as his mysterious love had long dried up, but the passage of time had only served to renew the memory and enhance the mystique of Master’s Monument to Love.
And while Master’s house accumulated many stories over the years after its construction, it wasn’t actually the first building in the area. Babu Rajan Salim, the Indian briefly famous for fathering the child that Reverend Turnbull raised, was the first settler to arrive by the lake, although his modest rondavel was not as prominent a landmark. Not being visible is not the same as not being there, he often reminded his Indian workmates who said McDonald had built his edifice to spite them. Africans arrived later and built their huts on the other side of the lake to complete the triumvirate of hostilities that had originated on the seashores of Mombasa, hundreds of miles away, when the construction of the rail had begun. And as Reverend Turnbull liked to remind any who would listen, the sins of the fathers would be visited upon their sons a thousand times. Local elders, too, had their own proverb. They said, Majuto ni mjukuu, which meant children would pay for the sins of their forebearers.
And so it came to pass that a sixty-year grievance between two old men—one brown, Babu; and one white, Master—fell onto Babu Rajan Salim’s grandson Rajan. And in keeping with the tradition of the monument, it all started as a quest for love.
2
On that balmy night in 1963, Babu’s grandson Rajan was at the Jakaranda Hotel, where he often could be found, waiting to take the stage with his band. While he was making his way toward the bathroom, the lights went out. The outage elicited a mixture of exasperated shouts, yells, and groans from bar patrons who instantly recognized the range of possibilities that the cover of darkness provided: scoundrels would flee without settling their bills, lovers would snuggle closer, and villagers would get a chance to hurl rotten eggs at the wazungu.
The latter arsenal wasn’t as crude as it sounds; it was actually a downgrade from the stones that the revelers initially took to the establishment, because for decades racial segregation had been enforced at the Jakaranda Hotel, with a notice at its entrance proclaiming: Africans and Dogs Are Not Allowed. Actually, some Africans were allowed: the cleaners and gardeners and cooks and guards and those who ensured the wazungu patrons were comfortable. But dogs were strictly prohibited, for reasons few could remember, and which many found confounding given the centrality of dogs in wazungu’s lives. They were always talking or cuddling or walking with one. In another part of the colony, one mzungu had gunned down an African for stoning his dog when it attacked him.
So in June of that year, 1963, with the onset of independence, when word went out that all races were welcome in the previously whites-only Jakaranda Hotel, most Africans suspected dogs would be allowed in as well, and so carried stones as a precautionary measure.
When they did not find any dogs at the hotel, the revelers exchanged stones for eggs, because given their restive past with the wazungu, they thought it foolish to meet them empty-handed, especially when unhatched flamingo eggs ringed the lake that gave the township its name. The use of eggs, the locals further conceded, would confirm to the whites that they bore no hard feelings. So, an outing for drinks nearly always concluded with quite a few rotten eggs cracking on white faces.
Rajan stopped abruptly, torn between proceeding to the bathroom and groping his way to the safety of backstage. A moment or two passed before some illumination glowed in the distance. A candle beckoned in the walkway, stretching a tongue that licked the walls at every swoosh of the wind. Rajan made a fresh attempt for the washroom, making short, hesitant strides because he still couldn’t see properly and the pressure on his bladder had slowed his walk. He had only shuffled a few steps when he felt, rather than saw, someone approach. He judged her to be a woman—her silhouette was framed by the faint candlelight, with tongs of hair looping a halo over her head. As she neared, he picked up her sweet, spicy scent; it descended on him like the sweep of an ocean wave.
Rajan turned to the right to dodge her but her hip was there already; when he turned to the left, the other hip was there too, curved like a strung bow. Without uttering a word, the stranger planted one of the softest kisses he had ever received and then drifted into the darkness. Rajan stood, momentarily transfixed, the tap-tap of the stranger’s heels reverberating like bathwater trapped in the ear. There was a clicking sound above him before a burst of light flooded the hallway, synchronized with appreciative shouts from the revelers assembled at the Jakaranda.
Rajan licked his lips—there was the gentlest hint of lavender. He found her scent fascinating. Some of the African girls he had kissed dabbed their mouths with Bint el Sudan balm, whose sharp, sweet taste turned their lips into sets of ripe guavas. But those were the chosen few, the urbanites who had outgrown their rural roots to acquire city tastes. Most village girls smeared their faces and lips with the milking jelly, because until very recently, man and beast had lived in the same quarters, virtually sharing food and drink.
The Indian girls were not any better, though their use of Vaseline on their lips was a bit ahead of the times. Rajan had not kissed a white girl, so had no idea how they tasted, though it wasn’t for lack of trying. He simply had not come into kissing distance of any white girl, since everything in his life had been organized according to his color. He was a brown man in a black world which had been placed under white rule all his life. But now that uhuru was in the offing and barriers that had divided the races for generations were beginning to crumble, maybe this was his chance. People were testing the limits, exploring new horizons.
The lavender lips were outside his experience. The idea that he could have kissed a white woman in the dark brought Rajan to a screeching halt, and his bladder released a drop or two in his pants. He momentarily feared he had dripped something else, and he unsuccessfully tried to steer his thoughts in a different direction.
Rajan couldn’t quite remember if the stranger’s lips touched his lower or upper lip, or even whether he had opened his mouth properly to receive the kiss. Yet the taste in his mouth seemed everlasting. The burning sensation in his bladder subsided, and was replaced with a tingling of excitement. Although Rajan was only a few paces from the washroom, and could detect the acrid smell of the toilets in the air, he decided to scour the hotel and look for the kissing stranger.
Outside on the hotel grounds, Rajan slowed down when he reached an intersection. Wooden planks with sharpened edges formed a compass pointing to the different directions of the establishment. Black marks now blotted out the scrawl that had earlier announced, Whites Only. Rajan licked his lips again. The mysterious taste was still on his tongue, seemingly stronger than the last time he had checked.
He took the path that led to the clubhouse, or the farmhouse, as it was still known to McDonald and a generation of men who now spoke in croaky drawls from years of dust clogging their throats. Those men, skin birdlike with age, still came to the club and trembled as they pointed to where the farm once existed, unable to mouth the name because of the emotion it evoked. They remembered the peaceful days when their hands were steady enough to balance minuscule measuring cups to get the right dosage of medicine for a sneezing cow at night. Now such doses were being administered to humans.
Rajan cautiously stepped into the clubhouse and glanced over at a group of men sitting at the counter. Those men, once white, now looked pink, like pigs. They sat solidly in their seats, their thick necks holding heads that were once proud and erect, but were now drooping, defeated, hairy hands clasping tall glasses with frosted rims. There wasn’t a single woman in sight and the four men seemed downcast. The only things that appeared alive were the three rhino and two buffalo heads hoisted above the main bar counter; glassy eyes stared vacantly, as though frightened by the bleakness of their future.
Rajan hurried out and took the path leading to the annex, which through colonial times had been reserved for Indians—yet even then, only a few token Indians were
