The In-Between World of Vikram Lall (3 page)

The railway running from Mombasa to Kampala, proud “Permanent Way” of the British and “Gateway to the African
Jewel,” was our claim to the land. Mile upon mile, rail next to thirty-foot rail, fishplate to follow fishplate, it had been laid by my grandfather and his fellow Punjabi labourers—Juma Molabux, Ungan Singh, Muzzafar Khan, Shyam Sunder Lal, Roshan, Tony—the cast of characters in his tales was endless and of biblical variety—recruited from an assortment of towns in northwest India and brought to an alien, beautiful, and wild country at the dawn of the twentieth century. Our people had sweated on it, had died on it: they had been carried away in their weary sleep or even wide awake by man-eating lions of magical ferocity and cunning, crushed under avalanches of blasted rock, speared and macheted as proxies of the whites by angry Kamba, Kikuyu, and Nandi warriors, infected with malaria, sleeping sickness, elephantiasis, cholera; bitten by jiggers, scorpions, snakes, and chameleons; and wounded in vicious fights with each other. They had taken the line strenuously and persistently six hundred miles from the Swahili coast, up through desert, bush, and grassland into the lush fertile highlands of the Kikuyu, then through forest down the Rift Valley and back up to a height of eight thousand feet, before bringing it to descend gently and finally to the great lake Victoria-Nyanza that was the heart of what became beloved Africa.

Anand Lal, my dada, stayed on in the new colony after his indentureship, picked Nakuru as the spot where he would live. A small thin man: rough chin and thin moustache, white lungi and loose shirt, and a fluffy white turban on the head. Thus he is captured, staring wondrously out of a photo, with three other Punjabi coolies and the legendary Colonel Patterson on a railway inspection trolley outside Machakos. It was 1897. I imagine him six years later, at the end of his second contract, seated atop a small pyramid of steel sleepers at the Nakuru railway yard, with a companion or two perhaps, chewing on a blade of grass or lunching on daal and rice from the canteen. The last key had been driven home on the railway, at Lake Victoria by an English lady, and he and a few others had been
brought back here to complete work on the station. I see him contemplating the vast flat grassy plains of the Rift Valley, the pointed Mount Longonot, its sides grey with volcanic ash, rising up like the nipple on the breast of some reclining African god, the two escarpments in the distance, along whose steep slopes they had lain the railway in the direst of wet muddy conditions, the shimmering Lake Nakuru, its blue surface painted over by the white and pink of a million flamingos…I see this turbaned young Indian who would be my dada saying to himself, This valley has a beauty to surpass even the god Shivji’s Kashmir, and the cool weather in May is so akin to the winters of Peshawar…

What makes a man leave the land of his birth, the home of those childhood memories that will haunt him till his deathbed? I received a warning telephone call late one morning, left home that night with my heart in my mouth; but for Indians abroad in Africa, it has been said that it was poverty at home that pushed them across the ocean. That may be true, but surely there’s that wanderlust first, that itch in the sole, that hankering in the soul that puffs out the sails for a journey into the totally unknown?

For many years I did not know the exact circumstances that made my grandfather want to leave his home and cross the black water—as the exiling oceans were called in his homeland. Those circumstances had to do, as I came to find out, with a quarrel he had with his elder married brother soon after the death of their father, who had been the only shopkeeper and moneylender in his village. And so the prospect of going home, after his indentureship, even with a bit of money of his own now, must not have seemed so very compelling.

He found a job in Nakuru’s railway machine shop, married a Punjabi girl living with her relations in Nairobi, received a decent dowry, and soon after opened a grocery store in Nakuru’s only and burgeoning street at the time. The town had become a business centre for many of the sons and
daughters of England’s landed class who had come to settle and farm in the sunny and temperate clime of the Rift Valley.

Dadaji! Dadaji!—we would happily shout, Deepa and I and our several cousins, and scamper up to him for our candies, immediately after the Sunday family meal in my parents’ home, when all the other adults had retired for their naps wherever they could. Seated on the armchair which was his siesta place, Dadaji would bring out a paper bag and hold it up and hand out to each of us, in turn, one choice sweet, always beginning with Deepa, the youngest, her mouth wide open like a puppy’s. These presents were slight, compared with the chocolates we received from our parents, but the ritual was a delight; at times we felt that it was we who were the indulgent ones. Little could we even begin to imagine what his life had been like, what his thoughts were now. Sitting at his feet, we would often be treated to his stories. The lion stories were always the favourite, because they were scarier and so much more immediate and realistic than the Indian tales of Lakshman and Rama and Sita speaking with monkeys and devils in the enchanted forests of a distant land.

So we are sitting round a fire like this, he would say, drawing us into a circle, each of us representing a coolie friend, and he would place his large white handkerchief on the nearest child’s head to represent a turban. Eh listen, you! So we are sitting round a fire like this, the six of us, Ungan Singh there, and there Birbal Singh, and Muzzafar and Chhotu and myself…and Malik. Ungan, saying Aha!, plays his hand, thus, and we lean forward to look—a baadshah, a king of clubs. Wah! says Birbal, you had it all along, and Muzzaffar turns to Chhotu and says, Eh Lala Chhotu, if you had kept your ace! But there is no Chhotu! While we have been all admiring Ungan’s king there in the middle like it was a bridegroom, Chhotu—the littlest coolie among us—has disappeared! And on the ground, leading to the bushes, is a trail left by his body—the poor fellow’s feet—and a few, eka-do
drops of blood. We start shouting and running about—here, there, here again, and the askaris and Nicholson Sahab arrive with their rifles…Poor Chhotu, only his head was found—hanging from a tree branch, beside a baobab fruit! With his turban on!

Tell us more, tell us more, Dadaji!

But Dadaji was beginning to forget the details by the time we were around. Sometimes it was the skull that was found, beside a river, with Chhotu’s turban beside it, all unwound. But of one thing he was certain, as he would sometimes say emphatically to our parents: those lions of Tsavo were the ghosts of dead men. Anyone eaten by a lion would himself come back to eat his fellows—otherwise, how did the lions time their attacks so perfectly?

It was a strange prospect, friends coming back to eat you. Then perhaps the lions didn’t mean ill after all? Dadaji had no answer to that. Another thing he was certain about was that the lions all had hypnotizing powers.

For every mile of railway track laid, four Indians died, our radical Mahesh Uncle would remind us when he was around.

India was always fantasyland to me. To this day, I have never visited my dada’s birthplace. It was the place where that strange man with the narrow pointed face, bald head, and granny glasses, Gandhiji, had lived and died, and where the man with the white cap, Nehru, now ruled, and where the impossibly four-armed and pink-faced gods of my mother’s statuettes and Lakshmi Sweets’ annual calendar pictures had fought their battles and killed devils, and where Sir Edmund Hillary and Sherpa Tensing had that year conquered Everest. It was Vrndavan where the butter thief Nandlal Krishna presided, where Dadi was born and the goddess Dayamati had presided. My mother had a dresser on which she kept her statuettes of Rama and Durga and Hanuman and of course Ganesh, and at times of stress she went and stood in entreaty before them. Our daily preservation, especially in those nervous times, was due to
their faithful intercession, she had no doubt about that. Even now, even here in this Canadian wilderness, I cannot help but say my namaskars, or salaams, to the icons I carry faithfully with me, not quite understanding what they mean to me. But I am convinced they represent some elemental force of nature, some qualities of it, like gravitation and the electric force and all other entities conjured up for us by scientists from our mundane existence. But I digress.

My father—proudly Kenyan, hopelessly (as I now think) colonial—went to India once, and brought back my mother.

He found everything in India dirty and poor, and for the most part he had a miserable time of it. Even to see the Taj Mahal you had to walk over gutters and push through a street fight, he would say. Beggars and touts everywhere; men standing around openly picking at their crotches. Even a taxi! he would exclaim. Even a taxi! You hail one, you want to feel posh and escape all the scum around you, you open the door and what happens? You step into a lump of fresh shit! It was one of his favourite stories, he would get graphic, and Deepa and I would roll with laughter. Mother would simply smile and say, There he goes again, with his taxi-shit story. It was 1944, the year he went, and the streets were in turmoil with strikes and demonstrations in aid of India’s freedom. While walking along a street in Peshawar once, Papa chanced to see a girl on a bicycle—evidently returning from college, her books clasped to the carrier behind her. She had one long pigtail almost down to her waist and she wore an embroidered cap. There was something in the face she made, when she had to halt and wait for a handcart full of smelly onion sacks to go past, that caught his fancy. It was like discovering a single, solitary rose blooming on the grimy sidewalk—he would go on, coming to the part designed to please my mother. Here were tongawallahs screaming at each other, the babagadi of half-rotten onions, an open kiosk selling tea and puris next to a gutter, everyone barefoot or in chappals and wearing dirty clothes, and this girl comes by on her cycle wearing a crisp pink and white shalwar-kameez, with
glistening black hair, full pink cheeks, and flashing black eyes! Impulsively, he began humming a film song and followed the girl in a rickshaw until she reached home. The next day, waiting for her at the same place and time as he’d first seen her, he saw her and again followed her in a rickshaw. He then asked a boy, who had observed him staring after her as she went through the gates of her house, Tell me, what college does she attend? The boy gave a wink and told him, and so the following afternoon my father waited for the girl outside the college gates. Before he could muster the courage to speak to her, she said to him, Ay budhu, you oaf why do you follow me? You must be a stranger in these parts, don’t you know my father is a police inspector? He’ll have the pleasure of having both your legs broken for you. Nevertheless, she let him escort her home. She was enchanted by his foreign accent and awkwardly Indian ways. After a few days my father made an appointment with her father at police headquarters and did the unorthodox thing of proposing to marry his daughter Sheila.

Inspector Verma—my father would say, running forefinger and thumb above his lips to indicate his father-in-law’s military moustache—did not speak a word for a full ten minutes, staring at a report in front of him, on his desk. His mid-morning cup of tea came and he proceeded to drink it, he nibbled a Marie biscuit. My father had of course introduced himself in some detail. Finally Inspector Verma raised his head and eyed the brash young man who was by now utterly discomfited. He grilled him about his background, made sure my father realized that his antecedents in India amounted to nothing, being village banias at most, and that his father had demeaned himself further as a labourer. When Papa was completely deflated, Inspector Verma told him to send his relations with a formal proposal.

Inspector Verma was a widower, and also somewhat unusual; he worked for the British, and in his duties to maintain law and order he often had to arrest Congresswallahs agitating for independence, one of whom was his own son
Mahesh, or send laathi charges against street demonstrators. Gandhi was in jail, there were sporadic riots between Hindus and Muslims. The civilizing order of the day, to the stern inspector, seemed to be on the wane, and the country was on the verge of falling apart. So he agreed to let his lovestruck daughter get away to a part of the world—be it in Africa—where the Empire still held firm, English values and manners still ruled the day.

My father returned to Kenya with my mother in late 1944. I was born the following year. In 1948, after the partition of India, in which Peshawar became part of Pakistan, my mother’s kid brother Mahesh—one of the millions of refugees now—followed her to the colony. My father and his brothers called him “communist,” because of his radical ideas, the term having a special ring to it in those days, meaning worthless intellectual ranter. My father actually tolerated him and could hold a conversation with him, but his brothers detested Mahesh Uncle. He was broad-shouldered and muscular, with a black untrimmed beard and wild glaring eyes behind his black-framed glasses. He was argumentative and sometimes ill-tempered, and he had a degree in English. And just to irk the settlers and the colonial Indians, on occasional days, such as India’s national day, he paraded Nakuru’s main streets in khadi, the pyjama and long shirt combination of homespun cotton that had been the symbol of Indian protest, the uniform of those who had fought for India’s independence. It had the desired effect in this British colony, in the heart of white settlerdom, where they still believed in the fifties that the sun would never set on their empire.

My mother and her brother had a very special closeness. Many times I came upon them sitting together on the sofa in silence, he having turned toward her, eyes lowered, his hands in his lap in respectful repose. A few times I saw her in that silent communion freely wiping tears from her eyes. She was very fair, her pink cheeks now fuller than when my father had first laid eyes
on her, her hair still long and black and thick, her pride and (on washing days) her cross. They had lost their mother and been brought up by a taciturn, high-minded father unable to show his softer nature, especially to his son, and this had not been easy for them. With the independence and partition of India they had lost their homeland. That weighed heavily on all our family, but especially on those two, the freshest arrivals from there. By some perverse twist of fate, Peshawar, our ancestral home, had become an alien, hostile place; it was in Pakistan.