Where the Air is Sweet (11 page)

“Why be around them then?” Mumtaz asks.

“To keep them in check.”

“You, who have no desire for power,” says Jaafar.

They laugh.

Late that afternoon, Jaafar is driving Mumtaz home to Fort Portal.

“How did you come to have a friendship with George?” she asks.

“When I was a small boy, I was trying to learn to ride Baku’s old bicycle. Amir learned quickly but he wouldn’t help me. So, I struggled alone on the road. And after a little while, I saw this boy watching me. I asked him to hold the back of the bicycle.”

“I never saw African children in Eastleigh,” Mumtaz says. “I saw only servants. Africans lived in the countryside, I think. It never even occurred to me to wonder where they lived or how they lived.”

“George helped, but he laughed when I fell,” Jaafar says, ignoring Mumtaz’s comment. “I was angry. I asked him if he could do better. He shook his head and said no. He wasn’t even ashamed.” Jaafar laughs. Mumtaz smiles. “He was nothing like Amir.”

“You learned to ride together?” she asks.

He nods. “When we became experts, I would pedal and George would sit on the handlebars, and we would speed through town. Sometimes, a shopkeeper would yell out, ‘The
kario
should be giving
you
a ride.’“

“In Gujarati, I hope,” Mumtaz says, laughing.

“He went to the Anglican mission school. I went to the Indian primary school. His family lived in the countryside, in the African area. But we met in town after school, every day until George started attending Mbarara High School. Then we spent time together when he was home for school holidays.”

“He seems intelligent.”

“He is very educated. But he has never treated me like Amir does. Like he doesn’t have the time to explain things to me. Even after he finished his degree he didn’t change towards me. He continued to ask my opinion. He continued to take my advice. When he came to town, we drank
waragi,
discussed politics. When I go to Kampala, I call George before I call Amir. Each time George is in Mbarara, he meets me, either at the nightclub at Kakeyka football stadium or at the Agip Motel. In the past few months, he has been bringing friends from the government to Kakeyka. They enjoy themselves.”

“They are in friendly territory,” Mumtaz says. “Mbarara is UPC country.” She looks at him, smiling.

He turns to Mumtaz. “I asked George to hold my bicycle that day because he was a
kario.
It was his job to serve me.”

She is stunned.

He turns back to the road. “That’s why I called him over. I didn’t ask him. I told him. I commanded him.” He laughs.

She is confused. For a moment she is angry. But she sees that his face is flushed, his eyes unusually wide. She cannot think what to say, what to do. For the rest of the drive, they are quiet.

When they reach her house, she turns to Jaafar. He is staring straight ahead, both hands on the steering wheel, though
the engine is off. “You became his friend,” she says quietly. He does not look at her. “You learned to be his friend.” He nods but says nothing.

It is Saturday night. Mumtaz, Jaafar and George are at an outdoor nightclub next to the Kakeyka stadium. George has gone to get beer for himself and Jaafar. Mumtaz turned down the offer of a drink. She is standing awkwardly, her left hand grasping her right elbow behind her. Mumtaz and Jaafar are the only Asians in a sea of black Africans. She asked him to bring her here, where, he explained, he used to spend his Saturday nights before he met her.

“What do you do here?” she asks.

He turns to face her.

“I mean, what is the attraction of this place?”

“The beer is cheap.”

George arrives with two bottles of Bell beer. Jaafar turns to him. Mumtaz feels the weight of a body push against her. She turns to see an African. He smells of alcohol. He nods, smiles, blows cigarette smoke upwards. But he does not apologize. She feels her body stiffen. She has never felt the touch of an African man before. She looks at Jaafar. He appears oblivious to any offence having occurred.

A tall, sinewy woman with closely cropped hair approaches Jaafar and George. She addresses them in a language Mumtaz cannot understand. “This is my fiancée,” Jaafar says in English, his hand reaching weakly towards Mumtaz. He does not explain to Mumtaz who the woman is. She smiles broadly, revealing gleaming white teeth. As she turns to walk away, Mumtaz sees
a look pass between the woman and Jaafar, a look pregnant with meaning, with knowing.

Later, on the drive home, Mumtaz turns to Jaafar. “I suppose it was foolish, but it never occurred to me you had African friends who are women.”

He laughs.

“Was she your girlfriend?”

He is quiet.

Did she serve you? Did you command her? she thinks but does not say.

“I knew it was a bad idea to take you,” he says. “But you insisted.”

“I wanted to go because you went. Because I imagine there is more to life than the inside of a kitchen.”

“So much more,” he says quickly. “I promise I’ll show it to you.” He smiles. “You are imagining too much. It was simply a place to have a beer with friends and look at pretty girls. Where else can we do this? At
jamat khana
? But now I don’t need to go anymore. Soon I will have a beautiful wife.”

She smiles. But her face feels tight.

“After we are married, we’ll go to restaurants in Kampala. I’ll teach you tennis. The Mbarara Country Club allows non-whites now. I’m a member.” He takes her hand. “Okay?”

She nods as the image of the shorn beauty floats through her mind like a phantom.

Raju is standing on a lawn. It is late afternoon and the sky is cloudless and the colour of the sea. For the past two decades, his stomach has been growing larger and fuller. Now, it
protrudes so much that it makes his back arch slightly, like a pregnant woman’s. Despite the extra weight, he feels light. Of the three mortgages he held with Diamond Jubilee Investment Trust, on his two houses and the garage, only one remains to be paid off and he expects to do so within the year. The garage is thriving. His hand is free to spend. Even his brother, Ghulam, is settled, living in Kabale, where his two grown sons run a successful
duka.
After Raju’s mother died of typhoid ten years ago, Ghulam cleaned up his behaviour, drinking less, staying at the shop later. “You are no longer anyone’s child,” Raju told him as he read him the telegram announcing their mother’s death. “Your only choice is to be a man.”

With Jaafar’s wedding today, Amir remains Raju’s only unmarried child. But Amir cannot bring him shame. He is a physician. Even though he chooses to live apart from his family, he brings them honour. There is nothing wrong if he lives without a wife for a few more years. Raju has done his duty as a father. He smiles as he looks around. Besides the entire
jamat
of Mbarara, the guests include the second son of the
Mugabe
of Ankole, the district commissioner, the commanding officer of the Simba Battalion and Mbarara’s pandits, priests and pastors. Everyone Raju knows is here. Except Mumdu. Raju expected Rehmat to ask about contacting their eldest son, about including him in the first wedding in the family since he left them. He expected an argument, anger, relief, perhaps forgiveness. But she did not ask about Mumdu. And he could not.

Children, children of Raju’s children and children he does not recognize are running through the small groups of adults that have formed, chasing one another, laughing, bumping into people, knocking over drinks. Their mischief, the disorder they
are introducing does not bother Raju today. As he watches them he feels the way he feels when he listens to raindrops falling on a corrugated-iron roof: confident that in spite of their clamour they cannot penetrate. He takes a sip of his sherbet. Pieces of chopped pistachios, almonds and tapioca slip into his mouth along with the sweet, creamy liquid. As he chews he turns. In the distance he sees his wife. Rehmat is sitting on a chair beside Sherbanu, but she is looking directly at her husband. He begins laughing. She is shaking her head.
“The evil eye of envy will befall you and yours
,
”
he can hear her saying, though her lips are not moving, though she is yards away.
“Don’t be so proud.”
But Raju is proud. He has earned this. He walks towards her. He is smiling when he reaches her. He pats his belly. Rehmat laughs. Her laugh, like her voice, is deep, sonorous. Her laugh is not infectious. It is calming.

“Mumda ni Ma.”
He says it quietly. He says it before his mind can stop him. He knows she has heard it. Their eyes meet and Raju feels his heart pushing upwards, escaping out of its cage of ribs, a creature with a will as strong as his own. He turns away from Rehmat and scans the crowd until his eyes fall on the newly married couple, on Jaafar’s black suit, its outlines stark against his wife’s white dress.

Mumtaz is three inches taller today than yesterday, when she was not yet Mrs. Jaafar Ismail. The heels on her pumps are only an inch, but her hair is sitting high on her head, in an updo. With her cousin’s help, she backcombed it this morning until the hairs expanded, until each strand became airy and pliable, like cotton. And then she lifted the hairs and pulled them back
and up into a beehive, using countless hairpins to hold it in place.

Her dress, made of white lace, hugs her slim body until it reaches her waist, where it poofs out, the underskirt made of tulle. She saw a dress like this in a photograph when she was in school, when she was a girl. She did not imagine then that she would ever wear anything like it. And yet the photograph stayed in her mind, deep inside it. Years later, when she was preparing for her wedding, when it became fashionable for Ismaili girls to wear white wedding dresses, she retrieved the image. She found the lace in a shop in Kampala and, over the next three days, stitched the dress herself. She stitched it just as she remembered it, except for the length. In the photograph, the dress reached the floor, hiding the European bride’s feet. Mumtaz pulled the hem up to her knees. “Otherwise,” she said to her stepmother, “I will take up too much space, more even than my husband.”

Four days after Jaafar and Mumtaz’s wedding, Jaafar is on the sofa in his family’s sitting room. George is seated on the far end of the sofa. Amir is opposite them in a wooden chair. The men are talking about the attack on the
kabaka’s
palace and Mumtaz is setting the table for lunch.

“Using the army to take out King Freddie?” Jaafar says. “This is ugly.” The
Uganda Argus
is laid out on the sofa between him and George.

“The
kabaka
is dead?” Mumtaz asks. She is standing next to the dining table, holding a fistful of forks in her left hand, knives in her right.

George looks over. “No. He appears to have escaped out of the country.”

Mumtaz nods and places the cutlery in a pile on the table.

“Though others died,” Amir says.

“Yes,” says George. “The army killed a fair number of people at the palace. And then afterwards they went on a rampage and killed many Baganda. I don’t know much about this General Amin. He was an officer under the British. You’d think he would know how to control his army better than this. But maybe they can’t be controlled.”

“Eh! Wife!” Jaafar says. “You shouldn’t be working. We can’t have your henna fading before even leaving for our honeymoon.”

“I’m not working,” she says. “George, why did this happen? Why did the army attack the
kabaka’s
palace?”

“In the years before independence, we went a bit crazy. We wanted independence as quickly as possible. We thought we could sort out the details later. So, UPC joined with the Kabaka Yeka. We all wanted indendence from the British, after all. But it was foolish. How can the UPC, a party that wants a unitary government, be in a coalition with a party that wants only their tribal king to rule? The tension between Obote and the
kabaka
became too much. Obote exerted his authority. By ordering the attack, he showed who rules. And it isn’t the
kabaka.
”

Jaafar folds the newspaper and puts it on the coffee table in front of him. He looks at George. “What next? A massacre of the entire Baganda population?”

“It is a painful and messy process, growing up and becoming independent,” Amir says. “Look at you. You’ve been in the process for years.”

The brothers laugh. George smiles.

“Africans weren’t grown-up before the British came?” Mumtaz asks.

The three men turn simultaneously to look at her.

“Their systems, their manner of living,” says Amir slowly, as though speaking to an elderly person, “were certainly not as advanced.”

“True,” she says.

Amir reaches forward to pick up the newspaper.

“If judged by British systems and manner of living.”

Amir turns to look at her. She is biting the nail on her smallest finger, her eyes on him. When he looks away, she drops her hand and walks into the kitchen. She hears George and Jaafar laughing.

Mumtaz first met Amir at her engagement ceremony. She was afraid of meeting him. She was afraid of the emotions that would rise up in her when she saw a replica of Jaafar. But he was not a replica of Jaafar. If she had not been told he was her fiancé’s identical twin, she would not have guessed it.

Amir arrived late to her parents’ house wearing a pale blue safari suit, his hair cut so close to his head his scalp was visible. When he leaned forward to kiss her cheek, his mustache brushed against her face and the smell of his perspiration made her recoil. Jaafar is clean-shaven and emits the scent of cologne and tobacco, but she could see him in his brother’s face. The shape of the eyes, the width of the nose, the smile were all the same. But Amir was different. He lacked Jaafar’s childlike energy, his impishness, his openness. If Jaafar made Mumtaz want to be near him, Amir made her want to be far.

“Do you two have a secret language?” Mumtaz asked Jaafar later when they were sitting in her back garden, the guests gone, their parents in the house discussing details of the upcoming wedding.