Read Online A Grain of Wheat by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o - Free Book Online

something. He held his tongue.
    ‘Anyway, I’m sorry,’ he suddenly said but in a voice edged with menace.
    ‘So you ought to be. What do you want here?’
    ‘Nothing. Just that Thompson wants to see you, that is all.’ Mwaura went out. Karanja’s mood changed from tension to anxiety. What did Thompson want? Perhaps he would say something about pay. He dusted his khaki overall, passed a comb through his mole-coloured hair and hurried along the corridor towards Thompson’s office. He knocked boldly at the door and entered.
    ‘What is it? Why do you people knock so loud?’
    ‘I thought, I thought you sent for me, sir,’ Karanja said in a thin voice, standing, as he always did before a white person, feet slightly parted, hands linked at the back, all in obsequious attention.
    ‘Oh, yes, yes. You know my house?’
    ‘Yes, sir.’
    ‘Run and tell Mrs Thompson that I’ll not be coming home for lunch. I am going – eh – wait a minute. I’ll give you a letter.’
    John Thompson had, over the years, developed a mania for writing letters. He scribbled notes to everyone. He rarely sent a messenger anywhere, be it to the Director, to the stationery office for paper, or to the workshop for a nail or two, without an accompanying note carefully laying down all the details. Even when it might be easier to see an officer personally he preferred to send a letter.
    Karanja took the note and lingered for a second or two hoping that Thompson would say something about the pay increment for which he had recently applied. The boss, however, resumed his blank stare at the mass of paper on his table.
    John Thompson and Mrs Dickinson used Karanja as their personal messenger. Karanja accepted their missions with resentful alacrity:weren’t there paid messengers at Githima? Mrs Dickinson was the Librarian. She was a young woman who was separated from her husband and she made no secret of living with her boyfriend. She was rarely in the office, but when she was in, men and women would flock to see her and laughter and high-pitched voices would pour out all day. An enthusiast for the East African Safari, she always took part, co-driving with her boyfriend, but she never once finished the course. Her missions were the ones Karanja hated most: often she sent him, for instance, to the African quarters to buy meat for her two dogs.
    Today as he rode his creaking bicycle he was once again full of plans: he would certainly complain to John Thompson about these trivial errands. No, what Karanja resented most was not the missions or their triviality, but the way they affected his standing among the other African workers. But on the whole Karanja would rather endure the humiliation than lose the good name he had built up for himself among the white people. He lived on that name and the power it brought him. At Githima, people believed that a complaint from him was enough to make a man lose his job. Karanja knew their fears. Often when men came into his office, he would suddenly cast them a cold eye, drop hints, or simply growl at them; in this way, he increased their fears and insecurity. But he also feared the men and alternated this fierce prose with servile friendliness.
    A neatly trimmed hedge of cider shrub surrounded the Thompsons’ bungalow. At the entrance, green creepers coiled on a wood stand, massed into an arch at the top and then fell to the hedge at the sides. The hedge enclosed gardens of flowers: flame lilies, morning glory, sunflowers, bougainvillea. However, it was the gardens of roses that stood out in colour above the others. Mrs Margery Thompson had cultivated red roses, white roses, pink roses – roses of all shades. Now she emerged from this garden of colour and came to the door. She was dressed in thin white trousers and a blouse that seemed suspended from her pointed breasts.
    ‘Come into the house,’ she idly said after reading the note from her husband. She was bored by staying in the house alone. Normally she