by M G Vassanji
On Sunday evenings we walk to the seashore. Always in the same order, Good Kulsum in the lead, then Baby talking loudly over her shoulder at me just behind her, and German bringing up the rear. And when the girls in pretty new dresses we pass on the road pull aside and giggle at our procession Baby gives them a good piece of her mind.
‘What are you laughing at? – Khi-khi-khi …! They think they are so beautiful. Look at the teeth of that one! She scares me, she does!’
At the seashore we drink coconut water, the old man buys peanuts, and we stroll for a while watching kids playing in the sand, boats bobbing up and down on the water, steamers coming into or leaving the harbour. We wave at the passengers when they wave at us and we wonder from what world beyond they could be coming, what country the ship’s flag represents. The Goan church starts to fill up and we troop slowly home.
In that same order I was brought home after the wedding, a prize. The taxi we took from the railway station deposited us on the road outside the shop. Kulsum got out of the front seat, and Baby beside me on one side and German on the other opened their doors. Already a small group of bystanders had gathered and people came to stand at the doors of their shops pretending to be casual. The old man was haggling with the driver and Kulsum was at the door when Baby and I walked in. The servant brought the trunks behind us. Good Kulsum never misses such a chance. A shower of rice fell upon us at the doorstep as she greeted us in the traditional way, cracked her knuckles against our heads for luck, and pushed sweets into our mouths. The African girls who had gathered to watch smiled with pleasure and shyness, saying ‘Mr Bridegroom!’ ‘May this union be blessed with long life and many children,’ Kulsum crooned with pleasure, as the bride and groom stepped on and cracked the clay saucers for more good luck. ‘God give you a long and contented life together.’ Then she sobbed. By this time German had arrived and angrily shooed the girls away.
I was an orphan half-caste when I married, mother black. I was brought up by an Indian family, half servant and half son, and the night following the arrival of Good Kulsum and German with their proposal, I was told to take it.
The other day Amin walked into the store.
‘Uncle, Roshan says she wants to talk to you.’
‘What, now? What is it?’ I asked a little anxiously. This Roshan is a little disconcerting.
‘She says now, if possible.’
‘Alright. Go. Tell her I’m coming.’
I told Baby to come and wait in the shop, and I crossed the road to find out what Roshan wanted. A most unusual request, this, but for her perhaps not so. I entered the dark corridor. The first room on my left was her sitting room and parlour. At the end of the corridor the fires were cold, but the broken-backed chair on which I sometimes sat was there. Inside the room, I sat on an old sofa with faded embroidered flower patterns, whose legs had been cut. A cup of tea duly came my way and Amin was dispatched to buy something. Roshan sat across from me at her dressing table and I realised that I was sitting there like one of her customers.
‘You wanted to discuss something?’ I began.
‘Yes, I have something to tell you. You must have heard that Zarina is going to live with her brother in Mbinga.’
‘No, I haven’t heard. What happened? Can’t she make it here?’
‘No, it is difficult. And the boy is giving her a hard time. He needs a father. A man he can fear and respect.’
‘Yes, yes. His uncle will be good for him.’ I felt a little uncomfortable. Behind her a faint light poured in through a small window almost blotted with dust. She was slurping tea. ‘She is a good and clever woman,’ I ventured warily. But you, I said in my mind, are the equal of ten ordinary men.
‘If you were a bachelor, you would marry her, I know!’ And she laughed merrily, her cup tinkled against the saucer. ‘Why don’t you take her for your second wife?’
‘This is no time for joking, Roshan,’ I answered severely. She had me positively flustered.
‘I am not joking, brother. You like her and the other day you touched her in your shop. You should marry her! Go with her!’
I spoke gravely. ‘I don’t need a second wife, Roshan. I have Baby, and I am satisfied.’
‘Ho! Who says? Why don’t you have children then, tell me! You like this woman and you touched her. And she is good and fertile, I tell you. Good and fertile! And she works hard, as hard as your Baby. You know what they are saying about you? They say you are henpecked. “Like her son,” they say. “Follows her like a tail, wherever she goes. No stuff! Hides in her armpits!” ’
When I’ve had enough I’ve had enough. I got up. ‘Who says this?’ I asked. ‘Let them say it to my face. Let them dare to say it to my face! Just once, I tell you! Do you hear me? Tell them to say it to my face!’ I told her what I thought of them, whoever they were, and I left.
Behind the rooms in the courtyard the servant irons the clothes I’ve decided to take with me. They include the shirts and trousers I brought with me and the wedding suit which was a gift from my guardian, nothing that I received from here. Behind me stashed away inside a shelf is a wad of money that I’ve surely contributed to earning and which they could easily earn at month’s end. These two things, the clothes and the money, I would like to take with me in a small wooden trunk I bought for this purpose from a hawker. Soon Baby and Kulsum will get up and prepare for the Sunday walk to the seashore. It has to be soon. But German sits there like an old dog who’s smelt something. He sits patiently on the bench, with the knife in one hand and one half of the sliced ball in the other. If I go, it will have to be with the clothes on my body and the few shillings jingling in my pocket.
Ali
When Ali came to work for us we were in the throes of domestic disruption. His predecessor had failed to show up after borrowing thirty shillings to add to what little remained of his salary at month’s end, and for a few weeks we were at the mercy of a spate of temporaries who could not be relied on for their honesty or their work. My two sisters went to school like martyrs one day – box pleats ending ruinously half way down their pinafores – and suffered the expected barbs from their teachers. ‘We were the town fools today!’ raged Mehroon, as another temporary servant was paid his daily wage and told not to return. Another day my brother Firoz’s shorts returned from the wash minus a shilling. Or so he claimed and was largely believed. Finally I, only in Standard I and therefore excused from the punctiliousness expected of the others, nevertheless came home one afternoon with a note complaining about my attire. It was obvious, we could no longer simply wait in the hope that a suitable and cheap houseboy would happen by and set us in order once more.
Mother summoned Omari, the tailor at Parmar’s Tailoring Mart nearby, who moonlighted sometimes by sewing our school uniforms and other clothes. Yes, he said, his brother was in town and looking for work. The next morning he brought Ali with him; the Ali who stood somewhat diffidently before Mother’s doubtful gaze from her position on the high stool behind the counter. ‘Same mother, same father?’ was her first question, it being the common belief that among the Africans the definition of brother – or mother, or father, for that matter – stretched somewhat to suit occasions.
‘Ah, Mama, you jest!’ laughed Omari good naturedly. ‘He is the son of my younger mother – he’s my brother, no doubt!’
This belied appearance. The two could not have looked more different. Beside the tall and stately Omari, in his clean white muslin kanzu over his black trousers and checked red shirt, his hand-stitched cloth cap, and his sandals, stood a proper mshamba – a man from the farms, from the interior. Short, though thin, with ruffled, thick hair, and barefoot – toenails broken, soles fissured where they turned up, like those of someone who has never worn shoes even under the hottest sun. Ali was coal black, and beside him Omari could even pass off as fair. His cutoffs were in tatters, his shirt had no buttons and was tied in front in a knot. He looked sullen and gave mumbling answers to Mother’s pointed questions. But he looked h
onest, if only for his oafishness. You could not easily mistake him for one of those shifty characters who made a living by unpegging some item hanging for sale in a crowded store and making a dash for it. For this reason, on recommendation, and with no other choice, Mother hired Ali.
One more village boy would have to be house-trained. And after that, how long would he last? If he was smart enough, he would pick up the requisite skills and sooner or later move on to employment in a richer home, finally even with a European family – who could tell? We all wished though that we could afford the well-trained servants who could run a household as smoothly as a well-oiled machine, without being visible. As Grandmother’s Chagan and Magan did. Her servants, she said, were gems. Everyone agreed. You only had to go to her home to see what a good servant could do. She got their nicknames from the old ditty that runs, ‘My Chagan and Magan are of gold …’ Their cooking was famed: on rare occasions she would loan them for a community feast. Everyone knew then that the feast would be something special. Remtibai’s Chagan and Magan were cooking it. Her grillings of prospective servants were also legendary. Can you sweep? she would ask a nervous applicant. Can you do beds? Can you cook biriyani? Come on, tell me how! My sons, when they return from work, require a clean house, like those of the Europeans. Do you clean latrines? Yes Mama, yes Mama, yes Mama, he would answer; and then, only if she liked him, she’d come out with: ‘And can you steal?’ catching his ‘Yes Mama’ with a mischievous glint in her eye before he could quite suppress it.
But our Ali caught on fast, barring the first few days of anxiety and amusement: as when, at Firoz’s suggestion, he tried to sip hot tea from the spout of the teapot to taste it for sugar; or, again at a similar suggestion, when he stood expectantly holding up the plug of the electric iron in his outstretched hand, imagining the electricity to flow from his body to heat the iron. On this second occasion it was only when Mother asked him rather sharply, ‘But what are you doing, standing there like that?’ that he realised something was out of order. But such incidents became rare, and soon everybody depended on him. His appearance changed too, and for the better as it only could. Gone were his initial surliness and embarrassment. He turned out to be of a more cheerful and lively disposition than we could have guessed.
At six every morning we woke up to his fist banging on the door. He would make the tea and send us off to school. Then he would clean the dishes, sweep the floors, and do the beds, before going down to help Mother who was already in the store. He would run errands and was learning to cook. Every evening a pile of clothes would be ready, washed, dried, and ironed – pleats done just right, shorts turned up at the legs at just the right length, shirt collars turned up or down, fully or partly, according to the dictates of current fashion in school. The pile rose in a pyramid from a chair, starting with a base of shorts and dresses and ending at the peak with hankics. Each evening Mother would call out to him as he left, ‘Tomorrow don’t sleep, you hear?’ And he, already outside, would reply, ‘No Mama, I won’t,’ knowing full well what she meant.
In short, Ali became indispensable. Yet he showed no signs of wanting to move on. No backtalk from him, no laxity in his work. And herein lay the wonder. What kept him with us? Not the pay, certainly; and not the working conditions, for ours was a modest household, with no benefits to speak of. He did not steal: nothing was unduly missing from the flat; our curries prepared by Mother in the morning survived the day with their modest meat portions intact; and he faithfully took our food offerings to the mosque without consuming anything on the way, so we were assured by the chits he brought back with him. He could easily have found a better paying job elsewhere, now that he had mastered the workings of an Indian household. Neighbours were already eyeing him approvingly. But he did not leave. Everyone in our home appreciated this, of course, but it made the situation a little uneasy. There was a feeling of uncertainty about. Mother gave him a raise without his asking for it.
I was Ali’s special and added responsibility. Often he came to fetch me from school when for some reason my elders failed to accompany me. On our way back, in the hot afternoon when the dirt roads and the whitewashed mud houses reflected sharply the sun’s glare, when he saw me finally stumbling along and lagging behind, he would pick me up and carry me on his shoulders the rest of the way. He came looking for me when I was missed. And I used to plague him for the stories he knew. On our way back from school, or later across the table where I watched him iron clothes, or downstairs in the store when there was nothing special for him to do, I would plead with him: ‘Say a story, Ali!’ If he was in the right mood, his eyes would pick up a gleam, his face a smile. He would begin. He spoke about the cunning rabbit who tricked the hyena; how the zebra exchanged his muddy brown suit for the lion’s striped black-and-white; of wily Abunawas, who outwitted everyone in sight. As he went on his voice gained expression, his eyes caught fire, and I listened spellbound. ‘The rabbit ran, and he ran, he ran and he ran, he raaaa … an, until he got tired. Then he spotted a big leafy tree.’ And Ali, himself getting out of breath, would drop whatever was in his hands and show the full expanse of the tree, its girth and height, and point to its top where the rabbit climbed, while his witless pursuer waited at the foot.
His favourite stories undoubtedly were about Shane. He had a host of Shane stories, most of which he invented as I now realise. A game he loved to play was to move to one side after knocking on our door. Then, when the door opened, he would step out swiftly with the cry, ‘Shane, look out!’ pretending to draw a revolver and shoot down whoever it was who had answered. Once he did that to Mother – by mistake, I believe – much to his dismay.
I learnt about Roy Rogers from Ali. On a wall in our stairwell he had drawn with charcoal a full-length sketch of the cowboy in full regalia. It was so well done that no one thought to bring him to task for defacing the wall, and no one ever wrote or painted over it. It stayed intact for years, long after he had left.
Thanks to him I had my first glimpse of royalty. The arrival of Princess Margaret in our town was an occasion for a big and lively celebration. Preparations were in progress for months, and the last few weeks before she arrived were like the days of festive Ramadhan. Streets were crowded, especially in the evenings. Stores, decorated with light series and flags, stayed open late and busy. Groups from schools, churches, Red Cross, and RSPCA, individuals on stilts and in fancy dress banging drums and tambourines, went around for donations. School bands, the police band, and neighbourhood bands equipped with lead pipes and tin-can maracas practised in different parts of the town. All of a sudden Union Jacks became a common sight, fluttering in rows on storefronts and in the hands of schoolchildren. Vendors of sweets, coffee, and brightly coloured sherbets set up on street corners or went about from store to store calling out their wares, whistling. The sounds of children playing rang out in the streets late into the evening.
Schools went through special preparation and drill for the royal visit. But to my great disappointment only the higher forms were to be allowed to welcome the princess. I missed the excitement of the rehearsals, the free lunches and sodas. Developments in the rehearsals were announced daily at home by Mehroon. She was the eldest and not for nothing called ‘Reporter’ by us. So and so would participate in the gymnastics display, someone else had the chance to sing the anthem, a third one would present a gift. Curtsies were demonstrated in our sitting room with much discussion and debate. I watched all this from a distance, feeling left out and envious. All the excitement seemed to be passing me by. On the day of the visit, even the motorcade was rerouted to miss our street.
Then, on the afternoon of the fated day, while I sat in the store with Mother and Ali and my younger brother Aloo, waiting for Mehroon and the others to return, a sudden commotion rose up in the street outside. A thunder of bare feet thudded down the street, as almost everyone who could simply left what he was doing and started running with excitement like a being possessed. Ali walked out, squinting at the sunlig
ht, made a quick enquiry and hurried back inside. On the store bench he left the shirt he was working on and was off.
‘What’s up, eh Ali?’ I shouted after him, looking up from an assembly of cardboard box and wooden reels on the floor.
‘The young queen,’ he said, ‘she’s coming!’
He stopped, came back inside, pulled my hand and together we took off. But that was no way to beat the crowd running with us, and soon I was on his shoulders, bumping along and towering over the others. We ran on main roads and along side streets, all the while following the crowd ahead of us as they took first this turn and then the other. Men and women came out of houses and stores, shielding their eyes from the sun, gazing towards a mass of people now converging from many directions. Some looked up at the sky and pointed. Finally we stopped where a huge crowd had gathered around the war memorial, the elevated bronze statue thrusting a bayonet at some unseen enemy.
‘There it is – the bird,’ said Ali, pointing up. And there it was, like a locust buzzing in the air – the helicopter from which the princess had landed. For some, as for Ali, this was the only sight they had of the royal presence.
Sitting on Ali’s shoulder and looking over the black, fuzzy heads of the mass of people, all straining their eyes and craning their necks, I saw the princess waving a white-gloved hand. Her dress was white and her wide-brimmed hat was also white. A figure of such grace and poise, as if an angel had descended from the sky. And beside her, in his tasselled black and gold ceremonials, the Governor, Sir Philip Morrisson – a name whose each syllable we had learnt to pronounce with mystical awe.