by M G Vassanji
“Fags!” called the women after them.
“I don’t know, did you want to … ?” Shawn asked.
“No,” said Ramji. Should they have? He didn’t even quite realize the two women were prostitutes, he’d been so terrified.
“Let’s run,” Shawn said. “Can you run?” And they ran for several blocks until a police car stopped and gave them a ride. They were Campus Police; the Tech wasn’t going to let its foreign student disappear inside a ghetto.
In Dar, not rich ourselves, we lived next door to Africans and were not terrified. The neighbours were Grandma’s friends and gave me that khanga as a going-away present. Here even a simple street scene has an aura that frightens — why? I can’t even recall what the women looked like … I only saw a red miniskirt and black thighs. And so you remain a virgin, because that faith of yours does not tell you how to cope with that insistent sexuality. The only time he visited a prostitute he had also returned empty-handed, so to speak. It was while on a school trip to Mombasa, when an audacious fellow among them did not want to return home to Dar without screwing an Arab prostitute. And so a few of the boys had gone along. But where to find an Arab prostitute? They went around the shabbier streets, inquiring discreetly, shook off a gang of Arab youths on the way, knocked on a few doors, were chased off, and finally found an African-style shared abode where in one of the rooms surrounding the courtyard a woman provided the services. She was Arab, as required, and asked ten shillings, which was steep. First Mehboob went, the instigator and horniest. He asked for soap and water to take with him and had also brought along a tube of antiseptic ointment. Then someone else went. Then Ramji, but he balked at seeing the woman nonchalantly naked in bed, except for a khanga covering, and somewhat piously, as he later described it, placed five shillings on the plate on the side table, murmured something, and left.
The first physics lecture was delivered by a donkey; a mechanical one. A crude-looking contraption of wood and metal, its voice coming from a tape recorder, this donkey wrote the formulas and drew diagrams on the blackboard using its tail. The writing was somewhat shaky; and the donkey could not cover the entire board, which had to be raised or lowered for it, using the electrical switch (and at times it had to be pushed closer or farther from the board). The effect, after the initial titters, was awe-inspiring, and the students sat enthralled by the contraption.
The author of this lecture was no less than Peter Bowra, who came speeding on his wheelchair to the stage area, when the donkey had finished its duty, midway into the lesson. Students loved him because he entertained as he taught; he once deduced the sizes of a marble, an apple, and the sun using the same principles, in plain English and without resorting to a single mathematical formula. As a student of Oppenheimer, he had worked on the Manhattan Project, which had made the world’s first atom bomb in Los Alamos. There, as he put it, he not only jointly gave birth to the doomsday gizmo, he was also the one who babysat it as it was being delivered to the test site. His calculations of its effects on a typical modern city had made him famous; but they had also turned him against the bomb.
“Actually,” said the professor, pausing a moment, “actually, the prototype for this machine is much smaller, and was designed to transport entire lectures — to the handicapped, to other countries, and so on. But one of my graduate students, as a bet, took on the project this past summer to build a large-scale version for class lectures. Admittedly it’s crude, but it’s no worse than a professor in a wheelchair with an extreme case of Parkinson’s disease. And so: Bowra’s donkey, as my students call it.”
The class applauded wildly.
And for the coup de grâce, he related the story of Schrödinger’s cat.
Consider, he said, this gedunken (thought) experiment: Imagine a cat inside a closed black box together with a contraption that, when turned on, has a fifty per cent chance of giving off a radiation, which would trigger the release of a poison gas and kill the cat. We turn the contraption on through some remote means. After a given time — let’s say half an hour — would you think the cat was alive or dead? What is the state of the cat? The question was only partly rhetorical, but there were no takers: even if you knew the answer, you did not have sufficient backup to take on the challenge. Well, the answer was this: As long as you haven’t looked inside the box, the cat is a Schrödinger wave, the dead cat and the living cat smeared out in equal proportions.
“Think about that. Any questions.”
Laughter; after all, what could you ask? The story was told to impress upon you what exciting adventures in knowledge lay ahead during your stay at the Tech. But Ramji raised a timid hand. “What does the cat think inside the box,” he asked. “I mean, what happens to its thoughts, are they fifty per cent …”
There was laughter, Bowra was happy, and he answered, “Ah, a metaphysician. Well, it depends upon whether the cat is one of Minsky’s artificial creatures or God’s.”
Did I expect an answer, Ramji thought afterwards, do I know what exactly I meant? It just seemed like the right sort of question … and anyway, I can say one day that I asked this question of the great Peter Bowra. Even though I may have made an ass of myself.
But the lecture that day had given him what he considered a more accurate, and scary, image of himself. He realized that to his grandmother back home, who could have no idea as to what exactly was happening to him, he would be very much like a Schrödinger’s cat.
3
The boy was always reserved, withdrawn, a resource unto himself. All the other children he knew had a mother and father and a few siblings, but he had only his Ma. At some point, when Ramji was not yet six, he asked her, Where is Bapa, and she said, With God. Is that Bapa? Yes. A man wearing a black fez hat; the photo was of him alone, head and shoulders, but he was the same man as in that other photo, with her, where they were standing side by side in some sort of yard. Why did others have younger mas and bapas, or mummies and daddies? He didn’t yet know of death, to guess and understand the answer to his question, but he was lonely and confused, harbouring this little grudge against his fate.
Unlike other houses, theirs was not filled with the laughter and play and shrill voices of children, did not reverberate with their running footsteps, echo piteously with their wailings when they were hurt or punished. There were no quarrels with neighbours, no fights between sisters-in-law, between man and wife. During Eid no uncles and aunts came around for a family feast and to present to a row of anxious children fifty-cent thumuni coins or shillings; before Eid there was no last-minute excitement about whether the moon would be sighted or not. Yes, neighbours would call out Eid Mubarak! or Idi Baraka! on the morning of the festival, and sometimes a distant relation would show up, shake hands, press a coin into his hand, and depart. In the evening, when the Eid drums beat at the Mnazi Moja grounds, he went with his Ma to the mosque to pray.
Unlike other homes, which had a busy shop in the front part of the house, or on the ground floor of a modern two-storey building, theirs did not. So there were no crowds of noisy haggling customers to engage with, no month-end sales to anticipate or the jangling of a busy cash box, no exciting stories to tell about thieves and shoplifters. Though sometimes when the neighbourhood shops stayed open late in the evening before Eid or during month-end, Ma would keep the front entrance to their house partly open and bring out a chair to sit on the sidewalk and chat with people.
Every morning at a little before four, Ma would wake up, get dressed, and leave the house. She would knock at a neighbour’s, where another woman would be ready and waiting. At this still hour then, the two would trek off to the mosque, walking in the middle of the street. At designated points on the street they would pick up other women who were likewise inclined towards meditation on the holy names at this spiritual hour, so as to attain enlightenment and freedom from worldly entanglements. Sometimes, if a companion failed to appear as they arrived, the women on the street would call out to her; for instance: Dolu Bai! Are you c
oming? And Dolu Bai would reply with a muffled shout: Yes! One minute! Or: Not today, Babu is unwell — I can’t come! And then the women would wait, or shuffle off. They were not fast walkers, these women in their fifties; they walked in their slippers, with a characteristically rolling gait, talking in murmurs which nevertheless could be heard for several blocks in the otherwise dead silence.
If Ramji woke up with her, he would join her in the march, dragging behind with the few other sleepy-eyed boys who had also decided to brave this hour; otherwise she simply let him sleep, and if he woke up when she was away, he would be frightened in the dark.
Ma was renowned in the community, and even outside it, for her power of healing. She treated cases in which doctors had failed or were not trusted. There would be one or two real patients a day, appointments having been made the previous evening in mosque; but there were always people who stopped by at any hour if the door was open, to discuss minor problems. Her tools included a set of rudimentary utensils: a brass bowl, needles, a brass tumbler; and water; and, most important, her two small hands. The boy had watched her treat jaundice, the patient almost comatose on the bed (in such cases she did home visits), the woman running the needles along the sick limbs while muttering her prayers, then dropping them in the water. The needles, the water, would turn yellow over a few days, as the sickness and its telltale colour were drawn out of the body. Often, at home, a child or woman would be brought in with a chronic stomach ache or loss of appetite, the result of a “jealous eye,” and receive a massage or rub. Back troubles were healed by her stepping in a prescribed manner on the patient’s back and reciting a formula. Then there were the potions for all kinds of troubles that went beyond the boy’s privilege of listening in on. He would come to know, later, that these were often marital problems, in which a “he” was the source of all the trouble.
With all her religious communal involvement, she carried a certain moral authority. She sometimes looked stern, but she was in fact positively light-hearted. She loved to sing hymns and folk songs, she sang in mosque and at home. Her voice had a scratchy quality to it, an old woman’s raspy voice painfully struggling through musical modulations. In the boy’s experience, though, she always came through, successfully negotiating the musical highs and lows; if you listened carefully you realized there was an authenticity to the singing voice, only it was remarkably eccentric, unlike anything else heard in the mosque. And so he had to watch members of the congregation hold their sides in silent laughter, and wipe their tears, unable to control their mirth. Perhaps she knew this, for she was no fool. The boy once asked her, Why do you sing in public? She, breaking off her humming, replied with a smile he swore was cunning in its look: Why, to praise my Lord!
He was eight years old.
It was four o’clock in the afternoon, the long bell signalling the end of school had rung, and the rest of the boys in his class had rushed out for home. Ramji was putting his things away in his bag. He had been delayed because of a bathroom break, which the teacher had allowed only after intense pleading. Now she was waiting for him at the door and chatting with another teacher. Mrs. Nanji was saying, while looking at her pupil, “He lives with his grandmother — all alone, poor child, his mother and father died —” She broke off when she met his eyes.
As he walked past the two teachers and on homeward, by himself since he had been delayed, he could barely contain his excitement. He realized that he had the answer to the mystery of his life. Ma was his grandmother. This made sense. And his mummy and daddy? They must be that couple in that other picture on the wall, the “auntie and uncle.” They were young and handsome. The man wore a white suit, dark shirt, and cravat, he had slick wavy hair, and he was smiling; she was in a Western dress, hair done up behind her, in a bun, and was also smiling though not as broadly. They stood side by side, close, he turned at a slight angle towards her, hands brought together lightly in front of him at the chest. The background behind them was a plain dark grey, it was a studio pose. That photo had always had a certain magnetism for him. A few times when he stood under it, staring at the couple, Ma had come and stood behind him.
When he reached home, as she laid the bread and butter on the table and joined him for tea, he said to her, “Ma — I know. That auntie and uncle in that photo over there are my mummy and daddy!” Her face crumpled, and two tears rolled down her cheeks, one of them dropping into her tea.
“They are with God,” she said, wiping her eyes, “and they are watching over you.” He watched her as she picked up her cup and took a sip.
Since then, Ma always let him hold the plate of sweet vermicelli, which they took to mosque on the morning of every Eid to say special prayers for the dead.
One day, she explained to him the meaning of a song that she often sang. Come let’s go to Sister Hare’s wedding, it went. Sister Hare goes shopping for a sari, the mouse scurries off with invitations, and the cat tries out her new dress. And so the animals lose themselves in preparation. Finally, dancing and singing, the monkeys playing flutes, drums, and tambourines, the wedding party sets off for the groom’s house. But on the way they pass a leopard who lurks up a tree. The happy procession proceeds, oblivious; the leopard pounces; and the victims lie torn limb from limb, their possessions scattered in the forest. Whose wedding is it? — reflect on that, cautions Khoja Bhagat, the mystic author of the song, in his last verse; this life is one such wedding procession; it will come to naught.
Ma the mystic. On festival nights, as the band played and men and women danced the stick-dance dandia or the circular garba, she would request permission to sing, and in that voice edged with the years she would sing this wedding song, its sound drowning in the tumultuous noise of celebration.
As the boy grew older he retained much of the reserve that had been the strength of his childhood. Tall and dark, with a slight stoop forward, he could be seen returning from school or the library, his books clutched under one arm; and more often alone than with a casual companion. Gradually he was also drawn out by his classmates, who found out that beneath the surface calm and tranquillity was a person who could laugh, if somewhat sardonically, and become excited and passionate, if not habitually. He would play cricket and football with them, but as the years passed, sports became less important and weightier matters occupied their minds, such as their futures, and the grades that could help secure them.
For Ramji, adolescence was a time of excitement and fear. What he had were books, knowledge in its abstract form, but the keys to the universe lay outside his world. Even as he lay in his bed in the dark night, the buttons that could end his existence were somewhere far from him, where two powerful adversaries stood poised with their weapons of destruction. These weapons held a morbid fascination for him — from the rockets of Peenemunde aimed at London in the Second World War to the mighty Saturn and Soyuz rockets waiting silently in their silos with their payloads of nuclear and hydrogen bombs.
In contrast to that distant world which threatened dazzling death, glorious destruction followed by an endless doomsday of radiation tortures, his small world offered inner peace, a tranquillity that ultimately encompassed all existence. All the attractions and terrors of modern science were an illusion. This was what he had been brought up to believe.
One day, in his last year at school, he went and heard an American politician, and the charm and mystery of that world outside finally won over his resistance to leave. With his classmate Sona from down the road he applied to go to the United States, and within months they were ready to leave. On the eve of his departure, all the African women who lived in a community behind their house brought delicacies for him, whom they had always loved as a “noble soul” for his quietness and his success in school. Of course the food could not be taken with him, but the women presented him with another gift, which he put in his bag; a khanga, which had a message printed on it: “Wayfarer, keep looking back.”
4
Christmas was when I committed evil, he thought, ye
t I cannot make myself regret it. In such a case the ritual of asking forgiveness is meaningless — or is it?
“The disciple has sinned, may those present forgive, may the Lord forgive …”
Kneeling, leaning forward in urgent supplication, hands joined before him, the sinner repeated the formula three times; the mukhi, his friend Sona, met his look eye to solemn eye, heard him out, said three times, “The Lord forgives,” then dipped two fingers in a bowl of water and sprinkled it on the sinner.
Everybody underwent this monthly purification, stepping up to and kneeling before the mukhi, one by one; finally Sona too knelt, before a member of the congregation designated as deputy for the occasion, and asked forgiveness. This was the last ceremony of the Friday closest to the new moon. The prerequisite for forgiveness was repentance.
“For a moment there, you actually looked sinful, Ramji,” Sona said with humour when it was over.
“Yeah, and I thought you were going to pour a bowlful of that water on me.”
Why do we need these ancient rituals in the first place, asked someone, more for the sake of argument than anything, and sure enough a passionate one began, everyone joining in. A question like that, well timed with mischievous intent, never failed to kindle fireworks of endless argument, which was so much a part of the fun of these Friday nights.
But the last word on the subject was Sona’s, and everyone stopped to listen. He gave a calm disquisition on ritual as poetry and the need to retain mystery, and Ramji looked at him admiringly.
“So, what sins did you commit during Christmas?” Sona asked when they were alone later, and Ramji simply shook his head. Not to deny sin, no, but to deny confession.
April is the cruellest month, yes, but for sheer doomsday bleakness, for gut-wrenching, soul-searing emptiness, you can’t surpass Christmas. Ask your resident aliens.
