Where the Air is Sweet

by Tasneem Jamal

  “They are not there,” Raju says loudly. “They are gone.”

  He sees Mumdu’s shoulders fall, slightly, almost imperceptibly.

  “But we are here.” He pats Mumdu’s back. It is the first time he has touched his son in more than twenty-five years. He holds his hand on him. Mumdu looks at him. “We are here.”

  It is late Sunday night. Mumtaz is watching Jaafar drink whiskey. He is leaving for Entebbe in the morning and he asked her to stay awake and talk with him, sit with him. She wanted to refuse. But he is drunk and she was afraid if she said no, he would speak loudly, shout, and the noise would wake the children.

  “The Jiwanis never paid me the money they stole. They robbed those Asians who thought they were leaving their money in safe hands. Those Asians who trusted me. Amir is convinced it was the Jiwanis who sent the army after me. And I never got another cent from Mubinga.” He looks at her. “I can’t go to Mbarara and get my money without risking ending up dead in the barracks.” He shakes his head. “I can’t go to my hometown to get a few thousand dollars for all that my father built because a fellow Asian, a fellow Ismaili, has sent Idi Amin’s lunatic soldiers after me.” He rests his head on the back of the sofa. He is slouching so much he looks as though he will slide off it.

  “You’re doing all this for Bapa?” Mumtaz asks. She makes no attempt to hide the disgust in her voice.

  “Bapa spent so much time putting down the foundation of a house. I’ve never built a house. But I always thought he spent too long on the foundation.”

  She stands up. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” She is going to bed. He is no longer coherent.

  “At first, I stayed to salvage something of what Bapa had built and what I had helped build up. And now I don’t know what I’m doing.”

  She looks at him. His eyes are on his glass. He is shaking it so that the gold liquid inside it moves in waves, like an angry sea.

  “I can’t build anything,” he says. “What’s the point when the foundation is sand?”

  She begins walking to the stairs. The floor feels warm under the soles of her cold feet.

  “Mumtaz,” he says, in almost a whisper. She stops but she does not turn to face him. “How do I stop doing what I know how to do? How do I stop being what I am?”

  “I don’t know.” She says the words before any thoughts enter her mind. She closes her mind. She has closed her mind. She walks up the stairs quickly. The rage she has begun to feel towards her husband ebbs and flows, descending on her as suddenly as a thunderstorm on a humid afternoon and disappearing just as quickly.

  She climbs immediately into bed. But she is still awake an hour later when he comes into the bedroom and gets into bed beside her. Only when she hears him lightly snoring does she let herself fall asleep.

  37

  THE SKY THIS MORNING IS DARK GREY, NOT A RAY of sunlight breaking through. When Mumtaz walked out the front door with the children earlier, Karim groaned. Shama smiled.

  “Rain clouds look like a big blanket,” Shama told Mumtaz once. “If I am under a big blanket, I can hide. Then bad things can’t hurt me.”

  Mumtaz touched the back of Shama’s neck gently. “If you are hiding, you won’t see the good things.”

  Shama smiled. “Maybe I can peek sometimes,” she said. Mumtaz is standing now, leaning against the gate, watching her children. They will be late for school if she does not send them off soon. But she does not want to stop looking at them. Karim is squatting like a frog. Concentrating. A warm breeze blows some stray hairs from Shama’s forehead as she sits cross-legged beside him. There is a thickness in the air and on the ground, as though everything in nature, the sky and the trees and the leaves and the flowers, is swollen and ready to burst. Mumtaz can hear the din of traffic. The smell of fumes tickles the hair in her nostrils. She inhales. The sharp smell of petrol washes through her head and makes her smile. It is a familiar, comforting smell. The smell of Jaafar after work. Karim’s bony thumb and forefinger release a stone. It bounces on the ground next to a lizard. It darts so quickly to the side, Mumtaz doesn’t know how it did it. Did it jump off all its limbs at once? Or did one, then two, then three, then four leave the ground? Karim laughs. He has a high-pitched squeal of a laugh. Shama laughs with him. Her voice is deeper, heavier, coming from farther back in her throat. All of a sudden, the lizard darts towards Shama. She jumps. So quickly Mumtaz doesn’t know which body part left the ground first. She is on her feet. Laughter gone. She is panting. Her hands are out in front of her, slightly opened, ready to fight. The lizard darts again, away from her. Mumtaz smiles. She hears Karim squeal, rolling on the earth, his white shirt picking up the red dust, his large knobby knees in the air as he rocks from side to side on his back. Laughing.

  And then the rain comes down.

  All morning the thunder is relentless and the rain punishing. Mumtaz is stepping out of the shower when she hears the telephone ringing in the sitting room. She runs down the stairs, a towel wrapped around her, and picks it up. Jaafar is talking quickly. The line is not clear. She hears a clap of thunder. She asks him to repeat himself. When he is finished, her mind processes his words and then slowly creates a series of images, each of which sucks more and more air from her lungs, until she is on the floor, lying on her side, her hand clinging to the receiver so tightly her arm is shaking.

  Jaafar cleared customs at Embakasi Airport, he was walking to the car in the pouring rain, a soaked newspaper over his head. He did not reach the car. He was arrested.

  Mumtaz drives as though someone else has inhabited her body. She does not know who is making the decision to shift gears, to press down on the brake, to turn the steering wheel. Somehow, she arrives at the police station in the suburb of Embakasi, near the airport.

  She looks at Jaafar through iron bars. He is talking rapidly.

  “The police have my leather case. It contains a cache of open airline tickets, my passport, our documents, marriage certificate, the children’s birth certificates, the deeds to our seized properties.”

  Mumtaz breathes slowly to counter the force of Jaafar’s energy, which is pulling her in, stealing her strength. She reaches forward and holds the bars to balance herself. He wraps his hands tightly around hers, so tightly the pain in her fingers is unbearable.

  “Please, Jaafar,” she says. “Let go.”

  From memory he recites a telephone number. The man who will answer the phone can arrange to deliver cash to their house, Jaafar explains. Mumtaz is to bring the money to the police station in the morning so that Jaafar can be released. She has no paper. She has no pen. She reaches into her purse and pulls out her lipstick. She lifts the sleeve of her blouse up to her elbow and writes the telephone number on the inside of her arm with the lipstick. Jaafar smiles.

  Mumtaz knocks on Raju’s bedroom door. He had been drawing the curtains when he heard her. He stops, leaving the moon to throw its light into the room. She comes in and sits down on his bed. Her skin is pulled tight and ghostly pale. Something has happened.

  Earlier, she told Raju about Jaafar’s arrest. He distracted the children while she spoke with a slight, short, bald Asian man who handed her an envelope of cash. Now, the children are asleep. The man is gone.

  “What is it?” he asks.

  “A detective from the Bank of Kenya came while you were in the bath. He took my passport.”

  Raju sits down heavily on the bed next to her.

  “We are trapped. I am trapped.”

  “You will be fine. Everything will be fine.”

  “How can it be?” Her voice is thick.

  “Wait until tomorrow. Jaafar will know what to do. You must trust him.”

  “You can say that to me,” she says. “Now?”

  “What choice do you have? Beta, Jaafar will know how to get out of Kenya.”

  “And then I will drag my children to yet another land where they will be outsiders.” She covers her face with her hands. “I’m sorry, Bapa. I am so tired.�
�� She drops her hands and stares straight ahead, out the window. “We belong nowhere.”

  “Nowhere? Then why did God put us on this earth?”

  She drops her hands and looks at him, her eyes sunken into her face, her lips bloodless, the moon serving only to reinforce the paleness of her skin.

  The next morning, Mumtaz returns to the police station with the envelope of money. She waits while Jaafar gives his statement. Within two hours he is released on two sureties of 50,000 shillings each.

  They leave the police station and drive into downtown Nairobi, where they meet with an Asian businessman whose brother works for the Bank of Kenya.

  “My brother has spoken to a colleague at the investigative branch of the bank. The colleague says you broke no law by possessing open airline tickets. You have not even violated foreign exchange restrictions. But you will be deported to your country of citizenship, Uganda. There, you will be at the mercy of Idi Amin’s legal system.”

  Mumtaz feels suddenly gripped by nausea.

  “His advice is for you to get out of Kenya and to stay out of Uganda.”

  Mumtaz looks at Jaafar. His brow is knitted, as though he is contemplating something. As though there is something to contemplate.

  “We’ll never be able to come back,” Jaafar says.

  “Come back?” she asks. “Isn’t it obvious to you yet? We are finished with Africa.”

  “You mean Africa is finished with us,” he says slowly. He turns to face the businessman. “We’ll need passports.” He is slumping in his chair. “Kenyan passports.”

  “I’ll make the arrangements. You’ll have them in hand this afternoon.”

  “We will have to drive out of Kenya,” Jaafar tells Mumtaz on the way home. “The children and Bapa will fly. But not right away.”

  “I thought they would be with us.”

  “Mumtaz, we have to go on the run. How can we take them? Bapa will fly with them directly to Canada. And then we’ll join them.”

  She presses her hand over her mouth and looks out her window.

  “As soon as the police realize I’ve jumped bail, they will look for us at the airport,” Jaafar says. “So Bapa and the children can’t travel immediately. They will need to stay somewhere for a week or two, maybe longer. But not with your relatives. The police will look there first.”

  “When?” Mumtaz whispers. “What will we tell the children?”

  Jaafar reaches over and puts his hand on her knee. “We’ll need to move quickly. A day or two. We’ll come up with something to tell them.”

  When they reach home, Jaafar instructs Mumtaz to call her uncle for help. He goes back out to fetch Raju from the Aga Khan Sports Club.

  Within three hours Mumtaz’s uncle finds a home where Karim and Shama can stay, with a friend of his son-in-law’s. Raju will stay in a small flat with an elderly couple.

  “Okay,” says Jaafar, clapping his hands. “We’re okay.”

  The children burst through the front door like an unexpected storm, noisy, arguing. As always. Karim’s shirt is untucked and Shama’s braids have come loose. As always.

  “Daddy!” Shama shouts, racing into his arms. “You’re home.”

  The telephone rings while they are eating dinner. Jaafar gets up to answer it. Mumtaz watches him. He is nodding, saying yes repeatedly, writing something down. He hangs up and gestures for her to follow him into the kitchen.

  “I’ve found a car salesman who has agreed, for a fee, to drive us over the border to Moshi in a four-wheel drive. He knows a route, through the bush, that skirts customs.”

  Mumtaz nods.

  “But we have to leave tonight.”

  She doesn’t move.

  “Mumtaz, you need to go upstairs and pack. I’ll phone these people and tell them we are dropping the children earlier than planned. Mumtaz, please. Be strong.”

  She empties most of the contents of the children’s drawers into the biggest suitcase they own. She does not know what she has packed. She sits on the floor crying silently as she arranges the clothes, swallowing her sobs, wiping her eyes and her nose on Shama’s bedsheet. When she is finished, she packs a smaller suitcase with Raju’s clothes. She does not have time to pack much for herself and Jaafar. In any case, they need to travel light.

  Things become blurry. As though a veil has been lowered in front of Mumtaz’s eyes. Karim and Shama are sitting on the sofa. Mumtaz and Jaafar are sitting side by side on the coffee table, facing them. Jaafar has just told the children that he and Mumtaz are leaving for Canada that very night to find a new house. Karim and Shama will fly on an airplane with Raju soon, very soon, and meet them there. But until then they will stay with some nice people. Just for a few days.

  “How exciting, isn’t it?” Mumtaz says, smiling, her tongue thick, her hands trembling. “We will go back to Canada, all of us, but this time we will stay there. We won’t move again. We will never move again.”

  Shama does not ask why. Karim does not protest. Their heads are tilted upwards to face their parents. Their backs are ramrod straight. Karim, like Shama, is sitting on the edge of the sofa, his hands clasping the seat cushion so tightly Mumtaz can see that his knuckles have turned white.

  Mumtaz feels as though a whirlwind is inside her, hot, long, narrow and fierce, like a fire sucked up a vacuum, running up and down her middle, from her stomach into her throat and back down again. She holds her mouth firmly shut. If she opens it even a fraction, she will howl. And she will never stop. And the fire will burn everything, everyone around her.

  The uncleared dinner plates, the half-finished glasses of water and chaas, the partially eaten beef saak, the platter of rice and three chapatis abandoned on the dining table are the last things Mumtaz sees when she leaves her home.

  Mumtaz kisses Karim and Shama repeatedly on their cheeks, their lips, their foreheads, their necks before leaving them at the strangers’ house. She knows she has no choice; she knows this is the safest way to get her family out of Africa.

  But, later, as she pictures her children’s faces as she walked away from them, she tightens her fists and presses her fingernails into her palms until they bleed.

  The next morning, from a hotel in Moshi, Mumtaz telephones to check on the children. The people keeping them are panicking. They are afraid of the police. They don’t want trouble. The children must go, immediately. Nothing Mumtaz says, nothing Jaafar says sways them. Jaafar calls Raju.

  The next day, Raju arranges to have the children picked up and taken to a flat where he once played cards. A widow with a young daughter has agreed to take them in.

  Mumtaz cannot talk to her children. The widow does not have a telephone.

  Mumtaz closes her eyes and sees Karim. He is wrapping himself in the curtains in their sitting room in Parklands. They are sheer curtains. Each of the three panels is a different colour. Blue. Red. Yellow. Mumtaz bought them to make the room bright.

  “Green happens when you mix blue and yellow,” Karim tells Mumtaz.

  “Acha?”

  “Blue on red makes purple. Red on yellow makes orange.”

  He wraps himself inside the curtains, tighter and tighter, until she can’t see him anymore. Until he is gone.

  She opens her eyes. She is in a restaurant in the hotel. She can’t eat the food in front of her. She can’t understand the words coming out of Jaafar’s mouth.

  That night, lying in bed, Jaafar sleeping beside her, Mumtaz feels a lump in her throat. It is so large the weight of it presses down onto her chest. She closes her eyes, hoping sleep will take away the feeling. She doesn’t sleep. But she goes somewhere else.

  Masaka-Mbarara Road.

  Jaafar is driving. A ray of afternoon sun slices across his face. It is unusually quiet in the car. Mumtaz turns to the back seat. Karim is looking at a picture book. Shama is staring out the window. Mumtaz looks out her own window. The soil at the side of the road is dark, deep red. They are driving fast. But everything outside the window is still. It is as thoug
h she is looking at photographs. Small shacks with tin roofs dot the landscape. Plantain trees grow in front of the shacks, their large green leaves sloping, sad. Clothes hang drying on lines. Schoolchildren walk along the side of the road, slender brown-black necks reaching out above dirtied white shirts, book bags slung over shoulders, feet kicking up dust. Between the tarmac road and the dark soil, there are ditches. No one lives in the ditches, no one walks on them. They are spaces between. What doesn’t fit elsewhere ends up there.

  Garbage. Weeds. Bones of dead animals.

  And flowers.

  Stark. Almost embarrassing in their misplaced beauty. They look like the ones in the garden at home. The ones that have to be cared for and protected, otherwise they will wither and die.

  “But who cares for these flowers?” Shama asks. “How can they reach up to the sky, the sun, when no one is protecting them? How do they grow if they aren’t in someone’s garden where they’re supposed to be?”

  Mumtaz looks over her shoulder, laughing. “They must be strong,” she says. She turns to look at the road in front of her and after a moment adds, her laughter finished, “They must be stubborn.”

  Mumtaz keeps a photograph in her purse. Their front yard and verandah in Mbarara. And Shama, two years old, standing perfectly straight, unsmiling, hair pulled back from her face, arms stiffly at her sides, clad in a long-sleeved white shirt and long green trousers. Behind her, warm pink bougainvillea climbs wildly up the verandah. And in front of the verandah, one perfectly formed pink rose sits atop a long thin stem, taller than Shama. Farther down, close to the ground, are more pink roses. Unlike the first, they are not in full bloom. They are separated from one another. Not bunched.

  Mumtaz showed Jaafar this photograph earlier that evening, in the restaurant.

  “Would you like to go back? Would you like to live in that house in Mbarara again?” he asked.

  Mumtaz lowered her head and began crying, trembling, until Jaafar helped her up and led her to their room.