Free The Book of Secrets by M.G. Vassanji Page A

them in Mombasa when he first arrived, and while planning this visit he had asked if they could arrange to have him met, this being his only imposition on them. For the two ladies to come to meet him, instead of sending a junior official or a store clerk, was a kindness greater than he expected.
    This was the capital of the land, where the rulers lived, he told himself. From here the Governor and the Secretariat sent directives to the Provincial Commissioner in Mombasa, who directed Corbin’s own master, the DC in Voi. This was the “up there,” or “God’s-eye view,” in contrast to the “down here” or “worm’s-eye view” of the lowly ADCS . There were hand-drawn hamali cartson the road, bullock carts with turbaned drivers coaxing their charges in Indian vernacular, rickshaws with tinkling bells, their African drivers calling out for passengers or right of way. There were a few motorcars.
    Edwina’s husband, Jack Unsworth, was a civil engineer who had stayed on, after completion of the railway, and was now part-owner of Unsworth and Mason, importers of machinery parts. Anne was the youngest daughter of one Edwina’s sisters. She had come on holiday and decided to stay.
    The Unsworths lived in a bungalow on a two-acre plot. Like so many of the newer buildings, it had the cold grey look of the stone now being quarried in the area. Solid and squat, respectable yet dreary-looking, especially on the cold misty mornings of Nairobi. There were stone steps descending to the driveway under the shade of a large tree, where the Ford was parked; an askari in khaki uniform and a red fez but no shoes kept watch from the top of the steps.
    After a game of tennis, a sundowner, a rubber or two of bridge, the servants pampering you with morning tea, the smell of frying eggs and bacon, the clink of china and crystal, a late round of brandy or port, the soft bed immaculately prepared by the trained servants … after all this the African night seemed as tame as it could be made. And you could eliminate it with the flick of a switch. Yet, he thought, there seemed a fraudulence in this little England in Africa — fraudulence in the sense of a conjuring trick — and fragility. He was told, however, that with persistence it could all be made real, like America. If only there could be self-government. Ten years ago this was all bush, dry grass. The Masai and Kikuyu walked around half-naked then. Now they would take loose hand-me-down tweeds if they could.
    Nairobi, even white Nairobi, was not a homogeneous society. Some wit, commenting on the scandals for which it became known, called it a “square” society. At one corner stood Mrs. Hollis, brothel-keeper and fortune-teller, who could also behired to preside over seances. Her Syrian girls had been put on the train, and Nairobi was bracing itself for the Japanese girls due to arrive before Race Week. At another corner were her customers, the low-level railway officials, salesmen, drifters, out-of-work hunters and scouts. On the third point of the social square were the few aristocrats and their fawning toadies, playing public-school pranks at the Norfolk. Then there were the high officials like Ainsworth and Whitehouse, responsible for much of the development of Nairobi, and respectable businessmen like Unsworth.
    With Anne, who wrote the occasional witty column on colonial life called “Our Way” for the
Herald
, Corbin visited some court hearings.
    4 April, 1914
    … A lord of the realm who shot a servant for serving bad cream with dumplings. A Jesuit priest who confiscated the possessions of his converts in the name of the church and was contesting them in earnest. A farmer who had a servant flogged fifty times, until senseless, for eating the kitchen rice and denying it afterwards; another who shackled his workers by their pierced earlobes, causing infection and death in one.… Two brothers, Londoners, who desperately sought for the graves of their parents while the land