The Gunny Sack

by M G Vassanji

“You know, Juma,” he said, “it’s a wonder. Who would have thought, so many miles away from home—you and I … it’s destiny.”

  “I still wonder, Shivji. Why you joined.”

  He glared at me. “You don’t think I’m better off? What was I back in Dar? Selling oil door to door. ‘Uncle, have you bought your oil for the month? The latest shipment of ghee from Musoma. Better than KCC. Here, taste it—’ That’s what the likes of you would have wished on me … while you go and get yourselves educated.”

  He brought out a tin box of 555 and took out a twig of marungi and chewed it.

  “I am the master of my world here! For the first time in my life. People look up to me. I am a leader. I command them, I can make them laugh and I can make them cry.”

  “I’ve had a tough life, Juma. No mother-father, brought up by grandmother. We had no money, and many nights I went to bed hungry. I would beg in the shops. Every month a woman would bring us a little money. What can I tell you—I was big but I was a coward. Boys would beat me up and I would cry. Even the younger boys would threaten me: Eti: ‘Weh Shivji, meet me outside.’ And I would tremble. People would pat my arse. Why, even when I was older, when I had left school and was ferrying oil—little Arab boys ran after me. There was this African who went around with me, carrying a tin of oil. One day he said to me in anger: ‘Weh Musa, you fag! Hanisi. What are you? What are you afraid of? Give one of them a good thumping, such that he’ll recall his blessed grandmother. That’s how you’ll get respect.’ That’s exactly what I did, Juma. But I was so nervous. There was this thin, wiry Arab called Faisal with a squeaky voice. ‘You,’ I said, that’s all I could manage, ‘You,’ and I stepped towards him. He stood there firm, confident, mocking me. All I could come out with was a timid backhand. But I tell you, Juma, it sent him reeling! Oh, the joy of it! He was crying, holding his head, I felt exhilarated! There is no thrill like power … I have tasted it, I am addicted to it! You remember I met you once on the road, and I said if you needed anything? It was then, soon afterwards.

  “Then, when Chou En-lai came, when I saw the National Service and TPDF marching … the power in their arms, their legs … I decided to join, to become a man. I was sent to Ruvu for training. But I had not conquered my fear yet. I had not learnt the extent of my strength. It was all right to fell a bone-pie like Faisal Sefu, but the African … that was another story. I was scared of the blacks. And they saw this Paado, this Fatty Matimbwa, who could not last long in their midst and they wanted their fun. They would steal my things. Within one week they had exchanged their old stuff for mine. I would spend hours starching my clothes, polishing my boots, and as soon as I turned my back on them I found them exchanged. Then I would be punished. I could not mix with them. I would feel lonesome and many nights I would cry in my bed. One day I took hold of myself. After starching my things I wrote my name on the inside of my shirt and the belt of my pants, Musa Shivji. I suspected who this person was, who always exchanged my clean clothes for his dirty ones. It was a tall African, as tall as I but thinner. They called him Twiga. Well, as soon as I saw the dust-covered shirt and pants folded carelessly on my blanket where my clean, starched ones had been, I walked up to his bed and looked at the inside collar of the shirt lying there. Musa Shivji. I went to my platoon commander and reported. ‘You have proof?’ he said. ‘You Mhindis think all Africans are thieves.’ ‘Come and see,’ I said. Well, my friend Twiga got extra drill. But it was nothing—half an hour of running with his kitbag—wait till you hear what happened to me.

  “When this man had finished his punishment (it was Sunday afternoon, a little before roll call) this man comes up to me and gives me a shove. You know, like he was looking for a fight. He shoved me a few times and I did nothing. I was paralysed with fear. But this man, I thank him for it, he did not relent. He kept shoving me and I kept moving back, and the other members of the tent cheered him on. Finally I was against one of the ropes and I couldn’t move back any farther. I told you he didn’t relent and I thank him. He shoved, and in desperation I returned a shove in good nature, saying, ‘Cut it out!’ Someone shouted, ‘Weh Twiga, you have an opponent!’ Twiga started coming at me like a wild animal, and blindly I took a swipe at him with my right hand—a terrific swipe that landed at the side of his head. Mama, what joy, what jubilation, the crunch I heard, he looked at me like I was Satan and went down! Juma, by God, I tell you, the man went down! The other fellows slunk away. That night I was a giant, a dumé, simba! But only for the night.

  “This man, I had broken his jaw. He was taken to the hospital and word got around. And I was punished. I was punished for being a fat Indian who had won, because I had humiliated the whole lot of them, from then onwards none of them dared face me one to one again. What I went through at Ruvu, Juma, it made me what I am today. I was sent into confinement, with one NSP to guard me and keep me busy.

  “On the first day I was asked to fill a drum with water. The drum was on top of a hill near the kitchen, and the tap was some distance away downhill. I had to carry the water in a mess tin, little by little. I don’t know how many trips I made—fifty, sixty, a hundred—before I collapsed. The next day he told me, this dog of an NSP, to stand in the sun with a brick in each hand, raised over the shoulders. And when he felt like it, he made me run with them. I had to fetch his food and wash up when he finished. I washed his clothes. I won’t tell you what else I had to do … They would have killed me if I’d let them. The camp commanders must have known what was up. They would pass by with amused looks in their Land Rovers. They must have known: everyone knew: an Indian who volunteers for National Service has no-one, no friend, no kin. Isn’t it true, I ask you Juma?

  “The following day he took me, this Masai NSP, to break stones at the river. All morning he lounged about on the bank sunning himself, as I broke stones and carried them to a pile. Towards noontime he brought some food. He went for a swim. Then naked he started eating. ‘Afande, I’m hungry,’ I said. ‘How dare you talk to me while I eat!’ he roared. I went on with my work and we eyed each other. When he finished, he got up.

  “He had brought two mess tins of food, now he held mine in his hand. ‘Indian!’ he said. I went up to him. He poured the food at his feet. ‘Eat.’ There it lay, the brown beans frothing and the solid lump of ugali, and over it his dick erect. At that moment, my fuse up here, it blew. I gave a roar and jumped at him. ‘This time I will kill you,’ I said. He went down and I on top of him, and I had his arm behind his back and started squeezing his throat. When his feet stopped thrashing, I released him. He was still breathing, then he started to moan. ‘Have mercy!’ ‘Report a word of this, and I swear by my God, by my Mhindi God that I will kill you. Now where is my food?’ That evening and the next two days I was served. He washed the mess tins. He washed and starched my clothes. We played cards. That, my friend Juma, is called Power.

  “I was called simba. Only a lion, they say, can tame a Masai. Funny thing is, the more my reputation grew, the more I was expected to do things, to show off my bravery. When some real lions came close to the camp (we could hear them roaring at night) I was expected to lead the chase.”

  “Did you?”

  “Yes, but I was scared! But there were Africans who were willing to come with me, and I couldn’t show them how frightened I was! … No, I haven’t been to South Africa. But I was sent to the Mozambique border. It was nothing really, some men were needed to carry provisions and build facilities and a few servicemen were chosen. But we came with all sorts of stories, how we fought the Portuguese, and so on.”

  Thus Shivji Shame, now the terrible Afande Shivji. He looked the same but he was different. The uniform was starched and proper, the boots polished, but here was no handsome, impeccable Lieutenant Colonel Henry, just Shivji. What had changed, what struck terror in his new recruits, was the person Shivji. We became friends, this new Shivji and I, despite his initial admonition, and every Saturday he would come to the tree where Amina and I sat, lower his ample body
on the grass and make a few wisecracks, after which Amina left and we would idly chat. An angry man, without anything in the world, just the army, and his ambitions of making it there.

  Bapa, old Jaffer Meghji, what did he know of Dhanji Govindji, my ancestor and mukhi of Matamu? Did be know of the sin, and the murder? There is nothing about Jaffer Meghji in Dhanji Govindji’s accounts of transactions. Yet he knew something, this old man whose eyes lit up at the name, but he never let on …

  Zainab! What young, pretty Shamsi girl has an ancient name like that? We had progressed to … Yasmin, Shamim, yes, flowers … Nur Jahan, the light of the world. But Zainab … Lateef, Kutub, Faruq, we left these archaisms a long time ago how could I have missed? Where was the Karim, the Amin, the Alnoor? The names should have told me (and the beards, yes!) but blindly I walked in, into a nest of—not Shamsis but rivals.

  Take the name Yusufali Adamjee, outside the small store that sells stationery (among other things) in Kaboya. A name that immediately identifies a Gujarati Muslim of a certain sect from Surat, who traces his ancestry in Arabia. The cloth cap, the shirt, the white beard, a sure confirmation. “Eh Chokra,” he calls out as I pass with Amina, outside his store. I stop in my tracks, look in, and he motions to me. “Come inside.”

  “See you at the Land Rover,” says Amina and goes off.

  “John,” shouts Adamjee, “two teas!”

  “What is your name, boy?” he asks.

  “Salim Juma.”

  “Shamsi?”

  “Yes.”

  “There is not a single Shamsi family in the town! Not since 1920!” He eyes me. “Do you understand?”

  “Bapa—”

  “Bapa!” he says contemptuously. “So the bastard has already worked his spell on you. The next time you come here, eh ulu, you’ll walk straight into a wedding procession. Yours!”

  “What?”

  “Yes. You, Bapa’s darling adopted son, you are going to marry his granddaughter Zainab! That I have heard from the old man’s mouth, with my own ears. Do you plan to marry her?”

  “No. No, no. There is nothing between us. You can tell them from me. I have no intention of marrying Zainab. I am going to university. Tell them I’ll never go to their house again! How dare they assume I want to marry their daughter! And tell them this from me. They should send Zainab to university. They should not force her to get married!”

  “Oho. Oho. So the spell has at least partly worked! I see. That sweet-sweet tea that she brought you in the afternoons? And the pendas, did she give you a sweet-sweet penda to eat before you boarded Bakari’s bus? And that soft-soft pillow you napped on smelling the sweet-sweet fragrance of jasmine from her hair? That, my friend, is what contained the spell. Two more weeks and your mind would have completely turned—they would have given you a shop in Kaboya, my friend! And you would have borne them an Abbas or a Hamza. That’s what happened to their other son-in-law. He came from Mwanza. And he’s never left!”

  “How do you know all this, Mr. Adamjee?”

  “I know. There is not a single Shamsi family in Kaboya. All the others left or converted, became Sadiqis. I am a Dawoodi. And I am leaving soon. Come on, have tea. It’s pure—all my daughters are already married, subhanallah!”

  Yusufali Adamjee drank his tea from the saucer and watched me do the same. Then he winked at me. “This black girl with you—she gives, eh?”

  The feud in the community at the turn of the century, the murders in Bombay, the splintering of the Shamsis into Hindus and Muslims, progressives, fundamentalists and mystics: one of the sects was fundamentalist Sadiqi, with its dress code and the Prophet’s beard, its imposed modesty for women. (Interestingly, the old photograph of Jena, the old man’s wife, did not show her in veil: a convert?) Of the remaining Shamsis some disappeared into various mainstreams, and there was left a single, still eclectic and little confused Shamsi community. The remaining Shamsis and the Sadiqis could not live together; in many towns and villages, the minority either converted or left. That had all been a long time ago, a feud that sometimes got bloody, and for many years even when the actual conflicts ceased and the two communities lived in the same town, their members would not eat at the same table. In Matamu there had been no splinter groups, and the Matamu Shamsis had later dispersed. In Dar, all that remained of the conflict was a slight hesitation, a questioning pause, before the boys answered it for themselves and sat down to lunch together. But here, in Kaboya, a backwater in the middle of nowhere, there remained a bastion of the old conservatism, a memory of the bloody conflicts and the losses suffered.

  That was our first visit, Amina’s and mine, to Kaboya together on official business. There would be one more. I never went to the Jaffer household again.

  On Thursdays at camp, during the hours before lunch, Amina was asked to give lectures on politics and culture. She decided she would read to her class. First she gave them Abdel Latif Kodi, then Shaban Robert. She translated excerpts from Chinua Achebe. She read Nyerere, Nkrumah, Lincoln, Martin Luther King, Lenin and Marx. I was enlisted as assistant and the two of us were excused regular duty and never learnt to fight with weapons. On our first trip to Kaboya we went in search of The Merchant of Venice at the local school library. This turned out to be one cupboard in the staff room, with no Shakespeare.

  Two weeks later we returned, in search of former high school students who had been educated elsewhere and might still have a copy of the play with them. We found one at the house of Ali Ramzan, former student of Shakespeare in Dar, now shopkeeper. It was lunchtime, and Mr. Ramzan, a bearded Indian, made us sit down to eat with him. His wife did not appear from the kitchen and a servant brought the food. After lunch, Mr. Ramzan, after reminiscing about his Shakespeare days at Dar, parted a little hesitantly with the book, as if with a little of his life. His name was scrawled in ink on the first page, Ali Mohamed Ramzan, Standard XIB.

  On our way back, on the lonely road that came up from the lake, Amina was looking for Shylock’s famous defence, when a noisy truck full of Indian boys celebrating a victory drove in front of us on a crossroad and stopped. Out came rowdy adolescents looking for fun and ran straight for Amina. “Come on, dada! Give us some, too!” The usually fiery Amina looked at me in terror: “What do we do, Indian?” And she started screaming, running down the hill. The boys then came at me. From their midst, Zainab’s brother Faruq stepped out. “Listen,” he shouted as if at a mosque gathering. “This ill-begotten half-caste son of a dog has spoken ill of my sister after eating from our house. What shall we do with him?”

  “Kill him!”

  There is one thing I have always dreaded, an irrational perhaps primal fear for the safety of my cranium, the very thought of which makes me cringe … a solid-wood made-in-England cricket bat aimed at my head. The hysterical Faruq now screamed, cricket bat raised … She told me she had fetched Mr. Ali Ramzan and the two had run up the hill to save me. The boys ran off, leaving me bruised and bleeding.

  Faruq had called me a half-caste, so obviously he knew of my background. What else did Jaffer Meghji know … did he meet Dhanji Govindji on his travels or the other way round … I never got around to asking (the slippery old man only skirted the subject) … and then it was too late. So much information simply hoarded for years and now lost … And the gunny sack is reduced to silence on the subject.

  … The back of a Land Rover on a bumpy road, Amina still clutching The Merchant of Venice. “Listen,” she says. “Here it is. ‘If you prick us do we not bleed? If you—’ ”

  “Yeah, we bleed, we bleed all right. Can’t you see I’m dying?”

  “Why don’t you lie down, Salum? Rest.”

  “On this?” I point to the grooved metal floor in disbelief. “And split my skull completely? If you hit our skulls—aah—don’t they crack …”

  “Here. Put your head on my leg and lie down.” She stretches her legs out and straightens her skirt. “Here.”

  There. I put my head where she indicated. Above the knee. T
he clouds overhead throw down a wicked glare and I turn my head. “It’s hard here.” I move my head up and into the warm embrace, the sweet enclosure of her lap.

  “Hey, Indian,” she says. “Watch out. You’re no better than the others.”

  “If you tempt us, don’t we fall …”

  “Weh Amina,” chuckles the driver in front. “He’s got you now!”

  I heaved and embraced her waist, pressing deeper … I’d got her … and her legs moved apart ever so slightly to receive me.

  And I swear that the Kaboya skies that never rain after noon rained some to celebrate.

  I fell asleep.

  DAR, MASSACHUSETTS, NEW YORK, AND THE MOON.

  The bush telegraph, they say, is slower than the electric, but it is more thorough. It begins as a whisper in the air. Carelessly, easily it travels, then it grows, acquires and gathers momentum, a current of whispers, then a murmur in motion. It delivers not one cryptic line in a khaki envelope but a resonance: mass of fact, opinion, speculation and pure fabrication. The news is in the air: Did you hear about Kala, the so-and-so who did the such-and-such … How did they know about us, Amina and me, in Dar? The message buzzed in Kaboya from man to man and woman to woman until it could not be contained, and from thence via bus and railway and lake steamer, through couriers, Post Office and word of mouth to Kulsum.

  Edward met me at the railway station. An older-looking Edward in the usual bush shirt and sandals, fatter, and because fatter looking taller and a little dissipated. He almost missed me, not recognizing me in military uniform and moustache. We shook hands and walked to the taxi he had reserved.

  Edward was Kulsum’s envoy.

  “What’s this I hear? You have an African girl?”

  “Sort of …” I grinned. “Yes …”

  “It’s true, then! Salum, weh! now why do you have to go and do a thing like that? First Begum, now you—” He was angry. Not angry to hurt me but angry to be hurt, disappointed.