The In-Between World of Vikram Lall (9 page)
As the Masai dispersed, walking in the middle of the street in bunches, one of them, a somewhat middle-aged man clutching his bottle of Coca-Cola in one hand and his staff in the other, came toward our house. He wore sandals and had a very slight, almost a shade, of a beard on his chin, and he had
a wry little smile on his face. He stood a few feet outside our door and a worried-looking Mother came out. The man bowed to her and asked after her family; she replied politely and anxiously. The man asked after my grandfather Anand Lal, to whom he sent good wishes, and then he strolled off, still with that wry and perhaps even thoughtful smile on his face. My parents, and my grandfather when he came the next time, could make nothing of this incident. But it has often made me wonder about Dadaji.
We used to laugh at the Masai as kids. We thought of them as dark exotic savages left behind in the Stone Age, with their spears and gourds and half-naked bodies; when one saw them on a street they were to be avoided, for they smelled so. Yet we were also in awe of them, we did not make open fun of them, for they were warriors, they hunted lions with those spears, didn’t they. There was a belief among Indian traders that the Masai could not count; yes, they couldn’t, some of them, not in Swahili, which was alien, and not in the foreign units of feet and inches, years and months, shillings and cents. And it was not only the Indians who disparaged the Masai. Country bus drivers were known not to stop for them, or when they did, to move all the other passengers up front so these red warriors with their odour could sit at the back by themselves.
Because of my dada and dadi’s close connection to the Molabuxes, I have often seen an affinity between myself and the Masai. I have even fantasized that Dada perhaps sought comfort with a woman of that people, perhaps she had his child and I have cousins in some of the manyattas of the plains. There is no proof anything like this ever happened—and my fantasy has partly to do with desperate need to belong to the land I was born in—but it’s not impossible either. The Indian railway workers were not known for their abstinence; reports of their British overseers, quoted in histories of the railway, attest amply to that. Perhaps that man who came over and spoke to my mother was a connection to the past; he has never been explained. But my grandfather among his
family was the picture of calm reserve and propriety, with no hint whatever that he had once been young and without care; the only time I saw that reserve crack was in the presence of his old friend Juma Molabux, when the two went on their walks together. In fact, it did not simply crack then, it burst apart like the shell of an overripe nut to reveal a softer, more nuanced inside.
On Sunday at noon, when Dada and Dadi arrived for the weekly family get-together, a servant would sometimes come from the Molabuxes with a message for Dada, Would the muzee like to go for a walk later with the other muzee, Juma? Dada usually said yes, and so after the siesta, at about four, the two men met by the road. Dadaji liked to take me along, and I was encouraged to go, it being implicit that this was just in case something untoward happened and a fleet-footed messenger were needed. We were sent off from the house with much fanfare. The sight of two old cronies more than seventy years old going out for a walk together, with a grandson to accompany them, was enough to warm the hearts of all. Even the servants would smile and well-wish, with admiring comments like, He who takes the road truly finds the elephant’s tusk, meaning that these two muzees had come from afar and had finally acquired large families and well-being as their just rewards. I cannot imagine them, always unassuming, dressed simply in white drill pants and plain jackets, ever being the target of attacks. They were both compact in build, Juma-dada somewhat stouter and rounder in the face. I would walk beside them patiently, dutifully, and when not called away by some boyish diversion like climbing upon a rock or throwing a stone at a lizard or vainly chasing a passing car, I watched and listened, enthralled. I did not know of any relationship like these two old men’s, their utter familiarity with each other, their constant chatter followed by a long silence except for the sound of their short breaths and the taps of their walking sticks, and then the sudden effortless resumption of their conversation, as
if an engine had simply been allowed to idle awhile and was now back in gear. Their arms would occasionally brush against each other, as they spoke of Chhotu and Motu and Ungan and Ghalib (who had regaled them with poetry around a fire on many a night) and of Buleh Shah (who had the voice of a nightingale), and of such-and-such who had settled in Eldoret, and another who had recently lost his wife in Eastleigh, and so on. I remember Juma-dada chortling one time, and—to my shock—my grandfather breaking into a brief giggle, and then after a short exchange Juma-dada, with a look toward me, saying, But he’s too small.
During another of these walks the two men suddenly stopped in their tracks and extended their arms toward each other, as if enacting the beginning of an Indian wrestling match or a fight. Then pointing out my anxious face to each other, they laughed and walked on.
My grandfather as I had known him at home was simply Dadaji, father of my father, a kindly old man with close-cropped white hair who had been born in faraway India in a faraway time, who had a certain past from which he pulled out partly recalled and perhaps exaggerated stories on Sundays when the mood struck him, the dada who after giving the children candies took a nap in the armchair in our sitting room. His mouth would hang partly open, he snored. But on these strolls with Juma-dada another person came out from inside him like a genie. I wished I could understand all that they said. But they spoke in a fluid Punjabi too quick for my ears, and the words and phrases I grasped were often alien to me.
A short walk away, our street met the perpendicular road, which led first to the shopping centre and then to the Nairobi highway, where it met the railway station. The yellow building of the station, visible in the distance, beckoned like a magnet and every few times the old men succumbed and turned toward it, heedless of the reminders from their families not to go that far, it was quiet that way and not entirely safe on a
Sunday. Having decided to walk to the end, they picked up a discernible spring in their step, a purposiveness to their manner; the talk became less, the breathing heavier though steady. We would walk past the car park and up the station steps and through the gate to the platform, check the time by the station clock—presumed unimpeachable—walk up and down, examine the arrivals and departures notices on the blackboard, cross the pedestrian overpass to the other side. The all-important Nairobi–Kisumu and Nairobi–Kampala trains always stopped at Nakuru late at night, and not many people were around on a late Sunday afternoon.
One day the two men, over an argument about the laying of a rail, stepped down from the platform onto the tracks to take a closer look. First, Grandfather clambered down the ladder, which the two of them had dragged over from somewhere, then Juma-dada followed. They stood down there on the rails discussing the quality of the metal sleepers compared with the wooden ones used elsewhere, and if the fish bolts and plates were the original ones they had fastened, when from the Railway Restaurant (Europeans-only), a man came and angrily bawled us out. What are you doing here? Jao, jao, kambakht! Who gave you permission to come inside? Imbeciles! They climbed back up, apologizing profusely—Sorry huzoor—which made the red-faced man even madder, and I thought he would strike one of them. The station master hurried up and also started apologizing profusely to the white man, then added, These two gentlemen, you see, sir, were coolies who worked on the construction of the railway.
The white man, I think, seemed to shrink back. He gave a nod and briskly walked away. Grandfather and his chum looked embarrassed, like normally decent schoolboys who had been caught out of bounds and scolded by the headmaster. They had been severely humiliated, and I was close to tears that someone would talk to my dada that way. The station master went inside the restaurant and brought the old guys a
bottle of soda each, which they sipped appreciatively through the straws, and an ice cream for me. The return walk was mostly silent. I did not tell a soul about the incident. But the station still beckoned, now and then, tugging at the men’s hearts. That station master, when he was on duty, always felt obliged to bring something for us from the restaurant. His name was Sidhoo. Not surprisingly, he was well known to my grandfather as the son of a former railway coolie.
But when a train happened to be in the station, having been delayed for some reason, the three of us would hasten to greet it with boundless joy. I would run ahead, the two curmudgeons following on their delicate legs. I would prowl up and down the platform examining the rolling stock, the mysterious numbers inscribed on them telling a story I could never guess, the EAR insignia on the crimson-coated locomotive. There would be lots of people about, including curious-looking passengers who had no relations in town, and vendors of all sorts. Grandfather and Juma-dada would stroke the locomotive as though it were a pet elephant, and chat up the engineer, usually a Sardarji with bright turban and fierce moustache. He would look down like a monarch from high above the awesome wheels that were bigger than any man, leaning out to watch up and down the length of his immense conveyance. There would be the shouts of workers and the clanking of hammers and spanners, grunts and huffs as the locomotive released great clouds of steam that enveloped its admirers. In the cabin with the engineer would be the fireman stoking the fire through its open grate, his face and bare back streaming with sweat, glowing from the heat.
The one who picked me up to bring me inside the cabin one day was called Tembo. He was a Goan, brown as cinnamon, and was called Tembo to mock his extreme thinness. If he ate more ghee he would make engineer, eh, Tembo? the Sardarji engineer teased. Osnu andar aanta deyo, he said to my two companions, with a gesture toward me, Dekhan ta deyo, Let him come inside and see, these days who’s interested in trains,
it’s all aeroplanes for the little guys. And so, as I clambered up, the two old men pushed me along, and Tembo the fireman, teeth gleaming like pearls, pulled me into the cabin.
Young man, began the Sardarji in English as I stood gaping inside. You are inside the injuneer’s cabin, from where the whole train is controlled. Kadi esa vekhya hai? The train-brain, ye…es, this is the brain of the train. And I am the brain of this brain. Brain-brain—ha-ha!
No, I shook my head, I had not seen anything like this train-brain before. I was in a magical gleaming enclosure of wood and brass, with a dozen little wheels and myriad gauges with quivering black needles that told of the current state of this giant locomotive. It was made in England, as a small brass plate in the centre of the front panel indicated, giving also the name of the company responsible. Sardarji pulled a green knob a couple of times and invited me to look out his window at the puffs of steam emerging from several parts of the engine where the release valves were located. I grinned and waved at bystanders. I pulled the chord and made the train whistle. Everywhere I touched and smudged, the brass or glass or wood was carefully wiped with a rag by sweat-streaming, smiling Tembo.
There was nothing more impressive for me in the world. Bill could go and become a fighter pilot chasing enemies when he grew up, Njoroge could become Moses to his people; I would be an engineer of locomotives, racing the length and breadth of the country, from Mombasa to Nairobi, through Nakuru and all the way to Kisumu or Kampala, and then back again, from Indian Ocean to Lake Victoria on that steady rhythm—a-jeeka-jeeka…grunt, grunt…a-jeeka-jeeka…grunt, grunt…a-jeeka-jeeka-jeeka-jeeka-jeeka-jeeka—on the railway line that my grandfather and Juma-dada and Ghalib and Buleh Shah and the other old folk had left their homes in Punjab to build.
As I emerged from the locomotive and waved back at the Sardarji, he blew a short whistle for me. And, mischievously, he released a giant puff of steam that drenched me and all the
others watching him in admiration.
That was engine number 5812 of the East African Railways. A 4-8-4 + 4-8-4 Garratt locomotive, as Papa called it when I described it to him, the numbers designating the configuration of its wheels. He too had loved trains and knew about them. Dadaji would take his entire family to the railway station when they were young, and Papa and his brothers too recalled the shrouds of wet steam released by a grinning Sardarji engineer.
Another Sunday afternoon, and again there was a train on the platform, this time eerily filled with hundreds of grim, black faces—Kikuyu men, women, and children, looking out through the windows, silent as ghosts, some with their passes and tax receipts in a metal box worn around their necks with a chain, on their way to their reserved areas, pushed out by the travails of the Emergency. Hoo-ooo, the whistle blew, the Sardarji from his engine seat picked up in his arm the tablet in its tennis racquet-shaped holder—which gave him the go-ahead to enter the next section of track—and the black faces in the third-class windows lurched forward, to where?
To Embu, Nyeri, Karatina, Othaya, all the towns of the Kikuyu reservation. Does the British government think, Dada muttered, that by shunting these people away they will disappear and the problems go away?
In such a way did reminders of the Emergency spring up, suddenly, when least expected—it was as if in the midst of a happy, technicolour family movie some black-and-white footage had slipped in, grim, unhappy, and foreboding.
The taste of kulfi on a Sunday afternoon—sweet and rich as childhood—nothing else will quite capture its texture, its flavour, that perfect frozen blend of green and yellow that melted in your mouth and lingered and lingered. The Sunday that comes to mind was unusual. The family get-together was at Dada and Dadi’s so we could go to see the much-publicized annual cricket match between the Nakuru Club and the
Asian XI. My grandparents lived in a flat above Bombay Sweets, a small restaurant with tube lights and glass-topped tables and oil-painted grease-glazed walls, whose glorious savouries and sweets—laid out in kaleidoscopic heaps on the counters—were renowned throughout the country, and even beyond, in Uganda, Tanganyika, and Belgian Congo. Across from this eatery was a long and high grey wall, beyond which was the posh, exclusive Nakuru Club. Nonwhites were not permitted in the club, but on special occasions such as this one, an area of the pavilion was set aside for the Asians. The Europeans, dressed smartly in white, the ladies wearing hats, sat in the wide, open, raised veranda of the clubhouse or outside on the grass where tables had been laid out. African waiters moved about wearing long, white kanzus, green sashes across their fronts, and green fezzes. This annual cricket match was always controversial, which made its appeal to the Asian spectators all the greater. This time, even before the toss, it was discovered by the Europeans that one of the Asian players had actually come all the way from Mombasa to assist the local side. He was promptly dismissed. News spread among the Asian crowd that a traitor had betrayed their Spartan side arrayed against a rich club. In response, the Asians objected to a Club player who was visiting from Middlesex county in England; the man was said to have emigrated, and the objection was not allowed. Asian youths heckled the decision.