The Gunny Sack

by M G Vassanji

  A tearful, distraught Kulsum looking beseechingly at the departing car, as at a hearse …

  Mehroon played it safe, and married not the cricketer Alnoor, but the serious, the prosaic, Amin with the Peugeot, whose family owned a business in Tanga, to where the car was soon speeding after the farewell. The cricketer would be in Kinondoni or at the Gymkhana with his friends every Sunday, he was still a child and would have to be tamed. But Amin was all ready, waiting to marry, join the family business and start a family. Mehroon was nineteen.

  “To spend so much on them, to give them so much, to expect so much from them, and then to give away to these men and their families this dream, ready made,” Kulsum would say. “But why did you agree to the wedding, then?” Sona and I would ask in exasperation. To which she would give a look that said: Better this than the curse of an unmarried daughter. “Don’t worry, Mummy,” Begum had told her, “I have no intention of getting married as yet.” Until, that is, Sona wanted to hear good things about himself, and begged Begum to visit the Parents’ Day at the Boys’ School.

  Sona remembers. A whim, a chance thought. No one had ever been to enquire about him at any Parents’ Day. Everybody else’s parents did … well, everybody who counted. Adil Mawji’s father never missed one, neither did Zahur Meghji’s parents. At every Parents’ Day, to which Sona himself went to demonstrate some experiment, show some scientific wizardry to the awestruck parents—colours changing in a test tube, sparks flying from a point—the teachers would throw meaningful, questioning looks at him. Who are his parents, from whence this golden genius, why doesn’t someone claim him? This time Begum did. She toured all the labs and saw all our teachers.

  On her way from Mr. Haji’s museum, where she duly saw the famous foetus in bottled solution, she heard a strain of piano music. There was a big piano in the assembly hail, across from the museum, which was used mostly by the expatriate European teachers. Begum saw Mr. Harris playing and walked over and stood behind him, watching over his shoulder.

  Mr. Harris was the physics teacher. Bearded, serious, solid, one of the new group that had arrived from Britain with Mr. Green. Only recently had he begun to show signs of having a life and opinions outside of physics. The whites in Rhodesia had given themselves independence, Ian Smith was the hateword all over black Africa, and Tanzania had broken off relations with Britain. The Union Jack flying outside the British High Commission on Independence Avenue had been burnt by university students. Every day dozens of lorries, with owners from all over East Africa, rushed oil supplies from Dar to Lusaka (now a household word), bringing back copper, risking lives and property over the treacherous Hell Run on the road from Morogoro to Iringa (where Ji Bai’s husband Gulam had met his death many years before with four other missionaries). Among these lorries that raced to Lusaka and back in four days were two Leylands, with Somali drivers and local turn boys, belonging to my brother-in-law Amin, which could be seen sometimes undergoing repairs at Kichwele and Viongozi. Kulsum declined putting her savings into the venture and later regretted that, because Amin added a Fiat to his small fleet, this being the prestigious make of lorry. Mr. Harris, at last showing signs of life and opinions outside of physics, asked the class, “How would you solve the Rhodesian crisis?” To which we replied, to a man, “Fight!” Mr. Harris shook his head and said, “Do you really believe violence and bloodshed would solve it?”

  Thus, Mr. Harris, who was playing the piano in the hall as Begum stood behind him to watch.

  Begum, if she had been a daughter in a rich family, would have learnt to play the piano … she would have driven a car and she would have been to London, and like the Londonreturneds, learnt to speak—English, Swahili or Cutchi—with that uppity accent they put on … With all due respect to Alzira, her clothes would have been mostly imported … and her hair … her hair would have been short. She would wear pants and tweed skirts and she would tie a bright-coloured scarf at the neck … She would know the piano and she would know how to waltz and tango and limbo and twist … Her children, to whom she would teach the piano, would be pretty if girls and handsome if boys and go to an exclusive school like the International School, and she would talk to them in English.

  “Any requests?” asked Mr. Harris, and smiled.

  “Petit Fleur,” she said.

  “That’s for trumpet—” he said, “but—” and tried a few notes.

  “Theme from a Summer Place,” she said, and he obliged with a few more notes.

  “Please Don’t Treat Me Like a Child,” she said, and he looked up startled.

  “What?”

  “By Helen Shapiro, you know—”

  He didn’t, because he had run away from it, and other things like it, but he played her something else.

  It was said sometimes, all in good fun, that you kept an elaichi, a cardomom, in your mouth to kill the breath of cigarette. Oh, they added, you smoked because you drank … you know, the company and so on. And drinking obviously was a prerequisite for gambling and whoring. So it all began with an elaichi in the mouth. When a girl got married her family wanted to know two things about the boy (besides how much money he made): Is he from the community, the comm, and Does he keep elaichi in the mouth. With a white man, there was double jeopardy, plus the added penalty that he ate pork. You could do worse, but not by much, by marrying an African or a Sikh Punjabi.

  How did she manage it, this liaison? The school was out of consideration as a rendezvous, both Sona and I were there every day. And he would be spotted in Kichwele from a mile off. But on Saturdays Begum came home late, at three o’clock, because the girls at the office, she said, went out on a little lunch. It must have been then. A two-hour date every week for a few months, at the restaurant in Sea View Hotel perhaps.

  One evening Begum broke the news to mother. “Sona and Kala’s teacher wants to marry me.” “Who is he?” “He is a European.” “Over my dead body. Do you want to murder me? Take a knife, go on, take a knife, take these scissors, I’ll give you my soul!” There followed a scene such as we had not witnessed for several years. But Begum had prepared for just this eventuality.

  The next day Begum did not return from work. Her friend Shamim Jadavji brought home a note, addressed to me:

  “I have gone to London with Mr. Harris, your physics teacher. There we’ll get married. Forgive me, please, both Sona and Kala, I did not intend to get married so soon, but I could not have kept my affair with Peter secret for long. The rest I cannot explain … your time will come. Look after Mummy. When enough time has passed perhaps she will find it in her to forgive me too. Love and kisses.”

  She had taken away a small suitcase, with a few clothes. A few other things were missing; some books, photographs, her old doll.

  A week later Kulsum gave away the store. Edward and another fundi took home orders, which when completed she delivered to a few stores downtown. There were three of us now, all in a daze, in the flat upstairs at Habib Mansion, and sometimes when she was especially depressed and brooding, Sona and I would find time from our schoolwork to play with her the card game two-three-five, a variation of whist for three desperate and lonely people. Whenever she heard the drumbeat at nine o’clock announcing the news, she would look up involuntarily, at the Philips on the glass cabinet, catching herself doing it, fighting something deep inside her.

  Part 3.

  Amina.

  BIG BLACK TRUNK.

  I think of you, Amina. I remember you on the front page of the Herald, a small African figure among large athletic Americans in Afros, tiny fist raised in protest outside a public building. “Students occupy university building,” read the caption. How proud we were then, our own Amina raising hell in New York. “Free Amina!” we said exultantly, closing our own fists, but ours was a call not to free Amina but in praise of a free Amina …

  We would see them sometimes, Alu Poni, Sona and I, as we trekked to school on Viongozi Street. Three girls would appear across the street from us, in complete uniforms, gree
n and white skirt-blouse, black shoes and white socks. One Arab and two Coast Africans, all with short little pigtails, walking selfconsciously in close formation, giggling and talking, keeping eyes averted from lecherous bystanders. Before the three of us reached Jogo’s block, these three had disappeared into a side-street, a short cut to the girls’ school.

  How many times must I have seen her, for how many years I cannot recall. She was part of my scenery as I was part of hers, one of the many people on the road, walking or cycling to work, sitting outside a house on the step or on a stone bench. At some point I stopped taking notice when I saw them, but I recognized her instantly when I saw her again, fully grown, a student servicewoman, witnessing my ritual humiliation as I reported for duty at Camp Uhuru.

  The National Service grew up on the ashes of the King’s African Rifles, in the wake of Tanganyika’s “day of shame,” when the navy of the former rulers had to be called in to disarm the mutinous guardians of the country, which it did in a trice. The National Service was set up, with the aid of the Israelis, to provide military training, political awareness and literacy for motivated youth with a right head on their shoulders, from whose ranks the Tanganyika People’s Defence Forces were to be recruited. Young men volunteered in the hundreds. So far, so good.

  When the Government announced compulsory national service for high school and university leavers, the students were up in arms. After having gone through the territorial high school entrance exams, the Cambridge School Certificate Exams, the Cambridge Higher School Certificate Exams, O levels and A levels, Alternative N and Alternative T syllabuses, having taken three exams every year for fourteen years, all to be successful in life, and now to be subjected to the ignominy of tilling the fields and chanting slogans and marching for six months, and after that to go to work in uniform and give sixty percent of your salary to the government for eighteen months! The students marched in protest. “Colonialism was better!” they chanted. “Student power!” Dar was humming with excitement. Student power! The crème de la crème standing up to Mwalimu himself! First it had been the army in revolt. Now it was the students—not so easy to extricate from this one—who would he call for assistance this time? Expatriate teachers nodded wisely to themselves: this was something they all knew at least a little about. This was something governments in the West all dreaded—student mobilization. The President invited the protesters to come and meet him at State House. In the grounds outside, seated with his ministers, patiently he heard them speak and saw them wave their fists in the air. Then he spoke. Colonialism is better, you say? Go home. Yes, go home, the lot of you, to your towns and villages. The University is not for you. The University was closed, the unions banned, including our Boyschool’s own parliamentary-style COPS, the Council of Pupils.

  When the President said go home, he was meaning business. The students, in the State House grounds, saw themselves surrounded by the army. The new army. Every student there had his name taken, every student, boy or girl, was escorted to their residence at the University where they meekly packed their belongings and left for their hometown to report to the local authorities.

  To say that colonialism was better! Eti. They had no sympathizers in the streets, these boys and girls who went to school and university free of charge and were given pocket money and travel expenses on top of that!

  Every year Asian students, after completing school or university, joined their African counterparts to go and build the nation at camp, to learn to defend its borders. Every year at Camp Ruvu, each Sunday Indian mothers would arrive with servants bearing sufuriyas and tins, laden with curries and mithais and chevdo to last their daughters until the following Sunday, and leave the camp gates tearfully with their empty vessels, as if returning from the very gates of Hades. “Your girls are treated well,” said a minister to a meeting of concerned women, but who would listen? It was all right if you gave them ugali and beans day in, day out; but when they had to bite rocks when they chewed rice, when they got bones the size of their heads to gnaw, when maggots floated in the stews … it was all too much, said the mothers.

  It was because of these concerns, expressed a little too loudly, that the Asian boys and girls were not selected for the most out-of-the-way places. But if you have a name like Salim Juma Huseni …

  When I turned the front page of the Herald to find out which camp I had been selected for, and who was coming with me, I found my name not at nearby Ruvu, or at Makutopora near Dodoma or Mafinga near Iringa or at Oljoro near Arusha. It was a new camp called “Uhuru” some distance north from Bukoba, near the town of Kaboya on Lake Victoria: in other words, the furthest possible place, along with Tamim, Umbulla, Mbogo, Raphael, but no Manji, Samji, Bhimji, Kanji—no other Asian.

  “A mistake!”

  “Definitely a mistake!”

  “I tell you, you will not survive! People die of malaria there!”

  “What if something happens to you out there in the jungle?”

  “Do something, yar!”

  “Baboo!”

  This last was whispered by someone in Kulsum’s ear. Baboo was then one of the richest men in Dar. He drove a Mercedes and lived in Salamat Villa, a luxurious home in Upanga that made the nearby embassies look like hostels, with an exquisite garden full of pink, yellow and red roses, bougainvillaea, hibiscus, champeli, jasmines and immaculate hedges, all tended by a resident gardener. Baboo was known for his charity. So was his father, who at his deathbed had had his life extended by ten years by a holy man, so it was widely rumoured. This much-publicized private event earned the old man his nickname of Baboo ben Adhem. The ten years had expired recently.

  Like a little boy I accompanied Kulsum to Baboo’s scrap and hardware store Downtown, where he sat, humble and soft-spoken, in his blue Kaunda suit.

  “I have never been parted from him,” said Kulsum emotionally. “I have brought him up without a father, I’ve given my all to him, and I don’t want anything to happen to him.” Just the right touch. If Baboo had the power to change my fate, he couldn’t refuse.

  “None of my friends is going to this camp,” I added for good measure.

  Baboo looked at me sceptically, but picked up the phone. Such is the power of wealth, I thought. He spoke straight to the Police Commissioner.

  “Baboo here. Jambo, Commissioner, how are you? Al hamdulillah, I don’t have a problem. But I have a boy here, perhaps you can help. Do you know anyone in National Service? … He’s from your tribe? Good. I’ll send the boy over.”

  It is my day to see the great, I thought. How easy it was … And how fortunate that the Baboos and the Punjas and the Premjis were there to serve you, to ease life through its difficult passages. Kulsum went on her errands, I went to Police Headquarters. Once I notified the desk who was expecting me, I was escorted straight to the personage.

  How humble are the great, I thought. First Baboo, now him. The Commissioner was a short thick man also in a Kaunda suit, sweating profusely behind a desk loaded with papers and large ring binders, pencils, pens and an ink bottle … An old upright fan whirred from a stand in a corner. No uniform and cap, no belt or gun, not even a moustache!

  “Yes? What can I do for you?”

  “Mr. Baboo sent me.”

  “Then what can I do for you?”

  “It is about National Service. I have been sent far—Camp Uhuru, near Kaboya … Lake Victoria. You see, recently I had an infection of the knee. The doctor said it was tuberculosis of the knee … the whole knee was swollen, I couldn’t walk … I have to come for checkup …”

  The Commissioner looked at me as if he had something bitter in his mouth but had to pretend it was not there. But his voice was kind when he spoke. “Here,” he said, writing me a chit. “Do you know where National Service headquarters are? Ask for Lieutenant Colonel Henry.”