Where the Air is Sweet (30 page)

“Jaafar, Amir,” one of them calls out. The voice is firm, commanding. It reminds Raju of his own voice when his sons were boys, when they misbehaved. In the same moment, Jaafar and Amir stand up. One of the soldiers walks towards them.

“Come with us,” he says.

Raju stands up. Jaafar looks at him and shakes his head.

“I am their father,” Raju says, ignoring Jaafar. “I will go with them.”

The soldier stares at Raju for a moment. Then he thrusts his chin forward, gesturing for him to follow his sons.

Once in front of the restaurant, Raju sees two army Jeeps and a black saloon car. He is shaken; he is shaking. He cannot make out the model of the car. The three of them are instructed to get in the back seat. An officer climbs into the passenger seat in front. A young soldier is driving the car. The Jeeps are behind them. They sit in silence. Raju is staring out the window. He begins to feel hot. He begins to feel that he cannot move, that there are chains wrapped tightly around him.

“Where are you taking us?” Amir asks.

“Simba Battalion.”

“Why? Who wants to see us?”

“My job is to take you to the barracks, to solitary confinement.”

“What have we done?” Amir asks.

The officer turns around and shrugs. His eyes are on Jaafar. “It is bad: a three-by-six-foot cell. One foot of water. No windows. No light. No toilet. You cannot sleep. You die in your
own filth.” He is speaking softly, a hint of pride in his voice. He could be describing a new car, a beloved daughter. His eyes have not left Jaafar.

Raju becomes overwhelmed by the need to urinate. He tells Amir in Gujarati.

“Can we stop? Please,” Amir says. “My father needs to piss.”

The officer tells the driver to pull over. They are about 40 miles out of Kampala, heading southwest towards Mbarara. Raju relieves himself in the grass beside the road. And then he leans into a bush and throws up.

He climbs into the back seat beside Amir, the taste of vomit on his tongue, his throat raw. Raju has driven this route, from Kampala to Mbarara, hundreds of times. He knows exactly when they will pass marsh, exactly when the road will swerve, exactly when they will see the signs marking the equator, exactly when they will reach the barracks at the east end of Mbarara. The driver starts the car. Raju closes his eyes and feels the car turning. He opens them. They are driving back, the way they came, towards Kampala. He looks at Amir, but he is staring straight ahead. Jaafar is looking out the window.

When they are at the Phoenix again, Jaafar explains to Raju that he made a deal. “Lieutenant-Colonel Abdu Saleel told me they are after only me. For 60,000 shillings he agreed to bring us back here. But as part of the deal I have to get out of Uganda immediately.”

“What?”

“It will only be for a week or two, Bapa. They want money. That’s all. It’s nothing to worry about. But don’t tell Mumtaz about this.”

“Did you anger some soldiers?” Amir asks.

Jaafar shakes his head. “I don’t know who could be behind this.”

“We can’t worry about it now. First we need to arrange to get you to Nairobi.”

Raju looks at Amir, then at Jaafar. “What is this? You are discussing this as if it’s a flat tire.”

Jaafar smiles. “It’s fine, Bapa. Everything will be okay.” Jaafar runs his hand over his face. When his hand falls to his side, Raju sees that it is trembling.

At home that night, Jaafar tells Raju that he has contacted Eliab. He owns a warehouse. It is empty. Jaafar will meet him there and Eliab will help him get out of the country safely.

The next morning, when Raju walks into the kitchen, Mumtaz is frying an egg. “Jaafar had to fly early to Nairobi, Bapa. Sit, I’ll get you breakfast.”

It is two weeks later. Raju is standing in his flat, smoking a cigarette. It is late. Mumtaz and the children are asleep. Jaafar has just returned from Nairobi. He is sitting at the dining table with Amir.

“I couldn’t make money. I couldn’t make any new business contacts in Nairobi. After all these days of doing nothing, I couldn’t take it anymore. It was impossible to get anything started. I felt like I was dead.”

“You may be dead yet,” Amir says.

“I think Abdu will be content with the money we gave him.”

“
Kadach
—Maybe.”

Two days later, Jaafar tells Raju and Amir that Abdu showed up at six in the morning, threatening to drive him to Mbarara immediately. Jaafar paid him another 60,000 shillings.

“I’ll drive to Nairobi this time,” Jaafar says. “Maybe we can work in the two cities. You can travel back and forth. I’ll deal with the contacts on that end; you deal with the contacts on this end.” He looks at Amir. “Or, I could grow a big, ugly mustache, cut my hair and become fat. Then I could pretend to be you and stay here.”

“You are thin because you smoke seventy cigarettes a day. It isn’t something to be proud of.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. You know I smoke only fifty.”

Amir and Jaafar laugh. Raju looks at his hands.

A week later, Jaafar returns from Nairobi. He walks into Raju’s flat and sits down on the sofa next to his father. “When I got back to Kampala, I went straight to the Speke Hotel and had a glass of whiskey at the bar, smiling at everyone. Two State Research Bureau men sat down. I didn’t want any trouble from them. I knew if I walked away too quickly it would look suspicious and they would follow me. So I was friendly. But uninteresting. I told them the Renault has been giving me trouble; I talked to them about its sticky gearshift, its faulty brake, about the crack in the rear window. Finally, they became so bored, they left.”

“Are you drunk?” Raju asks. “Why have you come back again? It is too soon.”

“I’m ready for Abdu,” Jaafar says.

The next morning, shortly after dawn, Raju is sitting on a chair near an open window, smoking. He is watching Jaafar standing on the verandah of his flat. He has been standing there for close to a half hour. He has bathed and is shaven and
dressed. When Abdu arrives, Raju puts out his cigarette and stands up. He does not know what will happen. He does not know what he will do if something happens.

“I’m not paying you,” Jaafar says.

Abdu begins to laugh.

“If you want to kill me, then kill me. I will not leave Uganda.”

Abdu stops laughing. Raju feels blood thudding in his ears.

“I am a Ugandan. This is my country. I will not pay you to stay here and I will not leave.”

Raju hears Abdu smack his lips. Then he hears him laugh. “I have no interest in killing you. This is not my problem. Do what you wish.” He gets into his Jeep and drives away.

32

J
AAFAR BEGINS TO INVITE ELIAB HOME FOR DINNER
every night. Amir sits with them and they talk. Mumtaz stays in the kitchen most of the time. The children scamper about the flat until it is time for them to go to sleep. The conversations have become laments, for a lost time, for lost lives, for lost livelihoods. It has become a way to pass the time. And Raju has grown tired of it.

“Are you planning to work as a doctor again?” he asks Amir one evening.

“Where do you think I should administer my medicine?” Amir is slumped on the sofa. “At Mulago Hospital, where doctors live in fear for their lives because they actually know how people are killed and have to lie about it? Or in private practice? How should I advertise my services? Should I offer a discount for those willing to risk their lives by coming to be treated by the universally detested Asian?”

“You will never practise medicine again?”

“Who knows what life will bring. Did we expect this?”

Raju reaches for his teacup and takes a sip.

“I feel something inside me I didn’t use to feel,” Amir says. “I feel a rage inside me. I have no business helping people who most of the time I cannot even look at.”

“You can’t blame all Africans—”

“You saw them,” Amir says, interrupting Jaafar. “Taunting us in lineups at embassies, cheering when cars drove to the airport.”

“Some teenagers taunted. Soldiers cheered. People who knew it was wrong could say nothing. They would risk their lives. You know that.”

“But, you see, I don’t care. I like this feeling.”

“Rage.”

“Rage.”

Raju looks at Eliab. He is playing with his fingernails. The men have been speaking in Gujarati.

“Is that why you’ve taken to drinking whiskey?” Raju asks. “It fuels the good feeling?”

Amir laughs. Amir, who refused to touch alcohol his entire life, now drinks whatever spirits he can get his hands on. He drinks so much that his eyes are continually bloodshot. When he is in Kampala, he rarely sleeps at the flat he shares with Raju. He wanders into the house at dawn, smiling like a madman, looking disheveled. Once, he brought a woman with him. Raju saw her when he stepped into the hallway, her long brown fingers, painted with blood-red polish, pressed over her mouth.

“They are calling themselves Black Patels. Did you know that?” Amir says in Swahili, interrupting Raju’s thoughts. He is sitting two feet away, but Raju can smell the whiskey on his breath. “The new businessmen. The new proprietors of Asian businesses. The thieves.” He is looking at Eliab.

“They are not thieves,” Jaafar says.

“The beneficiaries of the theft then? Shall we call them that?”

Jaafar pats Eliab on the back. “We don’t mean you,” he says. “You are a businessman. Markets opened up and you took advantage. Any good businessman would have done the same. You weren’t handed anything. Idi Amin’s army, his tribesmen got our businesses, our houses. Not you.”

Eliab smiles. Raju sees him look across the room towards the kitchen, towards Mumtaz. Their eyes meet and then Eliab looks away.

“They have a mantra,” Amir says. “‘The economic war is on and the war is winning.’ Can these people be so stupid? And I don’t mean you, Eliab,” he says, turning towards him, his hand held out dramatically. “The economy is in ruins. Sugar, flour and salt are luxuries. They think they are winning something?”

“Maybe it’s misguided, but they feel pride. I can understand that.” Mumtaz has walked into the sitting room. She sits down on the arm of the sofa. A haze of smoke from Jaafar’s cigarette rises up in front of her. Raju watches it move up towards the ceiling and disappear.

“What should they feel proud about?” Amir asks.

“They are their own masters,” she says. “I am not a man. But I think a man would rather be his own master and starve than be a well-fed slave.”

“There were never slaves in Uganda,” says Jaafar.

“I didn’t mean that,” she says. “You misunderstand me.”

“Africans came to us begging for work,” he says. “They’re still coming for work. We took nothing from them. We paid them. When Asians came in the early days, there was nothing
here, no shops, no businesses. There wasn’t even currency. We created all of it. We created an economy. They claim now we took businesses, houses, money from them. How can we have taken what did not exist?”

“Whatever has happened or however it happened,” Mumtaz says, gently, “Uganda’s back is broken. The general or field marshall or whatever Idi Amin calls himself now keeps flogging at the dead body, ordering the Bank of Uganda to print money to feed his bloated, insane military.” She stands up and returns to the kitchen.

Raju is alone with Jaafar. They are standing on the verandah, smoking. It is evening. The sun has set, but the guns have not yet begun to fire. Perhaps tonight, thinks Raju, they will stay quiet.

“What are your plans?” he asks.

Jaafar turns to him. He smiles. “What do you mean?”

Raju shrugs. “Have you decided what you are going to do? You cannot return to Mbarara.”

“How can I make plans when nothing around me can be predicted?”

“Whatever is happening around you, you must still build your life.”

“What do you want me to do?” Jaafar asks in a clipped voice.

“Something more than what you are doing.”

“More? How much more money should I make?”

“Money is a means to something,” Raju says. “You have made it everything. You have made it the means and the goal.”

“I have made it everything? I created this situation?”

“Of course not. I am saying only that you cannot continue
like this. You are making money for money’s sake. It is an empty existence. You are making nothing.”

Jaafar shakes his head.

“You must have a foundation.”

“Our foundation is gone.”

“Build another.”

“How? Where?” Jaafar drops his cigarette and steps on it firmly. He looks at Raju. “You worked hard, Bapa. You built a good life for us. But Uganda has changed. Everything has changed. I know better now. I know this new world better.”

“Better?” Raju asks. “You know better than I know?”

A burst of gunfire pierces the air. “We should go inside,” Jaafar says, and opens the door. He stands and waits until Raju walks past him and into the flat.

Raju is in the red Peugeot 204. He has asked Burezu to drive him to Mbarara.

When they reach the town, he tells him to drive to the cemetery.

The grass is overgrown. The
champeli
trees need pruning. Like everything Asian in Uganda, this cemetery has been abandoned. Someone appears to have taken a crude tool to the tiles that were carefully built up over Rehmat’s grave, that frame a small rectangular garden of earth at its centre, at its summit. Most of the tiles are missing; the ones remaining are broken. He pours water on Rehmat’s and then on Bahdur’s grave. He stands with his hands open in supplication and closes his eyes. He begins to recite al-Fatiha. The Opening. The beginning chapter of the Holy Book:

“In the name of God, the infinitely compassionate and merciful. Praise be to God, Lord of all the worlds. The compassionate, the merciful, Ruler on the Day of Reckoning. You alone do we worship, and You alone do we ask for help. Guide us on the straight path, the path of those who have received your grace; not the path of those who have brought down wrath, nor of those who wander astray.”

Raju takes one step back and recites it again. When he is finished, he stands quietly. Al-Fatiha is to be recited twice at the cemetery: first for the deceased relative, and then a second time, for all the believers who have been buried in that place.