who these benefactors were who sent so much money to the country, and—as I would not do now—how Narandas Hansraj, dealer in tourist gewgaws, could so easily muster the equivalent sum in shillings.
One day the two Americans told me there were ten thousand dollars extra in the briefcase. Let’s face it, said Jim, the job is risky even if it is above board—these are what we call campaign funds, all politicians need them. They are the grease that smoothes the democratic process. Now as our token of gratitude we would like you to keep the extra ten thousand.
I refused, saying I was only the minister’s minion.
In the future I would know better, for that ten thousand surely didn’t end up in a worthier pocket.
TWENTY-FOUR.
If I say I married out of boredom, I would not be far off the mark. This is not to devalue the marriage, nor to say I never loved her, in a manner, and she, me; there was never passion in it, true—since when is that required of arranged matrimony, anyway? An arranged marriage is an alliance, a prudent exchange of duty and understanding and care that leads to the growth of mutual affection and even a restrained species of that thing called love. It is comfortable, not extravagant, and consequently less painful. It was perfect for me, at a time when a sense of listlessness hung over me cumuluslike in its oppressive weight. And so I became husband and lord of the manor, which meant I looked after its material well-being. In return, I was looked after from my morning wake-up tea to the steaming buttery chappati straight from the tawa to my plate at mealtimes, to the nightly glass of milk and the pressed pyjamas on my bed; when I had a stubborn headache I could look forward to the pain deftly stroked out with medicinal oils, and when my feet and legs ached they too received ministrations from her small, dark, soft and cool hands.
And yet she was a highly educated woman.
The offer of marriage had come from her family of jewellers, called the Javeris, through our friends the Sharmas. Deepa was delighted at the prospect of seeing me finally settled. Without forewarning me about the offer, she took me to the jewellery shop on Kenyatta Avenue on a pretext, on a Saturday morning. Past the unfriendly, steel-reinforced glass double-doors unlocked from the inside by a switch, and the uniformed guard on duty, we were attended to by a young woman with a husky melodious voice smooth as silk; she was petite and dark, had large, deep, deliquescent black eyes. She offered us masala tea with burfi, and an assortment of diamond-studded gold jewellery sets was displayed before us on a counter. My sister, in the manner of the bourgeois wife she had become, bargained and haggled but bought nothing. And in the manner of the skilled saleswoman, the young woman at the counter did not attempt to pressure her, but remained friendly and charming throughout.
As we left the shop, a revelation hit me:
How did she know my name? She called me Mr. Lall.
Deepa gave a devilish smile, said, You are not unknown, you know, Bhaiya, and she giggled delightedly, took my arm, and guided me to a coffee shop nearby where Mother and Meena Auntie awaited us, picking anxiously at the cheese pies before them.
They asked me if I liked the girl in the jewellery store, a proposal having come from her family that the two of us were well suited to get married. Neither of us had been aware of the proposal in the store, though I recalled two men and a woman in sari taking peeps at us from an inside doorway.
England-educated, Meena Auntie said. Cambridge University, isn’t that so?
Deepa agreed. Very smart girl, Bhaiya, and she likes you too, I think. I saw you staring at her. The only hitch is she is Gujarati—but you’re fluent in Gujarati, aren’t you—kem che, and all that—after your Dar es Salaam experience?
She was enjoying herself. Nothing else in an Indian woman’s life quite approaches the sheer ecstasy of arranging a brother’s wedding. She turns into a child again. Many a young man has gone the marriage route through the happy wiles of an enthusiastic, busybody sister. Deepa was of course not a little envious at the freedom I still enjoyed, but she was also concerned about me, especially after my aborted affair with Sophia.
&n
bsp; But what’s her name? I asked my sister.
Shobha Devi, she answered, unable to hide the tremor in her voice. Call her Shobha and may she be a shobha in your home!
There was a wistful, almost resigned smile on Mother’s face, as she watched me for my response. She had already, in my absence, expressed reservations about the match. She would have preferred a Punjabi girl—there’s no dearth of good girls in Punjab, is there, she had said. And she thought the Javeris, who were from Mombasa, were somewhat compromised castewise (this was according to a rumour) and the girl in addition was a bit too dark.
Deepa watched her impatiently and blurted out, What’s the matter now, Mama? Do you want an Italian or Seychellois daughter-in-law? Because that’s precisely what you’ll get if you go on being picky—some Sophia or Gina Lollobrigida or—
Meena Auntie put it succinctly: Better an Indian and respectable Hindu in hand—
—than a Punjabi in the bush somewhere in India, Deepa completed.
I agreed to meet the girl. I saw her over coffee the very next day and we spoke about our lives and our aspirations. At some point in the future, she said, she wanted to return abroad and do her graduate studies, but for now she wanted to be in Nairobi. She had come with two other young women, one of whom was her sister, and they sat at a table away from us, conversing and looking up to watch us furtively. I was surprised and charmed at this bit of chaperoning. I liked Shobha and I didn’t find her very traditional. In this I turned out to be badly mistaken. We parted and informed our familes that we liked each other. Our families met. Finally, a few days after our first meeting, I took Shobha out to dinner with Deepa and Dilip. At the end of that dinner, which was very pleasant and turned more intimate as the evening progressed, Dilip asked the two of us, So can we assume that you two are agreed…er…to a union? We all laughed and Shobha and I looked at each other and said, Yes.
