The Two Krishnas (42 page)

But in his mind’s eye, Rahul saw Hanif and himself facing the same ocean as they had perched atop Fort Jesus all those years ago. A late afternoon and although the scorching Mombasa sun had begun tempering its might, its light still suffused everything around them—the profusion of milky frangipanis fringing the fort, the azure waters of the Indian Ocean dotted with swimmers and
dhows,
the minarets and gleaming white houses at the shores on the other side. From below them, they could hear the laughter of children diving off ocean rocks and from a distant minaret somewhere, the muezzin’s call to prayer.

Very slowly their knees began touching. Then Hanif had started to chat more animatedly—who even knows about what anymore? The impending results for their A-level exams? Plans for a foreign university? That rascal headmaster whose tyranny they were finally free of? —and Hanif had grown more physical. Innocent little gestures at first, like squeezing Rahul’s shoulder to express sympathy for something arduous, leaning into him and rocking from side to side as he bubbled with mirth, a flick at his earlobe when Rahul teased him. But then his hand landed onto Rahul’s lap and stayed there. Rahul let it.

“Who knows? Maybe you would have married him instead of Pooja!” Riyaz said and started laughing so hard that he coughed up his inhalation.

“We weren’t nice to him, man.”

Riyaz slapped his back. “Nice? What nice, nice?
Arre,
bwana,
what is all this sudden guilty nonsense, hunh? Don’t worry, I was very, very nice to him,” he said, making a crude masturbatory gesture and then chortling.

Rahul looked at him.

“What? What? Everybody did! Don’t act to shocked! So what? It doesn’t mean anything, you know that. I just sat there.
Bwana,
I still like chicks, okay? You’ve seen the fit girls waiting for me in there,” he said thrusting his head towards the party behind them. “Anyway, what to do? Our girls, man, you know how they are. They won’t do it. And a guy needs his release,
neh?”

Naturally he was right. It didn’t mean anything. Shouldn’t mean anything. Rahul knew for a fact that all his friends had dabbled in such experiences—hand-jobs, blow-jobs, frottaging, and in rare cases, even actually fucking other boys just so long as they were the “givers”—and that this was the norm, a rite of passage for boys, leaving not a smudge on their sexual identity. Ultimately, such encounters had served as outlets for oversexed boys in a conservative society where girlfriends didn’t grant sexual favors. So when they weren’t satisfying themselves, boys sought relief from either their other male friends—as long as this was never actually discussed afterwards and only alluded to when they needed indulging again—or paid a visit to the local African prostitutes at Abdullah’s little shanty. But all of Rahul’s friends had, in time, gone on to marry the childhood sweethearts who had denied them sex, or were now engaged to respectable women. In many cases, if the friendship had lasted, the male friend who had stood in for their bride now served as a kind of best man in the wedding.

Rahul felt Riyaz’s hand on his back but instead of startling him from his thoughts, the warmth brought him safely back to the present. He started to breathe again, feeling Hanif vanish in the darkness of the concealed vast ocean in front of them, the features dissolving until it became tough to piece them back together. “I’m going to miss you, man,” said Riyaz, and Rahul could have sworn he saw a glistening in his friend’s eyes. “You were always a little too
sidha-sadha
, so clean and proper, but man, I look up to you, you know.”

“Then can you do me a favor?”

“Favor?
Arre,
brother, anything you want, brother. Just ask! Just ask!”

Rahul pointed downwards. Riyaz looked confused. “Can you be…nice to me also?”

Riyaz was caught for a moment and then he slapped Rahul’s back. The two friends started howling away and with arms thrown around each other, made their way back to the club, trying to cull what they could from the joint’s dying ember.

* * *

All night Pooja suffered her dreams. Many times she thought she had actually awoken from them only to realize, much later, that this too had been part of her dream. When she groggily walked into the dining room, yielding to Kiran’s call, bits and pieces of her dream stuck to her like shards of glass in her hair.

The family had gathered around the table, feasting on an elaborate meal prepared by Mariam. The whole house, it seemed, danced in the smell of eggs and
parathas
fried in
ghee
and the incenses burning in a corner of the living room did nothing to douse their aroma.

“Aha! There is our
bitiya!
” Ravi announced, holding his hand up.

“These beasts wanted to wake you up! But I said, ‘No, no, let the poor girl sleep. Maybe she needs it for her little egg,” Suchitra said, raising her eyebrows at Pooja a few times.

Pooja didn’t have the energy or heart to tell her mother-in-law for the umpteenth time that she wasn’t pregnant yet and when Mariam had deftly and quite unnecessarily dusted the vacant chair, she seated herself with an obligatory smile. She missed her parents. At a time like this, she wished she could have talked with her mother about the dreams. Very patiently they would have first pieced together and then dissected the dream, like a jigsaw puzzle, as they had so many times when she was a child. Suchitra, while superstitious herself, would have no patience for such analysis and might attribute it all to the ghastly house they were living in and which she hadn’t stopped criticizing.

Pooja consoled herself by thinking she should feel fortunate. Most daughter-in-laws didn’t have such a good relationship with their in-laws. She knew for a fact that there was already some tension between Kiran and Lalita Jhaveri. Kiran had been quick to deprecate her haughty mother-in-law for slathering a good inch of butter on her toast before dunking it into her milky, sugar-laden chai and devouring it, and Pooja couldn’t help but say, “As if someone’s gastronomy determines whether they are a good person or not,” to which Kiran had barked, much like her own mother,
“Aiy-aiy!
Keep your big, big words to yourself, okay? But of course it does! As they say, Pooja, ‘You are what you eat,’ right? Too much butter equals
maha
-bitch!”

In the night, she had been transported back to her wedding. Everywhere she looked there had been friends and family, milling around in colored silk and jewelry. Laughter, gossip, paternal admonishments and
filmi
matrimonial songs hung in the air as the soundtrack of celebration. But Suchitra Kapoor was griping away about someone wearing a black sari. “What is wrong with her? Why is she here like this! Doesn’t she know it’s bad luck! Bad luck to wear black!”

Small colored lights had been strung through hedges and rooftops and pillars and the Kapoors’ garden was afloat with merriment. The
mandap
was in the middle of this garden, where a platform decorated with a profusion of flowers had been erected. The priests, chanting interminably in Sanskrit, sat around the ceremonial fire with Pooja, Rahul and their parents. The smoke from the fire began to bother Rahul, who started to cough a little. He covered his mouth with his hand and his eyes began to water. Pooja looked up at him quickly and with tenderness, concerned. His cough subsided. But was it just because he, like everyone else, had been distracted by that infernal sound coming from the heavens suddenly?

That sound, of crows cawing in the distance, grew louder and louder and she looked up, bewildered to see, through the brocade scarlet sari covering her face, that the sky was swarming with the descent of the dark, unruly birds until the chanting of the priests was drowned out and the sacred invocations ceased. The sky turned black. Pandemonium as people began screaming and running every which way. The fire, only minutes ago blazing, now fizzled and petered out and Pooja quickly thought that this was disastrous, if only because it had helped to keep the birds away.

Mariam stood over Rahul and Pooja and their parents, hollering and brandishing her
fagia
defiantly in the air as the birds dove upon them. She spun around the
mandap,
doing a strange, mystical gavotte, but soon fleets of crows were pecking away at the canopy, tearing it apart, and the tube frame, also adorned with vines of colored lights, began to sway so that it looked like the entire
mandap
would capsize upon them. Mariam fell and didn’t rise again.

Through all this, Pooja was the only one who did not scream. She stared, aghast, noticing that Rahul had pulled away from her. He was huddling with the rest of the family and blubbering priests, trembling like a petrified child. But she remained seated there, exactly where she had been before it had all been unleashed, paralyzed. He was her husband, was he not? Then why wasn’t he protecting her? Or, because the ceremony had been interrupted, they hadn’t been wed after all.

Then she saw it, the lone, large crow, perched at the edge of the brazier where the fire once glowed but was now coughing up only wisps of ashen smoke. It transfixed its gaze upon her, its beady, hematic eyes blinking anticipatorily. It did not caw like its minions who’d been sent on their destructive mission. She saw two holes in its beak and she wondered if they were nostrils, if it actually breathed through them. It skipped from one forked leg to another, preparing. That’s when Pooja let out a cry, awaking to the sound of crows in the compound outside.

“Tell her,
na,
to bring some food for Pooja?” Suchitra told Ravi and jerked her head in Mariam’s direction.

But Mariam didn’t need to be told again. She knew what was required of her and hotfooted into the kitchen eagerly.

Suchitra leaned over the table, hooking one hand under the chin of her plump, already-painted face and smiled deliciously at Pooja. “So, Rahul called while you were asleep. He’ll be here by this evening.”

First Pooja lightened up but then she looked even more distraught at missing his call, the pangs of wanting to connect with him searing. Especially now. If she could only see him, just talk to him, the dreams would disperse like a cloud. She couldn’t help but moan with disappointment.

“
O-pho!
Look at her! Just look at her! He’s not going anywhere,
beti,”
Suchitra said, slapping her wrist lightly. “He’s coming here, where else? Have something to eat,
na?
And then you can call him and talk to him all you want. But not all morning, okay, I’m telling you!” Suchitra raised one hand as if issuing an edict. “We don’t want to be late, you know. We’re going to Woolworth’s, that is if that good-for-nothing Salim comes back with the car! God only knows why I agreed to let him go with it.”

“Woolworth’s?” Ravi said, incredulous, his hand stopping short of parceling some yogurt-soaked
aloo paratha
into his mouth.

Suchitra looked somewhere up in the air, her eyes widening as if a portal had opened up in front of her. She could see the aisles and aisles of things she wished to possess and which she had lately felt deprived of. “Oh! But of course Woolworth’s! Where else?”

“Come on, Dad! Can’t come to Nairobi and not go to Woolworth’s!” Kiran baited him, nudging Pooja. “Like going to Greece and not seeing the Pantheon.”

“Or India and the Taj Mahal,” Pooja chortled in.

Ravi grunted at the girls’ implausible analogy even as he felt mildly relieved that his wife was feeling optimistic enough to consider any kind of expenditure. By the next day he hoped to take care of business and finalize the deal with the Samjis, putting an end to the tactile, touch-and-feel manner of conducting business that Asians were so fond of. Next to him, Pooja began to laugh. It was precisely because the Kapoors were so different from her own family, constantly bickering albeit innocuously, that she enjoyed their vaudevillian interaction.

Suchitra glared at Ravi.
“Hanh, hanh,
you don’t have to get an ulcer over it. All I want is to look,
bas!
Is looking a crime these days? Tell me!” She looked around at her daughters for reinforcement. “And anyway, at this rate, unless that buffoon Salim comes back from God only knows which relatives he has gone to visit, then only we can go somewhere,
na?”

Ravi threw his hands in the air.

But what the Kapoors didn’t know, as they began to prematurely celebrate the sale of the college and make plans about their day, was that by then the first gunshots of rebellion had already sounded in the city, and that in only a matter of hours, Pooja’s convoluted dream would reveal its actual, more cataclysmic relevance in their lives.

* * *

By that morning in 1982, when Pooja struggled from her dreams and her mother-in-law fantasized about ransacking Woolworth’s, President Daniel Toroitich Arap Moi had already reigned for five years as the second president of Kenya after President Jomo Kenyatta. Moi first entered politics when he co-founded the Kenya Democratic Union, or KADU, defending the interests of Kenya’s small minority tribes and rivaling the Kenya African National Union, or KANU, which was dominated by ethnic behemoths like the Luo and President Kenyatta’s own tribe, the Kikuyus.

After Kenya’s independence from British rule in 1963, Moi succumbed to Kenyatta’s reasoning that uniting forces would achieve the decolonization process. The white man had been kicked out and now the Africans must unite for a better Kenya! So Moi’s KADU collapsed into KANU, making Kenya a de facto one-party state dominated by the Luo and Kikuyu, who had played a pivotal role in ejecting the British from Kenya. But the minority tribes, from this point on, lost their voice forever. Having succumbed to Kenyatta, Moi was now rewarded for his loyalty and swiftly, the man from the Kalenjin tribe, one of the smallest, was promoted to Vice President.