by M G Vassanji
Thus Gulam saved the family name. And slowly the family began to prosper—there was food on the table, creditors left satisfied if not jubilant, children went to school, there were clothes to wear. But there was nothing like the old glory.
All the while, she watched Juma in her crystal ball, she knew when he was married, and she grieved when he died, and one day it told her that Juma’s family had arrived in Dar. How to contact them? How to speak to this stern young woman Kulsum, who had lived in the home of the great Hassam Pirbhai, and what to tell her? Of the shame—the double shame of sin against community and sin against God?
Then Providence played its part. It was Juma himself who brought about the meeting—follow the train of events: the dream, the forbidden fruit, the sin, the lapse, the search for redemption, and history bloomed, knowledge was victorious.
Kulsum, of course, would have none of this. “The budhi is demented,” was her verdict.
“Aré, Ma, the boys’ father comes from a good family,” she told Ji Bai impatiently over a cup of tea, the one and only time she went to see the old woman. “The Merchants in Pakistan are his uncles—”
“Precisely so, Beta,” affirmed Ji Bai, “the same family …”
“Even so,” Kulsum would later say, “the past is done with. Who can say what really happened, what the budhi is not making up … Think of the future …”
But I was given a new look, the carbuncle in the family, vague evidence of a long-ago temptation.
Ji Bai triumphant.
This was when Kulsum was at her lowest point since her husband’s death, she could not have survived the tragedy that loomed overhead, when the milkman was told simply to keep away and I kept in the background lest Providence select me as an agent for one of its unpleasant deeds.
Mrs. Pipa came on a call of sympathy and left, her blackened pachedi and all, a portent of death and disaster.
Kulsum never forgave Mrs. Pipa that call.
First, the Pipas. One son, Amin, after a long curse of seven daughters, when the couple were well past middle age. Amin had nieces and nephews much older than him. All except one or two daughters were unhappy in marriage, none got along with their mother. Some were married into poverty, one was married to a milksop, and Roshan was married off in haste to a drunkard. The problem with being married to a drunkard is that he spends all the money and he beats you. The whole community knows your story, and the more you try to hide your shame and disappointment, the more difficult it is to think of divorce, the beatings get worse, your eyes puff up, your hair turns grey, your face takes on a haggard look, your body loses shape, and he beats you like a drum, you tell your parents, but they send you away with prayers for remedies, the beatings continue until there is only one way out …
Amin, the delicate child, obviously, for whom the light green Ford Taunus was bought and the chauffeur hired, to take him to school, who liked to hang out with tough boys who took from him not only marbles and shillings but something else as well. Of the goings-on in the small space behind the Pipas’ courtyard, we found out from Ahmed downstairs. Ahmed sold information and thrills. This was the payoff, his price to stop harassment in the streets and under staircases. For that shilling you also got the most titillating pieces of information, something you hadn’t even dreamt of. For example, the sight of Roshan Mattress and the inspector in action in the back room behind her store—all you did was to climb onto the sewer pipe from the Bubus’ balcony, walk along it against the wall, a twenty-foot drop under you, to the storeroom roof in the building courtyard, and then climb down to the courtyard floor and peep in through the iron bars to watch the fat lady offer her milk-white behind to the inspector. This opportunity was declined because the storeroom roof was layered with broken glass against just such an intrusion, and who wanted to be caught with his back against the wall, standing on a sewer pipe, with wrathful Boadicea watching from the top? To see Amin’s sin was easier, you had to go to the Pipas’ courtyard with your guide Ahmed, climb on some crates soundlessly, hold your breath, and watch. Which is what we did, Alu and Shiraz and I, our hearts pounding: raw flesh, raw sin, buggery in a cubicle reeking of urine and bird droppings and rotting pawpaws.
One night a single scream pierced the silence outside, after which normality returned, with the elder Jogo hobbling along with his call to prayer and Kulsa Thauki’s gang shuffling along on their way to prayer. In the morning we heard that Amin had been taken to the hospital at night with a fever. Within a few days he was dead from a mysterious illness, and then the screams and weeping and sobbing were continuous for a few nights: Mrs. Pipa and the seven sisters.
From that time onwards, the Pipas’ lives were more or less over. When a few months later their daughter Roshan jumped to her death from a second-storey window of a friend’s flat, God, as far as the old couple were concerned, was flogging a dead horse. Amin Mansion stood like a mausoleum over Pipa Store, and old Mzee Pipa counted away his hours throwing package after package of spice into the basket in front of him, like grains of sand. But the green Ford Taunus continued to take boys to school every day and brought them back, fifteen shillings a month for each boy, and every Friday two stale chapatis and a fifty-cent thumuni landed in front of Pipa’s sister who sat with begging bowl outside the mosque.
When Sona’s fever would not go away and his eyeballs and nails turned an ominous yellow and he passed brown water, Kulsum took him to Dr. Vellani, who put her in a taxi and sent her home, promising to come himself to give the injections every day. But Sona would not get better. Kulsum bribed the gods and promised more bribes, but the heavens remained silent. Dr. Vellani started bringing on his rounds his Madrasi wife, who was also a renowned doctor. Kulsum sat up all night on a mat beside her large bed on which Sona lay comatose, her tasbih rattling impatiently and her mouth whispering urgent prayers … and finally her two elder sisters joined her in the vigil. It was then that the neighbours started coming, Mrs. Daya, Uncle Goa and Madam, Alzira, Nuru Poni, and finally Mrs. Pipa, who, as she left, said, “My son Amin had the same illness.” It was for this remark, which so cut her to the quick, that Kulsum never forgave Mrs. Pipa.
At this point the situation resembled, although somewhat imperfectly, the scenario of many a massala movie from Bombay, as they are called, in which a poor innocent lies dying on spotless white sheets, attached to a blood transfusion device, while somewhere a bearded Musulman is saying “Allah, Allah” to the click of beads, a Catholic woman (nurse) is crying in front of a crucifix, and a woman in a sari plays a sitar to a Hindu god reposing on his cushion. The sheets were soiled, the room was dark and there was no transfusion device pumping away. But Alzira had promised to pray to her God, and the three sisters were clicking beads and moving their mouths in a mixture of Hindu and Muslim prayers. Fatu Auntie started the first few bars of a hymn, which Kulsum immediately put to a stop with a sharp “Stop these sad songs. There will be plenty of time to forgive sins …”
(Fatu Auntie, a born tragedienne of the Zanzibari school, never missed a dramatic opportunity. When she arrived, she had taken Kulsum in a tight, tearful embrace accompanied by an audible sob, thus lowering the cloud of gloom even further on our household. When my grandmother Hirbai had died, several months before, and the men were taking away the body for burial, Fatu Auntie, who had not got along with her mother for the last ten years or so, had let out a terrifying shriek, “Oh, villains you, where do you take my beloved mother—” To the cemetery, of course, Fatu Masi, but the men, frozen in mid-stride with the coffin bearing down heavily on their shoulders, could not of course say this.)
Thus Fatu Auntie, who sat back smarting from her younger sister’s sharp retort.
When enter Ji Bai, leaning on my shoulder, having greeted Mrs. Pipa on the staircase. I had in one hand a small bundle tied up with a piece of cloth. Ji Bai threw one long look at Kulsum on the floor, then at Sona on the bed, and proceeded with her work. She opened the bundle and took out a small brass bowl, the kind used by barbers, a
nd handed it to me: “Water. About half full.” I brought the water. Meanwhile Ji Bai had found some sewing needles. She sat beside Sona and felt his body. “How are you, my boy?” she muttered. She pressed his hot forehead, all his limbs, and finally his stomach, in a kneading motion, with one hand. Then she took a needle from the other hand, and in one sweeping but slow motion moved it along one arm, from the shoulder down, whispering something, and dropped it into the bowl. This she repeated with the other arm and the legs. Finally she ran a needle from his forehead down to the back of his head. Every day she came to inspect the five needles lying under water in the brass bowl. Slowly the water turned yellow, and Sona’s fever came down.
Now you may say that it was only the rust from the needles that turned the water yellow, that what she did was all mumbo jumbo. But admit it—deep inside, you know that it just might be possible, that it was her medicine that had worked. Would you take a chance—that all the people who swore by her medicine were a superstitious lot and misguided?
Ji Bai said that she had learnt her art of healing from her sister-in-law in her hometown, when she was still a girl. It was a woman’s art, handed down from woman to woman on the eve of Hindu Diwali … yet the prayers were all ayats from the Quran, she insisted: sort it out, you purists.
One afternoon, while Begum and the rest were downstairs in the shop, entertaining and being entertained by Alzira, sharing the meagre portions of roasted steaming white mhogo, Shamim and I went upstairs to conduct an experiment. “Let’s find out if you are a man yet.”
I lay on my belly on the lower half of a bunk bed, her bed, and standing on the floor beside me she goaded: “Rub, Kala, rub. Harder, and it will come out if you are a man—” I rubbed and I rubbed, a fly button came in the way, yet I rubbed—“It’s not coming, are you sure?” “Rub, Kala, rub—” “But it’s not coming, I tell you … it’s hurting, this stupid button—” “Maybe in a few months more …” And then release, sweet sticky discharge. “You’re a man, Kala!” And who should turn up then: “SALAAA!” Boadicea.
Kulsum knew better than to rail against nature. She pretended she did not know of the event. But that night she wrote to her brother Bahdur: “My boys are now getting to that age, and I think it advisable that you take your daughters in your care …”
This time Bahdur Uncle did not dither. In two months he had sold his store and arrived in Dar, as penniless as when he left it, and took Shamim, Shiraz, Salma and Yasmin with him. He opened a small pili-pili-bizari store opposite the market.
CRICKET AND ELECTIONS.
The scene: the Gymkhana cricket ground on a sunny Sunday afternoon just after tea break, one team battling valiantly and with almost certain futility against the century and a quarter piled against it, jeers pour in plentifully from one jubilant side of the spectator area and tempers are short on the other. Batting are Hindu Sports Club, against the Challengers XI. The bowler is Gumji, short and affectionate for Gulamali Manji, better known for his century against the touring Indian team two years ago, when he would stylishly clip Desai’s bumpers between gully and third man for repeated fours. For that amazing feat, even when Tanganyika lost by an innings against India, Gumji became the Herald’s Sportsman of the Year. Gumji became a legend but never scored another century, instead he started to bowl his own fast bumpers.
Gumji rubs the ball against his trousers, gives his famous squint in the sun and comes running against Tapu.
“Come on! Come on, Gumji, come on, Trueman, break his stumps!”
“Aré Trueman your arse, watch the chakas fly.”
“Shut up, cuntface!”
Tapu is a nervous batsman, short, muscular and dark. And he taps the bat nervously, once, twice, as Gumji approaches, and as the ball flies towards him he gives a wild swing.
“How’s that?” the wicket keeper shouts as the ball smacks into his gloves, and the umpire plays deaf.
“Change the umpire!” shouts a segment of the crowd. “Ay, Fernandes, go and eat fish!” The umpire, obviously, is a Goan.
Nervous Tapu is known for his wild swings. Always, he either scores a six or nothing. And recently Tapu has scored many sixes. In fact, six sixes in an over. But this time, as he swings the second time to an angry full-pitch from Gumji, the stumps go flying. As the disappointed batsman reaches the gate, a spectator on the grass croons at him: “Ay, Tapu … maja avi? Ay, was that fun?” The angry Tapu swings his bat at him, and the fight begins.
“Ay, Banya, pick someone your own size!”
“Shamsi, Khamsi, khamosh! Quiet!”
Fist fights and stick fights get under way at several places. Coconut branches are appropriated for the battle, as are mangoes and Coke bottles. Fiery Gumji has reached the spectator area, has climbed on a car rooftop, saying, “Come on,” fists raised, ready to take on the world. Some spectators discreetly walk away, the clubhouse is over-run and the uniformed African barman closes shop and disappears, the European snooker players slip out of the back way and into their cars.
“Dengu! Dal-eaters! Your Gandhi went around in diapers! Your Nehru goes around in pyjamas!”
“Jinnah the bone pie!”
A song gets under way:
Banyani ganga!
Pili pili manga!
Choroni kula!
Kitanda lala!
“Go back to Pakistan!” “You go to India! Shit eaters!” scream the young men.
News of the ruckus reaches the settlements in Kisutu and Upanga and Kariakoo and Downtown and boxbodies filled with rowdy enthusiasts of the respective communities leave for the Gymkhana Club.
But happily the fight is settled by those who first started it. The two teams, now in their blazers and sweaters, make up and shake hands in the best tradition of cricket. “We are one,” they say, “we Asians must stay together.” Tapu goes to apologize to the Challenger fans and stoically accepts a slap on the face from a screaming middle-aged man and presents the boy whom he had previously hit with the weapon, his own Donald Bradman bat. “We are one,” goes the cry. The match will be replayed, the field empties of the crowd, and the Europeans return to their snooker and beer.
The reason for the animus between communities is the impending election to the Tanganyika Legislative Council, the first election of any consequence in the country. Every man or woman to vote for one European, one Asian, one African, for a multiracial Legco. Not democratic, said TANU: five representatives for 20,000 Europeans, five for 80,000 Asians, and five for 8 million Africans: divide and see for yourselves! But TANU went along.
But where TANU, the Governor, the Africans, in short everyone else, saw “Asian,” the Asians saw Shamsi, Bohra, Ismaili, Hindu, Sikh, Memon, Ithnashri. One seat in each polling district, seven or more competing communities.
The captain of the Hindu Sports Club was P. K. Patel, or PK, a clerk in the East African Railways and Harbours. His brother RK was a lawyer and leading member of the Asian Association. RK’s wife Radha was the TANU-supported candidate for Dar. Her strongest opponent was Dr. Habib Kara, supported by the UTP (the Governor’s party, some said) and the Shamsi community. RK was educated in Bombay, and Kara in Poona. Both had then gone to England, from where Kara brought home an English wife, and RK brought back Radha. Both had children studying in England.
This was the first election anyone had ever seen where you could send a representative right to the top, to the Governor’s council, to speak for you. This was only the beginning—if they did not know that, they certainly sensed it. The stakes were high. On every pillar and lamppost in Kichwele and Msimbazi, outside every Asian shop, were the signs exhorting “Vote for Kara!” and “Vote for Patel!” and displaying the candidates’ sombre faces and their symbols. Radha Patel’s symbol was the wheel, representing progress. The fact that it resembled Asoka’s wheel on the Indian flag was missed by her enemies. Dr. Kara was represented by the lofty torch, throwing its rays skywards. “It represents knowledge,” he said proudly. But Dr. Kara’s light was more mystical than political. He
came to our shop and shook Kulsum’s hand. Of course, we all knew him. The first doctor in the community. A Mombasa boy. Chubby and fair in a light bush shirt. Kulsum had been his patient, briefly, and given him up, as she had a dozen others. He had been treating my grandmother when she died, and although negligence on his part was always claimed by her family, this did not come in the way of how they voted. He came to our shop just to make sure, and went away reassured by Kulsum.
Against the lofty light and the steady wheel ran the fragile rabbit. The rabbit, Edward bin Hadith would tell you, is a cunning animal, as cunning as Abunuwas. In fact Abunuwas looks just like a rabbit. The rabbit outwits the hyena and leaves the lion shaking its head in despair. Watch out for the rabbit. The rabbit was the symbol of Fateh the Coalseller. It was a mystery why Fateh ran for the election. He had the support of no community or party. When Dr. Kara walked the blocks of Kichwele Street with his lieutenants, all in bush shirts, when Radha Patel alighted from her car in her afternoon sari accompanied by her son or daughter, Fateh would sometimes draw them to a challenge. “What is your platform? Which people will you represent?” Dr. Kara, who wore black-framed spectacles and looked like a studious schoolboy, would smile genially. “Knowledge. Education,” he would say. Mrs. Patel’s line was also straightforward. African country. Races living in harmony (Oh yes, Dr. Kara would echo when he was around, all equal, no differences) we are all Tanganyikans now. Dada Hodari, Fateh called her contemptuously. She has a mpishi at home, and a gardener, and a houseboy, he would tell the Africans, you think she will abandon them? And this Daktari. His children are studying in England. What will he do for you? Fateh threw his challenges in Swahili, he was answered in English. Whatever Swahili Dr. Kara had spoken in Mombasa, now eluded him. Mrs. Patel, it was said, was acquiring the language and could read her speeches in it. But Fateh did not know English. In other words, he was not educated. He had been to school only to take other people’s children there. He was scruffy-looking, often unshaven, and in not the cleanest clothes, as befitted his profession. “Wey, Fateh,” the TANU supporters would tease him, “eti, what will you say to the Governor at a tea party if you are elected? Don’t forget to wash your hands! His Excellency wears the whitest gloves!”