by Hafsa Zayyan
Sameer sleeps until four o’clock in the afternoon. He hasn’t been to Leicester for two weekends in a row and thinks about getting on the very next train, but his mind and body are so exhausted that he allows himself the rest of the weekend alone in London. At a loss for what to do, he leaves his flat and hops on the first bus that comes by, smiling to himself as he realises that it is going – of all places – to Leicester Square.
In the centre of London, he wanders aimlessly, bumping into and dodging tourists. The square is alive, writhing with forms that scream and jump; small hands holding balloons and bags from the M&M store; strong accents with backpacks on their chests, hands protectively placed over the zip. Sameer stares at these people. There is no one like him here – no real Londoners. Real Londoners do not go to Leicester Square at the weekends.
Outside the Odeon, a boy sits on a folding chair, guitar in hand, plugged up to an amp. He is singing a song that Sameer recognises, but cannot name. A small crowd gathers around him and Sameer finds himself drawn into the circle. The boy croons into a microphone; long brown hair flops towards green eyes, the lips that pucker up to the microphone are soft and plump. He is good-looking, and the crowd consists mainly of teenage girls. Sameer closes his eyes for a moment, trying to place the song. The crowd gets larger and Sameer is jostled. His eyes snap open as he remembers: it’s U2. ‘I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For.’ Zara’s favourite old-time band, she would play their music all around the house when she was in secondary school. He wishes that she were here; perhaps he will send her a video of the musician. His hand goes to his pocket to retrieve his phone. His pocket is empty.
Immediately, Sameer steps back and out of the crowd, feeling an instant sense of rising panic. He pats down his pockets frantically, searching, searching. Wallet, gone. Phone, gone. He knows exactly where they were: in the front right-hand pocket of his jeans. He searches every pocket anyway. He wants to kick himself. He has been in London for five and a half years and has never had anything stolen from him. Why now, why today? And when did London suddenly decide to switch loyalties and make him a tourist in his own city?
Everyone is a suspect. He looks up, scouring the crowds as though he might be able to identify the pickpocket if he just spends long enough looking. It is no use of course. Common sense takes over: he goes into the first EE store that he sees and has the SIM card blocked; he calls the bank from the store to block all of his cards.
How will he get back to Clerkenwell? Become one of those people he never gives change to – please, sir – I just need another 50p to make the bus fare home? Well, he thinks to himself, that is the beauty of living so centrally – it’s a forty-minute walk. It is only when Sameer is halfway home that he remembers that his house key was in his wallet. He thinks about stopping a stranger and asking to use their phone, but then he realises that he doesn’t know even his parents’ phone numbers off by heart.
Outside his front door, Sameer sits cross-legged on the floor, helpless. He doesn’t know what to do. An image of Rahool’s face appears in his mind with startling clarity and there is suddenly a huge lump in Sameer’s throat. He has not cried since he was a small child, but now something deep and painful in the cavity of his chest erupts through his body, shaking him to his fingertips, leaving his body heaving with sobs.
8
To my first love, my beloved
12th October 1959
It seems, my dear, that the anti-colonial movement has begun in earnest. We have lost Abdullah to anonymous threats of violence.
It is hard to believe that it was only last month that he sat here with us on a Sunday evening and took the children to catch nsenene in front of the house. The memory of you comes so strongly to me at the end of every rainy season; back when we were only children ourselves, running out into the velvety blackness of those earthy, damp nights to catch grasshoppers. The nsenene, arriving in their hordes, a clumsy mass of clicking and flapping, swarming the street lights with heady desire. I thought of you as I watched Abdullah from the front porch. The children shrieked, uncontained, jumping up to try to scoop a handful from the clusters gathered around the lamplights. Abdullah gave a corner of a white sheet to each of the children, and the creatures flocked towards it and were quickly bundled away. And in the same way that he taught us, he showed the children how to strip the wings, remove the feet and the heads, and roast the insects on a charcoal stove. My heart ached to the point that I had to look away. I have not eaten nsenene since you passed away. I have no desire to eat them without you.
The children miss him now. ‘Papa,’ they ask me, ‘why doesn’t Abdullah Uncle come any more?’ The adults will look at each other, faces rigid to hide the discomfort that we can see in each other’s eyes. ‘Papa, where is the ayah? Where is Mzee?’ It is not just Abdullah who we have lost. Gone are the ayahs, gone are our drivers. Only our cook remains, and he cannot leave the house for fear of being seen. Tasneem goes to the grocery store instead, but brings back the wrong things and is admonished. ‘How can I make corn curry without besan?’ he snapped at her, when she brought back corn and peanuts, but no gram flour. Since we employed a cook, it seems that she has forgotten everything. I saw you standing in the kitchen, instructing Tasneem as to salt, turmeric, chilli powder. The days when we did not have a cook and you used to teach her your mother’s recipes. Me, standing in the doorway, watching you in this very kitchen, a kitchen that is at a loss in your absence. You looked up at me and smiled; there was a streak of some brown powder across your cheek. I wanted to come over to you at that moment, scoop you up and kiss the powder away, but I resisted the urge to embarrass you in front of our new daughter-in-law. I miss feeling that way, Amira. I miss you.
Shabnam is ten weeks pregnant and has severe morning sickness. I do not of course condone the pagan practices of the Africans, with their glowing white pastes, their herbs, crushed between palms to release strange smells that make you feel simultaneously nauseous and euphoric; worst of all, the frantic, indecipherable chanting. But in times past, these remedies have helped Shabnam with morning sickness, and Allah knows they have caused less harm than any Western medicine she could take. The cook promised us that he could bring things to cure her, if only he could leave the house. Shabnam implored me to allow it, but I refused. It is too risky; we cannot lose the cook too. Without him, we will have no help at all. Now, I have told her, she will have to make do with our own prayers and duas.
I do not think that any of us, comfortably minding our own business in our small community, expected that the boycott would have such a profound effect. I never imagined a time when we would not have our help, or that we would not have Abdullah. Losing you should have taught me that nothing in life is reliable, that I should never expect things not to change; that there is only one thing that is certain for all of us: death. But we live, and our foolish selves become used to how we live; we become trapped in the illusion of this life and begin to believe that we are secure.
Thankfully, the ginnery has escaped the worst effects of the boycott, which seems not to have spread as far as the Kamuli district. But whispers travel between the lips of our communities, burning with the heat of shame and helplessness: others have not been so lucky – almost all of the men from whom the Waljis bought cotton are now refusing to sell to them.
The dukas have not fared as well as the ginnery. The stores in Kampala, Luwero and even Mbale are suffering – such a large proportion of our customer base is African. With Abdullah gone, I have left the ginnery in Samir’s hands and turned my attention to the stores. Sales have more than halved. It has been a long time since I have been on the shop floor, but I needed to go in to see what was happening for myself.
As many things do, working in the shop brought back the memory of you so vividly; the early years of our marriage when Papa had me running the shop. So much has changed, yet everything is the same: there are still rows and rows of stacked shelves, the musty smell of stored goods and dust. I saw you in a gre
en sari, coming to the duka at lunchtime, holding a three-year-old toddling Samir in one hand, a tiffin box in the other. My little duka, how big it has now become! My beautiful Amira, how meaningless such change feels without you.
The Africans do not trust us. Even those who still dare to venture into the shop despite the boycott accuse us of cheating them, of modifying the scales so that the amounts are recorded incorrectly, of short-changing them and hoping they won’t notice. ‘Ey, muhindi,’ one large black woman wagged her finger at me, leaning over the counter so that her enormous bosom, squeezed into an ill-fitting black polo shirt, rested on the countertop. ‘You give me two cents less than you owe me in change! Don’t think I don’t notice – that is how you make your money, ey?’ I had to spend ten minutes showing her why the change I had given her was correct, explaining basic principles of addition and subtraction that any child would know. There was no apology for wasting my time or for wrongly levelling accusations: she left only with eyes full of mistrust, a damp band of sweat on the countertop where her bosom had rested. The Africans were not so wary of us all those years ago when I used to work in the shop, were they? Or have I just forgotten?
Muazzam Kaka, sitting hunched on a small stool beside me, observed the entire interaction with mild interest. I asked him whether this was a regular occurrence and he nodded before reaching for his walking stick and wandering off into the aisles. I watched as he rearranged items on the shelves, slowly but steadily. Muazzam Kaka is in his early seventies now and is developing a cataract in one of his eyes. The younger boys come to the store after school to help him, but during school hours, he runs the shop alone. Perhaps he does make mistakes when counting change. Perhaps it is time he retired.
On Wednesday, an African boy pulled up a stool just outside the shop at the front door. ‘Paacha awee geya,’ Muazzam Kaka muttered, shaking his head. I asked him what he meant – who had returned? – but Muazzam Kaka simply pursed his lips and tottered into the storeroom, out of sight. I went to the front of the store with a broom in my hand. The boy could not have been more than thirteen or fourteen. ‘What are you doing here?’ I asked him in Swahili. The boy stared at me brazenly. ‘I have right to be here, bwana,’ he replied in broken English. ‘Outside your shop is not your land.’ I thought about striking him with the broomstick, calling the police, forcing him to move – but instead I did nothing and went back inside the shop. That day, his presence deterred any African from entering the store. He had in his small hands a notepad and a pen, and he loudly warned any karia who neared the store that he knew who they were, he was recording their attempts to trade with us, and that they should enter at their own peril.
I do not know what the Africans expect will come of this behaviour. That they will force us out of business? That we will stop trading? We will never stop. Trade is in our blood. It is the blood of my ancestors, and it will be in the blood of my offspring. If the Africans think otherwise, then more fool them. The karias do not understand the value of hard work. It is not a part of their culture in the way it is a part of ours. Why do you think the British brought us to Uganda, instead of trying to mobilise the native workforce? I am not saying there are not exceptions – Abdullah is obviously one such exception. But doesn’t the exception prove the rule?
When all this began back in February, Abdullah tried to warn me that something sinister was brewing. ‘The colonial powers are waning,’ he told me. ‘The people want an allied nationalist party for Uganda.’ The Africans were holding rallies for thousands of people in the centre of Kampala. Previously diametrically opposed political parties had united to defeat a mutual enemy – the non-African – and in the sphere of commerce in particular: the Asian. I dismissed it as a response to populist sentiment. Abdullah’s words made me uncomfortable, but I did not believe that it would lead to anything other than more rallies.
‘Hasan,’ Abdullah said quietly, ‘not everyone in Uganda lives like you – or even me. Allah has blessed us.’
‘I know that,’ I snapped back, conscious not to sound ungrateful.
‘Don’t you know that the Ugandan legislature is powerless in the face of the British government? That the British have a veto over everything?’ he said, staring into his cup of chai as if he might drown in it. I shrugged in response – what did it matter when life was so good? ‘Did you know that Asians were represented on that legislature for more than twenty years before the first Ugandan was nominated to sit on Uganda’s own legislative board?’ I could feel my face reddening; Abdullah was embarrassing me. He has no right to try to elicit from me a response to the actions of the British; it is not my place to cast judgement.
‘When things are working, why change them?’ I said shortly.
‘Things are not working for everyone, Hasan,’ he responded.
I promptly changed the subject.
Then, the very next week, the boycott was declared by the leader of the newly formed nationalist movement: all trade was to be put into the hands of Africans. No African was to enter a non-African shop. We did not go into Kampala that day, but we heard that the Africans chanted eddembe, freedom, as they marched through the streets.
The effect of the boycott was visible immediately. Although we still had Abdullah at this point, one of our ayahs resigned, closely followed by one of the drivers. Abdullah reported decreasing sales from the dukas. Shabnam began to complain that she felt nervous going into Kampala; I told her not to travel alone, and to take one of our boys with her if she was to go anywhere. It was a tense few weeks, but we carried on, business as usual. And it was not long before the colonial governor acted to ban public rallies and the nationalist movement; by May, its members had been arrested. ‘Nobody supports the boycott,’ Abdullah reassured me. ‘Not the King, not the Uganda National Congress.’ I sampled these words with bitterness. The Uganda National Congress. The political party that Shahzeb had tried to join on his return from London. The party that had rejected his application because he was not African. ‘Let us focus now on independence. My son has joined the military,’ Abdullah added. ‘They are recruiting in anticipation of it.’ I nodded and gave him a smile, but I must tell you, my dear, the idea of independence makes me quite uncomfortable.
Despite the ban, the boycott and the rallies continued. The colonial police responded to the rallies with brutal – and in some instances, fatal – force: they will stop at nothing in their attempts to protect our rights. I begged Abdullah not to attend such events, even for information. I may have lost him as an employee, but I cannot lose him the way I lost you. It would be wrong for his soul to join yours before mine does.
In the end, we managed to keep Abdullah until the first week of September.
It was a Sunday evening. We had only said goodbye to Abdullah an hour earlier, and I was having a cigar in the lounge with Samir when the dogs began to bark. Our ascari has gone: there was no one to open the gates – and so I stepped out into the static air to see who it could be at that time of night. To my surprise, I saw Abdullah. As I walked towards the gates from the house, I could tell that he was distressed; he was wringing his hands, brow deeply furrowed. We did not say anything to each other until we entered the house. I offered him a cigar but he shook his head. ‘Hasan,’ he began, but then words failed him; he sighed deeply, reached into his pocket and pulled out a piece of paper. ‘Just read it.’
I retrieved my glasses from my shirt pocket and unfolded the paper. An anonymous letter, typewritten, no return address. To a traitor and abaliga. You must resign from your position as employee of Saeed & Sons, an Asian-owned business, immediately. We will not warn you again. If we see you in the company of Saeed & Sons again, you and your family will be sentenced to death. Signed, Son of Muzinge.
I passed the letter to Samir to read.
‘They know where I live,’ Abdullah finally said. ‘This letter was posted to my home address.’
I thought of Abdullah’s house, a tenement block in Old Kampala, of his wife, their children. It sudde
nly struck me that I have never visited his home. ‘Who is Muzinge?’ I asked.
‘We do not know,’ Abdullah replied. ‘Nobody knows. But in the Luganda tongue, it means peacock.’
‘The king of the birds,’ I said, half remembering an old Ugandan folk tale that Abdullah used to tell me when I was a young boy, the story of a child whose family kept a peacock trapped inside a small cage. The child was warned not to touch the peacock but, feeling pity for the creature, one night she released it and watched as it spread its cramped wings and flew away into the night. But what the girl did not realise is that her family had sold the peacock’s eggs for a living and without the peacock they had no livelihood. The girl and her family slowly died of hunger as they spent the remainder of their short lives searching the land for the missing bird.
‘And abaliga, why have they called you that?’ Samir asked. Abdullah told us that abaliga is a term used for a cripple. One with crippled feet – the foot that carries you awry, leads you to the door of unfaithfulness. He reached into his pocket again and uncurled his fist; crumpled in the centre of his hand, a leaflet which read: Every person should act as a detective on his friend. ‘I found this in the centre of Kampala last week. They are watching me.’
Abdullah did not want to go the police or to the King’s chiefs. He said that there was no point; there is no way of identifying Muzinge, and if Muzinge were to find out that he had tried, the threats in the letter might well be carried out. He must protect his family.
And so the boycott has taken my Abdullah from me, the Abdullah who has been by my side since I was a small boy. Yet another person in my life whom I have loved who has abandoned me. And it is not just the store: to be on the safe side, Abdullah does not visit the house any more either. Will he get another job? How will he feed his family? He said that he had savings, and that everything would be all right. This boycott will not last forever, he promised. I pressed a bundle of notes into his hands the last night we saw him. He tried to refuse, but I insisted. ‘If the boycott will not last forever, then this is just your advance salary,’ I said. He accepted the money. He has promised that he will return to me, and I have to believe him because he is the only person in my life who has ever promised me such a thing.
