The Magic of Saida (26 page)

“We have no money, Baba …”

“Tell the doctor I sent you. Now go.” He quickly, almost furtively, put some money in her hand. “Buy the medicine with this.”

He glanced guiltily around him, at Lateef slurping his soup, at the glowering manager, at the cluster of touts gathered outside.

Even in charity you feel dirty; it’s so easy it’s not right, to give away a cure, possibly a life, just like that. And when you give, the word spreads, a provider has come, a donor is here, and a long line awaits you, the outstretched hand of Africa.

Later he would recognize this episode as his second turning point, the first one being his illness, possibly aided by a potion. He was a doctor, after all. How many sick people there must be like this girl. He did not even know her name.

He sipped his tea, met Lateef’s eye.

“Any luck about Saida?” he asked.

“Not yet. Give it time, bwana.”

How much time? Time for what? The matter was exceedingly simple: he needed to find Saida; she had relatives in town who knew something but were keeping mum.

A faint azan rose up from a mosque nearby, insinuated itself into their silence. Kamal watched Lateef become still, pay heed.

“Come, sir, let’s go to the mosque,” Lateef said.

Kamal pushed his chair back and they set off.

The mosque was around the corner, on a side street. The structure was imposing and seemed new, though the whitewash had long faded. There was an open space in front of it through which the street passed. Some eight or ten steps, built against the wall, reached up to the landing and the dark opening that was the door, a thin steady stream of men going inside. It was Friday. Kamal had not been to a
mosque, not prayed in decades; had prided himself in being a man of reason and consequently an agnostic.

“You go,” he said to Lateef. “I’ll wait for you.”

He wandered off, strolled up and down the streets, exchanging greetings with people outside their houses, pausing at the medical store, where he briefly greeted Amina and noted down the names of some medicines, and the video store, outside which he now noticed a martial arts movie poster on display, before arriving back outside the mosque. The prayer was over, men were departing. Soon the area was deserted, but there was no sign of Lateef. Kamal was about to leave, but just then he heard a mysterious humming. It came from inside the mosque, an undulation so faint and low and subtly pervasive in the air, it seemed the sunlight itself had been plucked. Kamal slowly climbed up the steps, drawn by the sound as it gathered volume; but there remained that lightness to its quality, a softness to its vibrations. Kamal took off his shoes and stepped inside.

A group of about twenty men wearing pure white kanzus and caps stood in a circle towards the front of the hall, swaying back and front, chanting,
La ilaha illallah
 … the extra-low register of the chorus filling up the hall with an insistent resonance. Outside this circle three little boys were performing the same rite, with some sense of play. Someone instructed Kamal to go out the other door and wash his feet at the taps. How could he have forgotten. He did so and returned, stood against the back wall, watching the ecstasy. The swaying became more intense, back and forth and faster, the chanting louder, keeping pace. All the time,
La ilaha illallah
 … There is no god but God.

And Kamal watching all this in the great hall was suddenly wrenched by a sense of loss, and bewilderment at his own condition. “After such knowledge …?” Is this what we mean by progress?—leaving this knowledge behind? This faith and certitude, this continuity. This connection. Is a child growing up here less happy than one in Edmonton or Toronto costing tens of thousands more per year to maintain? Did I gain or lose by being sent away?

He left the mosque, the session now winding down. He did not wait for Lateef but walked straight to the main road and took a bus back to Masoko. After a lunch of ugali and maharage—maize meal
and beans—and black tea, at a small restaurant, he strolled back to his hotel.

In the driveway he bumped into Markham, who had emerged from a guest cottage grabbing a bundle of linen. They stopped together, Markham struggling to control his breath.

“Here,” Kamal said and took the man’s wrist, counted his pulse. “Let me give you a checkup tomorrow morning.”

In “Town,” Dar es Salaam’s Asian quarter, the new arrival, Golo, the dark curly-haired half-African, was supposed to be good at football. He was. And physically strong. He was that too. When he hit a hard buyu, blocking a ball at the opponent’s foot with the side of his heel, he felt nothing but triumph; the Indian went limping away. It’s his African bones, they explained. Watch out for his buyu. How could this be, though, when his diet had included only a bony piece of meat on the occasional good day, and there were nights when he even went to bed hungry, while these pure-breed Indians ate three full meals and drank milk nightly before bed? As any African would tell you, it was the daal they ate that softened them. He was Golo, he did not eat daal. And he was a hero to his young cousin Azim, who once explained his prowess: “You know, you know, my brother Kamal has the blood of an African warrior—like, like, like … Tarzan! You should see him finish a bone—like, like, like … a lion!”

Strong but alone. Returning home from school in the afternoon; playing marbles outside the khano before prayer; on Sunday at the seashore; always that awareness of his distance from the others, even in their midst, and their unspoken awe of him. Often he felt the speculative gazes of the neighbourhood following him down a street.

His uncle could not relate to this half-caste nephew from Kilwa. What had made him send for the stranger to live in the family’s midst? He never denied him anything, though, and Kamal never felt second class in the home, dark skin and all. No one taunted him or teased him about his background or his mother. And Auntie was
simply a natural, kind and generous but crazy: stuffing a sweet into his mouth, a coin into his pocket—here, here, take it—and a pat on the head hard enough almost to dislodge it.

Of his three cousins, Azim was three years younger than Kamal, Shenaz was in between them, and the fiery Yasmin was older than him by a year. The four of them to a room, which had two bunk beds. Living on top of each other. Privacy was simply assumed when required. He knew when Shenaz got her first bra, ready-made and pointed, as she insisted, from Janmohamed’s; he observed the signals among the women when Yasmin started getting her periods; he had to go across the street and buy her pads, which came in a shoe-size box wrapped in newsprint, so that everybody knew.

They fought like cat and dog, he and Yasmin. Over anything: whose turn it was to do what, who would read the paper first, who had said what against whom. There was an element in their quarrel of the fact that he was boy, she was girl, and they were not strictly brother and sister. He was an alien male and in her way as a young woman newly aware of herself. When, in a new sleeping arrangement, she took the bunk above his, to be next to the window looking down on the street, and secretly at boys, he could not be unaware of her climbing up or down and showing her knickers, tight against her ass. Black knickers, deep red knickers. Surely she knew she was exposing. He burned, pulled the blanket over his head. And then, once, only once … Cousins arrived from Zanzibar, Kilosa, Mwanza, or wherever, there were seven or eight to the room, adults and children, sleeping any which way. He and she shared his lower bunk, an uncle went above. And there he was, awake in the middle of the night, erected, she with her frock pulled up just, revealing the tight panties. Her bum towards him. With heart throbbing, head screaming, he squirmed, he sweated. Did he touch her? He always said no.

She reported him the next day, thankfully, perhaps prudently, only to her mother, who took Kamal aside and said, to his confusion, “Arré, you’re growing up! Look at you! Chi-chi-chi, you should do it in the bathroom sometimes. Get it out, get it out!” He did not know what she meant. And why did the complainer smile?

No wonder as adults in Canada they did not talk.

•  •  •

“Ah Goro, what kind of Indian will you be?” Sabini would tease him. A question projected forward into the future, to be picked up eventually and taken where? Brought back here. The answer: a failed Indian.

Sabini was one of the three African tailors who sat in a row behind their sewing machines on the sidewalk of Jamat Street. A tall man, always wearing a shirt over his trousers, a kofia over his head, he was the acknowledged master, the fundi of clothes. It was he who stitched the neighbourhood boys’ grey cotton school shorts, and their precious woollen trousers to wear during festivals. When the mood struck him he would intercept Kamal, who might be returning home from school or play, with, “Ah, Goro,” rolling the
l
the Swahili way. Kamal would go over and stand to attention before the fundi’s Pfaff machine to humour him. And Sabini would begin his act. “Eti, look at you.” He would pinch the boy’s arm. “You are as black as I am.” And Kamal would hold up his arm and go close and say, “But there is a little of the Matumbi red there. That is the difference.” Sabini would laugh. “You are a rogue, Kamalu, and a true Swahili.” Which was a compliment. “Listen to this one.” He would tell a story.

The lowly servants too—there were always two of them and the turnover was often fast—saw in him a fellow, the African they recognized and he did not deny, to whom they pleaded silently for understanding, and who protested as mutely in their favour. He could not yell at them, call them
boy
as others did, or
kario
, or
chhoro
, or
chhach-hundro
and so on, a long and constantly renewed list of pejoratives. They well knew he was not one to call out a burn mark on an ironed shirt and await the drastic consequences, or mention missing coins from his pants pocket, and he would rather not have seen the kitchen servant quickly put a piece of meat into his mouth from the pot of boiling curry and wince afterwards.

Only Uncle was aware of his bond with the workers: his eye would follow him as Kamal drifted in the direction of Sabini outside the shop threshold, where the two would banter; he would see through the boy’s pretended distraction as a hapless servant faced the women’s wrath.

The most insulting term for a servant was used by Uncle when he addressed the boy who ran odd jobs around the shop. “Weh, mtumwa,” Uncle would call, You slave, do this or that. Take this chit to that shop, tell Mama upstairs to send tea, go and buy muhogo from the street vendor at the corner. Each time he heard this address, Sabini would glance up momentarily. Once he retorted, “Bwana, we thought that after independence we would not hear such terms.” And Uncle replied lightly, “Well, independence has come, and I have the shop and you are still the tailor sitting outside.” “You are right,” Sabini agreed with a laugh. “We all bring our luck with us.”

Uncle was not a bad man. Perhaps he thought calling a young servant mtumwa was appropriate. He himself did not abuse servants—that was left to Auntie and Yasmin. Uncle was the final arbiter after all the accusations of theft and misbehaviour had been heaped; when it only needed a waterboarding to draw out a confession.

Only once had Uncle beaten Kamal, severely with a stick, when the boy came home having bloodied two neighbours’ kids, who themselves had fallen on him previously with a gang. Some hidden spring inside Uncle’s mind released, some suppressed feeling seemed to vent, so unreasonable and uncontrollable was the retribution. He did not ask what happened, simply picked up the brass yardstick. Then, when Kamal had been rescued by Sabini, sobbing violently, he had railed, “To you I am nothing but a mtumwa, a slave … why have you taken me away from my mother … my father would have given you a good beating, he would …” Sabini held him, before Auntie arrived to take him away, and a servant brought him water. Azim, to whom he was a hero and a lion, held his hand, saying, “Basi, Kamalu, basi.” Hush.

He would never forget the frightful look that had come over Uncle’s face, a look not of trivial rage, an incontinent temper, but of a quiet and evil determination to squash him like an insect. As if some Hyde had emerged from that usually phlegmatic mien. Shocked by this outburst, at having revealed something of himself that he would not have admitted to, Kamal’s defiant accusation mocking him before a dozen witnesses, Uncle never again lifted a hand to him. In fact Kamal could detect some smidgen of respect in his attitude. A respect expressed in the occasional sardonic and knowing smile, watching to see how he’d get on after all.

•  •  •

But why had Uncle brought him over from Kilwa?

After Kamal had been rescued from Uncle Jaffu’s retribution, Zera Auntie railed against her husband. Calling him inhuman and a beast, scolding and wailing, she had finally pronounced with simple eloquence, “If he goes away, I will die, and it will be up to you. You will answer to the children.”

And Uncle, sheepish, had answered, “Look, nothing has happened to him. He’s a boy. I was treated much worse.”

It was on a Sunday afternoon, when Kamal had gone out with Shenaz and Azim to the seashore, that a moment of intimacy occurred between the cousins and the answer to his question was revealed to him. It was the hour when the Asians flocked to the shore every Sunday, sitting across from the cathedral, watching the odd steamer and the two tugboats on the water, children running on the beach, rolling in the grass, vendors selling street food. At that moment, the three of them sitting on the grass in a quiet spot and sharing a picnic, the truth slipped out. “Promise you will never tell,” Shenaz said quietly, flinging her head once so that her pigtails went flying. She was the quiet one, with the soft features, and an endearing way of assuming a serious, earnest, and almost adult look. “You must not tell we have told you,” she repeated. Azim nodded. “Promise by God and … and …” He would have added “By your mother,” but held back. “I promise,” said Kamal. “By God and the Prophet.” And so they told him the story—his hidden story. Their mother had become very sick, the doctor had given her only months to live. It was cancer, or TB, or some tumour, the cousins could not decide which. An Indian holy man happened to be visiting Dar and was consulted, and he told their mother and father that they should adopt a yatim, an orphan, preferably an African. The yatim was God’s price for allowing her the extra years. And Uncle said, “My cousin Amin left a child behind in Kilwa, why don’t we adopt him.” And so they made queries; unbeknownst to Kamal, Uncle went to Kilwa and had a look at him, and bought him from his Mama, promising to give him a bright future.