A Guide to the Birds of East Africa Page 7

  Now, if only he could remember why they used to call old Malik ‘Jack’…

  15

  Among the other late breakfasters in the Hilton dining room Harry recognized David and George, whom you will remember as the Australian couple at Tuesday’s bird walk whose abundance of pockets had immediately identified them as tourists. To narrow their identification still further, David and George (the one with the beard) were what are known in the travel trade as ecotourists. Not for them a luxury cruise around the Caribbean or a guided tour of the nine great medieval cities of Eastern Europe. On their holidays from their jobs in Sydney teaching the reluctant schoolchildren of Wooloomooloo High the language of Shakespeare, Dylan Thomas and Les Murray they preferred to spend their time and hard-earned money visiting Antarctica to see seals and penguins, the Galapagos Islands for tortoises and finches, or the high Andes for guanacos and condors. At the end of yet another twelve-week stretch they had come to Kenya not to laze by the warm Indian Ocean or visit the tea and coffee plantations of the hill country, but for the wildlife.

  For not without reason is Kenya safari capital of the world. If it is elephants, lions, rhinoceroses and hippos that you want to see, Kenya is the place to see them. The country is wildlife heaven and these days, thanks partly to Rose Mbikwa, there are whole hosts of people ready to help you enter its gates – hoteliers, game wardens, drivers, pilots and guides. David and George were themselves just back from a short safari to the Maasai Mara, where from a hot-air balloon they had witnessed the famed migration of a million wildebeest and zebra across the plains, and when out spotlighting at night had seen a pride of lions reduce that million by two – one of each. They hadn’t originally come for the birds but after their experience at the MEATI the previous Tuesday had become quite enthusiastic. It was to this subject that the breakfast conversation turned after Harry Khan joined them and told them about his own desire to begin some serious birdwatching.

  ‘We saw a hundred and eighty, and that was just in a few days,’ said George.

  ‘We wrote them down,’ said David, buttering his third croissant. ‘I was expecting the elephants and lions, but I hadn’t thought there would be so many birds.’

  ‘Mind you, our driver was pretty good at spotting them – right, Davo? Eyes like an eagle.’

  ‘Not too good on the names, but you can always look them up in the book.’

  ‘And we weren’t even looking for them, really, were we, Davo? Wonderful. I mean, it was the same with that walk we went on the other day with you, Harry. How many birds did we see then? Must have been forty, fifty species, just in a couple of hours.’

  ‘But it sounds like you’re on a bit of a tight schedule. How long did you say you’ve got?’

  ‘Seven days,’ said Harry. ‘Till next Saturday.’

  ‘Hang on a tick, Davo. We’re not flying back till…’

  ‘You mean why don’t we…?’

  ‘Great idea.’

  ‘Could be fun, I reckon.’

  ‘What do you say, Harry?’

  Harry was finding the conversation a little hard to follow.

  ‘I’m finding this conversation a little hard to follow, guys.’

  ‘What Davo means is, we’ve got another week here,’ said George.

  ‘Yeah. We could team up.’

  ‘Go places – find birds. Tsavo, Amboseli, maybe down to the coast. What do you say?’

  Harry smiled.

  ‘I say yes,’ he said.

  On the morning after the night of the bird wager we find Mr Malik in his usual place on the veranda of his house in Garden Lane, his morning Nescafé on the table before him, as Benjamin comes sweep-sweep-sweeping around the corner.

  I have not yet described the effect on Benjamin of the fart – sorry, hadada – count of two days before. By the end of that day Benjamin had become quite convinced that his boss was, as they say in this part of Africa, mad as an English. What could have been viewed at the start as a mere eccentricity – if Mr Malik wanted to count hadadas or any other bird he had every right to do so – soon manifested as a symptom of some deeper malady. It had taken Benjamin no more than six minutes to realize that the only hadadas that Mr Malik was counting existed within his own head (the fact that this was accompanied by a strange tendency to fart whenever he thought he heard one was probably, thought Benjamin, only of minor concern). But anyone with that many large brown birds aroost in his cranium and that much gas in his bottom was clearly not a well person. Probably harmless, but certainly not well. Benjamin could not help being reminded of the woman in the village where he grew up, who during an apparently normal conversation would start grasping invisible objects from the air and putting them in her apron. Perhaps he should speak to Mr Malik’s daughter about it. She had always seemed a friendly and sympathetic person.

  But compared to the fears and worries of Benjamin that morning, those of Mr Malik were as a toothache to a tickle. What, oh what, was he going to do? He hadn’t the faintest notion. And when three hours later he looked at his watch and realized that it was time to climb into the old Mercedes and head for the club for the start of the contest, still no idea – faint or otherwise – had come to him.

  For a Saturday morning the car park was unusually full. Mr Malik was surprised to see Harry Khan already at the bar – he hadn’t noticed a red convertible outside. Patel and A.B. were sitting at their usual table, keeping a respectable distance from the protagonist as befitted their positions as members of the Special Committee. Clothed in weekend casuals of startling vibrance, in swept the Tiger.

  If you have been to a boxing match or a cockfight you will have a good idea of the excitement buzzing through the club. When the hands of the old clock above the bar showed five minutes to twelve the Tiger stood up and called for silence. He reminded the audience of the serious yet magnificent nature of the undertaking now before these two respected members of the Asadi Club. Athens and Sparta, Rome and Carthage, David, Goliath and Winston Churchill were each called upon to give support to his case. Indeed so carried away was the Tiger by his own eloquence that he appeared not to notice the time. But no matter. Sanjay Bashu had borrowed a starting pistol from somewhere and as the minute hand reached the top of the clock, he took it from his pocket. Pointing the muzzle ceilingward, he pulled the trigger. Nothing happened, but the resulting cheer was the signal for Harry Khan to give a wide wave to the assembled crowd and head for the car park where a Nissan safari bus was now revving its engine, driver at the wheel. George and David pulled Harry into the vehicle and slammed shut the door. With a screech of tyres and to the cheers of the crowd now assembled on the front steps of the club, the bus took off towards whichever secret Mecca of birdlife had been chosen for that afternoon’s birdspotting. It was at that moment that Sanjay Bashu discovered the safety catch on the starting pistol and again pulled the trigger. The bang of the pistol echoed off the walls of the Asadi Club like the report of an elephant gun, followed by a cacophony of flaps and screeches from a tall maru tree in the corner of the car park.

  ‘Hadadas,’ yelled out Mr Patel, dissolving into such a fit of giggles that he had to be helped back up the steps by A. B. Gopez and into the bar.

  16

  Sitting on his veranda that afternoon back at Number 12 Garden Lane, Mr Malik turned to a fresh page of his notebook. He paused, listened and looked up into the croton trees at the end of the garden.

  ‘Day 1,’ he wrote. And underneath, ‘Hadada.’

  He should never have told the chaps at the club about the hadada thing – especially Patel. With a sigh he put down the pad and pencil. So many things he should never have done. He should never have issued the challenge, he should never have told them about Rose Mbikwa, he should never have written her that invitation. His sigh became a groan. He should never have been born.

  A pied crow hopped noisily across the roof and glided down on to the lawn, landing with its customary caw and shuffle of wings. He stared at it for several seconds, then picked up
the pad and pencil once more. From the bougainvillea opposite a pair of mousebirds emerged, fluttered across to an ornamental fig and began chasing each other among the branches, looking not like mice exactly but distinctly un-birdlike. But you could see a mousebird more or less anywhere. Who knows what ornithological wonders were being recorded by Harry Khan, wherever he was? Eagles, ostriches, secretary birds? Mr Malik wrote down ‘Pied crow’ and ‘Speckled mousebird’ and got to his feet. If he was going to sit here all afternoon, he supposed he may as well get his binoculars. Who knows, he might spot a sparrow.

  Harry Khan had not in fact seen a secretary bird, an eagle, nor even an ostrich. At the very moment that Mr Malik was going into his house at Number 12 Garden Lane to fetch his Bausch & Lombs, Harry Khan was sitting in the front of the Nissan safari bus just past the football stadium on the Limuru Road in a traffic jam. In the excitement of the morning he had failed to tune into 2KJ for the traffic report, and therefore failed to learn that the President was arriving back that very afternoon from his overseas trip. Roads were closed, traffic was being diverted; the result was gridlock. Even the matatus, those overcrowded minibuses whose drivers’ ability to move through traffic is generally accepted to owe more to witchcraft than the laws of physics, were immobile.

  In the Nissan, George and David were trying to make the best of it. They had already pointed out to Harry several crows and pigeons, and thought that they’d seen a marabou stork flying high overhead but couldn’t be absolutely sure. After an hour of going nowhere Harry decided he’d had enough birdwatching for one day. They were not yet too far out of town for him to walk back to the Hilton – he could still see the tall hotel on the skyline behind them. At that moment a shower and a cool drink were more important than an early lead. Leaving a sweating driver and a still optimistic David and George – ‘It’s bound to sort itself out soon, Harry – right, Davo?’ – to fend for themselves, he set off on foot back to the hotel.

  Night falls quickly in Nairobi. Only one degree south of the equator, at six o’clock it is full daylight, at six thirty pitch black. Mr Malik arrived at the club just as the outside lights were turned on, which is to say at six fifteen on the dot. In his hand was the notebook containing the birds he had seen that afternoon, the whole of which he had spent in his garden. Patel began transcribing their names on to a piece of foolscap paper. ‘Hadada (stifled giggle), pied crow, mousebird…’ The Tiger arrived soon after, followed shortly by Harry Khan, looking relaxed and refreshed. Though his walk back to the hotel had not been pleasant (walking anywhere in the city seldom is), he had managed to fit in a shower, a swim, a snooze and a drink before driving over to the club. He too passed a notebook to Patel, who looked at it with some surprise but said nothing. At ten to seven the Tiger called for hush in the bar.

  ‘Firstly gentlemen, may I say how pleased we are to see you both here – dimidium facti qui coepit habet and all that. And I must ask you, according to the rules of the competition, whether there are any points that either of you wishes to raise with the Committee.’

  Mr Malik shook his head and turned towards the newest member.

  ‘Yes,’ said Harry Khan. ‘Would any of you care to join me for a beer?’

  There was much laughter and several other members volunteered to join the Special Committee then and there.

  ‘Mr Patel,’ called out the Tiger. ‘Do you have the results for the first day?’

  Patel held up a hand while he checked through each list.

  ‘I have,’ he said. ‘Malik, thirty-one. Khan… three.’

  There was a stunned silence.

  ‘Did you say three, Mr Patel?’

  Patel read from the list. ‘Crow, pigeon, kite – that is all, though there is no indication of what kind of crow, pigeon and kite and I seem to remember that according to the checklist there are several of each.’

  ‘No doubt those would be pied crow, feral pigeon and black kite,’ murmured Mr Malik to the Tiger, who nodded.

  Harry Khan began a rueful explanation of how he had planned to spend the afternoon in Nairobi National Park but got caught up in the traffic, and even made his failure to check up on the movements of ‘El Presidente’ and his forced walk back to the hotel sound quite amusing. So everyone felt very sorry for him and ended up buying him drinks instead of the other way round. Mr Malik went to sit down at his usual table.

  ‘Shame about poor old Khan,’ said Patel, ‘but you didn’t do too badly, Malik. Not badly at all. Keep that up and you’ll be in with a chance – wouldn’t you say, A.B.?’

  ‘Won’t happen,’ said Mr Gopez. ‘Stands to reason. You’re bound to see all the common ones early on, then new ones’ll get scarcer and scarcer. Law of diminishing returns.’

  ‘Is that right, Malik?’ said Patel. ‘What do you say?’

  Mr Malik had in fact been giving this matter, and others, much thought. The afternoon’s tally had surprised him. He’d sat in the garden before, of course, and he’d noticed birds there, but never so many. Why was this, he wondered? He had seen birds that afternoon that he had never seen in the garden before – a common drongo perched on the telephone wire for instance, and a grey woodpecker flying from tree to tree. Not all of the birds stopped in the garden, of course, but it was amazing how many had flown over close enough to be identified – black kites and needle-tailed swifts and red-rumped swallows – even a pied cormorant flying high but quite recognizable, on its way from goodness knows where to goodness knows where else. Thirty-one different species, about five an hour – not bad for an afternoon’s work. At that rate if he just sat in the garden all day for the next week he would see almost half the country’s avifauna. But there was a simple flaw in this argument, and Mr Malik had spotted it long before A. B. Gopez. In one afternoon he may well have seen most of the local birds he was ever likely to see. If he wanted to capitalize on his early lead, he would have to go further afield than the walls and hedges of Number 12 Garden Lane. Which, given the nature of his commitments, would not be easy.

  ‘Commitments?’ I hear you say. ‘What commitments?’ Have I not already let it be known that Mr Malik is now in semi-retirement? Have I not explained that most of the day-to-day running of the Jolly Man Manufacturing Company is now undertaken by Mr Malik’s able but still-single daughter Petula? So what commitments are these that could prevent Mr Malik spending each and all of the six and a half days remaining out and about, here and there, up hill and down dale, in pursuit of as many different species of Kenyan birds as he could find and hence into the arms of the woman of his dreams in the ballroom of the Suffolk Hotel? Well, there is charity work – that takes up a surprising amount of time. But there is something else, something that Mr Malik has been doing every Tuesday afternoon after the bird walk for the last two and a half years. There is nothing else for it.

  I will now have to reveal another of Mr Malik’s secrets.

  17

  Think back to your first visit to the Asadi Club. You will remember that as Mr Malik enters, Mr Patel and A. B. Gopez are seated at their usual table. Mr Gopez is reading the Evening News and becoming more apoplectic by the moment. We discover that what is raising his blood pressure is not the leader, not the latest news from Buckingham Palace nor something in ‘Birds of a Feather’ but a small story about Danish research into – well, you remember the rest.

  But wait, what exactly is this ‘Birds of a Feather’? It is a weekly column, apparently about the birds and beasts of Kenya, that appears every Wednesday on page seven of the Nairobi Evening News. It is not really a nature column, though. It is about politics – or to be more exact, politicians.

  If you want the inside information on what the elected members are up to, the stories behind the stories, the good oil, this is where you find them. It is where the scandals break, the deals are revealed, the curtains (and sometimes sheets) are lifted. In the tradition of such pieces, the byline is a pen-name – in this case ‘Dadukwa’, which those with a knowledge of African mythology will recog
nize as the name of the black eagle who, seeing all but never seen, spreads the news among the other animals. No one knows the identity of the brave journalist (or politician, or civil servant perhaps?) who shelters behind this pseudonym. The copy, hand typed and anonymous, is delivered to the offices of the Nairobi Evening News every Wednesday morning by first post. It has been arriving every Wednesday for the last two and a half years, and is the reason that an extra fifteen thousand copies of the News are printed that day, for that is how popular it has become.

  But surely a responsible newspaper editor should know the identity of all the writers he publishes? What happened was this. Nearly three years ago the editor of the Evening News received in the mail a short typed note.

  ‘You have no natural history column,’ it said. ‘Would you like me to write you one?’

  The note was signed with an illegible scrawl above a typed name, Mr Dadukwa. The address was a post office box at Nairobi GPO. The editor thought for a bit then dictated a reply to his secretary to the effect that although a column of this sort might be suitable for the Evening News he regretted that – what with union rules, publisher’s regulations and printing overheads – no payment was possible for such material. The following Wednesday’s mail contained another typewritten letter, together with a short piece about the birds that might be seen in and around the National Arboretum. It was headed ‘Birds of a Feather’. The piece seemed innocuous and well enough written. The editor passed it over to the chief sub and thought no more about it.

  The column was published and the next week the editor received a description of the elephants that used to be found in Nairobi National Park and he printed that too. And so it went. Every Wednesday morning the copy would arrive in the mail – about elephants or baboons or vultures or whatever it was - and the editor would glance at it, pass it to the chief sub and it would be printed in that afternoon’s paper. This is after all what every editor dreams of, regular free copy. Some day he would perhaps meet this Mr Dadukwa, but he was in no hurry to do so.