Amriika

by M G Vassanji

  “Sure you did. Rumina’s from Zanzibar, and I only brought her here to meet other East Africans.” Then Sona grinned at Aziz. “But tell us, what news from the land of the dead?” When that line didn’t seem to go anywhere, he went on, “I hear the funeral business is quite lucrative these days …”

  That brought Aziz, an actuary by profession, plummeting down. “Hey … now that’s really below the belt — who’s been talking? The funeral parlour’s only a business interest, a minority partnership … and community work, damn you! Wait till you guys start croaking and your spouses come running for discounts.”

  That wasn’t enough to get him off the hook — laughing, curious eyes upon him from all sides — and Sona pursued: “Are you sure you don’t have a go at the dearly departed with pliers, to remove the gold teeth, for instance — after an auto accident, perhaps? …”

  “Tell them,” said Salma, but then went on herself. “He’s worried about his kids. It’s okay to be bohemians in rags when you’re still young. But when your kids are growing up, that’s another matter. Who can afford college fees nowadays?”

  Everyone looked at her and, not wanting to sound too hard up, she quickly covered herself: “But the parlour wasn’t my idea — it’s not our type of thing —”

  “And it’s a hassle, believe me,” Aziz said.

  “What, to put on a black suit and so on?” Iqbal asked in mock innocence, that manner a specialty of his.

  “The gold, I’d like to know more about this gold bit,” Zuli said, at the same time her eyes — and by consequence everybody else’s — falling on the gold bracelets adorning Salma’s arm.

  Salma reddened, said, “That’s not true, he’s not into gold extraction …”

  “The great Aziz Pirani,” Ramji murmured, recalling their days of boyhood dreams. “The local Elvis and Einstein all rolled into one — now an undertaker?”

  “Better than an underwear maker,” the great Pirani murmured, pleased at the mention of past glory, now gloating at Iqbal.

  “It’s manufacturing and selling underwear, you oafs,” shouted Susan from the other room. “And what’s wrong with that?”

  They laughed, and Iqbal, blushing at the secret of his new venture already out, said with a smile, “Anyway, they are called foundation wear in the business. And this one’s also an investment — I’m a restaurateur first and foremost.”

  “Isn’t it funny.” Jamila said, “Whatever professions we studied for and practised, we can’t seem to stay away from business. It’s in our blood, isn’t that how we say it? Even Ramji — now who would have thought.”

  “Who indeed,” Ramji said lamely and waited for the onslaught, thinking, Uh-oh, here it comes, an assault on my money-making disabilities. A few years ago he had invited his friends to invest in his business, a book-distribution company. Was he glad they’d simply laughed off his suggestion: the company was now foundering.

  But Sona came to his timely rescue, changing the subject. “About the, uh … foundation wear … how do you actually go about designing it —”

  That was when the remaining three women left the room.

  Eventually the four men came into the kitchen, bleary-eyed and tipsy, a little subdued also, evidently having had their fill of each other. They flashed rather sheepish grins at Salma, Jamila, and Zuli, who had gathered there to chat and who now looked up at them in amusement.

  “I am surprised,” said Salma, with a wink at Zuli, “that our men don’t kill each other — the things they say to each other — even in jest …”

  Jamila gave an exaggerated shiver. “Reminds me of the Muharram festivities I used to go to with my cousins — the self-flagellation and drawing of blood, and then the celebration —”

  “And what are we mourning?” asked Salma.

  “Our loss of home and dispersal to the four winds, for which we gather periodically to perform this bloody ritual,” Zuli pronounced with a lofty gesture of one hand, adding, “I’m quoting my husband, of course.” She threw a swift look at him and he acknowledged with a grin.

  “Aren’t you glad you’re the sane ones,” Aziz retorted.

  “Takes a woman to keep her head about her.”

  They stopped the banter to watch Susan and Rumina, who were standing together beside the swings outside in the backyard.

  Susan, as always, looked prim, a little too well maintained (in surprising contrast to the quite dissolute-looking Iqbal), what with the makeup and neat pageboy hairdo. And Rumina — she was laughing now, rocking back and forth on a swing as though prepared to take off, and apparently without a care in the world. Her headcover had fallen back on her shoulder.

  “Pretty, nuh?” Salma said. “I wonder who she is? Are you going to tell us, Sona?”

  “Talk to her and find out for yourselves,” replied Sona.

  “She’s not one of us, obviously,” Zuli murmured. “We gave up covering our heads decades ago. And when our grandmothers did cover, they didn’t do it this way, did they Sona?”

  “Right,” said Sona, the community historian.

  “Well, we have to find out who she is,” said Jamila.

  Later that night, the day’s noise and commotion having finally departed, there remained only the hush of sudden quiet in the house, now at one with the deep suburban stillness outside. Susan and Iqbal had taken Rumina to stay with them at the home of some other people they knew in the area; and Sona had agreed to put up at Aziz and Salma’s. Zuli had retired, and Ramji, sleepless with all sorts of echoes of the afternoon in his head, decided to sit out in the kitchen to recover, and was tempted to a cup of tea by Jamila, who hovered in the kitchen, puttering. He wondered if Jamila was detaining him with the tea, and the dessert that followed, and concluded yes. Zuli will have something to say about this, but it doesn’t matter.

  There loomed over the impending tête-à-tête the shadow of a past intimacy. Ramji and Jamila had known each other for a long time. They had been nodding acquaintances in Dar; boys and girls there pretty much stayed apart. Then he had met her accidentally in Cambridge and they began spending time together in a hectic, uncertain, unresolved, and, to Ramji, tormenting relationship. He thought: if he wanted he could easily leave the kitchen now, pleading sleepiness or the bathroom, even as she was putting away a stray item in the dishwasher.

  But he didn’t and soon she came and joined him at the table. They exchanged niceties, he declining more dessert, and they worked up to a neutral friendliness that they realized with relief would be the nature of their relationship in the coming week.

  “Would your wife approve, your sitting with me like this?”

  “Perhaps not,” he said. “She’s jealous — which is good, I suppose.”

  “Wives are jealous, no matter what. But, tell me, how’s it working out?”

  There had been other meetings in the past, over the sixteen years since they’d ended their involvement, but nothing this close, alone. Never these questions, which had been often in the mind.

  “All right, I suppose. I have nothing to compare with.” Liar, he thought to himself … but why should I tell her? “How about you and Nabil — the great love of your life, as you called it …”

  “Is that what I said?” She blushed.

  He’s just right, Ramji, she’d told him, he is what I’ve been waiting for all my life. When you find someone like that you’ll understand.

  “Well?” he asked. “Everything hunky-dory — with two kids and an expensive suburb and a brand-new car.…” He had seen the Acura in the driveway.

  She smiled, dimly. There was bitterness yet in his sarcasm.

  “I know, I know —” he told her, “things change with time; kids and middle age and a mortgage and life insurance and college costs round the corner; and it’s hellishly difficult to live close to another human being —”

  “Perhaps it’s best then that we decided not to come so close.” She eyed him, having spoken this half-truth about the past. It was she, after all, who had insisten
tly maintained a distance between them.

  “So, how is Nabil doing? I hear he’s dabbling in mysticism — news travels, you know. I suppose it’s middle age and premonitions of mortality — that would do it to most people.”

  “Would it do it to you?”

  “I am anachronistic. And I pay for my obstinacies.”

  She didn’t ask him how. There would be time for that. But:

  “Ramji — talk to him, please. Talk to Nabil. When you get a chance, I mean. I don’t even know what it is with him — mysticism or whatever … every other Sunday he goes away on secret meetings. It could be some fundamentalist group, for all I know — can’t you reassure him —”

  “With what? But I’ll have a talk with him … perhaps he’ll wind up converting me.”

  “Thank you. You’ve not changed,” she said.

  “Yeah?” He looked at her over his poised teacup.

  “I mean in your friendships.”

  “Maybe. Meanwhile, be nice to Zuli. Convince her you’re not interested in me. Never were. That shouldn’t be hard to do. Huh?”

  He stood up and ambled away.

  2

  Ramji did not go straight to bed. Instead of turning into the guest room where Zuli, he hoped, was already asleep, he went on to the living room and sat down in an armchair. There in the darkness by himself he began to recall those days so many years ago, days that for him were dominated by the presence of one person, Jamila.

  Nineteen seventy-four, the dog days of summer.

  Grandma had died the past winter and it seemed to him that now he was quite alone in the world. A telegram had arrived from an uncle he barely knew: “Ma expired 14th instant; funeral services took place 15th.” It was the 15th, February, when he read it. What bureaucratic language to announce death. And “expired,” what a word. “Died” was just right, simply died; mort, tot, kaput, khalas; finished. Finished? Not really, she would always haunt him, the old healer and singer and dancer, as he thought of her sometimes. In his absence many changes had taken place back home — in that country in Africa that would gradually over the years assume the shape of a thorn to prick his conscience. There had been the business about the introduction of forced marriages on the island of Zanzibar, news of which had come from Grandma and left him bitter and angry.

  It was 1974, yes.

  On television, the wethead was dead, as hairspray commercials announced with emphasis and joyfully, Archie Bunker still made his bigoted observations, yet we laughed, and Alka-Seltzer always tamed the spicy Italian meatball … and the Watergate hearings … and.…He smiled wistfully. Who remembers them now, once vibrant images long since consigned to the junkbox of private memory?

  Foolishly, he admitted now, he had accepted her invitation to this reunion, and Jamila was always larger than life. He hadn’t thought a lot about those days — their days — in a long time.

  Early June, streets awash in sun. He would sit for coffee or lunch outdoors, on Tech Square or on the green next to the Student Center, watching human traffic, so different in the summer. Convocation time, dreamy-looking alumni looking lost and found, happy families with minor anxieties.…And he, working and studying, with no one in the world, free yet envious, thinking, How I wish I had a home to go back to. But you do have a home, it’s just that there’s nobody there …

  In the evenings he would stroll on Harvard Square, visit the coffee shops, and the bookstore on Mass Ave, which, obedient to the demands of a new era, was now filling its former Eastern Religions shelves in the basement with books on management; and later, after coffee, he would sit on the pavement and watch a music group or a juggling act or whatever perform next to the newsstand, the summer sky only now beginning to darken and lights coming on everywhere. And one such listless evening, having sat down with a crowd in front of a classical music group, his ears perked up at a voice, an accent. He thought, It’s home, dammit, I’m sure, those inflections …

  “… and I said, ‘That’s ridiculous, you don’t serve drinks on Rockefeller Plaza,’ and she said, ‘It may be ridiculous ma’am, but.…’ The cheek, I tell you …”

  His eyes, having searched and found the speaker, met her eyes: Of course, the look, the style, I even know the girl —

  “Hey, aren’t you —” she exclaimed, excitedly.

  “Yes —” Yes what? He remembered — “You’re Jamila Lakhani?”

  “And you’re Ramji. Hey, come and join us.”

  He got up and joined her. There was another girl, an Indian from Kenya, introduced as Palu, and an American, Sibyl.

  “This is Ramji,” she introduced him. “Hey, I’m sorry I don’t even know your full name.”

  “It’s okay,” he laughed, didn’t volunteer it.

  The girls were former classmates from college in Minnesota; now Jamila had landed a job at the foreign section of a large bank in New York, Palu had just become engaged to a Pakistani jeweller in San Francisco, and Sibyl was at the National Geographic, also in New York.

  Jamila: How to describe her? … Life! Unabashed, silly, and quite naive at times, but that zest — pure, simple, authentic — simply won you, and everyone, over. That evening after the concert on the Square she actually went over — tugged him along — to compliment the members of the quartet on the last piece they’d played, though she got the name of the composer wrong. But so what. And, it turned out, the players quite appreciated her zeal.

  Jamila wore a long white skirt and red T-shirt; the long hair he remembered from Dar — a single ponytail halfway down her back — had only recently been cut she told him. How d’you like it, my new hair? He didn’t quite care for it, but he said, That’s the fashion, is it? And she said, All you Indian men like us to look traditional …

  The girls had been promised the use of an apartment whose occupant was away for the weekend, and they were somewhat stranded, waiting for the person who had the keys. So Ramji said, Why don’t you come stay with me — my roommates won’t mind, one of them is away anyway. They accepted gratefully. Jamila was excited about Cambridge, the intellectual hub, I’d like to meet some real intellectuals while I’m here — sorry for asking, but are you an intellectual? We’ll invite some real intellectuals for brunch tomorrow, Ramji said, how about that? And so next morning there came Sona and Amy, and an Iranian philosopher named Mahmood and a whole bunch of other people, and that evening they had dinner at the Algiers, a popular basement restaurant, which had been described by Time magazine in an article on Cambridge. Mahmood pointed out a clamorous group seated two deep in a corner, said, There’s the PLO table, and no one was quite sure if he was pulling their leg, Jamila’s in particular.

  Two weeks after the girls left, late one night, Jamila phoned. “Hey, thanks for your hospitality, that was very nice, we wrote you a letter, I hope you got it.” He said he had. “Listen, there’s a Ravi Shankar concert in Princeton on Saturday. Would you like to go?”

  Ramji demurred: All the way to Princeton for a concert? Then staying the night? Too complicated.

  “And you could spend the night in New York …”

  Soon he would never be found without his wallet-size train schedule. And he frequently made the trips, long train rides you wished would last forever, carry you in their gently jolting rhythm to the eternity of eternities … and then at the sudden end of it a girl like Jamila, a whirlwind who swept you off your feet, to concerts, films, record shops, tennis matches, brunches, parties … whatnot. Even wine-tasting.

  With her he came to meet a lot of other people, who had also come as students and were beginning to stay on. Among them were Salma, Aziz, and Iqbal.

  But if he were to write an account of their life together, he would call it “Not a Love Story.” How about that for recalling old times.

  What do you say about a girl who loves Beethoven … whom the Beatles do not quite excite as much, except the odd song that reminds her of Dar … who plays tennis in full gear and with boundless enthusiasm but whose game leaves much to be desired
… for whom life is the joy of process — being — though that is not how she would put it … and who is guaranteed to sweep you up in her enthusiasms and for that is the envy of all those who know her …

  Perhaps he would call his account “Swept Away,” after a film they saw together once …

  There was not, between them, a burning fire. There was instead the tepid warmth of smouldering possibility, though, even then, he knew in his heart of hearts that the affection and sympathy they had for each other would never fully ignite into passion and love. But he hoped, yes; and they were together so much, after all, every other weekend almost, and all their acquaintances knew about them: Ramji and Jamila, odd couple, yes, but couple nonetheless, and she was drawing him out — and he giving her a certain intellectual respectability?

  And sex. And sex? He gave an exaggerated shudder. Grotesque, that’s what sex was, could it have been otherwise, coming from where we did?

  The first night he spent in her room, she made a sofa up for him, then said, “If you want to sleep in the bed, you can — there’s room.” She was tired, feeling irate that day. But what did she mean? That was hardly an invitation to share an intimacy. He said, “I’m not Mahatma Gandhi.” The Mahatma, after all, could control lust lying down beside a woman, but not he, Ramji. That made her laugh and that was that.

  Or was he mistaken. Had she expected him to say yes, was this her way of saying it’s okay, we can do it? With Lyris, a few years before, it had been so easy, spontaneous, a single urge driving them on from day one. With this Cutchi girl, this Shamsi … how impossible. He wanted to do the right thing, not to act like a Westerner with a hit-and-miss attitude to sex. It was also a question of maintaining her respect: if he’d goofed in his decision that night, she might have thought sex was what he was interested in. Had he acted wisely? She never let him know. They went on as before, and he spent many nights in her room. Chaste.

  One night in Philadelphia, returning from a play, they went to an Indian restaurant in West Philly and, coming out of it, after a few paces in the dark and rather scary streets — not far from where her nephew would be murdered almost twenty years later — they were accosted by two guys. This is it, Ramji thought; not another soul on the street, a pretty Indian girl with me. He was sure, though, that the restaurant owner was watching from inside; perhaps had called the police, perhaps was too scared to do so. In any case, they were robbed of money and her credit cards. Fortunately, the muggers didn’t molest her — no rape, thank God — but then one of the guys returned, gave a violent push to Ramji, who staggered to the ground against a parked car, and then gave Jamila a long kiss on the lips.