Chocolate Cherry Chai

by Taslim Burkowicz

  “Your eyes are like ginger pickle doused in lemon juice, salt, and turmeric,” she said.

  In the lavish entrance way, a parrot sat in a cage atop a polished table. His beak, bundled into his feathers, gave him the appearance of a large lime. Slowly, he removed his beak from his feathers. Suddenly he stood up at attention, like a Ugandan police officer. First he copied the sound of the doorbell, and then he imitated the wife yelling at her husband. The imitation was so precise I was surprised to see the wife’s lips sealed like a purse.

  “He is such a joker, our Parmy. He has a bird brain, but he is a trickster,” she said, not amused.

  We walked down a corridor and the woman opened a door. “The four of you have accumulated enough dust to build an entire slum village. Please wipe yourself down with whatever cold water is left in the tank and sleep on these towels on the floor. I cannot have you dirtying up our guest cots. They must be kept pristine for real guests.”

  The next morning we were soothed with eggs and paratha, followed by papaya, British tea biscuits, and chai. “How did you sleep, lovey?”

  “Fine, thank you.”

  In the daytime, the house looked like it had been drenched in fresh lemon juice. Sunlight poured in through the windows. The walls glowed in a shade of a buttery yellow and a citrus scent hung in the air. The only other person in the dining room besides the wife was the maid, who was hunched over on all fours, washing the floors.

  “I have made the breakfast paratha myself. Not my aya, she cannot make anything half-way decent besides ugali. Make yourself at home. Once I locate your auntie, I will escort you to her myself.” She gave me a smile that could have lit up a cold, mud stove.

  I did not like the idea of putting off meeting Auntie. But I had no money and thus no ability to make any of my own choices. So I led the children away from the parrot cage, and told them to go outside and skip in the lavish courtyard. Nargis lifted one small baby on her hip and the other baby toddled after her. The courtyard was so fancy it even had a European-style water fountain.

  “Do you have any clothes to mend, sister? I am a skilled tailor.”

  “Please, call me Wife. Follow me to the master bedroom. I have the finest collection of saris you will ever see.”

  We scaled the ornate ivory staircase. For a brief moment, I imagined I was the lady of the house. We ended up in a large room with a handcrafted mahogany bed. Without hesitation, Wife laid out a dozen richly decorated saris.

  “I happen to very much like birds. Can you add embroidery to this sari in the design of our parrot, Parmy? How about sewing mirror work onto this blouse?”

  Before I left the room, Wife pulled me close to her again. “Could you give the saris a good hand-wash while you are at it? The aya mashes and beats the saris into a pulpy mess. Even dressed in your rags, you must know the worth of such fineries.”

  Yes, I knew all about fine saris. These dimmed in comparison to the ones Amma brought back from India. Those were made of such fine silk they would slip through your fingers like butterfly wings. They were spun with gold, teal, and violet. The patterns told a story when you looked at them: a bird’s first flight from its nest, or the tale of how drenched the jungles got after an entire season of monsoon rain. While Amma stroked the artistic patterns with her fingers, she would talk of her childhood in India, of how she was treated just like a Rajasthani princess. A childhood her daughter, me, would never have. But unlike Amma, I did not yearn for material pleasures. I only wanted to escape the store merchant.

  Over the next few hours I tailored her saris, taking care it was my most precise work. When my eyes got so tired I could no longer focus them, I made fresh curries from local vegetables, a carrot and chili pickle, and rolled out hot roti after roti, until the round bread container was full. This way the aya could grind Indian spices in the courtyard. She steadily pummelled a wooden stick into a large clay urn, a kerchief wrapped around her face to keep the spicy clouds from entering her nostrils. When the family ate, no mention was made that I had cooked and not the aya.

  The next morning, Wife found me meticulously sewing gold twining into her sari blouse. It had taken me hours to produce the design. She scrutinized my handiwork, screwing up her face.

  “Gold will not look good against my arms. My arms are already golden, do you not see? I will look nearly naked! I will have the aya fetch silver twining from the Indian bazaar so you can remedy this.”

  “Yes, Wife.”

  “Please make me chicken tikka to eat. These headaches I get, they keep me from the kitchen. I want my mother’s chicken.”

  Every Indian woman living in Africa could make this dish blindfolded, but tastes varied depending on the cook. Hesitatingly, I pressed her. “Do you have a recipe?”

  “None, mara passé kai nathi. I can tell you the tandoori paste left a zingy feeling on your tongue, as though a grasshopper was jumping around the inside of your mouth. Are you so daft you cannot make a dish without a written recipe?”

  I searched for ingredients inside the large pantry. I marinated chicken in lemon juice, tandoori paste, garlic, ginger, salt, and yogurt. When the sauce tasted of fresh citrus and zest that would please a Rajasthani king, I charred the chicken to perfection, plating it on a silver dish with freshly chopped cilantro and a lemon wedge.

  Wife lifted a leg to her mouth, ripping the skin with her teeth. The aya took a few steps back. “Disgusting!” she threw the platter to the floor. Masala chicken splattered on the floor in sticky pieces. The aya rushed forward to save more pieces from sliding down.

  “You have made a mockery of my mother’s memory!”

  A couple of hours later I heard a soft knock. The children were asleep on towels at my feet. I darted around their curled bodies, coiled like tiny shrimp, taking care not to touch the dressed cot.

  “Can you handle making monthar sweets? Perhaps it is best you use your own recipe.”

  I rushed down and measured out the ingredients. In record time I was stamping out wedges in the shapes of diamonds.

  “Your chicken tasted like gritty mud. But this is tasty,” Wife said, gram flour fudge melting in her mouth.

  “Soon enough I will be out of your hair … ”

  “Enough of your chatter,” she waved her hand. The parrot made the sound of a doorbell. The aya opened it to reveal the husband with his finger poised ready to press the buzzer.

  “Parmy is funnier than the men at the country club,” he said. The parrot made a laughing sound from deep within his throat.

  “Here,” said the husband kindly, walking straight past Wife and pressing gifts for the children into my hands. “I have also purchased blankets.”

  I was so grateful I looked him in the eye when I smiled. Though it was the season of hot weather, it had been difficult to sleep on towels alone.

  Wife dropped a square of monthar. She brushed the decoration of pistachios from her wet lips. She was actually quite an attractive woman. However, when she was angry her beauty was never more apparent.

  Wife pulled at her ruby jewelled rings. “Have you come to rob my family blind or to seduce my husband?” Trembling, she swiped at glasses filled with pomegranate juice. Red liquid splashed on the floor. Parmy squawked in the air like there had been a murder. The aya bent down and fervently began soaking up the concoction with towels. “You will get your payback, you snake-eyed whore. Mark my words.”

  But the very next day, the fit was forgotten. Wife told me about the boatload of men who once asked for her hand while I mended her saris. By evening, however, she had locked herself in her room. The aya sent up water, curd, pickled mango, and paratha.

  The aya said in a worried voice, “Ma’am refuses to eat. Ma’am refuses to eat.” She sounded just like the parrot. It seemed as though no time was a good one to ask Wife whether she had located the whereabouts of Auntie’s house.

  I did not know wh
y I was surprised when the store merchant showed up. Parmy made a buzzing sound before the doorbell rang, and the aya rushed to the door. Sitting on a stool while I stitched, I only saw the black outline of a figure, with shafts of sunshine glowing around the body. The store merchant emerged from the white light, like a holy prophet. He was sweating profusely in his tan suit. Slicked back with coconut oil, his hair separated into thick roads of scalp, reminding me of paths leading to the bungalow. The store merchant pressed bottles of sour Indian achaar from his store into Wife’s hands. The store merchant’s pickles were known to be the best in Kampala. But it is I who made them.

  It was Wife’s moment to shine. She waved her hands in a theatrical gesture, looking like Parmy did when he flapped his wings, frenzied and stir-crazy from being stuck in the cage for too long. “Sukaina lied about being a widow. Her yellow eyes are a gift from the devil! In the dead of the night I found her, just fallen from a cliff and wandering toward the water where she was going to drown herself next! Allah watches us all for good deeds, so I brought her home!”

  The store merchant’s face was pinched maroon with suppressed anger. “Thank you, thank you,” he sputtered.

  “Little did I know the harlot was going to set her eyes on my husband, after all I did to help her — has she no shame?”

  “Thank you, thank you.”

  “As I have become accustomed to providing for all these extra people, please stay for lunch,” offered Wife.

  “The next train leaves shortly.”

  “Then you simply must accept these toys. It is always the children that suffer at the hands of an unfit mother. Oh, and keep these towels. I have no tolerance for dirt in my house, you understand? Dirt is positively ungodly.”

  The store merchant walked toward the door, suddenly looking like a vendor at a fair, loaded with colourful trinkets. He held the towels away as though they were the rags used for my monthlies, no less. The husband handed over my suitcase, closing the door. We wound our way down the jumbled mess of white bungalows and high walls. At the base of the hill he hitched a taxi to the train station. We did not pass coconut farms on the way.

  “Of all the stupid things to do, Sukaina,” he seethed, ignoring the Africans chasing us with glasses of sugared lime drinks. A porter whisked away our luggage. The store merchant pulled the children onto the train. I lifted the hem of my sari so I could jump up onto the high step unassisted. We watched the village children chase the train after penny candies.

  The meteors on his face rose and fell. “How long did you think it would take for the news to reach me? You can thank those beastly eyes of yours. They look like pools of piss. No one can forget you.”

  We watched the colours of the plains race by: strips of lacy oatmeal, sheets of creamy wheat organza, and fields spun from golden thread, all rolls of fabrics ready to be sewn. I spotted a few Maasai, scarlet drops of blood on an oily beige background made up of dead grass and stunted trees.

  Finally, the store merchant spoke again. “You thought you could run away with my children? You created all this drama, for this no-good daughter you produced with a commie?” He gave Nargis a tight slap on the face. “I am sending Nargis away, and if you fight me I will send you to the insane asylum instead.”

  My first husband had loved reading historical tales to me. But it was the store merchant that had fed me his own version of the Queen of Spain. Nargis, at four years old, was cast off to live as a maid-servant with my first husband’s brother’s family. I sent her with my gold star pin, pierced through her nose. Trapped in my own tower of misery, I looked out the window from our modest bungalow on Mengo Hill, and I understood first-hand how it felt to lose your mind, bit by bit.

  ***

  IF YOU ASKED WHERE the best place to live in Kampala was, people would say Mengo Hill. After all, the King of Buganda himself had his palace built here in 1885. When you drove up the hill, you could almost hear the royal copper kettle drums as you saw the white bungalows come into view, winding up the hill like an albino mamba snake. You could see the ghosts of the past marching by: Ugandan officers clutching arms, nobles dressed in leopard-cat robes, and the sorceresses offering pombe. If you tilted your ears the right way to the wind you would hear the deep belly laugh of the great king himself, dressed in his national costume, guarded by two spears and a shield.

  My bungalow sat atop this royal hill. In order to even step onto our compound you would have to get past our African watchman. He was a big eater, our watchman. He often snuck rich goat dishes with plantains from the back door. My husband said a loyal watchman was a well-fed watchman, so we turned the other eye. The main bungalow was shaped in semi circles, just like iced cakes at top-class Indian weddings. The stucco was as white as a Portuguese bridal gown. Dozens of windows urged you to peek through them, like a European woman’s revealing blouse.

  People living on the estates of Mengo Hill wanted the very best of everything. They did not know I came to these estates years ago, selling homemade saris, or that I ate boiled peanuts sold by local farmers shouting “karraangaaaa!” for breakfast, lunch, dinner. These people only wanted the fresh peanuts made into Tanzanian jugu cake. The women here did not speak of politics, but if the men made an unintelligible remark about communism, my eyes stared them down. I wore my spoils of gold, feeling like the bride Rupali Ba in the Gujarati folk tale — weighed down by jewellery desirable to everyone but her. The wives murdered the reputation of woman after woman over countless tea dipped cookies. They waited for me to reveal the scandal of my past, but I silently set out chai as expected, topped with a Russian coat of scalded milk.

  From the window I saw a man with a thick beard approach the watchman. As I wondered who he was and what message he came to deliver, Miriam skipped down our icy glazed staircase, shined by the workers this morning.

  “Mama, where is the birthday sari you promised to make?” Miriam stood before me with daring brown eyes, deep like dug up soil. After my first daughter, none of my children had stood to inherit my yellow eyes; it seemed there was only one pair to hand out per generation.

  “Miriam, I completely forgot.”

  “You always forget, Mama!”

  Looking at her, I saw a young lady. Only last month she was interested in ice cream and balloons. Now she was filled with passionate anger that only surfaced when a woman’s monthlies began. She sunk into the antique Portuguese ladder chair, pouting.

  “You will be fifteen and this is your first sari. Papa will buy you a new collection from Old Kampala Town.”

  “You were a famous sari designer. I want something made by you.”

  “I was?” I laughed despite her seriousness. “Whoever told you that?”

  “My school friends said Indian starlets wore your sari gowns. Why did you never tell me?”

  I had been so sure the stories going around about me were unfavourable I never stopped to think anyone would place me in an admirable light. This was Kampala, however, and the good stories never strayed far from the bad.

  “Miriam, you know better than to listen to gossip.”

  Miriam shrugged, her interest in me already waning.

  “They exaggerate my success at best.”

  “Could I wear something you designed?” she asked, wide-eyed. “The 1930s are making a comeback.”

  “When I was younger, I recycled every item until the cloth wore out.”

  “Come on, Mama. No one reuses unless they are low class.” She wrinkled her nose in distaste.

  “Almost everything I had was destroyed by the fire.”

  “What fire?”

  Outside, the help watered the palm trees. Sweat droplets formed on their muscular backs. Small nets hugged the maturing coconuts, keeping them from striking people below. The same bearded man from this morning approached the front gates, but when I looked again, I was no longer sure he was there. Did I know this man?

&n
bsp; “Come, I’ll show you my designs.”

  We passed by a Portuguese-style oil painting of mossy Kenyan cliffs, done in strokes of lime ice. The steep hills plunged suddenly into the ocean, still as the glass blue eyes of a British porcelain doll. Despite its pastel palette, the painting was haunting and unnerving. For years, I had mentally painted my own figure hurling itself to death over the sharp cliff. Long ago I had marked myself for a young death, but so far my prophecy had not come true.

  We entered the master bedroom. Doors opened to a red brick balcony the sun had dyed coral. Too narrow to set chairs out, flowers had invaded the deck, sunning like shameless Europeans. A foliage of red, orange, and pink roses climbed up the iron supports, while pajama lilies opened their candy pink striped petals to the sun. Roses and lilies paired together made a fragrance only a mistress would be brave enough to wear.

  Miriam ran her hand along the African mahogany bedframe, made from the Khaya tree. With a renewed awe, her eyes washed over the painting above the bed. The moon was a chunky diamond stone sinking into a silver and indigo ocean. The water quivered with gems, liquid sapphires lapped against waves of onyx. A breeze rippled through Miriam’s hair, as though the painting was indeed a window opening to a mystical night sky.

  I walked up to the wardrobe with Arabic inscribed dials. Miriam watched suspiciously. I removed the saris hidden in a protective liner.

  “Hai Allah!” Miriam spread the saris into a stretched out rainbow. “These are designer worthy! The blouses are dated. Surely you can sew me a new blouse! Can you make me a big tikka like Pramila wears as a headpiece?”

  Girls had been imitating Pramila’s style since she won the first Miss India pageant a couple of years back. Daring pictures of Pramila had even made it here into African papers, where she stood by an airplane, wearing trousers and riding boots exactly like a man would.