Polar Vortex

by Shani Mootoo

  Suddenly Priya stood. “Come, let me show you my studio,” she said, already walking past him toward the back of the house. He turned to watch her but did not move. He had stretched his hand out along the counter toward her, tapping it as if to call her back. She stopped and said, awkwardly, “Don’t you want to come? I’d like to show you what I’ve been doing.”

  He said, again, as he had said to me earlier, when I pointed out her two works in the house, “There’s time.” Priya did not hide her disappointment well, and he quickly added, “We can’t leave her here all by herself slaving at the stove. Later, we’ll go later. There’s lots of time.”

  I began to protest. I was fine alone, I said, wishing they would leave, but Priya had quickly started gathering plates from one cupboard, napkins from a drawer, and glasses from another cupboard, with which to set the table for the night’s dinner.

  He got up and followed her into the dining room. While they remained in there for some minutes chatting, I noted to myself that while he wanted to regale me with the story of how they met, he didn’t seem in the least curious about how she and I had met.

  I often felt guilt that we were here. Countryside on the mainland would have been one thing, but an island is psychologically more isolating. But it doesn’t make sense that I felt guilt, for it was she who had been rather more gung-ho about the move to an island. She was born on an island, she’d say, and she plans to die on an island. The idea was that we’d be here forever.

  They returned just as I turned the stove off, and I was about to retreat to my office when Prakash addressed me: “I’m a refugee. Did you know that?”

  Priya had told me he was sensitive about having come here as a refugee, that he didn’t like talking about it, and that I should be careful about bringing it up. But here he was announcing it. I could not walk away.

  “When my family came to this country, it was a very different time than it is today, you know,” he said, and laughed. “People didn’t want us back then. Today everyone wants the Syrians.”

  “Well, that’s not exactly true,” Priya said. “There are communities and individuals sponsoring families, but there’re a lot of people, too, who don’t want them here.”

  “No one,” he stressed, “wanted the Ugandans.” He took a sip from his drink, hiding the seriousness his face suddenly took on.

  “Canada did,” I said.

  He didn’t respond.

  I asked, “Am I not remembering correctly?”

  Still he didn’t answer. I’d clearly gotten something wrong, but I couldn’t imagine what that might have been. I shrugged my shoulders and raised my eyebrows to let him know I welcomed being corrected.

  “Put it this way,” he said. “No other place wanted us. We didn’t necessarily all want to come to Canada, but this was the only country that would take a handful of us. Beggars can’t be choosers.”

  “How many of you did Canada let in?” I caught my choice of words only after they’d left my mouth: you, and let in, and was grateful I’d said Canada and not we.

  “It depends on who you ask. Some sources say 40,000 Indians were expelled. Some say there were 30,000 of us, others say 90,000. And then every site you consult on the internet gives a different number of how many Canada let in.” He didn’t look at me to suggest any complicity in those words I regretted using. “Some say,” he carried on, “under 6,000. Others say precisely 6,675.” His voice had changed; he seemed suddenly crestfallen. I suppose a nerve had been hit.

  My instinct was that we should move on from this topic. I picked up my phone, my pack of cigarettes, and my reader from the end of the counter, slapped my hand on the counter in a gesture of finality, and addressed Priya. “Where are you two headed?”

  There was more, it turned out, that he wanted to say. He did not let Priya answer my question but cut in to add, “There was a time, before the actual expulsion, when we used to talk about where we’d like to go to live once we left. My mother’s first choice was Britain, where she had family. She was a British citizen, having been born in British India, and after the expulsion she was accepted there, and I, her son, too. But not Pa. You see, in 1962, when Uganda got independence from Britain, Pa, in a flurry of national pride, gave up his Indian citizenship to become a citizen of the place he lived in and loved,” Prakash said. “Pa was like that, you know. But this meant he was no longer British or Indian, and so his application as a refugee was turned down by England.”

  Priya and I exclaimed at once, “What?”

  He nodded his head to agree with our shock. “And we wouldn’t leave without him, naturally,” he carried on. “And no other country — not even India — would take us. So when Canada opened up, we had no option other than to come here, and here we were accepted as a family. On the flight over, I remember my mother announcing with determination in her voice that she’d made the decision to find happiness in Toronto, where she knew other Ugandans had landed and stayed. But she never saw Toronto until decades later. We ended up going instead to a place we’d never heard of: New Brunswick.”

  In New Brunswick, they’d been placed in a small town called Salt Island, which wasn’t an island at all, far north of St. John.

  “Do you remember Salt Island?” he asked Priya. “Do you remember that long and winding road we took from the airport to my parents’ house? It’s now a highway cutting the length of time it used to take by half.”

  I had thought they’d soon leave, but Priya jumped up, reached for and noisily opened a bag of bagels. She asked how his mother was, and while she sliced the bagels and popped them one by one in the toaster, he answered.

  She hadn’t ever told me she’d visited him at his parents’ in New Brunswick. I realized the photos I’d dug up in her studio, of the two of them with a body of water behind them and no identifiable landmarks, must have been from that time.

  I took my phone and cigarettes, excused myself, and left for the sunroom. The sun was bright, and the room had warmed up. I opened the door to the outside while I smoked my cigarette. A female downy woodpecker, trying desperately to hack at a tiny morsel of fat in the suet cage, took off in fright. I stepped away into the garden, texted Skye, and told her all was well, better than I’d hoped — although everyone was a bit testy because there was a lot of conversation about race, and I was, truth be told, an outsider in this reunion. She texted back that she was on Skype with Liz. I replied I’d be alone in an hour or so and I’d try her again.

  Back in the sunroom, I looked up Idi Amin and Canada on my phone’s internet. One post said 80,000 Asian Ugandans were expelled. One said more than 8,000 Ugandans entered Canada between 1972 and 1974. Ten per cent. Asians, one site said, escaped by and large with their lives, but under Amin black Ugandans paid with their lives. Everyone was a loser, it seemed. There were all kinds of things happening in those days. I would have been twenty-one then. I participated in many organized protests on the street, and felt rather good about myself for standing up, waving placards, shouting slogans of protest, my fist held high. But in the light of someone being forced to leave their country of birth and seek refuge from it elsewhere, I couldn’t imagine my version of a proximity to history would interest them.

  When I returned to the kitchen, the bagels were set on three plates, and a container of hummus was open, a paté knife dissecting its swirl. Priya watched me as she asked Prakash, “Were you able to bring anything with you? Your mother must have had gold jewellery. Was she able to get it out?”

  “She was lucky. She got most of her jewellery out,” he answered. “We didn’t have time to pack anything. We’d had just a few hours’ notice.” He looked at her, somewhat blankly, I thought, and said, “You know the story. You’ve heard it before.”

  Priya jutted her chin at me and said, “Yes, but I don’t remember all the details, and besides, she hasn’t.” I had thought this was a topic that was not to be broached. Had she imagin
ed his story of escape would warm me to him, or had she become so insensitive that his trauma was for her some way of entertaining me?

  He jumped at her cue. “Okay, I’ll tell you.” He turned to me.

  When a person decides to tell the story of the flight for his life, you can’t just walk off. I had to stay and listen.

  “Indians had to leave Uganda by November 8,” he began. “People who had means and connections left well before that, but there were many, too, who for various reasons waited until the last minute. My father, and therefore our family, was always going to be amongst the last to leave because of his job at the bank where he worked. But one day, two weeks before the deadline date, my father didn’t come home from work. He’d been arrested. He hadn’t done anything wrong, but that’s how it was in those days. When finally he came home, he said we had to leave right away. We’d always been more or less ready to go at a moment’s notice. So the next morning, we were on a plane full of fleeing Indians. If we hadn’t left right then, he would have been dead in days.”

  With that, he’d concluded, it seemed, the story Priya wanted him to relate. It wasn’t much of a story, but some response was needed, so I offered, “I imagine there’s a difference, isn’t there, between how the Asians in Uganda had to leave, and the seemingly endless, daily flow of Syrians out of a land that their ancestors lived on for millennia?”

  “Yep. That’s right,” he said, and nothing more.

  After some long seconds I was about to say, Well, there’s time for this later, and attempt to shoo them out of the house, when he said, “He’d just confiscated a lorry of goods. He was taking it to the warehouse. That’s when they arrested him.”

  I must have looked puzzled, because Priya said, “Alex doesn’t know any of this. You have to explain why he was taking the goods, and where.”

  The confident, jovial man of minutes before became pensive. “My father was the bank worker tasked with removing goods from clients’ warehouses,” he said. “He and the driver of the lorry were transporting such goods to the bank’s warehouse. That’s when they took him.” As if to hide his face, he lifted his cup and took a long sip of his tea. In the discomforting quiet, he added, “He came home so late. His clothes were dirty and smelly. He knew we didn’t have a lot of time.”

  Priya put her hand on his for a moment and, rubbing it gently, said to him, “Prakash, slow down. I’ve never really understood what happened. You never told me about this. Why did they take him?”

  Witnessing her affection toward him brought out a sadness in me. I did not feel jealousy. Just overwhelming regret. It had been a long time since there’d been any such tenderness between us.

  Prakash’s eyes glazed. He looked suddenly older. “You know, there are Asian Ugandans here in this country who, so many years later, still won’t befriend other Asian Ugandans? We all went through the same things, but none of us wants to be reminded of what happened. It’s like we’re all ashamed of what was done to our families, to mothers, sisters, wives — to our women. We carry a collective shame, you know? It’s why we work so hard. My generation still feels we must show that there’s worth in us Indian Ugandans. We smile and smile and smile. We’re good people — we want everyone to know this. We won’t allow ourselves, or our children, to show anger about what had been done to us in our own country. Anger would be an admission that we’d been wronged, and none of us can bear having been a victim. You know, those of us who came in ’72, we’ve always been quiet. I was fourteen when we arrived here, and I learned from then that we Ugandans don’t make trouble, we keep our heads down, work hard, and just try to get ahead so that people will respect us. Above all, we all learned that we must be respectful of others. We’ve never publicly expressed anger about how we’d been treated — whether that was regarding our expulsion from our own homeland, or by the international community.”

  Under all that laughter earlier, that bonhomie, a subterranean hurt, some tempered rage, had just been revealed. He looked away. He’d exposed himself. Priya kept her eyes soft and on him. There was probably more anger in him than even he realized. The more I contemplated it, the more I saw it. This realization had the exact effect I didn’t need right then. I felt myself drawn to him, and into Priya and the unknown parts of her life that at another time in our relationship I would have longed for but couldn’t afford to be seduced by today. I needed to maintain my distance. But I was seeing — rather, she seemed to be making every effort, after all, to show me — who this mystery friend from her past was. Who she was, by extension. And I oscillated between feeling like an outsider and wanting to be drawn into the corners of her life, as I had once hoped would happen.

  Despite my discomfort, I actually didn’t mind, at this point, hearing more of what he had to say. I had no investment in him, nor am I attracted to stories of trauma and escape, but he was willing to be open and weak in front of me, and wished, I thought, to be seen as good and brave. He would not be a friend — that didn’t interest me — but he was, as far as I could see from this short time with him, a fragile and frightened man who wanted to be seen to be a good man.

  “I’ve wanted to talk about it lately, you know, with the Syrians being in the news, and all of that, but I didn’t know to whom, or how,” he said.

  I wanted to go around and stand next to him. To touch his shoulder. Or pour some more tea. But despite these unexpected kinder feelings toward him, I stayed where I was.

  He looked at me and said, “I’ll try and explain. You see, my father worked at the bank, but he wasn’t in banking exactly. What I mean is that my father was not a career banker. He’d been a teacher. A math teacher. Well, he was not just a math teacher, but also the principal of one of the best high schools in Kampala. He was well-known, and well thought of. Indians and Africans of the higher classes all wanted their children to go to his school.”

  As he spoke, Priya pulled the tray that sat on the counter closer. It held onions, garlic, ginger, root vegetables, and fruit, and although she began to clean the dish of old bits of vegetables, dried-up garlic scapes that had been there since last spring, and fragments of hard-curled onion and garlic skins and dust, she did it as quietly as if a sleeping baby were in the room.

  “One day,” Prakash said, having caught his breath again, and seeming now to have found his stride, “Idi Amin fired most of the Asian teachers without notice. My father was replaced by a friend of his, an African teacher. Because of my father’s math skills, the father of one of the students in his old school, a bank manager, offered him a job. But Pa didn’t deal with tellers or actually handle money. He was more of an accountant, not a qualified accountant, but it was his job to deal with the unpaid loans of Indian traders ordered to leave the country.”