by M G Vassanji
She was the woman twice scorned. Hatred seething below the surface at every domestic function. My every visit to that house on Viongozi would end with a quarrel which would destabilise us for the next forty-eight hours. Chained to a volcano, I would whisper to myself, sleeping with a land mine. At dinner, we were at each other’s throats like alley cats while little Amina looked in wonder from her imported high chair before joining in with her own screams.
The next evening, at nine, a lull in the hostilities at home, and in the activities outside—the nearby mosque had emptied—Zuleika was putting the little Amina to bed, and I sat with the Herald and a cup of tea, thinking periodically of the other Amina—what to do?—when there came a pounding on the door. A soft pounding made by a large fist. Shivji Shame simply pushed his way in as soon as the locks were unbolted. Again, without uniform.
“Ah, Juma. What news? I was passing by, I thought I should come and meet you.”
“Good of you to come, Shivji.”
“Fanta?” He asked.
His armpits were stained with sweat, there were beads of perspiration on his face. But it was the same Shivji, a little weatherbeaten, perhaps.
“No,” I said. “Water.”
“All right. Then tea, please. Sweet, army tea.”
He had been to Uganda, he said when he was relaxed and slurping the tea. One of the rebel forces on their way to Uganda from Tanzania had passed by Kaboya, in the dead of night, in fact the Kaboya men had assisted it. But then the excitement was too much for them to bear, who for several years now had carried weapons and sang of fighting, and some of them simply joined the Ugandan force on its way to Masaka. “When the shooting started—we were faced with tanks and a prepared army—aaiiiiii! we were scared … it was the first time we had seen any real fighting … killing … I tell you Juma, we were happy when the order came for retreat.”
“And when Kaboya was bombed—you were there?”
He looked at me. He asked for more tea. We waited.
“So?” I asked. “How did it go? Not many died, I gather.”
“You don’t know?” He looked up. “About Zainab?”
“No,” I said. “What about Zainab?”
The first time the bombs fell, they fell smack in the middle of the market, which was the centre of the town. Right across from the hotel I had stayed in, I recalled. Outside it was the bus stop, where Bakari had dropped me, with the three girls, and where Amina first spoke to me. People ran screaming out from the market, Shivji said, men, women and children, straight for the edge of town. Some went to the lake and waited, wading in the water or sitting in boats. That was when twelve people died. A big crater was left in the market. No one went to it again. But business must continue, the next day they lined outside, on the perimeter of the market, with their bananas and pineapples, fish and meat. The National Service was there to assist—to evacuate, if the need arose. Then news came that Bukoba had been hit again, Idi Amin was threatening to march into Tanzania, straight up to Tanga, and no-one was willing to wait. In cars, buses, taxis, bicycles, on pushcarts and on foot they started to leave the town, to go south, as far from the border as possible. People parted with their wealth just for a taxi ride, or gave one half away to carry the other half in a push cart. The Meghjis travelled in two vehicles, their own car and a taxi. Some ten miles after the side road departs for Uhuru Camp, the road rises steeply before falling again, and narrows for about a quarter of a mile, allowing only one vehicle to pass. To the right is a treacherous fall into a deep ravine bedded with bushes, trees and rocks. Before continuing on this stretch you have to make sure there is no car or bus coming from the opposite direction. Buses in fact let their passengers walk that distance. If you look down into the ravine, you can see the rusting bodies of vehicles. It was on this stretch that the Meghji car broke down. The driver got out to repair it, and the passengers came out to watch and stretch their legs: Zainab, her husband, her parents and Faruq. The rest of the family was a car and a bus behind, in the taxi. As the driver tinkered with the engine, behind them started a ruckus, no-one wanted to sit in the middle of the road in the sun, a ready target for the planes of Idi Amin if they arrived. Move, they said, impatiently, we don’t have all day. Haraka, basi! They threw up their hands in disgust. Of all the times and all the places, and all the people! … But the car would not start. The driver of the Meghji car went to converse with the bus driver. Then some passengers, after shouting at him, got out of the bus, and with the encouragement of the driver of the car behind them, heave-ho! harambee! tia maté! songa mbele! they lifted the car at one side and pushed it into the ravine, before the family quite knew what had happened. But then, Zainab turned and gave a loud shriek, then a wail of grief … her two children; three and one-and-a-half years old had been sleeping in the car. Wailing and shrieking, her hands to her ears, she ran in the direction of the car and her children, and before anyone got to her she flung herself into the ravine, behind them.
“She wanted four kids, she would say. Oh God—”
“I’m sorry, Juma.”
It was said in some of the papers that in order to initiate a four-year-old into the practice of murder, Amin would have a soldier tied down and let the boy hack through his neck with a panga …
After this, what complaint?
The next day I received the news in the staff room that Amina Binti Saidi, Miss Saidi of Jangwani, had been detained. With her, Abdel Latif Kodi. And some soldiers, including an Asian.
If I had stayed a little longer … if I had gone again the next night as I had been tempted to do while reading the Herald listlessly, would I have been in detention too? Or if they had come for Shivji while he was with me … perhaps he had given them the slip then. How deeply was Amina involved? I did not really know, I did not belong to that inner circle of hardcore theoreticians. Like most, I came for the atmosphere, and because of Amina. It is too dramatic to think of a plotting, revolutionary Amina, a mastermind using the likes of me, Rashid, Layla and Alex as a harmless front for her activities. Most likely the initiative came from disgruntled army officers looking for educated mouthpieces and political planners. And how could Amina and her rigorous friends, sitting in the sidelights, forego this one possibility of power, of putting their words into action? It came too easily, they should have been wiser. It turned out, in the end, to be a student exercise run wild. I had of course asked Amina about Shivji leaving the house. “Oh,” she said, “he came with an invitation.” “Will you go?” I asked. “I am not sure.” What invitation: to speak or to join? I think they both knew the game was up when I last saw them, Amina, that night in her home; Shivji the following night in mine.
And then two weeks later, a request to see me in the staff room from an old woman in a buibui waiting outside … looking withered and rather pitiful, bags under her eyes. “Jambo, teacher.”
“Jambo, mama. Your child in trouble?”
“E-eh.”
We were both quiet.
“She’s taken away,” she said in anguish.
“You’re her mother—” I spoke slowly. “Come, mama, njo. Sit, mama. I am so sorry. What can be done?”
“Perhaps you can do something … a bad child, why did she have to do such things …”
Perhaps I could bribe someone. Or see a lawyer. Or had a friend in government. Being Asian, she thought, I had access to more influence. I said I would try. I tried to detain her, this woman who was part of Amina, to see Amina in her, to get to know her … but having stated her request she wanted to leave.
I never saw her again, never had the opportunity to do what I had promised. For that night Jogo knocked on the door with Abdalla.
A few years ago in Nairobi: Down the Ngara hill and opposite the road from Globe Cinema with its huge, coloured posters of Hindi films past, present and future (badly drawn film stars, male and female, with thickly painted red lips), there was an empty warehouse, boarded up. It used to be a furniture store; a trading licence had been refused to t
he Asian British subject owner. One day a pretty young woman in sari ran screaming from this warehouse, crossed the road, which is quite wide there, bringing the bustling traffic to a temporary disarray, and entered one of the small furniture dukas facing the cinema. Thus came to light a sickening extortion racket. Respectable Indian women, wives of doctors and lawyers, were lured from their homes to this empty godown by a telephone call that informed them in urgent tones that their husbands were hurt. But, top secret: certain local politicians were involved. The women, when they entered the dust-filled and cobwebby hall breathless and flushed in a frenzy of anxiety, were faced with four leering men leaning against a table, looking like the film star Pran at his worst (said the Daily Reporter), all Indian, who raped them, took photographs, and subsequently blackmailed them. One woman committed suicide, rather than pay, the only traditional alternative. The one who escaped was brave twice over.
Among the four men, one was a Tanzanian, not caught. Meet Jogo: the practical joker, caught with his hand in a peanut-seller’s basket once, who would relate to us sexual fantasia all the way down United Nations Road to school, whose father limped all the way from the end of Msimbazi to Nuru Poni’s shop in Kichwele at four in the morning calling people to prayer: innocent, deprived Jogo, turned pervert: the new man after the flood, mercenary, cut-throat, preying on fears. But mere extortion of housewives, however rich, is not the way to phenomenal wealth, empire. Jogo had turned international. While Idi Amin was ranting away in Kampala, calling Nyerere an old woman, lorries took off in the dead of night for Kenya, full of stolen coffee beans for export by local merchants. Shivji had been to Uganda: unbelievable as it seems, so had Jogo.
Reports of such deeds do not stay hidden. The bush telegraph whispers them around. They are essential, they lend to the image and propagate it. The wonder is (then, perhaps not) that the authorities are helpless.
When I opened the door Jogo stepped in and Abdalla waited outside. There is a certain bearing, an apparent tallness, that power and well-being give. He had it. He wore a white Kaunda suit and carried a carved ebony walking cane.
“You are a friend of Amina Binti Saidi,” he said, after the preliminary greetings.
The same Jogo in manner of speech, his familiarity, sharing a common background, time spent together playing cricket, organizing teams and going to school. You begin to wonder, are we all like him?
“Yes, I am.”
“You know she has been detained for conspiracy to overthrow the Government.”
“I say, Jogo, can you find out where she is—her mother is frantic, bana.”
He ignored my outburst. “You were seen leaving her house the night before she was picked up.” There was now a shade more authority in his manner of speaking, enough when you knew his reputation.
“So?”
“So you are under suspicion. Your turn has come.”
“Don’t be silly! I don’t even know what conspiracy—”
“I’m simply telling you. You’ll be picked up any time. Outside,” he said in a low voice, indicating the door. “Abdalla. He is not your friend. He works for Security now.”
Abdalla was in our school for some years. He was from a very influential family, a very private person in our Asian school, who one day had had an altercation with Sona, with the result that both were caned by the African headmaster (this was after independence), after which he changed schools.
Preventive Detention. A Land Rover arrives in the middle of the night and takes you away. No-one knows where you’re taken or for how long, no-one mentions your name aloud, and when you return you’ve been silenced. What goes on there? What kind of jailers run these places and what would the likes of Abdalla, Asian hater, do to the likes of me?
Jogo offered a simple way out and I grabbed it. Too fast. I was a child in his hands, what with my own domestic predicament, and I swallowed everything he told me. Greedily. I did not even know if Abdalla was really in Security. I held a small conference with Zuleika, and then we both turned to face him.
“Do you have a passport-sized photograph?”
“Only one.”
“Enough. Pack your clothes. No-one knows where you’re going.”
Another conference, then again we turned to look at him, helplessly.
“Coming?” he asked.
“Where?” Zuleika asked.
“Yes, where?”
“Trust me. I am Jogo, your friend.”
I looked at her, she nodded, dumbly.
I kissed the sleeping child, and I hugged her, my wife. I tried to miss her but I couldn’t. “I’ll send for you,” I lied; she didn’t reply.
As we reached the airport, I told him: “I say, Jogo. Thanks for all this.”
“No problem.” He gave me the ticket. “Destination Lisbon,” he said. “… Walji runs a bar there. And take this.” He slipped a package into my coat pocket. “Give this to him.”
In Lisbon Walji, former lawyer and classmate, ran the Vitoria Pub, with his entire family, and I helped him, dispensing dreams of victory and early return to the Portuguese soldiers we had both decried in National Service. There was also a brisk trade in Iranian carpets, with a branch office in London. The family was waiting for Canadian immigrant visas. My own visitor’s visa to the United States arrived much sooner, and I left for Boston. There to live off Sona’s scholarship, in a dissipated, depressed existence, sharing his room, watching television, doing nothing, until in exasperation he said one day: “Do something, dammit!” Which I did, taking the bus and coming here … He was terribly sorry, and frantic with worry, but he was right, I had no business infecting him with my depression. He was so happy, immersed in his books, revelling in a scholar’s life, it was sinful to disturb him.
Jogo offered release, but into what? I think I ran away from the marriage, an impossible domestic situation … like my grandfather, Huseni … and even his father Dhanji Govindji who went to look for him. The irony isn’t lost on me. But is it destiny that is ironical, or is it the ironical in us, a predisposition, that makes us go after a certain fate, a certain pattern—poetry being more real than reality, as Rashid would sometimes quote. Something of both, I suspect.
AND THE FINAL NIGHT.
Memory, Ji Bai said, is this gunny sack …
I can put it all back and shake it and churn it and sift it and start again, re-order memory, draw a new set of lines through those blots, except that each of them is like a black hole, a doorway to a universe … It can last for ever, this game, the past has no end—but no, Shehrbanoo, you will not snare me like that, let it end today, this your last night.
One day Ji Bai said to her family, quite casually, I want to go to Bajupur. Bajupur! They were stunned. Does it still exist? Who is there, in Bajupur? My sister, she said, you know one of them still lives, and their sons and daughters, they even write sometimes … But they are in Bombay, and in Poona, and in Karachi! Even so, she said, they will take me to Bajupur. What is there in Bajupur? I want to go to the mela there, Hazrat Ali’s mela. One more time, before I die … I saw it once before when I was a child, now I want to see it again.
Once, it is said, in the villages around Bajupur, the Prophet’s favourite, Hazrat Ali, came to Gujarat on his horse Dul Dul, at a place which is thirty miles from Bajupur, and as proof of this blessed event, there is a hoof mark from the horse preserved in clay. Every year a mela is held there and villagers come from miles around. They sing verses in praise of Hazrat Ali and they pray to him.
Ji Bai left with her adopted grandnephew Aziz. They met her sisters and nieces and nephews and their children in Bombay and went to Bajupur by train. From Bajupur to the site of the mela is an hour’s drive by taxi. Ji Bai recalled that it used to take them two days by bullock cart. They used to spend the nights in makeshift sheds, now there were comfortable rest houses set up for just this event. And she found the heat oppressive, Dar was so much cooler in comparison. In Bajupur itself most of the Shamsis had left, for Bombay, Poona, Bangalore, Delhi
and Karachi. Only the poorest remained. And the house … the stone house in which she had frolicked as a little girl, which even in those days had an upper storey, she proudly recalled, her heart beating thur thur—was still there, intact, and there were marks on the walls made by children just as she had imagined (remembered?) them to be all these years. Who owned it now? Unsteady and weak on her feet, “Hold my hand,” she said to Aziz and went forward and touched a wall. A rough surface; she ran her old, bony hand over it, the veins showing like little ridges. Then, dislodging the other hand from Aziz’s, she put both hands against that beloved wall, went closer to it, and softly beat her head against it, once, twice, thrice and she wept.
Later she told Aziz; now to see him, Salim. So they came, and she brought the gunny sack.
A letter from Amina.
Salum.
Surprised? I am in New York now. Older, perhaps not wiser (!) but careful, working for the United Nations, on diplomatic passport and all that. No smug remarks! What else can I tell you, where to begin? Your family is all right, which of course you know. Little Amina is truly wonderful and can talk now. I went to get your address, and guess whom I saw. Staring from the doorway of the kitchen, as I was playing with the child, your mother! What big eyes she has! She just looked. I took the address and fled. What else? Shivji is out too, and I believe, reinstated. Abdel Latif is back in Lamu, desperately trying to avoid German tourists from Mombasa. But he is working with the museum there. And your friend (fiend) Jogo: he’s in. For smuggling diamonds out of the country, and other things. Why don’t you come to New York? There is so much to talk about, which I can’t write here. (All the details!)
Amina.