LITMIR.BIZ

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it was implausible that they were all together. Yet, the horse’s presence with Sally’s luggage showed she had met his servants. So where were they?

      As guests continued to stream in and greet old friends, McDonald quickly organized a search party that tracked down all the servants within the hour. Recalling the abduction of some British engineers four years earlier, McDonald was fearful this could develop into another crisis, so he had ordered the servants to be restrained from escaping, using any means necessary—a coded message for what military men called “appropriate force.” From the servants’ cuts, bruises, and bleeding noses, it was evident that those unleashed on them had applied McDonald’s instructions to the letter. Some inebriated guests joined in the flogging as the four men were delivered to McDonald’s house, arms tied behind their backs and roped together so that if one fell, the others followed suit.

      It was during this commotion that Sally stole into the compound, having spent the hour picking flowers while following the horse’s trail. She was actually tickled by the whole episode and thought no further about what may have prompted the servants’ flight. She instantly recognized the man who had been holding her placard. He had a wound under his left eye, and he looked pleadingly at her when she arrived. Sally thought of her naked truth, as she called her windy exposure. It was nature’s way of reminding her of her vulnerability, much the same way a hurricane sweeps onto the shores to return all the waste the humans have deposited in the sea for ages. Or a shoe that filters to the surface long after its owner is drowned. Sally thought she was being reminded of her own ordinariness, her near-nakedness reminding her of a birth into this new world, bearing nothing but her skin.

      Sally did not speak a word nor venture beyond the porch; she simply turned around and went back the way she had come, a shudder in her chest, a quiver on the lip, as memories of her college days flooded in. She had enrolled at the University of London to study history and, out of curiosity, took a minor in African history. A huge chunk of the study was dedicated to the transatlantic slave trade. Sally had nightmares reading about the inhumane treatment the slaves were subjected to on those trips. But what broke her heart was encountering her great-grandfather in the list of merchants who transported African slaves through Bristol to the new lands. How could a man related to her have been party to such injustice?

      Sally staged a solo protest against slavery by making amends to the next black man she encountered—a bearded student she had seen in the library a few times. He was from Ghana, shy, somewhat awkward. She invited him for a drink, gave her room number, and fled before he found his voice. He arrived as agreed and knocked timidly. Before the man could say Asantehene, Sally smothered him with kisses and undressed him, and it could have been misconstrued as rape had the young man not relaxed and grinned.

      Sally’s one-woman protest did not end there; her tryst with the South African gardener was prompted by the same instinct: an unspoken guilt over past mistreatment of blacks through slavery and her patriarch’s complicity in it. After reading Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness days after its publication in 1899, her estrangement from white privilege was complete. How she rationalized that it was right or moral to enjoy the trappings of comfort acquired through slave labor—the backbone of her family wealth—nobody knows. It may well have been what prompts a soldier to lay down his life for country, even when the cause that takes him to the front line is fraudulent; or for those inclined toward the divine scriptures, it is the same principle that leads a righteous man to lay down his life for sinners. Sally’s salacious behavior made her neither profligate nor righteous—her actions may have been an affront to the laws of the land but one could hardly consider them divine. Yet, it was difficult to divorce the simple privilege that her past afforded her, which freed her from the rigors of earning a living to fornicate at will. That fact of her life had been secured decades earlier, so her communion with black males, whether students in London or gardeners in South Africa, could only be seen as returning a favor of sorts—thanking the black forebears who had made possible her comfortable future.

      So when Sally caught a glimpse of McDonald’s brutalized servants, it brought back that resentment. She walked away in silence.

      She may not have spoken a word, but many words were spoken about her, especially after the assembled guests were told by a deflated and defeated McDonald that the guest of honor was unlikely to grace the celebrations due to some unexpected developments. He had been unable to extract any information from the servants, beyond the wind mishap and their flight from the station. But guests who had had a little too much to drink shouted that McDonald was lying because some had reported sighting a mysterious guest arrive and depart almost immediately. And since no one in the colony had met her previously, they all remarked on her skin, which was whiter than anyone they’d seen, her springy and dignified gait, as well as her manner of clothing, which was heavier than the Nakuru weather required.

      It was Sally’s letter from England a month later that finally broke McDonald’s heart, resulting in a depression during which he locked himself up and mourned his loss. By then, McDonald had confirmed that Sally had arrived on the coast as scheduled and departed soon after, but he had no way of verifying whether or not she had visited his house:

       I am distraught to write this letter, the last to you from me. Your cruelty toward me and fellow men, which I have borne and witnessed over the years, is the ground on which I’m filing for divorce. Yours is the Heart of Darkness.

       Sally

      Had locals been privy to this missive, they would have concluded that Sally was a witch, able to cast a spell and unleash a spirit. For the house that McDonald built soon turned into a veritable heart of darkness, with the windows shuttered for years and signs warning women to keep off the premises posted all over the property. Only male servants were allowed in the compound. They, too, were ordered to wear black uniforms because their master was mourning, although he did not specify his loss. Some overzealous workers chose to wear sackcloth as a mark of their loyalty, and those who learned about the secret code on the posters also abstained from touching their wives in solidarity with their master.

      And when the doors and the windows to the house were finally opened, the villagers were surprised to see cows rearing their big heads in the doorway. That’s when the edifice was converted into a farmhouse that later gave way to the segregated social establishment, which further gave way to the multicultural outfit named the Jakaranda, the letter k for Kenya replacing the c in the jacaranda that McDonald said sounded “colonial.”

      Now, on the cusp of the new republic and a new dawn for its multicolored citizens, the Jakaranda was about to acquire a new identity, yet again.

       4

      History has strange ways of announcing itself to the present, whether conceived in comforting darkness or blinding light. It can manifest with the gentleness of a bean cracking out of its pod, making music in its fall. Even when such seed falls into fertile soil, it still wriggles from the tug of the earth, stretching a green hand for uplift. The seed of wonderment that germinated from the flicker of a kiss in that darkened night had, in a few months, grown by leaps and bounds. And so it came to pass that the ancient history that Babu had dodged for two generations suddenly arrived at his doorstep, unfurling with the slow, deliberate motions of a burning rope, embers crawling from knot to knot. What was perplexing was the precision of the revelations: like the biblical plague that reached every household that did not bear a lintel, the dregs from Babu’s past rose to the fore, sliding beneath his locked door to sweep him off his feet.

      But that’s rushing the story, burying the inimitable drama that unfurled the night Mariam made her grand return to the Jakaranda and reordered the lives of those who she touched—not just with her already famously flavored tongue, but with words rolled off the selfsame organ. So let’s hold it right there and absorb the moment when, lured by the smell of sweet, spicy perfume, Rajan descended the dais and stretched a hand, like a leaf dying for light after months in darkness. He stretched a hand toward the woman he suspected was the kissing stranger, and on whom he seemed utterly dependent for survival.

      The young lass sat unmoved. She obviously did not understand the dance etiquette at the

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