The In-Between World of Vikram Lall Read Online Free PDF Page A

phulki chappatis and daal from yet another. Lilting melodies and sad lyrics from Saigal, Hemant Kumar, and Talat filled the air, courtesy of KBC’s Hindustani service on the shortwave. One song, a favourite among kids, went,

O darling little children, what do you hold in your fists? In our fists (sing the beggar children in chorus) we hold our fates!
    Soon the songs would give way to the one o’clock news delivered in depressingly funereal tones. Whatever the news, it always sounded tragic. African music played in some of the servant houses. In one song, in Swahili, the singer lamented being sent to Bulawayo to the diamond mines.
    Deepa came running out from our house and hurriedly sat down beside us, on her haunches.
    Mrs. Innes was brave, wasn’t she? Deepa must have heard a snatch of our conversation, probably from the French window above our heads.
    She died, Njoroge said.
    I don’t want to die, Deepa said. I don’t want to be a hundred.
    In her mind, at that time, to die meant to reach exactly a hundred years.
    Njoroge’s grandfather Mwangi called him from their flat, a neighbour’s servant quarter, and our friend stood up to go. Deepa took a few steps to follow him, then stopped. He turned, smiled, and waved briefly.

    Out in the distance, on the spit of land needling the giant lake, Joseph’s gone fishing with two young friends he has found, a girl of ten and a boy of eight from the neighbourhood. If he catches anything large enough he’ll bring it back for the barbecue. Sometimes he shows off to his young friends a few deft moves of soccer, and other kids from the few houses nearby come scampering down to join in the play. It is the boy who reminds me of Annie—the innocence with which he runs his hand up and down Joseph’s arm, for instance, to feel the black skin, is so reminiscent of my friend from long ago. It has occurred to me—how can it not?—that my picture of my pastcould well have, like the stories of my grandfather, acquired the patina of nostalgia, become idealized. But then, I have to convince myself, perhaps a greater and conscious discipline and the practice of writing mitigate that danger. I do carry my album of photos with me and my acquired newspaper cuttings and other assorted material, and there is always Deepa to check facts with. Still, what can ultimately withstand the cruel treachery of time, even as one tries to undermine it?
    Joseph too has an obsession with the past, that of his people, the Kikuyu. Many peoples in East Africa resisted the European colonization, but they had early on been subdued by the superiority of rifles against arrows and spears. It was the Kikuyu, at least a large section of the tribe, who organized a systematic guerrilla war that struck large terror among the settlers. And it was the Kikuyu who paid the harsh price of British countermeasures and settler rage.
    We may need their methods, Joseph says to me once, with a sparkle in his eyes and all the earnestness of his age, speaking of the Mau Mau. Even these days, right now, my people are being oppressed, they are being driven from their homes and butchered. But we will fight back—with guns, not machetes!
    He is referring to the recent occurrences of ethnic violence back home, in which the victims have been the Kikuyu of the Nakuru region, whose ancestors were immigrants from across the Aberdares. The youth of his people, he assures me, are now ready to take on their enemies. But the government, as I well know, itself implicated in condoning the ethnic violence, has always been nervous and vigilant about new breeds of militants inspired by those heroes of the past.
    Violence and civil war lead nowhere, Joseph, I tell him. Nobody wins. We all lose.
    I don’t think I sound convincing. We exchange looks, and turn away from each other to face the lake lying still in the dark.

 

    THREE.

    Sunday silence, a ripened equatorial afternoon sated and senseless in the heat, and suddenly an abrupt whine and growl