The In-Between World of Vikram Lall Read online

  When she found out that Njoroge too had been wounded by the same nail, she was thoroughly mystified. So if one of you gets cut in the arm, the other has to go and try it too? So what are you, two paagals? One jumps in the lake, the other has to do the same. Like Laurel and Hardy, the pair of you.

  Njoroge recovered without medication. Africans are stronger than us, Mother said.

  From that time onward I carried a strange secret that implicated me in things I did not fully understand, and yet which I could not share with my family. This secret was a curtain that came between me and my loved ones, and there were times when I would feel intensely sad and guilty. I never told anyone about it, I write of it only now, in the presence of Njoroge’s son, who has dug out sweet potatoes from the garden and will roast them on the grill for us to eat.

  The Mau Mau oath, as described by the colonial authorities and their informers, required participation in gruesome rituals involving acts of bestiality and even cannibalism. More benign forms of the oathing process have been described by some former Mau Mau and their sympathizers. The truth is complex and elusive. There has no doubt been both exaggeration and suppression in the published accounts. Historical veracity and the confidence to deal with it have not been strong points in our region of the world; the three-piece-suited African leader with a son at Harrow wants no reminder of the primitive processes that were sometimes at work behind the freedom struggle. The grimness of the ceremony undoubtedly gave it its shocking and binding value. Having taken the oath, when called upon to assist the freedom-fighters in any manner they asked, you had no choice but to obey. Of course you might be lucky and not be called upon for your services. But an oath once taken could only be revoked by a counter-oath—of which the government had its version, in which you swore loyalty to Queen Elizabth II.

  When we were older, even when we spoke of the past, I never could bring up with my friend the subject of that oath he administered to me. In my inner being, though, I felt—and still do feel—that an offence was done to me. Through friendly coercion I was made to participate in a private, debasing and repugnant ceremony. I swore to things I did not understand, I had to lie to my family, I had even tasted flesh, an act abhorrent to my Hindu upbringing. But I did not hold the experience against Njoroge; it was just one of those boyhood unpleasantries one has to face in school and college. We were only eight and nine years old! But from where had Njoroge obtained his inspiration for the oath? There was a rudimentary similarity between it and those Mau Mau oaths I subsequently read about. He must have witnessed something at that bloody makeshift altar he took me to. And Mwangi? It is almost impossible that Mwangi, or any other Kikuyu who worked in our development, could have avoided taking the oath. Was the benign-looking, elderly Mwangi, the wise and patient man, the dignified gardener, anything other than that? I mean, was he secretly involved with the Mau Mau, in its violence? I could never bring myself to believe that.

  Mwangi returned from police detention intensely sick. He and the others who had been taken with him were kept outdoors in the cold and rain for three days while they awaited their turn at interrogation. There were braggarts among them, as well as cowering boys who wept. As they sat and squatted on the ground, several hundred of them behind barbed wire, they were taunted and beaten and threatened by the police—chief among them the sinister Corporal Boniface—with all manner of dire consequences if they did not confess to being Mau Mau. Finally Mwangi was brought into a hut where sat Lieutenant Soames and an inspector, who remembered him from previous interrogations. There is a saying in our language, Mwangi wa Thuku, said the inspector, that bad money always returns. If you have been bad, confess and you will be forgiven. You will take an oath to the Queen our Mother and be sent home. You might even be rewarded if you agree to work with us. But, Bwana Sir, Mwangi had replied doubly respectfully, it is you who have brought me here every time. I am a simple gardener at the Indian housing estate, I have not been bad. I am old, as you can see yourself, I have danced my dance. This old fat doesn’t sizzle any more. We shall see, said the inspector, if it sizzles or not. Mwangi was asked many questions, as he told Mother, by the inspector, by Lieutenant Soames, and by that Bonifacio (as he called the corporal). They were relentless and harsh, listening to them was like trying to give heed to a waterfall. Afterwards he was stood among a long line of suspects as a number of witnesses, their heads and shoulders covered with sack-masks to hide their identities, were brought over by the policemen to pick out their oath-givers. Mwangi’s number seemed up when one of these witnesses coughed and hesitated momentarily in front of him. Subsequent to this, Mwangi was beaten mercilessly until he was almost senseless. He was taken to a hut by Boniface and two others and tortured. As a last resort they dunked his head repeatedly in a bucket of water, for over an hour until he thought he had died again.

  How did they torture you…inside the hut? Mother asked.

  Mama, you don’t want to be told.

  And then? What happened?

  What was there to confess? Mwangi replied rhetorically.

  They let him go.

  Dr. Sethi had been called to examine the shivering patient and, predictably, pronounced him with malaria and prescribed a strong dose of quinine, and light meals only. Mother and Sakina-dadi had accompanied the doctor, which is how they heard Mwangi’s story. He refused to let his body be examined privately, and after the doctor had left, the two women stayed on and instructed the old man how to look after himself. Mwangi did not believe in European medicine. He had his own potions, he said, prepared for him by a mundumugo. Still, the women argued, he should take the quinine also. Hitherto they had been speaking in Swahili, of which Mother’s version was quite rudimentary. Now, toward the end of their visit, Sakina-dadi switched to Kikuyu and began a lengthy discussion with Mwangi, asking him in a gossipy manner all about his birthplace and his life, and translating choice bits for my amazed mother.

  Sakina speaks Kikuyu so fluently, Mother told Papa later, and then she added thoughtfully: What must it be like to be a Masai and also a Muslim Punjabi…Are we really Africans?

  Papa, reading a paper: Eh? What are you going on about?

  The next time, Mother took me and Deepa along to see Mwangi in his room. He lay in his bed sideways, huddled inside his bedcloth like a child. His eyes were yellow, his hair seemed greyer at the temples than I had ever noticed before, and his deep black face looked as ancient as a mountain. He sat up, still covered by his bedcloth, and to every question from Mother regarding his well-being, he answered a grateful Ahsanté. She had brought a box of digestive biscuits for him and tea in a Thermos. I have often wondered at this innate kindness in my mother—her spontaneous sympathy for an old man who was sick; and how she always treated Njoroge as a boy, like me, and not as the grandson of a “boy,” a servant. She was intuitive and not political, and though she had her prejudices, they were hardly consistent.

  Soon Mwangi was up and about, pruning and weeding and planting, and when he sat down in the shade for a rest, washing his face with water to cool down, Deepa, Njoroge, and I would sometimes go and sit with him.

  Are you Kikuyu, or son of Kikuyu, Deepa would tease, and Mwangi would pat her hair and gently tweak her long braid.

  This is the story of Njoroge’s grandfather Mwangi, as I have learned and come to tell it to myself:

  The craggy white-striped Kirinyaga—called Mount Kenya by the Europeans—rises high into the mists, overlooking the ridges and forests of Kikuyu country. In Africa only Kilimanjaro rises higher, in the south, but Kirinyaga looms more mysterious and imposing, for on it among the clouds resides the One God, Ngai. Once upon a time, when the world was yet young and fresh, Ngai created the First Man, called Kikuyu, and sent him down from the mists to rule over the highland country that would be called Kikuyuland. Here the First Man built his homestead in the fertile land filled with mugumo trees under which he would place sacrifices for his God. In due time, Ngai gave his son a wife, Mumbi, who bore nine daughters. Whe
n the girls were grown, there were no men to be their husbands, therefore Ngai told Kikuyu to sacrifice a fat ram under a sacred grove. This Kikuyu did, after which each of these nine daughters found standing beside her a handsome man. And then from each of these nine daughters sprang a clan of the Kikuyu people. One of these clans was Angali, into which Mwangi wa Thuku was born. It was the time when the red foreigners had begun to arrive like a plague on the land and impose their godless ways upon the Kikuyu. In the area in which Mwangi’s father had his huts and wives and children, there arrived a fat and bearded stranger who came to be called Muruaru, the Sick One, because it was believed that although he looked healthy, it was due to some illness that he had neglected to shave.

  Mugeni amiaga mbirira, it has been said; a bad guest shits even in the cemetery. The red-faced Muruaru quickly took control of the area, the Kikuyu’s magic having failed against his guns. Muruaru imposed his own ways on the land. He installed a greedy young upstart called Njagi as chief among the Kikuyu, when previously there had been respected elders to lead the people and no one chief. Muruaru demanded taxes and he wanted labourers. Defiance was punished by imprisonment or whipping.

  In the year of Mwangi’s circumcision, half of his age group—those who had gone through the ceremony with him—disappeared, taken away forcibly to fight in the war of the red foreigners, far away in Tanganyika. He didn’t know how old he was then, perhaps seventeen. Of those who went away to that terrible war, fewer than half returned, after many months. They came back—these young men who had never ventured beyond the ridges—sad and old, unwilling to speak of the horrors they had suffered. Some had grown beards like foreigners; some returned missing an arm or leg or eye; some wore bandages on their heads. There were those among the veterans who showed no respect for the elders, got into brawls, abandoned their farms. Mwangi escaped this fate only because his young sister became Njagi’s third wife.

  When the danger of conscription was over, Mwangi, after much soul-searching, decided to leave the land of his ancestors, to travel west beyond the ridges and over the mountain range Nyandarua to settle somewhere in the plains of the valley where the Masai had used to graze their cattle. The Masai had been pushed away and the red foreigners were farming large stretches of land using ploughs that could do the work of a hundred women in a day. But they were giving land to the Kikuyu immigrants, so Mwangi had heard, to grow crops and make their homes. People of the clan had gone there and returned to tell their stories. Here in the land of the Kikuyu ancestors, the old ways were no more; disputes were no longer settled by the elders. Friends of Chief Njagi became richer and more arrogant. There was no more land to cultivate, for the serikali, the government, had forbidden the clearing of forests. Young men who had gone to the foreigners’ towns to work returned with rupees and threw their weight around. The medicines of the foreigners competed with those of the mundumugo. And yet sickness increased. Drunkenness spread. Finally even the God of the Europeans was gaining prominence over the God of the Kikuyu, who had become deaf to their pleas.

  Early one morning, while it was still dark, Mwangi and his wife Wanjeri and their son Thuku, who was two years old, departed from their homestead. With them they took a few goats, a goodly amount of rupee coins earned by selling their other animals, gourds of water, a sack of seeds, and their household pots. In his hand Mwangi carried a panga for defence and to cut through the forest where needed. Gradually, as they traversed the ridges, the sun rising every morning behind their backs, majestic white-striped Kirinyaga receded further and further in the distant mists, until finally, with one more twist in their path, the home of their God Ngai had disappeared completely behind forests and hills. They knew they were in a foreign land. He could always return to the land of his ancestors, Mwangi told himself, but the thought held little comfort, for he knew that the life of his people had changed so much since his birth that there was no telling what the future might bring.

  They had hiked up the slopes of Nyandarua (which the Europeans called the Aberdares), making their nervous way through thickets of tall bamboo and sighing forest, across burbling streams and over squelchy ground, the mountain air thin and misty and damp. At the end of the fourth day they arrived at a clearing at the edge of a great valley. Down below stretched mile upon mile of grassy flatland, dotted by trees and animals. A grey lake lay still as a mirror. Beside it was a large settlement. In the far distance, where the sun was setting, rose the opposite wall of the valley.

  The lake was called Naivasha, as was the village. Mwangi had been told he could catch a train from here to take him to a place called Njoro, where he would find land to work on.

  Mwangi had never seen a train before. He had never heard so much noise as it made. He had never seen anything go so fast, puffing and panting and shaking the earth, as this beast of iron. Now he knew that the lines on which the trains ran had been built by the labour of men like those brown-skinned bana-kubas, Anand Lal and Molabux and their like, who had come all the way from a far land while still in their youth. It is fate, he said, taking out a box of tobacco, picking out a pinch and stuffing it into one wide nostril. It is fate, heh, which takes the young to distant lands. It is when the mother that is the land says to her children, Go elsewhere to fill your belly. But these Indian wazees have made their fortune, why do they delay going back to their home?

  But they don’t want to go, it’s been a long time, Mother told him. This is their land too now, where their children and grandchildren were born. Isn’t that true?

  Mwangi said nothing.

  Did you ever go back to your home, Mother asked.

  I dreamed of going back to the land of Kikuyu, he said.

  Did you go?

  Silence.

  Mwangi settled in Njoro, further up from Nakuru. He was given a plot of land to grow crops, and in return he and his wife and children, like the other tenants—or squatters, as they were called—had to labour on the estate of their European family: work in the fields, graze the cattle, and provide domestic help.

  This way he brought up a son and two daughters. The girls were eventually married off to men who followed the new religion, repudiating the Kikuyu God who had looked after their people since time began. And the fate that he himself had escaped in his youth caught up with his son Thuku, who was conscripted to fight another war of the Europeans and was taken even farther away than those who had fought in the previous war. Thuku returned from this new war silent and restless. Gradually he recovered, but he did not want to settle on a farm. He went to work in Nakuru, where he found a job as a mechanic. Soon he moved to Nairobi. His wife Wangui followed him, leaving their son Njoroge with his grandparents.

  And now—what is Thuku doing? Mother asked.

  He is in Uganda, isn’t he, studying to be a teacher.

  Which was a lie.

  Ms. Chatterjee, whose family were refugees from East Bengal, which later became Bangladesh (what a curious coincidence, both our families rendered refugees by the Indian partition), tells us that her father would talk about how he had once seen black human carcasses floating in the Ganges outside Calcutta, during the Second World War. They were presumed to belong to the sick and dying African soldiers tossed out from troop trains in the middle of the night by their British officers. A feast for the crocodiles…are there crocodiles in the Ganges? I suppose not; I have not asked her yet. Joseph tells her that his grandfather served in Burma, but he returned from the war and disappeared a few years afterwards.

  Joseph claims only vague knowledge of his great-grandfather Mwangi’s roots in the Kikuyu heartland. He has been close, however, to his mother’s folks, moderately wealthy and established people of the Nyeri township. He is, of course, aware, as is everyone else familiar with the history of the country, that Chief Njagi was one of the first victims of the Mau Mau, gunned down with a pistol in his Bentley while returning from a government function in Nairobi. The chief’s grandchildren are currently among the country’s elite businessmen and politician
s, some of whom I have come to know well.

  Tea! From McGinty and Lloyd’s! Seema Chatterjee exclaims in her rich melodious voice from the kitchen. Where did you get it from? she asks, coming out to the deck.

  I had it sent from London…an old habit, I explain, uncomfortably.

  How absolutely decadent! she smiles in wicked satisfaction. And are your suits from London too?

  I look away, catch Joseph’s thoughtful eye belying his soft chuckle.

  Kenyan tea is the best in the world, he tells me, throwing down a schoolboy challenge.

  Which I take up, unnecessarily, with: Yes, but do you know, the best of our tea can be purchased only overseas, from people like McGinty’s.

  Immediately I regret my retort, noting his embarrassment.

  There is such a chasm between us, which I don’t see ever closing. What do I tell Deepa, who has such high hopes for our relationship? How do I explain that this boy can never trust me, with my bitterness of age and experience, my corrupt wealth, my alien Asian ways?

  NINE.

  A postcard came airmail from London:

  Dear Vic and Deepa, We’re having a wonderful time here! Hope you have a smashing holiday too. Say “jambo” to old Njo. Kwa heri! See you soon!

  —Bill and Annie

  On the reverse side, Piccadilly Circus in full colour, a city scene grander and infinitely more bustling than our own modest and quite somnolent King Street roundabout. Look, said Papa, who was holding up the postcard, the biggest city in the world.

  Where’s the circus, Papa? I asked him, our self-styled expert on matters English.

  Maybe there was a circus there a long time ago, he said, trying to sound confident and unable to hide his uncertainty.