by M G Vassanji
When he left for Chicago, it was with the understanding that they would call each other. They wound up speaking every day on the phone, yearning to see each other again. Ramji was convinced he was in love; so, it seemed to him, was Zuli. Within a month he was back to visit her. In Toronto’s Kensington Market she accepted his proposal of marriage. And there, walking together on the sun-drenched, littered streets, they stopped to watch a garishly dressed toy monkey drummer that had been stood upon a display table outside a Chinese variety shop and was beating relentlessly on its drum for the benefit of the steady human traffic. Delighted by each other, by the monkey, impulsively they had gone and bought it as a good-luck charm, a memento. Zuli’s easy laughing manner came like a refreshing breeze to blow away the residue of the complicated, painful relationship he’d had with Jamila.
And now … could any two people be lonelier, sitting so close together, even touching.
The differences between them, which they initially idealized, had gradually become occasions for bitter and hurtful quarrels. He could not muster enough enthusiasm for the middle-class aspirations she soon began to reveal in their suburb of Chicago, and he could no longer pretend to share some of her passions, for example for the Bombay musicals about (as he would describe them) rich fantasy-teenagers in heat. She found him — at his worst — a smug killjoy, an inadequate provider with a burnt-out idealism who had learned nothing about real life. And then after every such quarrel they would try and reach out to each other, but there always remained an unbridgeable divide with the potential for so much pain.
And if Adam had lived? He would often think that if the child had lived, their life and love would have been different; all the joy and expectation had been simply quashed by the stillbirth. Tradition demanded full burial rites, including naming of the baby, thus compelling them to think in terms of a death in the family. And the rituals only enhanced the grief, sanctified it — at least for Zuli. The sight of the dead baby — its thick black hair, the delicate fully formed features and the pale blue cheeks — which had been pulled out roughly by the nurse and taken away in a basin, would haunt her always. And in case she flagged in her grief, forgot the stillbirth, there was a perpetual reminder, because with full burial rites came the requisite annual services for the soul of the dead.
They had named the child Adam. A stillborn Adam — their friends had been startled. Trust Ramji to come up with such a name. An oxymoron, as Aziz quipped, at a previous reunion in Toronto, which happened to coincide with the annual services, when they expected sympathy and commiseration; trust Aziz to come up with something so out of place. And Zuli had never forgiven her husband for heartlessly picking the name, for somehow fooling her into accepting it, all for the sake of his cynical, agnostic world view and his wordplay. That of course was not quite his own version of how they had come to name their dead child. He too had been grieved, but more for her sake. He could not pretend to a mother’s grief, or to a belief in the religious mumbo-jumbo. “Adam” for him meant the first one, for there would be others. She had not been convinced by his arguments.
The widened gulf between them was bridged only, and narrowly, by the joint devotions of parenthood; thankfully, they had a healthy pair of twins, Sara and Rahim, to quell the grief and fill up the emptiness.
Ramji squeezed Zuli’s arm and she sat up, giving a smile; he leaned towards her and kissed her on the cheek. They discussed the kids, how they were doing so far.
5
The next morning, Jamila was busy touching up, altering, and agonizing over the redecoration that the downstairs of her house had seen in the past weeks. She was convinced, as no one else present could be, that the dining room wallpaper had not quite the warm tones of the matching drapes; moreover, the painting she’d acquired for that area, of a period tennis match in progress in patrician surroundings (viewed through an impressionistic haze), hung one — perhaps two — inches too high. Salma’s decorator acquaintance responsible for these lapses having departed for the beach, Salma was on her way with husband to verify for herself and bring her kids along as well to play with the others.
“Do you think Rumina is part African?” Jamila asked Ramji from a perch upon a chair, adjusting the hinges on a kitchen cabinet door with a screwdriver. “From the hair, you know, and generally …”
Rumina had just called to speak to Ramji, saying could she come over to consult with him about some work she had done as a student. Ramji, having spoken to her on the kitchen phone, now hung listlessly about watching the cabinet doors being tested for shutting speeds.
“Generally what?” Ramji asked Jamila. “Why don’t you ask her?”
“I’ll ask Sona,” she said. “She wouldn’t wear a hijab just to hide her hair now, would she?”
“That’s not the usual practice. And she did remove it, didn’t she?” Ramji said.
“Yes, but I still wonder. There’s a story there. Who were her parents, and so on.”
“You certainly do pry, don’t you.”
“I do like to find out,” Jamila admitted, still up on the chair.
Salma was preceded by her voice. “You could at least have let me eat,” she was complaining to Aziz.
“I didn’t know you were that desperate,” he said, defending himself.
To which she, entering through the kitchen door, retorted, “Not desperate. Just hungry.…Hi everybody. I was just complaining he wouldn’t wait to let me eat a muffin before leaving —”
Salma in these reunions was the odd one out, somewhat of an outsider. She was Kenya-born, the others Tanzanian, and that made for much of the difference between them. The Kenya Asians, having lived under the superior gaze of haughty British settlers in the heyday of colonial rule, tended to formality in their appearance. As if conscious of her dark skin, Salma always wore rouge; and she liked to dress, in Jamila’s description, maximally. Today she had on a black vest over a white shirt and khaki culottes, with high-heeled red leather sandals. Large brown African beads graced her neck. The clasp purse was cheetah skin.
Ramji and Jamila had first met her in New York. She was from a wealthy family, had recently arrived from Kenya and become one of the Silver girls: typists and clerical help awaiting their green cards while working at minimum-wage jobs, which immigration lawyer Alan Silver and his secretary Moira had found for them. Jamila was awaiting her Silver assignment before she luckily found her job in the rather exclusive international section of a bank. Whatever their education, joining Silver’s legion was a sure way for the girls to acquire a green card. (The story was different for the guys.) Their employers were all Jews and there was enough of the racist name-calling by the girls against them, before the reality of what was what in the new country had sunk in. There was a shortage of eligible men on the East Coast, giving rise to some desperation in the girls, and Salma’s hooking up with the rather handsome Aziz Pirani was generally considered a coup by all who knew her.
Rumina arrived, without a headcover, and wearing a white cotton dress; and all looked up at the apparition from the previous night.
“That’s more like it,” Zuli said with approval, and there was agreement all around. Rumina murmured thanks.
“May I borrow your husband for a couple of hours?” she asked sweetly, of Zuli. “He is one of the few experts in my field of study.”
And Zuli said, “By all means, yes, check him out.”
To which Jamila quipped: “But there’s a fee for overnight!”
And so, everybody laughing, Ramji and Rumina left the house. The plan was to go to a quiet place where she could tell him about the manuscript she had brought. It was her master’s thesis, she told him. Recalling his college days, he thought how most kids were so charged up about their first piece of work, they brandished it about to the slightest acquaintance, confident of its intellectual breakthroughs and far-reaching consequences; and most of them in ten years’ time wished it were buried somewhere unreachable. So how do you handle her? Sona had cleverly passed her
on to him.
They started at a casual pace along The Winding Way towards the mall. There was a Borders bookstore further up from it on the main Glenmore road, which they quickly settled on as their destination. Alone with her he felt awkward and foolish, having so easily succumbed to the flattery of a young woman’s attention. What would the three women they’d left at the house be saying to themselves by now, what malicious gossip would Aziz be cooking up? But the girl beside him, as though herself finally alert to this situation, was deferential, as befitted the fact that he was her teacher’s friend after all. Twice she pulled him in by the arm, away from the narrow, winding road when approaching traffic seemed perilously close, then let go, a little embarrassed. She must think me quite ancient, he thought.
Once they reached the main road beyond the mall, they could walk more relaxedly on the sidewalk.
“Tell me about what you do,” she said with a hop alongside him.
“Oh, am I walking too fast?” he asked apologetically.
“Rather,” she said, panting. “So — what sort of business is yours?”
He told her: We look at the lists of books our publishers have scheduled for publication in the coming season and we select all those we would like to distribute. Twice a year we have sales conferences when the publishers come and present their new titles. Some of our publishers actually have rather odd names — Black Tulip, Caligula, even Cat’s Pajamas!
She was delighted.
“Why did you decide to drop … leave your studies, I mean?”
He brooded for a while, looking down at the ground as he walked. “An overactive — but fruitless — love life.”
“Oh.”
“A subject not to be discussed in the presence of the others.”
“I understand.”
What did she understand? He glanced at her sceptically, caught her eye, and she gave a short chuckle: “Oh, all right! I don’t understand!”
“How about you?” he asked. “You haven’t told me what you do in D.C.”
“I have a temporary job with a Senate foreign relations subcommittee on Africa, as a translator. It’s not going to last long, though. I’m not sure whether to go back to school or not.”
They arrived at the bookstore, and before entering it, he paused at the door and pointed in the direction of the grey brick ivy-covered walls visible further ahead up the road: “Someone I knew long ago went to Glenmore College.”
“Who?” she asked.
He shook his head, lied: “Too long ago — I barely remember her.”
For a good hour they browsed among the aisles of the large and well-stocked bookstore and selected some books to give as presents.
Finally over coffees at the upper storey of the store, he said to Rumina: “I must confess I may not be able to help you much with this —” he indicated the buff envelope she’d brought along. “It’s been such a long time since I looked at Swahili poetry.” Better come clean, he said to himself.
“That’s all right. You can try,” she replied.
“So I may have brought you here under false pretenses.”
“Oh, did you now? I thought it was I who brought you here.” Her eyes flashed at him mischievously.
“I guess you did,” he conceded.
Is she hinting at something — or is she merely a tease, likes to see them make fools of themselves. She seems delightfully — breathtakingly — fresh and young, smooth-skinned (now, now, hold that old lecher’s eye …); unburdened and sprightly; still in her twenties, I guess. All those years she’s got ahead of her, like money in the bank.
“I’ll keep this copy then,” he told her. “I’ll read it, and maybe write to you —”
“I would like that, thank you.”
The material she had brought for him was a long Swahili poem written in the sixteenth century, during a time of distress, when the town of Mombasa was under foreign attack. It had seen numerous assaults from the sea by Portuguese and Arabs, and had earned the appellation Mvita, or “wars.” She had edited and commented on the poem. He could still be able to say a few things on the subject, he thought. He had, after all, at one time studied several varieties of the Swahili language, going to Boston University in the evenings, and had been versed in the academic literature.
“You know, Milton mentions both Mombasa and Kilwa in his Paradise Lost. I wonder where, in what texts, that knowledge existed … Portuguese accounts, I suppose. I picture the angel Michael and Adam kneeling on top of a mountain, at the edge of Paradise, and Michael pointing out Kilwa and Mombasa along the Indian Ocean coast, dhows bobbing in the harbour … and Adam looking at the whole panorama of East Africa.…Maybe that’s where the angel then sent him, and Louis Leakey found his remains in the Zinjanthropus!”
She had been staring at him, and he felt embarrassed, exposed, by his excitement.
“Have you ever been back?” she asked, indulgently.
“Regretfully, no. Never. I could have gone while I was still a student, I suppose. I never managed it.”
“Why? … An overactive and — what was it? — fruitless love life?”
“That, too,” he said to her beaming face, “but.…” And he explained to her patiently the difficult political climate of that period; and even how, when the Asians were afraid that their daughters would be taken away by African politicians as brides, his grandmother had sent him a photograph of a cousin and asked him to marry her. “Of course, as you can see, I didn’t.” He told her of the death of his grandmother, and that he had nobody left there.
It was, he thought, a wonderful thing talking to a young person outside business, outside family, outside the sansara of daily life, the janjaara, the hustle-bustle. So was she an angel, come to remind him, Harken! Wake up to life! He smiled at himself.
“A penny for your thoughts,” she said.
He smiled even more broadly. “I used to read that phrase in Enid Blyton. Did you read her?”
Yes, she had. And no, Elvis and the Beatles were not big in her time, it was Michael Jackson.
“Rumina mimina …,” he murmured. “You wouldn’t know that.”
“Repeat that, please.”
“It is a ditty some African girls used to sing at the back of our house while skipping rope — Rumina mimina/maziwa na sukari,” he recited with the proper stresses. It meant “Rumina pour out/the milk and the sugar.”
His grandmother’s house had been the old-fashioned kind, low, with a corrugated metal roof, mud walls, and cement plaster. Behind the backyard fence was an African settlement where his grandmother would send him to buy vitumbua or maandazi, sweet breads fried by the women, for breakfast. There would always be a group of young girls staring warily at him, having stopped their game of skipping rope to do so.
“Well, I’m half African,” she said, “as you’ve guessed.”
“Not really.”
“But I am half African,” she said, leaning forward to press her point. “In school they called me nusu, for ‘half’ — I’m half-caste.”
He stared at her. “Does anybody ever use that word anymore — ‘half-caste’?”
“Oh, it’s common. All us half-castes were lumped together. My father was the African.”
“And your mother?”
“I don’t remember her.”
He wanted to ask why, but he didn’t. That would be prying.
As they walked back, a feeling of contentment infused him. He hadn’t felt so with himself in a very long time.
6
Ramji and Zuli had planned to spend the next two days with their kids in New York before returning to Glenmore on the eve of Jamila’s “mustardseed” party. A few months ago a former school chum had called up Zuli from Long Island, where she’d moved from England, and an old, almost forgotten friendship had been re-established. This would be their first meeting in twenty-three years, with families, and there was some apprehension about that. The twins for their part were dying to see Gotham, the Big Apple, the city of everything
big and notorious, “cool” and “nasty.” And so Zuli with Sara and Rahim left by the Thursday morning Amtrak train, with Ramji staying back to attend to chores (a business call from his partner Stan, for one thing) and to follow in the family car later in the day.
Having dropped off Zuli and the twins at the train station, Ramji drove to Glenmore’s popular Le Coffee Break to meet Rumina. He had read her material late the previous night and had jotted down some observations. In this he was perhaps (why “perhaps”?) cheating a little; he didn’t have to do this, he had already promised to send her his comments by mail. But Rumina was leaving this afternoon, and he’d felt a sudden craving to see her one more time. (He didn’t want to admit that this was perhaps his real reason for wanting to stay on.) Family life seemed such a closed world, a relentlessly single track cluttered with routines, and predictable even in its upheavals and recoveries, that the prospect of a mere flutter, an ephemeral, fleeting moment of verbal seduction and daydreaming, was irresistible.
Rumina had already arrived and found a table, and she looked up with a large smile as Ramji approached.
“You certainly know how to keep a girl waiting, don’t you,” she said impishly.
She had been delighted, he would even have said flattered, when he’d called her earlier this morning and told her he could meet her later to discuss her thesis. Iqbal and Susan were gone, to Providence, and she had been alone in their friends’ house, packed up and biding her time before she left for the train station. She had no desire to wait for Jamila’s party on Sunday. “I think I’ve had enough of this company.” “Oh?” “I don’t mean you, of course,” she laughed.
“It’s quite a rendezvous, isn’t it — this place.” He gave a quick look around as he sat down. The café seemed full but not crowded, and there was an air of suburban gentility to it, reinforced by Vivaldi playing in the background.
“Yes. I was just thinking there must be a lot of affairs being arranged here!”
