Who Will Catch Us As We Fall (15 page)

‘Are you going to ask me if I took it?'

‘I know you didn't,' Jai replied.

‘What about you?' Michael turned to Leena.

Her foot refused to stop moving, reaching down to a lost root, she had dug so far in her guilt. Picking sides was not as easy as it used to be and she found herself in an unexpected, messy middle. ‘He stole my marble once,' she offered, and when the two of them laughed, she did too, pleased to have made them happy.

That evening, Michael and Angela were apprehended at the Kohlis' doorstep by Tag and his mother. A large woman, she wore a mint-green sari with arabesques in yellow and pearl and a low-cut blouse revealing wrinkled breasts. She moved in quick, conquering strides and glared at them through the ashy darkness.

‘You wait here,' she ordered, banging on the door with a closed fist. ‘Pooja!' she called up at the window. ‘It's me, Harinder.
Mane waat karvi che
.'

‘Is something the matter?' Angela stepped hesitantly forward.

‘Keep quiet.' Harinder spun quickly, shaking her finger. ‘Like you don't know what your son did.' As she continued to
rap-rap
against the door, Angela turned to Michael.

‘What is she talking about?' She addressed him in Kikuyu.

‘No speaking in your funny language! You think I don't understand you?'

Michael ignored Harinder and replied to his mother. ‘I didn't do it.' But she was unable to ask him what he was referring to because Pooja had already pulled open the door. She saw the furious woman at her doorstep and, startled, stepped back slightly.

‘What's all the banging for?'

At the ruckus, Jai and Leena slipped past their mother and came to stand outside.

‘You two, wait inside,' Pooja instructed, but they ignored her. Her daughter had been acting odd all evening. Secretive, unable to sit still, jumping at the slightest noise. Before Raj had left for his
karoga
he had told his wife that she was overreacting but, at the sight of Harinder, Pooja knew something had happened.

‘Your servant's boy has stolen Tag's money,' Harinder announced loudly.

‘Don't call her that.' Jai stepped forward and Pooja smacked him lightly over the head.
What have I told you about respecting
your elders?

‘Harinder, please speak slowly. I can't understand you,' said Pooja.

‘The boy stole three hundred shillings from my son.'

‘You said it was two hundred this afternoon,' Leena pointed out. They had not agreed on this, bringing their parents into it. When she had first approached Tag, she had only wanted Jai to stop spending so much time with Michael but she had never wanted to embarrass him this way – especially now, when they were just becoming friends.

‘I meant three hundred.' Tag was cowering behind his mother. He hadn't wanted such a big scene either, just for the boy to be sent away, but the afternoon hadn't gone as he had planned and he had been forced to improvise.

‘You knew about this?' Pooja asked her daughter.

‘Tag accused Michael of stealing his money but it's not true,' Jai spoke up.

Michael wanted to step forward and defend himself. He felt the indignation press heavily against his chest, but his mother's grip pinched his skin tightly. While he stood forward in defiance, her body was stooped and hung back.

‘Are you sure?' Pooja asked Harinder, trying to calm the woman.
So inconvenient
,
she thought.
Why do these things keep happening to us?

‘Are you calling my son a liar?'

‘Of course not.' Pooja sighed.
A real drama queen this one.
‘Perhaps it was just a misunderstanding?'

Tag tried to catch Leena's eye. ‘I know it was him. We were playing and I had it and now it's gone.'

‘Michael?' Pooja turned to the boy. So composed, looking so much older than he ought to – she had never paid much attention to him before this moment and she couldn't be sure what his blank expression meant. She almost felt guilty for so readily believing Tag, but how could she not? Poverty made you desperate, especially as a child. Especially when you saw what it was possible to have.

‘I didn't do it.' He faced the people in front of him with a heavy and tightening heart. His head hurt.

Leena watched him with dismay, saw her brother step forward and knew what he was about to do so she did it first. Not thinking, just wanting to relieve herself and make right what she had encouraged to go wrong.

‘I took it.'

‘What?' Tag's mouth fell agape as he stared at her, confused.

‘What did you say?' Pooja grasped her daughter by the shoulder and waved her finger in Leena's face. ‘Now you listen here, Leena Kohli, this isn't a game.'

Leena pulled away and went to stand beside Michael. How long had she been waiting for an opportunity to send him away? And now that it presented itself so readily, she was determined to make it disappear. To tether herself to him, if need be. She repeated, ‘I'm sorry. I took it.'

Tag wrung his hands together, hopping from foot to foot.
Girls. What silly things
–
can't trust them.
But he wasn't going to admit any wrongdoing on his part. If Leena wanted to take the fall for the
kharia
then he would let her. He spoke hurriedly, tugging on his mother's sari. ‘Can we go now?'

There are things a mother knows unequivocally about her children and Pooja was certain she hadn't raised a thief. ‘Where is the money now?' she demanded.

‘I spent it.'

‘On what?'

‘Sweets.'

The impressed look on Jai's face clenched her gut with excitement and she almost grinned, basking in the heroic feeling of self-sacrifice. Pooja grabbed her chin and twisted it until they were facing each other, her dark, thick eyebrow cocked.
You don't think I know what that look means?

‘Must have been expensive sweets.' Her mother's voice was a low threat.

‘Yes.' Suddenly overcome by an urge to cry, Leena just wanted to be let go.

Pooja dropped her grip, turned back to Harinder, who was now
tsk-tsking
under her breath. This was surely going to be around the block by the next morning. Pooja Kohli had a
chokora
for a daughter.

‘I'll return the money, of course,' she told Harinder through gritted teeth.

‘It's only three hundred bob,' said Tag's mother, suddenly calm, delighted to be getting more than she had bargained for out of the situation. Wait until Mrs Laljee heard the news! ‘I'm not angry with you,
beta.
No need to cry.' Harinder glared once more at Michael and Angela before guiding her son back toward their house.

‘Ma,' Jai began, but Pooja put out her hand to stop him.

‘Not another word from anyone.' She looked at Angela sternly. ‘You can go home now.'

‘My boy didn't do anything,' Angela said, in a weak defense that came too late.

Pooja didn't reply, distracted by the growing strain in her gut as she looked from her children to Michael, huddled close together in a loose triangle. She called them in quickly, pushing her daughter more forcefully than she had intended and worrying to herself that these sorts of relationships always brought more problems than they were worth.

Once back home, Angela sat her son down on the shapeless couch and paced the small length of the apartment uneasily. Something had been weighing her down for some time now, ever since Michael had started spending more time with Jai, and she was angry with herself for having ignored it for so long – for not having warned him to be more careful. Perhaps a part of her had been hoping she was wrong, that she had been too influenced by what had happened in the country's past. That maybe, in this day and age, things could be different for her son. She had been disappointed, but not surprised, to learn that they were not.

‘What is it?' he asked when she finally came to a standstill.

‘You're playing too much with them.'

‘You're the one who insists I go with you every day.'

His tone surprised her. When he had come back from Eldoret, he had been soundlessly obedient but now he spoke with certainty and she saw that he was no longer a child. She carried on, ‘I make you come with me so that you can help with the workload, not so you can kick around a football and cause trouble!'

‘They're my friends,' he argued.

‘I know you want to think that.'

‘But Jai—'

‘Is a nice boy, yes. The Kohlis are a very nice family.'
But.

He waited for her to go on, feeling like the lost and afraid child he had been when he had come to Nairobi for the first time, close to two months ago. But in some ways he was wiser – braver with his thoughts – infused with the city's boldness.

‘You weren't brought up here, Mike,' she reminded him. ‘You don't know how things work here, what the rules are.' She ran a tired hand across her neck, rubbing at her chin. ‘Why do you think I didn't allow you to speak in front of those women today?'

‘Because she called you a servant.' The words clenched in his gut.

Angela shook her head. ‘That wasn't right; but it also wasn't the reason.'

‘Then what was it?'

‘It wasn't our place to speak.'

‘She was accusing me of something I didn't do,' he half-rose from the couch, protesting. ‘I had to make sure everyone knew the truth. I didn't want you to lose your job.'
I don't want to lose them.

‘Do you know what happens to a drinking zebra when it makes too much noise in front of a hungry crocodile?' Angela asked but her son kept silent, watching her with those young, far-too-deep eyes. ‘It gets swallowed up.'

‘I don't know what you mean.' But despite his stubbornness, she saw that he did.

‘When we're at the Kohlis, our job is to work and say little. Our employers should not know about our lives, our troubles, our families. Because one day that information may be used against us.'

‘They wouldn't do that to us.'

She went to sit next to him, softening her voice so that her words wouldn't sound so cruel. ‘How did Mrs Kohli react when that boy accused you of stealing? Did she defend you? Get angry for you? No, she was suspicious. Even now, she is suspicious. She trusted them straight away, not you.' He was trying to move apart from her but she tightened her grip on his upper arm. ‘No matter how nice they can be, they will always consider us different from them.'

After a brief silence, she said, ‘I want to make you aware of all this so that one day, when the time comes and you understand it all, you won't be too heartbroken.'

He rose quickly, his words fast. ‘Didn't you see them today? They defended me when you refused to. Leena put herself in trouble so that her mother wouldn't think me a thief. And you! You just stood there and let that woman call you a servant.'

His words rendered her mute; his expression, a familiar one, brought up the memory of a rancorous, old woman in a house on a hill in Eldoret, glaring at her in the dark from across a table as she clung to a three-year-old boy. Angela had been tired and hungry but Madam hadn't even offered her a drink of water. She had simply stood up from her seat, strode over in her gigantic way and taken Michael.

‘You don't deserve him,' Madam had told her all those years ago. ‘Just like my son deserved better, so does yours. He will stay with me but so long as he does, you cannot come back here.'

‘He's my son,' she had protested weakly.

‘And those are my conditions.' Hard-hearted as always. ‘Get out now. You are nothing but a sad, little weakling.'

Now, Angela looked away from her son and chewed down hard on the inside ridges of her cheek. Michael left the house and went into the courtyard outside. Immediately, he was assaulted by the sulfurous leak from the open doorway of the Indian hair salon. His skin prickled at this new substance – he thought he would suffocate on it – and he slid down against the wall, breathing between his knees.

Somewhere to his right, he could hear the gossiping of the traveling market women, three of them pausing beside him for a rest – dropping their seemingly bottomless wicker baskets against their legs, thick as barks.
Mama Mbogas
, they were called. Vegetable women. Every morning he watched them leave from his window, their baskets balanced delicately on the stoops of their backs, belying their heavy load. Tomatoes, carrots, sugar cane – one of them carried only live chickens, clucking forlornly with their legs bound together and their pink beaks peeking out from beneath an old blanket. These women moved slowly throughout the city, calling out in their gravelly voices.
Mama, shillingi kumi, kilo bili. Good price, help me and I will give you good price.
Their voices sounded like ghosts to him, old and wise – a dense lullaby that sat upon the world and always made him wistful.

‘
Kijana, wewe ni mgonjwa
?' One of them paused between talking and laid a hand on his forehead, asking if he was sick.

He shook his head, but gratefully accepted a banana before they picked up their baskets once more and left. He tried not to cry, because with their absence he felt an aching loneliness stretch open inside him and, for the first time, agreed with his grandmother fully and thought his mother a coward.

It terrified Jeffery, how quickly a living person could be reduced to an animal. He had come home the first evening to find his mother squatting near their house because severe abdominal cramps had prevented her from going any further. Sweating profusely, making noises like an injured hyena, she relieved herself on their doorstep, leaning weakly against the mud wall as people side-stepped or jumped over her.