The Gunny Sack

by M G Vassanji

  “Please let me screw you,” begged Bakari, making his lewd gesture again, and all the way to Kaboya he tried to convince them of the benefits they would obtain by satisfying this, his one wish.

  He dropped us at the market and promised to be back at six.

  I looked around me at downtown Kaboya and wondered in which direction to start walking. There was a smell of ripe pineapples and bananas, lake fish were on display, a bus was being loaded.

  “Hey, Indian,” she called out after me, and all three came up. “Be sure you’re here at six. We don’t want to go with that Arab alone.”

  We were Indian, Arab, African. What were names for? They meant nothing to us, part of privacies we did not let each other into, had no desire to intrude into …

  “All right.”

  The town of Kaboya was built around the market. Streets went around it in squares, and other streets cut across them, so that the whole effect was that of a maze. The streets closest to the centre were paved. One street withered into a path that ended at the lake. Across from me was the hotel, the place where I had spent my first night in these parts. It now greeted me like an old friend, a familiar neighbourhood place. I went in and ordered tea. And I did what my ancestor Dhanji Govindji had once done at Matamu, I enquired about the local mukhi.

  I walked on the sidewalk, to the inner side of a dry, littered gutter, and looked for a decent-looking Indian face inside a shop. A man stood haggling with a fish vendor on the steps of the third store I passed and I walked up to him. “God bless, Uncle. I am from the National Service. Can you tell me where the mukhi’s shop is?”

  The man eyed me, scratching a beard that was beginning to turn white. He was in white pyjamas with a large shirt hanging out. “The mukhi, henh? Haya basi,” he said to the vendor, concluding the deal, “take them upstairs. Saidi!” this to the servant, “stand here and keep watch!” Without another word to me, as if it was quite normal for a strange boy to ask for the mukhi, he hurried inside, where a door led into a courtyard.

  The store was filled to capacity, not a shelf in any birij empty, every wall covered, the customary President’s photo prominently displayed, a calendar with English, Arabic and Hindu dates, with Hanuman, Ganesh or Rama covered over with a photo of the Kaaba, and two fundis sewing outside, facing each other from opposite sides of the doorway, the customary guardian angels. Arich store … not a customer in sight, but obviously they came in season, handling wads of crisp new “masais” with the facility of bankers … A boy ran in from the courtyard then back out as if he had taken the wrong way. Two girls peeped in, and then giggled. One was about my age, the other younger. And I thought, How sweet the sight! One takes the sweetness of Indian girls for granted—the playful, even mocking, innocence that evokes tender feelings inside you and you forget how possessive you feel towards them—only when you’ve not seen one for some time do you realize that … It seemed ages since I had left home, it was two weeks. I stood there waiting, reflecting on the sweet innocence of Indian girls among other things, a spectacle for those inside and outside. People gawked from the sidewalk, shamelessly retracing steps to take a second look. The informality that comes from familiarity. They too felt possessive.

  After about ten minutes, the man appeared, eating something. “Come,” he said. “I’ll take you to the mukhi.”

  A staircase went up from the courtyard. Boys and girls lined up at the foot to watch me. We went up, past the kitchen, where two women stood at the door to see me, from behind them coming the sweet smell of Sunday fare, hot ghee, frying saffron and cloves and cinnamon. We went inside to the sitting room, where a bald man of at least seventy, with a white beard, sat beside a stately Philips radio.

  “Bapa,” said the man who had brought me in. “Our guest.”

  “Aah!” said the Bapa, “come, come. Sit beside me. Tell me your name, whose son?”

  A chair was brought for me and I sat beside the old man.

  “Now tell me. Your name?”

  “Salim Juma.”

  “Aah! But Juma can’t be your family name. What’s your family name?”

  “I don’t know—Huseni is my grandfather’s name. His father’s name was Dhanji Govindji.”

  Bapa was excited. “Now you are talking! But that’s still not a family name. Never mind. There was one Dhanji Govindji at Matamu. Not the same one?”

  Give them a name and they’ll give you a place.

  “The same one.”

  “Hm. You will stay for lunch, na? Of course, you will! Do you want to wash?”

  One side of the flat opened into a large and wide balcony closed off with a wire mesh, overlooking a courtyard. This was the dining room area and the whole family had lunch here at a long table. The old man had four sons. Lateef had brought me in. Kutub was the second one, younger. The other two were away. The two women simultaneously served and ate. Bapa’s wife, Jena, was dead, but a picture of her sombre self hung on the wall in the dining room. (How seriously the old folks sat to have their photos taken … as if they wanted their inner selves to be captured, left behind, not a smiling façade.) The rest of the family were the eight children of Lateef and Kutub. The older one of the two girls who had peeped inside the shop to take a look at me was Zainab. She never looked up that day.

  It was two o’clock in the afternoon and the mesh cast a shadowy net on the table. They fed me like a king. I sat next to the old man and he fed me the choicest morsels himself (“Eat. Eat for the whole week!”) and the titbits of information about himself. “I am Jaffer Meghji. But like you, the children don’t use the old name. They use Jaffer. I have the honour of naming future generations!” I learnt that one son was in Dar, and the youngest studying in England. One daughter was married in town and four others in different parts of the country.

  Later I took a nap on a soft, cool bed with white, spotless sheets smelling deliciously of home, whose springs did not lower you to the floor as the camp beds always threatened to do. And then after tea, promising to return every Sunday if not more often, I took off for the bus stop to wait for Bakari. From a window in the flat, Zainab watched me go.

  (After National Service all the Asian boys agreed upon at least one observation.

  “These blacks, bana, they had such long ones, dangling there like anything—”

  “Yes, like a donkey’s or something—”

  “And we sitting there with our shrivelled little peanuts of cocks—”

  “Aré, even the cold water wouldn’t make a difference to their sizes!”

  “That’s the point, yar! That’s precisely the point! These long dangling things don’t have stretchability. Young’s modulus zero. They are already at their maximum lengths. While these peanuts, these little jugus grow and grow like there’s no end. They grow into fighting bananas and they still want to grow!”

  “Girls prefer them, yes?”

  Such our insecurities. And later, an observation from Sona at college: “Indian boys studiously avoiding each other at the showers, but (I swear!) all the while throwing casual glances at each other’s members as if to ask: Hindu or Muslim, Muslim or Hindu?”)

  She was sitting under a tree halfway up the hill from the river to the camp, on a bright red khanga with a cashew motif in black and white. Book on lap a flagrantly incongruous sight, besides violating the Mangati NSP’s injunction to leave scholarship at the main gate.

  “Come, Indian, don’t feel shy. No need to change your course.”

  “I have a name, you know. What—preparing for university already?”

  “Don’t be silly, Indian.” She dropped the book on the ground and slyly watched me read the cover.

  Amina as she sat there … In PT shorts of the female variety with elastic at the legs, and T-shirt … small and attractive, fair and African. With a twig she flicked a black ant off her thigh. A smooth, coffee-coloured thigh …

  “Abdel Latif Kodi—Songs of Captivity. You are reading poetry.”

  “Yes, Indian. Poetry of my kinsm
an, in my own language. But what do you do to pass your time, Indian? Have you had a Mhaya girl yet? You can afford the best of them—”

  “Perhaps I should tell you I’m not that sort of a person—”

  “What, a prude! Isn’t that what you boys talk about in your tents? Come payday and you’ll have yourself a Mhaya girl and get drunk. How can they refuse, poor peasant girls, the attraction of real money? But I forget, you are a modest sort—the story is around that you don’t remove all your clothes at the river. A clothed Indian among naked Africans.”

  “Some of us have a different sense of propriety.”

  “Some of us are Indians, and some of us are Africans.”

  A black girl lying on a red khanga in a green forest, near a stream. She would sit there under the tree with her book, everytime weaving new strands to her web, headlong I would fall in.

  “Why do you call me ‘Indian’? I too am an African. I was born here. My father was born here—even my grandfather!”

  “And then? Beyond that? What did they come to do, these ancestors of yours? Can you tell me? Perhaps you don’t know. Perhaps you conveniently forgot—they financed the slave trade!”

  “Not all of them—”

  “Enough of them!”

  … And what of your Swahili ancestors, Amina? If mine financed the slave trade, yours ran it. It was your people who took guns and whips and burnt villages in the interior, who brought back boys and girls in chains to Bagamoyo. Not all, you too will say …

  It was not only you who were brought up with a sense of modesty, Indian. My mother never showed her face outside, she went about in a buibui. Your mother, you say, runs a store wearing a dress … Perhaps they have met.

  Do you know what it was like to be an African in colonial times, Indian? It was to be told that no matter what you achieved, you were ultimately a servant. Miss Logan our headmistress once took me aside and told me, “Amina, my ayah has gone away, could you help me for a few hours today?” My ayah has gone away … After all this, what of self respect? How many years before we regain it? I look at an Indian or a European, and I wonder, “What really does he think of me?” How can one not be militant?

  Abdel Latif Kodi is a poet from Lamu. He was jailed for suggesting that independence in his country has benefited only a few, the new capitalists-cum-politicians in their pin-striped suits and Mercedes …

  What of Zainab? I imagine her with her bearded husband and two rowdy kids on a walk outside the New Naaz on Sundays, in hijab, with pyjama and kurta, looking very Iranian … But that was not so, no it was not to be.

  She was so soft and beautiful, so fair, so tender. She would be downstairs in the store, with Fatima her younger sister, every time I came. We would banter for a while, the three of us, then I would go up. At lunch she would be looking at her plate, but afterwards would bring me my tea. On my third visit Zainab and Fatima were out on a walk and passed me while I waited for Bakari to pick me up. And so it happened every Sunday thenceforth. They wanted to know more about me, about Dar. Did boys and girls go to the same school, could they talk in public, how many cinemas in Dar, had I seen the Comet 4 plane, did I go to see Cliff in Nairobi … Zainab had finished school and had no intention of going to university. “I will get married.”

  “Do you have a boyfriend?”

  Blushes and giggles, no answer. Then the next time, “There are not many boys here, you know!”

  “But all girls in Dar want to go to university. You should, too. You’re wasting your life!”

  “My father is very old-fashioned. Even if he sees me talking to you like this, he will eat me up whole!”

  “Alive,” concurred her sister.

  “Whole, and alive.”

  One night, a little after one at the camp, a lot of noise was heard coming from the front gate area: the sounds of trucks, men, luggage falling. Not one person from the servicemen’s tents bothered to peep outside. At three-thirty an emergency whistle sounded for assembly. At the circle, afandes, carrying lamps and stamping their feet in the cold, waited like angry wolves.

  “You cows, you pigs! The camp is filled with sounds of strange men, of trucks, and not one of you takes a peep outside? Eti, this is an army? These old women will fight the Wabeberu? They will take on Salazar’s boys? Do you know how many hours they go without sleeping in Mozambique? Chuchuma! Chuchuma! Chuchuma! On your haunches!”

  It was a new voice. Military service proper had started. Hitherto the work had been farming, mostly, tilling the fields, weeding the banana plantations, digging rocks, and building brick by brick the afandes’ new permanent quarters: sullen faces periodically looking up at the sun for some indication of the time of day: then a whistle would blow to fall in for the march to food: happy faces once more, calling the kinate. This morning we were visited by six new afandes from Leaders’ Training at Mafinga, to initiate military training. It began with strange voices goading us on in the darkness, to jump like frogs for an hour, heedless of pleas, medical excuses, tears.

  The next morning the camp was buzzing with rumours about the Indian afande, who was responsible for the punishment. With every sore muscle that cried out, a heap of abuses was hurled at our new tormentor. He was like an elephant, they said, tall and fat. He did not walk but stomped, this tembo. He would crush your feet into jelly. He could walk all day and night. He had been to Mozambique. At Ruvu he had chased a lion.

  But the new afande failed to appear that day.

  The camp had two corrugated-iron outhouses for the recruits, outside which long lines of ill-humoured men and women, toothbrushes or mswakis in their mouths, formed every morning. The two sheds stood behind the tents, their two open doorways looking out over the valley. You approached them from behind and you gave a polite little cough as you approached. If that failed to get a response, you waited at the side and gave a louder cough from deep inside the throat and waited for the answering grunt. Then you tried your best to convince the occupant to hurry up.

  “Come on, now, come out—you think you’re the only one here?”

  “Allah! I’ve not even started yet!”

  “There are three of us waiting here, and you sit there like a king. You think this is your home, now?”

  “Go away. I have diarrhoea. You think I like this stinking hole?”

  “If you’re not coming out, I’m coming in—”

  A tinkle of the coveted National Service belt, and out he came, in full uniform, stomping, not looking up, and marched past us to the camp. I looked at him astounded, not believing my eyes.

  “Even he finds it strange,” said the person behind me. “Are you going in or not?”

  “You know him, eh, this afande?” he asked me when I was in.

  “Yes, I know him.”

  “He’s vicious, eh?”

  “Yes, he’s truly vicious.”

  If I had been allowed to pick a thousand names for this new afande, I would not have picked his. Big, bluff, now vicious, Shivji Shame!

  On Saturday afternoon the squint-eyed Afande Ufinyo came looking for me in my tent. “Where’s the Indian? Wey Mhindi, come with me. And bring your pack of cards!”

  “Afande Shivji wants to speak with you,” he said, when I came out, taking the cards from me.

  The afandes lived in barracks behind the front gate. Shivji sat on a folding chair outside a hut, doodling on the ground with a stick.

  “Ah, Juma! Of all the places, to meet here!”

  “Yes, bana. But when did you join National Service? And why?”

  “It’s a long story. You know, Juma, out here we are not equals. See these stripes—I am a sergeant. Soon I’ll have scissors here—major. You’re a recruit. You are in my power. But I am your friend. And you know why, Juma, I am your friend? Because when I stood in front of the class and when Mrs. Schwering or Mrs. Lila would tell everyone to say ‘Shame! Shivji Shame!’ there was only one person there who was not yelling ‘shame,’ and it was you. I remember that. That is why I am your friend.”<
br />
  They dreaded the Terror of Mafinga, Shivji the Tembo, Shivji the Simba. When he took his company on exercises they crawled over rock and mud in areas infested with snakes and scorpions, and spent the remainder of the day scrubbing and starching. His route-marches inevitably stretched into the following day. But he also taught them well. That was one company, Chaleh Coy or Charlie Company, that could have walked straight into battle, that sang of Mozambique and Rhodesia with gusto, and set the pace for the rest. They could dismantle and assemble their automatic weapons in the dark. When they came to attention, it was at once, to a man, without the slightest shuffle. And his punishments were savage, similar, as he said, to those he had once received. Only on weekends, between two p.m. on Saturday and six p.m. on Sunday, did his iron rule relent. Then he was not to be seen. Other afandes could be seen going for a drink, or washing or ironing or even playing cards … but not Shivji. He stayed to himself. They said he smoked bhang, that’s what gave him his madness.

  On Saturdays Amina and I met under our tree and we talked. We never stopped parrying … if we did not banter and challenge, how could we relate, come close over the chasm that separated us …

  The tree was behind a bush a few yards away from the road. The guardpost was visible from behind the bush. On Saturday afternoons servicemen went to a village further down the road, where they got drunk on konyagi made of pineapple juice and stumbled back retching to the camp late at night. One afternoon Shivji stumbled towards us, mildly drunk, with a wrapped bottle in his hand.

  “Relationships between men and women are forbidden in the Service,” he said as he sat down heavily.

  “But friendship is all right,” quipped Amina, and I heartily agreed, not to be outdone in denial.

  “Excessive friendship is dangerous,” said Shivji, wisely. He unwrapped the bottle and passed it around. Amina got up and announced, “You men get drunk, I’m leaving.”

  When she had left, Shivji grinned and wrapped up the bottle once more. “That gets rid of her. I bought this for tonight.