Uhuru Street

by M G Vassanji

  But it was by her books that my sister swore, a few days later, when she came back from school. Two years younger, she knew I was stricken and had me on the rack, torturing me with bits of information about Amina.

  ‘Look! I swear by holy knowledge!’ Brown-papered exercise books held up solemnly as if they meant that much to her.

  ‘Don’t lie, or I’ll …’

  ‘Okay, then.’ A mock sullenness. The books are thrown on the sofa. She sits with a long face and draws her knees up close, looks from the corners of her eyes.

  ‘So? What was she asking?’

  ‘But you said I was lying! So I was lying.’

  ‘Come on now, what?’

  ‘What will you give me if I tell you?’

  ‘You’ll get a slap if you don’t!’

  ‘She was asking about you. They are teasing her about you, you know. The news has got around!’

  ‘They are stupid.’

  ‘Well, what do you expect? You danced with no one else. And to talk of studies all the time!’ She chuckles.

  ‘I don’t know her, silly! What if she is the pious type?’

  It didn’t hurt, being laughed at like that in the Girls’ School. To be studious was still a virtue in those days. No small matter. It was the way out. And it tickled my vanity no end to learn that I had been talked about in a conversation among girls. But perhaps she had found out about me only to reject me?

  Because she never came to those parties again. That was the last time, for the entire group. It indicated a certain rejection on her part: of my lifestyle and my friends. She’s chosen against me I thought. Perhaps she thinks I’m a loafer. Doesn’t she know I go to school, I don’t go around London cutting people’s hair? I go to school. To have come this close to victory – and to lose out without explanation. Maybe she was teasing, testing me; to show how vulnerable even we could be, the sophisticates who seemed to have the world in the palms of our hands.

  What agonising days I spent, keeping a lookout for her up and down Independence Avenue, entering Benson’s on impulse and coming out pretending to have forgotten something, a ridiculous figure altogether. There was no way of contacting her; you needed an excuse for that. I could not think of any that would not have seemed a direct proposition. But she could, and she did.

  I stand on our balcony looking down on the street. It’s five-thirty in the evening or thereabouts. There’s not a moving car on the road but some pedestrians are about. Except around noon this sidestreet is shielded from the sun by buildings and it always feels like five-thirty in the evening. A gloomy street. The sun always shines on Uhuru Street a block away. There the heat roasts you and you seek the shelter of the shadier streets.

  Below me two boys play marbles on the pavement. Some distance away a figure walks towards them. A circle with a diameter is drawn in charcoal, two marbles placed on the straight line. A game of ‘pyu’ beginning. I look away to the figure that is closer now and I see it’s a girl. Below me a marble gets projected by a forefinger pulled back, lands on the ground, rolls for a while, then takes a sudden turn and sweeps away towards the road – Oh God, it’s her! as she walks around them – ‘Aaaaaaah!’ Rage and disappointment, fists clenched. What did he expect, on such a surface? It’s the other one’s turn now. My heart leaps: she’s entered the doorway of our building. I picture her walking through the courtyard past the boys playing cricket against the wall and taking the stairs. I keep looking down at the road, chest pounding away, face flushed to a fever. Who could she be visiting? – four possibilities … no, three …

  A knock on the door.

  ‘Yes,’ says my sister behind me in a voice obviously spilling over with glee, ‘he’s right here!’ I turn away from the balcony and greet her.

  She is in a hurry. ‘Can I borrow Tranter’s book from you? I need it for my revision.’

  I bring the book, careful to avoid the mischief in my sister’s eyes.

  ‘You can keep it as long as you want – I’ll tell you when I want it back.’

  ‘Only for a few days. I have to rush now. Our driver’s waiting. Thanks!’

  So it was Tranter’s Pure Mathematics to begin with. She kept it for two months. Meanwhile I borrowed Cooke’s Organic Chemistry from her, and so it went on. Other books, other excuses, the books untouched. Anything for a chance to meet and talk under plausible cover. Education was not to be tampered with. I would on occasion miss my stroll on Independence Avenue and walk two miles down Uhuru Street with a book in my hand, past the barren grounds, the small dingy shops packed close together, to the flat above Amina Store where she lived. How delicious, luxurious, the anxieties of those days; how joyful the illusion of their pain! They consumed my existence. Her mother fed me hot bhajias when she was there, inviting me in with: ‘Come on in, babu, don’t stand there in the doorway!’ The servant would bring in the delights. At other times her young brother would sit at the dining table doing sums in an old exercise book while we sat on the sofa. I tried sending him downstairs to buy Coke or something, but he wouldn’t budge. And the two of us would smile, embarrassed.

  People noticed – and they talked, made up their minds. But for us nothing was decided – it could not be – the future was open. This was a chance to be together, to explore the bounds of possibility; and if it lasted long enough, it would lead to an eventuality that was acceptable. But of course, meanwhile, I had to leave. At the end of the holidays, when it was time for me to go back, I asked her: ‘Can I write to you?’ ‘You may, if you want to,’ she said. And so we corresponded.

  All this is eighteen years ago, and dead: but surely, the dead deserve their due? Or, as our elders said, they come to haunt your dreams.

  I sit here in the cosy embrace of a north Scarborough living room in winter, looking out through glass doors, mulling over the last years of our marriage. An intimacy that turned insipid, dried up. Not for us the dregs of relationships, the last days of alternating care and hatred. ‘I need a life of my own,’ she said. ‘I can change; we both can change. You can quit work and go back to college. Is that it?’ ‘Alone,’ she said, ‘we’ve moved apart.’ ‘And she? – I’ll want to keep her.’ ‘You may, if you want to.’

  The open field before me stretches northwards – a vast desert of snow. There are towns out there, I tell myself, cities full of people. Yet I see only endless stretches, a bleak landscape with a few brambles blown by a light wind. And way beyond, beyond which I cannot see a thing, there is a point marked by a pennant strangely still on a short pole. The North Pole as I’ve always imagined it. In that landscape I see a figure from the past, a former hero … Captain Scott from my Standard Six reader, cowering from biting winds … Why Captain Scott, out of the blue, as it were and at the wrong Pole? I cannot say for sure …

  I tell myself I walked too far, too north, and left too much behind. We inhabited a thin and marginal world in Toronto, the two of us. Barely within a community whose approval we craved, by whose standards we judged ourselves the elite; the chic and educated. Our friends we counted on our fingers – and we proudly numbered Europeans, Asians, North Americans. Friends to talk about, not to bring together; points on our social achievement score. Not for us the dull weekend nights of nothing to do. We loved to entertain. And we clamoured for invitations; when we missed one we would pretend not to care and treat ourselves to an expensive dinner instead. We had things to do.

  This marginal life she roundly rejected now – just as she did once many years ago. But then she sought me out in spite of it. She came to borrow Tranter’s blue and red book though I don’t believe she ever needed it … and now? She’s back in the bosom of Uhuru Street. Or rather the companionship that’s moved up Uhuru Street and into the suburban developments of Toronto. Her friends gradually came, one by one, and set themselves up with their families long after we ourselves had moved from London. And it bloomed once more, that old comradeship of Uhuru Street with Amina at the centre – first helping them to settle and then being with them j
ust like old times. Slowly, Toronto, their Toronto became like Dar, and I was out of it.

  She came to London exactly a year after the summer in which we had exchanged books and shy but satiated looks in her sitting room, while her little brother pretended to do sums in his warped exercise book on the dining table. This was a time of political change in our country: Asian students from all backgrounds were now desperately trying to go abroad. Her arrival was therefore a surprise; a cousin went to pick her up. A week later, on a Sunday morning, she telephoned me and with heart beating wildly I went to see her. It had been a long wait, a year in which we exchanged letters which delicately hinted at increasing affection. At least I did, and she did not object. I told her I missed her, she reminded me of a funny thing I’d said. I graduated from signing ‘Sincerely’ to ‘Affectionately’ and finally ‘With love.’ She stuck to ‘Affectionately.’

  She had put up in a hostel on Gloucester Road not far from High Street Kensington run by a Mr Toto, our townsman and reputedly a former valet to an oriental prince. It was a dismal place, this hostel, and I had been through it too. It was your first stop in London when you hardly knew a soul there. It picked you up and prepared you, sometimes for the worst.

  Here you could see what might become of you in a week, a month, a year. Previously it had been more pleasant, a hangout for rich kids, when Mr Toto let you have parties on Saturdays. Now, in the sixties, the faces were more desperate, lonely and white from the cold since they all flew in in September and October. Boys who left early in the morning in home-made Teteron suits carrying attache cases full of certificates, returning late, hopeless, to a night of exchanging notes on the old, sunken mattresses Mr Toto provided for his iron bedsteads. English pop songs mingled with tear-drenched Hindi film songs, the atmosphere was darkly nostalgic supported by a hollow boisterousness in the corridors. I knew the place so well, its mildew-smelling interior, the migrant Spanish maids in black, landings full of clutter to be picked up, bathrooms stained, taps leaking. I had come here many times, to meet relatives, pick up parcels from home, give advice. Over the years how many must have wept on those soiled, striped mattresses of Mr Toto, prayed on them or indulged themselves in the cold, lonely nights of London!

  I entered through the black door with the brass knocker that opened directly onto the street and went straight up to the first floor and knocked on Number One as instructed. There was a shuffle of feet behind the door, which was then opened by a girl in a faded pink home-style nightie with a laced neckline. Behind her, sitting on a bed already made, was my Amina, writing letters. On Sunday you write home I said to myself.

  It was still breakfast time and we went down three flights of creaky stairs into the basement. There a narrow pathway through junk and clutter led into a medium-sized brightly lit room laid with blue linoleum, long tables and some benches. There was a steady trickle of traffic in and out of this room and up and down the stairs. Here you could get onion omelettes, cornflakes, and black tea and milk (‘English style’) from waiters with strangely familiar faces who added advice and humour to the morning’s fare.

  Later we went out sightseeing. She made her pilgrimage to Trafalgar Square and with her Instamatic I took a picture of her feeding the pigeons to send back home. Then Buckingham Palace and finally Parliament with Big Ben, which for ages had chimed out the nine o’ clock hour to us over the radio. ‘Eighteen hours, Greenwich Mean Time,’ she echoed with amusement in a mock BBC accent.

  That night we had dinner at my flat. Rice and curry from a takeaway Indian store in Earls Court. After dinner we sat side by side on the sofa to watch television. From the floor below came the sounds of female laughter and hilarity. I knew them well, a group of Asian girls from back home who in their inimitable way mothered the boys they knew. I often stopped at their place and had dinner there. Later I was to introduce Amina to them, but meanwhile I hoped they wouldn’t come up to fetch me this night. They didn’t and we sat quietly holding hands. Then we went to bed. I slept on my box spring and she on my mattress on the floor. She would not have it otherwise. ‘I have to learn to be tough,’ she said. For a while we talked in the dark, holding hands. We caressed, touched, our hands trembling, groping for each other in the space between us. Finally the tension reached a breaking point and I looked down in the darkness at the figure below me. ‘Can I come down?’ I asked, my voice straining. ‘Yes,’ she said.

  How frail our defences, how easily cast aside when the time comes. Nothing could have been more natural. Yet nothing could have shocked more, caused greater pain, in a different setting. How easy it was to judge and condemn from there. Yet no sooner were you here than a layer of righteousness peeled down from your being.

  Last night we took a drive down Yonge Street, my daughter Zahra and I. We drove among the Saturday night traffic, among the Camarros and Thunderbirds swooping down south for the evening, or just a zoom past downtown, as we’d done before. This time we parked the car and started walking with the crowd, caught by the summerlike festive mood. People waited outside restaurants and cinemas; vendors of popcorn and nuts called out; cars hooted; stores were open and display windows lighted. At Bloor Street we exchanged salaams with a Sikh vendor, then stopped and I bought the little lady some flowers from him. We walked along Bloor Street for some time, arm in arm, talking about our joint future. Fortunately loneliness is not a word in her vocabulary yet. We reached the end of a queue outside an ice cream shop and joined it. We were happy, the two of us. We kept walking on Bloor Street. Somewhere nearby was her mother’s apartment; she knew where, but I didn’t ask. We reached a repertory cinema where another crowd was queueing and I picked up a schedule. Then, at a whim, I turned on her and asked, ‘How would you like to see Wuthering Heights?’

  Tugging my arm playfully she pulled me along. ‘How about seeing Star Wars? Finally?’

  Refugee

  Furtively, he threw another quick glance at the reflection in the window across the aisle. Then a confirming, brooding stare at himself in the window beside him. Through the glass he peered outside at the passing scenery in the dark: ghostly trees and buildings, not a sign of life. When finally he sat back from the darkness, it took moments to adjust to the brightness inside.

  There was nothing of interest in the compartment, just the rows of seats and people. Stops were few and far between on this train, passengers who entered and sat down were as quiet as those who got up and left. At one point a big man in a blue suit sat down heavily beside him, barely suppressing a grunt, glanced at him with a look of surprise and turned away to the aisle. Later the man brought out a magazine called Kultur and read it, still turned away. In reaction Karim confronted himself in the window yet again, then stared outside. A station flew past that the train ignored. He did not catch its name. It was this unpredictability that was the cause of his anxiety. He had been told to get off and change at Pegnitz.

  He was, he had realised unhappily, dressed all wrong. He had bought the right kind of things, of course, and was wearing some of them. All according to fashions picked up from films, tourists, and foreign-returneds. His two sisters, who prided themselves in matters of fashion, had accompanied him shopping; his mother and father had approved his choice. Yet now in the bright light of this train compartment he stood out like a sore thumb, he thought, using an expression he had read from American novels.

  No one that he had seen in the train wore sneakers, yet his stood out, sparkling white. His denim jeans were starchy like cardboard, and uncomfortable too. The sweater that in the store in Dar had appeared distinguished and conservative, now betrayed its faded grey, with the three large dirty red and white diamonds in front making pathetic attempts at design and colour. No wonder the first thing anyone looked at was his bright shoes then his face that needed a wash and shave. He looked, felt, so shrunken and small in this strange, alien environment. Alternately he sat forward; leaned back, pressing his arms onto the armrests; arched his back, stretched out his shoulders. He just wasn’t right.<
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  He had been instructed carefully. As soon as he got off the plane at Frankfurt not to speak to anybody but head straight for the immigration counters. If anyone came to ask him anything, to offer any help, he was to say only: ‘I am a refugee.’ To the immigration officers, the same thing: like a prayer. If anyone asked, ‘Have you come to look for work?’ not to say yes or no, either way to fall into a trap, but to say only, ‘I am a refugee.’

  He had done just that.

  He had got off the plane tired and dazed. The airport was radiant, busy, impressively modern, he expected nothing else. He had emerged into a large open area and paused uncertain: about him human traffic in all directions. He decided to follow a group of fellow-passengers, the wrong ones, apparently, for they soon walked under a lit sign that said TRANSIT. Avoid at all costs he had been told. He stopped, started back in the opposite direction. At that instant, it seemed, two men who had been standing together some distance away started heading towards him. They walked purposefully but without hurrying, their looks fixed on him. Like cowboys walk in movies, he thought fleetingly, as he looked around as if to escape; then he realised he couldn’t avoid them and waited. They were the same height, not very tall, one in a dark and the other in a light blue suit, their hair … what will they do? He watched them come to a stop.