A Guide to the Birds of East Africa Read online

  The now grown-up (and slimmed-down) Petula might tease him about it, the abominably hairy Patel might make sly references at the club to certain British footballers known for their adherence to the style. His barber might suggest that perhaps it was time sir might like to think about a toupee (his wife was by now sadly deceased and so silent on the matter). But one major change of hairstyle in life was enough in any man. Wigs were out, and he would not go from a covered scalp to a bare one no matter how long it now took him every morning to arrange each hair, and no matter how unconvincing the effect might be. But it is a little-appreciated truth that a bad hairstyle neither reflects nor affects the heart within. Passions burn as fiercely in Mr Malik’s breast as in those of other men.

  For the last three years Mr Malik – brown, short, round and balding though he may be – has been passionately in love with Rose Mbikwa.

  3

  When his wife Aruna had died from cancer eight years earlier, Mr Malik’s response, like that of many men in similar situations, had been to throw himself into his work. He had loved his wife. Not at first, not when introduced to the shy girl that their families had chosen to be his wife. She was rather on the tall side, he thought, and only a little bit pretty. But soon he came to know this deep and quiet girl, and as she grew into a woman he was impressed by her strengths, which were many, and endeared by her weaknesses, which were few. And beauty seemed to grow within her. It sometimes shone so bright he could hardly look at her. Her death caused a pain that stabbed into his soul, a pain that only ceaseless work could ease. When he suffered his first heart attack – at exactly the same age as his own father had suffered one and died from it – his daughter Petula insisted he see a specialist.

  And I’m talking Harley Street here, Daddy, not Limuru Road.’

  Mr Malik was not a poor man. The Jolly Man Manufacturing Company had been started by his father in 1932. This was the time when everyone seemed to smoke. Smoking was cool. Men smoked pipes, rich men smoked cigars, and women from maids to marchionesses smoked cigarettes. Everybody in films smoked – even Rock Hudson (though not, perhaps, Doris Day). In the Kenya of those far-off days imported cigarettes and cigars were sometimes hard to come by. Why not, thought Mr Malik senior, buy some tobacco, find some equipment and start making them himself? The Jolly Man Manufacturing Company, with its trademark picture of a smiling dark-skinned man in top hat and tailcoat puffing on a fat cigar, was an immediate success.

  Then came the Second World War. German U-boats patrolled the Atlantic and supplies to Britain of tobacco from America and the West Indies dried up. Kenya was part of the British Empire and Kenyan tobacco was requisitioned for British manufacturers. Output from the Jolly Man Manufacturing Company slowed to a trickle. As soon as the war ended the big international companies came in with their Navy Cut and Pall Malls and Lucky Strikes. The Jolly Man Manufacturing Company, with its old and inefficient machinery, could not compete. Things looked bad. But during the war Jolly Man cigars had become a great favourite of Mikael Oncratoff, the Russian consul (everyone knew he was really a spy, but he gave such wonderful parties). When the war ended he began sending boxes of the Kenyan cigars home to his family and friends in Eastern Europe. Being superior to the local product and cheaper than Cuban cigars, they were in high demand. So great became their popularity behind the newly forged Iron Curtain that he approached Mr Malik senior – perhaps he needed an export agent? By 1960 Mikael Oncratoff had a fine house beside Lake Como, while discerning comrades from Gdansk and Stalingrad to Sofia and the Black Sea demanded Jolly Man cigars. And Mr Malik’s father employed three hundred people in his factory in Nairobi making them. In 1964 he had his heart attack.

  By this time Mr Malik had left school and been sent to study at the London School of Economics. Though economics did not interest him in the least (the LSE had been his father’s idea), he loved London. He found digs in Clerkenwell and under those grey northern skies he blossomed as he never had in equatorial sunshine. He loved the pubs, the streets, the women, the freedom, the whole student life. He began writing the occasional piece on student politics for the University of London student newspaper (at that time still The Ferret), and the talent for journalism that he discovered within thrilled him so much he would often walk home from lectures along Fleet Street just for a glimpse into a real newspaper office and a fragrant whiff of printer’s ink. Perhaps, when he finished his degree, he would become a journalist. Then the telegram came. Like the dutiful eldest son he was he gave all this up, came home for the funeral and took up his position as reluctant proprietor and Managing Director of the Jolly Man Manufacturing Company.

  In the sense that he had always looked after his staff well and the business made money, Mr Malik was a good businessman. In the sense that he couldn’t stop worrying about the business all day and all night and all times in between, he was a bad one. When he wasn’t worrying about his business he was worrying about his daughter Petula. Petula had also been educated overseas and had returned home in 2001 with an MBA from NYC but without a husband. She was now twenty-nine, still unmarried and living at home. It was enough to worry any father – and if only she wouldn’t cut her hair so short and would wear a nice sari occasionally instead of those baggy jeans all the time. ‘Not jeans, Daddy – denims,’ she said, but they still looked like jeans to him. He had to admit, though, that Petula had become a great help in running the business.

  ‘I’ve made an appointment for you in London with Sir Horatio Redmond,’ she told him. ‘Don’t worry, Daddy, I’ll keep things ticking over while you’re away.’

  What Sir Horatio, staring over rooftops under a grey Marylebone sky to the bare trees of Regent’s Park, said to his new patient was this:

  ‘You need a hobby. Something to take your mind off work – it’s stress that does it, you see.’

  The eminent cardiologist savoured the word. Up until only last year he would have said ‘overdoing it’ and he still wasn’t sure whether that phrase was really a bit more Harley Street, but everyone seemed to use ‘stress’ these days and it was good practice to keep up with modern developments. Patients expected it.

  A large grey bird flapped slowly through the gloom towards the park. Bloody heron – what was that doing here? Trout-murdering vermin. The doctor turned from the window with a frown. Were there, he wondered as he watched his dark-skinned patient do up the top button of his shirt and reach for his bow tie, trout in India – no, Africa, wasn’t it? He still remembered snatches from the lectures in tropical diseases at Barts. Mosquitoes and malaria, blackfly and river fever, tsetse and sleeping sickness – yes, they had plenty of flies in Africa. But did they have duns and drones, skippers and sedges? Did highland burns dash down from Afric hills and slow chalk streams meander through gentle meadows wherever it was that this chap came from?

  ‘I fish myself,’ he said, assuming once more the demeanour which his rank and rent allowed him. ‘But for you, I think, birds.’

  Mr Malik, whose residence in the London of the 1960s had coincided with the brief and wonderful emergence of the ‘dolly bird’, was puzzled. Was this man suggesting that he find another wife? Or perhaps revitalize himself through the prophylactic of prostitution?

  ‘Sparrows, now,’ said Sir Horatio. ‘Why, a chap I know used to sit for hours and watch sparrows. Very soothing, so he told me. Sparrows flying, sparrows hopping, sparrows feeding, sparrows nesting. You have sparrows in, er…?’

  ‘Kenya.’

  ‘Quite.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Good. Well, that’s it, then. Oh, and take one of these green pills, three times a day before meals.’

  Mr Malik breathed an inward sigh of relief. Ornithology would be much easier – so much less stressful – than women. On the way home to Nairobi he picked up a pair of Bausch & Lomb 8 x 50 binoculars duty-free at Heathrow. He was surprised to find that during his absence the business seemed to have carried on very well without him.

  The very next Tuesday he began his a
cquaintance with the birds of East Africa, and with Rose Mbikwa.

  4

  By the time Mr Malik got to the MEATI most of the others had arrived and were surveying the surrounding bush for birds. The man with the sunglasses and gold bangles (and, Mr Malik now noticed, a gold chain round his neck) was standing next to the tourists. He was pointing to a tree but broke off his conversation when Mr Malik got out of his car.

  ‘Hey, Malik, is that you?’

  And it all came flooding back. Harry Khan.

  As an invalid in long remission may almost forget his illness until it returns, so it was with Mr Malik and Harry Khan. Mr Malik had been eleven when first struck down. He was a new boy at Eastlands High School, a boarder. So was Harry Khan. They were put into the same class and it was generally expected that the two new students (‘new bugs’ they were called in a faint echo of the language of an English public school) would get along. They didn’t. Mr Malik, or just plain Malik as he was now known to both teachers and pupils, was a shy and studious boy. Harry Khan was – well, how shall I put it? He was loud, though not in an obnoxious way. He was cheeky, though not in an impolite way. He was humorous, though not in an offensive way. He was clever without appearing to try hard; he made friends easily and had a quickness of foot in rugby and undoubted skill with a cricket ball and bat. It was Harry Khan who smuggled in the electric toaster to the dormitory, it was he who kept the radio under his mattress for tuning into the BBC World Service for The Goon Show on Saturday nights, it was he who introduced the younger (and some of the older) pupils to other nocturnal delights. He could even dance rock and roll. All of which made him popular among the boys, but for the next seven years he was the bane of Mr Malik’s life. For Harry Khan was a tease, a card, a joker – and for every joker there has to be a jokee. It had started on the very first morning.

  Now it has to be said that Harry Khan, were you to ask him even today, would still maintain that it wasn’t his fault. It seems that what happened was this. The two new boys, having survived their first night in Middle Dorm, were in the splasher washing faces and cleaning teeth before brekker. Mr Malik’s mother had packed her son’s trunk with everything on the list she had been sent by Matron including a fine new plastic BOAC zip-up sponge bag – also containing everything that the list said should be there. Though sponges were notable by their absence, the bag contained regulation face flannel (Clearly Labelled With Boy’s Surname), comb, toothbrush and toothpaste. Except that his mother had forgotten the toothpaste. Mr Malik had noticed this oversight the previous evening but had been much too shy to say anything either to Matron or any of the boys. He simply pretended that there was toothpaste on his brush and hoped that no one noticed. This morning he was feeling a little braver. He would ask that other new boy – Khan – if he could use some of his.

  ‘Help yourself, old boy, it’s in the bag.’

  So Malik had taken the tube from Khan’s sponge bag – a rather smart satiny Pan Am one – applied some paste to his brush and begun scrubbing the old fangs. Hmm, strange toothpaste – not minty. He continued to scrub. Feels funny too – not foamy, greasy. The next moment Mr Malik was leaning over the basin, his mouth afire, spitting for all he was worth. Harry Khan, who had picked up the tube and identified it not as toothpaste but as the ointment he was currently applying three times a day between his toes to cure his athlete’s foot, was also doubled up over his basin, not in pain but in mirth. Which attracted all the other boys and the hilarity became general. Which attracted Matron, who dragged poor Malik off to the surgery for a mouthwash with surgical spirit and a stiff precautionary dose of ipecacuanha.

  Now, did Harry Khan know or didn’t he? He swore to Matron he didn’t, and to House. But it hardly mattered, because all the boys assumed he did and thought it a great wheeze.

  Then there was the house cricket match. Though Mr Malik had always been very fond of cricket, he couldn’t play for toffee. He just didn’t seem to be built for it. As he had admitted to Khan, a cricket bat in his hands became a thing with a life of its own, a life dedicated to missing the ball, hitting the stumps or hitting himself. When Mr Malik threw a ball, he had already come to realize, he threw like a girl. If he had a favourite position on the cricket field it was sitting on the pavilion steps with the scorebook on his knees. He was good at that. All those neat and tidy pale blue lines, those dots for runs and nice little symbols for ‘bye’ and ‘wide’ and ‘not out’. So he was most surprised three weeks into term to find his name up on the board for the house cricket match as player. After two days of agonizing, he finally plucked up courage to question the house captain on his selection.

  Ah yes, heard all about you, Malik. Top scorer at your prep school, I hear. Glad to have you on board.’

  ‘No, House, I…’

  ‘Come now, Malik, no need for false modesty. Khan told me all about you. Just what we need.’

  ‘But I…’

  ‘Look, don’t worry, old chap. I’m sure we’re all a bit out of form after the hols. Just turn up in the nets tomorrow after prep and we’ll see what you’re made of.’

  The house captain, he wished to assure Malik the following afternoon after practice, was not angry. He was not angry, he was just very, very disappointed. There was only one way to become a good cricketer, Malik, and that was not by boasting, or lying, or pretending. It was by application. But he was really not angry, and he wanted Malik to treat his one week’s double detentions not as a punishment but as a lesson. He would do that, wouldn’t he? Malik agreed that he would. On consideration he thought it best not to ask if he might be scorer for the match.

  And lastly, there was his nickname. One of the things that Harry Khan was very good at was making up nicknames. He hadn’t been at school a term before all the teachers had acquired new nicknames, names which were clever and which stuck. The headmaster Mr Gopal, previously known to both teachers and boys as simply H.M., became The Gop – which was particularly funny if you understood Swahili.

  Prakesh Kahdka, who since his infancy had been tall and skinny and known as Stork, became transmuted by Harry Khan into The Stalker, and it became a silly game to run off when he appeared, shouting ‘Cheese it – The Stalker’, which rather upset poor Prakesh as he was a harmless and friendly soul. As for Mr Malik, he found himself referred to as Jack.

  Now you might think that Jack is a harmless enough nickname. It rolls off the tongue easily enough, and has no obvious link or even rhyme with other words comical or scatological. Even to fluent speakers of Swahili it appears to have no concealed meaning. But it had, and over those long school years Mr Malik grew to hate his nickname and no small part of the pleasure of leaving school to go away to university in London was being able to leave the name behind. When he returned to Kenya two years later he was relieved to find that not only had Harry Khan left Nairobi, the hated nickname seemed to have left with him.

  Now Harry Khan was back.

  5

  ‘Hey, Malik, it is you. Long time no see. Lo-o-ong time no see.’

  Mr Malik, unsure of what else to do, smiled.

  ‘Hey, I should have guessed – still last in the race. Don’t tell me, you took the scenic route?’

  Mr Malik’s route to the MEATI had been anything but scenic. An overturned matatu on the Langata Road had seen to that.

  Harry turned back to the tourists.

  ‘Was Harry right, guys, or was Harry right? Valley Road, way to go. But hey, Malik – you missed a good one.’

  ‘What was it again, Harry?’ said one of the tourists, the one with the beard.

  ‘What was it, Rose?’ said Harry.

  Rose Mbikwa turned towards them. ‘A red bishop, Mr Malik’, she said in the accent he so loved. The way she lightly rolled the ‘r’ in ‘red’ made him shiver from top to toe. A male. Magnificent. I’m sorry you missed it.’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Harry, ‘it was a beauty.’

  Again, Mr Malik smiled. He had long wanted to see the small finch of improbable colo
ur called a red bishop. Ah well, not this time. But at least Harry Khan seemed to have forgotten about ‘Jack’.

  The Modern East African Tourist Inn – universally known as the MEATI – is well known in Nairobi as the place to go to sample local fauna. Where else in Africa – where in the world? – can you see ten species of game roaming wild in an afternoon and eat parts of them that very night? Giraffe, zebra, two or three kinds of antelope, wildebeest, buffalo, crocodile, ostrich, guinea fowl, black duck, they’re all on the menu. You won’t see many locals eating there. Though most Kenyans love meat few can afford US$60 for just one dinner, and anyway bush food is rather looked down on. Chicken, goat and beef, that’s the stuff. Anyone will tell you where to find the MEATI, though, out on Ngong Road just past the old aerodrome.

  But the twenty or thirty people gathered outside this tourist restaurant on the edge of the city were not there for the food. They were there because this is one of those transition areas between forest and plains that birds seem to love. The few derelict acres between the restaurant and the barracks of the 1st/2nd Battalion Kenyan Rifle Brigade that lie just down the road have been fenced around with varying degrees of commitment and over the years much rubbish has been dumped there. Not only that but large holes, usually full of water, show where something else has been removed – murram, or clay perhaps. Most of the area is covered with weedy grass and acacias, though a dozen or so bigger trees have somehow survived the axes of the firewood gatherers. The site is on a slight rise and while it is true that if you look south you will see the grassy plains of Nairobi National Park, look north and you have a magnificent view over the Kibera slums. So, not exactly tourist brochure stuff. Rose Mbikwa’s voice again cut through the several conversations that had already started up among the group.

  ‘Ah yes. Thank you, Matthew. Soaring above us you have probably all seen the pair of augur buzzards – and as you can see one is the light phase and one the dark phase. And my goodness, is that a blue-headed sunbird?’