She went for her Sunday off, and called my mother in the evening to say she would come for her clothes. She was getting married she said, she was going to elope to MukomaGeorge’s aunt’s house in Engineering. She came back to pack up her things, her sewing machine, and box of letters, and her three pairs of shoes, her pleated skirt with the cloth belt, her two blouses and her two-piece costume that my mother had given her, and the three dresses that she had made on her sewing machine. The only thing she left behind was the uniform dress and matching hat on her bare shelf in the middle of my wardrobe.
Three weeks after she left us, there was a clanging sound from our gate, and the dogs from next door barked at the sound and there was SisiBlandina. She cried as she told my mother that George asked why it had taken so long for her to go to him if she was sure the child was his and anyway, George said, he had a girl in Munyikwa who was promised to him. SisiBlandina told my mother that she told him he had deceived her and then he said he could not marry someone who was not a maiden and she said but he knew all the time because she told him about the camp in Mozambique and how she kept the guerrillas company and my mother said Blandina, and SisiBlandina said but it was not my fault that is what we were told to do and my mother said ndine urombo Blandina, I feel pity, but you cannot stay here when things are like this, and SisiBlandina wept and said, I have nowhere to go and my mother said you can go back to Lalapanzi and SisiBlandina said oh God, my father, she said how will I face my father, and my mother said I can give you some money for the first few months but you cannot stay here and SisiBlandina wept and stayed the night but left before I woke up the next morning and I never saw her again.
The police came to our house on the same day that my mother’s sister, my aunt from Gwelo, came to visit and they said that a woman had been taken out of the Mukuvisi River and did my parents know her because she had an aerogramme in her bag with our address on it. My father went with them and identified SisiBlandina and he came back and told my mother. She cried and my aunt said to her, well, this is what happens when you try to help these girls and she said something about whores who slept with men to whom they were not married. Then she said to my father, really, these maids are all the same.
Aunt Juliana’s Indian
Mr Vaswani of Vaswani Brothers General Dealers was the first Indian that I saw closely enough to count the teeth in his mouth and the buttons on his shirt. I had seen Indians before; they were hard to miss, the women in fabrics of gossamer lightness, splashes of colour on Salisbury’s pavements, and, like their men, as brown as we but with hair that slipped and slithered like white people’s. Until I saw Mr Vaswani, I had never been close enough to them to see the colour of their irises.
Our school in Chitsa was closed because of the war so that my brother Danai and I were sent to Glen Norah Township in Salisbury to live with my mother’s younger sister, Mainin’Juliana, who shared a house with their brother, our SekuruLazarus. We came to know all about Mainin’Juliana’s Indian. She called him MuIndia wangu, my Indian, shorthand for my Indian employer, to distinguish him from all the other Indians that were not Mr Vaswani. She worked in a shop in town that sold everything an African could possibly need, she said.
‘I stand behind the counter and help the shoppers,’ she told us. ‘And all he does is to stand there ordering me about. It is always Juliana you are wary, wary slow, and Juliana hurry up, hurry up because there are wary, wary many customers.’
Mainin’Juliana argued with our neighbour’s daughter Susan, who worked in a white family’s house in the suburbs.
‘MuIndia wangu is a difficult man,’ said Mainin’Juliana.
‘My white madam is more difficult,’ said Susan.
‘He waits until the last possible moment before paying our salaries.’
‘Manje madam vangu lies in bed all day and smokes while I clean.’
‘He shouts at me, all day in my ear.’
‘She won’t let me eat any leftovers, imagine, her dog eats better than me. Ufunge, she even rides with her dog in front with her in the truck, and me in the back with all the sun and dust.’
‘He won’t advance me money to do my Pitman’s examinations. Just fifteen dollars, imagine.’
‘She won’t allow her husband to put electricity in the boy’s kaya, so I have to cook outside.’
‘He talks all day and sometimes won’t let me have my lunch.’
‘Madam vangu is too lazy even to wash her own underwear; I have to do it by hand.’
‘One of these days,’ vowed Mainin’Juliana, ‘I am going to punch those spectacles off his nose.’
Danai and I decided that when we grew up, we would work for MuIndia rather than the white madam. We spoke of him in one breath as MuIndia waMainin’Juliana, and talked of him as intimately as we did the members of our very large family, wondering at the peculiar singularity of his ways, his refusal to advance salaries even when there was illness in the family, his habit of picking his nose when he thought that no one was looking, the leftover Zambia cloth and bent out of shape Kango plates and cups with missing handles that he gave Juliana and his other assistant, Timothy, as Christmas bonuses, the yellow plastic comb that he tucked behind his ear and next to his hair, and his house in Belvedere, which we pronounced Bharabhadiya.
We became experts on Indians Mainin’Juliana was not the only one with an Indian connection; our long-dead SekuruSimplicious, who was the sibling between our mother and SekuruLazarus, had worked with Indians in Durban in South Africa before returning home to Rhodesia and dying in the war.
Indians did not wipe their bottoms with tissues: they washed them with water with their left hand. They worshipped cows. They did not eat meat. When they died, their bodies were burned and not buried. All their food contained curry. They all owned shops; and as shopkeepers, they were all just like MuIndia who gave Juliana no Christmas bonus, but instead, gave her leftover pieces of Zambia cloths that no one wanted to buy. The pieces were rarely long enough to wrap around my eleven-year-old waist, and so Juliana gave them to our maternal grandmother who seemed to have a use for every piece of fabric she came across.
Out in Domboshava where my grandmother lived, the pieces of cloth increased my grandmother’s consequence in the eyes of her neighbours. ‘Akadii zvake MuIndia waJuliana?’ she would ask after his health. ‘And has Juliana given him the herbs that I brought the last time that I was there?’
MuIndia waMainin’Juliana’s indigestion was of particular concern to her because it seemed never to end.
‘Why does he not eat sadza rerukweza?’ she asked, referring to a mud-brown traditional dish that required a strong stomach to eat.
‘You and your rukweza,’ said my uncle.
‘It is not meat, so he can eat it.’ And she launched into her usual lecture about the benefits of sadza rerukweza which opened up the intestines and allowed them to breathe.
‘As my brother Simplicious who died in 1974 always said,’ said SekuruLazarus, ‘the problem with Indians is that they eat curry too much. Always they say pili pili fakile.’
At the same time that we admired our dead SekuruSimplicious as a much-travelled man, Danai and I were surprised that the Indian language sounded so close to the little that we knew of Ndebele.
Mainin’Juliana saw her job as no more than a bridging measure until she landed her dream job. ‘I want to be a top-flight secretary,’ she said to anyone who would listen.
She bought used books with broken spines that proclaimed themselves as having belonged to Tracy Thompson and Debbie Moffat and Squiffy Stevens. In the evenings, she hammered out on a typewriter with a missing m, pressing down on the keys, but with no paper because she could afford neither it nor the typewriter ribbon. She listened to records from the Rapid Results College. There was a single called ‘Spoken English’ that I played for Danai with the gramophone switch in the groove meant for LPs, so that the needle dragged across the record and the voices sounded deeply low and slow, even the woman’s as she said, ‘I
want to speak good English.’
‘She wants to speak good English,’ said the man.
‘I speak bad English.’
‘She speaks bad English.’
‘It is very hot in Spain.’
‘She says that it is very hot in Spain.’
Her Rapid Results English proved unnecessary in her job; from what she told us, her real value was in translating MuIndia’s shouted orders to his customers to softer, more polite Shona.
Mainin’Juliana’s top-flight dream seemed close to her in the middle of 1978, the year of the changes. We learned on the news that the government would build more schools and bring electricity to the townships. Danai and I made games out of the cartoon strips in the Herald newspaper and Parade magazine and played being Sam and Ben, characters created by the government to exhort people to vote.
‘Sam,’ Danai would say, ‘if I vote in the April 1979 one man, one vote elections, what will I get?’
In a voice dripping with sincerity, I asked, ‘What have you always wanted, Ben?’
‘Majority Rule!’
‘That is what you will get.’
‘I also want peace; the war to stop.’
‘That is what you will get.’
‘I want the schools to open again; education for my children.’
‘That is what you will get.’
‘I want hospitals and clinics, good care for my family when they are sick.’
‘That is what you will get.’
‘There must be good jobs so we can earn good money.’
‘When you vote that is what you will get.’
Then all together, we said, ‘We must use our vote so that we can get our Majority Rule. We will both vote in the April 1979 one man, one vote elections.’
SekuruLazarus had much to say on these elections, as on every other subject. He spoke loudly and at length, kupaumba like my grandmother said, referring to the ceaseless sound that a drum makes in the hands of a particularly enthusiastic drummer, speaking always in a tone of argument even with those who agreed with him.
‘Where were all the schools and the electricity all this time? You tell me that. The suburbs where the whites live are bright and clean, and we have, what? Now that the blacks have said no to their nonsense and taken up arms, do they think they can buy us with their electricity and their schools?
‘We have said no, aiwa, bodo, hwi, nikisi, kwete, haikona, tsvo.
‘They want to cloak our faces with deception. These are bribes to make us forget our suffering so that we vote for their internal settlement.
‘I swear by my grandfather Musekiwa who died in 1959, I swear that even if all the townships in Rhodesia become white with light, I will never vote for Muzorewa.
‘And if this finger on my left had not been cut off in 1965, I would have taken up arms, me.
‘You would have seen me then.’
The new schools that were being built then meant an end to hot-seating, which had meant that we remained at home while others used our classrooms, and then we went to school in the afternoon. Now, we were to go to a new school, one of the three in the township that had been built across the river. A new school meant new uniforms. Mainin’Juliana said we should come to town to buy our school uniforms from MuIndia because she would get a discount.
Mr Vaswani’s shop was at the corner of Bank Street and Manica Road, in the section of the city that was called kuMaIndia. As we passed by a dusty-looking shop with a dressmaker’s dummy in the window and a dark interior, Juliana said, ‘In there is the tailor who makes suits for the Prime Minister.’
I tried to imagine Prime Minister Smith with his sheep’s eye walking kuMaIndia to have his suits made. He would have bumped into Africans, the women carrying bundles of shopping on their heads. He would have seen the Indians that we saw, and a few Coloureds, but he would have seen almost no Europeans, his would have been one of the few white faces. If he crossed the road, he would step into the road to Market Square and into a bus that took him to Mbare and from there to the rural areas. And if he continued walking down Manica Road and turned left at Inez Terrace, or walked up Baker Avenue or Gordon Avenue, he would end up in First Street facing the splendour of Barbour’s Department Store and all the other shops like Miltons’ and Thomas Meikle’s where only white people like him did their shopping. Try as I could, I could not see the Prime Minister in this noise and chatter, and I thought, as SekuruLazarus sometimes said, ‘Aunt Juliana tends to exaggerate matters.’
Mr Vaswani’s shop was in a building that had carved pillars, and a veranda that read VASWANI BROTHERS GENERAL DEALERS EST. 1921. Above us were rows and rows of bicycles hanging from the ceiling, I had never seen so many Black Beauties assembled in one place. Blankets were stacked in piles while the bolts of Zambia material formed column upon column of riotous colour. There were piles of Kango plates, pots and pans, the metal cups that burned your mouth if you didn’t wait for the tea to cool before you drank; there were grey metal buckets, metal dishes, and columns of heavy bhodho pots. And there, in plastic sheets with ENBEE printed on them, were school uniforms for all the schools in all the townships of Salisbury.
In the middle of all this was Mr Vaswani.
He looked straight at me, and I looked down, but not before I had glimpsed through the smoke that surrounded him the yellowing circles of his eyes, the brown teeth, the shiny buttons on his shirt, and the plastic comb yellow against his hair’s slick blackness.
‘How old are you?’ he said.
I was tongue-tied, I had not expected him to speak to me so directly, but I managed to say, ‘I am eleven and he is nine.’
‘Wary good, wary good,’ he said. ‘You must work wary hard, okay. No room for layabouts in this world. Maybe you work for me, hey, and I employ Juliana’s whole family.’
He did not speak English like we did, but nor did he sound like the white doctor who injected Danai and me at the Mission Hospital near Chitsa. He laughed to show more brown teeth right to the back of his mouth. I wondered whether he did not, after all, eat sadza rerukweza, like my grandmother said he should.
Mainin’Juliana pointed us to a bench in the corner and Danai and I studied him from there, hoping to see him pick his nose. His wife was with him at the counter. I watched in fascination as she walked behind the counter without once loosening the cloth around her body. I sniffed the air for curry, but all I could smell was Brylcreem and sweat and rubber and Lifebuoy and Perfection soap and the smell of the new things that were sold in the shop.
Like the Devure River near my aunt Vongai’s homestead at Christmas when the rains were at their heaviest, Mr Vaswani’s words were a constant flood. He aimed this flow at Mainin’Juliana as much as at the customers who took their time scrutinising every purchase before reluctantly handing over the money. ‘Hurry up, hurry up,’ he said. ‘We haven’t got all day.’ His words were so like what Mainin’Juliana always said he said that I had to stop myself from giggling. Mr Vaswani noticed a woman who was struggling to take the clothes off her squirming son.
‘Now, now, now, what is this, what is this?’ he said. ‘What is this?’
The woman ignored him and made the child strip off his clothes to try on a uniform. He wriggled in embarrassment, while his mother laughed as though she had not heard Mr Vaswani. ‘He is mad, MuIndia uyu,’ she said to Mainin’Juliana and pointed at Mr Vaswani with her chin. ‘How can I buy a uniform without my son trying it on?’
She yanked off her son’s shirt; he held on to his shorts, and received a tongue-lashing from his mother. When the shorts came off, only his mother seemed unsurprised to find that he wore no underwear, and she talked on, while Danai and I pretended not to have seen the tears of shame that shone in the little boy’s eyes.
Another woman came in with shorts and a shirt in two different sizes. ‘No return, no refund,’ said Mr Vaswani, pointing to a sign that said NO CREDIT NO RETURN NO REFUND in black letters on a white board. ‘You buy the goods foos-toos.’ She only stoppe
d shouting when a white man entered the shop together with a black man dressed in gumboots and a blue boiler suit stiff with newness.
‘Sanjiv,’ the white man said, ‘we want another bike.’
‘Oh, Mr Johnson, you wary, wary good customer.’ Mr Vaswani laughed with his mouth and his arms and his head. He tried to get the bicycle down himself but even on the ladder he could not quite reach it, and Timothy had to go up and help him.
‘Sanjiv, why are Indians not allowed to play football?’ the white man said.
Mr Vaswani revealed his teeth and said, ‘Ah, another good joke, Mr Johnson. Always you tell funny jokes.’
Mr Johnson said, ‘If they are given a corner, they build a shop. Get it, corner, shop, corner shop.’
‘Wary funny, Mr Johnson,’ said Mr Vaswani, ‘Wary good joke indeed. Give a corner, build a shop.’ He laughed again with his mouth and arms and head. Mrs Vaswani sent tinkles in accompaniment. The man in the boiler suit slapped his thigh as he laughed without a sound. Mr Johnson laughed some more as he left the shop. The man in the boiler suit followed with his Black Beauty, the knuckles of his hands prominent as he clutched the handles. As soon as they left, Mr Vaswani’s smile left his face as if it had never been. ‘Hurry up, hurry up,’ he said. ‘We haven’t got all day.’
Soon after our visit to the shop, elections were held in the townships for the first time. There were posters everywhere and placards with Bishop Muzorewa’s four principles: nationalism for the people, democracy for the people, livelihood for the people, peace for the people, with his party’s symbol of a hoe crossing a spear against the background of a shield.
SekuruLazarus’s face became sourer with every poster that he saw.
‘This is not true independence,’ he said. ‘They want to bribe us into voting to forever be second-class citizens.’
Danai and I gorged on the packets of crisps and flavoured milk that the election men gave to all the children in the township. Our voices rose as we made a song out of the names of the characters on the crisp packets. ‘Zsa Zsa the Scarlet, Mama Chompkin, Putzi the Dog, Professor Flubb, Jake the Pirate, Hairy the Hippy.’
An Elegy for Easterly Page 11