The Gunny Sack (11 page)

“But he is so dark,” said little Zarina at Kulsum’s side. Yes, he was dark. Not the dark of charcoal, the mweusi of the African from the interior, the Hehe, the Ngoni, the Haya; or the light dark mweupe of the Chagga; or the red-dark of the half-naked Masai, his arse showing firm and proud as he walked; but the dark of the Indian, the persistent brown-dark of sedimented coffee that refuses to whiten with any amount of milk. My father Juma was wearing white trousers and a
white shirt in the European style when Kulsum first saw him, and he had on shiny brown leather shoes. His hair was glistening black and he sported a red scarf at the open shirt neck. “But he is smart,” said Kulsum, “and he is strong. He will pick you up and throw you away.”

It was 1938, and my father was thirty years old. He was, like his father Huseni many years before in Matamu, in the process of getting tamed.

Moti, the orphan bride, the fallen jewel of Matamu, my father’s mother: she had waited two years for her vanished husband Huseni, before marrying again and setting off to make family and fortune in Kenya. My father Juma was four years old and went with her. When she died in Voi a few years later, she was on her third marriage. Her husband packed off all her children—three daughters and Juma—to her sister, Awal, further up along the railway line in Nairobi and disappeared. Had Dhanji Govindji, who came looking for Huseni not long after, stuck around longer in Voi or even Mombasa, he might have traced his grandson Juma and perhaps taken him home; and the world would have been different.

Awal was the wife of Hassam Pirbhai, one of the pioneers who had left the Indian Community behind in Mombasa, packed closely in their shacks around the mosque in the narrow streets of Membeni and Kuze, and struck out in the wilderness in the wake of the railway, shopkeepers to their compatriot coolies, artisans, stationmasters and infantrymen, before finally making their homes in the new capital Nairobi. Now the firm of Hassam Pirbhai and Co Ltd, Pioneering Trading Company, the famous PTC, clothed the police and the King’s African Rifles, supplied safari needs from matches to tents, and exported ivory and hides. The two sons of Hassam Pirbhai walked tall and proud in town, in the company of—if not always equal to—the most influential men in Nairobi. The old man and his wife stayed with their own kind, the new rich incapable of shedding
their origins; he, shrewd and reticent, accepting homage from fawning relatives with the air of a gentle prince; she, haughty, humble only before God; the two of them driven around by a black chauffeur, from home to shop, to other homes, to mosque, and on Sundays along the avenues of Nairobi to the hills around it where new suburbs were springing up with their neat bungalows and pretty gardens and khakied servants.

Awal was the proverbial stepmother. Most stepmothers at the time, when children came in packs and often unwanted, were of that proverbial kind. Knowledge of Juma’s pedigree followed him to the capital. And so Juma, because even the big house was packed, and to avoid his associating with her sons, was given a room in the courtyard, next to the servants’ quarters and the outhouse. There he grew up, a second-class citizen, nothing more than a glorified servant; whom the family sent away on pretexts when important guests arrived; who never sat in the family car except with the chauffeur; who to earn money ran errands for Awal’s sons; who more often ate in the kitchen than at the table. When the boys went on safaris, Juma went with them to skin the deer and clean the meat; when the family went on picnics or the Muslim servant was absent, Juma was the slaughterer. My father would tell of how his cousins would play jokes on him. “Oh, he is only the driver,” they would say when a guest raised an enquiring eyebrow. “Oh, he is the cook.”

One afternoon when a Kikuyu vegetable-seller arrived, they told her: “Mama, your lost son is looking for you,” and directed her to Juma’s quarter, where he was taking a rest. And when the poor, innocent woman actually went, and saw an angry young man ready to throw her out, she said, “Oh, my unfortunate son, they are making fun of you!” From that time, whenever she came around she would greet him, “Ah, mwanangu, how are you?” She called herself, simply, Mary. And she attached herself to his life.

In Juma, his cousins thought they had the family sidekick, the cowering poor relative always dependent and always at
their service; but Juma was made of stronger stuff. By the time he was sixteen he had grown away from the family and had a life of his own unknown to them. When he was seventeen he committed a terrible crime, for which they made him reckon. But by that reckoning they admitted that their old ways with their poor relative were over. “In those days,” Kulsum would say, “they gave terrible punishments to their sons.” But what did he do? “Oh, something.” As if it were nothing; but then why the terrible punishment?

Outside the family, information flows freely. One day in mosque, Hassam Pirbhai presiding, the congregation standing up for prayer—“Oh Lord, grant us increase in our progeny”—when, houuuk! a loud hiccup from Juma, and those around him stir uncomfortably. “Oh Lord, Oh Merciful Giver, grant us increase in our earnings.” Again, houuuk! This time there are giggles from the children’s section and muffled grunts elsewhere, and one or two young men walk out grinding their teeth in agonies of controlled laughter. Meanwhile, looks like light-beams have gone back and forth, from Awal to Juma, from Awal to her sons, from the sons to the attendants manning the pillars. “Oh Merciful and Kind Lord grant us increase in our lives.” And houuuuk-uk! as two attendants converge on the drunk Juma and escort him outside.

At home, when the hearing was over, he was handed over for punishment to the dreaded Raju Master. It was only fitting that when the crime was against God, the man who had taught him, or tried to teach him, religion should punish him. Juma was hanged by his feet at a doorway and whipped with a cane. The family watched, the two stepbrothers urging the master on, the women to keep pity or remorse at bay reminding each other of the crime. And when his howls drew an enquiry from a cruising police car, they said, “Oh, the dog is sick.”

Juma for some years afterwards lived a life of his own in and around Nairobi and then altogether disappeared for three years. Of these three years, as of any of his wild exploits before
marriage, Kulsum does not have much to say. Apparently he travelled a lot; and operated a taxi somewhere. But Kulsum, who likes to bring in associations of prestige, does remember that he went to Mwanza, to seek out Amir Merchant who, my father had heard in Nairobi, was a relation of his mother. Amir Merchant later went to India and subsequently became the head of one of the twenty-two families or so that reportedly at one time owned all the wealth of Pakistan; at whose daughter’s wedding no less a personage than the Shah of Iran was a guest. Of this far try on the part of my mother there is no need to say further.

One day Hassam Pirbhai received a call from the agent of the British Castle Lines in Nairobi. He apparently had received a telephone message from Mombasa. Juma had stowed away on one of its steamers to India and had been apprehended trying to disembark in Bombay. My father saw Bombay only from the porthole of the cabin he was locked up in. The agent informed Hassam Pirbhai that if his family did not pay the boy’s fare, the company would turn him over to the police. Hassam Pirbhai did the only honourable thing: hid his family’s shame. He agreed to pay the fare. In Juma’s absence his three fair half-sisters had rediscovered their ties with him. To appease these three young women, Hassam Pirbhai himself went to Mombasa, offered Juma a job, and brought him home. The marriage followed in due course, for which project Awal was assigned the job of looking for a fair beauty from a humble but respectable home. Mombasa was the natural choice as the home of the humble where, moreover, Juma’s reputation was unknown. The fair beauty was spotted by Awal in a Membeni street, returning from school.

Running away. Wanderlust. Having come to this theme yet once again, memory plays a trick on me. From her corner Shehru throws a wink at me … and do I imagine that the gaping mouth with its sisal moustache has a silent laugh on its thin old lips …

The question that comes to mind is: in coming here, have I followed a destiny? Satisfied a wanderlust that runs in the blood? Or do I seek in genes merely an excuse for weakness, an inability to resolve situations? Perhaps it is this weakness that’s in the blood: can you distinguish such weakness from wanderlust? When does a situation become impossible enough to justify escape?

I too have run away, absconded. And reaching this grim basement, I stopped to examine the collective memory—this spongy, disconnected, often incoherent accretion of stories over generations. Like the karma a soul acquires, over many incarnations, the sins and merits, until in its final stages it lumbers along top-heavy with its accumulations, desperately seeking absolution.

I, like my forefathers before me, have run away. But what a price they paid. Dhanji Govindji, his self-respect and his sanity. His son, the joys of family life, the security of community life. My father Juma, I don’t know what price he paid for running away—it was Hassam Pirbhai who paid the cash price—but he did pay a price for coming back. He joined his tormentors. And in joining them he lost his compassion for those of whom he was also a part—if only a quarter.

Perhaps I judge too harshly.

When they married, my mother was sixteen and my father a cynical, rough man of thirty who had seen quite a bit of the world and was now a salesman at the firm of Hassam Pirbhai in Nairobi. Kulsum had studied up to Standard Six in Gujarati, and always stood second in class, but her father had seen no use in education for his girls and did not let her finish school. But for one more year, she could have been a graduate, become a teacher … married well. She did not resent the marriage but the way in which she was given away. My father had been in and out of school and had learnt English on the streets and later at work. After the wedding at the Membeni mosque, they spent the night in a room at the home of an acquaintance of Hassam Pirbhai. The next morning, weeping, Kulsum said goodbye to her family and friends, and with her husband took the train for Nairobi. When she stopped crying, they had
reached Voi. She looked up at her husband, seeking comfort, but the irate Juma who had spent the day watching the scenery turned around from the window and sarcastically said, “Bas? Is that all you’re going to cry? We’re not even halfway there.”

There was a pitch-black, palpable darkness outside, the air was humid, and in the stillness—perhaps caused by the sudden cessation of the din of the iron wheels on the rails, the steam puffing and compartments rattling—the shouts of people in the distance sounded strangely hollow. They were alone, together, the two of them, and they looked at each other across the compartment in the dim light that had already attracted clinging insects. They reached some resolution, for she got up and set out the dinner her mother had packed for the journey, and he rang the bell and ordered tea. Sometime later the train let off a belch of steam, gave a lurch, and proceeded warily into the darkness. The way ahead was uphill, and there were elephants and giraffes about.

“They said, ‘We have quarter-and-lac-shilling bungalas in Nairobi,’ ” Kulsum would later say, “and what did they give us? This,” she would show her thumb. Awal had also failed to mention, when she haughtily brought the proposal to Membeni and proceeded to inspect the girl as if buying her, that the boy had certain bad habits, kept a haunt at the New Salisbury and often came home late in the night. He also had debts. During their first months of marriage, when he would return in the evenings to breathe spirits down her neck, the naive daughter of the Mombasa mystic, not sure at this point which she dreaded more, his return or his absence, who wanted to push the brute away but knew she mustn’t, would ask him about the strange smell of his breath. “It’s only lemonade,” would come the passionate reply.

In those first years of marriage they lived in Juma’s old room, now converted into an apartment. There were in the household then Awal’s two sons, now married, and her three
nieces, my aunts. Over the six young women the tall, thin-lipped, long-nosed puritan Awal ruled with an iron hand. “If your pachedis keep slipping off your heads, use a nail,” she would rail, in her constant efforts to preserve her home’s khandaanity: that snobbish form of respectability which every family, however crooked, lays claim to. Daughters-in-law, responsible for the khandaanity of their fathers’ names, occupied the lowest rungs in the family hierarchy. Kulsum was the wife of the orphan, the half-caste, and herself of humble origin: there was no one lowlier than her at the home of Hassam Pirbhai. The women took turns cooking, and inevitably the unsophisticated Kulsum, bringing with her a crude and limited cuisine from the dukas of Membeni, earned the ire of the old woman. My mother was told to assist the others and learn from them. And in this role she made mistakes that spoke sadly of her breeding and background and brought her the contemptuous taunts of her sisters-in-law. When the months passed and she put on weight—but she was robust, not weak, her belly round, not sagging, her periods regular—her chores increased, the sarcasm was more biting. Hassam Pirbhai at dinner: “Why no mangoes yet?” His wife Awal drawing blood: “They say that in Mombasa the trees are barren this year.” What irked my practical mother more, however, was the fact that three-quarters of her husband’s salary went towards their upkeep in that house.