by M G Vassanji
Her arms dropped to her sides. Her little eyes were moist. The chocolate skin on her face was so wrinkled it fell in folds. Her bare feet were covered in dust. Humiliated by fate and now this Indian. At another time he might have relented, he was known to soften. But this time he had to show his pride, demonstrate to all those present what stern stuff the cotton king Suleman Rawji was made of. Wealth didn’t come to you just like that.
The watchmen pulled the supplicant away, but not before she turned and exclaimed:
“Suleman, I curse you! I curse you. Today you deny me two yards of Marikani to bury my son. You, Suleman, I tell you, you will not even see your son’s burial!”
The sons were all there, three of them, standing among the fashionable crowd. Their pretty wives were there too, and some smartly clad children, running about.
* * *
—
This was the story told to me by Dadi, long after they had moved to Vancouver. She told it sounding matter-of-fact. But in that toneless voice, in that lowering gaze hid the regret, the blame. Like arsenic dissolved in plain water. Curses had power, Suleman knew that. And yet, adamantly, he refused to go and have the spell reversed. “We make our own luck,” he said. “And I pay my dues to God. Who else has the power to change my luck? An old beggar? If she had power, why was she in rags, a stinking destitute?”
* * *
—
Belgian Congo next door, across Lake Tanganyika, was one of the first African countries to become independent. Patrice Lumumba was the first prime minister, I studied that in a college course. Following his death, or assassination as many believe, war raged in that country that doesn’t seem to have stopped to this day. For the businessmen, this was opportunity: supplies were scarce—soap, sugar, flour, and oil; canned food and spices. Profits were high, and the armies had money. You remained safe because you brought in the essentials and paid off all sides for protection. In any case, you had some young clerk, fresh off the boat from India or from a poor family upcountry, to be your front man. You were the king, safe in your castle far away by the sea.
It was my father Pyarali’s turn to make the monthly visit to Bukavu, eastern Congo, to check on the family businesses there. Pyarali was the youngest of three brothers and two sisters. The journey was by chartered plane, its passengers a few businessmen and accountants. As usual for such visits, they took with them fresh supplies to stock the shops, and—a rumour never denied to this day—they would bring back pouches filled with smuggled diamonds together with their bags of cash from the previous month’s sales. It was Pyarali’s second such trip, but this time the plane disappeared on its way in. The pilot being a young American, the search that ensued was thorough and followed by the public. Two airplanes and a helicopter were chartered for the purpose. Men and women were paid to beat the bushes around their villages. (Outside one village a few people were attacked by a leopard.) The pilot’s parents and a sister from America and Suleman Rawji with his men covered the countryside in Land Rovers, in northern Tanganyika and western Uganda where the plane was believed to have disappeared. Prayers were said in the temples of worship in various towns and cities. A few months after the disappearance, when the search had been called off, a fragment of a small plane’s wing was found in a field in Uganda, having become a play object for children.
A service without a corpse was finally held in the compound of the khano, our prayer house. There, as Dada stood before the empty coffin, which was draped with a white cotton sheet, his remaining sons and two brothers beside him, their hands raised for the recital of the fateha, and a large congregation behind them, the women wailing and not only those from the family, a voice approached from behind.
“Weh Sulemani! Do you remember! Ten years ago I asked you for a shroud…” The old lady shuffled forward, more wrinkled and bent than before, hardly a curly hair left on the head. A finger raised. “…You refused. Ulikataa! And I cursed you. Your son will not even have a burial…I told you.”
She came forward and Suleman Rawji made room for her in the front row.
Dadi said a chill ran down her spine as the woman spoke. She let out a scream and wailed uncontrollably. And I suppose she’s still crying inside.
Remember, we don’t talk about it. Nothing happened except Pyarali died in a plane crash tragically when his wife was pregnant with the youngest. It was only this one time, when Dadi and I were alone, that she told me the story, just for the record, and to teach me a lesson. Even kings fall.
THE WAY STOP
Joseph and I got off our bus at Nasingwe, nursing a lingering disappointment at a journey aborted, or rather, reversed. Three days before, like a pair of excited schoolboys we had left Dar es Salaam and headed down south along the Tanzanian coast for Lindi, a once thriving historic town halfway to the Mozambique border. The Germans had their regional centre here a century ago, in colonial times; I recalled it having a competitive school cricket team. Now it bore all the signs of hard times and neglect. The economic boom had happened further south. Spending a night here, we took another transport, more local than the first, and headed inland west for the junction town of Masasi, with the intention of connecting to Songea, then going onward north to Iringa and Dodoma in the heart of the country, and finally east back to Dar. There was not a little satisfaction to be had in completing the loop, to say we had gone to the south of the country and around. But even before the Masasi junction, the portents had begun to look bleak, when we had to walk barefoot on a section of the road running through a seasonal lake where we were told—rightly or wrongly—a female crocodile had come to seek rest the previous year. At Masasi our fears were confirmed when we learned that the road onward to Songea, running through dense forest, was damaged from the rain; only open four-wheel drives ventured out, which meant the certain prospect of breakdowns and mosquitoes and the not unlikely possibility of meeting lions or leopards. Reluctantly, we had turned around on the only bus available that day. It was bound, hugging the border along the Ruvuma River, for the coastal boomtown of Mtwara. Nasingwe came halfway.
There seemed such a sense of nothingness to the place as to take the breath away, to depress the heart. The land was flat and sandy, the sky vast and blank, the air hot and hazy. The bus stop was a single abandoned gas pump at a clearing next to the highway. A few large mango trees heavy with fruit stood languid in the sun. Beyond, a single unpaved road led into the town, of which we could see some thatched and metal roofs. Another road, more a track, diverged perpendicular to it. Civilization as I knew it, as I had just left it—the life of a city—busy streets and crowded coffee shops, baby strollers, dogs and teenagers on the sidewalks, the rumble of the subway, building cranes and digging machines—was as far away as one could imagine. It had ceased to exist. We had not seen a single other vehicle in the four hours it had taken to reach this spot. There was no airport here. No river. No newspaper. No wireless tower. And yet it beckoned, like destiny.
“Let’s stop here for a night,” I said.
Joseph paused, gave a quick look around. “Are you sure, Daktari?”
“Yes, I think so.”
“All right,” he replied indulgently.
Joseph was a young academic from Nairobi with whom I had corresponded for a few years; when I described to him my project of traversing the country of my birth by road, he had quickly proposed to accompany me, his university schedule permitting. Thus far he had been my guide and, I suppose, my protector.
He sauntered over to the driver, who was standing by his bus, and confirmed that we would be able to use our ticket the next day; we went back inside and brought out our carry-ons. The bus took to the road and departed.
The two other passengers who had alighted with us walked away. A Bajaji appeared from somewhere and idly circled around, and we boarded it just as it was about to go away empty. A Bajaji is a three-wheeler auto-rickshaw manufactured by the Bajaj company of India, thou
gh nobody here would know that. I had brought that knowledge of the world with me.
The driver was a youth called Shomari, and saying he knew of a clean guest house where we could put up, he proceeded to take us there in a reckless display of driving, as he bypassed potholes and rode mischievously into others so that we hung on to the railing behind him lest we fell off or ran into a tree. Joseph’s admonishments to drive with care were of no avail. Reaching the junction he quickly swung towards the town and stopped across from a tea shop outside which a girl was standing, looking away. She wore a long blue dress with a yellow khanga draped loosely over her head.
“Halima, back in a jiffy. The bus was late. I’m carrying these gentlemen.”
She turned and gave an almost imperceptible nod.
Shomari grinned happily.
“Your girlfriend?” Joseph asked.
Shomari’s smile was still on and perhaps that was the reply. He did an expert U-turn, and before we could express our confusion, drove back towards the town exit, then turned left, and we were on the other road, bumping along faster than before. The young man was now in a hurry.
“What is this guest house?”
“It’s a good one. My sister’s. She’s been to school.”
Beyond the shallow green strip on our right was the silent highway; on our left was a dense growth of trees and shrubs. A steady sandstorm, churned up from the road, bit into our faces, against which we had little shelter but our hands. Just when we asked our driver how far was our destination, we had arrived at two cement gateposts. There was no gate or fence. Shomari went through and stopped outside a whitewashed house with a veranda and sloping metal roof, an imposing presence in the wilderness.
As we got off, Shomari called out to someone inside, “Nuru!—I’ve brought guests!” He turned around his rickshaw and disappeared. A woman with a long face, dressed similarly to Halima, had appeared on the porch. She didn’t say a word but went back inside and we followed her to a high counter, behind which she now stood. She pushed a ledger towards us.
“How many days?”
“One,” Joseph replied in good humour. “After we’ve seen your delightful little town.”
The ledger had all the usual columns plus one under the heading “Kabila.” Tribe. I looked at my young friend, then at Nuru, and wrote simply, “Mhindi.” Asian or Indian. That’s what I was, as a returned native of a country I had left many years ago.
Nuru glanced at our entries, said, “Pay when you leave,” and added, handing us our keys, “Numbers 2 and 3.”
A long, speculative gaze followed us as we made for our rooms. I imagined her thinking, An Asian and an African, come to do what?
“She may think we are government people,” Joseph said, as we simultaneously turned our keys into their padlocks. “See you in an hour? Meanwhile I’ll inquire about food. I spied a chicken running about outside.”
* * *
—
We were sitting outside on the cement floor of the veranda, next to a wooden upright. The evening was cool, and a light breeze was blowing; a rustle of leaves above and the crick-crick of insects in the distance; dark everywhere but for the white glare of the pressure lamp on the wall behind us. Before us stood the auto-rickshaw in silhouette, parked for the night by Shomari. I had gathered by now that he was actually Nuru’s distant cousin. Earlier, Joseph and I had walked to the town, had tea, and strolled about aimlessly, earning not even a cursory stare—as though strangers dropped by casually every day to roam the streets. At one spot we came across Shomari’s girlfriend, Halima, a tall and pretty young woman accompanied by an older woman, presumably her mother. There was no sign of the boyfriend. We saw shells of houses previously owned by Asians, who had all departed during the heyday of party socialism in the seventies. I recalled a boy in my school who probably came from one of these, and how he often returned to Dar late after the holidays due to the rains.
Idi, Nuru’s actual brother, came limping over with our bottles of beer, and having delivered them retreated to sit a few feet away. He had damaged his foot in Mozambique’s war of independence. I had discerned faint lines of a darker shade on his face, from which I deduced that he was a Makonde. This was a Makonde region. During my boyhood in Dar, the Makonde could be identified by their tattoo marks, short straight lines across the cheeks and forehead; the women wore black buttons on their lips. The men were considered reliable night watchmen, and my father’s shop had one called Sabini. They spoke little, because—as I would conclude later—they were not fluent in Swahili in those days. So far on this trip, however, Idi was the only one I had seen with the tattoo marks. I had not seen any woman with a button on her lip.
A short while before, I had informed Joseph of my intention to stay a few days longer in the town. He did not ask me why, for which I was grateful. He of course found nothing attractive about it, and besides he had to return to Nairobi to teach his classes at the university.
Nuru had come to sit outside and planted herself behind us next to the open door with a mug of tea.
“Why sit behind?” I asked her. “Come and sit with us.”
She said nothing and did not move.
Earlier she had prepared our dinner for us, a mildly spiced chicken curry and rice; she and Idi had finished the half portion we had left for them out of courtesy. We had to pay for the whole chicken.
“How did you come to run this guest house?” Joseph asked, turning towards Idi. “Impressive structure, this,” he added, casting an approving eye around.
“Our father was in government. It was an office then. When he died, we inherited it.”
“So it belongs to the government.”
“Nobody bothers us. We’ve paid our dues.”
From the evidence of his game leg, he was right. He had been in the National Service, he said, and was sent to assist the freedom fighters in Mozambique across the Ruvuma, where he was caught by Portuguese gunfire. I myself had done the shorter term of national service required of high school graduates, and recalled being warned that we too could be sent to the border to fight. That might have been mere threat to uppity students, though we were taught gun routines and made to shoot at targets once before our term ended. Times were tense then, politically. The Mozambique freedom movement had its office in Dar only blocks away from where I had lived during my high school days. The South African ANC fighters had trained somewhere upcountry.
“You’re leaving us tomorrow, then,” Nuru said at length, her soft voice barely disturbing the silence.
Joseph was only too pleased to respond. “Me, I’m taking the bus tomorrow, but Daktari here—”
After a moment’s hesitation, I said, “I’ll stay a few more days. I’m not sure how many.”
A look of concern came over my young friend’s face. “Daktari,” he said, “are you sure? You don’t know about such places. You’ve been away too long.”
“You go ahead, I’ll be all right.”
“I’ll be waiting for you in Nairobi.”
“I’m grateful.”
The brother and sister were watching us.
The next day, after a morning jaunt to the town, Joseph and I headed to the bus stop in Shomari’s auto, where I bade my friend goodbye. Having watched the bus disappear eastward into the glare, I walked back to the guest house. In that silence then I felt a sense of utter aloneness in the world and yet also a strange feeling of contentment. Nobody here knew who I was, where I came from. If I dropped dead suddenly they would not know what to do with me except bury me quickly according to custom. But this was what I had chosen, to step off the bus that had been my life, my sansara, as my elders would have called it. The opportunity presented itself, daring me, and I had taken it. I had a notebook and a few pens and pencils with me, which I intended to make use of, but I could not plan my forthcoming days or even hours. That afternoon I walked to town and bought a
loaf of bread, two chappatis, a bunch of spinach, and half a pound of red beans. When I returned, I agreed with Nuru on a weekly rate for my board. I needed tea in the morning, I told her, and for my supper spinach or beans would do, and chicken occasionally, but I could not pay for the whole chicken if I was going to share it. She said there was no fridge, therefore if I wanted chicken I would need to buy the whole of it. I need not share it. I apologized.
* * *
—
The first several days inched past on a turtle’s back; as though, in Einsteinian terms, time had dilated. I spent much of it sitting on the raised veranda, looking out, musing. How long could I survive this stillness, how would the hours and days pass? But there was no going back, there was no going back. If one day passed, the others would, surely, in a similar fashion. The trick was not to think about time as external to myself. My routine was my clock. In relativistic terms, again, my frame of reference was where I was now and what was around me.
I would notice a look of bemused surprise on Nuru’s face at seeing me still around in the morning, that I had not cracked my resolve and slunk off to the station and quietly disappeared. But within a week, I estimate, I had been accepted as part of the scene and daily routine. The veranda was a good place to have my meals. Any leftovers I threw off as instructed at a dump a decent distance away, where hyenas in the night and crows in the day wreaked their quiet havoc and Idi started an occasional fire. I walked to the town every morning, where I had a cup of tea with maandazi, a sweet fried bread, and watched the local scene for a while, before returning with some produce, usually spinach, peas, or mangoes. Passersby had taken to greeting me. In the afternoon, I took another walk, in the opposite direction. I had brought two novels with me, which I read very slowly, and listened to a story or music broadcast on the old-fashioned shortwave radio which by some prescience I had purchased in Masasi. One afternoon, listening to Handel’s Samson in my room, I gave in to a fit of crying, the tears falling in streams down my cheeks. Some inner pain, deeply harboured, was washing itself out.
