Where the Air Is Sweet
A NOVEL
TASNEEM JAMAL
Dedication
For Bapa
Table of Contents
Dedication
Map
A NOTE ON TERMINOLOGY
PROLOGUE: Apollo Hotel, Kampala
PART ONE: The Early Years: 1921-1949
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
PART TWO: The Good Years: 1966-1971
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
PART THREE: The Last Years: 1971-1975
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
About the Author
Paise for WHERE THE AIR IS SWEET
Copyright
About the Publisher
Map
THE TRADITIONAL KINGDOMS OF UGANDA
A NOTE ON TERMINOLOGY
IN BRITISH ENGLISH, THE WORD ASIAN IS COMMONLY used to refer to people of South Asian ancestry (those who trace their origins to the Indian subcontinent). In North America, by contrast, Asian usually refers to people with East Asian or Southeast Asian origins. I have chosen here to retain the British English use of the term to reflect its widespread use within Uganda during the time period the novel covers.
PROLOGUE
Apollo Hotel, Kampala
AUGUST 1974
THE SWIMMING POOL IS CIRCULAR, WITH A PLAT form on one side that juts into the water. A concrete peninsula. A few years ago Mumtaz watched a local band play here. They stood on the peninsula and crooned into the black night, slipping seamlessly between Swahili and Hindi. Today, the sun is streaming down, the peninsula is empty and the voices Mumtaz hears are children laughing, people talking loudly. In Swahili. In English. In Luganda.
She is sitting on the deck wearing long trousers, a sleeveless cotton blouse and a wide-brimmed hat she bought from a vendor on the street that morning. She presses her toes into the hot concrete and watches her children. Karim lowers himself until he is fully immersed in the water. Suddenly, he jumps up so high that Mumtaz catches a glimpse of his red swim trunks. Shama laughs, shielding her face from the water he is splashing. “Again,” Shama commands. He disappears. And then he leaps out, this time towards Shama. She is frightened. Mumtaz sees the child’s body stiffen, her eyes widen. After a few moments, Shama moves away, though she remains on the outer circumference of the pool, where the water is not deep. Karim kicks his legs in the water behind him, holding on to the edge of the pool. Mumtaz sits back in her chair.
A cloud obscures the sun and everything is grey. Dull. Diminished. As though, on a cruel whim, God lifted his hand and smeared the earth with ash.
The sounds coming from in and around the pool change. It is still noisy but people are speaking in hushed and clipped tones. Mumtaz sits forward and spots Shama. She has spread her arms to her sides and is leaning back, so that her face is turned to the sky. Mumtaz can see the small cavern of her open mouth.
She scans the pool. Karim is gone. She stands up so quickly her chair skids backwards. Then she sees him. Only inches from the deck. He has lowered himself until he is neck deep in the shallow water. Hiding. He smiles at her. She shakes her head and sits down.
A waiter loses his footing. Mumtaz watches him fall, sees the tray slip from his fingers. Glasses crash onto the deck, shattering into hundreds of pieces that skid across the ground. She looks around. Everywhere there is commotion, chatter, activity. People talking quickly, barking orders: mothers to children, security men to other security men, managers to waiters. Everyone is in motion. People scrambling to get out of the pool, quickly towelling themselves off, collecting their belongings. Waiters are rushing to settle bills. Even the wind has responded, picking up pace, shaking umbrellas and sending papers flying.
A group of African men dressed in dark suits and ties has emerged from the hotel. Four soldiers stand in their midst, tightly gripping Kalashnikovs. Their postures are, to a man, poor, shoulders hunched forward, hips dropped low. Mumtaz can see their heads moving, she can see their eyes darting. Idi Amin’s army. Even here. Her rage, always at the ready, sucks oxygen from her brain, leaving her feeling slightly intoxicated, slightly disoriented. Mumtaz and her children are the only Asians at the pool. Now they must leave, before the soldiers give them trouble.
She takes a step and opens her mouth to call the children. Before she can make a sound, the soldiers move aside to reveal a barefoot President Idi Amin Dada. He is standing, undressing, exposing thick thighs, a protruding childlike belly and, incongruously, delicate ankles. He is larger than Mumtaz had imagined him to be. And she had imagined him to be large. Covered in only small, tight-fitting swim trunks, he throws his head back and laughs. She becomes aware that she has stopped breathing. She looks at the pool and inhales, exhales. Karim has lifted himself out of the water. He is walking towards her. Shama is standing in the pool, her arms held afloat by her water wings. She is facing the far deck. Mumtaz looks where Shama is looking. A boy is there, standing next to the president. He is dressed in green military fatigues, a hat strapped onto his head, black shoes on his feet, even though the midday heat is sweltering, even though he is standing on the deck of a pool. He looks Shama’s size, Shama’s age. Five.
A miniature soldier.
Mumtaz can make out lines on his forehead. His eyebrows are knitted together. His lips are held firmly shut. She follows his gaze. He is looking directly at Shama.
“Shama!” Mumtaz calls. But she does not respond. Everyone else has come out of the water. Only the tiny figure of her daughter remains. Idi Amin walks to the edge of the pool. Mumtaz feels herself beginning to shake, as though her veins can no longer accommodate the force of her rushing blood.
“Shama!” she shouts. Angrily. Sharply. Others turn to look at her. Shama, too, turns. She begins walking, her movement slowed by the resistance of the water, towards Mumtaz, who looks across the pool again. Idi Amin is still laughing, perched on the lip of the deck. She can see his teeth flashing against his skin, which appears shiny, wet, even before he has entered the water. She lowers her eyes to look at the boy, who has not moved. He is darker than the president, his skin dull, bloodless. He appears incapable of laughter. He looks only at Shama and he looks angry. She steps forward, grabs Shama’s hand and pulls her up and out of the pool. Then she looks up. The boy’s eyes have not left her child. Now they turn to Mumtaz. Her body goes cold. She lowers her eyes and removes Shama’s water wings, throwing them into a large sisal bag. Shama is speaking, asking a question. Mumtaz can hear the inflection in her voice but she cannot comprehend the words.
She glances up. The boy hasn’t shifted his eyes or his body. The soldiers are positioned directly behind him now, like four long shadows.
PART ONE
The Early Years
1921–1949
1
THE EARLIEST SENSATION RAJU REMEMBERS, about the time he started attending school at age three, was an ache, a longing for something he could not yet imagine. By the time he completed primary school, this ache had been transformed into a belief that something essential was missing here in the Gujarati village of Malia, the la
nd of his birth, the land of his ancestors. In the months before he married, before he prepared to embark on adulthood, he took to stepping outside his family’s hardware shop and standing still in the middle of the gully, grains of fine, pale dust catching in the hairs inside his nose. He would look around him at the shops he could describe to their last detail, at the houses he had known since he knew anything. Then he would close his eyes. And he would see nothing.
And so, in his twentieth year, on the very day that he buries his stillborn son, he pats his wife’s fevered forehead, picks up his neatly packed suitcase, straightens his hat and hitches a ride on a truck to Rajkot. From there he takes a crowded train to Bombay. And from there, after a week’s wait, he boards a steamship bound for the East African port of Mombasa.
The year is 1921.
The powerful current of the Indian Ocean tosses Raju about, leaving him retching and disoriented. Even when the waters are calm and the ship steady, his body refuses to be still; his head continues to spin, his stomach continues to turn and he continues to vomit. When finally, twelve days later, he steps off the steamer in Mombasa, his eyes having sunk deep into his head, his trousers now hanging on his body, he drops to his knees and kisses the ground. He stands up and begins walking, feeling his strength return with each step. As he licks the grains of dust from his lips and feels them scrape against his teeth, an elderly Asian man, barefoot and wearing only a singlet and threadbare trousers, shakes his head and laughs. In Gujarati he says to Raju: “It is an illusion. This earth moves even more than the sea.” Smiling, Raju nods and continues walking away from the ocean. “Never trust it, my son!” calls the old man after the young one.
Raju continues his journey deeper into Africa, far into a land the English named Uganda, to a town called Mbarara.
Mbarara.
The first two consonants compete for supremacy, forcing Raju to slow and then, in an infinitesimal pause of contemplation, to stop before releasing the word. In time he will learn, like the English and Asians before him, to ignore the first letter and simply and quickly pronounce it Barara, failing to give it its due, failing to give it its time.
It was from Mbarara that a letter for Raju arrived in Malia one year earlier: Come, my cousin-brother. If you work hard, this land has much to give.
Hussein Mawji left Malia fifteen years before Raju. They are related through their paternal grandfathers but Raju, who does not recall meeting Hussein, knows him only as one of many men from Malia and its neighbouring villages who went to Africa to work and to prosper. When Raju arrives in Mbarara, Hussein welcomes him into his home with a warm embrace, as though he is greeting his own brother.
“Anything you sow here grows easily and wildly,” Hussein says, his eyes unfocused and staring off towards the horizon. Raju and Hussein are sitting side by side on Hussein’s verandah. The sun is about to set and a comfortable breeze has begun to blow. “This land is generous. If a seed falls anyplace, beside a busy road, in a pit full of filth, a flower will sprout. Just like that.” Raju’s heart begins to beat quickly and his mouth breaks into a smile. “But don’t think life here is so easy,” Hussein says abruptly, succeeding in wiping the expression off Raju’s face. “You want to grow flowers? You want to grow bananas?” Raju shakes his head. “Of course not. We are not farmers. We are merchants, like our fathers and our grandfathers. But we are different from them. We are merchants in a foreign land.”
He leans forward in his chair and points a finger at Raju. “Always keep your eyes open. Look.” He moves his finger to his temple. “Think. What do people need? What can I sell them? Learn the local languages, the local customs, the local manners. Get to know this land and its people until they are familiar. Until they are yours. In this way you will create your own livelihood; you will create your own life.”
Raju looks down at his hands, which are gripping the sides of the wooden chair, and feels weightless, as though if he pushed himself off the chair and off the verandah, he would fly.
2
TWO MONTHS AFTER FIRST SETTING FOOT IN Africa, Raju is living and working in Kampala, the one-time headquarters of Uganda’s colonial administration and a slow, six-hour bus ride northeast from Mbarara.
When the first Englishmen arrived in the area half a century earlier, they found impalas roaming on the slopes of hills. The king of Buganda, the kabaka, would come down from his palace on one of these hills and hunt them. One Englishman began to refer to the place, with its abundant greenery and temperate climate, as the “hill of the impala.” Soon, others joined him. Finally, even the Baganda adopted the name. In Luganda this is translated as kasozi k’impala. When the kabaka would go to hunt, his courtiers would say, “Kabaka has gone to k’impala to hunt.”
Hussein told Raju this eight days after he arrived in Mbarara.
“I have a shop in Kampala. You will run this shop, so that very quickly you will come to know Swahili and how to do business in East Africa.”
The shop, called a duka, is a stall cut out of a wide, two-storey building that houses two more dukas besides Raju’s, plus two Asian families in the flats upstairs.
Raju lives behind the duka. The windowless room has a charpai bed, on which rests a mattress stuffed with cotton, and a small wooden chest of drawers. The floors are concrete and uneven. A large crack runs vertically, from the ceiling to the floor, on the wall that faces Raju’s bed. The crack is the first thing he sees in the morning when he wakes and the last thing he sees at night, before he puts out the kerosene lamp and drifts off to sleep. Outside the door are a toilet and a small walled-off area where Raju bathes. Above the duka lives a Hindu Gujarati family. Raju pays a small fee to the family, handing the cash each month to a wiry old lady with no teeth and hair dyed orange with henna. In return, she provides all of Raju’s meals and takes his dirty clothes and returns them two days later, washed and folded.
From Monday to Saturday, Raju works in the duka. For more than ten hours a day he sits on a stool enclosed in a four-by-six-foot-space, gunny sacks full of flour, tea, coffee and sugar pressing against his long legs. Rows of neatly lined-up biscuits, soap and canisters of oil are positioned so close to his head, if he leans back, he will bump into them.
On Fridays after work he walks to jamat khana for evening prayers. There, he sits on a mkeka mat spread on the floor, his legs crossed and cramped, so close to other men he can feel their breath.
He begins to feel like a bird in a cage. A large bird in a small cage.
On Sundays, the duka is closed and Raju is set free. He walks all day. He passes by shuttered shops and children sitting cross-legged in the red dirt. He walks by the high walls of Fort Lugard. He walks farther, up Nakasero Hill, past the Europeans-only Kampala Club, stopping to admire the English policeman directing traffic in his smart white uniform and watching Englishwomen, small pink lips and ivory chins peeking out beneath broad hats, emerge from black motor cars.
But he prefers to leave the city. He walks beyond it, moving up and down hills until he reaches a wide road leading west, deeper into Africa. There he continues to walk on the side of the road as bicycles, cars and carts, drawn by men or animals, pass him, lifting the red dust from the earth and transferring it onto him.
The rest of the week, Raju’s days are ordered and predictable. He opens the duka at 8:00 a.m. He is not tardy like the shopkeepers next to him, who begin their days slowly, some days late, some days very late. At precisely 6:30 p.m. Raju closes the duka, checking to ensure that the money in his till matches the reduction in inventory. He carefully enters the sales in a small lined notebook he keeps under his bed, with the money from the shop, when he retires to his room.
Three times a day, the old lady who lives upstairs brings tiffins containing freshly cooked, steaming food to the duka, refusing any help from Raju as she carefully manoeuvres the steps, one hand gripping the iron railing, the other holding the stack of stainless-steel tiffins.
She has green tattoos on the backs of her hands and on her f
orearms, like Raju’s mother has. On his mother’s taut, tanned skin, the tattoos are beautiful, intricate depictions of flowers and trees. On the elderly woman’s wrinkled skin they look like enlarged, broken veins.
“Kha, kha,” she says, her gnarled fingers raised towards him, gesturing him to eat, her tiny black eyes staring at him as he unstacks the tiffins and begins peering inside. Her back is severely curved and her bones bulge under her skin, but she seems to Raju powerful rather than fragile.
She reminds him of a crow.
The food she cooks is tasty and Raju looks forward to his meals, but the amount of red chili she uses leaves his tongue scalded. Even her moong dal makes his nose run and his eyes water. For years afterwards, whenever Raju will think of Kampala, he will reflexively rub his tongue against the roof of his mouth and feel it go numb.
The Crow sits on the floor beside Raju’s stool, folding her small body until she fits into little more than a square foot of space, and watches him as he begins to eat. When she is satisfied that he is eating with relish and therefore approves of the meal, she unfolds herself, stands up and returns to her flat, her champals slapping the concrete stairs as she ascends.
A small boy, seven or eight years old, comes down about thirty minutes later to fetch the empty tiffins. The first time the boy comes, Raju smiles and says hello. The boy’s eyes open wide in terror. Then he looks down at his bare, dirty feet and his entire body begins to shake. Raju pats his back in an attempt to comfort him. But the boy turns around and runs.
“Is he your grandson?” Raju asks the Crow later.
She looks at him, raising her chin so high up in the air he can see the grey hairs inside her nose. Then she lowers her chin, fixes her black eyes on him and spits out the words as though they are poison. “He is the son of my son. His mother was a karki who died giving birth to him.”
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