“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.
Jaafar looked at her blankly.
“You and Amirbhai. Don’t twins have secret languages?”
Jaafar inhaled deeply from his cigarette. He shook his head, looked upwards and blew smoke into the air. “No language. But we often knew what the other was thinking.”
“What was he thinking tonight, when he met me?”
“Oh no, I meant when we were boys.” He smiled at her. “You’re interested in what he thought of you?”
Mumtaz blushed, realizing too late how her question sounded. “I wondered if he was jealous. That I was taking you from him.”
“We’re not close.”
“Why not?”
“He moved away to school and then university. He worked throughout the countryside, the bush. Then he was at Mulago for a few years. He decided to stay in Kampala, keep a practice there. I stayed home and worked with Bapa. After the mine closed, Bapa and Baku ran a spare parts shop. I helped out. When the garage opened I was there, every day. Amir had no interest in any of it, ever. He hasn’t lived with the family since we were thirteen.”
“You don’t feel any special connection?”
Jaafar stared at Mumtaz as he sucked in the last of his cigarette. He exhaled upwards, watching the smoke leave his mouth. “You know,” he said, letting his cigarette fall and crushing it under the ball of his foot, “I don’t want to know his thoughts. Maybe it’s a bad thing I don’t. Maybe I’m wasting a gift God has given me.” He shook his head. “But I don’t want to know.” His voice was even, calm. But Mumtaz could see the colour draining from his face. She tried to look at his eyes, to read them, but he was looking away from her. He was looking up. She followed his gaze and saw the moon. It was full, bright. The light it was reflecting was overwhelming it, pushing its circumference outwards, so that it looked like it would burst.
Mumtaz and Jaafar spend their honeymoon at Mweya Lodge in Queen Elizabeth National Park. The sprawling game park is only an hour’s drive southwest of Fort Portal, but Mumtaz has never visited it.
In the nights at this lodge, in a king-sized bed with crisp white sheets and draping mosquito nets, Mumtaz discovers she desires her husband. The sensation surprises her. “Breathe deeply and take it quietly,” her stepmother, face flushed and eyes averted, told Mumtaz the night before her wedding. “In time it becomes easier.” Growing up a good Punjabi girl, Mumtaz already knew this. She was prepared to be patient, tolerant and compliant at all times. She was not prepared to want anyt
hing. But, here, at this lodge, at twenty-one years of age, something has awoken inside her. And she wants. She wants pleasure. She wants excitement. She wants to be stimulated both in her body and in her mind. And with her new husband by her side, she is.
He hands her his camera, lets her play with it, fondle it. She is both frightened and drawn by its coolness, its foreignness, its complexity. It is a machine. It is a man’s machine. He explains shutter speed, aperture, depth of field. Her mind goes blank, unable to recognize the cadence, the music of the technical English words he is using. She stares at the Minolta camera in her hands and imagines her heart becoming heavy. Black metal. Iron. He is talking. He is telling her she must decide what to bring to the foreground, what to leave in the background. “You create reality through the photograph, Mumtaz. The objects are a collection of separate, meaningless things until you fashion them into a story. Your story. Mumtaz’s story.” When he says this, her heart feels like a feather, floating, tickling her, exciting her. She asks him to begin again, her mind starved now for what moments ago it could not even imagine.
“Field depth? Is that what it was? Tell me again. Show me.”
She spends hours in the grounds of Mweya Lodge taking photographs.
Each day, when Mumtaz and Jaafar go on a game drive, she sits forward in her seat and holds the camera to her eye. She photographs a cheetah preening yards from their Jeep, impervious, pleased even by the sounds of the shutter clicking; she watches a herd of elephants slowly meandering near a stream and focuses on the small mischievous ones wandering ahead of the others, widening the aperture so that the elephants in the background blur until they appear to be another species; she watches an enormous lion become as swift and nimble as a house cat as it attacks its prey, a delicate-boned deer. She photographs the lion sinking its teeth into the deer; she photographs the creature succumbing to its fate, its body limp and its face serene as its blood drains. She turns to look at Jaafar when she is finished photographing the kill. His eyes are closed.
On their final drive, Mumtaz leans back in the rear seat of the Jeep, a scarf tied smartly on her head, oversized sunglasses on her face. She feels like a queen. She was seven years old when Princess Elizabeth visited Nairobi. Mumtaz was sitting on her uncle’s shoulders when the young mother, who would soon reign over an empire, turned and looked in her direction. Mumtaz caught her breath and pulled her hands up to cover her mouth. The princess kept turning, kept looking into the crowd of faces, a beatific smile on her own, until Mumtaz saw only her back. And then she was gone.
The Jeep stops. “A mother lion and its babies,” the driver whispers. “Be very quiet. This is a most dangerous creature.”
Mumtaz sees a lioness sitting on a small hill, staring outwards, away from their Jeep and towards the horizon. She cannot see any cubs. Jaafar points away from the lioness at a ravine twenty yards away. There, partially hidden behind bushes, is another lioness. Three small cubs are jumping around her. Mumtaz removes her sunglasses, leans forward in her seat and watches them. The lioness begins to move, slowly, deliberately, up and out of the ravine. She is walking, her sinews pulsing, her head still, towards the Jeep. The cubs come along, bounding, jumping up near their mother’s mouth. The lioness stops and sits. She is tall, even while resting on her haunches, her neck long and lean. The creatures are so close to the Jeep, Mumtaz can hear the cubs meowing. They sound like kittens. The other lioness stays where she is, on her perch, watching. Two of the cubs begin to wrestle, rolling on the earth in front of their mother, who stares out at the savannah, away from Mumtaz, her ears perked, her eyes ready to dart, her body ready to fight. One of the cubs jumps up and throws its paws around its mother’s neck, falling back down and then just as quickly bouncing back up. The lioness bends her neck and kisses the cub with a quick movement of her tongue. Then she lifts her head and looks around again. She doubts nothing, neither her babies’ love nor her strength to protect them, Mumtaz thinks as she stares, her camera heavy on her lap.
“I think she’s come closer to show off her babies,” Jaafar whispers. Mumtaz laughs. The lioness turns to her. When their eyes meet, the lioness’s expression does not change. She stares at Mumtaz as though she expected to see her here, as though she knows her. Then, slowly, she turns away and looks outwards, towards the open land, towards the earth that holds no threat she cannot overcome.
After the honeymoon, a wardrobe, a dressing table and mirror arrive and are moved into Jaafar’s bedroom. Mumtaz carefully folds her sarees and hangs her dresses in the wardrobe that sits next to Jaafar’s. In the drawers at the bottom, she places her wedding jewellery. On the matching dressing table, she sets her makeup and perfume next to Jaafar’s neatly lined-up bottles of cologne.
“This furniture was made from local trees, mahogany wood,” Jaafar tells Mumtaz. “The Formica on the top is imported. It’s brilliant, na?”
“Is it?”
“Two opposing things,” he says. “Something from nature and something artificial. They can bring out the beauty in each other.”
She runs her finger over the smooth white Formica and nods. It occurs to her in this moment that though she has more formal education than her husband, he knows so much of life, of the world around them, and she knows nothing.
Jaafar returns to work and, immediately, Mumtaz sees much less of him. Three times a week he drives into Kampala. He is a dealer for Cooper Motors. They sell auto parts, he explains when she stares at him blankly. She didn’t know he went so far for work. She knows so little about his daily life, about how he lives. When he is in Kampala, he eats dinner there and arrives home after Mumtaz is asleep. After finishing work at the garage, he plays golf or tennis at the country club and afterwards joins friends in town at a restaurant. “I need a beer with dinner and Bapa won’t tolerate alcohol in his house,” he explains. “He doesn’t mind if others drink on occasion, on special occasions. But he doesn’t believe in excessive drinking. He thinks a beer or whiskey every evening is excessive.” Jaafar laughs. Mumtaz says nothing. She tasted wine for the first time on her honeymoon, when Jaafar ordered it for her. It was bitter with a faint taste of fruit, so faint it was a fading memory. She didn’t dislike it. But she can’t imagine needing it to eat.
Each evening, she makes chapatis while Raju sits at the dining table and then joins him and Rehmat to eat, politely answering her father-in-law’s questions about the servants, about how Punjabis make their big, fat chapatis, their achars, prepared to get out of her chair and rush to the kitchen at any moment in case he asks for something.
Mumtaz is taking photographs of the dining room chairs. She has lined them up through the sitting room, creating a row so that she can learn about perspective, so that she can learn how to capture a multi-dimensional world in two dimensions.
Rehmat went to bed shortly after they returned home from jamat khana. Jaafar is in Kampala and Raju has gone to play cards. Esteri, the housegirl, has finished working for the evening. Mumtaz is alone.
No matter how she positions herself, she cannot fit all the chairs in one frame. She begins rearranging the chairs, moving them closer to the dining room.
“Redecorating?” It is Raju’s voice.
Mumtaz turns around. He is standing on the threshold of the house, darkness behind him. She didn’t hear him open the door. She feels her cheeks grow warm.
“Sorry, Bapa, I was practising using my camera. Jaafar’s camera.”
“You are a daughter of this house, beta. You can move anything.”
She smiles. She waits for him to walk to his bedroom. But he walks towards the sofa and sits down.
“Do you want tea?” she asks. “Or something cold?”
He shakes his head. “Take your photos,” he says.
She turns to the chairs and quickly rearranges them. She focuses the lens, but she cannot focus her mind. She has never before been alone with Raju, or with any man besides Jaafar. Though her back is turned to Raju, she can feel him watching her. She wishes he had l
et her fetch him a glass of water. After a few minutes, she turns slowly to look at him. He is looking at a newspaper on his lap.
“I’m almost finished,” she says quickly, loudly, even though she has taken only four photographs, even though she had intended to use the entire roll of film. She takes hold of the back of a chair, preparing to return it to its place.
“You lived in Nairobi, then Fort Portal, now here. You have lived in many places for one so young.”
The sudden statement startles Mumtaz. She looks at Raju. He has not raised his eyes from the newspaper.
“Asians are running from Kenya before the passport laws take effect in Britain,” he says. “It is difficult to blame them. These policies in Kenya meant to give advantages to Africans are forcing Asians out, and soon they will lose the protections the British gave at independence. Uganda is good. Our history is different from Kenya. The British didn’t live here like they lived there, stealing land from Africans, creating so much rage. We don’t have the same history. We didn’t have the Mau Mau.”
“What about the difficulty here between Asians and Africans?” Mumtaz asks, slowly. She knows she should keep quiet, speak only when her father-in-law asks her a question. But she cannot keep quiet. He is wrong.
He looks up at her. Images enter her mind, of her grandmother, her aunts covering their heads with their dupattas, averting their eyes, erasing themselves in the presence of a man.
Where the Air is Sweet Page 9
