ten elders!”
And so, this type of dispute over meat and offal would be resolved with glasses of beer followed by: “Waiter, give us another round. And don’t let Gathenji thirst. Hey, Gathenji, give us another kilo and a half. And don’t let too much heat eat away the juicy parts. Give it some bones too!”
From his counter, Gathenji would shout: “Hey! Let the Indian Raj play us some music to seal the deal!” Era and Rajan and the rest of the band would have no choice but to oblige.
Such distractions kept Rajan’s mind off the kissing stranger, and his angst subsided; he quietly wondered if it was the revelers’ ability to endure that allowed them to bear his musical privations. But he still felt, without being able to explain it, that the kissing stranger knew him. That’s why she had kissed him in that dark corridor. And even after he’d given up searching, he could not forget her.
Then one day she returned. Just like that. Rajan was onstage at the Jakaranda, stretching out a hand to fish a pretty girl from the audience, when he detected the unmistakable sweet, spicy perfume. Like a bee drawn to a flowering plant, he leaped offstage and strode over to the table where he believed the scent was wafting from. He found himself standing within a foot of a stunning young woman. Even in the waning light, she was quite a presence. She sat ramrod straight, with long, lush black hair that reached her waist. When she rose to greet Rajan, he saw how her tiny waist supported massive hips, or as Gathenji the butcher liked to say, she carried her hips and her neighbors’. And when she moved, no matter how gently, her erect breasts shook lightly; her skin appeared to change from brown to white and back, as the oscillating lights did their dance around her.
3
In 1902, shortly after Master’s Monument to Love had been built, Sally did make a trip to Nakuru, and experienced firsthand how the town got its name. As she hoisted a leg up to board the carriage which had been sent to fetch her, a cheeky whirlwind, ngoma cia aka—or the female demons, as locals called it—picked up pace and swished her skirt this way and that, before knocking her hat off. When Sally bent to pick up the hat, the wind blew her long, flared skirt up and over her head, exposing her hindquarters that resembled a Maasai goat’s—if you ignored the cream drawers that resembled her light skin.
The African servants who had been sent to fetch her had the good sense to flee for dear life, fearing they might somehow be implicated in the ignominy. While they may not have conspired with nature to embarrass the English woman, seeing her nakedness carried with it a tinge of violation. After all, muthungu and God were one and the same. That’s the story locals liked sharing while devouring mounds of food, although the connection between the whirlwind and Sally’s naked truth and her rejection of Master, as most still called McDonald, was never quite stated outright.
But in a land where myth and history often intersected, what happened to the woman of England is uncertain. What’s more certain is that McDonald vowed he would never speak to another woman after Sally rejected him—for the second time.
* * *
The first time Sally left McDonald was preceded by a confrontation in South Africa, his last station before his British East Africa Protectorate posting. It was early morning. He had returned home unannounced to retrieve a diary he had forgotten. He had left Sally in bed, perhaps staring into space, picking her nose, or doing those things that most housewives did before they could summon up their energies to rise and face another day.
For Sally, there was nothing to face, save for the sun that she shielded herself from by wearing a sombrero as she cut flowers from her lawns maintained by a full-time gardener, hands gloved against the prick of rosebush thorns. One could tell the progress of Sally’s day from the trail of cups. The cup beside the bed was for the early-morning tea, taken in her nightdress, feet thrust in frog-shaped warmers, while leafing through a magazine bearing big images of thoroughbred dogs. The cup by the window was for the ten o’clock tea, consumed behind dark glasses or drawn curtains while admiring Table Mountain. The cup at the dining table was for the prelunch drink, consumed with a slice of lightly buttered whole wheat bread. The jar of butter was a locus of vicious warfare between Sally and McDonald: he liked the butter surface smooth and gentle; she liked to use the blunt edge of the knife, leaving ugly marks. To McDonald, this reflected the tangled mess of Sally’s life that he was fated to deal with. Smoothing out the butter became one of the many chores in his daily routine.
The cup by the balcony was for four o’clock tea, taken with biscuits or fruit. This trail of teacups wouldn’t be collected by their servant until Sally went out for her evening walk because she did not like her solitude to be interrupted. Solitude was the reason she gave for postponing motherhood.
“I can’t handle children,” she said earnestly. “Running noses and wet bums I can, but not the cries from toothless gums.”
McDonald had long taken note of the trail of cups but voiced no concern. Like the wise soldier he considered himself to be, he had learned to pick his battles wisely. So on that fateful morning, afraid to disturb Sally’s peace, he sneaked quietly into the house to collect his diary. He was tiptoeing out when he heard a moan from the bedroom. He paused and cocked his head. He heard another moan. It sounded like pleasure, and he doubted that Sally could have derived that from the big-eared thoroughbreds in her magazines. He made his way to the bedroom door, silently opened it, and entered. Sally’s face was not burrowed in some magazine as he suspected; actually, he couldn’t even see her face—the view was blocked by the back of a head he found eerily familiar.
He could see that it was a man’s neck, sinewy from his present labors and engaged enough in his task at hand not to sense McDonald’s presence. McDonald realized it was his black gardener; he had seen the man strike a similar pose as he worked—fondling soil to pick out a weed or pruning the bushes. Now he devoted similar attention to this chore, and for a while, neither the man nor Sally noticed McDonald. When Sally finally did, and screamed, the black man thought she was screaming because of something he had done, so he continued on. It was only when McDonald dropped his diary, his trembling hands unable to hold anything, that the man realized the intrusion. Where does a man hit another to inflict the most pain, without injuring one’s ego that the invader’s very presence under his roof seeks to quash? McDonald appeared hypnotized by the puzzle, much the same way vermin are dazzled by the sudden burst of light when emerging from a crack in the furniture. McDonald’s soldierly instinct was to cut off the offending organ, but he had no idea what he’d do with it. A soldier had to envision a whole operation before setting forth. Should he throw it to the dogs? Keep it as a memento? He didn’t even have a weapon in hand. Perhaps he could use his teeth, but that would intimate a certain rage. He wasn’t a savage. Yet.
He obviously did not approve of the man’s presence in his bed, but his training taught him to keep emotions out of his work. That’s why guns had been invented—to create distance between assailants and their victims. He tried to catch a leg, but the man was as slippery as a fish. He noted how feminine the man’s shin felt, bereft of hair or scars. McDonald was determined to leave a lasting mark.
He dashed out of the bedroom to retrieve a weapon from his bag in the sitting room, but quickly remembered it was in his rickshaw waiting outside. He was losing crucial time, so he sprinted back to the bedroom, only to find that the man had disappeared out the window. Sally had gathered herself and was sitting on the edge of the bed, downcast.
For several long moments, he glared at her, trembling with anger as well as the fear of what he was contemplating. He slapped Sally once, and being a soldierly slap, it left a buzzing sound in her ear.
When he was confounded, as he was then, words utterly failed him. And when he finally spoke, it was neither a personal rebuke nor a remonstration. “Even if you have to do these
