by M G Vassanji
Mother left behind a broken and disoriented Papa, who carried the desperate demeanour, it seemed to me, of a sailor lost at sea without a compass or a destination; thereafter he was a resigned man who would say his innings had run out. He seemed to possess none of his former authority, his endearing certainty, that cockiness with which he had visited Grandfather Verma to ask for his daughter’s hand, or asked his own father whether he had had a Masai girlfriend once.
One day Deepa told me that she had received overtures from parties willing to buy her portion of the shares of Mermaid Chemicals and had decided to sell and go to the United States, where she could be close to her children. She had observed a man in the city who, she was sure, was one of the assailants who had come into her shop and shot Njoroge. She was frightened. I encouraged her to go, telling her I would visit her regularly.
I remember one cold midnight bidding her farewell at the airport and thinking, The world as I knew it has now totally ended.
You had nothing to do with the murder, Seema says, why did you blame yourself the other night?
I suppose there is the burden of surviving a friend who died so young…and pure.
Before us is that maligned photo of grief-stricken Deepa, Njoroge’s head on her blood-soaked lap. His open eyes look up at her, send a chill through me. He had warned me once to be careful of changing political tides; a few weeks later here he was, riddled with bullets, in a scene screaming out with the agony of broken promise.
We have sat through an evening, Seema and I, looking at pictures, discussing memories. Balmy night breezes waft in through the screen door, carrying strains of distant music, laughter from a late party. The time she spends with me, I realize, cuts into her contributions to the cultural life of little Korrenburg.
He had striking eyes, Seema says.
And forehead, which his son inherits from him, I add.
She looks at me thoughtfully, then replies to my silent query, It’s a pity you and Joseph never came close.
Like father and son, as Deepa hoped? I would like to sound hard and cynical, but fail, I think, as I go on to explain, No…too much history, too much of the past stood between us.
I recall the morning last August when he left to begin his studies in Toronto. Seema, who was to drive him there, was in her car. As we shook hands at the door, I reminded him to call on me for anything he might need. Remember, I said, you are like a son to me and—
I saw him recoil momentarily, felt his hand go tense. We nodded our goodbyes to each other.
I was deeply humiliated at this instinctive rejection. I had believed I deserved to be acknowledged as a concerned adult, a friend of his father, and therefore a father. You should have known better, I chided myself as I closed the door. You are still an Asian.
Quite suddenly I desperately need this woman who is my friend, not just to talk to, but to be close to, to be one with. I beseech Seema with my eyes—perhaps I am drunk—and I take her hand as she gets up to leave and I hold it. I pull her back down. She stays the night.
THIRTY-ONE.
The days are long and warm; the air fragrant with the smell of grass and leaves and earth, the squirrels seem tireless, the birds are clamorous every morning, and spring bulbs in cheerful bright artificial rows have put their gaudy but no less authentic signatures on the season. It’s the heavenly, joyful spring and summer that lull you, Seema told me once—explaining herself, her immigrant life—that keep you here until you are suddenly trapped by the winter months and anxiously await the next spring and summer—which have never failed so far, let me tell you; and so the years pass and before you know it you’ve lived here decades and unwillingly, unwittingly, belong.
Belong, I echoed her word and asked myself, Can I too learn to belong here?
But now the night is still and we sit this side of the screen door, this side of the dark, over a bottle of wine, listening to the murmur of the waves on the lake, the rustling of the new leaves on the trees, contemplating the future.
She sits with me on the long settee, my confessor, leaning back at the other end, her two small feet on my thighs, as if to ensure I stay put. She has on a shalwar-kameez in soft warm colours, her perfume is nice, and she has a ring on one of her middle toes. I never paid attention to these little details about her before.
Do I belong here—in this wonderful country where the seasons are orderly, days go past smoothly one after another? This cold moderation should after all be conducive to my dispassion? No. I feel strongly the stir of the forest inside me; I hear the call of the red earth, and the silent plains of the Rift Valley through which runs the railway that my people built, and the bustle of River Road; I long for the harsh, familiar caress of the hot sun.
I feel the press of her feet upon me, sense the deep gaze from that soft round Indian face gauging my thoughts. She says, You’ve gone away, haven’t you, Vikram Lall. You are truly a cold man.
I’m sorry. It’s time for me to face my accusers, I tell her.
She pauses to gather this in, then says: And get your name off the List of Shame?
I’m not sure if she’s being sarcastic.
That List of Shame has long intrigued her. It does sound so dramatically damning. It counts me the most corrupt man in our country, itself ranked one of the most corrupt nations in the world. What does that make of me? During the first months of our knowing each other, this stigma stood like a wall between us. Aided by Joseph and the raucous headlines of the Nairobi papers, she made me into an evil genius, but then quickly and with touching honesty revised that judgement. I am actually quite the simpleton. I long believed that mine were crimes of circumstance, of finding oneself in a situation and simply going along with the way of the world. I’ve convinced myself now that this excuse is not good enough; as she put it so graphically and forcefully, That’s what many of the killers in Rwanda would also say. Thank your stars you did not find yourself there during the genocide, going along, as you say. But I would never kill, I objected, to which: There are different ways of killing, Mr. Lall.
I did not have the heart to risk a quarrel; but then perhaps I had no quarrel to pick. I recalled Kihika, how uncompromising I was in my judgement of him, as a young man. Now Joseph was my judge.
The Gemstone Scandal, now synonymous with me and my activities, was what put me on that shaming list. But that arrangement of business deals was not even my idea. It simply fell into place like a fortuitous hand at poker. All we had to do, my partners and I, was to pick up the cards and play.
One day a man came to visit my brother-in-law Chand, at the Javeris’ retail shop on Kenyatta Avenue, bringing with him a number of items, beginning with a sample of earth in a metal box. Jewellers entertain a lot of mysterious business propositions, very few of which pan out. The visitor, made comfortable in the confines of Chand’s inner office, threw his soil sample into a strainer and poured upon it a solvent, apparently a new product from America; he let the liquid drain away into a bowl. Chand saw in the glistening wet residue in the strainer a generous sprinkling of blue gems. Tanzanite, the man pronounced drily, an expert stating the evident. Tanzanite was the recently discovered rock much touted as the gem of the future. Chand, no fool in the matter of precious stones, knew that the gem turned blue only after heat treatment. The visitor’s dramatic demonstration was obviously a con. The man claimed to offer a small but lucrative Tanzanite mine for private sale on behalf of some unnamed local bigwig. A meeting was held of the Javeri brothers and myself; we were all of one mind: Let’s get hold of the mine; dud or not, it will come in handy one day.
So it did. For the government of Patrick Madola had a scheme in which it offered handsome commissions to exporters for selling local commodities abroad and bringing into the country precious foreign exchange. Solomon Mines, our new company, began exporting nonexistent or worthless gems at high prices from its little mine in Tsavo to its subsidiary in London, earning immense sums in commissions in foreign currency. What Solomon paid to itself were w
orthless equities inflated in value. The pounds sterling won as commissions from our government were deposited in British and Swiss banks on behalf of some of our elites, into their secret accounts, garnering further commissions for us; the local currencies so collected were sold to the national bank at premium during cash-flow crises. Needless to say, transfers of funds were handled by our affiliate, Aladdin Finance. But in a country such as ours, such large profits, the manufacture of money out of thin air and paper, as it were, plus a bogus mine, do not go unnoticed. Agents of powerful interests haunt the corridors of commerce and banking, feelers out for the smell of success, for rich veins to bleed and possess. Solomon Mines duly attracted its share of well-placed partners. The scam operated for a period of three years. It came to be called the Gemstone Scandal.
But my financial involvements were varied and many; they were a game that offered me comfort, prestige, and the friendship of the powerful. They made my name legend outside the country. Consider. One day a man walks into my office offering gold and diamonds for sale, cheaply, on behalf of a company in Uganda that is obviously a front. The payment is to be deposited into the account of another front company, in Europe; I also have to facilitate the arrival of certain metal goods in Mombasa port and their transportation in covered trucks back to Uganda, from where presumably they will go on farther north or west, where the civil wars are fought. Nothing could be easier to arrange. Another day brings a hand-delivered letter from a deposed general or his son or one of his wives. There have been dozens of coups d’état in Africa. Every coup releases its share of unwanted flotsam—generals, prime ministers, presidents, politicians, widows, orphans, with stashed-away millions and uncollected kickbacks that need the assistance of a finance company such as Aladdin to see them safely to their new homes.
This chummy bazaar of the discreet telephone call and the party circuit came under stress when the Cold War ended, and along with it the threat of international communism; countries of the West which had supplied aid and loans aplenty, turning a blind eye to abuses, now demanded accountability from the government; the press discovered its guts. The Gemstone Scandal became public knowledge and a symbol of corruption; its audacity provoked outrage. Consequently, when my name became reviled as the Fu Manchu of corruption and the King of Shylocks (our newspapers, under the thumb of the government or otherwise, have always been creative), my life seemed, at least in the initial months, cheap to all those I had offended or in whose way I stood.
Two days after the story of my degeneracy broke, while I was at dinner with my wife, a phone call arrived from Harry Soames, warning me that a midnight raid had been planned on my home. I had promised Soames a large sum of money for just such a timely warning. My son Ami and daughter Sita were out partying with friends and I prayed they would take their time returning. We turned off the lights in our home and waited, the children uppermost in our minds. Ami attended a local college; Sita had finished high school but was undecided. At eleven the phone lines went dead; my wife and I headed for our closet, behind which lay the walk-in safe which had been a present from my in-laws. We did not go immediately into the safe, for it was a cramped space, but sat down on the floor beside the open closet door and waited. At one a.m. Shobha tugged at my hand; I woke up to hear violent commotion outside the house, at the front door and windows. We quickly entered the closet, then the safe, and closed both doors behind us.
The next hour was a punishment from hell. The safe was shallow, with two tiny air passages, and in our enclosure we gasped painfully like two large fish trapped in a small tank. To make matters worse, Shobha and I had not been so physically close for a very long time. We sat down, and our bodies touched. We heard the front door crash open, one of the bedroom windows too, then the sound of booted footsteps and threatening roars and shouts. The attackers seemed frustrated; furniture and objects were thrown around, and in a final angry fit a couple of machine guns were let off randomly, in all directions, two bullets tearing into the wood and metal of the door that enclosed us. Shobha wet herself and worse, and in that intense humiliation I saw tears of frustration coming down the cheeks of my very proud wife.
The next morning I invited reporters to take a look at the unlawful attack and destruction of my property. I told them that if required I would be happy to come clean about my business dealings, and that my papers were in the keeping of my lawyer Mr. Sohrabji, who would know what to do with them if my life was threatened.
The President made a speech that very day, while on a visit upcountry, in which he reminded the public that we lived in a democracy and vigilante attacks on private individuals would not be tolerated. He invited the Attorney-General’s office to lay charges against Mr. Lall if it had a case, which of course it couldn’t without implicating members of the government. I was safe, for the time being. But Shobha had had enough, she departed for the safety of England with our two children.
And why didn’t you go with them? Seema asks.
After our experience in the closet, we could not even face each other without turning away in embarrassment. In my presence, Shobha seemed always out of breath, as if reliving the torment of the closet. Obviously, according to the unspoken rules of our household, I had not provided sufficient protection for my family. We thought at this point that a legal separation was a good idea. I didn’t want to leave the country, in any case. I had business to attend to. I didn’t believe I was any more guilty than a hundred others, and I was certainly less guilty than many I could name. Perhaps there would be a general amnesty, as was widely rumoured, allowing businessmen and politicians to come clean and start afresh under a new and strict code of ethics. What would I do in England or North America?
With your money? Plenty, Seema says. What made you leave, finally?
I give this one a long thought. I would like to say that Njoroge came to me in a dream and said, Vic, I’ll give you a new oath of allegiance…let’s go back and start all over again…And reluctantly I pushed myself off the wall on which I was leaning and followed him to the woods behind our house…I would like to mention the letter I received one day from a girl called Happy in Kampala. Dear Mr. Vikram Lall, she said, I have heard you are a big charitable man in Kenya…Her village had been raided by rebels in northern Uganda, her entire family had been killed except herself and her little brother; she was raped and abducted by the rebels; she was taught to fight her own people and became mistress of a commander. She was now in Kampala and needed money to pay her fees at a convent school. There was a letter from a principal and a transcript showing very good grades. I sent money, of course, I have always given to charity. I would like to say this was my transformation, my redemption, this terrible knowledge that I had been party to supplying guns to that area where Happy’s village was attacked.
But no. I left for neither of those reasons. I saw not light but the darkness of plain fear.
I left because I was afraid. Representatives of the donor countries, who underwrite social programs in our part of Africa, and of the World Bank, came to Nairobi, having frozen all aid and loan instalments, and demanded an immediate account of the hundreds of millions of dollars that had disappeared from the national kitty. The government set up the independent Anti-Corruption Commission to satisfy the Donors and the Bank, and the Commission published its List of Shame; Vikram Lall’s name was first. I was invited to testify about my questionable business dealings, in particular the Gemstone Scandal. But if Vikram Lall spoke, as everybody knew, a lot of prominent people would get skewered. I possessed information that could help indict a platoon of politicians and a hive of senior bureaucrats. The country, goaded on by the newspapers and the government’s opponents, held its breath: would I come forward? Meanwhile hitmen, I was warned, had been paid for my blood. And so Vikram Lall absconded for this town on Lake Ontario where he had earlier invested in a property.
I look at Seema, this new lover who understands my race, my needs, my loneliness, but not my career. There can be no reconciling betwee
n her idealism and my sins; her home here in a zone of temperance, and mine far away in the tropics.
There is no choice but to return to Nairobi and meet my destiny. Papa is alone there; and Joseph, I have learned, was arrested in Nairobi as soon as he arrived there on his foolhardy venture.
PART 4.
Homecoming.
THIRTY-TWO.
Mr. Lall, a man says as I come down the stairs into the arrivals lounge, and I get the fright of my life. My passport says Victor De Souza, and it is as such that I expected to be addressed. He nods as I look up and says, Everything is taken care of, and bids me to follow him. A slight-figured man in the careless khaki attire of a low-level bureaucrat, he leads me past the grimly intimidating, high-pedestalled immigration wickets, then down the stairs, past the carousels and the chaotic customs counters. If this man knows who I am, who else does too, and what is my life expectancy this precise moment? But nothing happens. Papa is waiting for me in the reception hall; he has been chatting with a large Somali woman and looks up with a wan smile as I arrive. He has on a red sweater over black pants, a black beret. My son, he says to the woman. We quietly embrace and quickly head for the carpark outside.
There is something immeasurably familiar in the feel of the cool Nairobi night that tells you you are home, that for better or worse, this is where you belong.
As we drive away from the airport, Papa keeps nervously looking behind in the car mirror, in case we are being followed. The road into the city is for the most part dark and deserted; the factory names we pass seem oddly cheerful; the police car by the lonely, barely lit gas station promise either comfort or menace. A haze hangs in the air, vestige of a prior rainfall.
