Free Who Will Catch Us As We Fall by Iman Verjee Page A

full of their belongings. They converged at the main gate, ready to walk home or take matatus together, speaking in rapid, fading tones. Housewives leaned out of doorways to call for their children, releasing cooking smells so that soon the entire compound was alive in the stink of Indian curry staples: cumin, fried red onions and garlic.
    To rid himself of the stench, Raj lit another Embassy Light. He was disappointed at the ending of the game outside. It pleased him to watch the children playing, their unrestrained, boisterous nature that knew how to exist only in extremes. When he had been his daughter’s age, all he had known was frenzied joy or the powerful crush of sorrow – anger that moved him to tears or the total stillness of an untroubled mind. There had been no room for a middle ground, no space for those diluted, in-between emotions which, as an adult, he had begun to settle for. Mock feelings ,he called them, because they weren’t real, only poor imitations of something true. Under the guise of maturity he had grown shallow and bland, but when he watched his daughter play – saw the permanent crease of irritation across her forehead or heard the tantrum-stamp of her shoes – it stirred within him a sweet recollection, a longing for a simpler time.
    He turned from the window and to the small picture that hung on the right wall, swallowed by the busy, floral wallpaper.
    â€˜You never lost that, did you?’ Raj said to Pio Gama Pinto.
    The modest Goan man stared back at him with that infamous, wide smile and 1950s bushy haircut, his essence perfectly captured in the sepia-toned newspaper clipping.
    When Raj had first come across that photo, he had been sixteen and restless. Two years after independence, the country was awash in so many possibilities that one went hunting for a dream the way they did a lion on safari – as mad and hungry men, greedy for a purpose. He had been rifling through the newspaper in the back room of a family friend’s duka and had paused at the image of a young Asian man hoisted upon the shoulders of his cheering black compatriots; had discovered something within its frozen celebration – a lingering hope that he had struggled to catch hold of before the demanding shop owner barged through the door.
    â€˜What are you doing in my things?’
    â€˜Who is this?’ Raj ignored the man’s annoyance and held up the photo.
    â€˜ Baap-re-baap! ’ The owner smacked his forehead in exclamation. ‘What rock have you been living under, boy? That’s Pio. Pee-O . Doesn’t your father teach you anything?’
    â€˜What does he do?’ His curiosity made him unashamed of his ignorance.
    â€˜He’s a freedom fighter – helped ship all those dandy-looking white fellows back to Eng- laand .’
    That evening, Raj sneaked the picture out of the man’s storage room, folded lovingly in the breast pocket of his shirt. He spent the night locked up in his room, searching within the photograph for an answer to a need he could not identify. There was an arresting air to the man, dressed in a button-down sweater vest and striped tie, his arms thrown out in modest victory. Pio was the only one looking directly into the camera; the faces of the men upon whose shoulders he sat were all upturned.
    The following week, Raj hungrily snatched up any information he could gather about the man, whether it was from the old newspapers his mother kept for cleaning and sorting rice, from his father or uncle or any other adult he managed to corner – and discovered that what the old shopkeeper had told him was true. Raj had accidentally stumbled upon one of Kenya’s first freedom fighters, and an Indian one at that.
    â€˜Brave man,’ Raj’s uncle, Dilip, informed him. ‘He returned from India to become involved in the local movement here, even supplied them with weapons. And in the middle of the night, he would put up