by M G Vassanji
Here came all kinds of people, the original SNAFU, and recently the poet Abdel Latif Kodi, and some overseas students. The poet was quiet and looked rather ordinary, and only with some difficulty could one induce him to recite any verses. It was only with the Zanzibari Zuleika, now a Swahili teacher, that he really sat down to talk seriously. It seemed that there was another existence that he lived, where he was quite eloquent, for in his country he had been in prison for his views … an existence that Amina obviously shared. Then there was Beverley St. George, also a teacher at Jangwani, a short Canadian girl with a rather freckled round face, who let herself be the butt of jokes sometimes, but who could hold her own quite well; and the Caribbean Indian student and poet Alex Ramdas, and Rashid and Layla, and Brother Zahir.
Rashid was born in Durban and brought up in Glasgow, taught political economy at the University, and never failed to rouse wonder in his listeners when, from his dark brown face and gold-toothed mouth, emerged an impeccably precise English accent, which earned him the title of “Call Me Bwana.” Layla was his English wife, a red-pigtailed girl in long, dumpy skirts, rather like the picture of a maid on a Danish biscuit tin. But appearances were deceptive: she was a volatile feminist, whose reason for her peculiar dressing, beside the evident comfort, was to drown in them the leery eyes of men. Layla was a social anthropologist, and one day she read what she had observed and concluded about our mixed-race group, with the result that she was almost beaten up.
Alex, the Caribbean poet, had a strange habit of reading—from a paper or book in his left hand, the right hand held up in front of the audience, executing a circular motion, like a strange little machine spewing forth words. A poor reader, who is to say how good a poet? One poem everybody definitely considered bad: it had “Ujamaa” appearing seven times, but it brought him opportunities to read at several University functions.
Then our own Brother Zahir, bespectacled, small and professorial—who, years before, would intercept us (Sona, Alu, Jogo and I) on United Nations Road on our way to school, emerging from behind a bush (for everybody avoided him) and asking, “Brother, did you say your prayers today?” This had earned him the nickname. He had, by way of Moral Rearmament and Gandhiism, now arrived at a cold-blooded theoretical Marxism, throwing every historical event to the cogs of a class struggle machinery, letting it churn out the conclusion. Thus Idi Amin, whose bloody deeds came splattered regularly in the news reports, was simply a monster produced by the structures left behind by colonialism. How could one disagree with such generalities? And what good were they to those who were literally battered to death? To Brother Zahir and Amina (and the two could go on for ages, talking of case histories like doctors), the political economist Rashid, interminably reading Durrell, was a mere romantic: he loved everybody, good or bad, and laughed at and with them, and at himself. He was most like the “Shehe,” Ali Tamim, and the two were planning a book on the life and economy of Kilwa when the Portuguese came.
Of course, it was not only for politics that they came to sit at her feet—these teachers, lecturers and students. There were always two sides to Amina—the theoretician scholar to whom the government measures seemed non-vigorous, slow, half-baked, its socialist vocabulary lacking commitment and real meaning; and the person, the warm, passionate and even fragile Amina, who needed people, who could lure them unawares to her causes as she had once lured me in Kaboya. Without her that group was nothing. She provided the place, the atmosphere and the agenda. For most of us that place on Viongozi was more—a club for like-minded people, always open, always hospitable.
And every evening a gang of noisy young boys waited expectantly outside this bustling house, then Mark would emerge in his shorts and colourful T-shirt and they would follow him at a distance as he jogged on Morogoro Road, in the direction of Morogoro, down the hill and then back up again, the only American to have lived this side of Mnazi Moja.
I taught at BOSS, my old school, where once the only important things were to get first grade in Senior Cambridge, for the school to win the Christopher Cup in cricket and the Youth Drama Festival trophy. Like other schools we now had a farm, to which every afternoon a few classes were assigned. Mr. Kabir, Mr. Khan, Mr. Sardar, once respective heads of departments, now you could see carrying the odd panga or jembe, desperately waiting for their retirement dates. None of them lasted till then, they went on to Zambia, these men who had simply come to teach but then had nowhere to go, who belonged nowhere. (Sona traced another of our Indian teachers in New York, Mr. Patwekar, who lived in a single room and taught maths in a ghetto school.) At BOSS the basketball court was overgrown, the tennis racquets were taken away by the last tennis captain, the cricket ground was becoming a Serengeti without lions. Perhaps this was how it had looked when the school was not built and there were lions in the area. (Looking out of the door of Form IA I would imagine sometimes a maize field there … and the ghosts of past cricketers Gumji Junior, Goani, Abuani Solanki running through it, picking maize … or slashing at the grass with their bats.) Jangwani was not far and I would sometimes have lunch there with Amina and Mark (who taught biology there); their house was a further five minutes away. At Zanaki, the former Agakhan Girls’ School, Zuleika Kassam, quiet SNAFU member, taught literature and Swahili. She also lived in Upanga. On two occasions we returned together rather late from Amina’s house. The second time her mother was waiting for her. She spoke the Zanzibari Cutchi-Swahili mix.
“Weh Zuli, mbona umerudi so late-late, basi?”
“Mummy, I was at a meeting.”
“Ah!” She was visibly vexed. “Why didn’t you tell me, then?”
“I didn’t know it would be so late, Mummy.”
The occasion had been the Uganda expulsion, its announcement, and the debate at Amina’s was heated.
“To come this late, and walking tena, and with a man in the dark … ah-ah-ah … I could have sent Mahmoud …”
“But he’s only Kulsum Bai’s son!”
“Which Kulsum Bai?”
She came to peer at me, I was still in the garden, Zuleika was at the door defending her virtue.
“Hebu, basi. Kulsum Dhanji?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Whose son is in America and writes to her in Gujarati?”
“Yes, my brother.”
“It is true, eti? In Gujarati? They teach that there?”
“Yes.”
He had only learnt the script, which Kulsum had written down for him. The language of course he spoke!
“Come in. You will have tea?”
“No, I must go. My mother must be worrying.” I watched her go back in: like most Indian women her age she had a roll to her walk from unduly large hips, a result of successive child deliveries.
The union was obvious to the most casual observer. Two teachers. Same interests. Friendly to each other. No competitors in sight. While I smarted from Amina’s betrayal and suffered Mark’s exaggerated courtesies, the two of them plotted to keep us late so we could go home together. While I dutifully escorted Zuleika to her home after dusk, her mother waited up for her and formed ideas, and boys and girls in Upanga East, from Red Cross to the Chinese Embassy, from Upanga to United Nations, started gossiping. Someone whispered the gossip into Kulsum’s ears. Kulsum promised two or three bribes to the gods, I don’t know what she put into my tea, and she got to work.
A teacher. Same interests as mine. Pretty and lively. What was I waiting for? I said yes.
She said yes, and the engagement was announced.
Weddings are fun. Begum writes a tearful letter and Kulsum relents. “Dear daughter Begum, to whom God grant etc. I am a widow and it is not appropriate for me to preside over the wedding of a son, to put on a colourful pachedi and welcome the bride home, this would be inauspicious and in bad taste. You being the eldest and married it is only appropriate that you should take over the task of the mother, you who brought them up while I was in the shop downstairs …” And Begum arrives fat but jolly with all kind
s of luxurious gifts that she has spent a considerable part of her savings to buy, and bringing with her two enchanting, beautiful children with whom Kulsum cannot communicate except through gestures and broken English. And there are tears of joy, joy too much to contain, “I wish he were here,” Kulsum sobs, remembering him, he whose name she never uttered, he who was and is always he, he whom she addressed simply with, “Listen …”: her husband.
Weddings are fun, they bathe you in milk and anoint you with saffron and shower you with rice while they sing folksy songs in hoarse voices … they fuss over you and they tease you (Will you forget them when she comes?) and make sexual innuendoes that you don’t know how to respond to … and finally you emerge, in your best suit from My Tailor and braced with Old Spice and put yourself in the hands of the best man, who accompanies you to the mosque … and she comes shy and tense in her white dress and glittering with jewels, her hair set high, hands painted with henna, tottering on her high heels, looking down … all afternoon having sat in front of a brazier being saturated in halud vapour, so that by the time you get her alone in the room at the Kilimanjaro, the family friends having left after examining the marriage bed for springiness and softness and taking that inane picture with your arm around her which you once swore you would never have taken, you can hardly wait and she can hardly wait but she lies down stiff and expectant, hard and full and fragrant as a ripe mango ready to burst, waiting with a fluttering heart for you to claim her.
Weddings are fun.
The morality campaign was on, Green Guard cadres went about town with a morality meter: this was a simple device, nothing more than a king-size Coca Cola bottle, which had to be able to pass through your trouser legs before they could be pronounced decent. Thus the fight against “drainpipe” pants and jeans. There were many quarrels and near fights. Officials were not willing to stand by and let their wives’ skirts be measured. And girls and boys out on Independence Avenue simply ducked into a store or restaurant when they saw a cadre approaching; and the tourists and expatriates simply ignored these guardians of public morality.
At about this time—Hassan Uncle had left a few months before—there came a visitor to Dar called Nasir Bunzai, from the mountainous district of Bunza in the north of Pakistan. Ever since the Daily Reporter of Nairobi did a series on the enchanting land of Bunza a few years before, the Shamsis in East Africa stood in awe of anything Bunzai. Bunza, it was said, was a land where people routinely lived up to more than a hundred years eating yogurt and nuts, breathing fresh mountain air, and possessed such a high degree of spirituality that they would wrap a newborn infant in fur and roll it down a mountain to test its sturdiness and spiritual power. Nasir was a Sufi from Bunza, a small man with a round face and thick spectacles, among whose feats was a night spent in a Chinese jail. He soon acquired a following, primarily among the women, chief among whom was Kulsum’s sister Fatu.
My Fatu Auntie, who would have made an excellent tragedienne, was in a spiritual phase, having elevated her father Mitha Kanji, who had predicted the fall of Zanzibar in the 1920s, to the level of a pir. In this she was joined by several women whose fathers or grandfathers had followed my grandfather, then called Mad Mitha, out of Zanzibar to Mombasa and Dar. This group then embraced Nasir the Sufi, still keeping their loyalty to Mitha Kanji (whose photograph, showing him in a turban, had been produced). From Nasir they learnt the science of meditation, or dhikr, the Bunza way. At eight every evening they met at my aunt’s, they sat in a circle on a mat, with Nasir at the head, and they held hands and chanted “Allah! Allah!” Overcome with emotion and exuberance, several of the participants would weep.
Needless to say, there were many who viewed the whole affair with disapproval, to the point of casting doubt on the Sufi’s moral integrity and on Bunza’s spiritual pre-eminence. He too left, soon thereafter, to serve the more needy souls in Canada.
This left Fatu Auntie with Mad Mitha. What future for this fledgling sect? That remains to be seen.
The last time I saw Amina …
Across the street from Amina’s house was a barber’s shop, with the sign
MATUMBI
the champion HAIR
DRESSING & CATTING
saloon
where two barbers worked. I don’t know if it ever changed hands, but I remember always seeing it, from the very first days I started taking that route to school. Next to the Matumbi was a nameless tea kiosk. Here one morning a neatly dressed man in a grey Kaunda suit, after impressing his credentials upon the owner, took a seat with a bunch of newspapers and began drinking tea, a procedure he followed for several days thereafter.
It was evening, after a reading by Abdel Latif Kodi at Jangwani. As I stepped into the dark corridor of the house I bumped into a stomach.
“Watch it,” I murmured in irritation, “you’re not looking where you’re going!”
“Weh, Juma!”
Shivji Shame in mufti.
“What are you doing here at this time—you’re a married man!”
“Yes.”
“And you are a father. What’s the child’s name?”
“Amina.”
“Aah! A girl.”
“What are you doing here? Without uniform—”
“Visiting. We want her to give a lecture. In camp.”
Shivji Shame was now in the army, but had not earned his mkasis yet, the major’s scissors. He was still a sergeant. He brought his head close to mine and whispered, forefinger raised: “You watch me, I’ll make it yet. I’ve been to Uganda.” Out he stomped into the dark night.
Amina was in the sitting room, sitting on a pillow on the mat, back against the wall, feet stretched in front of her, hands in her lap … Abdel Latif Kodi likewise against the opposite wall. A resigned, almost serene look on both faces, as if they had left everything in the hands of some higher authority, of fate, chance whatever. What did they know?
“Our conscience,” smiled Amina, bidding me sit. The poet smiled graciously. “No,” I said, “there’s our conscience,” and pointed to him.
“A stifled conscience,” she said.
The poet left soon afterwards.
“Where is everyone else? I thought they were coming here.”
“Dancing. Drinking. Whoring, for all I know.”
“I was passing by—”
“It’s late, Salum. Your wife can’t keep you?”
“Where’s Mark?”
I, too, had heard rumours.
“He’s left. For Nairobi and Lamu. There are enough hippies there. We have work to do here.”
We sat and talked late into the night. No banter and baiting this time. What had come between us before was now no longer there: too much had passed. Now a mellow Amina and a mellow Salim, unburdened of the pure rough-edged ideals of youth, the cockiness of the youth of a youthful country. Man and woman, we had known closeness before, we slipped easily into its embraces, a tremor to our voices, a tremble in our taut bodies, infinitely happy at this rediscovery. We loved that night but did not make love. And when I got up to go, that exchange of looks, What will happen now, and the barest brush of her arm against mine. “Be careful,” she said.
Oh sweet love, if only you didn’t hurt as much …
At the end of the street, at Morogoro Road, a GT Land Rover was parked. A policeman got out and I nervously looked up.
“Jambo.”
“Jambo.”
“Where to, at this hour?”
“Home. I was visiting a friend.”
“A girlfriend, no doubt! You should be careful at this hour.”
“Yes. Asante.”
“Kwa heri.”
I took the lighted United Nations Road, then crossed into Upanga on Malik Road. Soundlessly I unlocked the door and tiptoed to bed on the sofa.
Anatomy of a marriage.
She never forgave me Amina. Amina the girl and Amina the name. When Beverley St. George the Crazy Canadian said something about her being married on the rebound, the foreig
n phrase stayed on her mind, undigested, before it finally sank in with the bite of an acid. Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned. Zuleika took control with a vengeance. Within weeks Kulsum had fled to Tanga, to Mehroon. And then slowly came the attack … if not I, then everything I stood for … the very lifestyle, the commitment that had brought us together in the first place, the semi-bohemian simplicity and denial of everything foreign, the carefree intellectual existence free from the shackles of family and community …
But then, she had not really belonged, she had been more a sympathetic figure who belonged nowhere really, neither with the wives of the dukas, nor with those of the new mercenaries, she did not want to go abroad … and of our Viongozi group, she did not take it seriously (except Abdel Latif Kodi): Mbogo chasing Bev St. George, Rashid and Tamim forever planning their book but not getting anywhere, Layla fighting windmills (all men, except a handful), Alex reading like a windmill, and Amina: what was she doing, sitting there like a queen bee at the end of the hive? And I, she said, I went there only to see Amina and to impress her …
When the child was born, she would have her be named by a local religious personage (the same one who had prophesied to Alu Poni), who besides foretelling the coming apocalypse could successfully split hairs over the differences between Aisha, Asha and Ashia (outside whose house, which was guarded by a dog, boys had recently changed the sign to read: Beware of God), who cast a horoscope and pronounced: A name with an “m” in it—what better music to the ears than the gentle pleasing sound of the name of the Prophet’s mother? Amina. Zuleika looked up in disbelief, turned to me for the dissenting voice to escape my usually sceptical lips. An alternative name could have been requested, but I accepted Amina almost too readily, in the process admitting to the guilt she made me pay for. Of course, she could have accepted the name happily, and let the new Amina, kicking and screaming with fresh energy overshadow the old one. But no. Such philosophical patience was not forthcoming, and I offer it only in hindsight.