The Gunny Sack (13 page)

On the evening of October 20, 1952, when my father Juma came home, we all waited expectantly in bed for the clap of his hands to bring us jumping out of our beds, for the drive out to Icelands for ice-cream. But the door was firmly shut, all the bolts fastened and checked, the windows locked, the curtains drawn.

“What’s up?” asked Kulsum anxiously.

“Something is going on,” he replied. “I don’t know what. There are rumours. We’ll stay indoors and wait.” He turned on the radio. A talk show was on, discussing farming techniques in Kenya.

Early the next morning we were woken by the sound of lorries—not one or two, but a military convoy carrying white soldiers.

“Is this a new war or something?” asked my mother.

“How should I know?” came the impatient reply. “Keep the children at home. Tell Abdulla to stay out—” Playing tough, he pretended he would go to work, going behind a door, draped in khanga at the waist, to change—until, as expected, Kulsum expressed alarm and absolutely refused him permission to go out. Shortly afterwards, at breakfast, the funereal
tones of the Hindustani Service announced that the Governor was going on air. The Emergency was declared; Mau Mau was an acknowledged word.

The First Battalion of the Lancashire Fusiliers had arrived the previous evening and was now making its appearance on the streets of Nairobi in a flag march, driving around in the backs of military lorries, bayonets fixed, meaning business. In Mombasa the cruiser HMS
Kenya
had docked, and the Royal Marines were giving a similar show of British might. The Europeans waved, Asians heaved sighs of relief. “Peace at last,” said my father when he heard the Governor.

But peace did not truly come, and violence hovered nearby.

At about this time my Aunt Gula died. Unfortunately, she had been too accurate about what she described as her husband’s musical prowess. One day she doused herself with kerosene and set herself aflame. The forty days of mourning had not passed when her husband announced his marriage to a young nurse. They went to Mombasa, taking his two boys with them; my cousins Mehroon and Yasmin came to stay with us permanently.

At the firm of Hassam Pirbhai, Pioneer Trader, European farmers from the Highlands would stop by, Government servants of all races would check in. Close by were the Rendezvous, where they could have cakes and English tea, the Ismailia, from where they could order samosas and brewed Indian tea, and the New Stanley, where they could sip martinis under bright canopies in the sun and watch the traffic on Delamere Avenue directed into neat lanes by a traffic policeman in starched whites. Woolworths, the first Nairobi supermarket, agents for
Reader’s Digest
, and vendors of the London
Times
, the
Illustrated London News
, and much else besides, was a stone’s throw away. From this European and Asian hub, my father would come home at lunch and dinner time, bringing news of the Mau Mau.

The Bucks were a young English couple with a farm in Kinangop, and a seven-year-old son. Mrs. Buck was a doctor who ran a part-time clinic on the farm. The Bucks were regular customers at Hassam Pirbhai’s. They bought their safari clothes and their servants’ khakis from the store. They had bought a tent. Recently they had installed a siren. One evening at dinnertime, the servant walked in from the kitchen bringing with him an armed gang. The bodies of the man and wife were found horribly mutilated in the dining room. The boy’s body was found in bed, in what was said to be a worse condition. Civilized Nairobi was sickened. “No worse horror can be imagined, no worse butchery described,” wrote the
Nairobi Herald
. The settler community was up in arms. At the dinner table my father expressed profound shock. “Their own servant,” he would say. “This, our Abdulla, suppose he turned around tomorrow and betrayed us—” “Don’t say such things,” Kulsum said. “Besides, he’s not a Kikuyu. He’s a Muslim.”

A few weeks later there occurred the Lari massacre, right under the nose of the Uplands police station. Lari housed a large number of Kikuyu loyalists, including the Kikuyu Home Guard. That morning the local detachment of the King’s African Rifles had been called away; that night the Kikuyu Home Guard were patrolling the forest; so when the Mau Mau arrived there were plenty of women and children … when the huts were set on fire on the Lari plain, there were enough women and children. When the Home Guard returned to charred and mutilated bodies, all the strength in the world could not have stifled their howls of anguish.

Feelings ran high the following weeks, fear was at an intense pitch.

“What are the British good for, anyway? ‘About turn, left-right,’ parading on Delamere Avenue, but no action.”

“Aré, what we need are the Gurkhas. These Fusiliers are just dandies—boys from England. One platoon of Gurkhas could chase these Kukus up Mount Kenya—”

On a Sunday my Chachas had gathered at our home, playing bridge. In the courtyard Abdulla had grilled meat for supper. When the men had finished their meal, the servant brought water in a jug for them to wash their hands. He would go to each one at a time and pour water on the fingers held over the plate. Some water fell on Ali Chacha’s lap; our favourite Chacha who wore dark glasses and had brought my father a set of Kashmiri daggers. Ali Chacha got up in a fury and gave poor Abdulla a slap on the face and a kick. “Blaady basket! Blaady Kikuyu Mau Mau—”

“But he’s not Kikuyu,” insisted the girl from Mombasa, “he’s a Muslim.”

Poor Abdulla ran sobbing to his room.

A few days after the Lari incident, my father brought home a pistol. It stayed in the thief-proof compartment of his wardrobe. Every night for a few weeks, before retiring, he would take the key from Kulsum, and get the gun out. Then, as my anxious mother watched with prayers on her lips, he would open the front door and, taking steady aim, fire twice into the pitch darkness that was the shrubs, trees and refuse dump of the unused lot across the road.

There once was an incident, or non-incident, that we would all like to forget. It conflicts too much with our image of our father: Juma, who consorted with police inspectors and DOs, who had once been served a drink at the Norfolk Hotel, whom people came to call in the middle of the night seeking help and influence.

Operation Anvil was under way to wipe out the Mau Mau and there were regular spot-checks by what we called the military police. The military police were British soldiers, the police, and the police reserves, including local vigilantes. The pass book was introduced and the city was being searched sector by sector for Mau Mau sympathizers. Cars were stopped, trunks searched, and passengers scrutinized. In residential areas servants were questioned, often with slaps and kicks. In
all cases, suspicious-looking Kikuyus were taken away in caged trucks like wild animals to a zoo.

One evening while returning from the mosque, my father was waved to a stop at the bridge on Nairobi River, just before the road climbs up to Ngara and Parklands. It was here that the incident or non-incident occurred. Two European men, almost boys, one questioning my father outside, the other leering inside, the car packed with Kulsum and five children. The road was dark but the two men had torches and there was light from other cars. Just that. An exclamation from my mother, my father getting into the car and snapping at her question. A hushed ride home. Begum would say later that the military policeman slapped my father. “Don’t be silly,” Kulsum would answer, “he was only flipping the pages of his book. Did your father look like a Kikuyu? And anyway he complained.”

The gunny would like to throw out one more bad memory. Spit out a pang of conscience that’s been eating away at the insides, like a particularly thorny pip that’s been swallowed. Operation Anvil again. Hundreds of Kikuyus, guilty and not guilty, were sent away every day to await further screening; thousands waited at Langata. One night fearful Mary, Mary with the long, bony head and big, white teeth, this time wearing an old dress of Kulsum who had become bigger, knocked on the door. With her was a man. My father went outside to talk to them, and Kulsum was in a panic. Whenever my mother was agitated, her eyes would widen, she would turn pale and look in front of her, sometimes picking her chin. You could tell she was praying, some mantra was being invoked.

My father came in and said, “She wants us to keep her son.”

“And you said yes?”

“How could I refuse? Anyway, let’s wait till tomorrow. Give me the key, I’ll hide him in the store room.”

“Jambo, mama!” Mary peeped in from outside.

“Jambo,” my mother replied woodenly.

Actually, Mary had begged my father to employ her son and get him a pass book. All night my father and mother sat up in bed looking at each other, frightened, waiting for the night to pass. Stories of Mau Mau murders, of trusted servants taking grisly oaths and betraying their employers to grisly deaths, went through their minds. Every rustle outside acquired menace, even the crickets sounded eerie, and every motor vehicle that sounded as if it might stop at any moment could have been the military police.

At daybreak, my father took us all to the neighbour’s house, then he walked to the road and hailed a passing police car and said that there was a man hiding in his store room. Mary’s son was found among sacks of rice, potatoes, and onions, hiding in an empty sack, and taken away.

“The police would have found him anyway,” said my father.

We never saw Mary again. Perhaps she too was taken away, to be screened, detained even. Was she a Mau Mau sympathizer? What did we know of her—a friend from another world who came periodically and then once at night in an hour of need—whose memory we now carry branded forever in our conscience …

The Mau Mau years did not tarnish our memories of Eden.

“Just when we had established ourselves, when the future lay open before us, he went away,” Kulsum would say. And I, who took it all away, would look down in shame.

Four gallons of milk were spilt one day and all her happiness was washed away with it …

Four gallons of milk, boiled once in the morning and skimmed for the malai, now carried back to the fire by Yasmin to be heated. The pan is large and shiny, used only for the milk, and wide and heavy, and she walks in small jerky steps, grimy feet on a grimy floor, face twisted in a grimace, shouting, “Move … move, basi—oh Mother!” Kulsum is sending Abdulla on an errand, I fail to move out of Yasmin’s way and
bang into her, she stumbles back and four gallons of milk come pouring down my dark little body.

We all stared at the marriage of white and black on the floor, the white milk spreading out and breaking up into sickly little islands on a black sea—from which a frantic Kulsum divined disaster.

“Oh Mother!” cried my mother. “You bastard, you motherfucker …” A rain of blows kept pouring on my milk-washed body. The wet slaps smarted but not a tear I shed. Thump, slap, slipper, smack … I bore on back, face, buttocks, arm … thump, slap, slipper, smack … how can I forget? … until finally I whispered, “Forgive me, Mother.”

“Leave him, Auntie,” said Yasmin. “Leave him, Mummy,” said Begum. “Please leave him,” they all begged.

How could she forgive me, my crime was murder.

The milk was wiped off the floor, my mother went off to her room, and I was bathed, tears falling freely now. Not at the pain but at having hurt my mother. Fifteen minutes later, she came back, tearful, her tasbih in her hand. “Put him to bed,” she told the girls.

My father was not told of the incident.

There followed seven days of intense expiation, seven days of intense prayer on one leg; seven days of sweet offerings to the mosque; and the following Sunday a niani. Seven clean maidens put a clove in their mouths before going to bed the previous night and arrived to lunch with sore tongues, wet mouths and the soft clove. They sat in a circle, on a mat in the dining-room, and waited shyly to be served. Kulsum served each one of them herself; no child was allowed to help, Abdulla was sent away. First she gave each girl a glass of yogurt to swallow the wet clove with. Then on each plate she put portions of sweet rice steaming in cinnamon and saffron, and chick peas. And when they had eaten of my mother’s hands, they trooped off to the tap outside to wash their hands and returned to where she sat, on a low stool, a pan of water and a bowl beside her and a
cup in her hand. Each girl raised her right foot over the bowl and Kulsum poured a little water on the big toe and washed it. And the water that had collected when all of them had passed her was solemnly drunk. Then each girl took a sweet and a handkerchief as gift, and my father returned them all to their homes. Thus were the gods and goddesses, orthodox and unorthodox, placated on my behalf.

But the gods are not always heedful.

A few nights later my father woke up with a pain and asked Kulsum to call Dr. Joshi. All his usual bravado was gone. “I think there’s something wrong with me.” Abdulla was woken up and quickly dispatched with a note. But this was still the Emergency and Abdulla (although a Muslim, as Kulsum said) did not return for a few days. Day was breaking, a delicious cool breeze brought the smell of earth and dew and wet leaves through the window with the first golden rays of the sun, when I was woken up by a heart-rending scream from my mother.

We stayed in our bedroom all day, my brother and I. We tried playing ludo first, then snakes and ladders. We brought out the train set and the doctor set. But the sombre mood of the house was over us too, and we felt miserable. We cried a little and we slept a little. We held on to our natural urges until it hurt. Then my brother wet himself. I watched a trickle slowly move down his legs, the smell filled the air, and the front of his shorts gradually acquired an ever-widening wet patch. Then I too let go and relieved myself.

By opening the door a crack we could watch the proceedings in the rest of the house. The dining room table had been moved to a side and the floor was laid with mats and sheets. The sitting room furniture was hooded with ghostly white sheets. In the early afternoon the people trickled in. First the women, in twos and threes, talking in hushed, important tones, advising my sister and cousins and ordering the servant. They
sat on the floor counting beads, some with eyes half-closed, others staring blankly in front of them, lips moving; and when something occurred to one, she would turn and mutter in a husky voice to a neighbour; and then go back, to counting, staring, meditating.