by M G Vassanji
Zera, always fleshy, had put on more weight at an alarming rate. There were many among Don Mills’ Dar immigrants who in their first three months of consuming potato chips and french fries and root beer simply burst out of the clothes they had come with. Happily for Nurdin, his wife, out of her sense of modesty, did not take to cutting her hair or wearing pants, as many other women started doing, regardless of the size of their buttocks. So there were homely women, who had always dressed in long frocks, suddenly emerging swinging immense hips clothed in brightly coloured acrylic pants, and you couldn’t help looking and feeling ashamed at the same time.
For Zera, such questions of modesty were referred to the Master himself, Missionary, who reflected on values and tradition, and sent his verdict: If you wear pants, cover your behinds. An ardent request was submitted by Zera and his other former pupils, begging him to emigrate. We are desperate for guidance, they said. Life here is full of pitfalls. Children come home from school with questions we can’t answer. And want to celebrate Christmas. They sent him a long list of innocent-looking items that contained pork by-products, from bread to toothpaste. What is a by-product? Please come. He was said to be considering.
On weekend evenings most Dar Shamsis went to the mosque, held at a school gym on Eglinton Avenue, a destination every bus driver on the 26 route had come to recognize, at which he would let off nervous newcomers whether the stop button had been pressed or not. The newcomer, gazing intently out of the window at familiar-looking people converging in small groups to a place he didn’t quite know, would look up thankfully at the driver and step down with relief, spirits already soaring.
At the mosque a mukhi sat presiding from under a basketball ring. Here after prayers the newcomers announced themselves: tourists seeking spouses, jobs, ultimately reasons to stay; immigrants, en route to Calgary, Edmonton, or Vancouver, or simply staying in Toronto; visitors from south of the border. Once they had announced themselves the news would spread. So-and-so has come. What news from Dar? What price sugar? Do they mug you yet in the mosque in New York? And if they were staying in the city, the insurance agents would brace themselves, taking notes, keeping tabs – when the so-and-so’s found a job, when an apartment. And finally some evening one of them would knock on the door – a former teacher perhaps, his own genial self, with all the authority of his old status, asking a thousand ifs – pointing out at once the virtues and the shaky foundations of this new existence. Insure, not against revolutions, but death.
On Saturday evenings after mosque, Nurdin and Zera would watch TV with the children. Or leaving them in the apartment, they would go up to the eighteenth floor to the open house, to watch people playing cards and to chitchat over tea, to find out the news in Dar – the status of roads and food prices and the dollar price – all, reassuringly, bad. And, perhaps, to meet “the boys,” as Zera called them, the two new friends they had made, and if “the boys” were so inclined, to bring them home.
6
In the cavernous lobby of Sixty-nine, somewhat away from the path of the daily traffic, is a circular platform raised a foot and a half high, often used as a bench. In the centre, seated on a stool, a plaster goddess takes in with dumb composure all that goes on in the lobby, the comings and goings, the rendezvous, the daily battles with the elevators. Nude, long legged, her one hand rests purposely on her lap, the other raised to hold up something that’s long been dislodged. She is, for all those who pass under her stony gaze, a real, if a little mysterious, presence. Her nose is bruised, giving her the look of an antique statue, and the white plaster of her substance has invited many a creative hand to improvise on her features with chalk and markers, which the successive supers have patiently tried to wipe clean, leaving instead a dull grey skin. The lap has enough room so that on a Friday or Saturday night you might see some drunk taking comfort. Sometimes the raised hand holds a flower or a book or an umbrella, other times something more private or obscene. And once a pious Hindu pressed the lady into the ranks of the gopis by placing beside her a brass statuette of the flute player, the gopi-seducer Krishna.
Under the neutral gaze of this Aphrodite or Lakshmi, some male inhabitants of Sixty-nine would gather in the mornings to discuss “life and politics,” while their wives or mothers would be out at work or rolling chappatis upstairs in the apartments or, to be fair, out on their own breaks. This was the Don Mills A-T, men sitting in a circle on the goddess’s platform, and standing around, sipping tea, sharing snacks, chatting.
At a little after nine in the morning Jamal would descend in an elevator, clutching close to him an old black briefcase. If you happened to be with him and wondered out loud, or silently with a sniff, to inquire where the smell of samosas was coming from this early in the morning, Jamal would give a louder sniff as rejoinder and agree forcefully: “These Pakis! Cooking twenty-four hours a day!” He might grin with his large mouth, brushing with his fingers his shiny black moustache in amusement. Altogether a friendly, not to say gregarious, fellow. One to begin conversations, not end them. Everyone at Sixty-nine knew him.
Jamal had been a lawyer back in Dar. More precisely, a junior but important constitutional expert in the government. Someone who had advised on the criminality of shady shopkeepers and corrupt cabinet ministers, helped to produce amendments and draft papers on emergency procedures, was now emerging from a Don Mills elevator, clutching the same briefcase that had hidden secrets of state but was now hiding samosas destined for sale at the nearest tuck-shop. The irony would be lost on Jamal, because for him there was new ground to conquer.
Jamal was the only son of a mathematics teacher who was part Persian and dreamt of a new Africa. In 1950, Jamal’s father, influenced by the liberating optimism of the postwar era, founded a magazine of ideas called Atom. Its focus was the future, and its faith was the commonly espoused belief that Africa would in a few decades be like America. In one of its issues it favoured African independence, going so far as including on that subject an article by an African and another by an Indian from India. As if that was not enough, in a later issue the idea of racial integration was given serious thought. If the previous generation of pioneers could have intermarried or cohabited, so went the argument, what stopped the new generation from “mixing with our African brethren?” The community elders were perturbed, and so perhaps were the police. There was already some agitation by the Africans in neighbouring Kenya. It was suggested to Jamal the elder that perhaps the articles in his magazine should first be vetted by some committee so that nothing untoward or damaging was published. He should consider including recipes and jokes, brainteasers; the look of the magazine could surely be improved, there was money available. He refused. Thence began his downfall. A pretext was found to dismiss him from the community-run school: he did not have an education diploma. His decline was further aided by his own ineptness in all matters worldly. His wife took up support of the family, from which burden she found relief only after many years. Atom folded when its printer refused to donate his services any longer.
The boy Jamal (nicknamed “The Persian”) was bright but misunderstood, an attention-getter, coarse and loud, tolerated by friends, an irritant to teachers. He could finish school only by going up-country, barely surviving two years of rigour away from the city. It says much for the final examination system, in which you simply put down your number on your paper and allowed yourself to be judged by anonymous examiners in Cambridge, that Jamal passed with flying colours the Higher School Certificate exam and was given a law scholarship by a ministry of education with no contact with the shopkeepers. The country was independent by then.
After finishing his degree he was recruited by the government. A brilliant political career surely lay ahead of him. He had already shone in student politics. He was outspoken, though charismatic and bright. He only had to play it right, to move up. But then the infamous nationalization of rental properties took place, the Great Betrayal that rocked the Asian community. Ways were now sought to mislead the
government’s grasping hand. Those who had despised his father came to him for his help. How they bowed and scraped before him, practically offered their daughters now, they who would not let him sit in their cars and would look to see if he had washed his feet when he came with their sons to their homes. And how Jamal had felt contempt at these cheap attempts to buy his influence.
One night, however, he received a phone call from a colleague warning him that a request for permission of his arrest was circulating in certain circles. Jamal did not wait to find out what, if anything, he had said or done. He fled overnight, at about the time the Lalanis were trying to obtain their Canadian visas. Jamal flew to Cuba, an attractive place for idealistic young men in those days. International politics intervened, however; he was not allowed to stay. He went to Brazil then, where he sold rugs for a year – in effect becoming a shopkeeper – and learned Portuguese, until his visa to go to Canada arrived.
By the time Jamal returned from the tuck-shop with his black briefcase now relieved of its oily contents, seated at the foot of the goddess, holding a mug of coffee and reading a magazine, would be Nanji, a former classmate. “What, reading the Sun?” Jamal would comment with a wide grin, and Nanji would look up with a smile from reading material far more serious. “So, what brief did you carry today?” would be his sarcastic reply.
Unlike Jamal’s erratic and somewhat precarious academic career, Nanji’s had been straightforward. School had conferred upon him also an identity based on his surname. Brilliant throughout, he had won a scholarship to a prestigious American university. Another brilliant career, it seemed, spawned at the same school by the same shopkeeper community. But the world had caught the community dreaming and ill-prepared as it now found its youth. From all the possible disciplines he could have chosen, Nanji picked a branch of linguistics in which there were not many jobs. So he taught an evening course at Woodsworth College and whiled away the rest of his time talking and reading.
His looks reflected his anxious nature. Tall, with a high forehead, sunken eyes, face marked with the remains of youthful acne, always in ill-fitting clothes. When the two former classmates met in Toronto after seven years, an instant friendship developed where once there had been contempt on one side and suspicion on the other. Jamal, outgoing, full of mischief, now waiting for a place in a Canadian law school while looking for women to take to bed, and tall, stern Nanji, with all the moral weight of the world on his shoulders, reading the existentialists and despairing.
“You know,” Nanji told Jamal, in all earnestness, the first week they met, “the only choice, real choice, man has in the world is whether to go on living … or to commit suicide, end this absurd existence. Have you thought of that? Compared to this, all other questions are trivial, frivolous, irrelevant.”
“Bana! Wow! You’ve hit me between the eyes, man. Who else could have thought of that!”
“It’s not my original idea, I assure you,” Nanji protested in embarrassment. Jamal, without the benefit of a liberal arts education, showed a naïveté sometimes that was simply unsettling, as unsettling as his commonsensical to-the-point reasoning.
“But suppose I use my free will to decide to go on with this absurd existence, as you call it.… ”
“Well, if you really choose that … to go on living … then you live with that choice facing you every moment of your life. You are truly alive. Most people go on mindlessly of course, they don’t choose to live. That’s because they do what they are told or made to do.… And think of this: when death comes unasked, when it takes you by surprise, it will rob you of even this free choice, because when you thought you were choosing to live, it was only letting you live. The only way you can exercise free will, defeating it, is by taking your own life.”
All this in utmost seriousness.
Jamal grinned. “My friend, you don’t see many philosophers exercising their free will!”
Nanji smiled. “Well, they say that the body has a greater desire to live than the mind to perish.”
“Wow!”
Questions of morality and ethics, of good faith and compromise tormented Nanji. Suppose you were walking on a road and saw on a side street a person being attacked. What would you do, risk your life or that of the other person? Questions that, to Jamal at least, had a simple answer: save the person you can be sure of saving, yourself, and try to save the other by fetching help. But there was an idealism in the other, a death instinct perhaps, that refused this cold-blooded utilitarian logic. Suppose a girl was being raped, he would say. And then torment himself further by asking himself, Why this obsession with rape? What sins, evil desires, was he covering up? All existences make me anxious, from the smallest fly to the mysteries of Incarnation.…
“It seems,” he told Jamal, “that to become westernized, which is what we’ve opted for by coming here, we have to go back and battle by battle relive all their battles – spiritual struggles. How can you otherwise assimilate generations of experience – only now we’ve reached the Age of Reason.… ”
“But isn’t that better, Nanji? Our God is not dead, we are better off – ”
“Can we survive here, with our God … can He survive?”
So the two constantly discussed questions of life and death, at least to Nanji, Jamal often sceptical but egging him on. For Jamal was affected less by the contents of the thought than by the process itself: to be discussing with someone so obviously qualified as Nanji thrilled him. “Wait,” he would promise, “when I’ve made my millions I will have all the intellectuals like you and artists and musicians around me, my own durbar where you don’t have to worry about mundane things like where your next meal is going to come from.… ”
At the foot of the goddess, now, others would arrive and join in the conversation, which naturally flowed into more jolly directions. The A-T was in session. Tea would be fetched, and samosas. Among the men here there was an unspoken democracy, regardless of education, age, and social background. The former bandmaster Ramju would arrive from the fourteenth floor for a break from the chappatis, leading two noisy toddlers in a march, out for an ostensible walk, which their parents demanded. Ramju would sit on the pedestal and the children would run around the lobby, under his stern bloodshot eyes, and whenever they got into a fight or started to cry, he would shout at them “Shaddup!” And the two toddlers would reply “Shaddup! Shaddup!”
At first the Lalanis took Nanji for a simple young man, from a small town perhaps. He seemed shy. Nurdin even asked him if they were hiring where he worked. He had politely said no, realizing the reason why they had invited him to lunch. “What factory do you work at?” Nurdin asked, and Nanji had painfully cleared his throat, blood rushing to his face. “Oh, I work at the University of Toronto. Part time, of course.”
“Wow! said Fatima. “Do you teach there?”
“Yes.”
“Wow! Are you a professor or something?”
“Sort of. Part time.”
“Wow.”
Nurdin and Zera exchanged an embarrassed look and then tried to appear interested in his work, as he helped them change the subject.
It did inflame Nanji sometimes the way he was taken for a labourer and even a shopkeeper. He should not have mentioned the incident to Jamal, but he did, and Jamal, the next time he saw Nurdin, said to him, “So, Nurdin, we hear you want to be a professor.” And Nurdin suffered that jibe, fending it off as best as he could by laughing with the rest.
But they came to love Nanji for his simplicity and his humility and that helpless, lost look he bore. When they fed him, he ate well, with relish, cleaning his plate, while he answered the questions with which all four plied him. They were sure he was a lonely young man – and a hungry one as well.
In Zera he brought forth a mixture of maternal and sisterly feelings. “Make this your home,” she had said, and he had consented gratefully. When he hadn’t shown his face for a few days, she would fret, and worry lest she did anything to make her partiality to him known to his
friend, Jamal. Because Jamal, she told Nurdin, is like a dormant snake – walk carefully when near him, he cannot help striking. Best of all, for her, she could talk religion with Nanji. He was an agnostic, almost. He had reached this path through study and thought, by opening the door to doubt, so that quite naturally religious questions interested him. In all these discussions, Nanji never professed a faith or showed piety, discussing clinically yet showing such intimate knowledge of the faith. Perhaps his lost, innocent look suggested piety to his hosts. On the other hand Zera was no fool and surely guessed that Nanji did not practise, but anyone who spent so much time thinking and reading about religion was, must be, religious.
The two children loved him. “Finally,” said Fatima one day, “I know someone here – two people” – she took note of Jamal – “that I can respect. Isn’t that something?” Much to the consternation of her mother. Fatima’s two heroes had been “out there” in the world, had been accepted there, they had independent views, could explain the world to her. No reverting to Swahili and making silly jokes she did not find funny, about the differences between “back there” and “out here.” Nanji was also a playmate and companion to her and Hanif; he taught them how to play imaginary cricket, using only a pencil, and chess and backgammon, and went to the library and the Science Centre with them, buying them hamburgers and pizza without converting dollars to shillings in his mind. So taken was she with this young man whose only pants were Levi’s that she swore she would never wear dresses.