by M G Vassanji
“I didn’t know there was an army camp here,” she said nervously, watching the Land Rover head off.
“Guerrillas?…” said Bill.
“You mean … training them for Mozambique and South Africa….”
George said, “Hmm.”
A week later an army belt was delivered to the principal’s office. Farida was delighted; she was appreciated.
In the evenings she would read. The school library was good, and Bill had a constant supply of American paperbacks that he lent her. One day he gave her a copy of Jacqueline Susann’s The Love Machine with a glint in his eye. She did not proceed further than the description on the back cover, returning it with a meaningful “Thank you.”
Toronto
November 6, 1999
Dear Bill,
I don’t know why I am writing this letter to you … I simply had this overwhelming compulsion to do something unusual, courageous, and … foolish? I felt like grabbing a fistful of my life that’s so rapidly passed away, relive clearly those years … no, not quite like that, but a compulsion to touch the past again! Do you know what I mean? If you reply to this letter, then I’ll know that yes, those times we spent together at St. Andrew’s were real; and perhaps we can remind ourselves of them!
I have decided to write to you at your parents’ address, which I’ve remembered after all these years (“40 Fairmount Ave, Haverstock, NY 10929,” just like that, pat), hoping that somehow someone, whoever lives there now, will forward the letter to you. I wish I could do the same with George, but I don’t have a clue where to write to him. Do you? Have I lost him completely?
I pray that you at least are there and together we can hunt him down!
Affectionately,
Farida.
Cleveland
11 November 1999
Dear Farida:
Thank you. Ahsante. I’d like to paint that across the sky in mile-high red letters so you could see it from where you are in Toronto. You don’t know what your letter has meant to me. And yes, those times we spent together were real, how often have I recalled them! I have hundreds of slides from back then but nobody to show them to! I live quite alone now. After I returned from Tanzania, I went to grad school for a year, then dropped out, and worked as travel agent, insurance broker, and finally pharmaceutical salesman. I was married and have two children, both in college now.
I have a confession to make. Ten years ago I did return to Tanzania and met George. He had had quite a career. He had published a novel, not very successful, worked as a headmaster at a school in Arusha, and been a diplomat in Moscow, Stockholm, and Washington DC! He was quite touched to see me. It was the last thing he expected! We both remembered you with affection. He accompanied me and the kids to the game parks but was bored, and I’m sorry to say drank a bit too much. He didn’t seem happy. He had fallen out of favour with the government and was awaiting some assignment overseas. I don’t know where he is now.
I’m sending this to your office as you requested. Is there any chance we could meet? Cleveland is not far away from where you are. Tell me about yourself.
Love,
Bill.
You’re still there! And George, where is he? I can find out, if I wanted to, I’ve got connections that you don’t. We Indians exist in networks, don’t you know that! You didn’t send a photo, but then I didn’t either, did I… are you fatter now, or still as bony and angular as you were then … striding through the bushes, you were quite a walker. We had a theory about you, George and I—did you know that? We suspected you!
For instance when she had begun, to their joy, taking the occasional ride with her two friends to go and visit the town—
She had been “adopted” by a family there called the Bhanjis; she was royalty when she visited them, which was a bit embarrassing for her. But to them it was their duty to look after a single girl sent by an insensitive government to work in the countryside. They cooked the best food for her, gave her a comfortable bed to lie on, had her laundry done, and in the evening they took her to the local community mosque. The next day, Sunday, they dropped her off back at St. Andrew’s. Her fiancé Shamshu could also call her at the Bhanjis or leave messages. The small-town life was enchanting in its way; everybody knew everybody else, you could walk down the street and stop for a chat at half a dozen places. One day when she went to buy her last-minute supplies at a local shop, the man there mentioned that the American teacher telephoned Nairobi from his shop every time he came to Mbeya. The next day when she said to Bill, “I didn’t know you had close friends in Nairobi,” he gave a start, and she explained, “Oh, that Karmali Masa said you called Nairobi every time you go to Mbeya.” Bill said he had a cousin in Nairobi. Then there was this guy who came to visit Bill from Dar and wore rather stylish safari clothes. He said he knew Bill from back in college, but Bill had said he had met him first in Ghana.
“Do you think …” she said to George (they were sitting under her tree).
“What?”
“Could Bill be a spy, is that possible, you think?”
“Like James Bond.”
He looked amused and she laughed, “Not quite, but”
“He could be supplying information, I think Americans would be asked to do that by their government.”
They looked knowingly at each other. Bill was their friend, they saw no harm in him. And they never let on their suspicion. And he, Bill, did he think them simple, innocent, and naive? After all, the Dar papers occasionally did have stories about all sorts of agents: Americans, Chinese, Russians. She and George, the locals, on the other hand saw Bill sometimes as the genial and nice but quite naive American.
You might have thought that it was to Bill that she would have been attracted: his composure, his confidence, his authority, and he was American. But it was George who intrigued her like … something dangerous and attractive. Who had heard of an Asian girl attracted to a black man? It was absolutely unthinkable, not possible. Yet when they were together (Bill not around), there seemed to be an electricity around George, it was like being in a charged “field” (a concept which Bill had explained to her). Between them they laughed, yes, but there was more to him and she was aware of that.
The teachers lived in a small block of flats apart from the student dormitories. A red-earth flagstoned path led to the teachers’ quarters from the school compound. One afternoon while returning from lunch with George, he invited her for tea in his flat, which came before hers. It was on the ground floor. Bill was behind them and she assumed he too was invited; she even waved at him to indicate so. But Bill went on and she found herself alone with George. It didn’t bother her much, just that she didn’t want other teachers to form the wrong impression. It was there that, when she finished her tea and put down the cup and saucer, he declared his feelings; but he prefaced his speech awkwardly with “My dear—” so that, startled, she gave a little giggle, before he tumbled out with, “I love you, Farida.”
Just that. The simple truth. “But, but—” She was confused, she turned red (she must have). Total shock. Like when you’re a child and fall flat on your stomach and get up and don’t know where you are, why the tears are falling. Not angry, or offended, she realized, after a minute’s silence; and not too surprised: what he said was not what she reacted against as much as the fact that he said it, articulated it. He came and sat beside her, took both her hands in his. “George,” she said primly, pulling her hands away, “you know very well that I am engaged.” Besides religion and all the other differences … she must be as pink as a bougainvillea flower. Not for an instant did it occur to her that she didn’t care for him, that he was repulsive, presumptuous. He sensed something receptive in her and put his arms around her, and he kissed her. She would recall the fragrant soap on him, his towering height bending over her, his rough and wet mouth. She could be aroused as she had discovered during her secret meetings with Shamshu back home in Dar. “No”—she pulled herself away, and she could see that he c
ould barely control himself from going further than that kiss. But he desisted and went to sit across from her on a chair. She arranged her hair and clothes, got up and went out.
There was an impassioned exchange between them again a few days later, while on their way to the school one afternoon, he having caught up with her from behind, when she explained patiently to him that she was engaged, committed to this guy she had known for the past so many years.
“But you don’t say that you love him—” he said pointedly.
“I do love him, I don’t have to tell you that.”
“And you have no feelings for me whatsoever?”
“Not those kind … look, I do love you but in my own way….”
“Along with the rest of the world. What do you think, I’m a creature of some sort you can have love for, or some plant perhaps—”
“George, why do you have to spoil everything—” “You mean my being black has nothing to do with it?” “No.” But of course there was that, too, except she didn’t know what sort of difference it made. She was, conveniently, engaged.
“If you only knew how much I love you, Farida. No one will—no one dare—ever love you as much.”
They remained friends. The electricity was there between them. She cared for him, very much, would have loved to get to know him better. He remained passionately in love with her.
Her fiancé came on a visit. Shamshu stayed with her, which was awkward since they were not yet married. He didn’t see much of George but saw quite a bit of Bill, who was always around with jokes, and questions, and suggestions—the friendly American whose height he found rather intimidating, and whose closeness with Farida made him not a little jealous. And Bill was partly the reason why Shamshu, sounding somewhat awkward and furtive, told her, “Why not quit work now, how long can we go on like this, let’s get married quickly and apply to go to Canada.” Farida said, “Yes, let’s.” There was no point in prolonging the present state of affairs. She spoke to her parents over the phone from Mbeya about this new plan, and they approved. They were only too anxious to see her settled, a single girl so far away from family.
She was somewhat stoic in her goodbyes; she hadn’t realized how cut up she would feel, in a part of her, at leaving so suddenly. She might never see Bill again. But they promised to write. George found out she was going, but not from her; she had not had an opportunity to tell him, and he’d been keeping away. He met her in a corridor once, briefly, and said, “I understand you’re leaving us.” “Yes,” she said, mouth agape as though about to add something, but what? “Good luck,” he said. But the day she left—it was lunch break—saying “One moment” to Shamshu as they were about to board the car, she ran to George’s flat, knocked, went in, and said: “I’ve come to say goodbye.” He had stood up from the sofa, a magazine in his hand. “Goodbye,” he said. “I wish you a happy life.” “You too …” she said, choking, and left.
No promise to write, to keep in touch; perhaps she should have given him her address. But for what. How could she write to him?
Did I ask myself what exactly I felt for him… what he had asked me to risk, what that would have entailed … did I ever wonder afterwards whether I simply played it safe, was unwilling to scorch myself in a passion … that perhaps my decision was to live not fully but longer? How easily I decided to forget him, them both. How easily we cast aside, walk away from voices, from love, from friendship, from parts of our lives … and how desperately we try to grasp them when they are beyond reach. George, you’d never have been happy, I knew that. Perhaps it was that unhappiness I shrank from. But no, I just didn’t have it in me simply to fly away, the other way, from my flock, they were my golden cage, my security … my sanity.
Cleveland
3 September 2000
Dear Farida:
Thank you for your letter. It was certainly a long time coming. I understand—or I think I do. I suspected, you see. Am I talking out of line here? I don’t mind saying that your letter broke me up completely. I am extremely sorry, I only wish I had stayed in touch, with you, with him. It took you to seek me out, when I could have done the same, earlier. And it took you to find out about him. What a tragic fate. We can make excuses, but for my part there are none I will accept from myself. I was callous and forgetful, thinking life goes on. It doesn’t, at some point, does it?
Let’s keep staying in touch, dear Farida, for our sakes and also his. God, how I miss him now.
With love from,
Bill.
A young African with a thin face, in what we used to call a Kaunda suit, stares from a faded picture on the faded cover of a long out-of-print book—the orange, black, and white cover of the AWS literature series that we used to read during those days at school. It was left on an end table, deliberately, by my wife, partly I think to test whether I recall the name of the author, George Kasore. I do, of course, and recall meeting him briefly during that visit when I brought her back home, to marry me and move her far away. I did not think much about him, but those were the days. His existence was outside of my domain. Three letters from Bill Songa I also found, conspicuously, on top of the book. Offerings to my curiosity, for me to discover a part of her life, as I promise myself I will.
Farida
Some evenings we find ourselves sitting together in the living room, caught in a space, a moment, a span that lies between the unspoken intimacy and closeness of years spent together and our private worlds that have grown simultaneously and inevitably inside us; sitting diagonally across from each other, which is how we’ve grown accustomed to viewing each other, after a long day, a middle-aged couple well into a good joint innings, with memories and thoughts that erupt into gentle but sudden revelations we make about ourselves to each other; she reading a book or knitting, a new hobby undertaken with an almost biological urge as if an assertion of womanhood or motherhood; and I with the business section of the paper, or something else to cast an idle eye upon. And then I begin to drift, get drawn into myself, and I pick up this: my notebook and pencil; and she, having observed me withdraw with a concerned look toward her, makes a small try to keep me.
“You do embellish,” she says with a smile.
“I don’t embellish,” I defend myself. “I know the stories, and I know the characters—surely I can fill in?”
“You were always good at adding mirchi masala,” she insists, bringing in the past, knitting it, I imagine, intently into that sweater.
We go back a long way together, she knows things about me I’ve forgotten.
The earliest I imagine us together is in those sunny days of Tom Jones’s “Green, Green Grass of Home,” and of “Guantanamera,” and the heyday of the Beatles. Yes, those were our days. I had in my keeping for some reason the key to a storage room in our mosque, and on those bright musical Sunday mornings, the air fragrant with the aromas of sizzling spices in buttery ghee, we would meet on the quiet in the compound of that mosque and go to that room, which contained heaps of rolled-up carpets on which we would sit and share passionately of our intimacies, holding on tremblingly to our virginities. How terribly sweet were those days, how thrilling and anxious our pubescence, how the future loomed before us in its vastness, its abundance—all those possibilities! We gave up—or let’s say we lost—an idyllic, naive existence as a people in a small city, in a small country, far from the bustling anxiety and screech and snarl of modernity. That loss was inevitable, obviously; but perhaps not the violence with which it happened—I don’t mean of the physical sort, though there was some of that too, but the sudden and total upheaval in our ways and the scenery around us, the lack of gradualness. But, as we sit here musing on an evening, Farida and I—the kids out of the house, one grown up and gone for good, the other out somewhere with friends—we know we’ve not done badly at all, that our upheaval pales beside those of Somalia and Ethiopia, South Africa and Bosnia. Who would complain? And this place we arrived at, three decades ago now, also went through its upheaval because of
so many like us who had come to settle here. But it changed, this city of ours, from a scrubbed, antiseptic piece of concrete—so it seemed to us—into the exciting and exotic metropolis that it now is.
In those early days some twenty-five of us would meet in a small room on the lower level of Flemingdon Park Mall; that room was our mosque, and the locals had not seen anything like it. Come rain or shine, hail or snow, it would open for prayers, and the chorus of singing or chanting or the single voice raised in announcement or leading a prayer, echoed through the corridor, wafted up the open staircase to the floor above. Fortunately for everyone, it was evening, when few shoppers were around, or early in the morning, when there was not a soul in the building except a watchman. I remember being followed closely by a police car at four in the morning once, on my way to prayers. I was on foot and alone, and I would look behind me nervously, unsure what I should expect or do. It was January and biting cold. Finally the car stopped and the cop inside asked me to get in and requested my identification. I gave him my passport, informed him where I was going. “I’ll take you there,” he said. He was rather young. It turned out I was not the only one so favoured by his attention. We gave him the name “Bill.” Many times he would watch us from the parking lot of the mall or from the doughnut store as we emerged shortly after five. How does he recall those encounters, I wonder? And what was his real name? Ashiq, our son, was one and Mira was yet to be born. Farida and I had married soon after graduating from university, and when Ashiq came we applied to go to Canada.
The university campus in Dar back then was beautiful, I don’t know what it’s like now. It was located away from the city, on a hill, in luscious surroundings with large ample spaces, and its quiet walking lanes amidst the tropical gardens and shrubbery had been ideal for us to stroll through in the evenings and hold hands and murmur endearments and make plans for ourselves. Outside of these moments alone there was little privacy in our lives; rooms were shared and friends whom we’d known most of our lives, as neighbours and community members, were all around. Weekends we went home. She tells me I was quite the comedian and yarn-spinner then, among our group, and as a major in history quite the reader and intellectual. Sometimes during our walks at night we found a quiet spot behind a tree, ostensibly to sit together in a moment of emotion before we parted but actually for a cuddle and a little lifting of the dress and so on. University had not provided us with a private haven for our mischief, like the one we’d had before in that storage room in the mosque; not that she minded, we were older and she was more conscious of herself. The need for closer intimacy was mine, but I knew if we had a place to ourselves she would relent, if only partially. That was the understanding and trust in our love.