Posted on 23 April 2009.
I came to Mombasa, Kenya looking for solitude. Away from the shifts and swings of London, I could bask in a year-long sabbatical of writing and be away from the influence of a London I had spent my entire life in. Dad came to visit me while I was out there, as he had been born in Mombasa. He left in 1966, never thinking he would ever return. When we had pressed him about going back, he had evaded our persistence with the edict that ‘there were too many new places in the world to discover. What was the point of revisiting the past?’ However, when I had gone out to Kenya, he became obsessed with my weekly blog, obsessed with everywhere I was visiting, obsessed with drawing out mental maps in his mind of the new gridlines and paths of a Mombasa forty years after he had known it. Unknowingly, I was walking in his footsteps, and he was tracing over them in his mind, trying to layer them over his own footsteps, like my feet were walking pavements made of tracing paper.
He was a child of the British Empire. I could never get my head around that. It sounded so archaic and quaint. He was 13 when Kenya gained independence. He left three years later. So much had changed in the time he’d been away, and halfway through my sabbatical, he was desperate to come visit me. He booked a flight and came over to show me where he’d grown up. Here I could truly learn who my father was, and explore that missing link of my dual [no, triple?] heritage, the African part. Neither of my parents had ever lived in India, so the culture they imparted on me, was not only a time capsule, it was a time capsule of what their parents had retained about the country of our origin. How had Kenya affected that, I wondered, and with dad in the country, I could start to truly understand his origins.
In the cab to his hotel, he immediately fell into the age-old act of haggling. However, his pidgin-Swahili haggling only confused the driver more, who must have thought him extremely old-fashioned. I helped out with universal English and we were soon on our way. He was silent the entire journey. I hadn’t seen him for 6 months and I was worried we’d have nothing to say to each other. He stared out the window at his old home, and I watched him take it all in. He pointed to objects and buildings straining to recall their significance in his autobiography. He laughed to himself at years-old in-jokes. He whispered words in Swahili till he was sure they existed then shouted them out to the taxi driver, who told him what they meant. As soon as he knew their meaning, he repeated them loudly as if he was testing the driver. We got out at the hotel and he haggled the cab driver down to a below sensible price for the journey. The cab driver smiled and told him, ‘Looks like you’ve finally come home…’ He looked to me and said, ‘Your father has brought you to your real home now.’ He drove off, satisfied that we had returned.
I watched dad on the beach. I sat on the wall at the edge of the sand. He stood up to his waist in water. The tide was gushing in, slapping against the girth of his beer belly. His stoic legs rooted themselves firmly in the seabed as the water perilously crawled higher up his body. He stared out at the Indian Ocean, as if he was searching for India itself, the country he’d never known but had seeping with heritage through his veins. He couldn’t see it. He turned back to the shore, looked at Mombasa for a few moments and strolled towards me. I gave him the beer I’d ordered for him, Kenyan Tusker beer. He swigged it, looked up at the sky and winked at me in absence of anything to say.
He was annoyed that the main road running through the centre of town was no longer called Salim Road. He was annoyed no one could remember it being called Salim Road. He couldn’t get used to its new name, Digo Road. We got off the matatu there [an overcrowded minibus ferrying people for pence and personality all over the country]. He looked up at the old market place and noted it still looked like it harboured dirt and grime and disease and the best vegetables in the world. He laughed. We walked inside. Men followed him, offering nuts, chickens and avocadoes. He waved them all off. He told them he was not a tourist. He was Kenyan, like them. They laughed at him and pointed at his camera and bumbag. ‘Tourist, tourist’, they laughed and pointed. ‘Kenyan, Kenyan’, he laughed. Eventually they left this ridiculous crazy old man alone. I was bemused. I was dressed more Western than him, but was more local now than he was.
‘Here I’m not Indian’, he said to me as we walked past a temple.
‘That confuses me even more, dad. Especially when you and mum raised me to be a good little Indian boy.’
‘I’m Kenyan, my friend’ he retorted and ducked into a café that used to serve the best ugali in the country.
He was surprised to find it was still there. He ordered a beer, I ordered a tea with cold milk and we sat; I watched the cricket, he watched the street.
‘It’s so different now.’
‘Well, are you surprised, dad? It’s been forty years…’
‘So much is the same though. It’s the people, they’re different… it’s more mixed, more African, more coastal now…’
‘You lived here during the empire. A lot must have changed. 40 years of your life is a sizeable chunk. 40 years of a city’s life is not. But it’s been through major changes since independence.’
‘I never want to go back to India ever again. It’s not my home. This is.’
‘Not Middlesex?’
‘This…’
We carried on walking, stopping regularly for more Tusker breaks from the heat. He led me up the main road into town, now a bustling shopping district with department stores, markets, street vendors, taxis, matatus and the smell of commerce and rotten vegetables fetidly milking the air. Soon the road bended round and became busier, more hectic, as people trampled over each other to get on to buses, sell items to people on buses and get off buses. In the eye of the chaos sat a homeless man, his hair thickly matted into one high-reaching dreadlock, green with paint, dirt and grime. He propped himself up against a green wall advertising a mobile phone package. He had become the wall. He wore green clothes to camouflage himself. He looked at the ground, tired of the noise around him.
Dad led me through the throng, finding a natural ebb and flow to the dancing of the bodies around us. On the other side of this balletic thrust of people, he stopped and looked up at a newly painted peach terrace above us.
‘I was born in that flat.’
I looked at him and at the flat and I ran up to its front door. Dad hesitated, mumbled something about imposing and followed me anyway, having said the sensible fatherly thing but actually not caring that much about disturbing a household. I banged on the door.
Stairs clomped behind it. The door opened. A middle-aged man peered out at me squinting at the sunshine glinting off cars behind us, possibly casting us in a ring of celestial beauty.
‘Hi! My dad [point at dad] used to live here 40 years ago and he hasn’t been back to the country since. Can he come and see the flat, for old time’s sake?’
The man ushered us in and slowly clomped back up the steps. We followed, shrugging in surprise. He was incredibly trusting of these two strange men with bumbags. We clomped up the wooden stairs and entered an open air foyer with access to all the flats. Kids gathered at windows to watch the strangers with cameras and bumbags. I snapped. Dad looked around reliving fragments of his past, watching himself crawling, falling, playing, eating, existing all around us like ghosts. He took mental postcards of multiple moments from his short life here, turned to the man who lived here now, thanked him and left. That was all he needed.
Outside, he looked back up and then at me and told me I was cheeky for press-ganging our way in there. Across the street was the shop my grandfather used to own, selling cheap rations. For years I thought it had been called ‘Chip Ration Store’ and imagined it looking like some bizarre African slice of Americana. ‘Cheap Ration Store’, however, stood tall, and still. It looked exactly the same as 40 years ago. It sold the same products. You could see the old signage under the peeling paint of the new sign proudly inviting you to shop at ‘Citizenship Bookshop.’ Inside, the owner watched us looking about and photographing the shop, bemused. He eventually asked if we needed any help. Dad recounted his prodigal son story with the same enthusiasm he had thus far delivered it to everyone. The owner asked his name. He mumbled it a few times, turning it over in his brain till he said he had bought this shop from my grandfather. He knew my grandfather. He had bought the shop 40 odd years ago and was still running it, exactly the same shop as during my grandfather’s days as a working man.
He showed us around the shop and sent his grandson upstairs to fetch his wife. She came downstairs, a plump old lady, hobbling and hurrying to greet the foreigners with bumbags. She and the husband conversed in Urdu and she disappeared, returning with a tray of sweets and tea. Dad accepted the tea and I told him to sip it sparingly as the sweet masala chai oozed with the glucose pheromones that might trouble a diabetic such as papa. We drank the tea and dad made tiny talk about what the family had done since the move. The shopkeeper remarked that we could see what he had been doing in the last 40 years. He gestured to the shop around us. He worked here everyday and he lived upstairs and he rarely escaped. He had never left Mombasa. The shop was exactly the same, dad remarked and it confounded me that this shrine to my family should still exist intact, ignoring the progress and evolution other shops around it had experienced.
We left an hour later after fifteen minutes of no tiny talk. I murmured something sarcastic about the weird situation we’d been in and dad gave me a look as if to say, don’t ruin this, sonnyjim.
After lunch, we found ourselves sat on the steps of a big Swami Narayan temple behind dad’s Salim Road and my Digo Road. The welcome shade meant a shady draft was blowing over the sweat patches in our every crevice, sending much-needed shivers over our overheated bodies. I sipped water and dad longed for more Tusker. I remarked that his constant craving of beer made him sound like a Brit Abroad. He told me about the temple:
‘Your grandfather moved to Mombasa when I was 2. He hated Nairobi, it was too cold for him and he wanted the easier life on the coast. So he came here. He took no money from his brothers, left your grandma and me with them and came here to make his fortune. He had no luck for 6 months and was running out of money and was ready to pack it in and go back to Nairobi. He was sat on these steps here, about to go in and pray, and a man walked up to him and asked why he was troubled. They talked, the man admired his spirit and lent him money to buy Cheap Ration Store. You see? I always tell you, what is your objective, how will you achieve that objective. He did that.’
‘But all he did was borrow from a money lender.’
‘You’re too cynical for this place, my son. You truly are from London.’
We sat there. Dad reflected. I was embarrassed. I was ruining his trip with my sardonic sense of humour. It was ruining the atmosphere and we had already bonded more in an afternoon than we had ever done in a lifetime. I kept quiet and let him talk.
‘Your grandfather asked me to come here and give a tribute to this temple. It saved our family. We would not have ended up where we were… see how life unravels in tiny tapestries, each thread takes you on a new journey.’
I loved my dad’s poetical mixed metaphors. It had been years since he’d said one. London life had beaten language out of him. Here, in the lazy wink of Mombasa, with the sun parading above, the cacophony of memories celebrating below, he was rediscovering a zest for life. He was definitely becoming more sentimental in his old age, this stoic man of my childhood, obsessed with objectives and targets, business and commerce. He had this big stupid grin on him as he walked into the serene holy grounds of the temple. We walked around the main worshipping stage. He pointed at things that had arrived in his absence and told me what had existed before.
Nostalgia turned to thirst and he instructed me to find this bar he used to dream about one day going to in his teens, cos all the sailors went there and it was a legendary hotspot. I found the place on the map, not thinking to read the blurb about it in my travel guide nor heed previous advice given during my early days. We arrived at a thatched open-plan bar that advertised snooker, beer and dancing. We sat near the door and ordered Tusker. We had loads to talk about, finally feeling like we were connecting as father and son. It had been quite the journey for ol’ dad to bring me here. I understood him more. It made sense to me that there was this African element to him that didn’t quite synchronise with the Indianness I had been taught was my heritage my entire life. I was now knowingly walking in his footsteps.
At this point, it would have been wise for us both to notice the line of girls at the bar staring expectantly as us, and only us, the only ‘patrons’ in the bar. Alas, a few moments of nostalgia delayed our realisation till the beers arrived and then it was too late.
She sat down next to me, plonking down a drink that splashed cold sticky motor oil alcohol over my fingers. She looked into our discarded half-eaten plates of food. She had huge eyes that darted from corner to corner, unable to focus. We had watched them all watching us from the bar, waiting for us to make a move.
The friskiest, least subtle of the lot, had sat down on a stool, placed her high heeled legs on the bar and waved her privates at us, winking and laughing seductively, while we strained to look like we weren’t looking. Now, their ringleader had joined us.
She started crying.
Dad asked what was wrong. She told us about her life and about how the tourist trade kept alive the single women of this city. But she, she was too old and ugly now, she said, so acted as a friend to these girls, introducing them to tourists like us. Gone was dad’s pathos as soon as he heard the word ‘tourist’.
‘Excuse me… but we’re not tourists… I’m Kenyan.’
She looked at us. I was sat in a trendy Spider-man t-shirt. Dad had on a baseball cap and sunglasses even though it was overcast. He also wore the most ill-advised bumbag in the world. She laughed, and for a second, she was humanised for us, someone still capable of finding humour and laughter in the unlikeliest of dark places.
‘You sure, bwana?’ she asked, patronisingly called him the Swahili for ‘mister’ or ‘mate’ as a test.
‘I have just returned for the first time in 40 years. My son lives here now, and I wanted to show him how he is Kenyan like me.’
‘But you are Indian, yes?’
‘No. My mother and father are Indian. My son is British. I am Kenyan.’
She mulled this over for a few seconds and smiled and nodded. She stayed silent for a while. Dad and I continued our interrupted conversation where I was complaining about something trivial about my sister. The woman bowed her head silently, halfway between listening to us and falling asleep. She lifted a hand up to her glass and swilled it. Her hands were scarred, dry, peeled and burned. She wore her autobiography in her fingers. Whereas mine have adapted for guitars and keyboards and comic books, hers had adapted to a life at this bar, introducing ‘tourists’ to her ‘friends.’
She looked up when we reached a cadence in our conversation and said, ‘So you’re Kenyan yes? You like Kenyan girls? Most beautiful in the world…’
She pointed to the bar where they were displayed for us, like breathing over-sexed mannequins, hoping to be picked. They cared not that the potential punters were a 57 year old fat man and his young son. They wanted business. It was a slow humid day. Dad made the mistake of agreeing with the woman, that they were indeed beautiful. She told him he could have any one he wanted. He laughed and shook his head. He told her he was married. She laughed as if that was the flimsiest excuse in the world. I interrupted and started conversing with dad about something or other, not letting the conversation lull for even a pregnant second. The woman eventually got bored and left, not before downing her drink, pulling out the ice cubes on to the table and leaving them to melt on the table near my fingers.
‘You’re not Kenyan,’ she snarled as her parting remark. ‘You’re not even Indian. You have no home.’
Dad passed this off as the drunk rambling of a strange pimp, but I was mortally offended for him. To be called rootless when he had imparted the strength of three continents in me was a huge insult to the legacy of their cultures combined in his muscle memory. We sat in silence, listening to the echoes of ridicule hurled our way by the display board of women at the bar. Eventually, the one waving her privates at us, placed her heels over the floor, shimmied herself off her high stool and walked over to us smiling.
‘So, big daddy, we going to sleep together or what?’
‘………’
‘Go on baby, my sexy big daddy. Come with me.’
‘No thank you.’
‘Why not? Am I not pretty?’
‘Hey, we’re fine thank you…’
‘I’m not talking to you, I’m talking to big daddy.’
‘Yes you’re pretty. But we have to be somewhere in half an hour.’
‘Baby, big daddy, ten minutes is all you need with me…’
‘………….’
I ushered dad out of the bar and we thanked everyone for providing us with such seedy lunchtime entertainment and we walked back towards the main road.
‘So, all the sailors went there, did they?’ I asked and dad laughed in embarrassment, apologising for taking me there. I told him it was fine, not to worry. He said he was tired and asked if we could go back to his hotel.
I hailed a taxi and we climbed in and dad finally had his pregnant pause for the afternoon as he looked back on the streets he was born and raised in, watching ghosts of his younger selves and my present selves trace footsteps all over the streets of his past. Time had passed and things had changed. But it certainly looked a lot like home.
Nikesh Shukla is a writer, and rapper caught between the cityscapes of Bombay and the land of London. His writing has been featured on BBC2, Radio 1 and 4, Resonance fm, and he has performed at the Soho Theatre and Glastonbury in his quest to destroy the perfect metaphor. He recently completed his first collection of short stories, ‘I’ve Forgotten My Mantra’.
