Read Online The In-Between World of Vikram Lall by M. G. Vassanji - Free Book Online Page A

would undo one of the locks. Then, purposefully he went to his and Mother’s bedroom and brought out his revolver, a rather large and ugly, dull black thing inside a brown holster, and a small cardboard box of ammunition. He also had with him a yellow piece of paper, a pamphlet on which he placed the gun and ammo on the dining table. He would pick up the gun and,facing away from us all, hold it up in his hand. Then he would walk to the door, open it wide into the dark night. He would take a step outside.
    Hé Rabba! Mother would exclaim, holding us close to her. Don’t shoot into someone’s house!
    I won’t, I’m aiming to the side. I have to check it, na…
    Don’t shoot at anybody!
    As if I would. And who would be out at this time? I’m aiming high, anyway.
    We would hear a loud report that went tearing into the silence of the night, and then another one, even as the first one still echoed somewhere far away. He would come in, blowing the smoke off the gun, catching our frightened eyes and looking a little sheepish. The gun has to be checked, you see, he would explain, placing it on the table, on the yellow pamphlet. With the weapon now inert in front of us, Deepa and I taking sneaky, quick reaches to feel its grey metallic heft, Mother brought glasses of milk for us all.
    We all knew the pamphlet well, another government warning. This one had a drawing of a devilish black man with large eyes and open mouth, leaping out of the yellow page, under the caption: The Mau Mau want your gun! There were instructions on safeguarding the weapon. Do not leave it in the car when you step out for shopping, one of them said. Papa always kept it locked in the drawer of his bedside table and took it out, it seemed, only for this practice ritual.
    Muzee, why do the Mau Mau kill little children? I once asked Mwangi.
    I don’t know why I asked him this. Perhaps because he had a gravity about him, and an honesty, and he was an African and a Kikuyu.
    They are evil and mad, those who kill children, he told me firmly.
    I have never understood the full implication of those words. Mwangi often confounded me.

    There is a nip in the night air outside, a reminder that autumn waits around the corner. If you look hard during the day, you might even spot a telltale traitor yellow leaf among the green foliage. The night is moonless, thickly dark, rendered more so by the shadows of the trees and hedges; the stars above, though, look cheerful as diamonds, if I permit myself a nursery-rhyme image. The luminous hour-marks of my watch shine no less brightly. It is close to eleven. I step back inside this lakeside house, a hallmark of lonely luxury—and so extremely desolate compared with the bustling, peopled household of my childhood—to await Deepa’s phone call. In the sunken living room, Joseph watches television, with a bag of chips and a can of soda. Before he arrived I wisely had a satellite dish installed. He likes to watch soccer—football, we used to call it—and a Kenyan player recently drafted into one of the English teams thrills him no end. Perhaps here, in the first world, he can be corrupted away from his brash and dangerous idealism, I tell myself—but then hard on the heels of that thought comes the quick and cynical reminder: corruption has been my recent forte, hasn’t it.
    The hour turns and the phone rings. Joseph looks up as I pick it up at the kitchen table. Deepa wants to know how the two of us are getting along here, in our Canadian retreat. We are doing fine, I reply, and how is she? Her son Shyam, she tells me, might shift to Washington, DC—he is a resident epidemiologist in Rochester—and she will then have to decide what to do. Her worry, though, is Joseph.
    Vikram?
    Yes.
    Look after him, please, Bhaiya.
    He’s all right. Don’t worry.
    Keep talking to him. Make him understand that his education is the only important thing, it is not to be sacrificed for anything silly like politics—

    I’ll try, Deepa. I