Amriika

by M G Vassanji

  The lights were dimmed for the evening’s pièce de résistance. A slide projector was set up across from a bare wall. A slide was put on. A political map of the United States came up, on which several cities were circled prominently in black, with red lines of diverse lengths radiating from each. Zayd, who was an engineer by training, received from other Phantom watchers in the country regular reports of “sightings” — details about places where a letter had reached — and of simulation studies that were under way to calculate the home base of the mysterious writer. The map, he explained, standing beside it, was the telltale track left by the Phantom.

  “With every new missive he tightens the noose around his neck,” Zayd said dramatically, looping his own neck with his forefingers and thumbs.

  “Is the man condemned then,” Ramji murmured, thinking what a clever fool the poor mischief-maker had been and wondering what would happen to him if his identity were uncovered. Had he broken any law?

  “Yes, he is condemned,” Zayd said, and without further elaboration continued his discourse on the mathematics of Phantom detection.

  “The question is, what are the correlations among the mailing points — the cities from where he mails those letters? What airlines service them, for example, and how conveniently? Do the points receiving the letters lead back to an epicentre, which is most likely his base? Remember, that point is real and he is working around it. The Phantom has been clever — he’s mailed his letters only from the major cities; presumably, he’s close to a major city himself. So you see … the noose tightens.”

  “You … you seem to have followed him pretty closely,” Amir said admiringly, from the chair where he was sitting beside the projector.

  There was the barest trace of a flinch on his wife’s face at this brief stutter, which melted quickly into a look of affection. Amir, tall, fleshy, and bald halfway back, was well liked, a people person; a generous, uncontroversial man, the big breadwinner of his family.

  “Yes, I have my own file on him,” Zayd told him, “and there are definite patterns to his activities … like fingerprints.”

  “What will you do if you find him?” Ramji asked the question he had been toying with.

  “Why, he should be exposed … to the people,” Basu said. He turned to Ramji and added, “Let him face the consequences.”

  “Such as? …”

  Naaz said, “When I was young, when a thief was caught in our neighbourhood the crowd beat him up. That was people’s justice. That’s consequences for you.”

  “But surely,” Ramji said, this time to needle Zayd-the-hunter, “if we believe in political dissent, then there is room also for religious and cultural and all sorts of dissent. The point is, the Phantom should also be allowed to speak. No?”

  Howls of protest and ridicule exploded around him: But he’s gone too far! This is not dissent, it’s violence, it’s personal attack! He should be stopped! Punished! If that other satanic author had received his due —

  Darcy was standing at the back of the group, near the doorway, a sardonic gleam in his eye, unwilling to come to Ramji’s rescue; Rumina was beside Darcy and looking anxious. There was an embarrassed silence, then an eruption of good humour and fellow-feeling as dessert was announced.

  “It’s always nice to withdraw from a crowd and be alone, isn’t it?” Ramji said to Rumina, echoing a thought he’d often had after a raucous party such as the one they’d returned from.

  “Yes …,” she said, beside him, and he turned towards her, wondering what she was thinking.

  They had gone to sit on the beach. It was a cool night and for a while they sat together in silence, wrapped in a shawl, watching the black form of the sea straight ahead; the tide was low, the murmuring waves far away. At moments like these, he thought, you can’t help but become aware of your ultimate loneliness.…He gave her hand a squeeze. She had told him recently that she sometimes missed all the girls she had been brought up with; but then she added that that was a long time ago, they all had lives of their own, with families, and she had him. He had suggested once that they try and search for her mother, start by writing letters, but she had shaken her head. She did receive letters from Tanzania, but there was no one there really close to her now.

  “Do you believe that life exists in the stars?” she asked at length.

  “Yes, in some of them.”

  Following her eye he looked up at Orion overhead in the sky; a constellation, he told her, known to Indians as Trisanku, the remains of a mortal abandoned both by man and the gods.

  There came the sound of voices; low, but fairly close to their right, from a man and a woman, and they both turned to look. The couple was some twenty yards away. Perhaps they had been there all the time. The man was stark naked and crouched on his knees, visibly hard and primed for the woman who lay under him on the sand.

  “It won’t do to disturb them now, will it,” Ramji murmured, turning away.

  Rumina looked at him and nodded. He held her close, and they kept their eyes averted from their neighbours.

  4

  Darcy was telling his life’s story; but in the manner of the preacher he had once been, he began with an anecdote that at first seemed to have nothing to do with the subject.

  A long time ago, in the 1920s, there was an old white house on a beach in Zanzibar that was for many years known to be haunted; the ghost was that of a German diplomat. This ghost of a white man would appear in European-style white attire, complete with a sun helmet, called the topee, and shoes. He was tall, and seemed nimble and athletic. At nights he liked to stroll about in the compound, sometimes pausing for a drink from the well there; during the day he could be seen through the windows walking inside the house. Finally, a local exorcist claimed to have got rid of the ghost in the house, and a wealthy family rented it for the use of a young couple who were getting married. The wedding festivities were held in the house, and it seemed even then that something was not quite right. A cauldron of wedding biryani was first found to be missing, and then after much hullabaloo, during which the servants swore their innocence, the food was discovered in a room on the second floor. More surprisingly, the door had to be broken open — it had been locked from inside. How did the food get in there? It would have taken six strong men to carry the steaming cauldron up the flight of stairs; but without being noticed? and the locked door from inside? But the festive spirit had peaked, there was no inclination at this jolly hour to probe further into the strange occurrence. Food was served and the celebrations proceeded well past midnight. Not long after they were over, and the guests and families had departed, leaving the couple to their house, at four in the morning, just when the muezzin was beginning his call to prayer, a long and chilling cry tore into the quiet hour. People came running from all directions towards the source of the sound, the house on the beach. The sight that met them was horrific. The bride had been thrown clear through the couple’s window and landed close to the well, the length of her trajectory suggesting superhuman strength on the part of the assailant. The groom was a nervous wreck, muttering incomprehensibly. He never recovered, and he never told exactly what had happened. But the fact came out that the German had been a homosexual; and after that terrible night the groom was rumoured to have become a homosexual too. In fact, years later, as a tramp in Dar es Salaam, he attained notoriety by trying to waylay boys outside a local school, and the boys in their turn teased him mercilessly. Aside from this proclivity he was supposed to be simply crazy.

  “The exorcist was my father and the groom was my uncle,” Darcy said, speaking in the apartment of Rumina and Ramji, where he’d come to spend his Sunday afternoon.

  Darcy had called up Rumina during the week and suggested the invitation. “We can talk about the past, and listen to music from Zanzibar, and I can get to know you and your man better. Just make sure you have a bottle of scotch handy, I’ll pay for it of course.” And she, devoted to him, sensing his lonely call, said that, of course, he was most welcome
to visit them.

  Naaz and Naseem brought him over. The two women were on their way to the Golden Club’s practice for the Friendship Walk, which had been organized in aid of international relief and also to give a positive image of the Community to the media. A man from the L.A. Times had promised to show up today and Naaz as the Community spokesperson was excited and all dressed up for the interview, in designer sweats, a thick girlish hairband over the head and a gold bangle on one wrist for good measure. The Golden Club members were fifty-five and over, and Naseem was their volunteer chaperone and trainer though, as she reiterated, “I still have a ways to get there.” Naaz, in her early forties, had an even longer way to reach the Club age.

  As soon as the two women left, Darcy nodded to Ramji, who brought out the scotch. And the old man, clearing his throat after a sip of the lubricant, began his prologue. Ramji and Rumina sat in rapt attention in front of him, thrilled at the privilege of hearing his confidences.

  “I know the story — or rather, I’ve heard it told — though not the part about the man being homosexual,” Ramji said.

  Darcy nodded, saying, “Spoils our good image of ourselves to talk about homosexuality. We considered it evil or laughable — still do, sometimes.” He threw a meaningful look towards the outside door in case Naaz and Naseem had stopped there on their way out, to eavesdrop.

  Darcy was born in Bombay, he said, and brought to Zanzibar as an infant. His family were missionary traders, servicing the Indian Ocean from Calicut to Zanzibar throughout the nineteenth century, perhaps even earlier. His father Sherali, however, decided to settle in Zanzibar. He was a clove and cashew merchant and a renowned exorcist.

  As a young man, Darcy moved to Dar es Salaam, on the mainland, just prior to the Second World War. There he acted as his father’s agent and became a respected preacher.

  Did he also exorcise ghosts, they asked. He looked distant, didn’t give an answer. Perhaps it should have been obvious; it wasn’t, quite.

  He said instead, “Our people were backward. Religion and superstition were the same for them. There was no recourse to philosophy. Only magic and miracles. And blind worship. And the sins of poverty — envy and backbiting and inbreeding and intolerance. Any criticism of the Community and there would be a full-scale riot. I’m afraid I was no different — at first.”

  There was a group of educated Indians in town who used to meet and discuss independence for India. What he heard about their arguments attracted him, and he joined the group. It was low-key; this was after all wartime, and there was concern about government spies; Gandhi and Nehru were in jail in India and Jinnah had formed the Muslim League. Immediately after the war, Darcy went to London to study law. But he returned a few years later, before he could get admitted to the bar.

  Why? He didn’t say. Those must have been exciting times, Ramji imagined, picturing a young Darcy railing against British imperialism at Hyde Park Corner every Sunday. What colour suit did he wear then? And whence the name “Darcy”? Was there such a name in the tradition? Darcy was not one to tell all, to share the intimate secrets. It was impossible to imagine him insecure, afraid, though he must have faced his share of snubs by the whites in Africa. Perhaps in England he thought he could get away with his fair skin if he changed his name. Who would admit to such a weakness?

  Ramji discreetly picked up the bottle of scotch and went to the kitchen to make tea. Naseem, flushed from the walk and in high spirits herself, soon came to fetch Darcy. Naaz had gone home disappointed. The Times reporter had stood her up.

  “So the spin doctor was disappointed,” said Darcy. He chuckled. “Has she tried Time or Newsweek?”

  “I wouldn’t say that in front of her if I were you.”

  “I won’t. So how was your day?”

  They left after the tea.

  The man had been independent and forbidding once, had defied the highest authorities in his former country; in California, his former arrogance now seemed oddly to wilt under the various onslaughts from three women: Leila, his darling granddaughter, taller than him by almost a head, her hand placed patronizingly on his stiffened back (a gesture no one else could get away with); the small and compact Naseem, his over-diligent minder in sweatsuit and sneakers; the roundly sensual and scented Naaz, bullying, cajoling, confronting, making no bones of the fact that his cause was bunk and he was past it, even as his stature drew her respect and attention. Seeing him thus, taken over or besieged, you couldn’t help feeling sorry for him: there is no getting past growing old, and dependent.

  Rumina would graciously withdraw (or be nudged aside, as Ramji observed), whenever the three women approached Darcy in her presence, and watch sometimes with that dimpled smile she carried when she was with him. To them she simply didn’t belong, wasn’t community, family, or even race.

  Darcy adored her and grew attached to her and Ramji’s company, spending many pleasant hours in their living room or sitting with them for coffee somewhere. Among them there were things to talk about, to remember. Darcy was their past, a rich source of history, and there was a wholesomeness to sitting before him and listening to his stories. He could recall Ramji’s parents: father a civil servant, mother a secretary who wore short hair and dresses, a typical Westernizing couple of their period. But he had not known them well, had never spoken to them, his preoccupations had been elsewhere. Darcy admitted once that Kulsa Bai’s — that is, Ramji’s grandmother’s — spells seemed to have worked on his back problem, despite his scepticism. He also remembered a press conference given by Rumina’s father Sheikh Abdala, remembered shaking hands with her mother Elena at a reception at the Soviet embassy in Dar.

  Sometimes Darcy would fall silent, as when Ramji (sounding rather like a schoolboy) told him how he had held him in awe ever since he heard of the British governor putting him in prison.

  Rumina jumped in: “Look — you’ve embarrassed Mr. Darcy.”

  And Darcy said, musingly, “We’re all too human.”

  How human? Too human, Ramji would tell himself much later, only I was unwilling to concede him his humanity; I, who had never completely grown up, needed a hero.

  One Friday evening the three of them sat on a bench outside the Company offices and watched Naseem’s Golden Club come out from evening prayers and do one of their practice walks. Naseem marched in front holding a luminous baton in one hand, the gang of seniors straggling behind valiantly in a group, each wielding a baton of his own. Naaz, in an attractive green sari, traipsed after the seniors clicking away with her camera. Then she came over, in a cloud of exotic perfume, and spying an opening between Ramji and Rumina, squeezed into it, all warm flesh and silk. A very deliberate move, calculated to annoy, if not hurt, Rumina.

  “So, you are finding out everything about the Darcy history — which is more than I am privileged to hear, let me tell you,” she said to Ramji, pouting.

  “Well —” Ramji said, but the old man cut in.

  “Not that you’ve ever shown any interest, my dear.”

  “But I am interested, Bapa. I am married into the Darcy family, your history is my history, and the children are entitled to know of their background. Just tone down the politics —”

  “I am my politics.”

  “And see where that’s got you? This is no longer your silly sixties — it’s the nineties. Your politics could have cost us our citizenship; and it gives the Community a bad name — do you know how much effort we are putting into creating a good solid image in this country?”

  Naseem came over, having led her cohorts five times round the parking lot, and Naaz said, All right, let’s go, and they all drove to Darcy’s place. Once a month, on Fridays, the Darcy family met to spend an evening together, and today was that Friday. Leila was to come by later to show a video clip she had produced for a project on Muslim women; her brother Hanif would come with her; and Amir was away at a convention. Darcy sat on the broadloomed floor of his living room, leaning back on a bolster, as he railed against the free marke
t and the IMF, the root source of the corruption in the country he had left behind. Naaz meanwhile went out and returned with an open bottle of red wine. “Isn’t it a good thing you’re out of it all now,” she said to her father-in-law and flashed a conspiratorial look at the others.

  Naaz had trained as a pediatrician in Vancouver, but had given up her career to run a lavish household and devote herself to the Community and her children. She would have liked nothing better than to knock the old man off his pedestal. And at times, when she had him in her presence, it almost seemed that she had succeeded.

  Amir and Naaz believed that due to his politics, Darcy not only endangered his life (he had been beaten up twice in his career, the second time not long ago after he wrote an exposé on the business practices of a local consortium), but also risked not being allowed to come to the United States (he published a story that offended the U.S. embassy). The story that offended the American embassy concerned the so-called Pork Riots.

  In a suburb of Dar es Salaam a Christian butcher gave a piece of pork, apparently out of mischief, to a Muslim boy who had been sent by his mother to buy some beef. Within the hour, in the ensuing riots, the butcher’s shop was burnt down. A demonstration was organized the next day in the city against the sale of pork, during which some very suspicious-looking young men were sighted. They looked foreign. You could tell foreigners by their clothes, and their walk. There is a typical Dar es Salaam walk, a lazy amble, and these men didn’t have it. Their clothes had designer labels. They were fair-skinned and dark-haired, some of them had beards. Middle Eastern money had been pouring into mosques in recent years; religious animosities, Muslim and Christian fundamentalism, Canadian and American quacks with miraculous healing powers, had all been on the increase on the local scene. The young men in the demonstration were reported by some media to be Iranians. But Darcy produced a report claiming that two of the young men had been interviewed in his presence, enticed upstairs to his office by his two female assistants, and had boasted of having come from the United States. He concluded that they had to be American-hired agitators.