The Gunny Sack

by M G Vassanji

  Awal was the wife of Hassam Pirbhai, one of the pioneers who had left the Indian Community behind in Mombasa, packed closely in their shacks around the mosque in the narrow streets of Membeni and Kuze, and struck out in the wilderness in the wake of the railway, shopkeepers to their compatriot coolies, artisans, stationmasters and infantrymen, before finally making their homes in the new capital Nairobi. Now the firm of Hassam Pirbhai and Co Ltd, Pioneering Trading Company, the famous PTC, clothed the police and the King’s African Rifles, supplied safari needs from matches to tents, and exported ivory and hides. The two sons of Hassam Pirbhai walked tall and proud in town, in the company of—if not always equal to—the most influential men in Nairobi. The old man and his wife stayed with their own kind, the new rich incapable of shedding their origins; he, shrewd and reticent, accepting homage from fawning relatives with the air of a gentle prince; she, haughty, humble only before God; the two of them driven around by a black chauffeur, from home to shop, to other homes, to mosque, and on Sundays along the avenues of Nairobi to the hills around it where new suburbs were springing up with their neat bungalows and pretty gardens and khakied servants.

  Awal was the proverbial stepmother. Most stepmothers at the time, when children came in packs and often unwanted, were of that proverbial kind. Knowledge of Juma’s pedigree followed him to the capital. And so Juma, because even the big house was packed, and to avoid his associating with her sons, was given a room in the courtyard, next to the servants’ quarters and the outhouse. There he grew up, a second-class citizen, nothing more than a glorified servant; whom the family sent away on pretexts when important guests arrived; who never sat in the family car except with the chauffeur; who to earn money ran errands for Awal’s sons; who more often ate in the kitchen than at the table. When the boys went on safaris, Juma went with them to skin the deer and clean the meat; when the family went on picnics or the Muslim servant was absent, Juma was the slaughterer. My father would tell of how his cousins would play jokes on him. “Oh, he is only the driver,” they would say when a guest raised an enquiring eyebrow. “Oh, he is the cook.”

  One afternoon when a Kikuyu vegetable-seller arrived, they told her: “Mama, your lost son is looking for you,” and directed her to Juma’s quarter, where he was taking a rest. And when the poor, innocent woman actually went, and saw an angry young man ready to throw her out, she said, “Oh, my unfortunate son, they are making fun of you!” From that time, whenever she came around she would greet him, “Ah, mwanangu, how are you?” She called herself, simply, Mary. And she attached herself to his life.

  In Juma, his cousins thought they had the family sidekick, the cowering poor relative always dependent and always at their service; but Juma was made of stronger stuff. By the time he was sixteen he had grown away from the family and had a life of his own unknown to them. When he was seventeen he committed a terrible crime, for which they made him reckon. But by that reckoning they admitted that their old ways with their poor relative were over. “In those days,” Kulsum would say, “they gave terrible punishments to their sons.” But what did he do? “Oh, something.” As if it were nothing; but then why the terrible punishment?

  Outside the family, information flows freely. One day in mosque, Hassam Pirbhai presiding, the congregation standing up for prayer—“Oh Lord, grant us increase in our progeny”—when, houuuk! a loud hiccup from Juma, and those around him stir uncomfortably. “Oh Lord, Oh Merciful Giver, grant us increase in our earnings.” Again, houuuk! This time there are giggles from the children’s section and muffled grunts elsewhere, and one or two young men walk out grinding their teeth in agonies of controlled laughter. Meanwhile, looks like light-beams have gone back and forth, from Awal to Juma, from Awal to her sons, from the sons to the attendants manning the pillars. “Oh Merciful and Kind Lord grant us increase in our lives.” And houuuuk-uk! as two attendants converge on the drunk Juma and escort him outside.

  At home, when the hearing was over, he was handed over for punishment to the dreaded Raju Master. It was only fitting that when the crime was against God, the man who had taught him, or tried to teach him, religion should punish him. Juma was hanged by his feet at a doorway and whipped with a cane. The family watched, the two stepbrothers urging the master on, the women to keep pity or remorse at bay reminding each other of the crime. And when his howls drew an enquiry from a cruising police car, they said, “Oh, the dog is sick.”

  Juma for some years afterwards lived a life of his own in and around Nairobi and then altogether disappeared for three years. Of these three years, as of any of his wild exploits before marriage, Kulsum does not have much to say. Apparently he travelled a lot; and operated a taxi somewhere. But Kulsum, who likes to bring in associations of prestige, does remember that he went to Mwanza, to seek out Amir Merchant who, my father had heard in Nairobi, was a relation of his mother. Amir Merchant later went to India and subsequently became the head of one of the twenty-two families or so that reportedly at one time owned all the wealth of Pakistan; at whose daughter’s wedding no less a personage than the Shah of Iran was a guest. Of this far try on the part of my mother there is no need to say further.

  One day Hassam Pirbhai received a call from the agent of the British Castle Lines in Nairobi. He apparently had received a telephone message from Mombasa. Juma had stowed away on one of its steamers to India and had been apprehended trying to disembark in Bombay. My father saw Bombay only from the porthole of the cabin he was locked up in. The agent informed Hassam Pirbhai that if his family did not pay the boy’s fare, the company would turn him over to the police. Hassam Pirbhai did the only honourable thing: hid his family’s shame. He agreed to pay the fare. In Juma’s absence his three fair half-sisters had rediscovered their ties with him. To appease these three young women, Hassam Pirbhai himself went to Mombasa, offered Juma a job, and brought him home. The marriage followed in due course, for which project Awal was assigned the job of looking for a fair beauty from a humble but respectable home. Mombasa was the natural choice as the home of the humble where, moreover, Juma’s reputation was unknown. The fair beauty was spotted by Awal in a Membeni street, returning from school.

  Running away. Wanderlust. Having come to this theme yet once again, memory plays a trick on me. From her corner Shehru throws a wink at me … and do I imagine that the gaping mouth with its sisal moustache has a silent laugh on its thin old lips …

  The question that comes to mind is: in coming here, have I followed a destiny? Satisfied a wanderlust that runs in the blood? Or do I seek in genes merely an excuse for weakness, an inability to resolve situations? Perhaps it is this weakness that’s in the blood: can you distinguish such weakness from wanderlust? When does a situation become impossible enough to justify escape?

  I too have run away, absconded. And reaching this grim basement, I stopped to examine the collective memory—this spongy, disconnected, often incoherent accretion of stories over generations. Like the karma a soul acquires, over many incarnations, the sins and merits, until in its final stages it lumbers along top-heavy with its accumulations, desperately seeking absolution.

  I, like my forefathers before me, have run away. But what a price they paid. Dhanji Govindji, his self-respect and his sanity. His son, the joys of family life, the security of community life. My father Juma, I don’t know what price he paid for running away—it was Hassam Pirbhai who paid the cash price—but he did pay a price for coming back. He joined his tormentors. And in joining them he lost his compassion for those of whom he was also a part—if only a quarter.

  Perhaps I judge too harshly.

  HOW I KILLED MY FATHER.

  When they married, my mother was sixteen and my father a cynical, rough man of thirty who had seen quite a bit of the world and was now a salesman at the firm of Hassam Pirbhai in Nairobi. Kulsum had studied up to Standard Six in Gujarati, and always stood second in class, but her father had seen no use in education for his girls and did not let her finish school. But for one more year, she
could have been a graduate, become a teacher … married well. She did not resent the marriage but the way in which she was given away. My father had been in and out of school and had learnt English on the streets and later at work. After the wedding at the Membeni mosque, they spent the night in a room at the home of an acquaintance of Hassam Pirbhai. The next morning, weeping, Kulsum said goodbye to her family and friends, and with her husband took the train for Nairobi. When she stopped crying, they had reached Voi. She looked up at her husband, seeking comfort, but the irate Juma who had spent the day watching the scenery turned around from the window and sarcastically said, “Bas? Is that all you’re going to cry? We’re not even halfway there.”

  There was a pitch-black, palpable darkness outside, the air was humid, and in the stillness—perhaps caused by the sudden cessation of the din of the iron wheels on the rails, the steam puffing and compartments rattling—the shouts of people in the distance sounded strangely hollow. They were alone, together, the two of them, and they looked at each other across the compartment in the dim light that had already attracted clinging insects. They reached some resolution, for she got up and set out the dinner her mother had packed for the journey, and he rang the bell and ordered tea. Sometime later the train let off a belch of steam, gave a lurch, and proceeded warily into the darkness. The way ahead was uphill, and there were elephants and giraffes about.

  “They said, ‘We have quarter-and-lac-shilling bungalas in Nairobi,’ ” Kulsum would later say, “and what did they give us? This,” she would show her thumb. Awal had also failed to mention, when she haughtily brought the proposal to Membeni and proceeded to inspect the girl as if buying her, that the boy had certain bad habits, kept a haunt at the New Salisbury and often came home late in the night. He also had debts. During their first months of marriage, when he would return in the evenings to breathe spirits down her neck, the naive daughter of the Mombasa mystic, not sure at this point which she dreaded more, his return or his absence, who wanted to push the brute away but knew she mustn’t, would ask him about the strange smell of his breath. “It’s only lemonade,” would come the passionate reply.

  In those first years of marriage they lived in Juma’s old room, now converted into an apartment. There were in the household then Awal’s two sons, now married, and her three nieces, my aunts. Over the six young women the tall, thin-lipped, long-nosed puritan Awal ruled with an iron hand. “If your pachedis keep slipping off your heads, use a nail,” she would rail, in her constant efforts to preserve her home’s khandaanity: that snobbish form of respectability which every family, however crooked, lays claim to. Daughters-in-law, responsible for the khandaanity of their fathers’ names, occupied the lowest rungs in the family hierarchy. Kulsum was the wife of the orphan, the half-caste, and herself of humble origin: there was no one lowlier than her at the home of Hassam Pirbhai. The women took turns cooking, and inevitably the unsophisticated Kulsum, bringing with her a crude and limited cuisine from the dukas of Membeni, earned the ire of the old woman. My mother was told to assist the others and learn from them. And in this role she made mistakes that spoke sadly of her breeding and background and brought her the contemptuous taunts of her sisters-in-law. When the months passed and she put on weight—but she was robust, not weak, her belly round, not sagging, her periods regular—her chores increased, the sarcasm was more biting. Hassam Pirbhai at dinner: “Why no mangoes yet?” His wife Awal drawing blood: “They say that in Mombasa the trees are barren this year.” What irked my practical mother more, however, was the fact that three-quarters of her husband’s salary went towards their upkeep in that house.

  From time to time her “other mother-in-law” Mary would turn up with a companion, a basket full of produce slung on her back, hanging by its long leather strap fastened tightly round the forehead. Calling Kulsum over the back gate and shouting for someone to hold back the barking dog, Mary would give my mother a head of lettuce, a cabbage, a bunch of carrots.

  The year following their wedding, war was declared in Europe, and Kulsum’s father promptly closed shop in Mombasa, packed, and set forth with his family to Dar es Salaam, where their son Hassan had gone to seek his fortune. In the previous European war, Mitho Diwano in Zanzibar and his brother in Dar had been separated, without a word exchanged for more than two years. In this war, he decided, he was not going to take any chances. Mad Mitha was not one to draw fine distinctions between the Europeans, especially when they made war.

  It was about this time that Kulsum effected her release from the domination of her in-laws. One evening, while the rest of the family drove off to mosque, my mother, smelling of sweet perfume and makeup, her lips red, her cheeks flushed, her contours round and soft in the frock-pachedi, smiled shyly at my father and told him to take her to the cinema. My father did not say a word as he locked the door to their apartment and reminded the servant Karanja to watch the house. Then he looked at her again, and in the best European fashion offered her his arm, and the two walked to the Odeon a few blocks away.

  In such circumstances there is no time to confess, to plead extenuating circumstances: a mischievous whim, a romantic mood. The crime is discovered and judgement follows irrevocably. When my parents returned, the sinful couple, the entire family was waiting for them. The matriarch and patriarch on the big sofa, one pair of eyes glowering, the other twinkling. At their flanks the heavenly host: the three pert sisters, the two furious brothers-in-law with their two wives affecting a damaged, suffering look, quieting down with excessive vigour and unnecessary smacks the three cherubim. The family khandaan had been betrayed. First, they had gone together (when she should have waited for the zanana show on Wednesday afternoon); then, they had violated the sacred hour. My father and mother had made the mistake of going to the theatre which the family partly owned. As soon as the manager had counted the show’s takings, he had headed straight for the mosque.

  The wrath was delivered to my father, the barbs aimed at my mother.

  “Going to picture during maghrab,” the matron began. “With pimps and prostitutes and Bhadalas. Does that suit our reputation—”

  “But Ma,” said the Sweet Madman’s sweet daughter. “Even Europeans go, all the communities go—”

  “Keep quiet!”

  There followed a torrent of abuse such as my mother had never heard; during which Hassam Pirbhai, seeking refuge in an argument with his servant Karanja about his medication, wisely withdrew. My father remained standing, silent—men did not defend their wives from their families—and Kulsum sat on the floor, sobbing.

  “Eat, now,” my father would beg her for the next two days. But my mother pushed the plate aside and intermittently sobbed.

  The first guerrilla was surely a woman. The ways of a woman are softer but surer. The timing is precise and the target just right. When she strikes, with a force not overly strong, the whole machinery threatens to come to a riotous stop. Scandal and public embarrassment looms not far ahead, while panic takes over. At such a moment whatever she demands, she can walk away with. I talk of course of the traditional, extended family household. There are those—and I can name one—who will maintain that, nevertheless, the war was always lost; only isolated battles were won. In this one my mother carried the day.

  My father, of course, had been softened and was no longer the bully who had scoffed at her grief once. He, who could have put a stop to her show, if only by increasing her suffering, therefore simply ignored the suggestions of his sisters and the sarcasm of Awal (“If men would only slap their wives once in a while …”). Saturday turned to Sunday, and when at lunch time my mother’s hunger strike showed no sign of abating, the old man intervened.

  “Come, Beta. You must eat. Forget this quarrel.”

  “Just because I have no one here … (sob) … they bully me all the time … (sob) … they talk about my family … (sob) …”

  My father stood at the door, discomfited, Kulsum talked behind her veil, Hassam Pirbhai sat beside her, solicitous as a ph
ysician.

  “So you won’t eat, then?”

  “No.” Sob. Sob-sob-sob.

  “Now … if you feel that badly … that we’ve mistreated you … if you want to live by yourselves …”

  “Yes (sob) we want to live by ourselves …”

  “Well, Juma, is that what you want?”

  “If that’s what she wants,” said my father.

  Kulsum, in triumph.

  Those were the war years. What they saw of the war were the soldiers in transit to and from the Ethiopian campaign, the shortages of food, the weekly broadcasts, the blackouts. They had a room in Ngara, not far from their previous home. My father had acquired considerable influence through his job. He came to know commissioners, police inspectors and heads of government departments. And the more people he knew, the more indispensable he became in his job.

  Still Kulsum failed to conceive a child. Now all of his salary came to her, and what he spent were his commissions. The girl from Mombasa had been taught to save. “Eggs were 33 for a shilling; yet I would not eat one, saving it for him to eat the next day. Chappatis were a luxury. We had no table and chairs, but sat on the kitchen floor across from each other.” At the end of their first year alone she sprang a surprise on him by showing him a sum of money she had saved to pay towards his debt. “His eyes opened.”

  In the absence of a child, she took to her old hobby of sewing. And she profited from the war. He would bring in orders for mosquito nets for the army which she would sew during the day, and in the evenings he would help her to put on the cotton top and border.