by M G Vassanji
Haji Lalani left behind him three sons, four daughters, and an ailing business. At the time of his death his eldest son was in the Congo, where his fortunes had risen and fallen in recent years with the political fortunes of that newly independent country, and were on the rise again. Nurdin, the middle son, had just given up a hopeless salesmanship up-country. The youngest son was a mechanic, a not entirely honourable profession. The old man, approaching death, had not counted himself very accomplished materially.
Haji Lalani went to Tanganyika as a young man of sixteen in 1906 at the time when the German government there was recruiting Britain’s Indian subjects to help build the German empire in Africa. Young Haji apprenticed at an eminent Indian firm in the old slave capital of Bagamoyo. The name Bagamoyo meant “pour your hearts,” but no one could say what that referred to – the slaves’ grief at having arrived at the market to be sold away to foreigners or simply their relief at having reached the end of the long march. On the east coast of Africa, Bagamoyo was rivalled in eminence only by Mombasa, which was now part of the British colony to the north. In the last fifty years bustling Bagamoyo had received and dispatched slaves in the thousands; it had opened its arms to sultans, slave traders, ivory merchants, missionaries, explorers, and shopkeeper-moneylenders. All roads to the interior departed from here. When Stanley went looking for Livingstone, he left from here; when Burton and Speke went searching for the source of the Nile, they too were waved off at Bagamoyo. But the Germans decided to let the old oriental capital go its way and to build a new European city, at a neglected village with the beautiful name of Dar es Salaam, which would come to be known as Dar. In a parallel move to the north, the British delivered the same fate to Mombasa and developed a railway depot into a European capital city, Nairobi. But Bagamoyo had not given up heart, not as yet. Its citizens, its elders, the imams and the merchants, watched and waited.
Haji went on to become manager of the firm and finally to acquire a shop of his own. He became a man of strict disposition, to whom the harsh German justice – epitomized in the whip made of hippo hide and the name “Hand of Blood” given its wielder by the natives – was not alien in spirit. He could easily have bought a black woman, or acquired one, as some of his compatriots did to while away the lonely nights. He could have taken into his protection a discarded slave woman without a home and fathered a half-breed or two to join the small band that already made up some of the town’s youth. Instead he prayed and fasted and became friendly with the fathers at the German Catholic Mission. Any time he could spare from his shop, he spent in theological discussions and friendly debate with the fathers at the mission or with the sheikhs at the mosques.
He himself came from an Indian Muslim sect, the Shamsis, somewhat unorthodox, hence insecure. Aware that in his good-natured adversaries he had representatives of great and ancient institutions, he would hold his own by maintaining that the truth was known to the few and not the many; its seekers were individuals and not institutions.
One day a young fräulein stopping over at the mission came into the shop to look for gifts for her servants in the European settlement of Wilhelmstal up north, whence she came. She carried a parasol and had the most delicate features. As she stepped in from the glare of sunlight outside, it took a while for her presence to materialize in the relative darkness inside the shop, where Haji Lalani sat with his servant. The girl was accompanied by one of the fathers, who stopped at the doorway to chat, and a servant girl, who carried her shopping. As the fräulein raised her arm to point to a string of beads hanging from a nail, Haji found himself staring at her – she was flushed with the heat, her face lightly perspiring, and her armpit a delicate wet patch – and he felt the faint stirrings of a desire inside him. They did not go very far, in fact he would have quashed these forbidden shadows of thoughts there and then had not his face been brought alive by a stinging slap from the girl’s hand. “I am sorry, Fräulein,” murmured Haji, eyes smarting, cheeks burning, and the German missionary took the girl away.
“I should have been whipped,” Haji later told the church father, who listened in silence. Even saints have been guilty of desire, mused the padre, but of course the crime was not as simple as that.
Many years later Haji told the story to his friend, Missionary, who also listened in silence, perhaps with the same thought as his German counterpart.
Haji Lalani took the advice of the sheikhs of the mosques: to get married and have children is more than half God’s religion. He asked the elders of his community to find him a bride. They told him to go to Dar, where he went and approved the daughter of a respectable shopkeeper of modest means. Their first child, a daughter, was born in Bagamoyo. With the German fathers he could no longer consider himself at par, he who had made a virtue of his desire, who was now doubly and would soon be multiply tied to the material world.
War broke out, and the British attacked the German colony from the north, by land. On the ocean British man-of-wars chased German ships and bombarded the towns on the coast. The war on land moved southwards, the bombardments by sea increased, and finally Dar was taken. Haji Lalani and family, British subjects, marched to the capital that was now secure.
The shop of Haji Lalani on Market Street in Dar became a landmark among the busy side streets of the Indian quarter: not for its size or location but because everyone had had occasion to find in it something or other no one else carried. It was the only place where one was guaranteed to find the button of choice, or thread or needle or buckle; it also carried soaps and shampoos, cough mixtures, tonics, vitamin compounds, tooth powders and pastes, laxatives and herb leaves – all from India and England. In all these years it underwent one change in appearance: in 1934, the old mud-and-limestone building was demolished and replaced by a one-storey structure, with two flats above the store, one of which was rented out. As the years went by the white paint blackened and peeled, and nearby two- and three-storey structures, more solid looking and broader based, went up around it, but his building remained a landmark and Haji Lalani one of the prominent citizens, if known only inside the Indian community.
He was known for his sternness, which brooked no nonsense. He went early to mosque, a man slight of build with weathered face, in his white drill suit and red fez. He sat quietly against the back wall except when required to come forward to recite or announce, which he did simply and without hesitation, and returned home early. If ever he stayed late, his response to the foolery that men generally engage in while awaiting their more leisurely paced women would be an acid, cutting remark that would put the head fool out of commission. Very early he was made a mukhi, presider of the mosque, for a few years, and Mukhi Haji Lalani he remained to the townfolk long after the other mukhis were forgotten.
Haji Lalani’s renown and the respect in which he was held allowed him a certain licence over the community. He would not hesitate to send away a loud or rude boy with a cuff, or to scold a girl who had compromised her modesty by even a glance at a man. So, of his sons, he made examples. Of these, the eldest, Akber, was a textbook case, with whom the father set precedents, often with the help of a cane. The youngest boy, Shamshu, could hide behind female skirts, while the middle son, Nurdin, cowered before his father’s wrath, afraid to dare, aware beforehand of the repercussions that would follow.
Above the store, in the flat across from the Lalanis, lived a Hindu family, not Brahmins but humble cobblers, dealers in cowhide. Narandas had two daughters and a younger son. With the second daughter, Nurdin and Shamshu often played. The older daughter was tall and dusky, with a prominent jewelled nose-stud, and a mischievously suppressed smile on her puckered lips as she passed the playing children, holding on to her headscarf. She was liked by the children and talked to them all. Sometimes they could cajole her into casting aside modesty and playing with them. She did not talk to Akber, of course, because Akber was an adult. He was sixteen. A big sixteen with hair on his chest, which you could see because he kept his shirt button open, and who
smoked, in secret, affecting styles from the latest Hollywood and Indian films. He was in love with her and pretty certain his affection was returned. For one thing, when he gazed hard at her as she stood at a window she did not look away. And when he was bold enough then to sing out loud “Oh your face among your tresses like the full moon in the night” from a film song, no offence was taken. This form of lovemaking and serenading went on for a few months. Then Akber wrote a note – beginning with a ghazal and ending with “Will you marry me?” He sent it with a servant with specific instructions as to whom it should be handed. The servant headed straight for the opposite flat, without a moment’s thought, and the first person he saw there was Narandas’s wife. “What do you want?” she asked. He handed her the note. The note ended up on Haji Lalani’s lap.
The Germans, in their time, had a standard punishment for offences, called simply “Twenty-five,” for the number of strokes of a whip. The British later made their standard an even two dozen, though administered only through the courts. Haji Lalani would sometimes, for example, tell his sons of how a famous Pir punished his only son with one hundred strokes which he completed well past the death of the son, who had dared to consume alcohol. With the lover Akber, Haji Lalani took the German option and beat his son senseless using a schoolmaster’s cane. Young Shamshu was whisked to the female quarters, and middle-son Nurdin stood glued, tearfully watching from behind a shelf, muttering “Please, please,” wishing his father would stop.
Narandas moved away with his family. Akber was married off to a local girl, and a year later moved to Tabora, inland. Later he went to Belgian Congo. Fifty years after the store first opened in Dar, business seemed to be waning. Substitutes for what it sold were vast in number, and shops were opening up all over town to sell them. Monkey Brand charcoal tooth powder had to compete with Colgate and Pepsodent; Shikakai soap, by which girls with long thick tresses had sworn for decades, yielded to Lux and Palmolive, advertised by the likes of Sophia Loren at the cinema. To top it all, after the British left, import licences became scarce. Haji Lalani, entering his seventies, did not have the energy to diversify or expand his business, a job for a younger man. Of the two sons who still lived with him, Nurdin withered to ineffectualness under his father’s eye and Shamshu was simply a loafer. The shop remained open to give the old man something to do, for which the elderly who had come to depend on it over the years were grateful. His one remaining pleasure was to discuss religion, which he did with others of his age and inclination, and with Missionary, a younger man who had come to Africa during the Second World War.
Of his son, Nurdin – who had survived without giving offence and without special protection – Haji Lalani did not think much. If anything at all, he thought him a good-for-nothing, a bumbler, one likely to drop a cup of tea when serving a guest. But in school and among friends Nurdin Lalani was a middling kind of boy. Neither short nor tall, somewhat skinny, he was not one to take risks but was always game for mischief or a laugh, always with spare change or comic books to lend. He was prone to be the butt of jokes of the rowdier boys, the gang leaders, but these, as he grew older, he learned to manipulate, simply by sharing prudently his generous allowance.
After Nurdin finished school, failing his Junior Cambridge Certificate as many boys did, he tried his hand at various jobs, even at running a business, but with no success. At the prospect of working with his father, he sulked and complained to his mother and sisters. His father finally asked Missionary to find him a job. Missionary, a charismatic, fiery speaker whose fame had spread countrywide, after a few inquiries announced a job for Nurdin: sales representative for the Bata Shoe Company, in Central Province. The job required travel by train and car up-country, and Nurdin was finally free of his father’s sceptical eye.
Finally it came time for the young man to get married. Here too Missionary was approached. He ran a class for religion teachers, and he proposed for Nurdin nothing less than his star pupil, Zera. Nurdin acquiesced. His father operated like Fate. To oppose him even for the sake of a gesture would have been to unleash a fury and a storm he had no desire to face. If he probed his innermost desires, then the girl of his dreams was smart and fair, with boy-cut hair, who was comfortable in high heels, spoke English nicely, and perhaps even had been abroad. What hope did he have of that? Zera had none of these qualities. But she looked after and spoke up for him. And Haji Lalani was elated because he had someone he could make religious talk with, at home.
The place where Haji Lalani died, at Oyster Bay, was a peaceful spot under the gently swaying branches and rustling leaves of two neighbouring trees. They had discovered it together once, he and Missionary, and came whenever they could. It was, according to Missionary’s calculation and sure knowledge, one of precisely forty such spots on the face of this earth, whose heavenly bliss, especially after a recent rainfall, was incomparable. Angels, he said, danced in the sunbeams that fell on this sacred place.
When Missionary and Mr. Fletcher placed Haji Lalani’s body carefully in the back seat of the car, they placed his fez cap beside him. It was forgotten in the car, and Mr. Fletcher one day returned it to one of Missionary’s sons in school. Missionary saw his teenagers playing with the fez, each trying it on, and he retrieved it, sending them away with a few slaps. He kept the red fez as a memento of his dead friend.
It was as if with Haji Lalani a whole era died, a way of life disappeared. Some would say it was the onset of the new era that killed him. Certainly the changes that took place only two years later would have been beyond his wildest dreams.
A few years before, British Prime Minister Macmillan, speaking in southern Africa, hailed the winds of change then sweeping over Africa; in effect, by this very speech unleashing the winds that would accomplish the changes in British East Africa, beginning with independence. By the time Missionary and Haji Lalani’s two sons buried the old man, the winds of change had turned into a hurricane. It was a sign of the changing times that Haji Lalani was buried at the new cemetery, an inland site chosen by the new, independent government. At the old, venerated cemetery facing the Indian Ocean, the earth had already been turned, spirits and jinns exposed and rendered powerless, the bones of the Asian dead transplanted to the new site. The only redeeming feature of this new spot, it was said, in the wry humour that usually follows a funeral, was the presence close by of the new Drive-in Cinema, to which the unsettled souls could go to watch India’s Rajesh Khanna frolic in the grass with a sari-clad beauty, or America’s Charles Bronson mow down his enemies with a machine gun.
The idea of empire was relinquished slowly in the Asian communities. Right up until independence, letters would arrive addressed ostensibly to someone in the “British Empire” or “British East Africa.” The Asians had spawned at least two knights of the empire in their slums, they had had Princess Elizabeth in their midst, greeted Princess Margaret with a tumultuous welcome. They spoke proudly of Churchill and Mountbatten, fondly of Victoria. What schoolboy or girl had not heard over the radio the reassuring chimes of Big Ben before falling asleep, or the terrified voice of Dickens’s Pip, the triumphant voice of Portia, the Queen’s birthday message.
Independence came suddenly but not cruelly. The police and army stayed on, the governor spoke kind words and stayed on as governor general for a year, “Godspeed” said the colonial secretary, Prince Philip waved goodbye. Above all, in the first few days, the newspaper was reassuring, educating people in their new role as citizens of a new country on the world stage, a member of that brotherhood the United Nations, a nonaligned country. It all was fun and excitement, like growing up, being allowed to go out at night, standing up with the adults.
But the winds had only now gathered strength; the fury soon began. The governor general duly left after a year and a republic was declared. On the island of Zanzibar, some twenty-five miles from Dar, a coup finally toppled Arab rule in a bloody revenge by the descendants of the slaves. If it could happen in sleepy Zanzibar, it could happen anywhere.
As if confirming the worst fears, within a few weeks followed army mutinies in Kenya, Uganda, and Tanganyika, quelled, embarrassingly enough, with the help of British commandos. During the short-lived mutiny in Dar, looking out, frightened, through their windows, Asians witnessed their shops being looted. Zanzibar, in British and American eyes, became the Cuba of Africa. Cubans were, in fact, rumoured to be on the island, as were Russians, East Germans, and Chinese. Africa is ripe for revolution, said Chou En-lai. Now you could see Chinese men on Dar streets and buy Chinese goods, such as imitations of Parker pens, in the stores. Finally, a new dawn was proclaimed, the beginning of a new era of cultural integrity and economic self-reliance: banks were nationalized, English was replaced as the medium of instruction in primary schools, students underwent army training and political indoctrination, and tilled farms.
They, who had looked to London for the time of day, accepted the changes, the initial ones that came with popular, attractive slogans. Their children, third- and fourth-generation Africans, were taking readily to the new identity. What the government said made sense to the youth. Independence did open up new vistas, intellectually. Swatches of history became available, which had so far been hidden from them. They were not enamoured of the British as their elders were. Not after they had heard or read about Nehru and Tito and Nasser, not to mention Ben Bella and Nkrumah. The future was theirs, they were its masters, and the street fruit-vendor, the shopkeeper, the elderly sheikh all looked upon the schoolchild, black or brown, with pride. Youths would march proudly in support of African socialism in Youth League uniform, under a scorching sun. But as the changes became more extreme, as newer and stranger Ways were imposed, the idyll of a new Africa began to appear as shaky to those of the younger generation as it had always appeared to the older.