The Gunny Sack

by M G Vassanji

  Lieutenant Colonel Henry was in dark green army fatigues and a brown feathered hat of the type officers of the King’s African Rifles used to wear at the march past at Government House on Queen’s Birthday. He was looking out of the window at the garden being watered, and I could have been watching a film, so striking, so out-of-the-world he looked. His uniform was impeccable, gleaming with starchy stiffness, his trouser legs jutted out in two knife-edged creases and were stuffed in at the spotless boots. The man was almost white, slim and not very tall, with sharp grey eyes.

  “Yes?” he said, going to his desk.

  I knew the game was up. “Police Commissioner Shabani has given this,” I almost stammered and extended the note. Halfway through my account about my sick knee, he got up and I stopped. “Go,” he said curtly, pointing to the door. I took a step back. Then he blew his top. “Do you think we are running a kitchen? Don’t you think we have doctors here? Who told you to come here? Out!”

  The Lieutenant Colonel’s last question was repeated to me by Alu Poni that afternoon. “Fool! You should have gone to Bhatia. He arranges such things. Baboo—,” he gave me a look of contempt that could have come straight from the face of Hassan Uncle.

  “His children don’t do National Service!” I protested, defending my choice.

  “They go to Bhatia.”

  I see this somewhat silly episode (an example of shirking civic responsibility—but let’s not judge it out of context: the chain of influence from Baboo to Commissioner to Lieutenant Colonel was real: and neither the kindly Baboo nor the phlegmatic Commissioner did after all decline assistance)—I see this comedy now as an attempt to foil the workings of fate: how else to explain, what else to call, the irrevocable relentless chain of events that unfolded … how else to recall the overwhelming logic of what actually happened, compare it with the flighty fancifulness of what might have been. Somewhere in the government bureaucracy a moving finger wrote, the Herald’s presses rolled in assent, and nothing could change the destiny that was sealed.

  You were told (by those, and there were many, who claimed to be in the know) before embarking on your journey to camp to take with you a large, iron trunk. In it to put away some of life’s exigencies that could come in handy: a suit and some decent clothes for the times when you would go to town, canned food, such as corned beef and beans, not to forget chevdo and gathia and ladoos … and, oh yes, toilet paper: a must—what they gave you was more like sandpaper. You were told to lock the contents inside this trunk with a heavy-duty steel padlock. And it should be so heavy, this trunk, it should not be easy to walk away with.

  I took the big, black trunk that lay under Kulsum’s bed all these years, my father Juma’s trunk constructed by some long-forgotten Bohra tinsmith in Mombasa at the turn of the century, that had travelled with him from Kibwezi to Nairobi and later carried his bride Kulsum’s belongings from Mombasa … then loaned to Ali Chacha for his home-leave to India on the SS Amra, for which service my father received the three Kashmiri daggers. Under Kulsum’s bed it contained all sorts of knickknacks: a corset we would sometimes open without saying a word, a brassière pad, soft and spongy we would put our cheeks and nose to, a compact, a moth-eaten velvet clutch purse, a Taj Mahal with its columns broken, the sword, a piece of tarpaulin, a khaki cap probably a police officer’s, not unlike the one Inspector Kumar had worn. All these were hastily poured into a suitcase and room made for my safari inland.

  To go to Camp Uhuru you first took the crawling Central Railway Line to Mwanza. Peace Corps teachers would joke that the train was so slow you could step off it and go out for a stroll, and when you had finished you had to wait for the train to catch up. You saw the blackest of black nights, cooler than the nights of Dar, fought mosquitoes, and looked out of the windows at those sparse dots of light in the jungle, sparser than the stars in the sky, and you wondered what they were doing, these people in their small huts in the jungle with their kerosene lamps … who they were, what they did, what they thought … and when the morning came, the sweetest and clearest of mornings with its yet tender warmth and an ever so slight caress of a breeze, you saw them squatting, chewing on their mswakis, wondering who you were and where you were going … You reach Mwanza and are sent to the bus station, where you wait all night for the next bus to Kaboya. All day the next day, the bus groans and whines and breaks down, is pushed by the passengers, and starts again as it climbs up protesting towards Kaboya.

  In forty-eight hours I saw the vegetation change from the coastal coconut palms and sisal to the grassland and shrubbery of the plains and into the thick, tropical forest at the lake. I saw Lake Victoria, vast, tranquil and mysterious … for in the background lurked the Nile and Sudan and Cairo. History reflected from that shimmering vastness: what matter if the mind cautioned you to take that history, its white man’s romance, with a grain of salt? … the mind has many sides that do not talk to each other … meanwhile how can I help thinking of Speke and Burton, Livingstone and Stanley, catching the excitement and missing my breath at seeing Lake Victoria for the first time and seeing in my mind’s eye the River Nile pouring out from it in a great gush and flowing all the way to the land of the pyramids and pharaohs and Cairo the northernmost tip of Africa … In pitch darkness, after two breakdowns, the bus stopped on the road at the top of a hill. Passengers were woken up by commotion at the door and the sounds of feet on the roof. A few young men speaking the high school lingo of Swahili mixed with English were getting off. The word “camp” was mentioned incessantly and I looked around nervously.

  “Do you have a lot of luggage?” asked my neighbour, an African padre.

  “Yes. Iron. It’s on the roof.”

  “Better wait till we get into town. You can come back in the morning.”

  Camp Uhuru was a good three miles from the road. One of the boys outside produced a torch and they disappeared into the jungle, their torchlight flitting to and fro like a firefly. The bus engine, reeking of gasoline, roared and spluttered into life, an existence that violated the purity and mystery of the forest all the way to Kaboya and left behind a trail of exhaust.

  The bus stop was outside a local hotel. The padre waited for my trunk to be lowered from the roof and took me to the desk. He asked for separate rooms, and as we parted outside our doors, told me, “Lock your door. A National Service vehicle comes to pick up provisions every morning at the market. They’ll take you to camp.”

  How to explain the numbness, the loneliness, the total paralysis of memory, the glazing over of reality, at finding myself in the interior of Africa not knowing a soul, not knowing what to expect … as I sat on the springy bed with clean if stale-smelling linen, the locked door in front of me, the only furniture a locally made chair and dresser, on the wall a black-and-white calendar from the local cooperative with a photograph of men lugging sacks … at such moments you wonder if someone is watching you all the while, from a hole somewhere perhaps, and if that someone came in and cut your throat in the night whether you would ever be found by those who cared …

  … Strange black men chasing me through a thick, palpable darkness, carrying raised flaming torches and uttering strange oaths … I ran through thick bushes, stumbled over protruding roots and fallen stems, slipped on fallen wet leaves and bark, brushed against thorny branches that cut the skin and drew blood in thin streams … All the while the sounds drew closer, from all directions, the strange oaths, incessant drumming, branches crackling, feet thudding. Tall trees stood silently on either side, like hooded men, menacingly watching my progress into the jungle. I was on a beaten path, and this path was like a tunnel cut into the forest, and at the end of it was a light, the red flickering light of flaming torches against a pitch-black background, and the sounds of strange oaths, of drumming, of branches crackling, feet thumping the ground. As I hurtled towards it, it felt warm, this red flickering light of many torches, and it began to turn yellow and feel hot, and was blinding me as it streaked in through the window in radiant sunb
eams, roasting me where I lay perspiring …

  Downstairs the town was awake, the market bustling, the bus stop busy …

  “I bring you a guest,” said the driver of the vehicle to the sentry at the guard house. From behind the open Land Rover, among sacks of rice, maize flour and red beans, I surveyed the scenery around me. We had driven up a red dirt road through the forest, crossed a stream and climbed up the side of a shallow valley. On the other side some huts were visible. The camp, on this side, consisted of a few large khaki tents and some whitewashed buildings.

  My iron trunk was in front of me, painted black, my name prominent in white letters, secured with a heavy padlock.

  The sentry, a thin bony-faced Mangati youth, came to take a peck at me and grinned. Here was a man from the interior. I looked back at a set of wild-looking front teeth, the deep forehead, a scar at the side of the head. He was deep, properly black: what we call mweusi. I grinned back.

  He let out a shriek, almost doubling up in a show of anger and hurt.

  “Shuka-shuka-shuka—get out! Who do you think you are? Are you a minister? Do you think you are an ambassador, a balozi? The Queen of England …”

  Calmly and sure of myself I pushed my trunk behind me, jumped down and dragged it after me. Then I placed it on a shoulder, supported by one hand, the other at my side, as if to say: “All ready for service! Uhuru na kazi!”

  The Land Rover drove off kicking up a trail of dust and gravel, leaving me to my fate.

  The sentry looked at me with bloodshot eyes. His khaki stood up with starch and his boots shone. But his face somehow gave the impression of having just woken up.

  “I,” he pointed to his chest, coming close, “am an NSP: National Service Police—understand? Repeat after me: National Service Police.”

  “National Service Police.”

  “If you misbehave, you are brought to me for punishment. Now, did you understand?”

  I stood dumbfounded.

  “Say yes, you!” He screamed, stamping a foot.

  “Yes.”

  “ ‘Yes, Afande’ you head-full-of-water!”

  “Yes, Afande!”

  “Now. When you come here, your books and your learning you leave outside at the gate.” Stiffly and with ceremony he walked up to the gate and stooped to beat a post with his stick. “Here. Mother and father and uncles and aunts you leave here. Brothers you leave here. Sisters—” He paused to reflect on the lewd thought. “What do you have in the trunk? Dal? Chevdo? Biriyani?”

  The trunk now stood stiffly near me like a companion.

  “No. No, Afande!”

  “Pick it up and run. Come on, run. Run-run-run.”

  “With the trunk?” I cried out in disbelief.

  “Bagalas maguy! You talk too much. Put the trunk on your head. Now run.”

  Up and down the hill I ran like an unstable donkey, a pregnant camel, my eyes on my feet lest I tripped or stumbled, the trunk bearing down on me, and unknown to me a spectacle for the rest of the camp. Twice it came down, this big black trunk, came crashing down at my feet, each time I picked it up, put it on my head, then on my shoulders and then back when my skull threatened to open up under the weight. And at my side the berserk NSP, goading me with “Reft-light, reft-light, heet-ha, heet-ha,” beating the ground at my feet with his stick, letting out an agonized shriek every time I took a wrong turn, as if I had seriously wounded his feelings. Oh how I cursed you Nathoo and Bandali and Alu Poni, you who had advised me to take the trunk when all I needed was a small rucksack!

  Finally, as I was later told, one of the regular afandes showed mercy on me and sent word to the NSP to stop my ordeal. I was brought to a halt before Afande Ali, who then instructed someone to lend me his mess tin. It was there that I saw her again, Amina, under a tree with other fresh recruits from the schools.

  “If there is a hell on earth,” somewhat emotionally I wrote to Alu Poni that night under the light of a kerosene lamp, “this is it.”

  A few weeks later, with new insight gained, with the help of a metaphor: “We Indians have barged into Africa with our big black trunk, and every time it comes in our way. Do we need it? I should have come with a small bag, a rucksack. Instead I came with ladoos, jelebis, chevdo. Toilet paper. A woollen suit. And I carried them on my head like a fool.”

  To which Alu Poni, Mr. Swahili himself, the superpatriot, replied: “What happened to your hell on earth? You are getting brainwashed, my friend. We should be allowed our ladoos and jelebis. What’s wrong with them? If you were made to look like a fool, don’t blame yourself … Go to town on Sundays. Just walk into any Asian store and tell them you’re from the National Service. They’ll feed you.”

  Thus began a parting of ways.

  The songs of the National Service. When those months became a faded memory, when the names of favourite afandes were forgotten … when the names of the guns had slipped the mind … and a quarter-mile jog left them once more helpless … the songs remained, clear, every nuance in place, all improvisations at instant recall … on picnics, on Sunday afternoon family gatherings, there would be someone who would recall the song to the kinate. Kinate? Kinanguruma, it roars! Kinate kinanguruma! Ho-ye ho-ye, kinate kinanguruma! Tunakwenda! Kinate kinanguruma! Kula wali … Kinate kinanguruma! We go to eat rice in our mess tins, and the kinate roars. We put Blue Band margarine on our breads … the kinate roars! oh how it roars! Even when political or economic pressures had driven these former recruits across the seas, the kinate never ceased to roar. In a living room or kitchen in London or New York, in an office in Mysore or Karachi those songs were hummed. An ode to the President or the Land Rover, or even those inane lines taught by some cynical British or Israeli officer to his trainee afandes: How many days in a week? All together now: Seven days, seven days, seven days!

  Early in the morning we trotted to the main road wishing death on the enemies. Chaka-mchaka? Chinja! Kill! The Portuguese? Chinja! Salazar? Chinja! The South Africans? Chinja! And Ian Smith? Chinja! And Verwoerd? Chinja! And Kambona? Chinja! The straws? Cut! The pipes, all? Cut! As the Mwalimu had taught, the capitalists had long straws with which they sucked. And the bigger capitalists, the man in the street added, used pipes. Africa is ripe for revolution, Chou En-lai had said, and the National Service was in the forefront. Who is building our nation, eh mama? Not the Americans, mama, no, not the Americans!

  A quarter-mile down the valley from where the Mangati kept watch at the gate, the tiny Umoja River gurgled through on its way to Lake Victoria. Here after work we washed in its icy clutches and waited around on its banks like lizards on stones, while our clothes dried. From upstream came the tantalizing sounds of the girls doing the same. But the Umoja had a bend where we dipped our bodies and you had to wade a good distance upstream among stones and through a curtain of brambles and branches to catch sight of the frolicking nymphs. Further downstream the villagers from across the river washed. At the narrowest the river was a few stepping stones wide. To go to town you had to cross it, they said. An Arab called Bakari ran a transportation four miles further up from Denge, the village across. You had to find Bakari, they said.

  Denge was eight huts, three on either side of the path and two flung away in the jungle, each with a plot of garden, a goat or two and some children. Corn, banana and pineapple grew in profusion. We’ll take you to Bakari, said the children, and they ran in front of and behind me. Occasionally they disappeared behind a hut or a large bush and watched my progress, peering out and laughing. We’re taking you to Bakari, they assured me. The road was deserted save for a couple of women on their way back from the store with kerosene, and a steady female chatter in school Swahili that stayed unembodied and behind me all the way, making wisecracks about the Asian David Livingstone.

  We came to a largish village. Some of the houses were layered with cement. A large tree stood almost in our way in the centre of the village, giving shade to a large area. Here my little band of escorts turned left and stopped at a whitewashe
d house. A Coca Cola sign hanging out from the door said, “Prop. Abu Bakar Muhammed.” The door was closed, on it the ubiquitous Raleigh ad, man fleeing lion on the bike, and Stanley Matthews dribbling for Sloan’s liniment. A blue Volkswagen van was parked outside.

  Covered in sweat and dust, I banged impatiently on the door. A black woman answered.

  “Is Bakari there, mama? I want to go to town.”

  She went inside, leaving the door ajar. To my right, at a little window, came sounds of girls chatting excitedly, and I saw that I was being watched, the subject of amused curiosity. Meanwhile the three girls from the camp caught up and stood behind me, leaning against the van, all in pretty, light frocks and looking as fresh as ever. The one in the middle was Amina.

  Bakari came to the door, from a very private moment, it seemed, in a white T-shirt and a green loincloth.

  “Jambo, Bwana Bakari,” I said.

  “Jambo, jambo. Yes? You come from the camp, do you?”

  “Yes. I want to go to town. Can you take me?”

  “I am closed today. Come tomorrow.”

  “What now? Do you think they’ll let us out tomorrow? Eti, this man thinks we are on holiday here!”

  “Come on, take us to town, Bwana Bakari. And this Indian hasn’t seen his fellows in two weeks. Have pity on him!”

  A lewd grin came upon the Arab’s face. His hand brushed lightly across his crotch. “You girls want to make some money while you’re here?”

  “Shut up, Arab, let’s go.”

  Abu Bakar Muhammed actually did not run a regular bus service but used the van to transport goods and took an occasional passenger. With me he made an exception. The Africans and this Arab, seeing this sole, lost Indian in their midst, felt obligated to put him in touch with his kind. He looked at me as if he had no choice: “Let’s go.”

  “And we,” said the girls. “We’re coming too.”