by M G Vassanji
When the two men had been seen to have driven off, pandemonium broke loose around him. The door burst open and five more people – four men and a woman who had been hiding in a German neighbour’s flat it appeared – stormed in. And the guest became the centre of attention. Everyone seemed to be speaking at once, asking him questions, skipping his answers, offering advice. They told him not to worry … or to start worrying … What happened at the airport? they asked, how did the officers get hold of him? what answers did he give? … The mini-skirted woman, her face so close to him he could smell her perfume, was telling him, ‘… this is Bavaria. Big feet. Leather aprons. You know? Yodelei-o. Hitler started off here you know …’
He didn’t know. ‘Wagner, Wagner, Wagner,’ said the German neighbour and started walking stiffly about the room singing in a bass voice. The second woman had one of her legs on the arm of a sofa and acknowledged Karim’s glance with a smile. The Nigerian had started playing the piano. The Indian was walking around looking at wall hangings. A plate was thrust in Karim’s hand, he was escorted to the kitchen. Anand was telling him how he could go to Canada via Hamburg.
‘You will be let off in a boat some miles from the coast. Throw away your passport. Say you are from Lebanon. Beirut … Don’t worry. The Canadians can’t tell the difference yet. But there is some risk involved, and some money …’
All Worlds Are Possible Now
The ships that pass here no longer carry portents of faraway, impossible worlds.
The same harbour, in front of me. The tall-spired grey cathedral behind me on the right. The pipe fence on which I perch, nervous of pickpockets and the traffic screeching at the back of me; a gust of sea breeze to cool the heat still pulsing in my veins after the long walk. Before me a rolling patch of grass down which I remember as a child doing somersaults. And I remember looking up intently at some ship passing slowly through the narrow channel, at the white-clad passengers leaning out gaily against the railings, waving at us. Strangers whose worlds we had no cravings for at that time, mere curiosity.
All worlds are possible now. Shadowy cargo vessels cheerlessly ply these waters, bringers of unaffordable goods, reminders of deprivation, enticements to get up and go. Silent pipers, whom we follow by jet planes, those who can, and stretch ourselves between lives as contrary as the ends of a cross.
I returned, I suppose, because I always returned, ever since those student days I spent abroad. But a broken home also pushed me out as did concern for a palsied father spending his last years alone. There was an element of escape in my return as there was once in my leaving. So what right did I have in proposing, in holding up beggarly promises to someone who’d never made the voyage out even once and was now finally promised the world?
I remember my first day back. I had been brought home the previous night, had been made aware of the new airport road during the drive, a dual carriageway, some other sights, but shutting them out, closing my consciousness, until I had properly set my foot on the ground the next day. After ten years of absence, I had told myself, the reclaiming had to be a ritual, complete, not something done in wondrous spurts. In the same state of wilful unawareness I went to bed under a mosquito net. In the morning walking into the Msimbazi print shop from the back entrance – having walked down the stairs from the flat above – I paid polite tribute to the old Heidelberg still panting out wedding invitations which is all it is good for now. And then, saying my goodbyes I stepped onto the pavement. It was bright outside, reassuringly brilliant, the rude early-morning sun almost instantly roasting the skin and making the sweat glands run. And then, crazed, numb, wound-up, I set off.
I walked down Msimbazi, reached the crossroads at Uhuru, headed straight for it: Amina Store, the name sign no longer above it, only one of the three SALE signs extant outside on the wall, others posted over. I went up the stairs at the side of the building to the second floor; with bated breath, a peep inside the flat through the barred window beside the door: empty. It looks the same; she could have gone to school and her parents could be downstairs in the shop. Or do I imagine, delude myself it is the same? The silence jeers, and I walk down more slowly than I came up. And then, after this ritual, others. Up Uhuru Street – this once beloved street that looks so narrow and small now, I grieve for it. Past shops blaring music that sounds familiar but I haven’t heard. It is Ramadhan and men in kanzus and kofias must have come back from prayers somewhere. I hurry past Pipa Store – the corner grocery store where the legendary fat man used to sit, now a tailoring shop, the old shop sign half visible. Past Mnazi Moja grounds, and with beating heart to the street, the building, where I lived as a boy for so many years from whose second-storey balcony I saw her, Amina, that day – the mother of my daughter as they say here – but then simply a remarkable girl who came to borrow Tranter’s Pure Mathematics from me.
I walked to the second-hand bookstore where Mr Hemani instantly recognised me as a former Perry Mason fan, went past Empire Cinema where Mahesh the manager would chase us out of X-rated Italian James Bond imitations. And then along Ocean Road, past the hospital, past the Upanga Mosque, to the Boys’ School, making two stops on the way to drink a soda and cool off.
Thus my first reclaiming of Dar.
You say no. Superficial.
I recall the German who sat next to me on my flight back. A tall man with a huge brown beard, glinting glasses, big teeth. An incessant smoker. An expert on literature from our part of the globe it turned out. He heard my story a little impatiently then got his point in.
‘Yes, yes. I would like to recommend a novel. It’s called Time Reversal. Yes? Time Reversal. It’s about a young man – like you – who returns to his home country, or tries to, but he dies on his way back. Yes?’
It’s fine, I said in my mind, for you to prognosticate my life. Next you’ll quote me Thomas Wolfe. He did. So now I have to live according to the dictates of irony, I fumed inwardly, become slave to an aesthetic. We’ll see.
At the Boys’ School which was a father to a generation, the tennis courts were grass-grown, a huge storage shed covered part of the cricket ground. The halls were quiet when I got there, yet how could they have competed with the chatter of decades past, the clamouring voices in my brain. A teacher, a couple of students looked up curiously as I walked past, a nervous ghost returned to haunt buildings, impotent against the people inside.
In the physics lab a faded certificate hung on a wall in a black wooden frame. A humble-looking document, it could have been a barber’s licence. I walked over to it. It was the certificate a former classmate, Nanji, had won for first prize at the annual East African Science Fair. Fifteen years ago. I wondered how many fourth, fifth, or sixth formers, now buzzing in little groups along the benches, would identify with it. Rajabu the lab assistant had been hanging around the school a lot longer. A walking archive, if such things are important. He knew where each of the former teachers went to, under what conditions they had left. He identified me that day, he was one living thing in the school I could clutch on to and I did so desperately. Through him I met the physics master.
The equipment in the lab didn’t work. The DC supply at which Mr Bashir, a former teacher, used to stand trembling before turning it on, hadn’t been repaired since he ultimately damaged it before returning to India. Old (then new) UN-donated science supplies that needed fixing or installing. I don’t know how, I answered the physics master. Wheatstone bridge, potentiometer, simple circuits, perhaps. But atomic physics experiments, those exciting windows to the universe: no.
But perhaps there was a way. I have stretched myself thin after all. I got hold of Lateef, another former student, in Jeddah. Upon secondment from Bell Canada to the Saudi Government, he earns tax-free dollars and avoids the cold; and grinning his naive, good-natured grin he awaits his messiah to take the Muslims out of their misery. I remember standing with him in Toronto outside a Chinese restaurant. Euphoric, happy, stretching out his arms wide: ‘Great country, vast. You should see it fr
om coast to coast. Relish it.’ Less than a year later he was in Saudi Arabia. For him it was a short hop south from there to Dar. He has come now several times and brought new equipment. He has no hope for the country though. The roads, the schools, the hospitals – every pothole, every malfunction delights him in its confirmation of his prediction. But for this his old school – almost all African now – and the Asian boys and girls from the other non-government schools whom he meets after mosque and encourages to see the world, he is the messiah, and I the philistine.
On one of his visits I took him to meet our former history teacher Fahndo, now force-retired and living on the charity of a former student (one of his worst he says) and writing a ‘history.’ A secretive Fahndo, this one, much poorer, and not wanting to tell us what the ‘history’ is about.
We talked of old times, and Almeida.
We discovered Almeida together, Fahndo and I one day, dying and helpless. A student coming for extra help got no reply at the door several days running and, knowing how sick the teacher had been, assumed the worst. He came to Fahndo: ‘Sir, I think Mr Almeida is dead.’
Fahndo in his brusque arrogant way with students – how well I remember it – dismissed the observation (it couldn’t happen without his permission). The two had taught together for a couple of decades. He took me along to Teachers’ Quarters to Almeida’s flat. We knocked on the door, and listened. Then holding our breath we inserted the spare key and threw the door open. And there he was, the maths teacher, lying shivering in bed. He had turned a feverish, harried face to look at us. After being jilted in love once many years ago, Almeida had taken to a beard and grey clothes and a suffering mien that had been enhanced, it seemed, by the food shortages several years ago. And since he was the kindest teacher in school he came to be regarded by students as a mysterious, saintly and suffering figure.
Fahndo and I found no food in his flat except stale bread and sugar. But on the kitchen shelves in neatly arrayed ancient boxes and tins of English crackers and toffees and chocolates we found banknotes, some thousands of shillings’ worth. For a maths teacher not to trust banks … but then these are uncertain times. Almeida was worried silly that the recently announced devaluation and change of currency would certainly lose him all his life’s savings. But Fahndo has connections. It was his patron Nizar who ultimately got the money changed, and perhaps saved Almeida’s life, because malaria pills were temporarily unavailable.
One day some weeks later Almeida came to say goodbye to Fahndo. His mother was dying, he said. He should see her. And, perhaps with the money he had saved … So he returned to Goa. And found out that he had been tricked: his mother was hale and hearty, his brother wanted to open a bar. Almeida, without an Indian teaching certificate, found a job only with difficulty and according to Fahndo’s report cycles twelve miles a day each way to a village school where he teaches.
‘So he went home,’ I said.
We were in Fahndo’s sitting room, two former students come to visit a teacher. Fahndo was extremely flattered, especially by Lateef’s visit. He had given us tea brought in by a maid.
‘Yes. But what is home?’ he said.
Fahndo and Almeida, like many of our other Indian teachers, came to East Africa as young men, unlike most of us, their students, who were second and third generation Africans.
‘The whole world is our home. It’s a global village,’ grinned Lateef.
‘This was more his home, I’d say,’ Fahndo said reflectively. ‘He desperately wants to come back, but who’ll let him?’
We went on to discuss other students, friends, classmates. Fahndo takes a great pride in their achievements: professors, scientists, engineers ‘out there’. He himself has refused to follow them out … and has stoically borne the brunt of the hardships that have swept over the country.
Finally, as we left, Fahndo wrote something on a piece of paper and gave it to Lateef.
‘Here – I want you to do something for me.’
Lateef looked at it, his face lit up and his teeth became visible in a delighted grin.
‘Wow. Panjim, Goa.’
‘I still have family there.’
‘Wow! When were you last there?’
‘Long time ago,’ said Fahndo with a stern look from his best schoolmaster days. ‘Anyway, I’d like to ask you a favour – if you could send some money to my mother.’
‘No problem! I might even take it myself!’
As we emerged he asked me if Fahndo was that poor. I told him he couldn’t get the foreign exchange without using underhand means, which he wouldn’t do.
Again that amused look on Lateef’s genial face, as if to say, ‘What to do with deluded fools.’
‘I see you intend to settle down here properly,’ he said, and I simply gave a shrug.
‘Take care of her; she deserves the best,’ he said at length. He was referring to Farida.
I met her at the mosque one day. I am not religious. That innocent magic, that faith that led you to believe that you had control somehow over your destiny – or at least had a say, a vote, a hand in it – has been buffetted and tattered, like the naive hopes we had of founding a great society … But in this city when two hours after sunset the grip of a silent darkness throttles the life out of the day, the mosque is one place that tries to prolong the hum; not with the uproar of previous years; and not at the landmarks that are the town mosque or Upanga mosque but at this once humble one behind the fire station to which we wondered who would ever go.
The mosque has a little library. A room – shed really – its walls impressively lined with books in a bid to provide education where it is at a premium. The atmosphere is appropriately grave, the lighting soft and sparse so that shadows are ominously large, and in the silence the flick of a page can echo sharply as if spurring one to greater concentration. But in fact the books are mostly paperback romance and crime novels that the youth consume in large quantities.
This time as I wandered in there was a boy engrossed among the thrillers, the same boy as on several previous occasions. Several girls walked out huddled over a heap of romances. A librarian absorbed in her own book looked up as I came in, did my quick frustrated hopeless tour and was on the way out. She smiled at me.
I said, ‘Don’t you have any more books … than these? …’ it was impossible not to give a dismissive wave of the hand. I even threw a look at the book she was reading.
An attractively plain girl with wavy black hair down to her shoulders tied at the back; a striking, long face – white, high-cheekboned, with an oriental quality I had often associated with some Jewish features.
‘There are lots of books to read here,’ she spoke primly.
Obviously I am not unknown here, it’s impossible to be. So she was throwing a challenge.
‘But these books are not educational,’ I spluttered out an observation she could not possibly argue with.
‘Boys and girls need entertainment. We don’t have TV here.’
Another barb there.
‘And where do they go for serious entertainment?’
‘They listen to sermons,’ she smiled.
By this time the boy who had been engrossed in the thriller section had come and stood beside her.
‘This is my son Karim,’ she said, throwing a glance at his acquisitions and a challenging look at me.
We wound up over the course of several days making up a list of ‘serious’ literature, and we sent it off to friends overseas.
And so on themes of educating children and running a library, we came closer together. The July festival caught up with our shy self-conscious bewildered overtures. We danced the dandia together, that delightful communal stick dance that also allows you to have partners, and between rounds we would sit, drink sherbet, or talk earnestly of our pasts: our failed marriages, our single child each; our aspirations for the future, for her the future of her boy. We allowed ourselves to touch each other.
She is the youngest daughter of Rahim Ma
ster, the stern teacher of religion whom at least two generations of ‘former boys’ remember fondly whenever a verse of a hymn escapes their lips. She was as a girl a serene-looking person, a face of innocence, dressed plainly, walking erectly, two long pigtails falling down to her hips, when other girls were busy with VO5 and beehive hairdos.
Why she was languishing here was the result of a bad marriage that had robbed her of a chance even to go to college: Rahim Master’s way of disposing of a daughter with the first decent-looking proposal, at a time when the youth were taking to jeans and western-style dancing. She was living with a brother and his family now, and we were allowed to go out together and given occasional use of the only car. There are not that many men and women of our age here, and such a stage of a relationship implies a successful courtship, a permanence.
That she would impress the grinning, unctuous and rich Lateef was obvious.
I realise that our relationship started out by her humouring my stumbling self-conscious efforts, in the same way we once humoured the good intentions of European teachers. We came quite some way from that beginning. There is a sensitivity in that plainness that penetrates, cuts right through the tangle of convoluted justifications to the bare longing that lies underneath. Yes, when it comes down to it, there is only a plain longing for a home, a permanence. That is what she taught me. And permanence and home are what I began to hope for and finally looked forward to from her.