The Gunny Sack

by M G Vassanji

  We all stared at the marriage of white and black on the floor, the white milk spreading out and breaking up into sickly little islands on a black sea—from which a frantic Kulsum divined disaster.

  “Oh Mother!” cried my mother. “You bastard, you motherfucker …” A rain of blows kept pouring on my milk-washed body. The wet slaps smarted but not a tear I shed. Thump, slap, slipper, smack … I bore on back, face, buttocks, arm … thump, slap, slipper, smack … how can I forget? … until finally I whispered, “Forgive me, Mother.”

  “Leave him, Auntie,” said Yasmin. “Leave him, Mummy,” said Begum. “Please leave him,” they all begged.

  How could she forgive me, my crime was murder.

  The milk was wiped off the floor, my mother went off to her room, and I was bathed, tears falling freely now. Not at the pain but at having hurt my mother. Fifteen minutes later, she came back, tearful, her tasbih in her hand. “Put him to bed,” she told the girls.

  My father was not told of the incident.

  There followed seven days of intense expiation, seven days of intense prayer on one leg; seven days of sweet offerings to the mosque; and the following Sunday a niani. Seven clean maidens put a clove in their mouths before going to bed the previous night and arrived to lunch with sore tongues, wet mouths and the soft clove. They sat in a circle, on a mat in the dining-room, and waited shyly to be served. Kulsum served each one of them herself; no child was allowed to help, Abdulla was sent away. First she gave each girl a glass of yogurt to swallow the wet clove with. Then on each plate she put portions of sweet rice steaming in cinnamon and saffron, and chick peas. And when they had eaten of my mother’s hands, they trooped off to the tap outside to wash their hands and returned to where she sat, on a low stool, a pan of water and a bowl beside her and a cup in her hand. Each girl raised her right foot over the bowl and Kulsum poured a little water on the big toe and washed it. And the water that had collected when all of them had passed her was solemnly drunk. Then each girl took a sweet and a handkerchief as gift, and my father returned them all to their homes. Thus were the gods and goddesses, orthodox and unorthodox, placated on my behalf.

  But the gods are not always heedful.

  A few nights later my father woke up with a pain and asked Kulsum to call Dr. Joshi. All his usual bravado was gone. “I think there’s something wrong with me.” Abdulla was woken up and quickly dispatched with a note. But this was still the Emergency and Abdulla (although a Muslim, as Kulsum said) did not return for a few days. Day was breaking, a delicious cool breeze brought the smell of earth and dew and wet leaves through the window with the first golden rays of the sun, when I was woken up by a heart-rending scream from my mother.

  We stayed in our bedroom all day, my brother and I. We tried playing ludo first, then snakes and ladders. We brought out the train set and the doctor set. But the sombre mood of the house was over us too, and we felt miserable. We cried a little and we slept a little. We held on to our natural urges until it hurt. Then my brother wet himself. I watched a trickle slowly move down his legs, the smell filled the air, and the front of his shorts gradually acquired an ever-widening wet patch. Then I too let go and relieved myself.

  By opening the door a crack we could watch the proceedings in the rest of the house. The dining room table had been moved to a side and the floor was laid with mats and sheets. The sitting room furniture was hooded with ghostly white sheets. In the early afternoon the people trickled in. First the women, in twos and threes, talking in hushed, important tones, advising my sister and cousins and ordering the servant. They sat on the floor counting beads, some with eyes half-closed, others staring blankly in front of them, lips moving; and when something occurred to one, she would turn and mutter in a husky voice to a neighbour; and then go back, to counting, staring, meditating.

  Then came the men, when the sitting and dining rooms were almost full of women, standing behind with a respectfulness I’d never seen in any of them before. Drinking companions, gambling companions, men he’d had released from arrest, men he’d lent money to, policemen, civil servants. Babu Chacha, Lal Chacha, John Chacha, Mr. Stephens; there were Sikhs, Goans, Patels, Shahs and Manjis; and they stood respectfully at the back, dressed modestly in trousers and jackets, hands in front of them, heads lowered, waiting.

  Finally came the elders, pushing gently through the group of men, and the mukhi among them enquired of the women in front with a gesture that said: “Where?” And the bedroom door was thrown open as they went in, and remained wide open. Inside, on a long, low table, was a figure draped in red cloth, and I saw Kulsum for the first time that day, sitting beside the all-covered figure, her own head covered with a white pachedi.

  A murmur filled the outer two rooms where the men and women were congregated and, suddenly, a woman’s voice started in a wavering voice that slowly picked up:

  O fickle mind, you desire …

  The murmur subsided, a loud sob was heard, and the chorus went relentlessly, unmercifully on, drawing tears in its wake:

  How flowers wither

  And Kings pass on …

  The red cloth had been partly lifted to show my father’s face. The mukhi sat on one side of him and Kulsum on the other. Then, at a signal, she got up and knelt before my father, and the mukhi with a sprinkle of water on the stony face forgave him on behalf of her.

  I saw death but I did not know it. I saw my father stretched out stonily on a low, wooden table, I heard my mother sob, I heard the singing that induced tears among the women, yet I did not know it was death. But a gloom descended over my brother and me, and we started to cry, the two of us, not knowing what was happening around us. Our sister and cousins opened the door and strode in, saw two wet pants, sniffed the air, and got to work. Soon my brother was fresh and ready, rubbing his wet eyes and sniffing, and was taken out of the room. Then he returned with Mehroon, and she took my hand. At that moment my mother walked in. She looked at me and said, “It’s not necessary to take him. He’s too young.”

  The two of us sat in the room, alone again. We were told to go to sleep, but we sat there on the bed in bewildered silence. Presently there was a commotion outside, voices, movement. Then we heard repeated sobs and we dared not open the door to look. There were people on the other side of our door, we could hear men, and heavy footsteps. Then, some sharp calls, by men. It was as if the men had taken over from the women.

  “Babu! Here.”

  “Is it over?”

  “Yes, soon now. Where is—”

  Then a man’s slow, resounding cry, the Shahada, and a woman’s sob broke out into a long long wail. Kulsum.

  The hair at the back of my neck stood on end. A shiver ran down my spine. We stared at each other with wide-open eyes, our hands hanging in front of us at our crotches, our legs stretched out on the bed, and, simultaneously, we too began to wail loudly and hoarsely.

  After what had transpired between her and the Hassam Pirbhai females, Kulsum found herself in a hostile city without an ally. Two months later we had visitors. Two elderly-looking women came, hugged my mother, and the three of them sat down on a mat and cried in grief, as custom required. They were Kulsum’s elder sisters Fatu and Daulat, and they had come to convince her that it was best for her to move to Dar es Salaam, where most of her family now lived.

  Six months after my father Juma died we took the train to Mombasa, stayed with Kulsum’s cousin Zainab, and then sailed on the SS Kampala to Dar.

  DAR ES SALAAM.

  There lived in this town, then called Mzizima, at the place where Sea View now enters like an eagle’s beak into the side of the Indian Ocean, a rich Indian merchant called Majigo, whose son Badula was caught in the act with Mwatatu the daughter of Kitembe, an elder of the town. The girl’s brother Mwanashehe, who surprised the young lovers, was a big dumé of a man, who took Badula and twisted his neck like it was a chicken’s. When Majigo the Indian discovered his son’s murder, he went to Said bin Abdalla, another elder of the town and a
good friend of Sultan Majid of Zanzibar. “Mwanashehe bin Kitembe has strangled my son,” he complained. “Why did you do this?” asked Said bin Abdalla of the son of Kitembe. To which proud Mwanashehe, without looking up, replied: “I know nothing of the crime.” Said bin Abdalla was angered. “There is no law in this country,” he said. “I shall go to Zanzibar and speak with the Sultan.”

  When Said bin Abdalla reached the presence of Sultan Said Majid of Zanzibar, he was welcomed and duly fed. After dinner, as they sat relaxing over halvah and coffee, catching the sea breeze and watching the stars, Said bin Abdalla, as if beginning a riddle, said, “There is a beautiful country, but it has no law.”

  The Sultan remained silent, immersed in thought. A minute, two minutes, passed. Then he sighed, and shifted his weight. “Which country?” he asked.

  “It is called Mzizima.”

  “Who lives there?”

  “The Shomvi live there and they pay tribute to the Pazi.”

  “Who lives there?” asked Said Majid again.

  “Kitembe and his family. Gungulungwa and Tambaza. Shomvilali. Palalugwe, Zalala and Abdullah Usisana. These are the chief men of Mzizima.”

  “I will come and see this country,” said Said Majid.

  When the Sultan in his sailing ship reached Mzizima, he anchored outside the channel and sent a letter to the elders of Mzizima. “Sultan Said Majid of Zanzibar is here and wishes to see you and all your male relations.”

  The elders of Mzizima, Kitembe and Tambaza and others complied, and when they were assembled before the Sultan, Said Majid spoke to them. “I have called you all here because I wish to settle in your land.” The elders of Mzizima were all not of one mind on hearing this, and they began arguing, so the Sultan told them to go home and think about it, but to return together when they brought the answer. The next day they gave their answer. “Come in peace and live with us.” Said Majid returned to Zanzibar and came back with Arab soldiers, a carpenter and many other retainers. This time he sailed right into the harbour. He stayed several months and he brought many gifts. And he built houses of stone. His people cultivated the soil. And like the illustrious Caliph Haroun al Rashid, who took Baghdad by peace, Said Majid, who took Mzizima by peace, also called it Dar es Salaam, the haven of peace.

  Thus is the origin of the name Dar es Salaam, as told by one Edward bin Hadith, tailor and fundi in Kichwele.

  Mzizima, Prosperous Town. There was talk, much later, of changing the name back to Mzizima. There is not much difference in the two names, really: Prosperous Town or Haven of Peace—dreams, both of them, dreams and hopes.

  There was still hope when we disembarked from the SS Kampala, and were rowed ashore to Dar es Salaam harbour with our trunks rattling with memories …

  A hope that was stalwartly being defended in a letter by a local pawnbroker to the Tanganyika Herald. Tanganyika will become like America one day, and Dar es Salaam will be its New York! This was in reply to a quip by an American visitor, that the town was half the size of a New York cemetery and twice as dead. “Perhaps our Yankee visitor,” wrote our enraged citizen A.A. Raghavji, also known as Nuru Poni to the locals, “has not ventured too far from Sea View, where he has presumably put up with European friends, and mistaken the cemeteries and crematorium in that area for the town itself. Let him walk the streets of Kariakoo (if that is not too much for his dainty constitution) and he will see life. Let him knock on our doors, and we will show him life!” The letter then entered into a discussion of the meaning of the word life, which digression the esteemed editor wisely suppressed.

  That year, double-decker buses had been introduced in the streets and, in some areas, were running into electric wires not strung high enough. And there were those who objected that the passengers in the upper deck could see over the stockades into the compounds of their huts. Eti, if a woman is bathing … a woman out of buibui … a girl in her period … the anxiety of the invasion of privacy. Nuru Poni was right, as he was right about many things. Perhaps the American should have taken a ride in a double-decker bus.

  There were three dreams in this town that aspired to Baghdad once and New York afterwards. The European dream stayed near the seashore. Everything beyond Ingles Street up to the ocean in the north and east was Uzunguni, “where the Europeans live.” Whitewashed, tree-lined, breezy: dreamlike. Huddled behind the Europeans, crowded, came the Indian quarter, with its dukas of groceries, produce and cloth: gutters overflowing and smelling at street corners, rotten potatoes and onions smelling outside the produce shops, open garbage smelling in the alleys. Then came a breathing space from the European and Asian … the Mnazi Moja ground, uninhabited, uncultivated, a sandy desert: beyond this, in the interior, was Kariakoo, formerly home of the German Carrier Corps, the beginning of the African quarter. Only a few streets ventured, from the Indian quarter, into the African quarter, but once inside, got lost in the maze of criss-crossing, unpaved streets lined with African huts.

  One of the streets that actually braved into Kariakoo was Kichwele, carried by the poorer Indian dukas, themselves of mud and wattle, a respectable distance up to Msimbazi Street, along which they turned right, with a little loop around the market, then past it and back almost up to No Man’s Land again. A long entrepreneurial, exploratory and tentative U-turn into the interior, barely thicker than a line.

  My grandmother Hirbai’s shop was one half of a dwelling on busy Msimbazi Street, rented from A.A. Sagaf the Arab butcher. The other half was occupied by my uncle Hassan and his family.

  The thousand faces of Kariakoo … From the quiet and cool, shady and dark inside of the shop you could see them through the rectangular doorframe as on a wide, silent cinema screen: vendors, hawkers, peddlers, askaris, thieves, beggars and other more ordinary pedestrians making their way in the dust and the blinding glare and the heat, in kanzus, msuris, cutoffs, shorts, khaki or white uniforms, khangas, frocks, buibuis, frock-pachedis … African, Asian, Arab; Hindu, Khoja, Memon, Shamsi; Masai, Makonde, Swahili … men and women of different shades and hues and beliefs. The image of quiet, leafy suburbia impressed on the mind, of Nairobi’s Desai Road, cracked in the heat of Dar into a myriad refracting fragments, each a world unto its own. One of which was grotesque and mysterious, always threatening, that never failed to leave a chill in your heart every time you encountered it … Of Abdalla the beggar, a mere torso of a man, a foot-and-a-half high, a baby’s body with an adult moustachioed face always looking up, making conversation that sounded serious and earnest but never seemed to make sense to anybody … of Bibi Fatuma, thin and old and so weak it took her ages to go from shop to shop, tottering into sight leaning on a staff taller than herself and with much difficulty coming to a trembling halt and putting out a hand: expecting not a penny or two like any other beggar but a ten-cent copper, and she would throw back at you anything smaller you offered and totter away … of the beggar, perfectly healthy if you did not count his head, a full two-and-a-half times any normal head and hopelessly lopsided, who would take his penny and walk away with a sinister grin …

  The shop was cleaner than the two rooms behind it, or the courtyard; the floor was spotless and swept from time to time, everything was neatly folded and in place or displayed on a rack or a board. Khangas of the most recent fashions, judging by the print and the proverb on it, hung folded lengthwise from beams suspended parallel to the ceiling. Then would follow a row of kikoi hanging likewise, and lastly the lowly loincloth, the msuri with assorted checks. There was always the smell of new cloth in the air. Whenever Grandmother or the servant Hamisi flapped open a piece of folded khanga or some other cloth, with a brisk phat! a faint powder would fly in the air, which I eagerly sniffed. I would watch the mamas in buibuis step in from the street, in twos and threes, and wait hesitantly at the threshold, when Grandmother would call out, “Karibu! Welcome, Mama, welcome! Come in, Shoga!” And the mamas would all say, “Thank you, starehe, don’t trouble yourself, Bi Mkubwa.” And they would come in and proceed to examine
the khangas, or buibuis, or kaniki. Grandmother would then hobble up and down, concerned not to let the customers slip away, ordering Hamisi, bargaining the prices to the narrowest possible profit margin.

  Nguvumali was in town and every day people flocked in their thousands—clerks, messengers, thieves, policemen and the occasional shopkeeper—to see him and be cured and bring back charms. There was one khanga, much in demand, that punned: “Nguvumali husema akili ndiyo mali,” Your mind truly is the important thing, or: Use your heads. But all turned a deaf ear to this proselytiser for reason against magic, wearing the khanga only to laugh at its killjoy message.

  Shoplifters were called 420, or char so wis. Once, when Grandmother was not looking and Hamisi was away, one 420 stretched out a long stick and picked up a child’s dress hanging at the door frame. My uncle Rehman was about and seeing the theft, shouted at the thief and called out to my other uncle: “Come on, Hassan! Let’s show him!” The two uncles ran out of the shop and soon the 420 was on the ground, and a fight ensued in the dust, Grandmother frantically trying to get the bystanders to stop it. But a large crowd had gathered, people happily calling out to each other to watch the two Indians struggling against the African. When, finally, they separated, the thief disappeared into the crowd and my sore uncles limped in, Rehman clutching in his hand the battered dress, crumpled and dusty, the hanger broken. That night they both received intensive massages and went to bed early.

  The nights were warm. Dim lights inside the house threw long shadows against the walls, leaving parts of it in permanent darkness. Outside was a thick darkness, a black, menacing universe, with faces occasionally illuminated by moving kerosene lamps, and eerie, momentary shadows, gigantic, cast by passing cars against building walls: a darkness that rang with shouts and cackles and squeals of laughter. A little after sunset a drum would start rolling at the nearby Pombe Shop and the sounds of singing would add to the other sounds of the night. We would sit in the shop with two or three panels removed from the door to let in the night air; the adults would talk in low murmurs, while we children watched the teeming darkness outside and waited for what it would next summon at our doorstep.