It seemed strange to leave Ellen here, but of course the pilot stayed with the plane. She would deal with airport formalities and buy gas and then wait for Lew and Balim to return.
The rental car was waiting: a four-door maroon Peugeot 504. Balim sat in back, visibly delighted to be no longer in the plane, and Lew drove through Nairobi, following Balim’s directions.
Wilson Airport was south of the city, while the coffee plantation they wanted was to the north; unfortunately, there was no way to go around the town. Still, despite the rain and despite the congestion, traffic scooted along at a pretty good clip. Lumbering trucks, little rusty taxicabs, wetly gleaming Mercedes-Benzes, saturated bicyclists, and completely oblivious pedestrians all contested together, weaving a manic tapestry on the wet streets.
In all the cultures in the world, the rich live on the hills above the city. Leaving behind the crowded, raw-looking, hurriedly constructed streets of the main part of Nairobi, Lew steered upward through decreasing traffic and increasingly expensive-looking houses. After a while the streets became wider and sported gentle curves, sure signs of wealth. They passed the German Embassy, two other official residences. They passed a boarding school where the visible children were all white.
“This is why Kenya has remained a stable country,” Balim said from the backseat, “while so many other independent African nations have fallen away into bankruptcy and corruption. Kenyatta is of the Kikuyu tribe. When independence came, the Kikuyu thought they would be moving into these houses, but they did not. The whites are still here; the Indians are still here; the successful blacks are still here. That’s why international commerce can continue in Nairobi, and Kenya remains solvent. It would have been very popular politics to give these houses to the Kikuyu down from their mountain villages, but it would have killed the country. And where would we be today, eh, Lew? You and I?”
“I don’t know where you’d be, Mr. Balim,” Lew said, grinning at him in the rearview mirror. “I’d be in Alaska.”
“We owe much to Jomo Kenyatta,” Balim said.
The city itself was left behind, and then the suburbs, and still the Peugeot climbed upward into the foothills of the Narandarua Range, north of Nairobi. A group of black schoolgirls in bright purple jumpers, carrying many-colored umbrellas, waved and laughed at them as they drove by, and a few minutes later Balim said, “That is coffee.”
This time Lew frowned into the rearview mirror. “What is?”
“The shrub growing on both sides of the road. We are in the plantation.”
Lew then realized they were driving through cultivated fields. The shrubs were about three feet high, very bushy, and with intensely green leaves. In the rainswept distance he could see their parallel rows curving across the hillside, like a drawing in a children’s story, grainily reproduced.
“Beyond the next curve,” Balim said, “there is a white house on the left. That is our destination.”
“Fine.”
The land sloped down on that side, and the house would have been very easy to miss, being set low and back from the road and surrounded by trees. A rain-gullied gravel driveway lay just beyond the curve; taking that, Lew circled down and around amid the trees and came to a stop at the side of the house, facing a three-car white wooden garage.
Before they could open their doors, a broadly beaming skinny black man with a huge black umbrella appeared beside them. He gestured for Lew to wait in the car and opened the rear door for Balim. Having safely escorted Balim from car to house under the umbrella, he returned for Lew. “Good rain,” he said, smiling and nodding as they hurried toward the side door. “Excellent rain.”
“Very good rain,” Lew agreed.
Lew’s first impression inside the house was of darkness, as a setting for a tiny woman dressed all in white. This broad brushstroke was followed almost immediately by far too many details. The woman was very old. She was clearly an Indian, and in fact with her round spectacles she looked absurdly like Mahatma Gandhi. The white swath of cloth covering her from neck to toe was a sari. The rings on her tiny gnarled fingers were all of a style: intricate dark-gold vinelike bands clutching small glistening stones of red or green.
The black man with the umbrella disappeared down a narrow dark corridor crowded with furniture. There were dark green walls, mahogany sideboard, rococo gold-framed mirror, small Persian rugs spaced on the gleamingly waxed dark floor, a wooden staircase leading upward with black steps and white risers and banister.
Balim’s normal politeness was redoubled in here, intensified into an almost palpable concern, as though this old lady were both extremely fragile and terrifically important personally to Balim. “Mama Jhosi,” he said, “may I introduce a young friend of mine from America, Mr. Lewis Brady. Lew Brady, may I take pleasure in introducing Mama Lalia Jhosi, who is the mistress of this magnificent house.”
Lew could rise to formality when required. Taking Mama Jhosi’s hand—a collection of pencil stubs in a tiny leather sack—into his own, and half bowing over it, he said, “I am very pleased, madame.”
“You are tall,” she said. Her voice was as gnarled as her hand, rough and very faint. “A man should be tall.”
“And a woman should be beautiful,” Lew said, smiling broadly to show he meant to compliment her, and released her hand.
The giggle and head bob she gave were astoundingly girlish—heartbreakingly girlish—in acknowledgment of the gallantry. Then, stepping slightly to the side, she said, “And may I present my grandson, Pandit Jhosi. Mr. Lewis Brady.”
The grandson was eleven or twelve, a slender solemn boy with soft Indian skintone and features, and huge dark eyes. He wore sneakers and blue jeans, but his white-and-blue vertically striped dress shirt was buttoned at neck and wrists, making him look like a miniature of a formal Indian shopkeeper. Lew saw in his eyes that he was intelligent and shy; a bright boy who knew it was appropriate now to shake Lew’s hand but was too shy to initiate the move. Lew helped him out of the impasse by extending his own hand, smiling, saying, “Pleased to meet you.”
“And you.” The boy’s handshake was correct; two pumps, and release.
His grandmother touched his shoulder. “Tell Ketty we would like tea.”
“Yes, Mama.”
Balim said gently, “Pandit, Lew Brady knows very little about coffee plantations. Why don’t you take him with you to the kitchen and tell him about them?”
Ah. The pilot stays with the plane; the chauffeur waits in the kitchen. Whatever Balim’s business in this house, it didn’t include Lew, who grinned at the seriousness with which Pandit accepted the task, saying to Balim, “Yes, sir, I’d be happy to,” then looking up at Lew to say, “We have a very modern kitchen.”
“I’d be interested to see it.”
As Pandit led Lew down the long corridor, Mama Jhosi ushered Balim into a room to the side. Now they could talk Hindustani together without rudeness. Lew was still grinning at the courtliness with which people around here got their own way, when Pandit opened a door at the far end of the corridor and ushered him into a gleaming large kitchen, which was, as he’d been promised, very modern. Copper pans hung over a large pale-wood central table. The appliances along the walls were all brushed chrome or white porcelain, and included a large separate freezer. The uniformed black woman reading a newspaper spread on the table was middle-aged and just a bit hefty. Pandit said to her, “Ketty,” and then flowed away at her in Swahili. Ketty nodded, folded her paper, got to her feet and, turning away, presented a huge behind, tightly swathed in the black uniform skirt and framed by the string and side hems of her white apron.