The Magic of Saida (30 page)

Tears in his eyes, Kamal cried out, “You have been picking on me, and lying about me, and the teachers listen to you, and this buffalo Mr. Haji—”

Mr. Fernandes, the English teacher, had walked in from outside and stood beside Mr. Haji. He spoke sternly, “Now Kamal, don’t be silly. Let Miss Kanga go.”

Just that, no threat. Kamal released her and a boy escorted her to the staff room.

“Not only will I expel you,” spluttered Mr. Haji, “but I will call the police, too. But first, your uncle. Let’s see what he says to this! You, my boy, are finished! You are finished!”

“Don’t you touch me!” Kamal replied. But he went with the principal to the office to await his uncle.

Kamal would never quite understand his uncle, who had brought him to his home, but not completely accepted him, and yet given him everything he gave his own children. And now, as he stood beside Kamal, facing Mr. Haji and Miss Kanga in the office in his shopkeeper’s crumpled trousers and shirt hanging out and not quite shaved, he replied to the principal’s charge.

“No. Kamal would never do that.” He stared contemptuously at Miss Kanga and said, “You have a piece like that, dressed in this way, stand before young men, and what do you expect?”

Miss Kanga seemed to wither away behind Mr. Haji.

“Mr. Punja, I am expelling your son. And if Miss Kanga desires, I will report the attack by your son to the police.”

Uncle looked at Mr. Haji and said, “I would like to speak to you in private.”

“By all means,” said Mr. Haji. “But don’t ask for leniency. Kamal has overstepped all bounds. There will be no mercy. No mercy whatsoever. Understand this. There are rules.”

Kamal went to stand outside Mr. Haji’s office, and Miss Kanga went away to the staff room.

Ten minutes later, Mr. Haji told Kamal to go back to his class. And Uncle went back to sit in his store, whose confines he hated so much to leave, except to go to the khano in the evening.

When Kamal returned to class, he was a hero. Wah, you held her like that, you felt her ass. Did you dig into her, Kamal, eh, did you dig into her? You should fuck her. They like Africans with their big
pricks, these educated women. You should fuck her. Just ask her. And then tell us about it!

Later they all became friends, he and his tormentors. Whenever they met, in Edmonton, or Toronto, at small reunions at the house of one or the other of them, they joked about the antics of their school days. Had bellyfuls of laughs, till the tears ran down their cheeks and the children present wondered what had happened to their fathers. And yet in his privacy when he would recall the cruelty which had been meted out to him, its crude racism, a bitter feeling would rise in him. Could the young be truly evil? Or was it all innocence? Could all be forgiven from the past? The chumminess only began when they got older and more mature, and as he began to be accepted as one of them—and indeed became one of them.

“Weh Kamalu,” Sabini said to him a few days later. “What miracle did you accomplish in school that we hear about?”

“Sabini,” said Kamalu, speaking forcefully but in a low voice, “I refused to be whipped like a slave.” Nilikataa kuchapwa kiboko.

“So you think you are Mau Mau now?” Sabini replied, unable to keep the pleasure from his face.

And back in the shop, when one of his cronies asked Uncle, “Arré, Jaffu, what did you say to Mr. Haji that he let Kamal go?” Uncle replied, “I told him I would go to the Party office and make a report that they were harassing an African child. And they would all be deported to India, the lot of them. That took care of that stuttering, big-balled Haji.”

“Was that teacher a white woman?”

“As good as white, and what a piece. So when are you sending me a girl?”

“You didn’t want that Arab. The taxi driver would have brought her and picked you up. No hassle.”

“No, no Arab. Bring me a Halima or a Fatuma.”

One moment he was proud of his uncle, the next disgusted. He would think he deserved a father like Sabini, who worked hard and understood him, was friendly, had principles. He himself knew little about the man, but they were kinsmen, there could be little doubt of that.

•  •  •

Mr. Fernandes, who had broken that High Noon moment, the minihostage crisis in the classroom, as Kamal would wryly recall it, had recently taken him in hand. He was an English and history teacher of the higher forms, with a particularly haughty no-nonsense manner, because he was good and known to be so. He knew what he taught, and he could guide you to do well in the final-year national exams, which determined university entrance and therefore your future. Not the same could be said of other teachers. And so Mr. Fernandes was not one to be easily impressed or fooled, but he had been impressed by Kamal’s essay on the First War of Independence, as the Maji Maji War was called after the independence of the country. In his essay Kamal had written that the Germans must have had some good in them, for they had started schools, and some Swahili poets praised them. The other boys as usual had regurgitated paragraphs from the textbook. One day Mr. Fernandes took Kamal aside in the corridor and complimented him on having taken pains with his essay, and asked him what source he had consulted regarding the Swahili poets. Kamal was dumbfounded at this close, unwanted attention. Perhaps the teacher was out to challenge him? Mr. Fernandes asked him again what book had he consulted, and if he knew any poets; did he know any poetry himself? Kamal told him about Mzee Omari and his utenzis that he had heard in Kilwa. Did they count as a source? He thought they were, for in them the old poet wrote what he remembered. Or
thought
he remembered, Mr. Fernandes corrected. Still, he admitted, Kamal’s source was an important one, an original one. Not many people thought of poems as historical sources, but they were. “Keep it up!” Mr. Fernandes told him. “Keep it up, and you will go far.”

Mr. Fernandes spoke to Mr. Gregory, the senior English teacher, about his discovery. Mr. Gregory had been renowned in Dar for many years as the teacher who knew Shakespeare by heart. He was essential if you wanted to understand
Julius Caesar
or
Macbeth
. Under the patronage of these two teachers Kamal became not only mainstream but also among the elite, upon whom the school’s academic reputation rested. Soon he was a member of the Dramatics Society, the Literary Society and the History Society. He was made a prefect.

Mr. Fernandes practically begged Kamal to take up history or literature
at university. All the bright boys pursued science, he said. But history and literature were as important. Perhaps more so, because they kept alive the soul of a nation. “Kamal,” he pleaded, “you have a gift for humanities, you have sensitivity. The nation needs to learn about our poets. The
world
needs to know about our poets. We need to write our stories.” But Kamal was adamant. “I want to become a daktari, I want to do something useful for the country.” “History is not useless, Kamal. Literature is not useless. Think about it.” “Yes, sir.”

But he had already made up his mind.

I happened to go to the same school as Kamal Punja, this man who told me his story, as we sat at the Africana or the Kilimanjaro, at the A-Tea Shop or a bench on Ocean View Road watching the waves. I did not remember him from our school days, though I did try, until he mentioned the episode of the lovely Miss Kanga; only then did I recall being pointed out the large-headed African boy two grades higher who had almost strangled Miss Kanga and defied Mr. Haji.

In those heady few years following the country’s independence, several slogans articulated the prevailing attitude and ideology in our country, which had taken the socialist route to development and a pro-Chinese political stand abroad. One of these slogans proclaimed, “Uhuru na kazi”—freedom and work. Another said, “Make effort, don’t be a parasite.” I recall myself as a young cadre marching in the streets, singing, “Who’s going to build our nation, mother? Not the Americans!” Needless to say, the Americans were not our friends, because we were China’s friends. And needless to say, too, that our high-minded socialism ultimately failed miserably, crippled by all sorts of inadequacies.

Kamal wanted to do something useful and practical for the country. Tend to the sick, using modern medicines. No more old women’s prayers and witches digging up roots from the forest and old men writing down verses from the Quran.

Mr. Fernandes could not persuade him, but he did point me to my path. I decided to accept his encouragement and ultimately became
a publisher. And now we sit facing each other, idealistic products of our time, influenced by the same teacher: one a wealthy doctor from abroad who did not tend to the sick of his own country; the other a former publisher whose vocation almost disappeared because of inept socialism, now desperately hoping to publish the doctor’s story.

Late one afternoon in Dar, as Kamal emerged from the shop, bathed and neatly combed and attired, on his way to khano down the road, Sabini was waiting for him outside on the pavement.

“Kamalu, kwa heri. Goodbye, I’m going away.”

“Kwa heri, basi. See you tomorrow.”

“There’s no tomorrow, I’m going away for good.”

“Don’t fool around …” Usinitanie, sasa!

Where? Home … somewhere, never to return. Why? He would not say. He was just going.

First the bullying:

“You can’t go, Sabini. I don’t allow you to go. Your place is here.”

Then the pleading:

“Nowhere else but here, Sabini. We are of one blood, Sabini. Don’t abandon me! Please … listen to me …”

“Don’t cry, my friend. The girls will laugh at you. I must go.”

“Really?”

“Really.” Mungu na mtume. By God and His Prophet.

“But you must come back. To see me …”

“I will, my brother.”

And so he was off. Just like that.

First Mama; then Sabini.

Kamal followed him at a distance, like a stray, all the way down Mosque Street, Market Street, to Uhuru Street and the bus station crowded with workers on their way home. An average figure of a man, one to disappear easily in a crowd, not even a basket in his hand, walking at a steady, unhurried pace. Loose pants, overshirt,
sandals. Only when he reached the bus stop did he look back briefly at Kamal before getting into a waiting bus.

Kamal hadn’t thought to ask him for an address. He probably didn’t have a concrete one, a writable one—he was going away. Kamal saw the bus lurch forward and drive out onto the main road, full to capacity, men hanging out from the door. The sun was sinking, the grey of dusk had spread all over. The khano’s clock chimed seven o’clock. He would be late this evening.

Could someone disappear so easily from your life, without a trace? How did Sabini remember him afterwards? It would seem to Kamal later that unlike his ordered life in Canada, his childhood existence had been some conjuror’s creation, with the ability to change shape, parts of it to disappear like smoke, leaving behind only the indelible impressions on his mind and heart, utter bewilderment and sorrow.

Sabini’s departure was the last of his childhood chapters; following the fundi pathetically up to Uhuru Street until he disappeared was Kamal’s last childish gesture of despair. His life was changing. He was growing up to be respected and treated like an adult, an educated one at that, with prospects. The head prefect in school. His skin colour was rarely an issue now, he had grown into the Shamsi community, he was one of them, though a dark one. What defined him were his clothes, his manners, his speech; his reputation. His Swahili intonations had gradually been smoothed away under the clamour of two Indian languages and English. He could recall Mama, but the ache of her loss was mere memory now. If she had needed him, she would have come to see him. He did not feel bitter. And Saida? What would she look like now? The tawiz belonged among his precious possessions, but he did not wear it, didn’t want to explain it. He thought of her fondly, of the times they spent together. A many and a pany: she could draw a smile out of him even these many years later. But she was no longer his succour at night, to turn to when he felt unhappy.

It was a tumultuous period in the nation, in all of Africa, as Kamal entered his final years in school. One day Ethiopia’s emperor, Haile Selassie, passed through the city; another day it would be Tubman of Liberia, or Nkrumah of Ghana, or the Chinese premier, Chou En-lai. A politician was assassinated in Kenya, a routine settling of scores,
but the longed-for East African federation seemed to recede even further away. It was a time of action, of building the nation, a time of the maandamano, the public demonstration. Singing slogans, student patriots marched in processions to demonstrate against the oppressors of Africa—the Portuguese, the white Rhodesians, the white South Africans—and were ready to pick up rifles to go and fight. Young and old marched in support of the new dawn of African Socialism, which would bring on a just, egalitarian society. Naive times, but proud times. The nation received aid but did not kneel for it yet.

It was then that Mr. Fernandes attempted to net Kamal Punja into the humanities, for the sake of, as he called it, the soul of the nation.

One day the Ghanaian writer Ben Assamoah came to the school, brought by the headmaster, Mr. Palangyo. Nobody knew that Palangyo himself was a closet novelist, whose only novel Kamal discovered to his amazement in the remainders bin of an Edmonton bookstore many years later. But Assamoah was world-famous even then. Mr. Fernandes and Mr. Gregory arranged a meeting of him and the senior boys, in a corner of the school hall. Mr. Gregory had deigned to wear a tie and clean shirt for the occasion.

Ben Assamoah was already sitting in the assembly hall with Palangyo when the boys entered. He was a somewhat small man with a round face and wore a coloured African shirt. Palangyo introduced the Ghanaian guest as Africa’s greatest writer and an editor. Gregory mumbled something about the school’s new literature program. Assamoah first spoke about his own school days, the books he had read, how they influenced him. He stressed the importance of literature, of writing authentically. He concluded by holding up the samples of the boys’ writing the teachers had given him to look at. “I’ve read these,” he said, “with much interest. You will see my comments squiggled on these pages. But I have one overall comment to all budding African writers. Write about what you know. Why write about England? What do you know about living in New York? Write about Dar es Salaam, write about Tanzania. Those are the stories we need.” He looked around at the faces before him. “By all means read about London and New York, but let those in Europe
and America, and indeed Nigeria and Ghana, read about your Dar es Salaam. That’s what Africa needs.”