by Shani Mootoo
He looked at us, and from what he said after, it was clear he must have been calculating how much backstory and history he should relate to make this personal tale clear.
“You see,” he said, “the majority of traders in the country were Indians. We hadn’t been given much warning or time to leave. Shops, like almost every business, depended on loans from banks. Almost everyone got the loans they asked for, because business in general was very good, and loans to the Indians were usually paid back on time. When the announcement came, ordering us to leave the country and to take nothing with us, it was clear that business owners would have to abandon their businesses and all those goods that had been bought and paid for with the loans. The banks immediately became concerned. If everyone just left the country owing money to the banks, the banks would fold, the economy of the country would collapse. So my father was one of many bank workers whose job it was to go with a bank lorry to the deportee’s store to confiscate unsold goods. He had to watch and make notes on everything as merchandise was loaded onto the lorry. He had to make sure nothing was left behind, nothing pocketed. Pa would then accompany the lorry and the storekeeper to a warehouse owned by the bank, and he’d supervise the unloading there.
“On the morning of October 25, he was carrying out one of these — these, these” — he couldn’t find the word, so I offered the word repossessions, but Prakash adamantly said, “No, I won’t call them that. That implies that the owners were unable to meet their financial obligations and the bank was taking the goods in lieu of payment, but that’s different than what was happening.” For him there was no word for it.
Priya and I both indicated we understood what he meant, and he carried on.
“The lorry had just been packed up at a furniture and household goods store, and Pa, the store owner, and the driver were in it, on the way to the bank’s warehouse, when it was stopped by army hooligans. They made them come down from the lorry and asked for everyone’s ID. But some days earlier, at a roadblock, soldiers had asked for Pa’s ID, and when he gave it to them and they saw he was a Ugandan citizen, they laughed and said that it was not real ID, that no Asians were Ugandans. They made him get out of his car, tore up his ID right there, pushed him about, and ripped his shirt. They told him to walk. They kept the car.”
Priya said, sharp surprise in her voice, “Prakash, you never told me any of this.”
He stopped short, perhaps as confused as I, and for a moment it was as if she were accusing him of telling a lie, of having taken — rather than of having kept — something from her. I thought of the photos in her office and bit my tongue. She was clearly affected by what had happened to his father. I supposed this might have been because she had actually once — perhaps more than once, how would I know? — met him.
In response Prakash said, “It was common. It happened regularly to Asians who’d taken out citizenship after Uganda’s independence. I don’t remember what details I told you and what I didn’t. These days, as I listen to the stories of Syrian refugees, I am piecing together my own. It’s taken me a long time to remember, but I’m remembering more lately.” He took her hand and held it. “Let me tell you. I’m trying to tell you.”
I walked around the counter to the cupboard with the glasses, took three out, went to the fridge, and poured us all club sodas. The noise caused by my scooping ice from the freezer seemed like an affront, but I carried on, and splashed Angostura bitters on top. I handed one glass to Prakash and one to Priya. He still held her hand. I stood next to her, pressed my body lightly against her, and put my hand on her back. I felt the knots of her spine, and ran my hand down slightly into the curve of her back and rested it there. She took her hand from his and leaned against me. How much easier it was to be affectionate in a third person’s presence. In that brief connection, the desire I once felt so immediately for Priya filled me. I felt ill and a weight descended on me. This was not going to be helpful to either of us in the long run, and so I backed away and returned to my side of the counter.
“I still feel sorry for my father. He had always tried to be a responsible citizen in Uganda, taking part in community events, et cetera. It didn’t matter if the events were for Indians or Africans or for both. But after Amin’s expulsion order, the army went wild and we were on our own. There was no one to look out for Asians.
“So, on that day when the lorry was stopped and he was asked for his identification, he explained that it had been taken from him by other soldiers some days before. But the hooligans” — Prakash’s voice was filled with emotion — “they wouldn’t accept his answer. They began to rough him up. Without ID, my father was considered a stateless person, and stateless persons had no rights. They accused him of smuggling the goods that were in the lorry. He was pushed around, hit, kicked, and taken away by the soldiers in a jitney. They threw him in a prison that was packed with other Indians who, he later told me, had been treated much worse than him. When he didn’t return to work that afternoon, the bank manager did some calling around and heard what had happened. Furious that one of his workers — not to mention the bank’s lorry and all the goods — had been taken, he called the Minister of Defence and implored him to release his worker. The minister said he’d see what he could do. At three the next morning, Pa was released.”
As Prakash spoke, I realized that, forty-three years later, in telling this part of his life, he used words that were of a different time and place. Lorry. Jitney. Traders. Hooligans. Words, I thought, likely exchanged among people here who’d survived the same experiences, those people he’d told us about whose only bond was this singularly profound and defining experience. I asked him if he had been scared.
“Yes, yes. I’m coming to all of that,” he said.
I watched and listened, and it dawned on me that his experience in Uganda itself was not only a story about his family or about the history of Uganda, but it was part of Canada’s history, too, as are the conditions in the Middle East that have led to the arrival of the Syrians today.
“I don’t think people ever really cared then, or today, about Uganda,” he said. “But Idi Amin was so bizarre and unpredictable, he was such a clown as a statesman, that it was he who made the news. People in the rest of the world knew more about Amin than they did about the Asians who had to leave, or about the state of Ugandan Africans once we’d left.” Without further prompting, he recounted details, and where he heard them muddled, he stopped himself, gathered his thoughts, and made his way around again. It was interesting to watch him, as he seemed, at least in my opinion, to be figuring out how to create a narrative out of his family’s experience.
“My mother was seriously ill in bed with typhoid,” he said. “Her mind was so confused she couldn’t keep track of time. When I came home from school that day, I did my homework and waited for my father to return from work so we could eat the dinner my ayah had left under a cloth on the table for us. For the last couple of days, Pa had taken my mother her meal and fed her before he and I sat down at the table. When Pa didn’t come home at the usual time, I thought nothing of it, because I knew it was a busy time at the bank, with so many traders leaving the warehousing of their goods until the very last minute before they left the country. But when my mother called out for some food, I realized that Pa was much later than usual. By this time, he would normally have telephoned to explain why he wasn’t home yet and to say when to expect him. I dished out my mother’s food and took it to her room. She had enough presence of mind to ask where he was. I was beginning to worry but didn’t let on about this to my mother. I told her he’d telephoned and said it was busy at work, and he’d come as soon as he could, so not to worry. She accepted this, and I fed her each morsel by hand, like Pa would have done. I helped her to the washroom, and back into bed. I sat in a chair in the room and watched her. I fell asleep, and when I awoke saw it was almost ten at night. I went out into the dining room and looked out the window. In the distance I could
hear small explosions, but this was usual. Sometimes it was fireworks and sometimes it was gunfire. Everyone had learned soon enough to differentiate between the two. It was known that Indians were being picked up on the streets, or taken from their homes with no explanation given. Ninety per cent of such people were not heard from again.”
This man was a stranger to me, but I was being drawn into him by this story he was revealing in minute detail, and a party I’d attended in the late eighties flashed through my mind. There was a man there, I recalled, Ricardo, an exile from Argentina’s Dirty War. He was surrounded by women and his shirt was drawn up, his stomach exposed. There was a long wide scar across his chest and ragged, discoloured patches of skin on his stomach. He was describing how he’d been tortured by the military. Then, later that night, I came upon him on the back porch of the house, holding the face of one of the women who’d been listening. His mouth was pressed against hers and his tongue was clearly working its way around inside her mouth. She seemed to be a willing receptacle for his trauma, and I guessed he’d expected this would happen with one or the other of the women he’d been regaling. A man came up behind me and laughed. He said, “Ah, Ricardo. Every time. He shows his wounds and never fails to score.”
Prakash carried on over my thoughts. He was saying that he went into the kitchen and checked that the back door was locked, then walked around the house making sure all the windows, too, were locked. Back in the kitchen he took the rolling pin from a drawer. He held it in the air and swung it.
At this, Priya put her hand to her mouth and barely held back a chuckle. “Are you serious? A rolling pin?” He stopped, and the two of them burst into laughter. I did, too.
He said, “I was a skinny fourteen-year-old kid. What was I to do?” Tears welled in his eyes. He took off his glasses, and Priya threw him a kitchen towel. He caught it but reached in his back pocket for a white handkerchief and wiped his eyes, all the while laughing and moaning playfully with the embarrassment of having wielded that particular weapon.
“I turned off all the lights in the house and, with only enough cast weakly from a street lamp across the road to guide me, went back and forth between crouching in the corner of the sofa, a throw pulled over to hide me, and standing at the side of the window peeping at the yard in front. I scanned the neighbours’ yards, trying to see into shadowy areas behind trees and parked cars. Every so often I tiptoed into my mother’s room and checked on her. I grew exhausted with worry, then almost sick with fear. I didn’t want to sleep, but I lay on the couch and dozed, and eventually fell into deep sleep. Suddenly I awoke: the front door lock was being fiddled with. My heart raced so fast it felt as if it had stopped beating. I glanced at the clock and saw it was 4:00 a.m. I pulled the throw over my head and tried to sink into the couch and stop shaking. The door opened quietly, and I heard someone enter. The person was coughing into something that muffled the sound, but in a few seconds I recognized it as my father’s cough. I drew the throw back hesitantly and saw it was indeed him. Pa was barefoot and seemed to limp. He smelled of urine. I eventually stood, shakily, and was about to switch on a side lamp. Pa said, in a calm but quiet and sharp voice, ‘No. Leave it off.’ In the weak light coming in from outside, I saw his shirt was ripped, the buttons missing. There was a cut above one eye, and blood and dirt streaked the rest of his face and his arms. I began to shake and weep. Pa did not hug me but held one of my shoulders with one hand and shook me. ‘Stop it, Prakash. I am fine. No time for any of this.’ He spoke in our Gujarati rather than the Swahili he enjoyed speaking, even at home. He pushed me toward my bedroom and shut the door behind us. In a low, controlled voice, he gave me a five-minute account of the day’s happenings, and said there was a bus hired by the Canadian government leaving one of the hotels for the airport at 7:00 a.m. We had to leave on the very first flight that morning. If we stayed even a day longer, we risked not only his being killed the instant they found him, but my mother and me as well.”
From everything I’d ever read of these kinds of situations, according to documentaries I’d seen, films, news clips, I knew that an expelled person, or one running from mass persecutions in a country in turmoil, doesn’t simply get on a bus that happens to be going to the airport and then get on a plane and leave. Perhaps, I thought, details that people like Priya and I — people who weren’t there — wanted, and for whom such stories were a history lesson or even entertainment, were irrelevant to him. But he got to them, after breaking off a piece of bagel and putting it in his mouth. He chewed slowly and we waited.
“From the phone in the dark kitchen, Pa made some calls,” he continued. “The first three, he dialled ready to press the switch hook, and the instant he heard the line ringing he cut the call. On the fourth, in Gujarati, he said, ‘It’s me. Cricket match. I’m calling about the cricket match.’ He was quiet as the person on the other end spoke, then he said, ‘Yes. Thank you, my friend.’ That was how we all lived,” Prakash explained, “with codes for the various situations, which someone you could trust would know how to decipher. The man on the phone was a friend who planned to leave the country two days later. He would come and pick us up. It was risky for him, but every day had become risky for Ugandans, regardless of whether they were African or Asian. We kept the lights in the house turned off, and Pa showered and put on clean daytime clothing. Many days before, we had decided what was to be worn out of the country when the time came, so he and I collected and laid out the clothing for the three of us. In time, we woke my mother, and Pa helped her to wash and dress. It would be many hours before she’d understand what had happened to him, learning of it only when he explained to the Canadian officers why he was a special case and had to leave the country that morning. But we’d all been aware that a day like this one could very well come, and so, despite her illness, my mother was prepared, at least mentally, for it. The friend arrived at about 6:00 a.m., and without carrying any luggage with us that might alert the soldiers at any roadblocks we were sure to encounter, we drove to the bus-meeting spot.”
Although one might have imagined the answer to her question and therefore not asked it, Priya asked, “What’s a bus-meeting spot?”
He looked at her as if everyone knew what a bus-meeting spot was. Then he said, “Oh, right. That’s what we called it. The bus-meeting spot. The place where people gathered to meet the bus that would take them to the airport. It was in the parking lot of a hotel in which Canada had set up a temporary office to register applicants, process emergency visas, and hand out boarding passes.”
I wanted to ask then about the Canadian government’s involvement. Was it a covert operation? What were the politics of their operating on Ugandan soil? But it didn’t seem like the time for an interrogation of logistics, facts, or details. By way of understanding what was being left out, I thought of the current photos that showed towns and villages in Syria being bombed and destroyed, lifeboats limping through the seas, crammed with people, people on larger ships trying to pull refugees out of the water, pictures of bodies floating in the sea — some alive, some already drowned, and the tragic little boy whose body had been washed ashore from a capsized boat. I tried to recall footage of Ugandans at the time, of the deportees, but I could only remember images from the newspapers and TV of Idi Amin in his military uniform, the red band in his green cap.
“There were hundreds of people there,” Prakash was saying, “all wanting to be handed their boarding passes for the flights that would leave the country that very day. It took what seemed like an eternity, but we were processed and were on the first bus of the day heading for the airport.
“Our bus,” he said, “was stopped eight times. The soldiers combed through, making sure that the very people they wanted out of the country had boarding passes for the flights, and that no one was trying to leave with currency of any kind, including gold. The guards frisked passengers, laughing as they touched women and girls on their private parts, and if they found any gol
d hidden on anybody, they roughed up that person and then pocketed the jewellery. In the days just before my mother fell ill, she had begun the process of hiding her jewellery. She didn’t have much to begin with, but into the bands and hems of the pants my father and I were to wear out of the country, she had stitched light necklaces, earrings, the stud she wore in her nose, and rings with sapphires and rubies, pearls, emeralds, and zircons, not big or expensive gems but little ones that were of astrological and religious significance, and heirlooms passed down from ancestors, and pieces that might fetch a little money if needed wherever we landed. She had two studs for wearing in her nose: a gold bead and a diamond, both of which she’d stitched into the hem of her sari. They were so light and small they would not give the sari a telltale unevenly weighted hemline. She knew, too, however, that if she, an Indian woman clearly of some means, was seen to be wearing no jewellery whatsoever, it would be a sure sign that she was hiding it, and this would invite a search. So she wore a few pieces she’d decided to sacrifice if necessary. When she was told to remove them at the first stop, she remained calm but did so slowly, giving the impression that she was giving up everything she owned. My father wore a watch of no great value that had been given to him some years before for service in education. On that first stop he was made to hand it over.”
My mouth was brimming with the kinds of simplistic questions journalists and anchors on TV ask as their camera person closes in on the face of the interviewee to catch the frightened whisper, or the tears the questions — like instructions — are meant to provoke. He seemed moved, a little shaken by all he’d been recalling for us. I wondered if, like the Argentinian at the party, he expected something in return. Not something physical, but sympathy or admiration for having gone through such trauma. I’m not being harsh, just wondering. I was moved, but it’s what researchers do, they look at all angles. I couldn’t hold back. Wasn’t he frightened? Even as I asked, I saw what a silly question it was.
