to another, teasing revelers that the skin drums were not taut enough and needed heating. He would make as though to head toward the butchery, but fans would wave him away, hurling coins onto the drum that Chege accepted with comic deference. It someone offered a note, especially if the giver was a woman, he would direct them to deposit it into the waistband of his pants, his bare chest glistening with sweat.
* * *
Rajan was tongue-tied when he was finally alone with Mariam backstage at the end of the concert.
“Sorry for the late introduction,” Mariam said, finally introducing herself properly. When Rajan stated his name, she smiled sweetly. “Who doesn’t know you . . . ?” she breezed.
Rajan simply stared back, dazzled by the beauty that seemed to radiate out of her every pore. Her face glowed at her every turn, and her circular, silvery earrings danced, oscillating in the darkened space. She was in high heels, and Rajan realized to his horror that she was taller than he. She was so beautiful, he couldn’t imagine her doing any of the ordinary things ordinary folks did, like having a bowel movement. He couldn’t imagine such ugliness from her gorgeous form.
“You are suddenly very quiet,” Mariam whispered.
He wanted to shut his eyes and be serenaded by her cooing voice. His mind was racing through the past few months, when the mere thought of Mariam diminished his hunger pangs and set off such an acute desperation that he feared he was losing his mind. He remembered the many sleepless nights he had agonized about her, and now here she was, in a poorly lit space close to their original point of collision, looking even more lovely than he remembered her. The memory of the kiss resurged with such power that Rajan staggered toward Mariam and pulled her toward him.
“Hey, hey, pole pole,” she protested. “Don’t jump on me as though I’m a stolen bicycle.”
Rajan laughed. “You just can’t imagine how long I have waited for this moment . . .”
“I thought we barely met an hour ago,” Mariam replied.
Rajan stopped himself before blurting about their first kiss in the dark and how it had affected him. He needed to kiss the girl again to confirm she was the one.
“I want to go home,” Mariam said.
“You want me to take you home?”
“That’d be nice,” she smiled.
“Where do you live?”
“Where do you live?”
“You mean my home?”
“Where else do you call home?”
“I am home right now!”
“Stop pulling my leg.”
“I wish I could pull your leg!” Rajan smiled even as a knot of panic congealed in his stomach. Home meant the house of his grandparents, Babu and Fatima. This girl wasn’t possibly thinking he’d take her there on their first night out.
Rajan was suddenly awash with shame. At twenty-one, he still had not moved out, and possibly wouldn’t ever leave home because he was a Punjabi boy. He was bound to live with his grandparents his entire life. He envied his bandmates who all had their private spaces outside the family homes. Era had his small dwelling that was detached from his mother’s house. It wasn’t much, just a tin shack—ten by ten feet, meat paper on the walls, a single bed, and an earthen floor. But Era derived great prestige when he told the other band members: “I have to rush home, I got a bird in the cage . . .”
Rajan could never dream of saying such a thing. The backstage operations at the Jakaranda served to minimize such complications.
He had never taken any girl home to his grandparents, but then again, none had ever expressed such a desire. They seemed content to consummate their lusts backstage. But this was no ordinary girl; he had searched for her for nine months and she wanted to be handled pole pole. She was not a stolen bicycle.
* * *
That night, Rajan and Mariam ended up at Era’s tin shack on the fringes of Lake Nakuru near the kei apple trees and fence that separated Indian from African quarters. The white quarters towered above, close to where McDonald had built his house, the layout of the township forming an unstable triangle, each race on a far end of the lake.
It was at that hedge separating the Indian and African quarters that Era had first encountered Rajan fifteen years earlier. Era was nine; Rajan was six—his small head appearing one day just above the hedge that stood between his family’s house and Era’s.
Era’s principle memory of that first encounter was how Rajan resembled the portrait of Jesus that adorned their living room—only the crown of thorns was not standing on Rajan’s head, it hung around his neck where the hedge reached.
“Maze, umeona mpira?” Rajan’s had asked during that first encounter, his tender voice trilling like a flute.
“Eeeeeehhh?” Era shouted.
“Our cricket ball.”
“Where is it?”
“It just rolled under the fence,” the boy with the thorny garland said. “Have you seen it?”
Era pretended to be looking, although the tiny hard ball was under his heel. “Sioni!” he said in a voice that declared the search over.
“Sawa!” the other boy replied with resignation, and walked away.
Era had hoarded eighteen balls by the time his mother discovered them: tennis balls, cricket balls, and footballs. “I’m not rearing a thief in this house!” she said as she administered a beating over the transgression. “Return them where you got them or else . . .”
Era’s mother left her unspecified threat hanging, but he had a pretty good idea of what would follow. He was the oldest and the only male of her four children, and his mother was determined to make him a good example to his younger siblings. Their father was in a colonial detention, where thousands were being held.
“We may be poor, but we are not thieves,” Era’s mother reminded him. He walked heavily to the fence and hurled the balls over, tears rolling down his face.
The noise of the returning balls drew Rajan back to the fence. He got a glimpse of Era as he disappeared into their mud house and noticed that the older boy had no shoes.
Rajan went back inside and picked out a pair of shoes that he had outgrown and returned to the fence. “Maze! Maze! Maaaaaaaaaazeeeeeeeeeee!” His voice floated in the air.
Era stayed away. Rajan returned to the fence several times that day. He wanted to reciprocate the return of the balls that he and his cousins had been searching for for months, so he decided to dispatch his gift that evening.
The shoes landed on the tin roof where Era’s household was waiting to cook a meal on the open fire. Even from a child’s hurl, the shoes arrived with reasonable force, sending coils of soot tumbling off the roof into the cooking pot.
Initially, Era’s mother did not know what to make of the whole episode. She armed herself with a
