Saraswati
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Reproduced with permission from the novel Saraswati by Gurnaik Johal, out now with Serpent’s Tail.
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The train slowed as it approached Konza. The station had been renovated along with the new line, but no futuristic architecture could keep out the dust. The last time Nathu had been here, the last time he had left Mombasa, he’d stepped off the train to get food for Akeyo. It had been the final ever running of the old Uganda railway, the line that his great-great-grandfather, Ravi ‘John Henry’ Hakra, had helped to build.
He and Akeyo had travelled to Nairobi on the Friday, and stayed in their old neighbourhood in Ngara, before returning to Mombasa on the Monday. As the old train had rattled along its metre-gauge tracks, Akeyo had asked him again to repeat the story of Ravi, a story as worn-through in their marriage as the cracked leather seats upon which they were sitting. He had been happy to tell it again, happy to spend time with her alone, the whole carriage theirs, the whole of the plains.
They had looked out at the same view he was seeing now, but one thing was different about it today. Nathu could see the old narrower tracks, stretched out on the plains like a great fallen ladder. In some sections, people had hacked them apart to sell on the metal. But floating above those rusted bones was the memory of Akeyo, alive, drifting through the air, how she looked out the window while she spoke, picking the stuffing from her seat with her short nails.
‘Say it like it’s your first time telling me,’ she had said. ‘Like we just met on the train.’
*
Ravi of Hakra was named, like all his siblings, after a Punjabi river. His eldest brother had been named after the Sutlej, near where they lived, and, once his parents had named their first daughter Beas after another river, they continued in the same vein. Ravi was raised to have an equal share of the square farm as all his siblings, but he forwent the inheritance to pursue his dreams of seeing the world. Stopping at a crowded bar in town after a busy market day, he sat next to a drunk British sailor who seemed eager to talk about his travels. Ravi asked what the world was like beyond India. ‘Africa is to the Hindoo what America has been to the European,’ the man said. He wrote down a name and an address in Karachi, in exchange for another Patiala peg. Within a few weeks, Ravi was heading down to the coast.
His timing couldn’t have been worse. Karachi was in the throes of a great plague, and Ravi was forced to quarantine along with thousands of other workers in Budapore. The scale of death at Budapore was such that he was tempted to turn back, but he had signed himself away, and, in any case, didn’t want to be the one to bring the invisible killer to Hakra. He coughed and coughed, covering his mouth with the red cloth his mother had given him, cut from a large piece she had split evenly among his siblings. He survived, and then endured the long, cramped voyage to Mombasa, where he was designated to become a pile driver on the Kenya–Uganda railway. It was a costly line, linking Mombasa and Lake Victoria, and some in British Parliament had already nicknamed it ‘the lunatic express’.
As was the case for many colonial infrastructure projects, the line had been designed to make the extraction of resources from the interior more efficient and cost-effective. It wasn’t about joining up communities but about creating a direct channel for goods to flow down to the coast, where they would travel on to the Western world.
‘All was well and good on the line,’ Nathu continued, sounding like his grandfather, ‘until the workers came upon the Tsavo River. Which is where they encountered the lions.’
It had been an early education, Nathu thought, in the fact that all history was historical fiction. A story had a longer life than a fact.
Here, the thread of the story frayed. This would have been 1898, with the rail works stopping for a bridge to be built, thousands of Indian workers forming a camp eight miles wide at the point the river bled out into swamp. But, to Nathu, the timelines didn’t quite work. There was a thin chance that Ravi had made it all the way up to Tsavo in time for the end of the lion drama, but the likelihood of him being involved in the episode to the extent that his grandfather claimed was low. Too low for a man in his line of work to allow for. Akeyo thought differently: a story with lions was more memorable than one without them.
‘There are different theories about the lions’ unnatural taste for human flesh,’ Nathu went on. ‘It was either caused by the rinderpest outbreak that had decimated the plains and removed the lions’ normal food sources, meaning they were so hungry they’d eat anything, or the lions of the Tsavo had become accustomed to scavenging on the dead bodies of slaves tossed into the river and swamp by the caravans heading to the coast.
‘See, the very reason the railway was being built was to reduce the cost of the long journey through the interior, to reduce the loss of property. The bodies the lions were eating were the reason the men were in Tsavo trying to build a bridge. The railway would put an end to the perilous crossing, the caravan raids. Well. Whatever it was, thousands of tired men had just camped upon the scavenging grounds of two very hungry man-eating lions.’
The men fought over who could sleep at the centre of the camp. Ravi, who had established himself as one of the hardest workers on the line, wielding a hammer in both hands, slept near the heart of the camp, while many of his peers were less fortunate, pitching tents near the fiery border of the swamp, keeping watch. One by one, they were picked off, dragged screaming into the shadows.
‘The lions were shot, and Ravi survived. When he reached Lake Victoria, the inland sea, he was supposed to ride one of the first full-length trains to Mombasa, and then travel on to India, but he stopped off at the brand-new town of Nairobi and never got back on the train.’
‘I prefer the version where he fights the lions himself,’ Akeyo said. ‘The version you said your dad would always tell.’
Nathu laughed. It was, perhaps, one of the few positive memories he had of his father, the way he’d embellish their family origin story. According to his father, Ravi had taken a hammer in one hand and a knife in the other and had run at the lions while his superiors shot their rifles. This version was the one that had stuck with Nathu’s younger nephews and nieces, and perhaps they still believed it now, wherever they were. It had been an early education, Nathu thought, in the fact that all history was historical fiction. A story had a longer life than a fact.
If Nathu had ever become a father, perhaps he would have intensified the story of Ravi ‘John Henry’ Hakra as his own father had. The story would morph into a more durable shape: Ravi the lion-killer outliving Ravi the piledriver. Whatever had or hadn’t happened in Ravi’s life, it was undeniable that he had helped in some way to form the tracks Nathu and Akeyo had been moving along then – the very tracks that he could see now in the parallel distance.
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Image credit: Robin Christian.
Gurnaik Johal is a writer from West London. His 2022 collection We Move won the Somerset Maugham Award and the Tata Literature Live! Prize. Its opening story won the Galley Beggar Short Story Prize. Saraswati is his debut novel.
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