by Anar Ali
In the distance, Ruby notices another electrical tower. It looks minuscule, the size of a candle, as if it’s part of a scale-model of the city. From here it’s hard to imagine that it rises hundreds of feet above the earth. As Ruby examines the city, she suddenly begins to see more and more towers. They are everywhere—as if the city is an electrical field! But there is no pattern to their location. They seem to be randomly dispersed. There are some houses with several towers nearby, while others have only one or two, and yet others have none. Why didn’t the city have a plan? Ruby wants to know. It’s as if the city never once considered that the towers might be harmful. But what if they are? Ruby asks herself for the first time. She feels a strange bitterness rise in her, like an unexpected aftertaste. Ruby wants to spit it out, but instead she swallows hard and then turns to leave. She has to get home. She still has work to do.
Samuel Mathews
The stewardess, in her tight green uniform, extended her arm over the seats in front of us and leaned in. “Drinks?” she asked in a Swedish accent.
I sat in the window seat, fidgeting with excitement. I had never been on an airplane before. It was August of 1975 and I was seven years old. It was hard to believe, but overnight, we would be transported to a new world. It was as if we were climbing into a storybook where we would easily become part of the page. For months now, my father had told me all that Canada offered and I could not wait to get there. He sat in the middle seat, and my mother in the aisle seat. This way she could attend to my dadima, my father’s mother, who sat in the row behind us. My dadima refused anyone’s help except my mother’s. It was, after all, my mother’s duty as her daughter-in-law to attend to all her needs.
The stewardess reached over to release our meal trays and then snapped open three Coca-Cola bottles. My mother leaned into the aisle, twisting her head back, and translated for my dadima. She wanted a cup of tea. After the stewardess left, my dadima tapped my mother’s arm. “Eh-hey, Shamim, call that hussy back. I want saccharine, not sugar. And ask for more cashews. As if such a small package will fill me up.”
My dadima had a long list of ailments, none of which I understood. All I knew was that she carried a pillbox of multicoloured tablets and a small flask of brandy in an oversized black purse, which she clicked open every few minutes to check the contents. “She’s crazy, I swear,” I once heard my mother say to her sister. “Not like she carries any money in there. Thinks we’re made of gold.”
“How about a colouring book?” the stewardess asked when she returned with my dadima’s saccharine. She waved a plastic package at me.
I nodded enthusiastically. The stewardess handed me the package. Inside, I found a set of crayons and a colouring book titled Vinter Olympisk 1976: Innsbruck Willkommen die Welt! The cover featured a downhill skier in a sleek red snowsuit, one leg splayed back as he pushed himself through the starting gate.
My dadima tapped my mother’s elbow. “Eh-hey, Shamim. Mukaye-pasab laygee-ai. I need the washroom.” My dadima could go to the washroom by herself, but preferred assistance. She was a bulky woman and often had trouble removing her underwear and properly aligning herself over the toilet seat.
My mother rolled her eyes and then unbuckled her seat belt.
“Looks like fun, huh, Farah?” my father asked me, tapping his pen on the skier’s goggles.
“Uh-huh,” I said.
My father was an avid athlete. Fit body, fit mind, he would always say. In Nairobi, he went speed walking each weekday morning at 5 A.M., circling the track at the Aga Khan Sports Club until the sun rose at 6 A.M. My mother would not allow me to go with him; it was too early and I was too young. But I insisted on golfing with him each Saturday at the Royal Nairobi Golf Club, where I was the only child on the course, not to mention, the only girl. I could barely carry my golf clubs and I inevitably slowed his game. But my father never said anything. He waited patiently as I swung the ball, moving it forward a few feet at a time, scoring triple and quadruple boogies, while he scored birdies and pars, even eagles. His swing was smooth and sure. I watched him carefully, eager to shadow his every move.
“Maybe we’ll go skiing in Canada,” he said. “Too cold to golf.”
“Is this Canada?” I asked, examining the cover.
“No, it’s Austria,” he laughed. “But close enough.” My father went on to explain that the Winter Olympics were being held in Innsbruck the following year even though they were originally supposed to have been held in Denver, Colorado. “But the Americans, they didn’t plan properly, you see. Let things get out of hand. Hard to believe, really. Think they’re so bloody smart and still they ran out of money,” my father said, shaking his head. “So what do you think? Should we take up skiing?”
“Yes!” I emptied the crayons onto my meal tray.
My father removed his To Do list from his shirt pocket and added a new item, Ski Lessons. He had started the list months before, adding and removing items as our impending departure neared. At the top of the list, in red ink: Find a Business. My father had six brothers and sisters. He was not the eldest son, but it was still his job to set up a business in Canada, get us settled as quickly as possible, and then sponsor the rest of the family. He had dreams of studying abroad, but when my grandfather died of unknown reasons during a trip to Rangoon, leaving my dadima a widow at the age of thirty-six, my father took over the family business as well as the responsibility of the family. He was sixteen years old.
His brother Kamru was the eldest at nineteen, but he was unaccustomed to working. He had been the first to benefit from my grandfather’s business success, the nouveau riche of Kenya. He was spoiled and spent most of his time at the casino or in bars. My father built the family business to new heights. “You have the Midas touch,” people told him. Years later, my father accidentally found out through a business acquaintance that my grandfather was not dead; he was remarried and now living in Hyderabad. My father never told his family. There was no point in causing them any undue pain.
My parents had had no plans of leaving Kenya, but the combination of Nyerere’s nationalization scheme in Tanzania followed by the expulsion of Asians in Uganda sent one shock wave after another through the Asian community in East Africa. It’s only a matter of time, people said, before Kenyatta follows suit. It was as if we had been swept into the ocean, our feet no longer able to reach the bottom. Many scrambled to invest abroad. But my father already had an escape plan. He had been sending money out of the country for years through my mother’s cousin-brother, Jimmy Ratansi, or Jimmy Bond as my father would sometimes call him, winking at my mother and saying, “Kenya’s top secret agent, nuh?” to which my mother would just smile or at other times, cuff his elbow and then scold him, half laughing. “Shh! Your mother will hear.”
Jimmy Uncle was an exporter of coffee and had accounts overseas. My father arranged to give him cash shillings, which he used to pay his workers and buy supplies. Jimmy Uncle then transferred money from his account to one in London that he had opened for my father under the name Samuel Mathews, an alias for my father, whose name is Shiraz Mitha. Jimmy Uncle wanted to pay my father a rate that was better than the black market rate, but my father refused. “As if I could do that. You’re my brother now.”
Jimmy Uncle was the only boy in a family filled with girls. He also had a severe limp (having had polio as a child), which served to generate excessive sympathy from his sisters and cousin-sisters. My mother asked my father to please help Jimmy Uncle; he had been involved in several businesses, all of which had failed. “If you don’t help him, God only knows what will happen to him,” she said. Jimmy Uncle was older than my father and still had not made his mark in the world. My father agreed to help. He encouraged Jimmy Uncle to get into the coffee business. Many in the community had begun to diversify, to invest in new businesses like manufacturing and farming. After all, owning a shop made you vulnerable; it built resentment among Africans. My father taught Jimmy Uncle how to manage his business. It was importan
t, for instance, not to report all your income. This would help minimize taxes. It was also important to keep a tight reign on employees—otherwise they’d rob you blind. With the combination of my father’s sound business advice and rising world coffee prices, Jimmy Uncle’s business flourished. Soon, he became a rich man, and many women, who had normally ignored him, were now pursuing him left, right, and centre.
“How to know? Are they well intentioned or are they only after my money?” Jimmy Uncle asked my father when he came over for tea. “I wish I was lucky like you, Shiraz-bhai.”
“What luck?” my father said, smiling at my mother. “I just made a good choice.”
Jimmy Uncle laid his cane across his lap. “No, no. Even if you choose, who knows what she will turn out to be like in the end. I’m telling you, it all depends on your luck, your naseeb.”
“You’re right, Jimmy,” my mother teased as she poured him another cup of tea. “He’s lucky that I even gave him a chance.”
“See that?” my father said, his palms to the air. “See how she treats me? Maybe you’re the lucky one, Jimmy Bond. Better not to be trapped by the love of a woman. Once they have you, kalas—you’re done for. You’ll take anything she throws your way.”
Everyone laughed, including me, although I didn’t think it was funny. To me, it was romantic. I did not fully understand what my father meant, but in my mind, I saw him effortlessly carrying anything my mother threw at him—pots, pans, balls and bats. There was nothing he would not do for her.
My parents had a love marriage, which was still unusual in those days and made me feel special. We were not like other families. We were a modern family. The idea of love, free love, had trickled into Kenya through Hollywood movies, magazines, business trips to London, and people returning after studying abroad. If you looked at early photographs of my parents, my father is wearing bell-bottoms and platform shoes. His hair is styled (and still is) like Elvis’s, his dark locks slicked up and back with Yardley’s. My mother is wearing cork-heeled sandals under a mini-skirt, she has black, thick-rimmed eyeglasses on, and her hair is styled in a beehive. To my dadima’s dismay, my parents also held hands in public and were often seen arm in arm. “Shameless! She’ll ruin our reputation, that girl will.” My mother was also the same age as my father (twenty-two when they met), not to mention the fact that she was much too educated: she had attended Kianda College of Secretarial Management and was working as a bookkeeper at the Hilton. “Mark my words. She will never take care of you properly.” My father ignored my dadima’s pleas. “Love is enough,” my father told his mother, to which she cried and beat her chest. “Love? What kind of rubbish are you talking? You think that is what makes a marriage work? You wait and see. That girl will be the end of us one day.”
My mother’s parents approved of my father. This is the way of the new world, isn’t it? Let the children choose what will make them happy. My mother had five older sisters and by the time she was of age, her parents were tired—she would joke—of trying to find yet another suitable match. Thank God! Even so, her parents insisted, as was the custom, that a chaperone accompany them on their dates. Jimmy Uncle was chosen and for close to a year, he would trail behind them during their walks, even bring a book along and wait in the car, or else join them at Kenya Cinema but watch another film, or even go to a friend’s house, where my parents would pick him up at the end of the evening.
Jimmy Uncle finally made a choice and married a woman confined to a wheelchair. This way, he had said, she would never leave him, even if his luck turned bad and he lost all his money.
“Don’t be silly, Jimmy,” my mother said as she refilled his cup with tea. “If anything ever happened, as if we’re not here for you. That’s what family is for.”
After returning from the washroom and buckling my dadima back into her seat, my mother leaned over and whispered to my father, “My God, it’s like having a baby.” She then explained that the airplane washrooms were so small that she had had to leave the door open, asking one of the stewardesses to watch for other passengers. “I swear the woman should be in diapers.”
My father nodded and took her hand in his. “Take it easy, darling. It won’t be long until Kamru moves to Canada.” In Nairobi, my dadima used to live with Kamru Uncle. Kamru Uncle was unmarried, so my dadima had no choice but to accept the ayah he’d hired. To my mother’s consternation, my father’s family decided it was better if my dadima immigrated with us rather than waiting to immigrate with Kamru Uncle. The sooner she got to Canada the better. After all, the Canadian health system was much more reliable (not to mention free). “If something ever happened to her,” my father’s siblings had said to him, “God knows, you would never be able to forgive yourself.”
—
AFTER REGISTERING ME in grade two at Connaught Elementary School, my parents set out looking for an apartment. They found several, but in the end, my father decided on the one that was slightly more expensive. “Are you sure, darling?” my mother asked. “Absolutely,” my father said. The apartment was a modest two-bedroom at the edge of Calgary’s downtown core. The appliances were mismatched, the walls were watermarked, but it had a balcony. My father wanted my mother to be able to grow her flowers—even if only in the summer. Our flat in Nairobi had had a back garden and a front verandah, both of which boasted brilliant pink and red flowers. My mother scrubbed the pigeon droppings off the balcony and then decorated it with a few pots of hardy plants, ones capable of enduring the winter. “Looks so pretty,” I said. “It certainly does, doesn’t it, mitu?” my mother responded. “But this is just temporary, you know. Wait ’til your father finds a business. Then we’ll move into a proper house with a garden and everything.”
Our apartment doubled as my father’s office and I was now privy to conversations that would never have taken place in front of me in Nairobi. My father spent most of his time at the kitchen table, a foldaway that my parents had purchased at The Bay and set up at the end of the small galley kitchen. He would flip through the classified sections of Alberta’s newspapers—Calgary Herald, Edmonton Journal, Red Deer Advocate, Olds Gazette—circling potential ads under the column Businesses for Sale. On the wall behind the kitchen table, he had tacked a large wall map of Alberta, the various towns decorated with red and green push-pins. “Too bad we hadn’t come earlier, huh?” my father once joked. “Like the British—those smart bastards! Then we wouldn’t have to worry about finding a business. We would have found all this land instead. Not to mention, we would have made real Indians out of the Indians, huh?”
Each day after school, I would rush home, eager as always to tell my father about my day. He was usually busy working at the kitchen table, but when I came in, his attention always turned to me. My dadima often sat at the table with him—to give him company, as she put it, even though my mother was only a few feet away preparing our dinner. My mother made two different meals, one for us and one for my dadima, who needed to control her sugar and salt intake. There weren’t any proper Indian grocery shops in Calgary yet, but my mother had brought a box from Nairobi that was packed with spices, as well as a bronze mortar and pestle that had been her mother’s. “Your mother, she’s a saint. What would we do without her, huh?” my father would often say at the end of a meal.
“Come look at this,” he said to me one day when I came home from school.
I threw my lunch kit and Etch-a-Sketch by the front door and hurried to him. The Etch-a-Sketch was a welcoming gift from Shirin Virji, a woman my mother had befriended at jamatkhana. There were hardly any Ismailis in Canada yet, especially in Calgary; most of them had settled in Toronto or Vancouver. (My parents had chosen Alberta because of its good business climate. They also liked the idea of living close to the Rockies. They had spent part of their honeymoon in Moshi, at the base of Mount Kilimanjaro, and ever since had loved the mountains.) There were several makeshift jamatkhanas in Calgary, one held on weekdays at various people’s houses (including one at the Nanjis’ a few
blocks away), and two others, held on weekends—one in a hall on Tenth Avenue and another one near the old airport. We didn’t go to jamatkhana often. “What’s the point of going,” my mother had asked my father, “if I spend the whole time doing one thing or the other for the old woman?” My mother suggested that my father and I go to jamatkhana and she would stay home with my dadima. My father refused. He would not go without her. “It’s okay, darling. We’ll make our own khane, right here.” So we did—we sat around the coffee table, on the orange shag carpet, saying both du’as, singing a ginan, and then reciting a firman each evening starting at seven. My dadima tried protesting. “What am I? A prisoner. Can’t go anywhere. Keep me locked in this godforsaken place all day.” “It’s easier this way, Ma,” my father explained, to which my dadima retorted, “Not everything in life has to be easy-kama-easy, understand? Sometimes, you have to suffer.”
My father lifted me onto his lap. “See this,” he said, running his finger up and down the ridges representing the Rockies on the map of Alberta. “This is where we’ll go skiing.”
“But when, Daddy? When are we going to go skiing?” I wasn’t interested in skiing as much as I was in spending Saturdays with my father once again. Most of our weekends were now spent driving to various towns to look at businesses that were for sale.
“But isn’t it dangerous?” my dadima asked as she slurped her tea. “Especially for a girl?”
“Can’t be that dangerous. Thousands of people do it—both girls and boys,” my mother said. She leaned down and removed a casserole dish of keema and mayai from the oven using two tea towels as oven mitts.
“Exactly, Ma. Shamim is right.”
My dadima mumbled something and pushed her chair back. It screeched against the tile floor. “Eh-hey, Shamim. Washroom,” she said as she pressed her palms to the table and lifted herself to standing.