Where the Air is Sweet (6 page)

Rehmat and the younger children live here during school
holidays. Raju does not want his children to compromise their education. When school is in session, they stay with Rehmat in the house in Mbarara. Mumdu and Baku remain at the mine with their father, though occasionally on weekends they return to Mbarara. Raju rarely leaves. For years, he will live at the mine, for years he will be so near the earth that he does not know where it ends and he begins. In the night he sleeps in his mud house, inches from the dirt floor, the dirt walls. In the day, as long as the sun is in the sky, he digs and scours, coated from the top of his hat to the bottom of his rubber boots in earth. The dust at the mine is always in movement, always disturbed, intermingling with the air that enters Raju’s lungs, his bloodstream, his cells. No matter how much he scrubs his face and his hands, the smell of the earth will not leave him.

In the years immediately after the war, tin, trucked to Kampala, sent by rail to Mombasa and then shipped to Europe, continues to be in demand. Raju is able to earn enough money to feed, clothe and house his family and send his children to school. He gives his brother money to open another grocery shop, this time in Masaka; the new small
duka
allows Ghulam, for the time being, to support his family.

Deep inside the land, Raju finds the beginnings of peace.

It is morning. Raju awakes, slowly stands up and heads towards the door to join Rehmat, who is already outside. But first he stops, turns and looks behind him at his family: Gulshi sleeps on one bed in the corner; Mumdu and Baku lie next to each other, each on his own
charpai
; Bahdur and the six-year-old twins, Amir and Jaafar, are curled in a heap on a bed in the corner,
their limbs entwined like the roots of a tree. He smiles, lifts the mosquito netting, opens the door and steps into the cool, dark morning.

A half hour later, the tip of the sun appears over the horizon. Raju is watching the smoke rise near the huts of the mine workers. The long pieces of wood in his
chulo
are burning brightly. He places his open palms towards the fire, warming them. Gulshi comes outside, her eyes pink and puffy, and sits down on a low wooden stool in the corner of the walled-off outdoor kitchen.

Gulshi yawns. She does not lift her hand up to cover her mouth.

“Did you not sleep well,
beta
?” Raju hears Rehmat ask.

Gulshi shakes her head and tucks some stray strands of hair behind her ear. Then she leaves to wash, returning a few minutes later to help her mother prepare breakfast.

Gulshi is seventeen. She will be married soon. Rehmat’s workload will increase when her daughter moves to her in-laws’ home. But Raju has begun to look for a wife for Mumdu. The family will be given back the daughter they have given away. And when the younger boys marry, they will have even more women in the house. With so many sons, his wife will never be alone.

Bahdur, Amir and Jaafar run out of the house. They are laughing and pulling at one another’s shirts, kicking up dust.

“Stupid boys,” says Gulshi, curling her lip. She is sitting cross-legged on the ground near the
chulo,
spreading ghee and jaggery on a chapati using her forefinger.

The twins are scuffling with Bahdur. Jaafar falls on the ground next to Gulshi. She shoves him. “You’re going to fall into the fire! Go play somewhere else, you animals!”

“Boys, come. Eat and then go and play.” Rehmat’s words are measured, even in tone. The boys walk towards their mother and sit on their haunches in the dirt, facing Gulshi. After they have finished eating their chapatis, Rehmat hands them each a banana. They begin munching, their eyes fixed on Gulshi.

“You look like three idiot monkeys,” she says.

“You’re an ugly donkey!” Jaafar shouts, chewed banana falling from his mouth. Amir joins him and both boys stand up and begin pointing at Gulshi and chanting: “Ugly donkey! Ugly donkey!” Bahdur is smiling, but Raju catches him look at his sister, shake his head slightly. An apology. Then he joins his brothers who are running away, bananas in hand, continuing to chant: “Ugly donkey! Gulshi
bai
is an ugly donkey!”

Raju presses his lips together to keep from smiling.

“You always laugh at them,” Gulshi says, looking at her father. “No one tells them anything. No one teaches them anything.”

Before Raju can answer, she walks past him and towards the house.

“Bapa, Amos is singing.”

Raju looks towards Jaafar’s voice. Each night, an
askari
sings. Tonight, it is Amos’s turn to guard the family’s house, the workers’ huts. Raju turns back to face the ceiling. He sees only black, but he knows the corrugated iron sheets protect him from the night.

“I like his voice best,” Jaafar says. “It sounds like the hum that comes when I put my head under the water at the river in Mbarara. It sounds like something that I heard before. Like a sound from inside me. Bapa?”

“Hm?”

“What if the animals, instead of being scared by Amos’s singing, will like it? What if it makes them come?”

“No one will hurt you,
beta.
I am here. Go to sleep.”

Could the animals be drawn, Raju thinks as his mind begins to descend into unconsciousness, as Jaafar is drawn? As Raju is drawn? Gently. Lovingly. Inexorably.
Orare jye … Orare jye … Orare jye …
Imagining a pride of lions silently, stealthily crawling towards the mud house, Raju falls deep into sleep.

Bahdur, Amir and Jaafar stay away from the work site unless Raju tells them they can come, usually to slide down the mud paths the workers have left on the hills. When Raju sets off explosives to break through thick rock, they are instructed to stay directly next to the house.

The boys spend most of their days next to the family’s house or in the vicinity of the workers’ huts nearby. They do not wander too close to the huts. “This is where the workers live,” Raju told Jaafar and Amir once, pointing at the small round huts, their thatched roofs like unkempt hair, small
chulos
with blackened wood sitting in front, and admonished them to keep their distance. “We must always,” he said, “respect a man’s home.”

Twelve miners, three
askaris
and the men who help with the family’s house—with keeping the fire going, with the washing and the cooking when Rehmat is in Mbarara—live in these eight huts. Raju can see their clothes drying on the lines; he can hear them laughing in the nights.

Thirty to thirty-five more miners return to their homes nearby each evening. At the end of the workday, Bahdur, Amir
and Jaafar stand and wait for them to roll the wheelbarrows to the house, where they are stored at night. The young men have been working in the sun all day, their ebony chests glistening with sweat, their tattered trousers held up by ropes looped through the belt holes, their feet coarse, bare and caked with mud. Raju knows they are exhausted. But when his sons ask them for rides, they smile, lower the wheelbarrows to let them jump in and then begin pushing them around, tipping the wheelbarrows to the side so the boys have to hold on tightly, racing in small circles and then larger ones and then even larger ones, their laughter drowning out the boys’ squeals.

Whenever it rains, Raju brings three pailfuls of dirt into the house. The boys sit side by side, raindrops pounding on the roof, and dig through the dirt with their hands, looking for black stones. “It is tin,” Raju tells them, though he can see they don’t care. “It is used to build many things.” Digging through dirt looking for stones is a game, a way to compete against one another, to determine who is the best.

For Bahdur, Amir and Jaafar, life at the mine is a time of freedom, of play. When the day comes to return to Mbarara and to school, they protest, they beg to stay. Jaafar offers the greatest resistance, his hands clinging to the leg of a
charpai,
the door of the house, until Raju or Mumdu carries him out to the truck. He does this every time he must leave. For years. Even as he grows bigger, stronger, older.

Mumdu rarely speaks to his father, even though they are together from morning to night. At twenty-one, Mumdu is taller than Raju, but when Raju barks an order at him, Mumdu keeps his
head down and follows the command, his mouth tightly shut, his shoulders pulled forward. Baku looks after the books for the mine, keeping records that Raju reviews each month. He does not do the heavy work Mumdu does. He oversees the employees, the output, the deliveries.

Raju is sitting with Mumdu and Baku. Rehmat and the younger children are in Mbarara. The men are eating dinner on the floor of the house, their enamel plates on the
mkeka
mat in front of them.

“We need two or three more men to assist with digging,” says Baku as he scoops up some
kichri
with his fingers.

“We have too many already,” says Mumdu, looking up at his brother, his mouth full. “If we hire more men, they will have another excuse to be lazy.”

“Your brother is more educated than you,” Raju says, his eyes on his plate. “You listen to what he has to tell you.” Raju does not trust Baku’s judgment. Despite his secondary school education, Baku makes poor decisions; he appears to have little instinct for business matters, or any matters. But Raju cannot tolerate Mumdu’s arrogance.

Baku begins to talk of pains he feels in his shoulders, of the rain that is threatening, of the mischief the twins got into last week. When Raju looks up, Mumdu is staring at his plate, still half full. Baku has stopped talking and is shovelling the rest of his food into his mouth. Raju watches him wiping his plate with the fingers of his right hand until it is clean.

7

O
NE MONTH AFTER GULSHI IS MARRIED AND
moves with her new husband to live with his family in Jinja, Mumdu agrees to meet a girl his parents would like him to consider as a bride. She is the sixteen-year-old daughter of Rehmat’s cousin.

Raju is sitting on a sofa next to Rehmat when Mumdu first sees the girl. She is standing with a tray in her hands, framed by a narrow doorway. She is tiny: a child with a high forehead and large, heavily lashed eyes. She is wearing a pale green saree and her hair is pulled back into a low bun. Without raising her eyes, she walks towards Mumdu and kneels in front of him. She places the tray on a shaky table next to Mumdu and pours tea into a cup. She is so small, Raju thinks, if Mumdu held her, he would crush her.

After the wedding, Dilshad moves into the family home and begins to come to the mine with Rehmat and the children. Whenever she is there, she has dizzy spells; she faints. She spends her days lying inside the mud house, a cool cloth on her forehead. Finally, Raju tells Mumdu it would be best if
she remained at the house in Mbarara while the family is at the mine. Mumdu lives at the mine during the week, returning to Mbarara and his wife on occasional weekends.

Less than a year later, Baku is married. The bride has a round face and a round, unappealing body. Khatoun is not pretty like Mumdu’s wife. But she is strong and a help to Rehmat.

As his family expands, Raju feels larger, as though he is taking up more space on the earth, as though his reach is extending farther and farther outwards.

Gulshi has given birth. Raju and Rehmat travel to Jinja to see their first grandchild, a girl named Noor. Moments after they enter the house, Raju watches Rehmat take the tiny, sleeping bundle into her arms and then turns to look at his daughter. Gulshi looks plump, her face childlike again. But under her left eye is a small purple mark, the residue of something that a few days ago must have been deeper, darker. He does not ask her about it. He says nothing to Rehmat. Over the days, throughout the visit, no one speaks of it, but Raju knows Gulshi’s husband is beating her. In the nights, he hears them arguing. Even in front of Raju and Rehmat, the young couple spit words across the room, their contempt for each other undiminished by the birth of their child or her parents’ presence. Gulshi speaks in clipped tones to her mother-in-law, who talks always slowly, in halting, circuitous phrases. Once, Raju sees Gulshi roll her eyes while her mother-in-law meanders through a description of an illness she recently suffered.

Raju takes Gulshi aside. Gently, he tells her a daughter-in-law must know her place in her new home; she must learn to
hold her tongue, to follow directions, to obey, to smile even when she is not happy. He reminds her that she is no longer a child, that the fire he admired in her when she was a girl has no place here. “You must always speak respectfully to your husband and to your father-in-law and to your mother-in-law,” he says, smiling, his hand on her arm. She stares at him, her eyes flashing, her lips stretched tight, as though he were the one who has beaten her, as though he has betrayed her, wounded her.

Over the next few days, for the remainder of his visit, Raju watches Gulshi with her husband and her in-laws. She remains silent, even when provoked, her head lowered, her body slack. Though Raju should be pleased with her improved behaviour, he feels bereft, as though he is in a house of mourning rather than one celebrating a birth.

Raju is having a dream.

In the dream, his father is alive. Raju sees him standing on the manicured lawn of a large house in Mbarara. His father is wearing the crisp white trousers and shirt of a traffic policeman. Raju wants to embrace him, to ask him where he has been all these years, all these years that Raju believed he was dead. Finally, thinks Raju as he walks towards him, I am not alone.

But as Raju gets closer to him, his father begins to shout in English, with the accent of an Englishman. “Get away! You!” He points at Raju. “Get away!”

Raju stops cold, stunned.

His father hollers to an African in a starched white suit to come over. Raju stares at the servant who, at his father’s
command, comes running towards him with a stick. When he lifts it, Raju holds up his hands to shield himself, shouting, “Bapa!” His father shakes his head and curls his lip contemptuously. He turns away and disappears into the house. The stick lands on Raju’s head and he wakes in his mud house, in the darkness, his head pounding.