Where the Air is Sweet
Page 27
Jaafar spends a large chunk of their cash on a brown Datsun 1600 from an Ismaili dealer in Moshi. The plan is to drive across Tanzania and cross the border into Rwanda. In Kigali, they will meet Amir, who will drive from Mbarara with airplane tickets to Canada.
After two weeks in Moshi, they begin driving. The road to Arusha is tarmac but it is terrible. Jaafar curses each time he fails to swerve in time and hits a pothole. And Mumtaz’s lower back is aching from absorbing the shocks. It is 50 miles to Arusha, but it feels to her like 200.
In Arusha they stop for a night, eat, bathe and fill the tank with petrol. The next morning they set out for Shinyanga. En route they fill the tank, but when they reach the town, seven hours later, they are very low on fuel. They can find no petrol in Shinyanga. Mumtaz throws her head back in frustration.
“I have an idea,” Jaafar says. He buys kerosene and fills the tank. After a few tries the car starts. It runs rough, as though they are driving on jagged stones, but it runs. They pack four one-gallon containers of kerosene in the trunk and continue driving west, deeper into Africa, leaving a trail of ugly black smoke behind them.
Exhausted, Mumtaz and Jaafar spend the night in a convent near the forest. They lie in a bed that creaks each time they move. The mosquito net draped over them has a large hole in it. Mumtaz tries to pull the net down so she can tuck the hole under the mattress. But it won’t reach. She grabs the hole in her hand and clenches it into a fist. She looks over at Jaafar. The light from the candle throws dancing shadows across him. His face is coated in dust. His shirt is soaked with perspiration. He smells like sweat and kerosene. They can’t bathe. There is only one bucket of cold water for them both to use and they will need it to brush their teeth and wash in the morning.
“When we first married, this was all I wanted, you and me and nothing else. No one else.”
He looks at her. “And now?”
“Now I want my children.”
He looks away from her. He looks straight in front of him at the ceiling. “I’m sorry.”
She continues as though she has not heard him. “A safe country. Tarmac roads. Petrol. Water that comes from taps.”
He smiles and looks at her. “I will build you mahal one day, my Taj.”
She turns sharply to face him. “I don’t want a palace. I want a home.” She looks at the ceiling, releases the mosquito net and begins laughing. She can’t stop. She sits up, doubled over. “Did you know, in Canada,” she says, finally able to speak, “they sell mango pulp in tins? You open it, you pour it and just like that, you have keri nu ras.” She stops speaking. She feels suddenly like a madwoman for laughing so much. There is nothing to laugh about. She looks at him. “I could make it for you and Bapa every day, if you want.”
“Or I could make it for you,” he says quietly.
The next morning, they begin driving to Mwanza. The potholes become more frequent, deeper, wider. The dust from the roads and the black smoke from the kerosene fill Mumtaz’s head until it is pounding, until she is nauseated. They stay in a hotel in Mwanza for two nights.
Finally, nearly three weeks after leaving Nairobi, they reach the border at Benako. The Tanzanian customs official questions them, asking where they are going, where they have come from, where they live. He pauses and stares at them after each question, after each answer. He wants money. Jaafar won’t pay him. Mumtaz is angry. She tells him in Gujarati to hand over some cash so they can carry on. He refuses. “Why is this bloody fool giving me trouble? We’re leaving this stupid, petrol-free country and its broken roads.”
Finally, with Mumtaz clawing on his arm, he relents, hands over cash and is allowed to cross the border into Rusumo. They are in Rwanda. The roads are smooth tarmac, free of potholes. There are petrol stations.
In Kigali they stay with Zulfikar Dadani, a car-dealer friend of Jaafar’s. Amir is supposed to meet them here. He has not arrived. Mbarara is only 100 miles from Kigali. Jaafar assures Mumtaz that he will be here any day.
When Raju arrives to fetch Karim and Shama for their flight to Canada, they are standing alone in the hallway, just outside the door of the widow’s flat. Raju hasn’t seen the children in three weeks. Their suitcase is packed and leaning against the door. They walk towards him. He is stunned by what he sees. Their hair is filthy, unkempt. They smell dirty, like stale urine. Their clothes are wrinkled and Shama’s bare legs are streaked with black. He wants to ask them why they haven’t bathed. He wants to shout at them. He wants to slap them. He wants to beat these dirty, pathetic children. He closes his eyes and inhales. But he cannot stem the tide rising through him. He feels his body heave, feels his swollen heart force its way upwards, overwhelming the suddenly pliable bones of his chest, pushing open his throat. He cannot stop it. He can no longer stop it. He is shattering, breaking apart. He opens his mouth. The force of the tide pushes his head back. He sobs. And sobs. And sobs. The sound of his voice, of unrestrained grief, bounces against the high walls of the hallway, returning to him like a relentless fist pounding him, again and again.
Jaafar and Mumtaz have been in Kigali for four weeks and they have not yet heard from Amir.
“He’s not coming,” Mumtaz says. “We have to do something.”
“What can we do? We have hardly any money left. He’ll come.”
“What if something has happened to him?”
“Nothing has happened to him.”
Every week for the past four weeks, Mumtaz and Jaafar have had this same conversation. She is trapped. Thousands of miles from her babies, she is descending slowly into madness. She spends her days staring at words on the pages of books, refusing to lift her head to look at the deep blue sky, to inhale the scent of jasmine. Every morsel she puts into her mouth scrapes the inside of her throat. Every sound of every bird is the voice of her daughter, of her son. She wakes up repeatedly throughout the night to the sound of Shama crying, of Karim calling for her.
“Let’s beg. Let’s borrow money for tickets,” she says. “You’ve helped Zulfikar so many times with cars. He can help you.”
“We can’t buy tickets to Europe here. They don’t sell them in Kigali. We would have to borrow a lot of money.”
She cannot stand to look at her husband any longer.
Nine days later, Amir appears. He is thin, thinner than Jaafar. His hair is longer than Mumtaz has ever seen it. He has grown a beard; it is sprinkled with grey. He hands them tickets that will fly them first to Brussels and then to Montreal and then to Toronto. He has brought $5,000 US, in cash. He couldn’t bring them more, though he tried. There is a few thousand more in the Brussels account, he says. Not much. He is not coming with them. He will return to Uganda. He is sorry for the delay. He met with trouble. Mumtaz does not want to know. She does not care. She wants only to get to her children. She leaves the brothers alone and goes to bed. For the first time in weeks, she sleeps soundly.
The next morning, Jaafar sleeps late. Mumtaz is having tea when Amir walks into the dining room. He has shaved off his beard. She greets him and then watches while the housegirl brings him a cup of tea.
They sit across from each other in silence.
“I tipped off the Bank of Kenya detectives. That’s why Jaafar was arrested.”
Mumtaz does not look at him. She cannot move.
“This hell Uganda has become would have kept pulling him back here until it killed him.”
She looks at him. She wants to slap his smug, stupid face.
“He never learned how to do what’s best for himself.”
“He does only what’s best for himself. Like you.”
“You can be angry at me. You can hate me. But he is my brother. I owed it to him to save him.”
“Are you drunk? Were you drunk when you did this?”
He is silent.
“Because it would have been nice to have had some warning before we had to run. Before we had to abandon our children.” A sob breaks free from her throat. “Did you think to put some more money in that fo
reign bank for him, for us. For Bapa?”
He is staring at her. He looks so much like Jaafar she cannot bear to look at him. She turns away.
“Bhabi, I’m sorry. But I was pulling him with me. He couldn’t, he wouldn’t let go. I had to push him out of here. I didn’t think. I only knew—” He stops.
She looks at him. He lowers his head until his forehead is almost touching the table.
“I knew even if I couldn’t stop, I had to make him stop. I didn’t think of anything else. Or anyone else.”
The immigration agent at Dorval looks at their passports for so long that Mumtaz begins to dig her fingernails into Jaafar’s arm. “You left Canada well over a year ago with Ugandan passports,” the agent says. “You are returning with Kenyan passports.” He pauses and looks at Jaafar. “Did you buy these documents?”
Mumtaz looks at Jaafar. His shoulders are pulled forward. “Yes,” he says. “I bought them.”
Mumtaz sucks in her breath. He has lost his mind.
The agent looks back down at the passports. He flips through the pages. He examines the cover. Mumtaz’s mind becomes clear. She will tell the immigration agent that Jaafar did this against her will. If he wants to be arrested again, if he wants to be sent back to Africa, let him go. She will not go with him. She releases his arm.
“Your visas must be accompanied by a valid travelling document.”
Jaafar nods.
The agent stamps their passports. “These are travelling documents.” He holds them towards Jaafar. “And they look valid to me.” He smiles. “Welcome to Canada.”
Jaafar does not move. He is staring at the agent. Mumtaz reaches forward, takes the passports and puts them into her purse.
“To hell with Idi Amin,” the agent says, his eyes on Jaafar. He is not sneering. He is not mocking. He is not holding his hand out for money.
Mumtaz begins walking away. After a few moments, Jaafar follows her, walking briskly to catch up.
38
FIVE MONTHS AFTER ARRIVING WITH KARIM and Shama in Canada, Raju is walking on Confederation Drive in Kitchener, his hands clasped behind him, a black bowler hat perched on his grey head, a heavy, black overcoat covering his barrel chest. It is cold but spring has come to southern Ontario. Buds are pushing their way open on the birch trees that line the road while sheets of thin white bark peel off their slender trunks: the ravages of a cruel winter. Shama, half-submerged in an oversized red parka, flits around Raju like a gnat, jumping, bouncing, running circles, but he is steady, like a deep underlying rhythm to her frenetic young life.
“Dadabapa!” she shouts, slowing down momentarily to speak. “Let’s please walk on the sidewalk today. The ice melted a long time ago.”
He smiles and carries on, his black shoes treading the smooth tarmac. Already at six, thinks Raju, she has been cowed by life. He watches her racing around him, trying to run faster than her terror of speeding cars, of wayward bicycles, of taunts of “Paki, go home!” He reaches out and takes her hand, pulls her towards him, beside him. They walk, side by side, slowly, on the side of the road. He does not look at her. He is looking towards the sun resting low on the horizon, preparing for its descent.
When Raju and Shama left for their walk, Mumtaz was in the kitchen making chicken saak and rice. She had arrived home from her job at the Arrow Shirt Factory at 4:30 p.m., as she does every day. Jaafar is still working at his garage. He will come home late, after 9:00 p.m., as he does every day, as he will do every day until he builds enough of a customer base to hire another full-time mechanic. Karim was in front of their two-storey townhouse, playing hockey on the road with a group of boys who live in the same housing complex. He was laughing.
Raju can see their house. They have come full circle. They are returning home.
“The bedroom windows on the second floor look like two wide-open eyes,” Shama says, pointing. “The sitting room window looks like a flat nose, the front door a mouth.”
She loves her house. Before she leaves for school, Raju watches her stand at the entrance, spread her arms out and hug the air inside it. Shama has lived in this house for two months. Already, she has begun to ask him when they must leave. Every day, she asks him.
“Shama.” There is no inflection in Raju’s voice when he says her name. He is not calling her name. He is declaring it. She looks at him. “The day your grandmother went to heaven and the day after were bright and clear and good.” He smiles at her, his hand gently tightening its grip on hers. He is nodding. “Like today. Like this day.”
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
THOUGH THIS BOOK IS A WORK OF FICTION, IT IS framed by historical events. Because of this, I have done my utmost to be accurate with respect to the politics of the period. I relied, in particular, on two books for background on the Idi Amin years: General Amin by David Martin and A State of Blood by Henry Kyemba. I made extensive use, as well, of microfiche files from The Globe and Mail for 1972 and 1973.
On page 338, the lines from the soundtrack of the 1973 Hindi film Aa Gale Lag Jaa are my own rendering.
I would like to thank my agent, Dean Cooke, and everyone at the Cooke Agency for their enthusiasm for and belief in my book. I am indebted to my editors, Iris Tupholme and Jane Warren, and everyone at HarperCollins Canada for helping me bring the book to this, its final form.
I am especially grateful to my late grandfather, Kassamali Jamal, and to my parents, Sadru and Habiba Jamal, for sharing their stories so I could tell mine.
And finally, I want to thank Craig Daniels, my husband, my champion, my gentle critic. Without him this book would not exist.
About the Author
TASNEEM JAMAL was born in Mbarara, Uganda, and immigrated to Canada with her family in 1975. She has worked for over a decade as an editor at The Globe and Mail and the National Post. Her fiction and non-fiction have been featured in the Toronto Review of Contemporary Writing Abroad, Saturday Night magazine and the Literary Review of Canada. She lives in Kitchener with her husband and two daughters. Visit her online at tasneemjamal.ca or on Twitter @tasneem_jamal.
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Paise for WHERE THE AIR IS SWEET
“Big of heart and mind, Tasneem Jamal’s powerful debut novel exposes the fragility of belonging and, with its sweeping historical eye, brings home the true meaning of Canada.”
CARRIE SNYDER, AUTHOR OF THE GOVERNOR GENERAL’S AWARD FINALIST The Juliet Stories
“Enthralling, moving and beautifully written, Tasneem Jamal’s remarkable debut reveals the joys, heartaches and fragilities of human connection, the relationships people forge with a land, the promises they make to each other. With her graceful, confident prose, Jamal creates a world so real it pulsates with vitality and tenderness. Her characters straddle the permeable, ever-shifting line between homes, between overlapping identities, between longing and belonging, desire and hope.”
AYELET TSABARI, AUTHOR OF The Best Place on Earth
“Tasneem Jamal’s tale of the travels and travails of a multigenerational Asian family, from India to Uganda, to the UK, to Kitchener, Ontario, contains a powerful truth—at the end of the day it is family that allows individuals to endure and recover from the refugee experience.”
MICHAEL MOLLOY, PRESIDENT, CANADIAN IMMIGRATION HISTORICAL SOCIETY, AND FORMER
CANADIAN AMBASSADOR TO JORDAN
Copyright
Where the Air Is Sweet
Copyright © 2014 by Tasneem Jamal.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the expre
ss written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
EPUB Edition May 2014 ISBN 9781443408196
Published by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd
FIRST EDITION
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