The Gunny Sack (16 page)

A small incident, perhaps. A child crying for his father and the mother spanking him for disturbing the peace … and the dead, for the dead don’t rest easy with children bawling for them.

Mchikichi Street was not far, a few shops from Grandmother’s you turned right to Tandamti and came to the market and turned left. There in the mattress shop she was waiting, Ji Bai … resolutely … perhaps seeing my tantrum in her mind’s eye, the witch, imposing her will upon me like a magnet, guiding me to that union with the past, while comforting me: “Later, later …”

Now the dead speak, from the depths of the gunny sack, Shehrbanoo speaks.

I remember a beautiful Japanese fan. The vanes were threaded with a white silk ribbon and were themselves of
imitation ivory, an intricate pattern cut three-fourths of the way up formed an arc of frieze when you opened them. At the closed end they were also threaded with silk, and there was a bob of silk thread there.

This fan was a gift from Jenny Auntie, and it fell into the way of darkness …

Rehman was my educated uncle. He had reached the Junior Cambridge level, although he failed the examination, like most boys who sat for it, and worked as a book-keeper downtown. He was engaged to Jenny Auntie. She was fair and pretty with short boycut hair, bright and chirpy, in smart clothes and high-heeled shoes. She lived downtown and was a typist. Everybody agreed that Rehman was lucky to get her. And everybody wondered exactly how she would fit in to the Kariakoo household. But she loved me, intensely and exclusively, for no other child in the house received the barest attention from her, even when they were thrown at her feet. Every time Rehman Uncle brought her home, I would run up to her sweet perfumed embrace, sit on her lap, stand pressed to her knees and receive gifts of sweets and boxes of chocolates.

One Sunday afternoon they took me to the seashore with them. We took the bus from Msimbazi, which dropped us outside the cathedral, and then we walked along the front lined with trees and filled with crowds of people. Vendors on foot hissed by with their peanuts and popcorns, others clinked coffee cups, still others sat in rows along the sidewalks calling out their wares—fleshy, yellow mangoes cut up enticingly and sprinkled liberally with red chili powder, khungus and guavas and thope-thopes and oranges and jackfruits whose wild odours shouted promises of tastes out of this world … We walked past the cathedral, saw the famous Lutheran church, and the high court. There were ships anchored in the harbour, the tugboat racing gracefully but purposefully on the blue water, ngalawas bobbing up and down or pulled on shore,
fishermen mending nets, yachts sailing out from the yacht club, the ferry inching its way to the opposite shore. This was Dar es Salaam on Sunday: hundreds of Indian families on foot, men leading the way, women bringing up the rear; men playing whist on sidewalks; boys and girls making houses and waterways in the sand; men in suits and women in white walking to church.

When we returned it was dark, the bus dropped us a little way before the Pombe Shop, and Jenny Auntie’s reassuring forefinger pulled me along at a brisk pace on the side of the road as I strained my eyes to avoid pedestrians and potholes. We were late, and I could sense the urgency in her step and was almost running. There was the sound of drums, and a stench of brewing liquor, of woodsmoke, and roasting maize, meat and cassava. From time to time my eyes would fasten on the halfwall of the Pombe Shop from which the stench steamed out thickly and the drum-sound called. We reached the break in the wall, which was the entrance. Smoke filled the air inside, yellow flames rose up at the back, licking the sides of huge cauldrons, large shadows danced and people shouted.

At the entrance I saw her.

I knew her name but couldn’t make myself say it. She was fat and immense, moving up and down to the rhythm of the drums, her huge belly jiggling against the khanga, her arms raised sideways, their flesh rippling with pleasure, her eyes gleaming. She jiggled forward and then backward, but all the time she kept approaching. My uncle and aunt had stopped, and stood there as if mesmerized by those drunken eyes approaching, and even when I cried and pulled at Jenny Auntie’s finger, she did not move. And then Timbi Ayah was upon me, pulling me by my other hand, so that I was between her and my aunt in a tug of war which the black woman won as Jenny Auntie’s tight grip slipped, and I was dragged screaming into the warm brewing darkness with its fires and dancing drunken people, its squeals and laughter …

I learnt that a man brought me out of that inferno.

Jenny Auntie was a witch. She tried to take poor, simple Rehman Uncle away from his mother. But Rehman was a good son and he was strong. So Jenny Auntie in revenge tried to take me away and give me to Timbi Ayah. But I knew Timbi Ayah’s name even if I could not say it aloud. Perhaps that had saved me. Shamim and I on the lorry tire debated over this long afterwards. And we took the beautiful fan and dropped it into the other blackness where maggots crawled in pungent juices of human excreta.

That Sunday evening, as we walked up and down the seashore several times, Jenny Auntie had given Rehman Uncle an ultimatum: either after marriage they lived in a separate flat, downtown, alone, or the engagement would be off.

I didn’t see Jenny Auntie for a long time. Perhaps they kept me hidden from her, Kulsum and the rest. I never saw her, until I forgot what she looked like—except that she was slim and fair and pretty.

Breakfast was a prolonged, indefinite affair in that house. Early in the morning someone—my grandmother or my young aunt Zarina—set up the table. By the time the children had been dragged out of bed there was already a small circle of adults chatting and drinking tea around it. The shop was open, manned by Grandmother and the servant. At this time spirits were high and everybody talked loudly and called out. The dining area was the veranda, which opened into the backyard and was almost filled by the long, dark brown table and the chairs and bench. Two to three sufuriyas of tea were cooked on the coal stove, which was brought right into the yard so an eye could be kept on it. We breakfasted on loaves of soft, steaming white bread, washed down noisily with sweet, thick tea from porcelain mugs. Sometimes we had sweets bought from the African girls who vended them in the street outside, and occasionally my Aunt Zera would make a philanthropic swoop on
our breakfast table, bringing jelebis and ladoos in oily brown paper bags. It was breakfast time also beyond the corrugated-iron wall that separated our yard from the African houses behind. Woodsmoke rose from that area and also the sound of African women and children. Grandmother knew them and sometimes ordered the maandazi from them. We breakfasted till way into mid-morning. The adults were up one by one within a few minutes of each other, starting to clean and sweep the rooms and dressing up, beginning their daily chores, and the children lingered on, clambering up the table, spilling tea and food on the floor. Flies droned with pleasure there, indulged by the sun, which lit the veranda in the early morning then would rise up and bring cool shade. We left this happy place only when the table was wiped clean, and my sister and cousins came armed with brooms and wet rags. The solid wooden table always carried with it the smell of breakfast, the stickiness of sweet and strong tea and evaporated milk from Holland.

It was from my cousin Shamim that I learnt we were finally to leave that house. She who told me about Red Riding Hood and Cinderella and Hansel and Gretel, and Timbi Ayah’s real name, who would take me aside by the hand and say, “Sit,” and sit down with me on the veranda step or the large tire in the backyard, who when I got restless and began to stand up would keep my hand pressed down and raising a forefinger begin, “Listen. Once upon a time,” in English and then mixed with Cutchi and Swahili tell me a story, said: “Listen. Your family is moving to a new house.”

“Is it in Nairobi?” I asked.

“No. In Dar es Salaam.”

“Whereabouts, then?”

“Somewhere. In a new building. With a terrace. On the second floor.”

“Are you coming with us? I want you to come with us.”

“Then you must tell your mother.”

Kulsum standing outside her shop every morning, eyes half closed over the tasbih, briskly threading her hands, whispering the sacred formula for good luck before she opens the first of several padlocks on the door, as the servant and the tailors wait nearby.

The beginning, the traditional beginning,
Kulsum’s
beginning: always with the Bismillah, the Name, or the nad-e-Ali for more dire straits … for it is related that in the Battle of Khyber when the Prophet, on the verge of defeat and in despair, uttered this prayer, Imam Ali the Favourite appeared on his horse Dul Dul with his mighty three-edged sword Zulfikar, and he came and supported the bridge with his bare hands for the army of the righteous to cross over to victory.

So much on the strength of a prayer, a name.

Habib Mansion, into which we moved, was on the corner of Kichwele and Viongozi Streets, two blocks away from the no-man’s land of the Mnazi Moja grounds. It was the newest two-storey concrete building on the Kariakoo side of Kichwele, having taken the place of the mud and limestone and corrugated-iron shop-house. A yellow corner building with a roof terrace, a symbol of patient acquisition of wealth, of squeezing a stone dry, as Hassan Uncle would later say. With Habib Mansion the development of the Kichwele/Viongozi intersection became complete: there were on the remaining three corners, Salama Building, and Anand Bhavan, and Mzee Pipa’s Amin Mansion.

Kulsum had paid handsome goodwill money for the choice location, the corner store open on the two fronts to the two streets and a display window, a showcase, between them. Every store had a name, painted by Khaki (modest) or Rex (expensive) or an anonymous African (cheap) painter. Begum and the others were all for the name The Curiosity Shop, culled from some school book, but the voice of my uncle Hassan, Kulsum’s adviser then and later on all matters relating to business, intervened impatiently. Hassan Uncle’s long face became longer when it expressed contempt. The mouth stayed open, having said what he wanted to say, his eyes widened and his body arched backwards as if that was the only way he could get a proper perspective of your silliness.

“What curios? Where are the curios, eh? Choose something people can see. Okay, Bai, tell me. What will you sell?”

Kulsum had in mind the stores of Nairobi’s Indian Bazaar, to which even the European ladies from the Highlands dropped in, where you could satisfy the most exacting requirements, from a needle with the tiniest eye to the freshest shipment of chiffon and nylon and georgette from England. “Fancy goods, brother,” she said, “I want to sell fancy goods.”

The signmaker was asked to paint over Curiosity, and The Fancy Shop it became, and Hassan Uncle rode away on his bicycle satisfied at his achievement.

Every family has a nickname, usually describing some member of the family, so you are so-and-so’s brother or of the so-and-so family. But there are no strict rules about nicknames. You could get one for the oddest of reasons: for your looks, for what you said once, for what someone spoke about you, for your occupation: or for no apparent reason at all. A public blunder is sufficient to brand you for life and perhaps for the next generation too. When you move into a neighbourhood, you wish in your heart of hearts, above anything else save for good business in your shop, for a
nice
nickname.

Parmar Tailoring Mart was next door to the Fancy Shop. Parmar was simply Parmar; no nickname: a stranger, however familiar his face, who cycled in every morning from the Hindu village in Kisutu, where he probably already had a nickname. Next to him was Roshan Mattress, named after her shop and her body.

Of fat women, the expert lady-watchers of Kichwele and Viongozi all concurred there are those that are ugly-fat and those that are beautiful-fat. Roshan Mattress was of the latter sort. Plump really, rosy and fair, soft but not sagging flesh in all the right places, beautiful in the classical sense though obese (what a term!) in the modern, Westernized sense. When she flaunted those haunches, swinging her hips on her way to throw a taunt or two at Mzee Pipa, the more lewd bystanders would pick their crotches in muted satisfaction—for this was all they would get, the real thing was reserved for a certain police inspector, Kumar, no person to mess around with.