by M G Vassanji
Two tears rolled down her cheeks. She wiped her eyes and he took her hand. She looked at him gratefully.
He asked, after a while, “And the girl he married … do you remember her?”
“Yes, I remember her. At meals, and sometimes playing with her. She was a lovely girl, Zainab, thin, with long hair down to her waist which always took a long time to wash. I wanted her so much to be my sister. My father loved her, I know that.”
Did she love him? — Ramji wanted to ask. That man whose memory I’ve hated for more than half my life. Instead he said quietly: “But can you justify taking a girl by force — at gunpoint?”
Rumina’s eyes widened and she drew a quick breath — Is this the end of our relationship, Ramji thought in a moment of alarm — but she recovered.
“No. But in a year or two she would have been married off by her father, against her will, most likely. I’m just giving you another side to the event. You don’t know her family, I did. And my father had known the family a long time, they used to be neighbours, he had seen Zainab and liked her …”
She was crying now, and Ramji took her in his arms and held her. “It’s all right, Rumina — we have to be able to talk about it …”
She is humanizing him for me, he thought; and it feels strange to see Sheikh Abdala as a loved and loving father.
Rape was a heinous crime then, not so routinized into our language and consciousness as it is now. Of course we believed in virginity then, the purity and sanctity of women; rape was worse-than-death. But was it the idea of black, communist too, impregnating white, Indian, virgin, that made the crime seem even more terrible; made our — my — horror and anger so obsessive? Perhaps there was a twinge of racism in my reaction? But still, what justifies such an abduction of a girl from her home, her family, her hopes and dreams?
“And your mother — she never tried to contact you at all? Did you think of visiting the Soviet embassy?”
She shook her head. “She didn’t contact me — and she must have heard about my father’s death. I have no memory of her. Until I was ten I believed that my mother had died, and whenever I formed a picture of her, I would imagine someone who looked like Zainab.”
After her father’s death she was brought up by Zainab’s people, the Gulamhusseins. They treated her well, she said. Her father had had two brothers and a sister; every Eid her uncles came by to give her gifts of money. Only when she was much older did she realize that Zainab’s family had taken out insurance in adopting her — after all, one of them had killed a member of the first Revolutionary Council.
When she was ten the family moved to Dar es Salaam.
“We lived opposite Odeon Cinema,” she said, her face lighting up, “but we were not allowed to see movies. My guardians — the Gulamhusseins — were very conservative. Once, though, a few of us girls from the family stole into the women’s show, wearing veils to disguise ourselves, and we saw Pakeezah!”
She was sent to the International School, with a team of other girls in hijab-headscarves. It was here, as a teenager, that she recovered her African identity — she learned about the history of Zanzibar, its slave trade and its domination by Arabs from Oman; she learned about who her father was — a son of a dockworker. She gave up her adopted last name, Gulamhussein, for her father’s name, Abdala.
“And Darcy? How did you meet him?” he asked.
“The International School organized a trip to Europe for the twelfth graders, and those who couldn’t afford the ticket were told to seek sponsors. My family wouldn’t pay for my ticket. So I went to Mr. Darcy’s newspaper office and asked him for a job. ‘Can you type?’ he asked. ‘No,’ I said. ‘Even if you could, I don’t have a job,’ he told me. I broke into a giggle. But he did find me a sponsor. Only later I found out it was his son Amir, in America.”
There were questions he had, but didn’t want to ask, and there were thoughts he had best put aside for another day.
And then one day they put the past finally behind them, after he confessed to her his own terrible thoughts about her father. They had come to visit the Yoga Shrine on Sunset Boulevard one Sunday, and as they sat on a stone bench in a cool shaded spot, tucked away among palms, pines, and banana trees, watching the peaceful water of an artificial lake, suddenly he could no longer hold his secret inside him. He told her how he had rejoiced at the news of Sheikh Omari Abdala’s murder.
“I had to tell you — be absolutely honest with you. This is where I come from, what I am. Please don’t hate me for it,” he said in a low voice.
She sat motionless for a moment, then leaned her head on his shoulder, tears running down her cheeks.
“How can I hate you?” she said. “But it’s over now, isn’t it?”
And he met her look and said, “Yes, my dear, it’s behind us.”
3
Ramji had come from his previous job with a detailed knowledge of the niche markets for political books and magazines that the Company could tap: the left and radical; the academic and multicultural; the ethnic. Within weeks of his arrival he had worked out promotional strategies for both the magazine and the books. He succeeded in having Inqalab’s look changed from that of a tabloid to a standard newsmagazine. The emphasis, Darcy said, should be not on shrillness but credibility.
The magazine’s contents were no more radical or extreme than those of half a dozen or so periodicals, or some of Chomsky’s books, which you could pick up a few blocks away at Santa Monica’s Promenade on Third Street. But the distinction was that Inqalab’s perspective was not entirely American, and it was not delivered from the distance of high objectivity. The magazine’s concerns were more rooted in issues pertaining to the so-called Third World, issues to which Darcy with his first-hand knowledge of Africa brought a sense of immediate reality; the (occasionally unbridled) passion with which Inqalab expressed itself was due to the memories of racism and colonial domination that all four of its principals could attest to.
Of course, the new man on the Company masthead had to live with certain compromises, tolerate some ideas that made him squirm, allow his name to endorse some opinions with which he did not quite agree. Basu’s ardent and earnest Marxism, for one, seemed as out of place in the world around them as the Daily Worker would be on the trading floor of a stock exchange. (Though Ramji liked plump Basu, a gentle man, in his white shirt and black pants and threadbare grey woollen Indian waistcoat that was a symbol of his devotion to his homeland. He was from Calcutta, and like many compatriots of his whom Ramji had met, he operated with the happy presumption that a nice guy like you obviously thought the same as he, how could it be otherwise, it wasn’t even worth considering: didn’t you share ethnicity, a history under the colonial yoke, Third Worldness? There.) Zayd bristled on matters concerning Islam. And terrorism was a subject too lightly taken up by all three editors: not, they would insist (oh, no), to condone, but to understand the causes. For Ramji there was something disconcerting in this attitude; how far was understanding from actual sympathy, and then, down the slippery slope, condoning? And what was one to make of the gentle Basu’s humorously stated though nonetheless cynical aphorism, “Today’s terrorist, tomorrow’s statesman”? But Ramji was convinced that the concerns of his co-principals for the wretched of the earth were genuine. To him they were far truer than the reckless, spoilt, and ultimately fickle radicals of the sixties — his former roommate Shawn Hennessy came to mind — who had (having awakened from the acid trip of commitment, as it were) scurried behind cover of nostalgia and academic analyses while rejoining the ranks of the world’s affluent.
And so, in spite of a few misgivings, Ramji held firm to the belief that in coming to Inqalab International he had rightly followed a destiny, heeded a call of conscience. In his desperate desire to believe thus, he could not see those doubts for what they were: gaping holes in his idealistic universe.
One Saturday afternoon Darcy was a speaker at the Tomonaga College of Applied Arts in a seminar on American policy in Afr
ica. A small thin figure in his trademark beige suit, with red tie on white shirt, he stood at the side of the table of speakers, half-turned towards the white board behind him as if at any time he would go and write something on it for emphasis. The bony right hand would move as he spoke, but not enough to distract, two long fingers stretched as if holding a cigarette (which he must have done in his younger days). In that rich voice of his, with its distinctive crackling edge, he seemed to have the large audience, who almost filled the hall, mesmerized, giving instances and reminiscences of imperial practice gleaned from over four decades. “And I asked the ambassador — whom I met again in Virginia not long ago — I asked him, ‘Did even our most cherished freedom-fighters have a price in American dollars?’ And he said to me, ‘But they were among our cheaper investments.’ ” Someone from the audience finally asked him why he was here, in this America he considered evil. Which question he dismissed easily with “But Sir, America is everywhere. What better place to speak about its sins abroad than right here at its heart.” A helicopter passed low overhead and he, making reference to the famous murder trial going on a few blocks away, said, “There’s another Simpson juror being sent home,” drawing a laugh. That was vintage Mr. Darcy, in new surroundings, adapted quite well, thank you. He was a pleasure to watch.
Afterwards, he came and stood with Ramji at the tea table outside the auditorium and asked, “Well, how did I do?”
“Splendidly,” Ramji replied.
Naseem the caterer came breezing in from outside to join them. “Don’t stuff yourselves with these cookies, leave room for my famous biryani tonight,” she said, speaking to Darcy and referring to a get-together at the home of Darcy’s son that night. It was Ramji who was actually guilty, with a couple of cookies stashed in his napkin. She took one from him. A few people came by to chat briefly with Darcy, some others whom he must have offended pointedly avoided him; a Bengali Indian woman in sari stepped up and gave him a large hug. Then Darcy and Naseem drove off in her hatchback marked SANTA MONICA CATERERS, of which she was the owner, manager, and chef. Ramji stared after them, speculating on the relationship, and reflecting on this Darcy he found a little hard to reconcile with the image of the outcast radical he had carried with him since childhood and the provocateur he had seen performing so electrically earlier at the seminar.
From Tomonaga College Ramji walked over to the Promenade, where he bought all the radical magazines he could find and sat down for coffee. In the years following his marriage he had found himself embarrassed to be seen with such material; and what he had dismissed as mere rich people’s toys in his younger days evoked in him responses that rather shamed him when he caught himself, as when lustfully eyeing other people’s Land Rovers and BMWs. His acquiescing to middle-class desires counted among Zuli’s partial victories over him. She had wanted no trace of his political views to disrupt their relationships with their neighbours or, as she put it, pollute their children’s minds. Once, he remembered, a few years into their marriage, she had locked him inside the house on the day of the protest march he had planned to attend after the American invasion of Grenada. And so now these magazines, a little more of getting back his own life. He read for a while before getting up to go. From one of the shops in the mall he was moved to buy a couple of baseball caps for his kids.
Ramji walked to the Company offices and tried calling Zuli in Chicago to discuss further his proposition that since now he was more or less settled, Sara and Rahim should visit him. Zuli had sounded reluctant the last time he presented this suggestion to her. Rumina had had no objection, had shown not an iota of jealousy; it was a wonderful idea she said. But no one was home in Chicago that afternoon.
He worked in the office till a little past five, when Rumina picked him up to go to Amir Darcy’s house.
And yes, she said in answer to his question, they do seem to have a thing going between them, Darcy and Naseem. “I don’t think the family’s so thrilled about it, though outwardly they are all amity itself. How old would you say Naseem is?” Fifty, fifty-two, he guessed; and Darcy twenty years older.
Darcy’s marriage had been controversial, Ramji recalled. There had been talk about “the woman,” an enchantress who, through magical spells, had won over the brilliant young man that Darcy had been and induced him into marrying her. She had been a Sunni Muslim and perhaps a little older than he. Since then, Darcy had lived at odds with his community. His wife had died a few years afterwards and had left behind a son, Amir, who had grown up and gone to America and become a dentist. Darcy became a solitary man, of radical and fearless politics. And now, Naseem? — how unlikely a companion.
Amir and his wife lived on the outskirts of Brentwood, an area currently under siege by journalists and tourists, for it was where the football star O. J. Simpson, on trial for a double murder, had his residence. Amir’s Moorish-style white house had a massive studded front door that opened onto a long corridor, divided by an arch and decorated with Middle Eastern-type art objects on its white walls: a dagger; a painting of three women peeping out through their black veils; framed samples of Arabic calligraphy — all reflective of the Community’s current fascination with its supposed origins. Amir’s wife Naaz had come to greet them. She was a breathtakingly beautiful woman, with a husky, seductive voice; her black hair had just a touch of brown to lighten (or perhaps heighten) it, and she seemed to glide before them in an elegant cream silk top with matching pants. As they followed her to the kitchen and den area, where the others had gathered, their eyes fell on a slim young woman in a long yellow dress, her head covered in a printed silk scarf, very hijab-like. She was standing with Darcy.
“Meet my granddaughter Leila in the veil,” Darcy said with a friendly grin as they approached.
The girl said firmly but with affection, “Bapa, it’s not a veil, as you well know.”
“Come and have a scotch — or something,” Darcy said to them, adding for Rumina’s benefit, “there is tropical punch too, and it’s safe.”
Darcy, out of his suit for once, was wearing a printed shirt over cotton slacks, and sandals. He helped them with their drinks, then came and stood between them, beaming, paternal. And fragile, vulnerable right here in the bosom of his family, Ramji thought, or is that simply how I want to see him? … But I’ve never seen him like this, a party man straight out of Hollywood, out of Gatsby!
Leila joined them and put a friendly arm around her grandfather, who stiffened instantly before yielding. She was a good few inches taller than he, and her angular face seemed to owe more to him than to her mother.
“Tell him why you cover your head,” Darcy said to her, lifting her hand from him but holding on to it. “Maybe he’ll drum some sense into you.”
“Will you, Ramji?” she asked, in a voice spoilt and childlike. “Is that your real name?”
“Of course. And don’t pay any attention to what your grandfather says, wear anything you like,” he told her in a friendly, elder-brother way.
“But what do you think of women covering their heads in modesty?” she asked.
“Ramji thinks the hijab adds to a woman’s beauty,” Rumina said, teasing him.
“Is that how she snared you?” the girl asked him vampishly.
“Yes, I would say so,” he said, and stopped there, unwilling to be drawn into further discussion on the desirability of the headdress. But he had his opinions, which she divined; and so she gave him a piece of her mind, which she’d obviously been itching to do.
“Nobody tells me to wear hijab — it’s my wish. It’s my Islamic identity. I follow the injunctions of the Quran for modesty — they are quite clear — and I make a political statement as well.”
And she walked away towards her mother.
“Don’t worry, it’s just the current phase,” her brother Hanif said, having come over, making a circular motion with a finger to his head to indicate his take on the status of her mind. He was a big strapping youth, darker-skinned than his sister, with jet-black
gelled hair. Easygoing too, but with a certain vacuousness, a rootlessness of spirit perhaps: he was intensely inquisitive, not about what people did, but what they thought, no matter what the subject. It was a relief when he drifted off to corner someone else.
Basu and Zayd had arrived, Basu having come with his wife and daughter; Zayd’s wife, who was American-born, apparently kept away from places where there were men and drinks. They did not have any children of their own but had adopted two kids from Pakistan. Zayd and Ramji had over the months settled into a mutual tolerance, a forced friendliness laced with the occasional sarcastic bite of a casual remark. To Ramji, Zayd was religious in the worst — that is to say, political — way; despite his loud professions of faith, there was not a trace of piety in him. Zayd dismissed Ramji as a romantic and not fully committed to the cause. The fact that he was not far off the mark in the first part of his assessment fuelled Ramji’s ire.
Zayd was currently covering for Inqalab the trial of a blind Muslim cleric who was being held on suspicion of instigating the bombing of the World Trade Center building in New York City. He had just returned from Manhattan, excited by news of the cleric’s previous association with the CIA. But Zayd’s passion these days, which he shared with Naaz, was attempting to follow the trail of the Phantom Author, a status report on whom seemed to be the main attraction of the evening.
News about a phenomenon termed the Phantom Author had broken into the print media several months earlier. Also called the Holy Pimpernel, the Blasphemer, and much more by some of the more sensationalistic commentators, the Phantom had been mailing out anonymous public letters pertaining to the Muslim faith and, it seemed, offensive to many Muslims. Copies of each provocative letter were sent from a different city to selected and well-placed people, and to news and other organizations. Ramji had read quoted excerpts from some of these letters, but he had dismissed their author as an academic crank whose day in the sun would inevitably pass. But the Phantom continued to receive attention and to persist in his campaign. For Zayd he had become a cause. “You want a terrorist, here’s a terrorist — bombing people’s hearts and children’s minds. What’s the U.S. government doing?” Apparently nothing. Therefore, Zayd said, the Muslims should take it upon themselves to do something about that perfidious character.
