Who Will Catch Us As We Fall (9 page)

‘I didn't know Angela had a son.' Leena pressed her nail down into the balloon-like poori. With a slight whistle it flattened into a yellow heap on her plate.

‘Your father and I knew about Michael – that's his name. He's around your age.' Pooja turned to Jai. ‘He was going to school there but now he'll be living with Angela so you'll see him around here sometimes.'

Pooja had made it clear to Angela that she would not be paying for the extra set of hands. She was the one doing Angela the favor – so that she wouldn't have to leave her son at home during the school holidays while she came to work.

‘Do we have to be friends with him?' Leena chewed down anxiously on her food, imagining all the cruel taunts she might receive if she should befriend this strange, light-stepping boy.

Whilst debating how to answer, Pooja looked over at her husband. She had been worried about bringing the boy here, especially at this
raging-hormone
age and especially around her daughter. ‘You just never know with these
kharias
,' she had told Raj, hush-hush in their bed the night Angela had informed them about Michael. ‘And yet here you are saying we must agree to let her bring him into our home because that is what Pinto would have done.'

At the table that night, unable to keep the crossness from his voice, Raj told his daughter, ‘Of course you'll be his friend.'

Pooja interjected, ‘He's coming here to work. Not to play.'

‘No matter what you decide, I want you to treat him with respect and kindness, is that understood?' Raj addressed Leena but looked instead at his son. He put his napkin down. ‘Jai, come outside with me while these two ladies clean up.'

They left the table together, his daughter's nasal whine following them out onto the street. ‘It's not fair that Jai gets to go outside while I have to clear up the table.' Stomping feet could be heard above her mother's harsh reprimanding. ‘I hate being a girl.'

The street outside was empty but Raj still led his son to the most secluded area on the compound – behind all the houses, where the communal water tank was situated. He settled on the brick ledge there, crossing one leg over the other knee and pulling a cigarette from his trouser pocket.

‘Sit down,' he told his son as the air filled with the fast hiss of a matchstick lighting. The orange flame, captured in the round cup of his father's palm, danced in flickers about his face and Jai immediately went to him. He tucked his hands beneath his thighs, zipping up his hooded sweatshirt right beneath his chin. He was used to the seriousness of his father's tone, understood already what was coming next.

‘Your sister can do whatever she wants but you will become friends with that boy.'

Jai scuffed his feet against the loose gravel. He dragged the heel of his sneaker slowly toward the ledge, opening up a valley of tiny, gray stones. He said through gritted teeth, ‘Okay.'

Arguing with his father was impossible. Jai had recognized early on the burden that had been placed upon him but was now old enough to reach the conclusion that while having your own hopes could be thrilling, being forced to carry someone else's was exhausting. And yet, he always found himself relenting, always agreeing.

Raj exhaled – a dragon puff of smoke. ‘I knew you would understand. You're a special boy. You're going to do great things when you're older.'

‘I wish you would stop telling me what I am.' The words sneaked out. Perhaps it was the darkness, the fact that he could not make out the details of his father's face so was unable to detect the gathering up of his features, the set lips and tight brow.

‘I'm reminding you because I know how easy it is to forget.' Raj dropped the cigarette to the ground, let it smolder. ‘When I was younger, I asked a great man what it takes to be a hero. He told me that it wasn't about being the bravest person – it was about being a good one. About sacrificing your happiness for the right thing.' He searched the straight-edged nose and apple cheeks of his son. A mirror image of himself. ‘I couldn't understand him then but now that I do, I want to teach you.'

‘I just want to be normal.' There it was again, his feelings made bolder by the night.

‘But you aren't normal, don't you see? None of us are until we allow ourselves to be.' Raj was facing his son fully now. ‘It is the greatest injustice you can do to yourself – to settle for ordinary.'

Jai took his hand out from under his father's and slipped it into the pocket of his jacket. As always, the words his father spoke affected him in a way no one else's did. Perhaps it was the weight of them; they carried a thrill, which despite his annoyance, always had a way of exciting him, pushing him into action, and he said, in the final spark of his father's dying cigarette, ‘I'll talk to Michael tomorrow.'

It was after lunchtime the next day when Jai went out onto the veranda. There was a back door leading onto it from the kitchen – a congested space cut off from the rest of the street by a low iron fence. A clothes line swung across the width of it, the concrete floor permanently wet from drying garments. There was a narrow bench that ran along the perimeter, though no space existed upon it to sit. It was overrun by potted plants, ponytail palms, blooming white-flowered cacti and Leena's favorite, a purple-tinged flower, puffed out like soft cotton. A
touch-me-not
, it shrunk and closed up at the slightest touch. Slowly, she placed the tip of her pinky along the slim, ridged leaf and allowed it to curl, drawing up its edges into a spiky barrier.

‘Why do you like to scare the
prrant?
' Angela asked in her comforting Kikuyu accent, the absence of ‘
l
' replaced by a heavy, rolling ‘
r
' making everything sound like a shout, even the most loving murmur.

‘I want to know why it does that.' Leena touched another leaf, giggling as it compressed and folded into itself.

‘I've told you a hundred times, it's for protection. So they won't get eaten by insects or other animals.' Jai turned to Angela impatiently. ‘I'm looking for Michael.'

‘He stayed home today. He's feeling tired after his journey and wanted to rest.'

That morning, his father's words having slept within him, Jai had risen full of childish excitement. He felt it deflate slightly now, curdle in disappointment. ‘When he does decide to come, please let me know.'

Angela picked up a wet shirt and began scrubbing it hard,
slap-slap
, against her knuckles. She wondered whether that was a good idea. Two or three days of playing and they'll be done with each other, she decided.

‘Okay.' She waved them away, her arms buried in foam. ‘Go now and let me finish my work.'

Eldoret. The town of hills – training grounds for Kipchoge Keino, the famous long-distance running champion who was also the hero of Michael's childhood. A place of wholesale
dukas
and manufacturing companies such as Ken-Knit, Lochab Brothers and Raiplywoods, set up and developed by the oldest East-Indian families living in the Rift Valley Region. A city of few museums and too many nightclubs, with a vast night sky that hung low like a canopy, traversed by
Ngai
himself, the creator and giver of all things.

Michael had never been close with his grandmother – had in fact lived in terror of the heavy-set, lumbering woman upon whose doorstep he had been dropped when he was three years old, after his mother had found some casual labor working for an Indian family in the capital city.

‘Nairobi is no place for a child to grow up,' his grandmother had said to him when he began asking questions. ‘Drugs, sex, thieves – it's a city where everything that can be stolen will be stolen, including yourself.'

Known to most people as simply Madam, his grandmother made a living trading anything that her hands came upon. Potatoes,
sukuma-wiki
, maize, all of which she grew in the communal shamba running along the edges of her home, closing off the half-acre plot with a wire fence and keeping such close guard of it that no one dared steal a single cob or pull one leaf of the collard greens.

She took Michael out to plow, dig, water and hoe as soon as he was old enough for proper hand-eye co-ordination. Chickens, a few short-haired cows, some goats; whether it was the gift of the gab or the ability to terrorize, his grandmother sold back to people the things they already had at a grossly inflated price and garnered a reputation as a cunning and ruthless businesswoman.

As Michael grew up she began to accept books and magazines instead of money for her goods, but only those written in English. She had forced them upon him as his friends played outside on the street, saying, ‘Your father,
mjinga
, stupid man, thought he could win without knowing a single thing! You are going to learn their language, speak it properly, become as clever as they are – it's the only way to send them back and return this country to the people it rightfully belongs to.'

A gossiper, a maker of sordid stories, Madam went about systematically destroying the reputations of all those who crossed or angered her, or those she felt to be a threat. Michael heard her talking about his mother once, when he was supposed to be asleep but had instead crawled up behind the door of the bedroom they shared.

She was sitting opposite another woman, Mama Itanya, and they were slowly sipping on Jack Daniels from small glass mugs. Michael had no idea how she had managed to get her hands on something so decadent, but he wasn't surprised. His grandmother was as wily and devious as a magician and just as selfish with her tricks. He watched them swirl, suckle and gulp in the light of a quarter moon and devised a plan on how he would sneak some. Little did he know that two weeks later the old woman would be dead and he would be the sole inheritor of that half-f bottle of whiskey. He couldn't have envisioned the night he sat beside her bed and looked over her still body, finding it impossible that someone so fearsome could succumb to something as inconsequential as a mosquito. A peculiar sadness would pick away at him and, although he would be eager to see his mother again, he would also be reluctant to leave that town, those people, and the only memories he had.

But that night he listened to her with growing rage, any insult against his mother feeling like a personal slight against himself.

‘I
wouldi
never work for anyone!' she was burping, the drink making her louder than usual, her Kikuyu-laced English more difficult to understand.

Mama Itanya had hushed her. ‘The boy will hear you.'

Madam drank again, ignoring her companion. ‘I told his mother, you come
andi
work for me and we make good money together. We get there
sirowry buti surery.
None of
thisi
working for criminals.
Ngai!
Ten thousand shillings a month – how
cani
anyone live off that over there?'

The day following her death, Michael had left Mama Itanya, who was also his grandmother's second cousin, in charge of the house and
shamba
and had boarded the Eldoret Express at eight thirty in the morning. On the torn and rickety seat, pressed beside a student of Chepkoilel Campus, Michael had listened to her babble excitedly about her boyfriend in Nairobi.

‘City boys are different. So sophisticated,' she had told him, describing the fancy, European-style restaurants, the shopping malls and hotels, the Phoenix Theater where one could go and watch a local play, and coffee shops – ‘Can you imagine sipping coffee for one whole hour? Absurd.' Trying but failing to communicate fully the intangible energy of the capital, the dreams it infected you with so that, even if you wanted to leave, once you set foot in Nairobi you were changed forever and there was no going back.

Still, Michael had no idea what to expect when he arrived in the congested city. He saw all manners of people – cheeky, African pedestrians; sour-mouthed Indian shop owners;
mzungus
in all their khaki glory, pink-faced and friendly, as if they had been plucked straight from a romance novel. He even spotted a Chinese man haggling at an electronics store and stopped to gape at the unusual sight. The sounds of the evening traffic mixed with gospel music from bus radios and people setting up shop wherever there was space on the bumpy, unpaved roadside – selling sweets, hot peanuts and magazines. Above his head ran lines of wire mannequins dressed up in the latest Western fashions.

Michael leaped across an overflowing, festering sewer filled with rainwater, fast-food wrappers, plastic bottles and cigarette butts, aghast to see some boys washing themselves in it. The ‘city of possibilities' the girl on the bus had promised him, but to Michael it was ugly and disturbing.

When he reached the apartment building his mother worked at, he gave Angela's name to the askari as instructed. But when he stepped inside he was even more terrified of this neat, tiny oasis than he had been outside on the darkening street, because it was full of the very people his grandmother had warned him about –
muhindis
. Those loud, expressive people who spat on sidewalks and spoke with swinging hands and bobbing necks.

‘That's how you can tell they're lying,' his grandmother had said. ‘Too dramatic – they are trying too hard to make you believe them.'

Walking amongst the cluster of houses, the occupants peering down at him suspiciously, Michael worried about how he would find his mother without an apartment number. He had to stop behind a group of children engaged in a game of glass balls and ask for her.

He had never experienced looks of that kind before. Not fear or hatred, but something that lay in the muddy, indeterminate space between the two, making them glance suspiciously at each other but never at him. Shifting from foot to foot, he stared back at the small Indian girl who watched him like a jumpy animal, when a boy emerged from a house and gave him the first smile he had received all afternoon.