Free The In-Between World of Vikram Lall by M. G. Vassanji

own dadaji had gone to witness. In what manner would the drumbeat, the dance, have brought back her youth? Did she ever yearn for the simplicity and open life of the grasslands? Or, like the wife she was expected to be, had she easily given up thinking of that past, relishing her privileged urban status and her wealth? Did she ever stop worshipping the God Ngai of her childhood, did the spirits of the trees and the forests and the grasslands haunt her? The sour note of that moment came when Saeed Molabux angrily stormed past his mother and father and drove off noisily in his car. He obviously didn’t think much of his Masai heritage. I would learn that Saeed had an elder brother who had disappeared, had in fact gone back to his maternal origins to become a Masai moran, and had that afternoon, following rehearsal at the football ground, brought his friends to perform for his mother.
    As the Masai dispersed, walking in the middle of the street in bunches, one of them, a somewhat middle-aged man clutching his bottle of Coca-Cola in one hand and his staff in the other, came toward our house. He wore sandals and had a very slight, almost a shade, of a beard on his chin, and he hada wry little smile on his face. He stood a few feet outside our door and a worried-looking Mother came out. The man bowed to her and asked after her family; she replied politely and anxiously. The man asked after my grandfather Anand Lal, to whom he sent good wishes, and then he strolled off, still with that wry and perhaps even thoughtful smile on his face. My parents, and my grandfather when he came the next time, could make nothing of this incident. But it has often made me wonder about Dadaji.
    We used to laugh at the Masai as kids. We thought of them as dark exotic savages left behind in the Stone Age, with their spears and gourds and half-naked bodies; when one saw them on a street they were to be avoided, for they smelled so. Yet we were also in awe of them, we did not make open fun of them, for they were warriors, they hunted lions with those spears, didn’t they. There was a belief among Indian traders that the Masai could not count; yes, they couldn’t, some of them, not in Swahili, which was alien, and not in the foreign units of feet and inches, years and months, shillings and cents. And it was not only the Indians who disparaged the Masai. Country bus drivers were known not to stop for them, or when they did, to move all the other passengers up front so these red warriors with their odour could sit at the back by themselves.
    Because of my dada and dadi’s close connection to the Molabuxes, I have often seen an affinity between myself and the Masai. I have even fantasized that Dada perhaps sought comfort with a woman of that people, perhaps she had his child and I have cousins in some of the manyattas of the plains. There is no proof anything like this ever happened—and my fantasy has partly to do with desperate need to belong to the land I was born in—but it’s not impossible either. The Indian railway workers were not known for their abstinence; reports of their British overseers, quoted in histories of the railway, attest amply to that. Perhaps that man who came over and spoke to my mother was a connection to the past; he has never been explained. But my grandfather among hisfamily was the picture of calm reserve and propriety, with no hint whatever that he had once been young and without care; the only time I saw that reserve crack was in the presence of his old friend Juma Molabux, when the two went on their walks together. In fact, it did not simply crack then, it burst apart like the shell of an overripe nut to reveal a softer, more nuanced inside.
    On Sunday at noon, when Dada and Dadi arrived for the weekly family get-together, a servant would sometimes come from the Molabuxes with a message for Dada, Would the muzee like to go for a walk later with the other muzee, Juma? Dada usually said yes, and so after the siesta, at