The In-Between World of Vikram Lall (33 page)

In a thick cloud of clinging hot steam in the early morning chill of the Kenya Highlands, the 5607 “injun,” as the Sardarji engineer calls his locomotive, pulls off under the watchful eyes of Kijabe station crew and soon arrives at the lip of the Great Rift Valley—the expanse of grassland stretching vastly before us in the mist down below, virgin as God created it, endless and endless until the Red Sea, as Papa would describe it to my childhood wonderment. Beside me stands Dadaji, shaky on his feet, clutching my arm as he too looks down at the valley, which we descend at a slow ten miles per hour, his eyes glazed with grim nostalgia. This is the route he toiled on sixty-five years ago with fellow Punjabi labourers, here he lost the tip of his pinky finger as the rails were laid down one after the other on the muddy slopes during March rains. Down we come, and pick up pace, whistling steaming racing ecstatically on the flatland
toward Naivasha—the deep green Aberdares looming to our right, beyond which lie the Kikuyu highlands from where Mwangi had arrived once, and on our left at the foot of solitary, nipple-shaped Mount Longonot stretch the dusty Masai plains where once Dada witnessed his friend Juma Molabux’s wedding with the Masai girl who would become our Sakina-dadi. A weak old man now, Dadaji walks with the aid of a stick, one eye near sightless; he gazes at the plains knowing perhaps that this could be his last look down at them. As he stands lost in thought on the gleaming footplate of the locomotive, the downy white hair on his small head blowing softly in the wind, I am snatched by a true and rare sense of pride and accomplishment; this trip is a treat from me, Vikram Lall, newly hired at the Ministry of Transport, Nairobi; it is my gift for a grandfather who would take me to watch the trains on Sundays, and whose name is supposedly etched in wriggly Punjabi script on one of these rails he helped to lay down.

This is definitely the last voyage out of the 5607 “Sir George,” yet another steam locomotive fated for the ignominous scrap heap, to be replaced by a newfangled diesel engine. And so it is also the last voyage home on the engine footplate of Sardarji Hardev Singh, native of Nakuru. The occasion is momentous, both engine and driver have a long history in the Railways. Sardarji Singh is silent and contemplative, like my Dadaji; his father like him had been an engine driver. The 5607 was brought to Kenya in 1949 from Burma, where a fierce guerrilla war had rendered the “bechari”—Sardarji said—useless and forlorn. It was, famously, an articulated locomotive of the Garratt type, made in Manchester, wheel arrangment 4-8-4+4-8-4 in the jargon, the heaviest most powerful locomotive in East Africa when purchased; the design, with the boiler and cabin suspended on pivots between the fuel bunker and water tank, was one specially adapted for use in the British Empire, to go up and down the winding routes of its colonies, on steep gradients and narrow gauges.

Stuck crudely with glue in front of Hardev Singh, among the brass handles and knobs and the many twitching monitor needles is a wrinkled picture of Guru Nanak, right hand raised in a blessing, and a smaller one of grinning elephant-faced Ganesh. We pull into Nakuru to a clamour of welcome shouts and clapping and the careless clanging of a bell. Dadaji is helped, almost carried, down to the ground; I leap out, then the engineer. His wife, a big woman in white salwar and shirt, steps forward, pulls the dupatta tighter round her hair and puts a garland round his neck, saying with a shy smile, Wahe Guru di mehar! You reached safely. For good measure she garlands Dadaji. And then she and the other Punjabi women present shower the 5607 “Sir George” with rice, anoint its sweating crimson-painted iron body with orange paste, accompanying the process with a cheerful though discordant song that I surmise is about a gaja, an elephant. Tearfully, Sardarji goes down on his knees, joins his hands, and bows farewell to the 5607.

Thus the marking of time passed, one generation yielding to the next—with grace and thanks, some nostalgia, some sentimentality, why not. But it belied the reality elsewhere, this last voyage of the 5607 and the farewell ceremony in Nakuru station, it was time out from the practical, real world around us. In this new decade of the 1970s which had just set in, when I found employment that would alter my life in previously unthinkable ways, our times were actually turbulent and reckless, in a manner I can only describe from a personal point of view and in hindsight. But I make no moral judgement on the time or its people, I am quick to add, I am hardly in a position to do so.

Independence had brought an abundance of opportunities, the British and the Europeans vacating lucrative farms and businesses and well-paying jobs, foreign aid and loans promising contracts and kickbacks; this was a time to make it, once and for all, as a family, as a clan, as a tribe—the stakes were mountain-high. And this in the tinderbox cold-war climate of the period, foreign governments peddling influence, bribes,
arms. Many of the newly powerful had never been in close proximity to such authority before, such organization, such influence, such access to wealth as had become possible. From pit-latrine to palace, was how one foreign journalist crassly described these changes in fortune; he was quickly deported. But his fault was more his limited imagination; if I say that by the end of that decade it would be possible for a politician to own real estate on the French Riviera or interests in Manhattan, I would be closer to the truth. Money and power were all around me, the one dizzying and glamorous, the other intimidating and coercive, and the two often went together.

In the first-class cabins of Hardev Singh’s train that day were a team of West German engineers, whom we dropped off at Naivasha; they were out to survey the tracks and the lie of the land for which they wished to supply a new generation of diesel locomotives. The Americans, the Canadians, the Japanese, and the British also desired to do the same, all promising long-term loans for our young nation to make its purchases.

How Nairobi had changed by then. Among its Asian communities a devastation had taken place. Half the stores on River Road had new, African owners; from the remaining Asian shops you would catch the vacant looks of owners expecting any time someone to walk in with an official writ ordering them to vacate the premises and hit the footpaths.

In 1968, the British government, apparently in a bid to preserve the authentic nature of British society, hastened a bill to curb the flow of British Asians from Kenya. A date was set beyond which they would lose the right to enter Britain as its citizens. Their applications for Kenyan citizenship had been held up or were no longer accepted, and as noncitizens they could not work or do business. A mass migration began, as thousands took to the planes almost overnight, to beat the British deadline.

The Nairobi sky reverberated with airplanes leaving at all hours, where previously only one or two would leave for Europe
on overnight flights. At the airport, overflowing with passengers and well-wishers, the GSU, the dreaded General Security Unit normally used against rioting students and rowdy strikers, was sent for crowd control. There had descended a sort of numbness upon the city we knew, the Little London of old. So many friends and acquaintances left; families were torn apart; stores which had been landmarks for decades vanished, personalities who had been fixtures in our social lives departed. Property values in Asian Eastleigh, the Punjabi haven, had plummeted. Previously arrogant men, regulars at the fashionable clubs, were reduced to quivering, stammering victims, begging my father, Please accept the keys to my property, Mr. Lall, whatever price you can fetch for it, Mr. Lall, will be acceptable, and send the money to such and such a bank account, in Southall, Brixton, Greenwich. Meanwhile if you can advance some cash for tickets and such…

One morning Papa came to his office to learn a piece of news that crushed his spirit, at least for a time. His friendly assistant, Mrs. Burton, had left for London the previous night, having transferred to her own account there twenty thousand pounds, which he had entrusted her to deposit into an absent client’s account, also in London. He spent much of the day at his bank trying to place a hold on the transfer; but the misappropriation had taken place a few days before and the cheque, which had carelessly been made out to cash, had gone through. Papa came home in the evening tearful and still incredulous. She had been such a friend and so solicitous to the plight of the Asians; she had wholeheartedly condemned the British government and was a fount of helpful information for Papa’s departing clients, who would arrive in London to greetings from hostile demonstrators and a blistering winter.

Mother’s look of gloating when he told her the news was a sight to behold, a portrait of the cold-hearted contempt she had developed for him. This was the darkest time of their relationship, and it was painful to watch. Having observed Papa and Mrs. Burton in the office, I knew there was nothing
sexual between them. She had been merely an ornament for him, a happy, carefree diversion, and perhaps a fantasy. He and Mother had continued to drift apart. After Deepa’s departure Mother had become even more religious, attending the exclusive gatherings of the most devout women at the Arya Samaj temple Saturday mornings, where they would sit around a tape recorder on the floor and sing along bhajans with it, declaring their devotion to Lord Krishna. Papa had simply lived his life at work, where there was friendly and smart Mrs. Burton, and at his club, in the company of cronies and whisky. But that evening he had, in a sense, come home to her, hoping for comfort and reconciliation. She replied only with taunts.

Deepa had returned from England with Dilip at about the time of the Asian Exodus—as the migration came to be called—with two-year-old Shyam in tow and pregnant with her daughter Alka. Dilip acquired a pharmacy on Government Road, and the two seemed well settled and happy. It was a joy to go and see her those days, preoccupied with her boy and her pregnancy, mature and less impulsive than before, contented and philosophical about life. She lived with her in-laws and there was a cool but not hostile relationship between her and Meena Auntie. She and Mother had made up and often got together, and she would come and look up Papa on Sunday mornings as he sat down with his paper, listening to Hindustani music on the radio and working on the Spot-the-Ball competition in the
Nation
. He needs the prize money for sure, Mother would comment sarcastically, to make up for his British woman’s theft. Deepa would lecture Mother on the need to look after him, and Mother would hmph and retort with something like, He’ll be all right.

I had seen only a little of Njoroge in the last few years, since Deepa’s wedding and her departure. He was a rising government bureaucrat specializing on Kenya’s infamous land question, and I was aware that he had been overseas on training. He had found his calling and was well set to achieve his
ambitions, it seemed to me, while I was nowhere close to even a life of my own. After graduating I had apprenticed in Limuru at a shoe factory and in Kisumu at a tire retreading company, before settling in uncertainly with my father in his business. Therefore it came as a pleasant surprise when Njoroge phoned me at the office late one afternoon to ask whether my family or anyone else close to us needed help in these trying times of the Asian departures. I replied that we were unaffected, we all had become citizens long ago, adding somewhat arrogantly (and, I am ashamed to say, perhaps to gain approval) that it was only those who had hung on to colonial coattails who were now in trouble, on their way to an England that despised them. We agreed to meet, and during our lunch together, hearing of our real estate woes and Papa’s recent humiliation and money loss (he couldn’t help a loud guffaw at that), he said he would set up a job interview for me in government, if I was interested. I very much was.

It was that short innocent meeting with a childhood friend whom I had not seen much since his involvement and breakup with my sister that set me off on my life’s path and the career that I have followed. There are doubtless those who will say that, intrinsically corrupt as I am, I would have no doubt reached the same degenerate end through some other means. You will judge for yourself. Here I was, a young Asian graduate in an African country, with neither the prestige of whiteness or Europeanness behind me, nor the influence and numbers of a local tribe to back me, but carrying instead the stigma from a generalized recent memory of an exclusive race of brown “Shylocks” who had collaborated with the colonizers. What could I hope to achieve in public service? Black chauvinism and reverse racism were the order of the day against Asians.

With a strong recommendation from Njoroge, though, I won a job at the Ministry of Transportation. For three months I was the comptroller at the ministry offices, a duty given to me, I believe, under the assumption that as an Indian I was naturally adept at handling large sums of money. Behind a
bulletproof glass cage with my heaps of newly minted notes and coins, I also did not have to be dealt with socially. We Asians were considered strange in our ways. (Though, to be fair, in the Nairobi offices of those times, a Boran, a Turkana, or even a Masai would have seemed equally if not more alien.) My break from this boredom came, however, when I volunteered to join a team of auditors setting out to evaluate the complete worth of the Kenya portion of the East African Railways. With Tanzania having taken a stridently socialist direction, rumour was that it would not be long before common services among the three East African countries disintegrated. Every section of rail, every locomotive, defunct in its shed or operating, every bogey, tanker, and flatcar, all the signals and relays in the store yards, and even the eucalyptus trees imported and planted next to the tracks in the old days of wood fuel received a price tag from us. The auditors were the venerable company of Anderson Peacock from Nairobi, working in collaboration with an engineering outfit from Manchester in England.

According to my family, my arrival at the East African Railways was pure destiny—kismet and karma combined, sheer good fortune and just reward. We had come full circle, from my grandfather laying down rails at the inception of the railway to myself, assistant auditor and inspector on the line in independent Kenya. No other job could have thrilled me so much. As a boy I had dreamt of speeding on a railway engine from Lake to Coast, crossing the country back and forth, head and shoulders leaning out proudly to appraise the world flying past before me, like those Sardarji engineers I admired. I would imagine trains travelling west from Nairobi to Lagos and Accra, south to Cape Town, north to Khartoum and Cairo, uniting all Africa. Now I had the rare fortune to fulfil that childhood dream as closely as possible in the circumstances. The country was mine to explore, on this mysterious metal highway stretching from the coast into the interior, its iron
rails reaching to diverse, far-flung and strange places; stories clung to it and ghosts still haunted its path. It could well have been called the Thousand and More Miles of Fantastic Lives and Ghost Stories.