No New Land

by M G Vassanji

  There were two more disruptive swoops the winds had in store for them, after which they could be said to have done their work.

  In Uganda, General Idi Amin, who had over-thrown an elected government, had a dream. In this dream, Allah told him that the Asians, exploiters who did not want to integrate with the Africans, had to go. It was said, in an attempt to discredit the revelation, that the general had a few weeks before made an unsuccessful overture to an Asian woman. In Amin’s “final solution” the Asians, their citizenships stripped, were expelled – to whatever country that would take them, or else to refugee camps; in effect, they became orphans awaiting adoption. Many of them would wind up in Canada and the United States.

  Weeks later, in Dar, rental properties, most of them Asian, were nationalized. There were those whose final act of faith in the new country was to put the savings of two generations of toil to develop a mud-and-limestone dwelling into a two-storey brick building. These buildings lined Dar’s main streets, each a monument to a family’s enterprise, proudly bearing the family name or else that of a favourite child. When they were taken, that was the final straw. Cynicism replaced faith, corruption became a means.

  The “Uganda exodus” showed a way out for Dar’s Asians. Canada was open and, for the rich, America too. Thus began a run on Canada.

  It was the rich, the hardest hit by the takeovers, who started the movement. Not everyone joined initially, but soon a chain reaction set in, drawing more and more people, fuelled by insecurity, fear, competition, greed, love. Everyone felt the pull. On one hand to see your children using hoes and spades and brooms during schooltime and not learning English when English was one constant you could not deviate from: English education, the one pillar of success, tenet of the faith as it were, becoming more and more inaccessible in the country. On the other hand lay the wealth, the stability of Canada and the Western world. Ten years hence, would your children forgive you when they saw their friends return as wealthy tourists waving dollars and speaking snappy English? The way you spoke English determined who you were. Nurdin remembered: the boys and girls who went to England for their education and returned a class apart – in speech, in clothes, in bearing and manner – in everything. His dream girl had been such a person.

  He had been a good employee of Bata. He had developed his market in Central Province patiently, town by town, store by store. He would drive out with his African assistant, Charles, to Morogoro, Dodoma, and towns in their vicinity, trunk and back seat crammed with shoe boxes. He rather enjoyed being on the road. Sleeping in the car, or the backyard in a strange bed in the humble home of a Bata agent; eating in a dimly lit restaurant, under a tree, or at a table under the overwhelming generosity of his host and hostess. There would be the occasional breakdown on the road. In the rainy season you could drive into a ditch. Then you waited hours for help to arrive, on the long-deserted road, or spent a nervous night in the jungle, in the thick impenetrable darkness, encased in the car, straining to hear the distant roar or the closer scratch or rustle, keeping eyes well averted from the window lest a glance outside lock into the ferocious eyes of a devil or an animal. It was always good to have someone with you, and in the morning you felt the stronger for the experience.

  With Charles he developed a friendship and came to learn of African ways. Charles, he learned, had about the same education as he had, but was some years younger. Charles too had had a tyrannical father, who was now dead. Most of his life he had spent in a village. He had got the job at Bata through influence, as had Nurdin. Charles had a girlfriend, a university student. In this developing familiarity, Nurdin felt, with some satisfaction, a new experience, a breaking of walls. He let the experience develop its own sure course, take its time. Back home he had two children, a boy and a girl, and a wife who respected him, was affectionate. It was always good to return to them. He looked forward to a permanent return and promotion in Dar, but was hesitant about living under his father’s grim rule. This was his life, his lot.

  But then came the changes in the country: the nationalizations and the Africanizations. Charles was given the coveted promotion and position in Dar. Peons, it seemed to Nurdin, rose above him merely because of their black skins. The Europeans had always been masters; their higher positions he had taken as a matter of course. But now in the scramble for promotions he saw himself overlooked, neglected, as a matter of policy, and felt bitter. The quality of shoes had gone down, and customers laughed in his face, showing him the shoddy products of the new government company, holding him to a responsibility his seniors did not respect. Life on the road had lost its charms and he missed Charles. In those tumultuous times it seemed Dar was the place to be. He quit and became a free sales agent in Dar, not waiting for the managership Charles had promised him.

  Then his father died. His wife, Zera, ran the shop and Nurdin was all about town looking for odd commissions, spending a lot of time at the middle-aged men’s haunt, the A-T Shop, whose tea and kebabs were legendary and where the most up-to-date information on any subject was available.

  No one could tell when it happened, but it seemed, suddenly, that a switch had flipped, transforming the mind-set, the worldview: from a position in which Dar was your world, its problems your problems, to one in which leaving became an option, and to many an imperative. There was excitement, restlessness in the air. Canada, someone must have whispered the word somewhere. What was Canada – a distant place most did not know where, a pink mass on the map beside the green of Greenland. Suddenly everyone was talking of Canada: visas, medicals, interviews, “landeds.” In Canada they needed plumbers, so those who did not know one end of a spanner from another, schoolteachers, salesmen, bank clerks, all joined plumbing classes and began talking of wrenches and discussing fixtures they had never seen in their lives. Toronto, Vancouver, Montreal. You got the most recent news outside mosques after prayers, when men await their women, and during morning and afternoon teatimes at the A-T and other tea shops: who had left, the price of the dollar, the most recent black-market-related arrests. They talked of Don Mills as if it were in Upanga. The buildings of Rosecliffe Park were known, it seemed, in intimate detail. The rich had left almost overnight following the great nationalizations. As the uncertain tension-filled months passed, friends would come to say goodbye, others simply disappeared, and you understood or were told that they had got their landeds and were now probably somewhere in Don Mills.

  Zera had taught religion in the schools before; some years after her marriage she took over and infused new energy into the old shop, running it with the help of her mother-in-law. After Haji Lalani’s death Missionary still came around, although he now sat to chitchat a few stores away, with another old-timer. He would park his car outside and announce himself to Zera, then go on to have his chat. She would send a plate of snacks after him, then his second cup of tea, the first cup of course the prerogative of the host. Zera, who in all matters, spiritual or material, deferred to her master’s advice, had approached Missionary about a possible move to Canada. “No,” he said. “Let the rich go and leave us alone.” Zera’s sister, Roshan, had already gone with her family and was urging her to come. The rush was on. If you asked the remaining community leaders what to do, they told you somewhat cryptically: “If you’re thinking of going tomorrow, go today.” Finally Missionary relented. “Soon only the crooks will be left here,” he said. “Go.”

  Haji Lalani, who in his last days would sit at the ocean looking towards the land of his birth with only a twinge of nostalgia (“After all, we’ve brought India with us”), died believing he had found a new country for his descendants. Two years later, his middle son, with his own family, set off for yet another continent.

  3

  It was the first flight in an aeroplane, for all of them: Nurdin, Zera, and the two children. Fatima and Hanif, ten and seven, the girl already rid of her baby fat, tall and thin, energetic and demanding, already at this age contentious. The boy affectionate, with a boy’s mischief.


  “Good night Dar, good morning London”: that was the catch phrase they had heard over and over again in cinema advertisements. Comet 4, VC-10, jumbo jet; they had been kept up to date with the advances in jet travel. Now they were inside one of them, on the night plane with its magical lights and reassuring hum, travelling through a darkness as palpable as any he had known in the jungle. Looking out, this time he saw only himself – his reflection.

  The Asians, for some reason, had been seated together and for their meal were all fed vegetarian. “Perhaps the meat is pork,” murmured Zera. But how, in an airline of a Muslim country? They thought they were taking a friendly airline, Air Egypt, its hostesses bearing names like Farrah and Jahan. But these dyed-blonde, tight-skirted, small-bottomed Farrahs disdained to look at them, and agreed to serve coffee only when the polite and timid raising of hands gave way to a few loud requests accompanied by a ripple of assenting murmurs, so that a protest was seen to be brewing. And then, the embarrassments: to be told like a child how to fasten seat belts and open trays and turn the reading lights on; searching for the toilets, trailing European passengers with your eyes, desperately, waiting until the last moment – like children – before finally plucking up courage, going there and fumbling with the bolts, the hostess lingering to look on and not helping, perhaps later to giggle with her companions; and when inside, not knowing what to do. And later the complaint from the Europeans: the toilets are dirty. Goodness, was Canada going to be like this: every step a mystery and trap, fraught with belittling embarrassments, and people waiting to show you up.

  They had to change planes at a terminal in the desert somewhere, outside Cairo, chaotic and crowded as the Dar market, where only American dollars and British pounds were accepted and the change returned in soiled Egyptian notes.

  Then finally, with two exhausted children, the flight to London.

  They thought they should see London, at least this one time in their lives. London was not a foreign place, not really, it was a city they all knew in their hearts. To hear Big Ben chime for real, see the Houses of Parliament and London Bridge, Buckingham Palace, perhaps the Queen and Prince Philip, and Westminster Abbey where David Livingstone lies buried. London – the pussycat and Dick Whittington, nursery rhymes clamoured in their brains. Zera recited, Fatima corrected. From above, in the plane, as they left the desert of Egypt and Africa behind and flew over the flat, grey and brown wintry fields, neat roads, the orderly rows and squares of staid brick or stone houses, the spires, Nurdin felt a certain foreboding, felt vaguely that he was making a crossing, that there would be no return. Face glued to the window, he watched the world below come alive to the morning’s first light: this is Europe. He should make the best of it.

  At London airport normal eyes would have seen, at the end of a long queue, a somewhat dowdy couple with puffed faces and two children practically asleep on their feet. What the immigration officials saw, apparently, was a pack of skilled and rehearsed actors from the former colonies out to steal jobs from hard-working English men and women. First a joint interview – “Why have you come?” “Do you know anyone here?” “Do you have a permanent address in East Africa?” Then interviews, with Nurdin and Zera, in separate rooms, the kids on a bench outside. After that, the frightened kids taken to an inner office for a separate interview. Finally, “I am sorry, sir, you are refused permission to land in the United Kingdom.” Words that did not make sense, that cut deeply, for their sheer obstinate wrongness, their boot-like sensitivity. A rubber stamp on their passports to deter future attempted visits. “This way, sir, madam …” and onto a departing Air Canada plane.

  “The bastards,” Nurdin sobbed. “The bastards, the polite British, even when running a noose round your neck, you know how they addressed you back home: ‘Your obedient servant, sir, your obedient servant, sir, YOUR OBEDIENT SERVANT!’ ”

  “Nurdin, take a hold of yourself!” hissed his wife.

  “The bastards!”

  On board the first available plane to Canada he did not even glance outside as they took off. Fifteen years ago he could have come to London as a student and been accepted. What was different now?

  In Montreal, the immigration official smiled genially at them. “Welcome to Canada!”

  Finally, someone welcoming you, a white man welcoming you. Finally a place to lay down your head.

  In Toronto, where they flew straight from Montreal, they were met by a tired-looking Roshan and her husband Abdul. The first thing Zera’s sister did when the preliminaries were over was to pass around a pack of chewing gum. “This is Canada,” she said, as if mouthing a credo, which indeed it was for her, as they would soon realize.

  Snow had fallen, a blistering wind blew squalls on the road and, as they stepped outside the airport building, it made sails of their ill-fitting secondhand clothes, which had seen better days on the backs of colonial bwanas and memsahibs on chilly African evenings. “So this is snow,” Zera remarked. It had been cleared into unimpressive mounds and at their feet was a fine powder blown about by reckless gusts. Toes freezing, faces partly paralyzed, eyes tearing, they stood outside, shoulders hunched. The two children were moaning and shivering, weeping, hiding behind adult coats, creating fresh pockets and exposing fresher areas of anatomy for the wind to snatch at. After the projected taxi fare was mentally converted to shillings, they opted for a bus. And finally the embracing warmth of a heated bus, heating every pore, releasing by delicious mechanisms every shiver out from it. In a semi-dazed state, Nurdin watched the yellow streetlights and the snow-flakes and the myriad of cars on highways winding around each other like ribbons, like nooses, if you please, your obedient servant. Big Ben says eighteen hours Greenwich mean time, and Father looks up, raises an eyebrow, if you please, and shush, everyone listens to perfect inflections from the BBC, you dare not scrape or cough at this holiest of hours at home and you hold your water and your bowels and your wind, and if a giggle escapes, then the wrath of God, Haji Lalani’s cane on your buttocks until you cry out Mercy, mercy, Father, but Haji Lalani will complete his quarter-century – Mercy, wails the lover Akber, but the strokes keep coming, regulated, calculated, for it is God’s punishment and Akber lies comatose, Father falls back exhausted, and you become aware of the wetness between your thighs.

  “Aré, Hanif, you could have waited,” Nurdin said to his son, but the boy slept peacefully on his lap.

  The next morning, in Roshan and Abdul’s Don Mills apartment, the sun shining brightly, deceptively, through the balcony’s sliding doors, an abundant breakfast on the table – with toast and eggs and juice and jam and parathas – Zera practically danced through the two kitchen doorways, going out this one and in the other, saying wow, this is big, gorgeous, a refrigerator, a television, new sofas, dinette.

  “But you have everything,” she said to her sister, still dancing in the doorways.

  “Aré, you should see how the others live … carpet wall-to-wall, not an inch uncovered.” She emphasized, eyes flashing: “Not one bare inch, and console television and – ”

  “Wah,” said Nurdin, lounging on the sofa. “This is enough for me. This is all I ask for.”

  “Wait,” said his sister-in-law, “you’ll want more. And you’ll get it. This is Canada.”

  Nurdin eyed the two women. They had such affection for each other, spoke so freely to each other. No one could have guessed they were sisters. Zera, round face and soft body, had that twinkle in her eye and dimples and the puckered half-shy smile that won everyone over. It certainly brought forth his affection for her. Roshan, taller and stronger, was some years older. She had been their father’s child by a previous mother, rarely mentioned, but a black woman, as everyone guessed. Perhaps a kept woman. Roshan had a dark complexion, which she tried unsuccessfully to lighten, using loads of makeup and creams, and wavy hair she tried desperately to straighten and lighten. She had large front teeth that simply wrecked her smile, and a dark scar on one cheek where Zera had burned her with a spatula in
a girlish squabble long ago. Perhaps to deflect attention from her face, she wore loud and garish dresses.

  Roshan’s husband, Abdul, was a mechanic and had a job as mechanic’s assistant and gas pump attendant. In Dar, he had been head mechanic at Datsun. A dour, private man, tall and balding, depressive. He had been married before, a marriage that lasted a few days, for reasons that could only be guessed at. He carried a secret, deep hurt that no one could ever fathom. Roshan worked at a factory. They had two children, a boy and a girl.

  Within a week, Fatima and Hanif were admitted to school, Zera found a job as a receptionist, and proper winter clothes were bought. They thought they would stay with the in-laws until Nurdin found a job, or the financial crunch relaxed, but it was not easy. The four children fought over practically everything, but mostly the television. And Abdul was a difficult man. Finally things came to a head, and they had to leave.

  One Friday evening Roshan had been ironing the pants for her husband to wear to the mosque, when a loud cry and a fight broke out among the children before the blaring television set. All four were on the sofa, in a screaming sobbing tangle of arms and legs. The two women ran to the rescue and in the meantime the iron tipped and burned a pant leg. Abdul went over, picked up the pants, and held them in the air.