by M G Vassanji
Kulsum sitting at her zig-zag sewing machine, staring ahead of her, at infinity, picking her chin, brooding.
The zig-zag of course came with us from Kichwele, as did much of the furniture from the flat upstairs. The ship SS Nairobi, the toy cabinet, the Philips. A bookcase was a new addition, with some Reader’s Digest Condensed Books, assorted Oxford dictionaries, Ian Fleming, Prester John, Lobsang Rampa. The same photographs on the walls, with one addition: the family portrait at Mehroon’s wedding. This hung a little to one side, as if leaving place for another, twin photograph: the absent, Begum’s never-to-be wedding family portrait …
After Kichwele—that dominating artery now called Uhuru Street, with its bicycles and cars and buses, its dust and its people and the buildings that appeared ancient after only ten years—Upanga nights were lonely, its maghrab more oppressive … the skies were open, when children cried they did so against the universe … couples walking on the sidewalk, you saw their heads and shoulders over the hedge, walking and murmuring, their thoughts ever so serious, weighing down on them, as if so much was at stake, so much depended on the right decision … Peeping pawpaw trees casting ominous, twisted shadows outside gardens, looming coconut trees rustling overhead, gutters tracing dark lines on the streets. All against a background sound of chirping crickets. What was it about Upanga that gave it such gravity at night?
Sometimes a lonely trumpet would sound, a practising band musician, playing of all things ancient “Swanee River” …
Kulsum sitting at her zig-zag, brooding, picking at her chin: what is she thinking about? About Sona’s coming departure.
Sona was one of the boys whom former Boyschool teacher Mr. Datoo influenced when he returned from America on a visit. On a fateful afternoon in Dar, Mr. Datoo went about town like the Pied Piper followed by a train of adulating boys, the procession ending at the United States Information Service library on Independence Avenue, university catalogue section. “You can make it,” Mr. Datoo had told the boys.
Catalogues started arriving at home, glossy affairs promising exciting academic opportunities (“A first-hand look at the moon’s rocks, can you beat that?”), with tantalizing photos depicting student life in Arcadia: playing tennis barechested, under lights; the glee club in session; making a snowman in the shadow of an imposing statue; and that favourite of all catalogues: boy or girl reading under a tree (even if it’s the only tree on campus, as Sona would later joke).
Kulsum did not pay much attention, if at all she pooh-poohed the whole project. No money, not possible, was what she firmly believed. Edward and another fundi took piecemeal orders from her and these she delivered Downtown. A few more years to go, she said.
Then one day Sona brought home a thick envelope, Abraham Lincoln stamps on the outside. It spoke not only of admission but also of a scholarship. The letter was signed “Gene”: Foreign Student Counsellor. We were sitting at four o’clock tea, it was Sunday, I was home from University. Kulsum looked flustered, angry, searching for an answer, knowing she would soon find it, and that would be that.
“What’s wrong with the University here?”
“It doesn’t teach what I want to study.”
“What do you want to study?”
“History—of our community.”
“And what job will you do studying the history of our community?”
“I will teach.”
“Why don’t you become a teacher here, and study the history of our community at the side?”
Would he have left if she had refused permission? But for someone like Sona, the case is always a clincher. All signs point to the same direction, the path opens of its own accord …
Sona the golden boy, how much she had loved him, we all had loved him … the youngest, the darling … even the meanest of his pranks, offences, were laced with mischief and laughter. The golden mean, he took no sides, hurt no-one, and had no strong beliefs: above all else, did he, does he, then love only himself? For that is what you expect from everybody’s darling.
In the next week Kulsum had two visitors. The first one was Mr. Blunt the Form VI counsellor, followed by Brother Augustine, a Quebec Jesuit who lived in a house behind our block of flats.
Brother Augustine lived with a few other Jesuit brothers, how many no-one quite knew. He was the kind of white man who takes a tengo of chickens with him inside a bus and then clumsily runs after one if it escapes, returning triumphant—red-faced, smiling, sweating—to everyone’s delight. A studied idiosyncracy this, perhaps, but he was by no means trivial. He would sit with Sona on the wall that bordered the house—Sona never saw the inside of it, even when he knocked to enquire about Brother Augustine he was asked to stand outside, by whichever of the Jesuits that answered: CIA agents? we speculated—and the two would talk. It was Brother Augustine who convinced Sona of his vocation—the study and love of antiquity: old alphabets and scripts, crumbling manuscripts: the “history and mystery” of sects, in medieval Europe and India and—Sona’s later interest—Coastal East Africa.
Brother Augustine wrote an additional special recommendation for Sona.
Kulsum always stuck to an old maxim: nothing comes before education. Be it month-end at the shop and 420s hovering at its doors like vultures over a dying body, say you want to study and Kulsum would leave you alone. After the visits of Mr. Blunt and Brother Augustine, after being told that not everyone’s son or daughter gets admitted to a university like that, and with a scholarship, even in Europe or America:
Kulsum made her biggest sacrifice by letting Sona go.
Kulsum’s commandments to Sona: Don’t marry a white girl. Don’t smoke or drink. Don’t eat pork. Don’t turn your back on your faith and your community. Don’t forget your family.
And so Sona left: no government sponsorship, no picture in the Herald, but like Alu, quietly. With him he took a box of old printed books, tattered, torn, yellowing, relinquished to him by amused old ladies. A treasure, he said.
Only Kulsum and I went to the airport to leave him. Kulsum waved and waved, even when he had disappeared behind a door, her four fingers folding and unfolding in a mechanical, absent-minded, outward goodbye that was a mere form for the torment she felt inside.
Sona’s first letter was from London:
Kala: Everything they said about it is true! It is glorious, it is magnificent, I don’t know how to describe it. Even from the plane, before landing, the miles and miles of cultivated, ordered land, then blocks of paved streets, stretching endlessly, the staid row houses, the cars parked neatly outside, the streets like endless ribbons and traffic snaking its way through them, the tall buildings, the parks, the river. The first thought that strikes you when you take this all in (after you’ve said, how clean, how great, how beautiful!) is, how many of our Dars could fit into this world of a city. And inside London—the Parliament buildings, Nelson’s Column, Westminster Abbey, Big Ben—good old Big Ben, I wanted to go and hug it—and Buckingham Palace—it’s all here—repeat—it’s all here! And I don’t mind telling you, I saw the Queen leaving Buckingham Palace and I waved at her. That’s what I wanted to do for a long time, didn’t you?
When you walk past these great structures rising up, when you see the craftsmanship that went into the smallest details in them, when you sense the weight of history these magnificent structures support—when you find yourself reciting the names of people and events they remind you of—when you experience the pomp and pageantry, the purity of sound and the tradition behind a simple boys’ choir (which I did on television) … when you walk the halls and corridors, see the rooms, feel with your hands a solid wooden desk—where Newton, Shakespeare, Milton conceived their universes … you wonder. Is it surprising they behaved the way they did when they came to our countries, these Englishmen? Sure, we too have a history, and old traditions, but they are undefined, uncelebrated, and sometimes as confusing as a cauldron of witches’ brew, don’t you think? There lies the difference between our histories …
&nbs
p; And how does Britannia treat her offspring who come from all over the world to pay respects?
At the airport, lines, long lines: coloured, white, coloured, white … A coincidence? Hardly. First class and second class British subjects. You look at the others in your line, and you wonder, Am I one of these? Why do they look so strange … and dark? You ask yourself, Why do these Indian women always travel with bedding, for God’s sake? You want to move away from them, then you check yourself. It could be your mother. You smile. Kidhar se ate ho? Amritsar. Ap? Tanzania. You wait for minutes on end, watch them endlessly quizzing those ahead of you, as the other lines beside yours swiftly diminish and passengers from other, European, flights join them. Then my turn came. But it came in a special way. Alau was ahead of me. I was called before they had finished with him, and we were taken to see some officer. Then we were questioned, in separate rooms.
“Why do you want to stop over?”
“I want to see London. Like the pussy cat.” No smile.
“What’s your destination?”
“Boston. It says so on the ticket.”
“Then why do you want to stop over?”
“To see London.”
“For how long?”
“Two weeks.”
“Do you know anyone here?”
“Yes. Lots of friends. My sister lives in Cambridge.”
He searches me, brings out my black book of addresses, copies out names and addresses. Brings my bag, searches it. Leaves with the black book. And so on, once more the questions.
“You’ve completed school.”
“Yes, that’s why I’m going to university.”
“You don’t want a job in London, for instance?”
“Why would I want a job here when I’ve got a scholarship to study in America?”
“This scholarship. They just gave it to you?” (Is he jealous?)
“Yes.”
“Anyone can apply?” (Not you, if you’re so dense.)
Finally, after several hours, he let me through, but Alau, as you probably know by now, wasn’t let in. I wasn’t even allowed to go and wish him goodbye. Poor, sad crestfallen Alau watching me go to London.
I stayed at Palace Inn on Gloucester Road, and it’s a zoo of a place. There are three very springy iron beds in each room, and many of the occupants there are permanent. You can hear the Beatles here, but I confess tearful Talat Mahmood songs are probably more appropriate, the place looks so gloomy. It is run by a Mr. Toto, who welcomes all the lost children of Britannia who find their way here, never turning anyone away even if he has to put them up in his own rooms. Breakfast is in the basement, and you can get eggs in three styles—omelette, sunny-side up, and over—and tea in Indian or English, and the Kariakoo boy who takes orders also gives you tips about possible part-time openings and how to get visas. “Didn’t we play marbles together?” I asked him as he put my omelette and chai on the table. “Excuse me,” he said, without looking up, and stiffly walked past to take another order. He might even have sniffed … Jeeves, I said to myself. Girls are looking for secretarial positions and boys for articleships here. Come evening and they return, exhausted on their platform shoes (the boys), in the tailor-made Teteron trousers you can recognize anywhere, carrying briefcases full of O Level and A Level certificates, real and fake letters regarding previous experience, to compare notes and pore over newspaper advertisements for the next day’s enquiries. There are many sad and tired faces, many tears shed in the night. I met your friend Jiwan: he was overjoyed to find out that I was sleeping in the same bed in Number 1 where he had shed so many tears. Someone should talk to those sheets … Those, like Jiwan, who find what they are looking for of course leave to look for better accommodation. Some have simply given up hope of becoming CAs and go to work in factories, returning late in the night with grimy faces. Some have simply turned into cranks. There is one person from Dar who goes around showing a photograph of himself taken (he says) with a professor at the University of London.
I am at Begum’s now. They are doing quite well, but sometimes there is talk of going back to Dar (to teach) or some other place. The full names of the two children are: Peter Juma Harris (“P. J.”) and Sara Kulsum Harris. There goes the next generation.
Yours: Sona.
DELUGE AND A NEW SAVIOUR.
How to recall a storm, the actual downpour, the continuous pelting, in this case, of events that battered at the old world and brought down the shaky structures which had lost their foundations? Wiped clean was one prevailing image, exaggerated and too personal, applying perhaps to the bankbook, for a storm wrought by human bands does not wipe clean but leaves debris behind. Broken hopes, broken families, above all, broken faith washed away by the torrents into time’s flooding gutters, to be replaced by a new cynicism: every man for himself and God against all.
In the Parliament of Tanzania the Uniform Law of Marriage was passed: Marriage shall be entered into only with the free and full consent of the intending spouses. No crib marriages, when parents betrothed infants while still rocking them to sleep in their cribs, and boys and girls could remember being married all their lives … but that custom was long gone, only to be joked about every time a child was born; and going but not completely gone was the custom of giving a girl in marriage—now the Indian movies and film songs and Filmfare magazine all preached “love marriage,” it was only a question of whether kisses could be allowed on the screen, swimming costumes and fat female thighs being all right—and in the soft light of the evenings the shades of mango trees in Upanga could be seen occupied by couples in clandestine meetings. Why clandestine? Because the message was Love, if you want to love, but love in secret, otherwise get married. Ah, the thrill and the sweet agony of those rendezvous! You go with beating heart every time, you don’t want to be seen, yet you don’t want complete privacy, for the world must know or guess and suggest, part of the thrill is simply the speculation and the teasing. Months can go by without that sacred word spoken. Love. For once it’s spoken the wind catches it and whispers it around and it gets conjoined with its mate, marriage. And as long as no obvious bounds are broken, the parents simply go along with this sweet flirtation-exploration, hearts overflowing with joy, there are few things as satisfying as a child getting married properly.
Tell that to the parents of four Zanzibari girls.
One Sunday morning four girls of Persian descent, ages fourteen to eighteen, were taken before a full meeting of the Revolutionary Council and asked to choose husbands. The girls refused and were sent to prison. “Better prison than …” said Kulsum. But hear this: a few days later the girls were taken to the homes of their Council-chosen husbands. Old bearded shehes, two to three times their ages, married previously: the flower of youth, the apple of dad’s eye trampled in the mud.
In Dar, some Muslims sent a petition written in blood to the President, angry letters were sent to the Herald, a flood of marriages took place; a call to the Shah of Iran was made, to send gunboats; and in the United States a court granted Alu Poni permanent residence on the basis of these reports, faithfully included by Nuru Poni in the weekly batch of news clippings he sent his son.
At this time also Amina arrived with a boyfriend, and we joked, “Weh Amina, were you too scared to come alone?”
In January 1971 former KAR sergeant Idi Amin, star pupil of his British mentors, who had hunted with them the Mau Mau in the Aberdares, took over as President of Uganda, hours after Milton Obote ordered his arrest by telephone from the Commonwealth conference in Singapore. It was also at this conference that the British Prime Minister’s clairvoyant powers came to light, for he had quipped that some of the Commonwealth leaders might not have a country to return to at the end of the meeting. A few days later Obote came to Dar.
Long before Mawingu House reached for the clouds behind Ocean Road to become the tallest building in Dar, by which families with cars would drive on Sundays before stopping at the Naaz, before the Standard Bank and the IPS buildin
gs similarly took off upwards, there was Hassam Punja’s building: not a concrete block of air-conditioned offices for overseas firms and overseas-educated professionals, but a pyramidal structure broad at the base, narrowing to the top, an imposing landmark overlooking Mnazi Moja from the downtown side, where families lived and scruffy children ran around, in which cricket and marbles were played, where a bar called the “Roof Top” thrived emitting strains of Bosco and Satchmo music into the air and ejecting drunken sailors back into the streets, and where at least one prostitute was permanently stationed.
Hassam Punja was in some ways like Mzee Pipa. But he operated at a higher level: a businessman rather than a shopkeeper. Legend had it that he too had acquired his wealth through hard work, starting off in the humblest of professions, a boy selling peanuts. From this he had risen to acquire a large number of buildings and a soap factory. Like Mzee Pipa he had to be escorted around, but he rode in a Mercedes. He also suffered from ailments and did a peculiar thing: all the time, whether sitting or on his feet, he rolled from side to side, oscillated very much like the rotund red dancing doll I had won as a healthy baby once. There were all sorts of stories that boys concocted about Hassam Punja’s escapades, which all boiled down to one fact: because of his sideways roll he could not be shot, or hit with a boxing punch, rolling away just in time to dodge it. This made him invincible.
When the Arusha Declaration was announced—when the nation chose the socialist path and banks were nationalized and the state took over the importation and exportation of key items and the distribution of produce, and strong foreign exchange rules were put in place; when men, women and schoolchildren in the thousands marched in the streets in support of the event; when groups of people took off by foot from the smaller towns for Dar to show support; when Asian boys hitchhiked across the country and visited the villages and said, “We are also ungaing mkono” this Declaration, and were then welcomed by the elders and fed—during a rally not far from Mnazi Moja a government leader pointed to the yellow pyramid-building that towered in the distance and laughed: “Tell him not to worry. We won’t take his buildings!”
