Ode to Lata (14 page)

I knew that even the infomercials hadn’t promised such results in a month.  This was my mother’s personal endorsement.

“Can you please just charge this for me?  I promise I’ll give you the money.  I’m not running away!”

“Look, I don’t care about that, okay?  You just shouldn’t believe all those things on TV.” 

“There was even a doctor they interviewed!  Are you saying that he’s lying?”

“Okay, fine.  Good luck losing all your fat.”

She sighed as I walked away from her and into my bedroom.  Was she sighing at my cynicism or my impatience with her?  Maybe both. 
What the hell? I’ll just get the damn fat-loss pills for her.

“I’ll call them tomorrow,” I lobbed from my room.  “You get the phone number?” But she had already moved on to greener pastures.  “Oh, and Ali, do you know about this Super Thaw plate?  It can thaw everything in seconds!”

SIBLING RIVALRY

When thinking of home, it is the North Coast of Mombasa, known as Bamburi Beach, that I crave the most. I can still see the Indian Ocean from the place where I often wiggled my feet into the warm beach sand.  Sometimes, when dismayed by a smear of tar on my heels from Santa Monica’s polluted Will Rogers Beach, I think of the endless miles of that beach I have forsaken; the sprinkling of fishermen mending nets and towing in dawn’s fresh catch from their dhows (instead of the beer guzzling, cell-phone-and-Powerbook-clad denizens of this beach); her clear waters that gave the impression I was looking through a pane of glass; laughing to myself because I thought the beach looked like a plush carpet of cocaine that I should fall to my knees and snort.

These are the things I missed most about home.  People, I somehow find a way to replace over time.  But I could never efface the smells, the sights, the sounds.  Familiar little secrets that the land whispered to me.  Expressions on the face of a land that remain hidden from outsiders, like that infernal traffic of foreigners who are met with only gratitude for gracing the country with their precious foreign exchange.  They were always welcome because they were good for the economy – third-world countries could not afford the luxury of being spiteful to foreigners.

We were grateful to them.  At least on the surface we were.  We made great efforts to show them this.  Those
dhorias
who danced awkwardly to African pop and Hindi film songs performed by the live bands at the beach hotels; coated in suntan lotions to bake themselves dark, so they could look more like the very races they had taken such pleasure extorting and condescending to.  They had forgotten that the natives had achieved
uhuru
.  But then, so had the natives frantically darting to serve another tropical cocktail or supply a fresh towel in their starched white uniforms, completely overlooking patrons that weren’t white.  Ah, but the foreign exchange was needed to boost our perpetually dwindling economy, so we consoled ourselves.  Smiled.  Displayed our dazzling white teeth and swallowed our pride. 
Yes,
bwana.
Of course,
bwana.
  Anything you need,
bwana. All teeth and eyeballs.

 
In the mind, there was this dialogue:
These
mzungus,
they are all
unbwas!
  Barking all the time for more of this and more of that the moment they land on foreign soil.  And what the hell do they do in their own country, eh? 
Hunh!
  Clean toilets, I tell you!  They save up all through the year and then they come down here with their pounds and dollars, and they boss us around like they are royalty! 
Pumbafus!
  Well, let them crouch and admire the
Makonde
carvings of ebony and mahogany and rosewood.  And let them buy these souvenirs right along with the beads and
kitenges
and charms and try to absorb some fragment of a true culture.  Must be quite enriching after making do with McDonald’s and a national sport to constitute a culture.  Let them take their pictures of us with their telephoto cameras, which they will no doubt be wheedled into bartering for more of our abundant artifacts.  Throw your arms around them and let them do the same, beautiful native.  See how hard they try to inosculate so that they can take the pictures back as proof of their authentic African vacation?  To boast to their fellow toilet-cleaner friends?  Why, they have tanned to such a crisp, you can barely even tell they are
mzungus
anymore!  And what about their eyes?  Eyes like the devil!  And that hair! No, they cannot hide that.  That’s a tough one.  But wait a minute.  There is something that can be done!  Braid the hair!  So many of them have been known to sit for hours to have their hair braided with beads and cowrie shells. 
Hunh!
  Do they realize how ridiculous their enthusiasm for the cultures they claim to have saved from paganism and ignorance makes them seem?  They seem to have an inclination for everything we have to offer.  Even sex with the locals.  Please, don’t act shocked now! Surely you’ve heard of the sex safaris?  They come down with their hard earned money and mileage-accrued tickets, and if they have an appetite that stretches beyond the scenery, food, souvenirs and local pot, they can even sample the sex with local African beauties.  We need the money, you see.  More importantly, we know our place.  When you get back, between scrubbing the bowls and waiting tables, you can show everybody the pictures.  You danced with the native. You ate with the native.  And you ate of the native.  And for so little money. Such a bargain.  Everybody loves a bargain.   

You must take a trip to Africa, white man.  There they haven’t discovered what trash you are.  Like babies learning how to walk, they appear unsteady with their independence.  They will cater to your every need.  And you can bark at them like the dog you are when they are slovenly. There, in Africa, where they still think you’re
Mungu,
where they still think you’re God.  
 

That same summer I said goodbye to my grandfather, we rented a beach cottage in Bamburi.  We planned a barbeque.  We called our weekend a “
vashiah manzil
,” the destination of prostitutes.  We invited friends who we suspected were like us.  Part of the agenda for the evening included a
mujrah
, a traditional dance of Indian courtesans, by Sunjay.  As soon as he finished performing in rented traditional garb, accentuated with befitting jewelry and
ghungroos
, Sunjay disappeared behind the kitchen door and emerged again to Indian cabaret music, wearing black lace panties and bra under a sequined pink dress for a bonus striptease.  He had been transformed from Sunjay to Rekha and then from Rekha to film vixen Helen in the course of thirty minutes.  Everyone was infected by his performance.  Soon everyone was taking turns dressing up and performing with an almost competitive spirit.  We all laughed so hard at moments that we cried.  Akil drank so much, danced wildly in a clumsily wrapped white bed sheet and his clownish makeup, fell back and started to cry in the back room.  Once I had brushed his hair and asked him what was the matter, he shook his head and through globs of makeup, replied, “I’m just so happy.  And I know I’ll never be this happy again.  I’ll never be this free again… ”

Life was going to change for Akil.  Responsibilities and expectations had crept up and were knocking on his door.  Marriage, I knew, was being imposed on him.  Some Bohora girl from Kisumu or somewhere.  The glass factory, which had been in his family for generations, was now awaiting his leadership.  What could I say to him?  I said, “Why don’t you just leave this place and come with me?”

He wiped his tears with the back of his hand, smearing kohl across his rosy cheek and smiled at me.  I must have sounded completely naive because I felt that he had looked up at me like a mother might at the child that tries to console her after a grown-up squabble.  “You know, I’m so happy that you got away from all this,” he said.  “You always knew what you wanted,
ney?”

I lay my head down upon his, while Sunjay could be heard in the other room encouraging the others to throw money at him, promising that he would return it right after his dance number.

But at that moment, I tried to concentrate on Akil and held his hand in mine.  “Akil, you can do the same. 
Tun mari waat sambhar
, you have the same choices, you know?”  

But Akil had chosen instead, like everyone else there that night, to just continue with the suspension of time, and to hope that the night would not see the light of day. 

One of our guests that evening was Fareed, Nawaz’s younger brother.  Although we had never spoken much before, I remembered him mostly as the athletic kid brother Nawaz and I avoided when getting together at his place.  From the little we had communicated, I knew him to be a generally soft-spoken, kind and very gentle being – the virtual antithesis of his brother.

We had once found ourselves in a group of mutual friends who had converged after the evening prayers outside the mosque library.  After the group had dispersed, I escorted Fareed to Safiri’s
banda
, a kiosk for nocturnes where we sat around on crudely assembled wooden benches and chewed on
marungi
plant and Big G bubble gum.  I was delaying going home where gloom had descended upon my family because of my grandfather’s dilapidation and opted instead to shoot the breeze with my lover’s younger brother.

There, at Safiri’s
banda
, he had alluded to his knowledge of my sexuality and said rather sweetly,
“Bwana
, I don’t care what people say.  Just because people are a little different doesn’t make any difference to me, you know?”

So I had gone ahead and invited him to our beach retreat.  He came laden with bottles of local papaya wine and the
marungi
he had acquired a taste for from his late nights at the
banda
.  By the time he arrived, Akil had recovered from his depression and was barbequing the
mishkake
.  Sunjay, in his mischief, was refusing to return any of the money that had been dispensed on him, claiming “men always wanted it for free.”

Fareed and I snuck away to the beach where we drained out a bottle of wine.  Although we had pretended that we were only going for a walk, we both knew that sex was imminent.  It was like one of those things pending for years.

There in the dunes we found a shallow basin in the sand where we stripped and lay down.  The sand under my back itched and the lack of suspension for his grinding body made it doubly uncomfortable.  Fareed asked me if we could “do it.”  When I declined, he told me about the blowjobs he had been getting on a weekly basis from this thirteen-year-old boy in our community and how it was no problem because he was going to fuck him one of these days anyway.  I was aghast.

“You wouldn’t!  He’s only a child!” I objected.

“Hunh!
  Not in the way he sucks me.  You should see him begging for it,” he said, grunting.  “He
loves
it!  He
wants
it!”

I made no attempt to conceal the repulsion on my face.  It had been no different for me, I tried to rationalize in my mind.  I had been exactly thirteen when his brother had initiated me, when Nawaz had first taken my hand and guided it down between his legs.

Just then, as if he had read my mind, Fareed suddenly stopped moving, and looking me dead in the eye, said,  “You’ve been fucking my brother, haven’t you?”

I was confounded.  Trapped beneath him as he grabbed my face in his hand and forced me to look into his menacing face, I mumbled something incoherent, unsure of what he expected me to say and what my admission might evoke in him. 
Oh, God, help me.  What if he starts to get really violent or something?

“Haven’t you?” he demanded, his fingers digging into my cheeks.

“Fareed, please don’t,” I said, my hands pushing up against his chest.  “Don’t get this way… ”

Then, pinning me down with his weight, he clamped my mouth shut with one hand and tried to force himself inside me with the other.  I wriggled around on the sand like a fish abandoned by receding tide. But after the first minute or so, I stopped fighting him, not because I acknowledged his strength, but because I enjoyed his anger.  At the sign of capitulation, he removed his hand from my mouth and replaced it with his lips, mashing mine in a mass of flesh and teeth.

He had known all along.  Big brother.  Swimming champion.  Soccer star.  Bedding numerous women.  And at least one man.  Perhaps Fareed had even silently watched us fucking away during those long afternoons and kept it to himself all this time.  Watched his big brother and me in the bed of the servants.  In the bed of their parents.  In his bed.  Paralyzed.  Repulsed.  Aroused.  Now it was his turn.

When he was ready to come, Fareed pulled himself off me and just as unexpectedly, ran off into the ocean by himself.  I followed him in, wading through the icy water, wanting to fuse back into him.  Knee-deep in the ocean, he stopped and started to masturbate himself vigorously.  I watched his face contort – a mixture, I thought, of the anger in his heart and the approach of his climax.  And when he came, spurting forth over his hands like an excited child, he touched his head to my shoulder and called out God’s name.  And with the kind of tenderness I believed him to possess in moments other than this, I wiped his semen off our bodies with the salty ocean water.

HE’S BACK

I’m five again.  I sit on a chair, my feet dangling in the air, wearing a blue sailor suit.  We are at a coffeehouse on Kilindini Road.  Behind a counter that displaying an array of Indian sweetmeats, the Indian shop owner waves at me and uses baby talk to attract my attention.  I ignore him completely as I relish my way through a cube of
monthar
.  My father is seated across from me.  I bask only in the light of his gaze.  He is wearing a long sleeved white cotton shirt and dark pants, as always.  A stubble has greeted his handsome face and his dark hair is combed back.  He smokes a cigarette and barely eats.  His piece of
monthar
sits neglected after the first bite on a plate in front of him.  I see him smiling at me and watching me eat between his thoughts.  My mother is not with us because she is at work.  I miss her yet feel content in being alone with him.