by M G Vassanji
Today, the second Friday of the new term, there was a large attendance at the mosque. It was actually noisy when they arrived, and Lucy-Anne turned somewhat pale at the sight of so large a group. Amy was talking good-naturedly with a few guys and, apparently in a bid to tease them, had drawn the attractive Smith girl Samira into the discussion. Samira, however, had come with a guy of her own, an American. This semester there were two other newcomers, students at Harvard, who had already begun to undermine Sona’s prestige by insisting that proceedings at the mosque were not being done in the proper Islamic way. Today, for example, having arrived early, they had evidently moved Sona’s little platform, behind which he always sat as presider, so that it faced west now, and the congregation would have to face east, towards Mecca. Sona moved it back to where it had always been. It was clear now to everybody that the music mosque would no longer be the calm and harmonious communal gathering it had been; it was now a theatre for opposing ideologies.
Towards the end of the ceremonies, Sona sang a beautiful hymn with a lilting melody containing traditional Indian references. It told the story of how a famous king restricted his queen from practising her faith and how by a series of miracles she made him yield. It was all about the call to duty, and when it was sung in the main Dar es Salaam mosque every New Year’s Eve, people claimed they got goosebumps, so powerful was its message. The hymn also marked the annual change of regime in the mosque back home, the implication of which Sona hadn’t quite thought of.
As Sona concluded the hymn, with the king putting down his sword and saying, Queen, tell me about this faith of yours, one of Sona’s detractors spoke up: “But Sona, where is Islam in this song you sang?”
Before Sona, getting red in the face, could find a response, there came quick, urgent voices from the outer room, where the non-members were, then the sound of angry swearing, and a loud squeal. After a moment’s hesitation, a few guys from the congregation got up and made a dash for the lobby, the others followed not far behind. Two very official-looking men — short-cropped hair, light suits, compact builds — stood at the doorway ready to leave with a handcuffed Lucy-Anne between them, her face contorted in a grimace. The Feds turned around and took her away.
As she left, Lucy-Anne looked behind at Ramji and shrieked: “Asshole! You traitor — betrayer of your world —” There was venom in her eyes.
Ramji gaped, watched her as she disappeared into the corridor, unable to grasp what he’d just witnessed. Did she really think that he had turned her in?
How had it happened, what had just transpired? How did those men know where to find them — was he being followed all the time? Who else — besides Shawn and Kate — knew where to find him at this hour? Steve Mittel could conceivably know, and therefore all the YAP guys. Who else had seen him leave with the bewigged Lucy-Anne? Enough people surely, and someone must have seen through the disguise, after all. And he thought he was being smart, avoiding his room all day — that was another sure giveaway. You can’t fool the pros.
But Lucy-Anne — how could she have uttered those words — did she really think he had betrayed her, set her up in the mosque? After all he’d been through on her account — the anxiety, the risk? If he had wanted to, he could so easily have turned her in simply by sending the cops to his room in his absence. How typical of these radical types, with all their ideals but no trust in common decency. And here he was left standing, burning with embarrassment, all eyes upon him wondering what exactly he had been up to.
He agreed to spend the rest of the evening with a solicitous Amy and Sona, so he could recover from the shock. The thought of spending the evening by himself in his room was appalling. The three of them went to see a film, and later at a café they chatted late into the night. Apparently Amy liked to sit for a discussion somewhere after every movie, and with, “So — what do you think?” at Sona, take the movie apart.
This they proceeded to do for some time, with Ramji putting in his half-hearted bits now and then. Earlier on he had explained to them what the evening’s drama at the mosque had meant.
When he reached his room late in the night, he ignored the telltale signs of Lucy-Anne’s presence and got straight into bed. But it felt like a strange bed, her tormenting presence very much with him.
The next morning, Saturday, the phone rang at nine, waking Ramji up, and Dean Johnson of Undergraduate Affairs asked a nervous Ramji to be present in one hour in the President’s office in Building 10.
“Mr. — er — Ramji,” the President began, after the preliminaries, having waited for Ramji to sit down across from him. He picked up a paper from his desk. “I surmise from this pamphlet you helped distribute last fall that you are not destructive; you have kept up with your course requirements and Mr. Neville the Foreign Student Adviser very much corroborates my estimation.” He paused. “But if you are not careful you can be drawn into violating the law … even in participating in a violent act.”
Ronnie McDonald was a tall studious-looking man, with circular-rimmed glasses. He was sitting rather erectly, in front of an arched window that overlooked the Charles River. Ramji had never been this close to him before. Dean Johnson was younger and more athletic; he was always seen dashing about in the corridors, and as front man for the administration, much disliked by the activists. He had pulled a chair to the President’s side, like a secretary. The two federal agents of the previous evening sat on either side of Ramji, their chairs turned to face both him and the President and Dean. They were introduced to him as Mr. Harrington and Mr. Butler and had the hungry look of those who had come bearing a complaint. Of the four, only the Dean was not in a suit; he had on a navy blue sweater.
Ramji kept quiet for a while, trying to understand the President’s gambit. What does he know, what doesn’t he? He knows everything of course, he’s got the full dossier. He sat with his hands clasped between his knees, wondered if there really was a tremble in one of them, or if it was simply the posture in which he had been caught, causing twitches of protest in the leg muscles.
Make a clean breast, he thought. If necessary, beg forgiveness. Crave it. Crawl on knees.
“About Lucy-Anne. I had no choice really, she simply walked into my room —”
“You could have picked up the phone,” one of the agents said. “According to our information you went out of your way to assist her in hiding —”
“But she was not a fugitive from justice,” Ramji said, thinking: I’ve had it.
“It is not as simple as that, is it,” President McDonald suggested. “She lives in the, uh, Dagger-and-Poison Commune, which as you know was raided by the FBI and where bomb-making materials were found.” The President paused awhile, then added: “A man has been killed; thousands of dollars worth of property has been damaged — thank heavens the computer and files were saved. Surely it’s the duty of law-abiding citizens to assist in official inquiries of … such terrorist acts.”
“For your information, on Friday morning a warrant was issued for the arrest of Miss Miller,” said the second agent.
There was a long, painful silence. I’m not going to be kicked out of the Tech; but the U.S. — that could be a different matter. Hi, Ma, I’m back — kicked out by imperialist America.
“Who do you think phoned you with the tip?” Ramji asked.
Ronnie McDonald drew a breath and sat back. The four interlocutors exchanged quick looks.
“That settles it, then,” Dean Johnson said, softly.
“I think that it does.” The President.
The first FBI agent picked up the slim briefcase at his feet. The other stared intently at Ramji for a few more moments, then took the cue from his partner and relented. Both stood up.
“You did the right thing in following your instinct,” the first agent said to Ramji.
The two agents left, shaking hands with the President and the Dean, with deference and thank you sirs, and a nod towards Ramji, who stood gaping at the open door behind them, wondering what to say. As
he turned round to face the President, Dean Johnson came to him and escorted him to the door.
“You know better than to do something stupid,” he muttered.
“I didn’t make that phone call,” Ramji began to protest, but the Dean didn’t seem to understand.
That all recollections, unless forcibly extracted, contain at their core at least a germ of vanity I would hardly quibble over. But, much more than anything else, for me these memoirs are a balm; I take to them like a plunge into cool water in a heat wave, and emerge only at my own peril. Is this dwelling in the past an act of surrender then — of having lived, and then nothing more? I pray it is not. For I know she will return.
I am told I should consider myself lucky I am not in a country where even the least suspicion of wrongdoing is enough to put one into the clutches of so-called “research bureaus” and their truth-extracting torturers. To which I answer, Of course I appreciate that; but am I supposed to feel grateful for not being tortured? I receive a smile, and a “No, of course not.” My interrogator is a far cry from the agents whom I met once in a university president’s office, all of a quarter-century ago. He tries hard to be chummy … but I must return to him later. “In all the time that’s passed, how did you look back on your first years here,” he once asked.
It’s twenty-seven years since I first set foot on the soil of this country; the earth has gone round the sun so many times. The Vietnam war is over (but who won?); Mandela was freed and became president (and the world sings Nkosi sikelele, God bless, all is forgiven); the Berlin wall came down and the Soviet empire imploded; we lost Elvis and John Lennon; the Shah of Iran was deposed as was Haile Selassie (dictators replaced by more dictators, and where is my friend Ebrahim now); thousands of species of life, biologists tell us, became extinct, as did, in my own (former) country, the Aasax language. And what became, what’s become of me?
Whenever — and it has been often — I think of my first years here, in this land, it seems I had walked through a portal — a passageway — to emerge into a state of enchantment. There was no walking back of course, no undoing of that spell. There was now a certain looseness in the step, an exhilaration, a sense of freedom. I had an awareness of a larger universe than the one I had known and of all manner of possibilities, of choice: in one’s beliefs and actions. I wouldn’t say there was any less anxiety in this freeing myself of the faith and the moral order of my ancestors, of the sense of guilt and sin which keeps one bound to their universe. There was terrible fear — of hell and damnation — awesome anxiety and loneliness, which only appear diminished now from this distance of years and seen through the intervening medium of nonbelief.
Okay, so you finally got rid of that monkey on your back, God, that Old Codger in the sky, and you walked away a free man, an individual at last with destiny in his own hands. But what else, Ramji, what more did you come away with?
Perhaps — and I need to say this — There was a sense of smug self-satisfaction and arrogance, at having been if not anointed then at least touched by the magical “sixties” with its mark of righteousness and belonging on the right side always, its belief in the underdog, in the “oppressed” against the “oppressor.” For we of that generation were convinced we had been given the revelation of political discernment and a belief in engagement.
And all that followed seemed to fall short of those inspiring years, seemed a betrayal. That too.
Betrayal — how subjective a term, depending where you stand. For example, who betrayed Lucy-Anne, that night she was arrested? Or was she betrayed at all? I have asked myself these questions often enough in the intervening years. Now that I am in the hands of someone who might know the answer, I realize these questions have lost their urgency. Did Lucy-Anne believe it was I who betrayed her to the cops? It seems impossible to me that she could have believed that for very long. After all, had I wanted to, I could have given her away sooner, and without embarrassment to myself.
From the newspapers I had learned that Lucy-Anne had been released on bail a few days after her arrest. A photograph showed her walking away from the court with her parents and a prominent New York lawyer. I never tried to contact her. One day, almost a year and a half later, I ran into Shawn and Kate in Central Square. They told me that Lucy-Anne had been acquitted on a technicality. The news had been in the papers a couple of months before and I seemed to have missed it. I never ran into either Shawn or Kate again.
But more than questions about Lucy-Anne and betrayal, what has nagged at me all these years is whether or not she had lied to me about her innocence. And, further, if I had known she was involved in that bombing, would I have acted any differently? That almost three decades later, I would be confronted by a horrifyingly similar dilemma is something I could not have dreamed up in my wildest fantasy.
The Friday night of Lucy-Anne’s arrest marks the end of that period of enchantment for me. I recall the months and years that immediately followed as a period of diminished intensity, of relative calm, both in my personal life and in the scene around me. It was a time in which to observe and to reflect, and to carry on. I recall vividly sitting up half of one hot August night to watch George McGovern secure the Democratic convention to tumultuous cries for peace; then sitting up another night a few months later only to see him lose the presidential election by the greatest margin ever. There was the Watergate Show with Chairman Sam Ervin, and the end of the war; the pathetic I-am-not-a-crook Nixon resigning, and gleeful media pictures of the new president Gerry Ford stumbling. The gullible and gentle Moonies and the gullible and abrasive ESTers offering truths for which the hunger was gone.
For me, there came the years of hard work, when I began to study the philosophy of science, while making annual guilt-ridden resolutions to go back to Africa, to do my bit for nation-building. But instead of going back I took a job at a Cambridge electronics corporation editing brochures. This was a far cry from the career in science I had once dreamed of, but I realized I no longer had a head for the hard-core nitty-gritty of the discipline (as Peter Bowra might have put it), though I remained a believer in its perspective of the world. Gradually I also developed an interest in Swahili philology (perhaps to assuage my guilt), which I studied in the evenings at Boston University. This period of study and employment coincided with a disastrous love affair, and I have often been tempted to put my failed patriotism at least partially at its doorstep.
Sona too remained in Cambridge, and we continued to see each other. He and Amy lived together for a couple of years before getting married, and I rather envied him his settled life. His scholarly work now preoccupied him completely. He had already resigned from the “musical mosque,” which moved out of the Tech and became a more formal, established affair.
About a year after Ginnie’s death, five months after the ISS bombing, I received a letter from John Morris, announcing that he had married a woman in Montclair and had moved in with her. She had three young children, two cats, and a dog, he said, and he was very happy. It had been Ginnie’s wish that he remarry as soon as possible. There was a phone number, but I could never find the will to call him up.
Back home — how haunting is that term home — back home times were hard. A mad dictator called Idi Amin had taken over the neighbouring country of Uganda and expelled all Asians, having received instructions from God in a dream. Asians from my own country were being driven out by the rigours of socialism, the whims of arbitrary bureaucrats, nightmares of a local Amin. Now that I had a place of my own, I thought of inviting my grandmother to come and visit. Instead she asked me to come back, and get married. Along with her letter and newspaper clippings, she sent me a photograph of a distant cousin in Zanzibar. According to the clippings, five members of the revolutionary council in Zanzibar, led by a sheikh I had always believed to be ruthless and extreme, had each chosen for themselves an Asian girl as a bride. This despotic measure, as announced by the sheikh, was an effort to help along the integration of the races. There were fears of m
ore such forced unions, and many Asians were in extreme anxiety and on the lookout for suitable husbands for their daughters. Now I was being asked to be one such son-in-law. Our girls are in danger, said Grandma in her letter; you must help your cousin. She is a good, decent girl.…I sent Grandma a long and (I now think) callous lecture to accompany my refusal: If we Asians had integrated with the Africans before this, such problems would not have arisen; I could not marry a girl I had myself not chosen, the world had changed from the day of arranged marriages; and so on. It was half a year before she replied. By this time, the protests were so strong, that it became unlikely that more forced marriages would take place. But I could never escape the guilty feeling that I had disappointed my grandmother, and hurt her. The newspaper reports of the abductions of young girls by African dictators helped me to convince a judge to grant me the status of a permanent resident in the United States.
And so I followed the route of so many visitors to this country. I allowed convenience, the temptation of the good life, and the assurance of safety and freedom to detain me, even as I held on to the image of the errant patriot, needed, missed in his native land.
And then my grandmother died, and home had never seemed so far away.
Lucy-Anne: You betrayer of your world!
No, I would not come to blame her for subsequent feelings of guilt and betrayal, but she certainly took a hard poke where one day it would hurt.
One Christmas I visited Toronto, where a large number of my people had arrived from East Africa and formed a thriving community. It was 1979, the Shah of Iran had been deposed; Americans had been held for weeks now as hostages in the former embassy in Tehran. On my way back from Canada, I faced a dour immigration officer who seemed far from well-disposed towards dark-skinned foreigners — a sentiment not uncommon at border checkpoints in the best of times, and this was hardly one of those. He seized the moment (as we used to say), found something wrong with my passport — the photo seemed to be peeling — and questioned me for a long time. My bus left without me, having deposited my luggage in the blustery cold outside the immigration building. I waited in an inner office dreading all sorts of outcomes; now and then someone would peer in through the glass walls to see I was not up to any mischief. And then suddenly, after an hour of detention, my nemesis walked in, handed me my passport, and told me I could go. There was a New York bus early in the morning, for which I could wait. Bristling with embarrassment and humiliation, I resolved to wait outside, lest these watchdogs of the home of the brave change their minds, or sniff out something else.
