The Gunny Sack (37 page)

Geoffrey Umbulla, a thin wiry fellow, a self-styled party watchdog. He came in the full Youth League uniform, a mannequin in green and black drill shirt and pants, and yellow scarf and beret. His name appeared prominently in our communiqués, in case anyone doubted our loyalty. But he was opposed to the concept of a public debate, which was a “foreign import.” Quietly disliked. Several years later he was detained for seditious activity, distributing Kambona leaflets at the university: he was also in a hurry, as we of course knew.

Ali Tamim, also called “Shehe,” who came in kanzu and cap because we met on Fridays, wise in human affairs, who made the final peace whenever a meeting broke up into squabbling factions.

Salim Juma, one-eighth African. I was made treasurer and business manager (talk of stereotyping) of
The Voice
and before every issue toured the Indian dukas for donations, taking a
100 percent African with me, and never failed to raise enough money. Also in charge of raising membership, which was lagging.

Zuleika Kassam, from Zanzibar, who came to Dar after the revolution. Of whom more later …

These, and a few others—Ogwell, Raphael, Walji, Washington—out to influence the world.

Amina and Ji Bai. They simply fell in love. They met twice, when I took Amina with me on the rounds of the Indian dukas. Old, bony Ji Bai could match Amina word for word. Among her friends were more Africans than Asians … old men in kanzus would stop for a chat, women would go inside with her to tell her secrets, boys would shout a greeting … sitting at the sewing machine all day, except for a few trips inside, was how she passed her time. “Nyerere is my son,” she once told us. “Wé Mswahili, nini?” Amina asked, another time, to which she said, “Yes, I am Swahili … and Indian and Arab … and European,” at which point she walked stiffly up and down as she thought the Europeans did, and sat down giggling. “Taratibu,” she once told Amina, “taratibu,” carefully. But Amina had heard the story from me. “Oh no,” she said, misunderstanding (but only partly, she later conceded), “no taratibu for me.” And Ji Bai, looking closely at her all the while, as at a specimen, simply said, “Live. Live, first, then start hurrying to wherever you are going.”

One day Amina asked her about the Maji Maji war. “Oh, the Germans,” she said, “bad, bad. For a small mistake, khamsa shirin, faap, faap. A bigger mistake, fifty strokes. Or a hundred. A thousand or more strokes given in a day … One day there was a revolt.”

She went outside and brought back a twig from a weed growing at the steps. She held it to her forehead and with the long reach stick held like a spear she started dancing and chanting “Maji maji, maji maji, maji maji, maji maji …” Amina of course joined her and the two did some “maji maji”
before a few young men joined in from outside, and the whole shop was going maji maji …

To have met in the jungle and fallen in love there, among people we did not know, on the banks of a stream, under a tree, how easy it was. No sooner were we back in the city than we started carrying the burdens of our races. In the dead of night, when no eyes could see, Asian or African, I would go quietly to her room. Or, sometimes on Saturday afternoons, when the others were in bars or in town, we would meet behind the football field, chewing grass, talking, trying to remain intimate.

But our world was pulling us apart.

To uproot a healthy young shoot—a lively sapling with a lot of energy and promising many new things—and transplant it in an uncaring soil … that is what returning to Dar meant. For me, it was simply to be doing the unthinkable; to be the subject of discussion for anyone in the community, from the precocious ten-year-olds to the senile:
the children, religion, the differences, it’s not easy, nothing to do with racism, of course
 … And what words did Dar say to her … to have fallen in love with one of the exploiter class, a dukawallah, mere agents of the British, these oily slimy cowardly Asians, what future did they have … the world had so much to offer a bright young African girl.

Kulsum eyed me suspiciously every time I returned home, as if I had come with hands soiled by the vilest deed, so that she would purify me by inviting people over, by observing special rites for my father, by taking me to watch Indian films at the drive-in with her friend Mrs. Daya, by talking about the past when there were Begum, Mehroon, Yasmin, Shamim, Shiraz and Salma with us, when times were hard but there was a real closeness, a bonding, among us.

One day Edward went to see Amina at the University. “Weh Amina,” he said, “listen. You have it in your power to kill another woman.”

Amina did not know who he was and gave a characteristic reply: “Are you telling my future? You are a mchawi? You gaze at stars?”

“If you go ahead and marry this boy Salum—”

“Who said anything about marriage? And what business is it of yours?”

“This woman’s husband died when she was young—”

“Weh mpumbavu, nini? You fool, do you think one can turn off love for an expediency?”

“It is possible to control it.”

For Edward love was something you could give and take at will. Even if you had it inside you.

“What do you know of love? You who have slaved away your life at a Singer telling stories—”

“I have known love but I have controlled it.”

“What love, you … working for an Indian woman and telling stories to her son!”

“I have known love but I have controlled it.”

She told me her mouth opened to hurl another contemptuous epithet at this fundi, but then his words clicked. Amina’s eyes opened with new respect … pity perhaps. “You know, Salum,” she told me. “There were others before us.”

“You’re telling me …”

To get back to Dhanji Govindji. Did he know love, before those missives started coming from Junapur urging his good sense, and the mukhi sent him to Zanzibar? Did he tell Bibi Taratibu before he sent her away, This won’t work, our worlds are too far apart, they won’t let us? And Bibi Taratibu, the Gentle One who later ran a tea shop at the end of the village, watching her half-caste son grow up into a loafer, did she love, or did she simply put up with the pawing of this lonely Indian? And my grandfather Huseni escaped from this intolerant world but left behind a pining woman … did he also love and control, as Edward would have it? But whom, another woman, or the pining
Moti? There was Uncle Goa, who in another scenario would have run away with my mother and now, as Amina told me, Edward … unrequited loves, because we catch the world unprepared for us.

She announced one day she was going to New York on a scholarship. It was a chance too good to miss. The two years would fly, she said, meanwhile we’d test our commitment and let the world get used to the idea. To see her off came two West African professors and one British, some American friends, black and white, and her local friends. SNAFU was put in abeyance, except on the day we saw her picture in the
Herald
and there was talk of having regular meetings once again. She wrote a few times, long descriptive letters full of her experiences, the exuberance of black power and the student movements against the American involvement in Vietnam, the fight for the third world. Things are happening here, she said, there is a feeling that you can really change the world, the numbers are on your side … can this be real? When Martin Luther King was shot I stopped hearing from her altogether.

But when she left, I thought she would come back to me. By then the world, moving at breakneck speed, would be ready for our revolution … when the evidence before my eyes since childhood had always told me, a journey overseas changed you indelibly. In that hour of grief in America, what could I have offered her, what did I possess which could hold her … She was in another world, and I knew I had lost her.

The Bee Gees were singing “Massachusetts” from all the radios on Kichwele on Sunday mornings, and Alu Poni’s few cryptic notes from Boston sounded as distant as those from the moon. He knew, of course, of his brother’s arrest, and assumed his letters were being read.

Try explaining gravity to Edward bin Hadith. The news of the moon landing thrilled him, although he did at first put forward
the hypothesis that all the pictures had been taken on earth and the Americans were simply fooling the world. But the news bombardments and the colour photos outside the USIS library were simply overwhelming, Quran- and Bible-thumping traditionalists notwithstanding. But then, how do the rockets leave the earth? Here, I braced myself to explain Newton’s laws. To which Edward’s response was a sungura story, with the sungura-rabbit playing football against the hyena. But the sungura was on the moon and could use its low gravity to give a whamming kick, a mkwaju like the ones the legendary Ali Kajo and Kadenge from Mombasa had never seen … Try protesting on the side of science against a gleeful, orbiting deaf Edward bin Hadith, for whom the moon is only a stepping stone …

We were living in Upanga, in the cooperative flat on Upanga Road that comprised Kulsum’s second investment, using half of her husband’s insurance money, the first half having gone towards key money for the defunct The Fancy Store, now replaced by a very ordinary Kariakoo shop, its showcase that once drew crowds to watch the Father Christmas display in December now simply a storage area for excess stock. The flat had a long history of defaulting tenants, one after the other, whom the lawyer Kulsum hired could not evict because he was working for both plaintiff and defendant, a fact that emerged when the police went looking for him one day and he escaped to India. The one tenant she could successfully get evicted was her own brother Bahdur …

Bahdur Uncle had to vacate his Kariakoo shop opposite the market to make way for a two-storey building and busstop.
Kulsum had a flat available, but she did not trust him. So she took a signed statement from him to the effect that he would vacate after a year. Twelve months later Bahdur Uncle would not leave and Kulsum got a court order. Bahdur Uncle, when the police arrived with the order, moved to a slum in the same general area, slated for demolition, and then Kulsum, Sona and I went to live in the Upanga flat.

(Shamim, my cousin … the image simply intrudes itself … she had become fat, but attractive-fat, with short hair, a younger Roshan Mattress with a reputation for excessive flirtation … but history does not repeat itself, not yet. She was studying in Uganda at Makerere and Bahdur Uncle was anxiously waiting for her to return and lift him out of his misery.)

Kulsum sitting at her zig-zag sewing machine, staring ahead of her, at infinity, picking her chin, brooding.

The zig-zag of course came with us from Kichwele, as did much of the furniture from the flat upstairs. The ship SS
Nairobi
, the toy cabinet, the Philips. A bookcase was a new addition, with some
Reader’s Digest
Condensed Books, assorted Oxford dictionaries, Ian Fleming,
Prester John
, Lobsang Rampa. The same photographs on the walls, with one addition: the family portrait at Mehroon’s wedding. This hung a little to one side, as if leaving place for another, twin photograph: the absent, Begum’s never-to-be wedding family portrait …

After Kichwele—that dominating artery now called Uhuru Street, with its bicycles and cars and buses, its dust and its people and the buildings that appeared ancient after only ten years—Upanga nights were lonely, its maghrab more oppressive … the skies were open, when children cried they did so against the universe … couples walking on the sidewalk, you saw their heads and shoulders over the hedge, walking and murmuring, their thoughts ever so serious, weighing down on them, as if so much was at stake, so much depended on the right decision … Peeping pawpaw trees casting ominous, twisted shadows outside gardens, looming coconut trees
rustling overhead, gutters tracing dark lines on the streets. All against a background sound of chirping crickets. What was it about Upanga that gave it such gravity at night?

Sometimes a lonely trumpet would sound, a practising band musician, playing of all things ancient “Swanee River” …

Kulsum sitting at her zig-zag, brooding, picking at her chin: what is she thinking about? About Sona’s coming departure.

Sona was one of the boys whom former Boyschool teacher Mr. Datoo influenced when he returned from America on a visit. On a fateful afternoon in Dar, Mr. Datoo went about town like the Pied Piper followed by a train of adulating boys, the procession ending at the United States Information Service library on Independence Avenue, university catalogue section. “You can make it,” Mr. Datoo had told the boys.

Catalogues started arriving at home, glossy affairs promising exciting academic opportunities (“A first-hand look at the moon’s rocks, can you beat that?”), with tantalizing photos depicting student life in Arcadia: playing tennis barechested, under lights; the glee club in session; making a snowman in the shadow of an imposing statue; and that favourite of all catalogues: boy or girl reading under a tree (even if it’s the only tree on campus, as Sona would later joke).

Kulsum did not pay much attention, if at all she pooh-poohed the whole project. No money, not possible, was what she firmly believed. Edward and another fundi took piecemeal orders from her and these she delivered Downtown. A few more years to go, she said.