Dance of the Jakaranda by Peter Kimani: An Extract

Peter Kimani

PROLOGUE

I

n that year, the glowworms in the marshes were re­ placed by lightbulbs, villagers were roused out of their hamlets by a massive rumbling that many mistook for seismic shifts of the earth. These were not uncommon occurrences-locals experienced earthquakes across  the Rift Valley so often they even had an explanation for it. They said it was God taking a walk in His universe. They believed this without needing to see  it,  but on  that day the villagers saw the source of the noise as well. It was a monstrous, snakelike creature whose black head, erect like a cobra’s, pulled rusty brown boxes and slithered down the savanna, coughing spasmodically as it emitted blue­ black smoke. The villagers clasped their hands and wailed: Yu kiini/ Come and see the strips of iron that those strange men planted seasons earlier-which, left undisturbed, had grown into a monster gliding through the land.

The gigantic snake was a train and the year was 1901, an age when white men were still discovering the world for their  kings  and  queens  in faraway lands. So when the railway superintendent, or simply Master as he was known to many, peered out the window of his first-class cabin that misty morning, his mind did not register the dazzled villagers who dropped their hoes and took off, or led their herds away from the grazing fields in sheer terror of the strange creature cutting through their land. Neither did Master share in the tamasha booming from across the coaches where British,  Indian,  and African workers-all in their respective compartments-were celebrating the train’s maiden voyage. Instead, Master was absorbed by the 1andscape that 1ooked remarkably different from how he remembered it from his previous trip.

The mass of water appeared to have grown from a pond into a large lake. Maybe his eyes were playing tricks on him; or maybe after craw1ing through that very same land on either donkey or zebra, his lofty perch on the train now afforded him a very different view. To the left, a spring spewed hot water, the vapor casting clouds of woolly nothingness above it. One of these should be named for Sally, Master thought-the idea eliciting  a  melange  of  sore­ ness and softness  that  always came with  the  memories of his English wife, now estranged  for four years. She was the reason he was looking forward to returning to England. A ship was waiting at the port of Mombasa, some five hundred miles away, where the rail construc­tion had  begun. The  railroad  tracks ended  at  the  head of what he had named Port Victoria, memorializing the lake there with the same name, in honor of the Queen of England. So the rail that started by the shores of the Indian Ocean now cut through the hinterland to the shores of Lake Victoria. This was the mission that had brought him to the British East Africa Protectorate, and it had now been accomplished. He had been discharged with full honor, the ca­ ble from London said, echoing the military jargon that had regulated his life for twenty-three years. The cable also said a letter with full details of his release had been dis­ patched on SS Britannia, the vessel that would then deliver him home to England. Master suppressed a smile at the thought, and further subverted the thought by pretending to scratch his pate, whose receding hairline merged with

his forehead to form what looked like a small crater. “Happy are the pure at heart,” Reverend Richard Turn­ bull, sitting beside Master, said over the rattling sounds of the train: Kukuru-kakara, kukuru-kakara. They held different sections of the shiny pole that served as passenger support, as though they were experienced pole dancers, though their bums never touched.

Master nodded and smiled ruefully but said nothing, retreating to the cemetery of his mind where memories un­ furled. He wanted to absorb as much as he could from the land, a sudden burst of emotion clogging his throat. It was hard to imagine the space they were gliding through with such swiftness had been a blistering crawl that had taken them four years to complete. Four years in the wilderness. What had partly kept him going was the anticipation of the triumphant maiden ride. That moment had finally ar­rived, but Master felt somewhat  deflated,  the memories of his difficult past keeping him from fully enjoying the celebrations.

As if reading his mind, Reverend Turnbull bellowed, “Rejoice!” as the train approached a new township, which, like many other settlements they had encountered, seemed to have sprouted up out of  the steps of the train station. On either side of the compartment, Indian and African workers, traveling in second and third class, made music from anything they could lay their hands on, rattling bot­tles with spoons, clapping, ululating. The walls that sep­arated the different races were still up, just as they had been through the years of construction. The different ra­cial groups, Master had written in one of his dispatches to London, remained separate like the rail tracks. Yet the rail was the product of their collective efforts-of black and brown and white hands.

The African and Indian workers on the train danced jubilantly and Reverend Turnbull joined them, nodding his head and waving excitedly. But Master remained unmoved through the razzmatazz. Still unable to savor the moment, he was still distracted, lost in his thoughts. He found it strange that he was starting to miss the land before even leaving it. He had anticipated this moment for four years, but now that it had come, the longing that he’d harbored fizzled into knots of anxiety-not just about the future and Sally’s place in his scheme of things, but also about the present that would soon become the past.

Trying to rid himself of his anxiety, Master glanced outside. “That’s where we left that Indian bastard,” he said to Reverend Turnbull,  his forefinger  arching into a crooked arrow that pointed to a spot where rows of mud-and-wattle rondavels stood. The walls were plas­tered with white clay and the shingles on the roofs were aligned neatly, like rows of com.

“The runaway father?”

“Yes, the £-the bastard,” Master replied, checking himself just in time before cursing in front of a man of God. “We have all come short of the glory of God,” Rever­end Turnbull said quietly, glancing outside, the rondavels almost out of sight. “I’m glad I took the baby into my care.”

“Was our suspicion borne out?” “What suspicion?”

“That it was his child?”

Reverend Turnbull shook his head quietly.

Master turned to face him. “What does that mean?”

“No.”

“What do you mean?” “Nothing.”

“Why?”

“That’s a secret only known to the child’s mother.” Master opened his mouth, then sighed and shrugged.

“Was the child Indian or Caucasian?” “What’s the difference?”

“Hair? Nose? I thought it was pretty obvious … ” “Nothing in life is that obvious.”

“So, are you confirming the child was Indian or Cau- casian?”

“What does it matter?” “It does.”

“Why?”

Master opened his mouth, flashed a wan smile. “Be­ cause … ”

“What’s done is done,” Reverend Turnbull said. “I’m now the girl’s father. I will raise her as my own.”

Master opened his mouth again but kept quiet. He had burdened the man of God with enough secrets.

Both men returned to gazing out the window. Their arms were tangled around the shiny pole and their faces nearly touched as they craned their necks to peek outside­ their bums still as far from each other as possible-stretched out at awkward angles so that they resembled ducks. The lake was almost out of view, only a sliver of light visible where it stood, and the clouds above the hot water spring appeared to have shifted.

“Reverend,” Master said, facing him, “I know your Bi­ble says heaven is somewhere else, but I think it must be close by.”

Reverend Turnbull smiled, loosened his collar, and re­sponded, “I’m afraid so.”

“Why are you afraid?”

“Because God shouldn’t live so close to heathens.”

 

HOUSE OF MUSIC

1

 

G

od’s Country was how Reverend Turnbull described the land in 1893 when he wrote his first pastoral let- ter to the mother church in England. He wrote about the marvels that he had witnessed during his travels— from the gentleness of the sands on the pristine coastal beaches, to the stunning lakes that seemingly appeared out of nowhere in the middle of forests, to the dramatic plunge of what European geographers had named the Rift Valley.

Although the natives do not know God, the perfection of their land raises serious doubts as to how this could have been created by heathen deities, Reverend Turnbull confided in his letters. What he failed to elaborate on was whether or not it was his mere presence that elevated the heathen land to God’s dominion­ but then again, it was pointless to state the obvious. In that age, God and the white man were one and the same; in fact, even the locals had an expression for it: Muthungu na Ngai no undu umwe.God’s Country was how Reverend Turnbull described the land in 1893 when he wrote his first pastoral let­ter to the mother church in England. He wrote about the marvels that he had witnessed  during his travels­ &om the gentleness of the sands on the pristine coastal beaches, to the stunning lakes that seemingly appeared out of nowhere in the middle of forests, to the dramatic plunge of what European geographers had named the Rift Valley.

When Reverend Turnbull started preaching in Nakuru, he liked to refer to his mission as God-ordained, for he was not destined  to be there in the first  place. He used the locals’ idiom of the train as a snake to recall the sto­ry of Jonah, God’s servant who had  defied  His call only to be swallowed by a whale and spat out in the city of Nineveh, where he was meant to be in the first place to spread the word of God. Reverend Turnbull told his congregations that Nakuru was his Nineveh, where he had emerged from the belly of the iron snake.

The Nineveh narrative was a white lie. Reverend Turn­ bull simply appropriated a line that Master had used to describe the dramatic events that followed upon reaching Mombasa to commence his return trip to England. The letter of Master’s discharge from the colonial service was there all right, but it contained an unexpected gift. He had lobbied heavily for a knighthood for his service to the em­ pire, and the letter from London indicated his bosses had acquiesced to his request and had granted him a title. But when the letter elaborated upon the details of his title, he realized his was a different kind altogether: it was a title deed to a parcel of land of his choice, anywhere in the col­ ony. The only condition was that the portion of land had to lie between two natural boundaries for easy demarcation.

Master instantly recognized this as a bureaucratic slip that would be corrected in due time. But since he was al­ ready attached to the land, he saw it as his chance to kill two birds with one stone; he would accept the land, but this would not stop him from pushing for knighthood. He remembered the breathtaking hot water spring and the lake in the Rift Valley, and he decided that would be the land he would claim. Reverend Turnbull offered to accom­pany him on the trip back to the valley.

“This is your road to Damascus,” Reverend Turnbull intoned, to which Master replied, “Feels more like that Nineveh fellow, reverend.”

”Jonah?”

“Yes, Jonah must be his name. Here I am in the belly of what locals call the snake, destined for England, but fate conspires to return me to the African wilds.”

Reverend Turnbull smiled and touched his collar, and said, “I hear you,” which was his way of saying he had

deferred participating in the conversation because he was distracted by a pressing thought. He was thinking Nineveh sounded both profound and spiritual. He committed it to memory for future use.

“You can build Sally a house,” Reverend Turnbull said to Master when they arrived in Nakuru. “A castle between the spring and the lake.”

Master thought that would be blasphemous but he did not voice his concern-building a house between two mar­vels of nature was like challenging God’s creation.

It was the talk about the Indian who got away, the one who Master was reticent about, the one whose child Rev­erend Turnbull was raising, that helped clarify things.

“God says we should love our enemies, and He has brought you close to the Indian to test your faith,” Rev­erend Turnbull said, adding immediately : “Build Sally a monument to love like that beautiful building in India … ” “The Taj Mahal,” Master said triumphantly, as though

the sheer intensity of feeling would somehow will such a majestic building into existence.

“And those Indian workers must know how to build such monuments.”

“Technically, they are still under my command,” Mas­ter reminded.

“Then command them to action!”

The legend about the house that Master built is that the construction went on for so long that babies born during that time were toddlers when the work was completed. Others said construction went on around the clock, with shimmering lightbulbs suspended off the trees to illumi­nate the workers’ paths at night. Yet other villagers claimed they slept one night and woke up the following morning to find the towering structure sneering down upon them.

But the reason Master became a legend in his own life­ time was because of what happened with the house. Soon after its completion, the windows of the Monument to Love were shuttered so that no light streamed in as Master mourned and villagers whispered of the loss of his myste­rious love, who had dropped him like a piece of hot ugali. Some villagers disputed this, saying it was impossible for one to hide that long, burrowed like  a  huko-a  rodent­ and devised ways to test if anybody was home. A typical test entailed picking wild eggs  from  the lake  that gave the township its name, letting them cook  in  the hot wa­ter spring, and then hurling them at the wooden shutters. Cooked eggs, the villagers said, bounced off better than raw ones, their intention being not to defile the building but to rouse the aggrieved Master-ngombo ya wendo, or the love slave, as they nicknamed him-from his slumber. No­ body appeared, so they concluded that Master was no more. Then one day, as a gentle sun rose in the east, the shut­ters were flung aside, the windows slid open, and throaty shouts were heard to mark the reopening. Master had overcome his grief, but only after issuing a decree of a most intriguing nature: he posted notices around the property warning that females caught trespassing on the land would be shot on sight. He and women were done, kabisa. But since very few locals could read at all, and those who did were protective of the white man, it was hard to tell which aspects of Master’s life and the house that he built were fact and which were fiction.

What happened for a fact is that Master turned his castle into a farmhouse and brought in dairy animals. He patrolled the large expanse on horseback watching his an­imals graze. This was a downgrade, as Master had spent

years watching over humans at work and, like Jesus, rode a mule. The mule was preceded by a zebra, whose mouth was muzzled to ensure it did not bite Master. The dairy animals, beautiful in their brown, white, and black skins, grazed with white pelicans perched on their backs who watched as they mowed grass. Imagine an uninterrupted stillness of bovine bliss, the low hum of munching animals enhanced by whistling thorns in the distance. The stillness is broken by the mufiled sound of a cow scratching where a tick has attached itself, but even that seems to be part of the natural ambiance. A pelican in soundless flight from the muscle twitch of its host, before relanding, the soft drops of dung at calculated intervals opening a floodgate of urine.

An electric fence surrounded the farm, dividing the animal kingdom. Wild animals that often streamed   to the nearby watering hole would be jolted to their senses whenever they touched the fence, and most learned to keep their distance. By dusk, if the dairy animals had not been milked, their udders would swell and the drip-drop of milk from their teats would grow into a steady trickle, soaking the black-cotton soil to evoke notions of that an­ cient land where milk and honey flowed.

The wild animals watched the milky spectacle but none dared to touch the fluid, even when it formed a rivulet and coursed beyond the fence. They had the sense to stick to the pond water that they knew. A deer would mount an­ other after quenching its thirst, which appeared to trigger other thirsts, while the hyena, convinced that Master’s arm would fall from its rapid swings, stalked him on the other side of the fence, giggling at the prospect of a meal that never materialized. The giraffes would trot through the brown savanna, and the zebras, with their black-white zig·zags, brayed for Master’s attention, yearning to cross the line and leave the wilderness for his domestic dominion.

But that was before a plague wiped out the entire dairy herd yet affiicted none of the wild animals; they appeared to thrive through that period of strife.

The farmhouse was turned into a private club where white men in wide-brimmed black hats and knee-high boots sat in high-backed  seats and waited, with guns at the ready, for wildlife streaming to the watering hole. They seemed to begrudge the wild animals for the plague that scuttled the Pipe Dream, as Master had called his grandi­ose plan  to lay pipes across the country and supply milk in place of water. There would  be plenty of  milk for all to drink, Master had declared; even natives would have enough to drink and wash their dark skin if they so desired­ it might just whiten them.

After the plague, men and, increasingly, women arrived to the shooting range and placed bets. With the carousing that went with the shooting, seldom were hands steady enough to make a proper shot, especially if it might inter­ rupt the mating animals. As if on cue, the humans would try similar antics, reaffirming that years under the sun had not wiped out their primal instincts. The shooting range gained a whole new meaning.

Master’s real name was Ian Edward McDonald, but there was nothing real about his identity. He could as well have been Wasike or Wanyande or Wainaina, as he fluently spoke the local languages. But since he privately enjoyed the sobriquet Master, he neither protested nor affirmed its usage. And there was nothing unusual about his name, for even the colony that he had come to serve for God and country had no solid name. It was called the British East Africa Protectorate before it was christened the Kenia col­ ony. In June of 1963-six decades after the construction of the Monument to Love-the country would gain yet another name: Kenya. And the house that McDonald built out of love would be conferred with yet a new name-the Jakaranda Hotel-immortalizing the  jacaranda trees  he had planted for his love, Sally. By then the trees had long wilted, just as his mysterious love had long dried up, but the passage of time had only served to renew the memory and enhance the mystique of Master’s Monument to Love. And   while   Master’s  house  accumulated   many  sto­ ries over the years after its construction, it wasn’t  actu­ ally the first building in the area. Babu Rajan Salim, the Indian briefly famous for fathering the child that Rever­ end Turnbull raised, was the first settler to arrive by the lake, although his modest rondavel was not as prominent a landmark. Not being visible is not the same as not be­ ing there, he often reminded his lndian workmates who said McDonald had built his edifice to spite them. Afri­ cans arrived later and  built  their  huts on  the other side of the lake to complete the triumvirate of hostilities that had originated on the seashores of Mombasa, hundreds of miles away, when the construction of the rail had begun. And as Reverend Turnbull liked to remind any who would listen, the sins of the fathers would be visited upon their sons a thousand times. Local elders, too, had their own proverb. They said, Majuto ni mjukuu, which meant children would pay for the sins of their forebearers.

And so it came to pass that a sixty year grievance be­ tween two old men-one brown, Babu; and one white, Master-fell onto Babu Rajan Salim’s grandson  Rajan. And in keeping with the tradition of the monument, it all started as a quest for love.

*******

Notes
-Dance of the Jakaranda by Peter Kimani is published in the US by Akashic Books and in the UK by Telegram Books (2018)
-Check it out at: https://saqibooks.com/books/telegram/dance-jakaranda/ . 

Peter Kimani is an award-winning Kenyan novelist. He was one of three international poets to compose and present a poem for National Public Radio to mark Barack Obama’s inauguration in 2009. A prominent journalist on Kenya’s national news circuit, Kimani’s work has also appeared in The Guardian, New African and Sky News. He teaches journalism at the Aga Khan University’s Graduate School of Media and Communications in Nairobi, and is presently the Visiting Writer at Amherst College in the United States. Kimani was awarded the Jomo Kenyatta Prize for literature, Kenya’s highest literary honour, in 2011. Dance of the Jakaranda was longlisted for The People’s Book Prize and The Big Book Prize in 2018.