“We have hardly spoken in four months. And now this?”
“Because you talked nonsense about divorce. I know you don’t want to end our marriage. I know you’re tired and frustrated. This is a crazy situation. Our whole family, our community has lost everything. It isn’t something that I can deal with in a few weeks. Did you think I would abandon you? Our children?”
“We have been alone, I and your children, almost since the time we left Uganda.”
“You wouldn’t accept money from me.”
“What about your promises, that you were moving here in a few weeks?”
“The plan was to move here, but then Amir and I began to realize things were okay in Uganda, in Kampala. Day-to-day life is okay.”
She looks at him. She isn’t angry. She is confused. She is tired.
“Idi Amin is making mistakes, angering his own army, everyone,” he says. “Another coup will easily take him out, any day now. When he is gone, they will beg Asians to come back. In the meantime, we are doing well. We are making money.”
She turns her head towards the ceiling and closes her eyes.
“I shouldn’t have kept promising, but I didn’t know if it would work there. No one could predict anything. I wanted to give you hope, something to hang on to because I knew how hard it was for you. So I kept saying I was coming. It was stupid now when I look back. I made it worse. I’m sorry. Please, Mumtaz, I’m so sorry.”
She turns to him. He has been talking quickly, so quickly that his breaths are shallow.
“I’m here. We’re together. You don’t need to work. I’ll work and look after you, the children and Bapa. Karim and Shama have their father again. You have your husband again. Mumtaz, it’s time to go back.”
“If I won’t?”
“Then I’ll stay,” he says quickly. “I won’t go without you.”
She looks at him, at his eyes, probing them, looking for something that will betray his real intentions. She gives up and looks away again.
“I’m a man, Mumtaz. I need to look after my family. There, I can do it. I know how. Let me do it in the way I know.”
A week later, Mumtaz tells Karen that she is moving back to Uganda.
Karen is quiet. She tucks her hair behind her ear. “It will be difficult for Karim and Shama. Can you wait until the school year finishes?”
Mumtaz shakes her head. “It would be too disruptive for my husband’s work.”
“What does he do?”
Mumtaz looks past Karen at the chalkboard. She doesn’t know. “He imports. He exports,” she says, repeating Jaafar’s phrases.
“Is it safe there?”
“Uganda is not Canada. But I’ll have my family together. The children will have their father.”
“Shama is in kindergarten so the change might be less jarring. But Karim is in second grade—he likes it here. He’s made friends. His teacher says he speaks up in class. Finally. He is really thriving.”
“He needs his father,” Mumtaz says quickly. “Children need their parents more than a nice teacher.”
“I’m not suggesting you don’t go.” Karen’s face has become pink, the pink growing beyond her face, down her neck, forming a patch on her pale chest. The patch is the shape, Mumtaz thinks with some amusement, of Africa on a map, deep, jagged, coming to a point. “I think if Karim and Shama could somehow finish their year, it would really help. It would give them some stability to have had one full year in the same school.”
“I know you mean well,” Mumtaz says. “You have been nothing but good to me and my children. But I know the cost of growing up without a proper family. I can’t let my children bear what I have borne.”
Karen straightens her skirt and clears her throat. “You have been taking care of your children on your own. You know you don’t need your husband. Why are you clinging to him?”
“It isn’t only about me and my husband. It isn’t so simple.”
Karen lowers her eyes.
“My husband is trying to look after his family. He could have handled things differently, it’s true. He’s made mistakes. But he has come to us now. He wants to take care of us. I must go with him.”
Karen shakes her head.
“I won’t destroy our family.”
“But what about you?” Karen asks. “What’s best for you?”
Mumtaz knows that no matter what she says, Karen will not understand. A Canadian woman who lives alone and sleeps with her lover on weekends cannot understand. But she says it anyways. “What’s best for me is what’s best for my children. Alone, I can work to feed and clothe my children. I can keep a roof over their heads. But they will be vulnerable in other ways. He’s not a bad man. He’s a good father. I won’t be the one to take their father from them. I could never forgive myself.”
“Vulnerable? Do you mean they won’t be respectable? Mumtaz, it isn’t like that here, not anymore.”
“But it is for us, for my family, for my people, no matter where we are.”
“Then leave your family. Leave your people. Won’t you do that for your children?”
“Leave them? How can we leave them? Where will we belong then? If I am forced to choose between my family and a country in which I am an outsider, I choose my family.”
“Mumtaz—”
“What happens when people here begin to hate us? When they believe we are taking what is theirs?”
“Canada will not throw you out. People here are educated. We have laws, protections. Once you get your citizenship they can never throw you out.”
“My husband needs to live in Uganda,” she says, punctuating each word. “It’s what he knows. It’s where he is strong. I don’t know if he’s right, if things will return to normal. I know it will never be the same. We can never trust Africans again. But who can we trust? Only our family. I will keep my family intact. I will do that for my children.”
Mumtaz walks towards the door.
“What will you do if your family turns on you?” Karen asks. “When it’s your family that hurts your children?”
Mumtaz stops at the threshold of the classroom. She closes her eyes. The question does not penetrate her mind. She will not let it. She smiles. “Thank you, Karen. For everything.”
As the plane begins to move down the runway, Mumtaz pats Karim’s hand. He is staring out the window at the rain falling onto the tarmac. She can hear Shama giggling in front of them, sitting between her father and her grandfather. “We’ll find you a better school in Kampala,” she tells him. “Everything will be fine. We’re going home.”
“Kampala is not home.” His voice is flat. He does not turn to look at her.
She opens her mouth to speak, to refute him, and then closes it again. The plane accelerates and pushes her against her seat. She closes her eyes, relaxes her body and surrenders to the invisible force shoving her backwards.
30
THE MOMENT MUMTAZ STEPS OFF THE AIRPLANE, a gust of thick, warm air rushes towards her. Her mouth is slightly open and she has no choice but to suck the air into her lungs. The sensation momentarily disorients her and she stops moving. She closes her eyes and reminds herself that she has arrived. That she is home. Slowly, she begins to walk down the steps, one hand on the railing, the other clutching Shama’s hand. When they reach the ground, the girl pulls free and sprints to catch up to Jaafar, Raju and Karim, who are walking ahead.
Mumtaz looks around. The terminal building is intact. The trees in the distance are as lush as she remembers them. But it is different. It is quiet.
The airport looks hollowed out. No planes are taking off or landing. No army Jeeps patrol the tarmac. Inside the terminal, no families are gathered, chattering, waiting for loved ones. When Mumtaz stands in front of the customs officer, he barely lifts his eyes to look at her. He says nothing as he stamps her passport.
The car park is almost empty. Burezu, the family driver, is standing next to a small red Peugeot 204, his eyes on the ground in front of him. Mumtaz stops w
hen she sees him. They are five, plus Burezu. How will they fit in that car? In response to her silent question, a taxi appears. Jaafar raises his hand, a cigarette tucked between his first and second fingers, and gestures to Burezu, who begins to load the suitcases into the taxi.
A few minutes later, Jaafar is driving the Peugeot northeast on Entebbe Road, towards Kampala. Mumtaz is sitting beside him in the passenger seat, the children in the back seat. Raju is following in the taxi with Burezu. Even after an exhausting cross-Atlantic flight, Jaafar will not relinquish the steering wheel. He is driving quickly. The roadblocks have disappeared. Mumtaz no longer needs to worry about soldiers pointing Kalashnikovs into the car, near her pounding chest, next to her children’s small faces. She stares out the window at the red soil sprouting rows of plantain trees and corrugated-iron shacks. Everything is smaller than she remembers it, as though she has grown, as though when she left sixteen months earlier she was a child and now she has returned a woman.
When they reach Kampala, the car slows at the clock-tower roundabout. Mumtaz watches a man walking on the side of the road. His shirt is filthy. It billows on his slender frame like a flag on a mast. He walks with his head lowered, his shoulders drawn inward. Like a beaten dog.
Jaafar shifts gears. The Peugeot picks up pace, moving quickly again, and the man disappears.
Mumtaz turns to glance at the back seat. Jaafar catches her eye and smiles. She cannot manage a smile. Her husband is beside her. Their family is together again. She made the right decision to leave Canada and return to Uganda. But the silence that has descended here is heavy, fraught. It is drowning her.
Over the next few days, Mumtaz brings plants into their new flat in the suburb of Rubaga. She changes the bedding. She hires a seamstress to make curtains for all the windows in her flat and in the adjacent flat where Raju and Amir are staying. She makes regular trips to the market, where a seemingly endless supply of fruits and vegetables is thrown onto the backs of wooden carts, onto the ground, wilting, spoiling, the smell of rot seeping into the tarmac, into the air. Shops advertising everything else—dry goods, medicine, hardware, clothing, shoes, toys, cleaning products, electronics—are almost completely empty, their shelves covered in dust. Still, proprietors sit behind the counters, ready to accept payment for goods they do not offer.
One day, Mumtaz enters Hirji Camera and Supplies. In the dimly lit shop, she sees no cameras, no film, nothing to indicate what this shop sells or once sold. Damp clothes hang on a rope strung across the length of the room; an empty kerosene container lies on its side on the floor. When Mumtaz turns to leave, she accidentally kicks a small sagri placed next to the door. It tips over. She crouches down to set it upright, expecting to find spilled coals and ash. But she finds nothing; the sagri was empty. She sees a young woman in the back corner of the shop, gripping an aluminum saucepan in her hand. The woman is looking at her. She is squinting, her hand held up to shield her eyes from the sunlight streaming into the shop. Mumtaz stands and leaves.
Each time she goes out, Mumtaz drives herself, refusing to let Burezu take her. But she is frightened. Why she is frightened, she cannot say. She has seen only two or three soldiers, and they paid no attention to her. No one looks at her or seems to notice her presence, though she is the only Asian on the street. People avoid her, but it is not only her they avoid. They avoid one another, their eyes sharply averted as they walk. It is as though they are trying to hide, trying to disappear into themselves. But things are better than they were, she tells herself, just as Jaafar promised her.
It is evening and the children are asleep. Mumtaz is sitting at the dining table with Raju. They are drinking tea and he is eating gajjar halva she made that afternoon. Jaafar is in Nairobi on business.
“Do you think we will return home?” Raju asks, chewing slowly. Mumtaz looks at him blankly. She waits while he swallows. “To Mbarara?”
She opens her mouth to answer but a sound in the distance, a powerful, brief explosion, stops her. Another explosion follows it, and then another, and then another, until the sounds quicken to a staccato. Mumtaz feels her bowels loosen.
“They are far. They aren’t nearby,” Raju says, standing up, turning to the window.
She runs to the children’s bedroom. Mercifully, the sounds have not woken them. Her hands are trembling as she pulls the sheets over their ears. When she returns to the sitting room, Raju hasn’t moved.
“Bapa, my children are in there. I have only cotton sheets to protect them. Guns are firing outside—”
“The boy came in,” Raju says, interrupting her, still looking out the window. “He told me this happens sometimes in the nights. The soldiers fight among themselves. This happens.”
“This happens?” Mumtaz can feel her body shaking. It is moving, almost imperceptibly, forward and backwards. But she is no longer afraid. She is angry. “The houseboy told you this? What happens? What has this place become? Where has your son brought us?”
Raju turns slowly to look at Mumtaz. The colour has drained from his face. She regrets her words, the harshness of her tone. Before she can apologize, he raises his hands, palms open and flat, towards her.
“Maaf karje,” he says. Forgive me.
“Why is our house called Rubaga Flats? Everywhere around us are hills.”
Raju smiles at Shama’s question. He has taken the children for an outing in the Peugeot 204. Burezu is driving and Shama and Karim are sitting in the back seat.
“Flats means apartments, stupid,” Karim says.
“Shama is right,” Raju says. “Kampala has many hills. We live on Rubaga Hill. The kabaka used to have a palace nearby. First it was on Rubaga Hill, then on Mengo Hill.”
“Can we see it?” Shama asks.
Raju shakes his head. “The army lives there now.”
“Like our house in Mbarara.” Karim’s voice is dull. He has become a sullen child.
“Where does the kabaka live then?” Shama asks.
“Some years ago, just before Karim was born, the kings in Uganda had to give up their kingdoms.”
The children are quiet.
“Do you know?” Raju says loudly. “The palace of Buganda never remained in one place.” He turns to the back seat. “When the kabaka died, his palace became his tomb. His son, the new kabaka, built a new palace on a new hill. Each kabaka built a new palace on a new hill.”
“Until he died and his palace became a tomb, too?” Karim asks.
Raju nods. “But after an Englishman named Captain Lugard came many years ago and built a fort, this palace remained. And now, it is not a palace anymore.”
“It’s a barracks,” Karim says.
“Vando na,” Shama says. It doesn’t matter. “The new kabaka will find another hill. He has to build a new palace anyways.”
Raju laughs softly, quietly. Not heartily.
It is evening. Mumtaz is setting the table. She hears men’s voices coming from outside. She moves closer to the door. Someone is speaking to the houseboy. She recognizes the voice. It is a man, an African. He is asking if this is Jaafar Ismail’s home. She rushes to the door. She has not seen George since before the coup, three years ago. His face is drawn, his lips dry and cracked. His eyes are bloodshot. He looks frail. She hugs him. It is inappropriate. She doesn’t hug Jaafar’s friends. She doesn’t even hug Jaafar in front of anyone. But she can’t stop herself.
Later, after the children are tucked into bed, they gather in the sitting room, Mumtaz, Raju, Jaafar, Amir and George. Amid a haze of cigarette smoke and the sounds of distant gunfire, George tells his story.
“The day of the coup I wasn’t in Kampala. My father-in-law needed cataract surgery and so my wife, the boys and I were with him in Nairobi. We had planned to travel to Mombasa afterwards for a holiday. Instead, after the news, we remained a few days in Nairobi, listening to reports. I was hoping to see Obote there after his plane was diverted. But he almost immediately left for Dar es Salaam. I called my office. My minister, the cabinet
minister I work for, was gone. My father-in-law thought it would not be safe for me to return to Kampala. He bought us tickets to fly to Dar es Salaam. He returned home. I thought Obote could get back, undo this coup. I thought we would be back at work in days. Over time, as others arrived, we started hearing how Amin pulled it off.
“While Obote was in Singapore, soldiers were told if they didn’t take their back leave immediately, they would lose it. Half of the soldiers at the barracks were on leave. And for months Amin had been filling the ranks with his tribesmen and with Nubis. The night of the coup they took all the armouries right away, but first they took the biggest, Malire, right up here in Mengo. In the end there was little resistance.”
“The bloodless coup,” Jaafar says.
George laughs all of a sudden. Then abruptly stops. “The blood quickly began to pour,” he says. “Officers were trucked into Makindye prison, near Malire. They named cells ‘Singapore,’ where Obote was at the time of the coup and ‘Dar es Salaam,’ where he was afterwards. Forty officers at a time were killed. Their heads smashed with guns and hammers. They used bayonets, pangas and dynamite. And they made other prisoners clean up the blood and bits of brain and bone.”
It is quiet.
Then George speaks again. “This is Amin’s method. Kill any perceived enemies, perceived threats. It’s simple. For a simple man and his simple henchmen. He’d have killed Asians if he thought he could get away with it. But his instinct for survival is too strong. He can kill as many of us as he wants. The world’s tolerance for slaughtered Africans is without limit.”
“Britain will do nothing to stop him,” Amir says in a monotone.
“And what has any African country done to stop him?” George asks.
“What was Obote’s plan for the Asian problem?” Amir asks.
George blinks quickly and shakes his head. “I don’t know.”
“George,” Mumtaz says, “why did Obote make Idi Amin the head of his military?”
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