Where the Air is Sweet (31 page)

Raju looks around him, past the cemetery. He sees houses in the distance, corrugated-iron sheets sheltering inhabitants from the punishing sun. As he draws his eyes back to the cemetery, back to himself, he sees a small boy only a few yards away, watching him. The boy’s hands are held open and near his chest. His pale palms are turned upwards. He is imitating Raju. When he sees Raju watching him, he drops his hands and looks at the ground. He is wearing threadbare trousers that reach just past his knees and a shirt that belongs on a body much larger than his, on a man’s body. He is barefoot. His head is shorn.

Raju walks to the outside edge of the cemetery. He closes his eyes, holds his palms upwards and begins reciting al-Fatiha again, a third time. His voice is insistent, pleading as he offers the prayer for the boy and for George and for everyone beyond this vandalized, overgrown, forsaken cemetery. Everyone who has been bereft and beaten and tortured and shot and ripped apart and bludgeoned and made forever a part of this land, a part of this red earth: this earth that Raju has known better
than he has known any human being; this earth that has opened to him as no woman has; this earth that has given more to him than he dared to believe he deserved.

He opens his eyes and looks up. The boy is gone.

When he returns to the car, he asks Burezu to move to the passenger seat.

Raju drives beyond Mbarara, to the west, onto a dirt road. He knows where he is going. But he does not know what is drawing him there. He keeps driving until he reaches a cluster of homesteads reaching into the hinterland. He stops the car and steps out.

Grace lived here. Raju never saw her home. He was driving with Hussein, once, fifty years ago, and Hussein stopped and pointed over here, in this direction. He told Raju she lived somewhere deep in the countryside. But Raju never came. He never asked about her. He never spoke of her. “I want children, many children,” she once told him. “Children are a blessing. They are the future.” This is what Raju remembers now. These are the words that come to his mind. It occurs to him for the first time, in this moment, in this place, that she might have wanted his child. That perhaps she was carrying his child. That this is what she was telling him.

“I’m going for a walk,” he says. Burezu opens his mouth to speak, but Raju has already begun to move ahead. Burezu follows him at a distance. Raju can hear him breathing.

He walks past the homesteads, past the children staring at him, past the scattering chickens, farther and farther off the road, off the footpaths. He stops walking when he sees a woman in front of a small shack of a home, one corrugated-iron sheet covering mud walls. Grace was older than he was, and he was
twenty-three. Now, he is seventy-three. Though he knows this woman is much too young to be her, he imagines he is watching Grace. He imagines he has found her after all these years.

She is hunched over. Her arms hang loosely, but her legs pound powerfully. Each time she stomps on the earth, red dust is released into the air. The soles of her feet are coarse. Her long, empty breasts sway from side to side under her dress. She grunts rhythmically, like a stuck record.
“Hanh! Hanh! Hanh!”
The pupils of her eyes have rolled back into her head. Every so often she closes her whitened eyes, throws her head back and ululates. Is she celebrating? Is she grieving? Raju knows nothing of this language. But he longs to join her in this mad dance, to crawl on his hands and knees and rub his face against the raw earth, to taste the blood that has seeped into each grain of its dust.

“Mzee.” It is Burezu. “Soon it will be dark. We must go.” The sun is low in the sky. Raju does not move. Burezu takes his elbow gently and leads him to the car. Then he drives him through Mbarara and to the east and the north, back to Kampala.

33

“I
MADE A MISTAKE, TELLING YOU TO STAY WITH
Jaafar.”

Mumtaz was wiping the dining table with a damp cloth when Raju walked in, startling her. She stops and looks at him. “Bapa, I was angry that night when we first came to Kampala. I was terrified. I’d never heard guns before. Please forgive me for speaking that way to you.”

“No,” he says. “You must forgive me.”

“Bapa—”

“We have been watching men go mad holding on to their tribes. Fools, all of them. Banyankole, Baganda, Banyoro, Acholi. But I, too, am a fool. My whole life I have been a fool. Fighting to hold on to my tribe, my people, as if they were my life, as if they were my breath.” He looks at her for a moment and then walks out. She hears a door close.

After a few minutes, Mumtaz walks across the hall and enters Raju’s flat. He is standing at the window, smoking. He turns to her. She opens her mouth, but he speaks first.

“You need to know how Jaafar is making money,” he says.

“I don’t care,” she says. She turns to leave.

“You must care. You must know.”

She stops.

“You are not a child.”

She walks towards him and sits down on a dining chair. Raju sits down across from her. He puts out his cigarette in the ashtray.

“Eliab has given Jaafar employment cards. As far as the government of Uganda is concerned, Amir and Jaafar are his bookkeepers. But they do not work for him.”

“I know,” she says.

And then Raju tells her what she does not know.

A travel agent in Kampala sells East African Airways tickets to Jaafar for the official rate of 7.14 shillings per US dollar. The employee turns a blind eye to the fact that Jaafar buys a handful of tickets almost weekly. The blind eye costs Jaafar some money, but he easily makes it up. The value of the ticket in US dollars is printed on the front of the ticket. The market value of the tickets is much higher, almost seven times as high, because the black market rate of exchange is 40 to 50 shillings per US dollar.

“So, a ticket that costs $100 is worth 4,000 to 5,000 shillings. But Jaafar pays only 714 shillings?” she asks.

Raju nods. “It’s like buying US dollars for 7.14 shillings each instead of 50 shillings each.”

In Nairobi, Jaafar takes the tickets to an East African Airways contact who, for a bribe, reissues them as open tickets by removing the name of the carrier. The face value remains the same on the ticket. But without the name of a carrier, the ticket becomes an MCO. A miscellaneous charges order can be traded for air tickets or hotel vouchers at any IATA airlines and hotels.

Jaafar flies to Brussels and sells the open tickets to a European contact for 25 percent less than their face value; he receives payment in US dollars or pounds sterling. He deposits the money in a bank account he has opened in Brussels, and then transfers it to the European accounts of Kenyan businessmen with whom he made arrangements before leaving. He returns to Nairobi and is paid by the businessmen in Kenyan shillings. They pay for the US dollars at a premium. In Kampala, Jaafar sells the Kenyan shillings, making more and more Ugandan shillings, which are devaluing daily against the Kenyan shilling as Uganda’s economy continues its collapse. Then he uses these Ugandan shillings to buy more airline tickets and make more money.

“My husband is a forex bureau.”

“Your husband is clever.” Raju’s voice is thick. “But he didn’t come up with this plan. An employee at Sabena airlines in Kampala, a young Lango, saw him regularly meeting with the manager. One day, outside a restaurant, he approached Jaafar. He suspected he had access to a market for US dollars and pounds sterling.”

Mumtaz folds her arms. “They know we Asians stick together.”

“This Lango put Jaafar in touch with a European contact.”

“Open tickets can be used by people on any airlines?”

Raju nods. “Yes, any IATA airlines. The bills are sent to the airline that issued them. In this case, East African Airlines.”

“The airline that Idi Amin insisted Asians must use to leave Uganda?” she asks. “Is this some kind of payback?”

Raju ignores her question and continues. “Amir and Jaafar work the scheme together, taking alternating turns buying the
tickets in Kampala and having them reissued in Nairobi. Amir has established a second contact in London. They keep a small float in Jaafar’s Brussels bank account. But otherwise, they do not send money out of the country; they do not keep it somewhere safe. They keep reinvesting cash into the scheme. They are making up to $1,000 US a day. They spend hours and hours in the casino in Nairobi, gambling, drinking. And then they make more money. It is falling out of their hands as easily as it is falling in.”

She moves her head from side to side as though she is trying to shake something loose. She stares at Raju. “So much money? Why are we living here?” Her lip curls. “And not in a posh house with a big garden for the children to play in.”

“We must not attract the attention of Idi Amin’s security people. Jaafar and Amir drive only inexpensive cars and wear only inexpensive clothes. We live in a modest home in a modest neighbourhood. Jaafar and Amir have learned to keep an eye out for the killers of the State Research Bureau. You must learn as well. They are easy to recognize. They wear, always, dark sunglasses, bright colourful shirts and those trousers with the big bottoms. They drive Peugeot 504s, and sometimes Toyotas. Their skin is a lighter brown, not dark, and their faces are long and narrow. They look and sound nothing like the Africans we have known. They are Nubis, from Sudan and northern Uganda. Their Swahili is weak; their English is worse. If you are face to face with them in hotels, at restaurants, be polite. If they talk to you, talk about trivial things. Make no obvious attempt to conceal yourself.”

Mumtaz can see Karim and Shama playing on the tarmac driveway. The parameters of the car park have become the limits of their lives. They are forbidden to go beyond the gate. They have no toys, no books, no television. Rubaga Flats is made up of two four-storey buildings that face each other. Except for the two flats Mumtaz and her family occupy, the buildings are completely empty. Everyone has gone. Everyone has fled.

Today, Karim and Shama have devised some sort of game with pebbles. She presses her forehead against the bars on the window and watches them. Her children are trapped in a concrete prison. Jaafar is earning more money than she believed it was possible to earn, and yet he cannot provide them with a spot of grass.

Karim has become cruel to Shama. Every day Mumtaz must go outside and scold him for hitting her, pulling her arm too roughly, shouting at her. And Shama cries at the smallest provocation. A slow, piercing moan. It has begun to grate on everyone. Even Jaafar scolds her, sending her to her room. Something he has never done.

Mumtaz has instructed them to come inside when the sun begins to set.

“Because mosquitoes bite when the sun is going down,” Shama said.

Karim laughed.

“No, Shama. Because the army is outside all the time and at night they are more dangerous.”

“What is dangerous?”

“It means they can hurt us.”

Mumtaz turns away from the window and starts cleaning the floor. Whoever once lived here did not regularly clean,
or properly clean. Stains dot the cheap tiling. The houseboy they have hired does not know how to wash a floor. He is not well trained like Esteri was. Every day Mumtaz kneels down and scrubs. Today, she uses Dettol and then bleach. When she is finished, she stands up, exhausted, her hands aching, and looks out the window. She cannot see the children. She walks outside and calls to them. They do not answer. She looks in each verandah and then races to the gate and looks around, shouting their names. They are nowhere in sight. She runs down the road, calling for them. People stare at her, a wild-eyed barefoot Asian woman wearing a torn
kanga.
She turns around and runs in the other direction, up towards Mengo Hill, towards the barracks.

Fruit stalls line the road. Mumtaz stops, scans them, the people near them. She hears a child scream. She turns. It is a small child. Not Shama. Not Karim. She turns again quickly and her elbow hits a tower of passion fruit, knocking it over. A vendor begins shouting at her. Mumtaz cannot understand the words. She raises her hands apologetically, defensively.

“Polé, polé. Watoto wangu ni kupotea,”
she says in Swahili. My children are lost.
“Watoto wangu ni kupotea,”
she repeats.

The vendor is a heavy-set woman with a scarf tied on her head. She begins to laugh, turning to look at a man beside her. They both laugh, their bodies shaking, their yellowed teeth mocking Mumtaz. She doesn’t know Luganda. She tries speaking English. But this makes them laugh harder, more loudly. She runs her hands over her face and holds them at her mouth.

She sees them.

They are on the other side of the road. Shama standing slightly behind Karim. Two soldiers face them, blocking their
way. The soldiers’ faces are like their bodies, thin and long. One is much taller than the other. Kalashnikov rifles hang by straps over their shoulders. Mumtaz’s throat tightens, the smell of bleach swirls through her head. She lowers her hands and, slowly, begins walking. She crosses the road so that she is behind the children, so that she can see the soldiers’ faces.

“Lost,
mhindis
?” the taller soldier asks in Swahili.

“No.” Karim spits the word out.

“Where are you going?”

“We can go anywhere we want. We are Ugandans.”

The soldiers laugh. The taller one bends down so that he is looking at Karim. He stops laughing. He looks angry. He looks dangerous. Everything slows down. Mumtaz can see the soldier’s eyes. They are light brown, extraordinarily light, and glassy. He is struggling to keep his eyelids open. His head is lolling slightly, as though it is too heavy for his neck. She steps closer and is hit by the smell of whiskey and sweat.

“
Polé
,” Mumtaz says quickly, putting one arm around Shama and grabbing hold of Karim’s elbow.
“Polé.”
She smiles. “They are only children. They are children.”

The soldier looks at her, his eyes scanning her body, stopping at the level of her breasts. She pulls the children towards her and takes a step backwards.