Uhuru Street

by M G Vassanji

  I will get him. I will get this chubby Indian boy even if I have to walk this street up and down every day …

  At regular intervals green government trucks suddenly appeared in the main streets at night and a general chase ensued, policemen jumping out and checking African pedestrians for their cards. Those who couldn’t produce them were carted off to the police station, and if not claimed by employers the following day were sent off to their villages.

  A month ago he had found his way back to the city after six months upcountry. And a few days later on the morning of Eid, he had come across the three boys, returning home from prayers, all in crisp, new clothes, polished shoes and slick hair. They were in a jolly mood. He stood aside to let them pass and stretched out his hand, respectfully, with a friendly grin. They took no notice, continued to play. One of them tickled the other, the thin, bony one, at the sides, who turned around with a shout and gave chase. The two boys ran around a parked car several times, chasing and provoking each other in turns. The chubby one stood back, calling after them and laughing.

  The man stood watching, ignored and hurt. Then in a final effort, he turned on the grin and started walking towards the chubby one, his only hand held out once more to beg. The cane protruded upwards and sideways from the hand. The boy, doubled up in excitement and pleasure, saw the raised cane and the man’s grinning face and straightened up. With a look of terror he let out a cry and started to run. The other two gave up pursuit of each other and with a look at the man, followed. The man stopped in his tracks and watched them. Then, in a fit of anger he ran after them, giving them a good chase for a few hundred yards. They jumped over gutters, pushed aside people and ran into each other in their fright. They kept running even after he had stopped and turned back exhausted.

  What cowards they are, these Banyanis. Three boys like that … and an old man like me. Even their fathers – all faggots. Hanisi! When I was young I stopped them, walking home nervously across Mnazi Moja Grounds. A gruff ‘Give me money’ and a shove in the chest was enough to produce a coin …

  Two weeks after he first chased the three boys, he came across one of them again. Not the chubby one, or the bony one who got tickled at the sides, but the other, the sly one. This time he was walking along Selous Street which goes straight up to the school. It was late afternoon, school was over and the boy was walking home alone in the opposite direction, swinging his satchel. The man did not recognise him at first. But a few yards ahead of him the boy stopped and giving him a fearful look crossed the road and started running. The man turned and gave chase. This time he ran farther, for a full mile or so, and he ran with all the strength he had. The boy took several corners but he followed. People sitting outside their houses, old men playing bao, looked up unperturbed. Several times the boy looked behind and tried to gather more speed to lose his pursuer. He was getting tired. Then he reached the potters’ village and ran in through the gates. The man went and stood behind a small baobab tree, exhausted. His sides ached and his head pounded. The soles of his bare feet hurt and the stump which was his left arm throbbed with pain. A few minutes later an Indian woman came out through the gate, wiping her hot face with the end of her veil. She checked both ends of the road and then motioned the boy to come. The boy returned the glass of water and started walking home. The woman stood watching after him, glass in hand. The man did not follow.

  Why do I scare them so? Am I the devil, now? Or a djinn?

  A week later he saw all three of them again. Early in the morning at sunrise out for a stroll. They stayed in the middle of the street and moved away only when a car or a bus appeared. Chattering in low tones they first walked up the long Kichwele Street all the way to the seashore. They walked along the shore for some time, their voices louder, there being no residences there. Then they started walking back. By this time the sun was higher and there were people and cars on the road. On the way two of them started a fight. The chubby one and the sly one. They exchanged a few shoves and got ready with their fists. The bony one intervened. He pulled the chubby one aside and talked with him while the other looked away and sulked. Then the bony one and the sly one talked, and peace was made. They walked home in silence, the peacemaker in between. It was while following them back that morning that he found out where one of them, the chubby one, lived. At the corner of Kichwele and Livingstone Streets.

  It is evening. There are people on the pavements. The man is walking up Kichwele Street and the boys are returning home on the same side. They are talking excitedly in loud voices. When they reach the shoemaker’s store they stop and chant something in unison and laugh. The shoemaker, sitting on the floor, his feet pressed to a shoe, waves a hammer and swears; the boys go on. Now their paths will cross, the man is sure. They are too much involved in themselves to decide suddenly to cross the street, or to see him walking in their direction. He keeps as much as possible in the shadow of the parked cars. The chubby one is to the outside. He sees the man at the same time as the others, only a few feet away. They start to run. The chubby one catches his foot in the broken pavement and lurches forward. The man, arm raised, brings down the cane heavily on the boy’s left shoulder. The boy gives a loud howl and lands flat on his stomach. The man, whom they had made into a devil, walks on.

  For a Shilling

  She gives a loud masculine howl as the smouldering matchstick head disappears into the shadow and makes its shaky contact there.

  ‘For one shilling you can give her the burn,’ he had said. The burn. That mysterious infliction referred to by adults in brief parenthetical statements that ended with dark suggestive silences, leaving the mind to grope at its further reaches. I had not yet reached the refinement my friend Ahmed knew about. What kind of burn? I had often wondered, never having seen one given. A match? A nice brass spatula fresh from flipping a hot chappati? On the shins? The thighs? I was getting closer.

  ‘Do you know what happens to girls who pee in bed?’ he asked me one day.

  I looked back squarely at him, without a word. Perhaps even with a challenge in my eyes. The trick in these instances is to appear knowledgeable. But inside I felt a tingle, a luxurious thrill run down me. Here was another of those deliciously dirty secrets he hoarded, which he shared with the adult world and let drop one after another in our outings.

  ‘They get the burn,’ he said. I maintained my calm. ‘You know where?’ Now his smug, derisive look told me something had been let out for me to catch.

  ‘Don’t tell me,’ I said, unable to contain myself any longer, ‘you mean there, in the –’ Then he made the proposition.

  From a bully who had laid ambushes for me at the bottom of the dark staircase of our building he became a friend and a mentor. And he laid down his guns and converted for that simplest of reasons: money. He taught me expensive tricks, at a shilling each, and I paid up. My price into the fantastic – and all too real – world he conjured up for me. A price for knowledge not easy to come by. Starting with simple revelations, and explications of what I knew only by hearsay and mouthed without understanding about our boys’ world. The crazy world of our daily associations – of Arabs, Africans, Asians and assorted half-castes – in which the arse was king.

  In our moments of rage, it was your arse this or your arse that. It was on the arse that the big boys patted you if you let them get too friendly, and Lord forbid you sit on a willing lap in a crowded car returning from school. Starting with the arse then and culminating in the burn, a weird introduction to that other, that hidden world. Of girls.

  One day when our relationship was new and still uncertain, he said to me, ‘You know, Amin sells.’

  Amin was a cheeky, spoilt, rich kid, whose father Mzee Pipa owned the only motor car for a block. I looked silly.

  ‘Heh? What does he sell?’

  ‘His arse, stupid!’

  I confess I still looked dumb. He was so much beyond me in such matters, and what he said so teased the imagination, that I was often, as they say, a ‘tube li
ght’: blinking uncertainly.

  ‘You don’t believe me?’ he said, excited and intimidating, as if ready to fight. ‘Nizar and Ramesh – them. They have a hideout … and – I swear it, upon my mother!’

  The recollection was too much for him and he doubled up in a fit of such loud laughter, snortles and backslapping that it brought tears to his eyes.

  ‘They’ve got big fat ones you know,’ he added, making a fat circle with thumb and forefinger.

  I was aghast. He had bowled me over by the very concreteness of his disclosure, its closeness to our lives. Could that actually happen among people we knew? But that was Ahmed. With him things happened. He gave life to words. There was now a drumming in my ears and I would have given anything to find out more.

  ‘You will see,’ he said. ‘Pipa’s driver caught them at it yesterday – but they might also be there today. One shilling,’ he added.

  We got up from our hideout under the staircase, dusted our backsides and walked up to Pipa’s courtyard across the street. There we sat behind an old rotting cupboard and waited, well concealed from the traffic of people that went up and down the stairs to the flats above. We would wait, he said, until we heard sounds from behind the wall. Then we would place the bricks and boxes against it, stand on top of them and look down on the action. We waited one hour and nothing happened. I thought I’d been had. With a story like that and no proof – well … I stood up and started walking.

  ‘Give me my shilling,’ he said. I refused.

  ‘I told you about it, didn’t I? I’ve shown you the hideout, haven’t I?’

  Still I refused. Whereupon he threw me to the ground and prised away the shilling from my now yielding fingers.

  It was a rough world. There were only a few tough boys on the block, but you had to tame them or be terrorised. They could get you on the dark staircases or in the streets at night, or they could wait for you after school and harrass you on the long way back home. He was not any bigger than I: but there are some who are born fighters and others who just aren’t. A big brother could help but I was the eldest boy in my family. I chose the old and time-tested method of paying off. As the proverb goes, when trouble arrives, send it home with a penny.

  My family had moved into the second floor of the most recent of the two-storey buildings that were giving a new, modern look to our side of Kichwele Street. Ahmed and his brother and sisters were on the first floor. Their grandfather was the landlord.

  They were a brood of five orphans, three of whom could not speak but could let out loud horrifying yowls during quarrels. But in their saner moments they used gestures and made soft sounds that were almost a pleasure to hear. Then you could almost make out the words they struggled to dislodge so painfully from their mouths. To call them you hooted: ‘Hoo!’ as everyone did, and they responded. Their disability gave them ugly faces. The youngest was a boy of about seven, with a long face and a mouth he moved into a sort of twist when he tried to talk. Then came a sister, of about the same age, also dumb. Followed by Ahmed, and then the terror: Varaa. She was heavy and strong, with a large mouth and a wild look, frequently barefoot, and in a loose frock that was always too short. She was a terror for what she could do with that mouth: let out howls of anger – or sorrow, for she also cried – that sounded varaa, varaa, varaa! Hence her name. Just to avoid hearing this babel you would keep your distance.

  The eldest was also a girl, of about sixteen, the most normal. She dressed neatly, went to school regularly and talked to neighbours – mainly to hear complaints about her brothers and sisters or to defend them. She defended them vigorously but could not manage them herself, and was often very much a part of the screaming and yelling that went on inside that flat. Sometimes she simply left them and went to live with relatives.

  This was a family of howlers that periodically went berserk. They lived on the floor below us and we trod it with special care, gingerly, when a fight was in progress. It would not have taken much provocation, so it seemed then, for the whole lot of them to stop fighting among themselves and to fall on you like a pack of hyenas. Accompanying the howls would be the sounds of objects getting thrown: chairs, spoons, pots and pans.

  Periodically too – for better or worse it was always hard to say – the grandfather came to mete out punishment. He was a small thin man in a crumpled white drill suit and a black fez. He brought with him a cricket stump, held firmly at the spike with what seemed a certain urgency. When the door closed behind him the howls became ferocious, interspersed with the sounds of the old man’s oaths. Downstairs in the street people would look up and pause, some knowingly, others in alarm.

  I remember the first day we moved into that building. I had taken my two younger brothers up to the roof terrace to keep them from getting under people’s feet. There we were, myself looking down on the traffic below, and these two youngsters making hopscotch markings with charcoal, and what happens but we get our first treat to the howling chorus: varaa, varaa, varaa.

  She swept in through the doorway, trailed by her two youngest siblings, making emphatic gestures with her fat arms, thumping along from wall to wall, glaring at us. Then she came and stood in front of me, arms akimbo, eyes fiery. The message was clear: this was her territory. My youngest brother had started to cry, and my own hair stood on end. It was my first sight of her – let alone of a dumb threesome – and she looked wild. Slowly I walked past her and down the stairs with my two charges and this foretaste of things to come. What a way to move into a new home.

  It was us and them. There were no other kids in the building, and they had Ahmed. Vocal, strong, a bully, a fighter; a loafer. The staircase was his domain. He would sit sideways on a step near the bottom, his feet stretched across it, daring you to jump over. Sliding down a balustrade he would call out names. At night the staircase was dark and menacing. When threatening sounds – hoots and chortles and moans – issued forth from its shadows there was no doubt who lurked behind them.

  He roamed the streets with a gang of boys, and he made threats about what they could do. He loved a fight. It would be nothing for him to take you into a hold from behind and make you fight or trip you. The school had given up on him, he came and went as he pleased. And like many bullies, he was an expert at marbles. It was sheer folly to play with him, however much he persuaded you, for he could make you ‘serve plays’ for a lifetime if he wanted.

  We might have moved from that unholy place if some sort of unstable truce had not been declared between our families. And I take no small credit for that.

  It started the following way. I had finished buying a cut-up chutneyed mango from the roadside on my way home from school and was putting back my five-cent change when he walked up to me. After school a row of hawkers squatted behind a display of wild or unripe fruit normally forbidden at home. Those who had the money bought, others borrowed, begged slices or bites, or hung around unfulfilled and drooling.

  ‘Can I borrow five cents,’ he said. ‘I’ll return it tomorrow.’

  I then did one of the wisest things I’ve ever done; I said ‘Goodbye, copper.’

  He bought a mango with it and we walked back together. Thus began our dubious friendship, held together delicately with a reasonable supply of cash. For me began a period of revelations – of grisly little bits of information that shocked yet sent tingling sensations down my spine and left me yearning for more; of guilty knowledge: forbidden fruit. My bought prestige was duly recognised on the block – and became a cause for concern at home. I must confess that my life at home was one tedious drone. I was ruled by a triad of females – my mother and two older sisters – and I had, besides, one drip-nosed and another smart-arsed brother, both younger than I. My lot there was a series of long, drawn-out sermons and sob stories of family misfortune handed down in the evenings after dinner. And a call for more work and help. Nothing exciting happened, life was a small cooperative.

  That day, our first day of association, Ahmed invited me to join him and other boys
in their nocturnal revelry. So in the evening on the way home from mosque, somewhat warily I passed by the street corner he had indicated and watched them from a distance. That gang of boys, I decided, I was not ready to join as yet. They were a desperate lot, whose families – if they had any – had even given up on them. I am cautious by nature. I decided I would have my excitement in small, controlled doses. After all, I was going to pay for it.

  They sat on the steps of a store in darkness, visible collectively as a dense shadow occasionally changing shape, emitting a murmur or two, a cracking of fingers, a chuckle, and so on. Occasionally too a match would strike then go off and a cigarette glow travel from end to end. Then, when a pretty young thing passed by, clop-clopping on the pavement and framed splendidly by the light from the corner lamp post, they would begin with calls and whistles. ‘Sweet arse!’ would go the cry, ‘Oh my! Milky-milk-white!’ It took some nerve.

  I related this one evening to my sisters, the two tyrants at home, Mother’s viziers. There was no end to surprises. I thought I was saying something offensive, which would put Ahmed in a horrible light (we’d had a fight), making him appear as the very devil incarnate. Perhaps I hoped the old grandfather would hear about this and bring his cricket stump to bear on that fat rump. But no. They loved it! They made me repeat that incantation syllable by syllable, to the very tones in which it had been chanted. ‘Oh my! Sweet arse! Milky-milk-white!’ Talk about lack of excitement at home.

  To come back to the proposition. For a shilling I could give her the burn, he said. I paid up. I obtained the shilling as I’d always done; in the thick of end-of-month rush in the store, pretending to help and looking as busy as a bee, stationed behind the cashbox, I slipped the coin quietly into a pocket. I’d never been caught before, but this time brother Smartarse saw me and when I was outside the store, threatened to report.