Amriika (38 page)

“The exorcist was my father and the groom was my uncle,” Darcy said, speaking in the apartment of Rumina and Ramji, where he’d come to spend his Sunday afternoon.

Darcy had called up Rumina during the week and suggested the invitation. “We can talk about the past, and listen to music from Zanzibar, and I can get to know you and your man better. Just make sure you have a bottle of scotch handy, I’ll pay for it of course.” And she, devoted to him, sensing his lonely call, said that, of course, he was most welcome to visit them.

Naaz and Naseem brought him over. The two women were on their way to the Golden Club’s practice for the Friendship Walk, which had been organized in aid of international relief and also to give a positive image of the Community to the media. A man from the
L.A. Times
had promised to show up today and Naaz as the Community spokesperson was excited and all dressed up for the interview, in designer sweats, a thick girlish hairband over the head and a gold bangle on one wrist for good measure. The Golden Club members were fifty-five and over, and Naseem was their volunteer chaperone and trainer though, as she reiterated, “I still have a ways to get there.” Naaz, in her early forties, had an even longer way to reach the Club age.

As soon as the two women left, Darcy nodded to Ramji, who brought out the scotch. And the old man, clearing his throat after a sip of the lubricant, began his prologue. Ramji and Rumina sat in rapt attention in front of him, thrilled at the privilege of hearing his confidences.

“I know the story — or rather, I’ve heard it told — though not the part about the man being homosexual,” Ramji said.

Darcy nodded, saying, “Spoils our good image of ourselves to talk about homosexuality. We considered it evil or laughable — still do, sometimes.” He threw a meaningful look towards the outside
door in case Naaz and Naseem had stopped there on their way out, to eavesdrop.

Darcy was born in Bombay, he said, and brought to Zanzibar as an infant. His family were missionary traders, servicing the Indian Ocean from Calicut to Zanzibar throughout the nineteenth century, perhaps even earlier. His father Sherali, however, decided to settle in Zanzibar. He was a clove and cashew merchant and a renowned exorcist.

As a young man, Darcy moved to Dar es Salaam, on the mainland, just prior to the Second World War. There he acted as his father’s agent and became a respected preacher.

Did he also exorcise ghosts, they asked. He looked distant, didn’t give an answer. Perhaps it should have been obvious; it wasn’t, quite.

He said instead, “Our people were backward. Religion and superstition were the same for them. There was no recourse to philosophy. Only magic and miracles. And blind worship. And the sins of poverty — envy and backbiting and inbreeding and intolerance. Any criticism of the Community and there would be a full-scale riot. I’m afraid I was no different — at first.”

There was a group of educated Indians in town who used to meet and discuss independence for India. What he heard about their arguments attracted him, and he joined the group. It was low-key; this was after all wartime, and there was concern about government spies; Gandhi and Nehru were in jail in India and Jinnah had formed the Muslim League. Immediately after the war, Darcy went to London to study law. But he returned a few years later, before he could get admitted to the bar.

Why? He didn’t say. Those must have been exciting times, Ramji imagined, picturing a young Darcy railing against British
imperialism at Hyde Park Corner every Sunday. What colour suit did he wear then? And whence the name “Darcy”? Was there such a name in the tradition? Darcy was not one to tell all, to share the intimate secrets. It was impossible to imagine him insecure, afraid, though he must have faced his share of snubs by the whites in Africa. Perhaps in England he thought he could get away with his fair skin if he changed his name. Who would admit to such a weakness?

Ramji discreetly picked up the bottle of scotch and went to the kitchen to make tea. Naseem, flushed from the walk and in high spirits herself, soon came to fetch Darcy. Naaz had gone home disappointed. The
Times
reporter had stood her up.

“So the spin doctor was disappointed,” said Darcy. He chuckled. “Has she tried
Time
or
Newsweek
?”

“I wouldn’t say that in front of her if I were you.”

“I won’t. So how was your day?”

They left after the tea.

The man had been independent and forbidding once, had defied the highest authorities in his former country; in California, his former arrogance now seemed oddly to wilt under the various onslaughts from three women: Leila, his darling granddaughter, taller than him by almost a head, her hand placed patronizingly on his stiffened back (a gesture no one else could get away with); the small and compact Naseem, his over-diligent minder in sweatsuit and sneakers; the roundly sensual and scented Naaz, bullying, cajoling, confronting, making no bones of the fact that
his cause was bunk and he was past it, even as his stature drew her respect and attention. Seeing him thus, taken over or besieged, you couldn’t help feeling sorry for him: there is no getting past growing old, and dependent.

Rumina would graciously withdraw (or be nudged aside, as Ramji observed), whenever the three women approached Darcy in her presence, and watch sometimes with that dimpled smile she carried when she was with him. To them she simply didn’t belong, wasn’t community, family, or even race.

Darcy adored her and grew attached to her and Ramji’s company, spending many pleasant hours in their living room or sitting with them for coffee somewhere. Among them there were things to talk about, to remember. Darcy was their past, a rich source of history, and there was a wholesomeness to sitting before him and listening to his stories. He could recall Ramji’s parents: father a civil servant, mother a secretary who wore short hair and dresses, a typical Westernizing couple of their period. But he had not known them well, had never spoken to them, his preoccupations had been elsewhere. Darcy admitted once that Kulsa Bai’s — that is, Ramji’s grandmother’s — spells seemed to have worked on his back problem, despite his scepticism. He also remembered a press conference given by Rumina’s father Sheikh Abdala, remembered shaking hands with her mother Elena at a reception at the Soviet embassy in Dar.

Sometimes Darcy would fall silent, as when Ramji (sounding rather like a schoolboy) told him how he had held him in awe ever since he heard of the British governor putting him in prison.

Rumina jumped in: “Look — you’ve embarrassed Mr. Darcy.”

And Darcy said, musingly, “We’re all too human.”

How human? Too human, Ramji would tell himself much later, only I was unwilling to concede him his humanity; I, who had never completely grown up, needed a hero.

One Friday evening the three of them sat on a bench outside the Company offices and watched Naseem’s Golden Club come out from evening prayers and do one of their practice walks. Naseem marched in front holding a luminous baton in one hand, the gang of seniors straggling behind valiantly in a group, each wielding a baton of his own. Naaz, in an attractive green sari, traipsed after the seniors clicking away with her camera. Then she came over, in a cloud of exotic perfume, and spying an opening between Ramji and Rumina, squeezed into it, all warm flesh and silk. A very deliberate move, calculated to annoy, if not hurt, Rumina.

“So, you are finding out everything about the Darcy history — which is more than I am privileged to hear, let me tell you,” she said to Ramji, pouting.

“Well —” Ramji said, but the old man cut in.

“Not that you’ve ever shown any interest, my dear.”

“But I
am
interested, Bapa. I am married into the Darcy family, your history is
my
history, and the children are
entitled
to know of their background. Just tone down the politics —”

“I
am
my politics.”

“And see where that’s got you? This is no longer your silly sixties — it’s the nineties. Your politics could have cost us our citizenship; and it gives the Community a bad name — do you know how much effort we are putting into creating a good solid image in this country?”

Naseem came over, having led her cohorts five times round the parking lot, and Naaz said, All right, let’s go, and they all drove to Darcy’s place. Once a month, on Fridays, the Darcy family met to
spend an evening together, and today was that Friday. Leila was to come by later to show a video clip she had produced for a project on Muslim women; her brother Hanif would come with her; and Amir was away at a convention. Darcy sat on the broadloomed floor of his living room, leaning back on a bolster, as he railed against the free market and the
IMF
, the root source of the corruption in the country he had left behind. Naaz meanwhile went out and returned with an open bottle of red wine. “Isn’t it a good thing you’re out of it all now,” she said to her father-in-law and flashed a conspiratorial look at the others.

Naaz had trained as a pediatrician in Vancouver, but had given up her career to run a lavish household and devote herself to the Community and her children. She would have liked nothing better than to knock the old man off his pedestal. And at times, when she had him in her presence, it almost seemed that she had succeeded.

Amir and Naaz believed that due to his politics, Darcy not only endangered his life (he had been beaten up twice in his career, the second time not long ago after he wrote an exposé on the business practices of a local consortium), but also risked not being allowed to come to the United States (he published a story that offended the U.S. embassy). The story that offended the American embassy concerned the so-called Pork Riots.

In a suburb of Dar es Salaam a Christian butcher gave a piece of pork, apparently out of mischief, to a Muslim boy who had been sent by his mother to buy some beef. Within the hour, in the ensuing riots, the butcher’s shop was burnt down. A demonstration was organized the next day in the city against the sale of pork, during which some very suspicious-looking young men were
sighted. They looked foreign. You could tell foreigners by their clothes, and their walk. There is a typical Dar es Salaam walk, a lazy amble, and these men didn’t have it. Their clothes had designer labels. They were fair-skinned and dark-haired, some of them had beards. Middle Eastern money had been pouring into mosques in recent years; religious animosities, Muslim and Christian fundamentalism, Canadian and American quacks with miraculous healing powers, had all been on the increase on the local scene. The young men in the demonstration were reported by some media to be Iranians. But Darcy produced a report claiming that two of the young men had been interviewed in his presence, enticed upstairs to his office by his two female assistants, and had boasted of having come from the United States. He concluded that they had to be American-hired agitators.

The American embassy protested; and a local man gave an interview in which he said that all the
gasia
, the palaver, was about nothing, his nephew who lived in America had simply brought over the Iranian boys as his guests to the country. The story sounded fishy, the man was not available for further interviews, and so Darcy’s paper, the
Clarion
, did not retract its version. Its editor and proprietor, however, was a little apprehensive. His visa application to go and visit his grandchildren was pending at the American embassy.

But the Americans did not make life difficult for him. The visa arrived without delay, perhaps was even hastened. He had applied for a resident permit, a green card — so he could begin to spend long periods with his family. On the day he went to pick it up (he said he felt like an outlaw in the castle of the Sheriff of Nottingham), he was invited to meet the cultural attaché, Darlene Blake, a heavily madeup elderly woman. In the course of this interview, Mrs. Blake,
treating him with a deference that accorded with his age and status, gave him a short list of addresses of foundations and people who might help him put his media experience and activism to use in the service of the immigrant community in the States. He was not unappreciated, her manner told him; and there were more sides to America than he might have realized. It occurred to him, though, that the addresses had possibly been given to him to keep him out of trouble, perhaps even for his own good.

In Los Angeles, of all places, in his son’s home, he found himself in the midst of the Community, which he had shunned in the past because of its narrow-mindedness and backwardness. His daughter-in-law’s false piety repulsed him, her interest in the Third World was a public-relations gimmick. In his new home in affluent Brentwood he was irritable and unhappy, at a loss for what to do.

This was when he discovered the newsmagazine
Inqalab
and became friendly with its editors, Zayd and Basu. It was, despite its limitations, tailor-made for him. With his experience and abilities, what could he not do with it! What he needed was a sponsor, to help him get the paper out of its financial hole and put him in charge.