The Gunny Sack (31 page)

Nurdin and Nasim’s romance blossomed, and it went public. Within a few weeks Roshan Mattress closed her shop and went to live in Upanga. Nurdin married his second wife and
lived in Downtown, and Roshan, still his first wife, concentrated on the Women’s Movement. Occasionally she would lecture the Asian women, explaining the Government’s policy in some detail. From time to time, after major processions, her photograph would appear in the papers.

The most memorable part of the wedding is the farewell and last ceremony. You remember it when she comes back after the first fight, and you remember it when she bears the first child. You remember it when he begins to beat her, and you remember it when her hips grow bigger, her face looks plainer, her manner preoccupied. And the parting that once was a mere formality is a deep schism, permanent and hopelessly cruel. And you realize, one day, why there were tears then even though it rained flowers; why every step of the happy way was paved with good-luck portents and disguised prayers.

On the afternoon following the official wedding, the registration and blessings by the mukhi, the afternoon after the reception and the first night spent at the Sea View, the couple are escorted by the bridesmaid and the best man to Kichwele and Viongozi, where they slowly make their way up to the roof
terrace of Habib Mansion, laid with mats. Mehroon enters like a goddess, a blushing queen looking elevated and larger than life—in her wedding white, a dress made by Alzira of the most expensive brocade available in town (the groom paying), in high-heeled shoes and with her long hair set in a style known as the birdnest. As they enter the doorway they step with a little excessive vigour, just in case, on auspicious clay saucers, the camera clicking away, and walk over to the sofa which is the centre piece of the terrace. After lunch, the groom’s youngest sister appears and takes hold of Mehroon’s dress and doesn’t let go until she is paid a sum approved by her family. Sona then hides the groom’s shoes and doesn’t return them until he is paid a sum approved by his family, in other words, Begum. Patience is wearing thin by now, the bridesmaid and the best man get up, and Mrs. Daya takes the cue and shakes Mehroon’s hand and gives her a big hug, sobbing. Then Mehroon’s friends appear to wish her goodbye, and the other neighbours, Alzira, Roshan, even Mrs. Pipa. Finally comes the turn of the family, beginning with Ji Bai, who’s won her way in but just. And then Sona and I go to shake Mehroon’s hand, shyly, because we’ve never shaken hands with her before, this cousin-sister who has bathed us and spanked us and taken us to school. Then weeping Begum comes and gives Mehroon a big hug, followed by Kulsum. Tough Kulsum, without a tear in her eye, shakes Mehroon’s hand, slips some money in her hand … at this point she is supposed to tell Mehroon not to return except with her husband, she is no longer a daughter but a wife with a home of her own, but then she breaks down. Mrs. Daya pulls her back, the bride and groom leave, the bride throwing rice behind her, to the left and right, her abandoned rights in the home of her parents, and without looking back she descends the three flights of stairs to be greeted by a bevy of chattering, excited African girls murmuring, admiringly as young girls do on such occasions, “Mhindi ame owawa,” the Asian girl has wedded, and passes through them to the waiting car whose trunk is now filled with her
belongings, the doors slam shut and the car drives over two small coconuts for more good luck and takes the bride away.

A tearful, distraught Kulsum looking beseechingly at the departing car, as at a hearse …

Mehroon played it safe, and married not the cricketer Alnoor, but the serious, the prosaic, Amin with the Peugeot, whose family owned a business in Tanga, to where the car was soon speeding after the farewell. The cricketer would be in Kinondoni or at the Gymkhana with his friends every Sunday, he was still a child and would have to be tamed. But Amin was all ready, waiting to marry, join the family business and start a family. Mehroon was nineteen.

“To spend so much on them, to give them so much, to expect so much from them, and then to give away to these men and their families this dream, ready made,” Kulsum would say. “But why did you agree to the wedding, then?” Sona and I would ask in exasperation. To which she would give a look that said: Better this than the curse of an unmarried daughter. “Don’t worry, Mummy,” Begum had told her, “I have no intention of getting married as yet.” Until, that is, Sona wanted to hear good things about himself, and begged Begum to visit the Parents’ Day at the Boys’ School.

Sona remembers. A whim, a chance thought. No one had ever been to enquire about him at any Parents’ Day. Everybody else’s parents did … well, everybody who counted. Adil Mawji’s father never missed one, neither did Zahur Meghji’s parents. At every Parents’ Day, to which Sona himself went to demonstrate some experiment, show some scientific wizardry to the awestruck parents—colours changing in a test tube, sparks flying from a point—the teachers would throw meaningful, questioning looks at him. Who are his parents, from whence this golden genius, why doesn’t someone claim him? This time Begum did. She toured all the labs and saw all our teachers.

On her way from Mr. Haji’s museum, where she duly saw the famous foetus in bottled solution, she heard a strain of
piano music. There was a big piano in the assembly hail, across from the museum, which was used mostly by the expatriate European teachers. Begum saw Mr. Harris playing and walked over and stood behind him, watching over his shoulder.

Mr. Harris was the physics teacher. Bearded, serious, solid, one of the new group that had arrived from Britain with Mr. Green. Only recently had he begun to show signs of having a life and opinions outside of physics. The whites in Rhodesia had given themselves independence, Ian Smith was the hateword all over black Africa, and Tanzania had broken off relations with Britain. The Union Jack flying outside the British High Commission on Independence Avenue had been burnt by university students. Every day dozens of lorries, with owners from all over East Africa, rushed oil supplies from Dar to Lusaka (now a household word), bringing back copper, risking lives and property over the treacherous Hell Run on the road from Morogoro to Iringa (where Ji Bai’s husband Gulam had met his death many years before with four other missionaries). Among these lorries that raced to Lusaka and back in four days were two Leylands, with Somali drivers and local turn boys, belonging to my brother-in-law Amin, which could be seen sometimes undergoing repairs at Kichwele and Viongozi. Kulsum declined putting her savings into the venture and later regretted that, because Amin added a Fiat to his small fleet, this being the prestigious make of lorry. Mr. Harris, at last showing signs of life and opinions outside of physics, asked the class, “How would you solve the Rhodesian crisis?” To which we replied, to a man, “Fight!” Mr. Harris shook his head and said, “Do you really believe violence and bloodshed would solve it?”

Thus, Mr. Harris, who was playing the piano in the hall as Begum stood behind him to watch.

Begum, if she had been a daughter in a rich family, would have learnt to play the piano … she would have driven a car and she would have been to London, and like the Londonreturneds, learnt to speak—English, Swahili or Cutchi—with
that uppity accent they put on … With all due respect to Alzira, her clothes would have been mostly imported … and her hair … her hair would have been short. She would wear pants and tweed skirts and she would tie a bright-coloured scarf at the neck … She would know the piano and she would know how to waltz and tango and limbo and twist … Her children, to whom she would teach the piano, would be pretty if girls and handsome if boys and go to an exclusive school like the International School, and she would talk to them in English.

“Any requests?” asked Mr. Harris, and smiled.

“Petit Fleur,” she said.

“That’s for trumpet—” he said, “but—” and tried a few notes.

“Theme from a Summer Place,” she said, and he obliged with a few more notes.

“Please Don’t Treat Me Like a Child,” she said, and he looked up startled.

“What?”

“By Helen Shapiro, you know—”

He didn’t, because he had run away from it, and other things like it, but he played her something else.

It was said sometimes, all in good fun, that you kept an elaichi, a cardomom, in your mouth to kill the breath of cigarette. Oh, they added, you smoked because you drank … you know, the company and so on. And drinking obviously was a prerequisite for gambling and whoring. So it all began with an elaichi in the mouth. When a girl got married her family wanted to know two things about the boy (besides how much money he made): Is he from the community, the comm, and Does he keep elaichi in the mouth. With a white man, there was double jeopardy, plus the added penalty that he ate pork. You could do worse, but not by much, by marrying an African or a Sikh Punjabi.

How did she manage it, this liaison? The school was out of consideration as a rendezvous, both Sona and I were there every day. And he would be spotted in Kichwele from a mile
off. But on Saturdays Begum came home late, at three o’clock, because the girls at the office, she said, went out on a little lunch. It must have been then. A two-hour date every week for a few months, at the restaurant in Sea View Hotel perhaps.

One evening Begum broke the news to mother. “Sona and Kala’s teacher wants to marry me.” “Who is he?” “He is a European.” “Over my dead body. Do you want to murder me? Take a knife, go on, take a knife, take these scissors, I’ll give you my soul!” There followed a scene such as we had not witnessed for several years. But Begum had prepared for just this eventuality.

The next day Begum did not return from work. Her friend Shamim Jadavji brought home a note, addressed to me:

“I have gone to London with Mr. Harris, your physics teacher. There we’ll get married. Forgive me, please, both Sona and Kala, I did not intend to get married so soon, but I could not have kept my affair with Peter secret for long. The rest I cannot explain … your time will come. Look after Mummy. When enough time has passed perhaps she will find it in her to forgive me too. Love and kisses.”

She had taken away a small suitcase, with a few clothes. A few other things were missing; some books, photographs, her old doll.

A week later Kulsum gave away the store. Edward and another fundi took home orders, which when completed she delivered to a few stores downtown. There were three of us now, all in a daze, in the flat upstairs at Habib Mansion, and sometimes when she was especially depressed and brooding, Sona and I would find time from our schoolwork to play with her the card game two-three-five, a variation of whist for three desperate and lonely people. Whenever she heard the drumbeat at nine o’clock announcing the news, she would look up involuntarily, at the Philips on the glass cabinet, catching herself doing it, fighting something deep inside her.

Part 3
.
Amina.

I think of you, Amina. I remember you on the front page of the
Herald
, a small African figure among large athletic Americans in Afros, tiny fist raised in protest outside a public building. “Students occupy university building,” read the caption. How proud we were then, our own Amina raising hell in New York. “Free Amina!” we said exultantly, closing our own fists, but ours was a call not to free Amina but in praise of a free Amina …