‘What does muzungu mean?’
Ba Simon kept humming for a moment. ‘Where did you hear that word?’ he asked.
Isa didn’t reply.
Ba Simon hesitated. Then he made a face.
‘Ghost!’ he blurted, waving his hands about. ‘Whoooo! Like that katooni you are always watching.’ He smiled and moved closer to her with his hands still waving. ‘Caspah the chani-chani ghost,’ he sang in the wrong key.
‘The friendly ghost!’ Isa sang back, giggling in spite of herself.
They chatted about nothing for a few minutes. Ba Simon wasn’t very clever, Isa thought at one point, and then promptly forgot. But Ba Simon noticed her think it even though she hadn’t said it, and soon enough, he told her it was time for bed. Isa dragged her feet to the glass veranda door with the twisty white security bars. It gave an unhappy moan as she opened it. She looked back over her shoulder.
Ba Simon was getting ready to carry her father to bed. His body was pitched awkwardly over the sleeping man, his dark stringy arms planted beneath the Colonel’s neck and knees. When he saw Isa watching, the strain in Ba Simon’s face dissolved instantly into a smile.
‘Go,’ he whispered.
And she did.
1995
Everyone knew that Balaji sold the best hair products in Kamwala, the neighbourhood inhuska where the Indian traders and their families lived. The other shops in that six-street radius around the market specialised in chitenges or kitchenware or carpets or a desperately motley assortment of goods. Only Balaji specialised in hair. Wig packets lined the walls of his dark, narrow shop, Patel & Patel Ltd, Inc., making it look like a furry animal turned outside in. And inside the belly of that beast was everything you needed to care for your homegrown or purchased hair – tongs, brushes, combs, rollers, pins, clips, bands, oils, creams and a bevy of just-in-cases.
Balaji was widely regarded as a savvy businessman and a decent man. But he was over forty, for goodness’ sake. The women of Kamwala, that chorus of wives and widows who determined the fates of every Indian bachelor in Lusaka, had given up on marrying him off. Whenever they discussed his profound eligibility with his Aunt Pavithra, they never called Balaji single. They said he was unmarried, a word moulded around the absence of what really ought to be the case by now.
Balaji treated the young boys who worked in his shop like sons, ordering them about and smacking their heads with a firm palm whenever they erred. They were all sorts, those shop boys, every shade and type imaginable. Sikhs with sparse beards and bobbling hair buns; Hindus who cursed Balaji’s pubic hair when he made them stay late; blacks with bare feet and lambent eyes; coloureds with sulky charm and bitter eyes. Balaji fired them often for the slightest misdeeds, stories of which he would ebulliently recount to their replacements.
‘That muntu shuffled my wigs, not even asking! I had them organised type-type-type – horse here, artificial here, human there – and the boy decides to line them up by colour! Like a bloody rainbow. Now if Mrs Tembo comes in and wants very-special-good horsehair, I can’t tell the bloody difference – it doesn’t smell like horse, and the labels on the packaging are faded from when that Chinese boy decided to steam the hair scarfs instead of ironing them and…’
The boys listened to his monologue as they wiped counters and changed price tags, their hands and eyes slow. The only reason anyone ever chose to work for Balaji was his endless cache of mbanji, which he freely distributed but of which he never partook. While his stoned boys orbited around him, Balaji held forth like a man at a bar, his voice a heavy ball rumbling over a wooden floor. That’s how Isabella first encountered him: a broad-shouldered, square-jawed, moustachioed mwenye behind a counter, thundering on about the placemat a dullard coloured had sold as a doormat.
Isa had ended up at Patel & Patel Ltd, Inc. by chance. After picking her up from the new Shoprite in town, the driver had slowed down just past the bridge on Independence Ave and turned into the market area around the Hindu temple and the mosques. Her mother, the driver said, wanted them to pick up some hair oil. Isa sighed. She was twenty-two and jobless, certainly the right person to do the family shopping, but she didn’t like the markets, preferring the fluorescent lights and clean parquet of the South African chains that had cropped up everywhere when Zambia had dropped its embargo after Apartheid fell. Although Kamwala had real shops, not just wooden stalls, and was chock-a-block with imported goods, she did not enjoy navigating the dirt roads and the shouting people.
Parking was a nightmare near the market, so the driver stayed in the car while Isa got out and searched for the shop that sold the special olive oil her mother used. She wandered for ten minutes before she located Patel & Patel Ltd, Inc. in a side street. Its outer wall was covered with a fading mural of products – scissors, brushes, combs – each with a thin shadow painted behind it. She stepped from the trashy bedlam of the road into the cool cave of the shop, relieved to escape the experience of walking outside while female. She wiped her hair off her forehead and brushed her hands down her denim skirt. Then she raised her eyes and realised the ordeal wasn’t over.
The shop boys had locked on to her, their blunt eyes sharpening at the relatively unusual sight of a young white woman in Kamwala. Behind the counter, a large blustering Indian man was booming about a doormat. He paused when he saw her, then boomed on, slapping some of the heads that had frozen with her entrance, as if to jumpstart them. The telephone rang and he interrupted himself to blurble into it: ‘Patel and Patel Limited, Incorporated, Balaji speaking. No, no kettles here, sorry-sorry. Fine and classic hair products only…’ He was big-boned, but his eyes were light and skittish, flocking to Isa then fluttering off again.
She approached him and asked for the olive hair oil. He nodded and stooped behind the counter, lowering his thick body into the recessed space. She heard him shifting some things. The shop boys veered lazily around the store like flies around a piece of offal – erratic but curious. He stood up quickly.
‘Very-very sorry, Miss,’ he said, tilting his head equivocally. ‘It has not arrived.’
‘Oh. Are you sure?’
‘Yes. Well? No.’
‘You’re not sure? Or it’s not here?’
‘What I am sure,’ he said, leaning towards her, ‘is that you must come back for it.’
The boy polishing combs to Isa’s left giggled. Heat flurried into her cheeks and the corners of her mouth twitched, tugged by a tangle of competing strings – amusement, annoyance, attraction. Balaji smirked – his teeth were yellowish but she liked his pointy incisors. She smiled. He grinned. By the end of this hitching exchange, they were both beaming.
Embarrassment sent Isa scurrying out of Patel & Patel Ltd, Inc., but she returned the following week, when Balaji sold her just a little oil, so that it would run out faster and she would have to come back. When it didn’t run out fast enough, Isa applied it to her own scalp so that she could come back even sooner. He never did tell her that he’d had surplus of it in stock the day that she first came in.
* * *
Eventually, word of Balaji followed Isa home. It was like a mosquito, that word – invisible but unavoidable – and it even sounded a bit like one: mwenye. It whined around among the other words winging from the mouths of the workers in the Corsales’ kitchen.
‘Heysh, but what did they expect?’ asked Chanda, whisking a broom. ‘Sending her to the shop. Alone? Cha-cha!’ A young woman now, Chanda was both deeply judgmental and deeply envious of those with greater liberty than she.
‘At first, they didn’t know,’ Enela said, up to her elbows in dish-soap bubbles. ‘Isa was supposed to be fetching hair creams, not kawaya-wayaring.’
‘But Aunty, that area?’ Chanda stopped sweeping. ‘It is where all the young mwenyes work.’
‘You don’t know? It is not one of those shop boys. It is the owner of the shop himself!’
; ‘Ah-ah! An old mwenye!’
‘With a belly from eating the food he should have given to the children he does not have.’
‘Aaaah? But that girl is very foolish!’ said Chanda, wondering if she herself would ever have the opportunity to be so foolish.
‘Shem. She is not becoming a wife, that one. She is becoming a widow.’ Enela raised a soapy finger. ‘He will fall on the ground before he can even fall into the bed.’ They looked at each other and giggled.
Meanwhile, the widow-in-training, oblivious to these footnotes to her story, sat alone in her room, justifying her feelings to the mirror. Though she was no longer a child, Isa’s bedroom had not changed much over the past decade. Her D’Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths still stood on an otherwise empty bookshelf, its pages now yellow and dog-eared, as if it had undergone one of the metamorphoses it depicted. The cardboard box under her bed was crammed with a genocide’s worth of Dolls.
Only the dressing table felt new. Simon the gardener had commissioned a carpenter in Kalingalinga to build it for her thirteenth birthday. It was heavy wood, painted in white, its table littered with make-up tools she liked collecting more than using: the bristly puffs and metal instruments; the severed fingers of lipsticks and mascara tubes; the iridescent crumble of eyeshadow staining the surface like butterfly dust. The dresser had a built-in mirror, in the glassy depths of which Isa was now pondering her face – bracketed, thankfully, by the straight, reasonable hair she had inherited from her father – and rehearsing the case for Balaji.
Balaji was the only person who listened to her. Balaji didn’t care that she had no sense of fashion. Balaji was a respected businessman. Balaji was strong and kind. The measure of his strength was the stern voice he used with his shop boys. The measure of his kindness was the length of time his hand lingered in the hand of a begging leper: one and two and three and four and only then would Balaji let go, leaving a heap of ngwee in the fingerless palm. Isa looked away from her face in the mirror, down at her hands, when other justifications came to mind. The way his skin, the colour of the caramel inside a Twix bar, made her forget her own, which was the colour of the biscuit. The look in his eyes, the tremble in his lips, when he had kissed her for the first time last week.
They had been standing in the stockroom of his shop in Kamwala. Balaji had finally managed to convey to her through their casual banter that he was burdened with neither child nor wife. Then he’d made some excuse for her to join him in the back as he searched for a special comb he thought her mother might like. There, in the midst of the mess of things to be stored or sold or forgotten, he’d leaned forward and put his lips to hers, sending a fierce boomerang of desire pivoting into her belly and out again towards him. Isa had been startled by the look on his face when they parted. He had seemed almost offended by his attraction to her. His caterpillar eyebrows had bent their backs and she’d nearly heard him say it in a hoarse, indignant whisper: How dare you? It made Isa feel guilty and proud, as if, just by existing in the same world as him, she had done something of note.
Everyone else had ignored Isa all her life. Her parents were too busy distracting themselves to attend to her, and she never got along with the other expat kids. She looked down on them for fear of being looked down upon – a self-perpetuating cycle. As a child she’d felt connected to the workers, especially Simon, who would sing tunelessly to make her laugh, and beckon her with that lilting Bemba call that doubled her name: Isa kuno, Isa. But when she’d learned that black Zambians saw her as a muzungu, Isa had isolated herself from them, too.
As she matured into the not-quite-beautiful daughter of a truly beautiful woman, Isa’s sense of self-pity only grew. Over the years, she had strung for herself a rosary of grievance, all the slights of her life clicking against each other as she counted them: not enough love, not enough attention, not enough praise for her perfectly adequate beauty. Balaji changed all that. He looked at her as if her beauty were complete, and more importantly, as if it were a threat to him. Now, Isa looked back up from her hands to her face in her dressing-table mirror and saw herself through his eyes. She almost gasped with wonder.
* * *
When the time came for Balaji to meet Isa’s parents, she warned him in advance about her mother. Sibilla, knowing that her appearance often came as a surprise, wore her biggest boubou, swamping herself in its tented folds. But Balaji still exclaimed when Sibilla opened the door.
‘Miracle of miracles!’
Sibilla demurred with a smile, stepping back so he could come in, her long train of hair slithering on the parquet floor. Balaji, in a crisp white kurta, clasped his hands and gave an ambiguous roll of the head, then followed her into the sitting room. It was decorated with a few knick-knacks – a little Leaning Tower of Pisa, a troupe of carved wooden hippos – but its walls were practically tiled with framed photographs: the Colonel stoical in a safari suit before a white gush of water; Isa climbing a tree in her school uniform; the Colonel in a t-shirt pointing at a bird in a tree; Isa smiling wanly over a birthday cake. There were none of Sibilla, the photographer. A skittery Isa, in a plaid blouse and an old-fashioned denim skirt, was sitting on the settee across from her father in an armchair. Tea was laid out on a low coffee table but the Colonel had eschewed it for his usual mug of gin.
‘Welcome, Mr Patel,’ said the Colonel without getting up.
‘Oh, I am not Patel,’ Balaji said affably as he sat on the settee beside Isa. ‘That is just the name I inherited when I bought the shop.’
‘Papa, I told you,’ Isa seethed.
‘Okay-okay,’ Balaji placated with a smile. He was sweating profusely. ‘We can now clarify: my name is Balaji. Just Balaji. My family is from a town called Tirupati in the south-east of India.’
‘How interesting,’ Sibilla said cautiously.
Overexcited by her attention, Balaji turned to her and leaned forward. ‘I must tell you, mother-soon-to-be, you alone could feed the hungry scalp of Venkateswara!’
‘What is vinka—?’
‘In my town,’ said Balaji, ‘there is a temple called Tirumala. It sits in the seven hills – the seven heads of the serpent Adisesha – and it is dedicated to the Vishnu Lord Venkateswara—’
‘What does your pagan god have to do with my wife?’ asked the Colonel, waving his stein in Sibilla’s direction and sloshing gin over his trousers.
‘Sorry-sorry,’ said Balaji, sweat spritzing from his moustache. ‘Should have started earlier. Once upon a time long-long ago, Lord Venkateswara was struck in the head by a rock. A shepherd threw it or maybe some cruel kiddies. No matter. A princess, Neela Devi, saw the bald patch the rock left when it scarred him. And so in her pity for him, she cut off her own hair and planted it in his scalp.’
‘Planted it?’ the Colonel scoffed. ‘Like a garden?’
Balaji shrugged. ‘All we know is Princess Neela Devi gave her hair to Lord Venkateswara to cover the bald spot. And it was a great-great honour. Maybe she gave him a wig? That,’ he brightened, ‘is my line of business. Wigs-wigs-wigs. And I am still importing the hair from Tirupati.’
‘What do you mean?’ The Colonel was growing drunker and stupider, and because he knew it, angrier as well. ‘They sell hair at this,’ his fingers danced mockingly, ‘Titty-Putty temple?’
‘Tirupati is the town,’ said Balaji patiently. ‘Tirumala is the temple.’
‘Tiramisu, tiramoola, qualunque cosa.’ The Colonel waved his glass and gin rained over them again.
‘Well,’ said Balaji. ‘As you may conceive, Tirupati is positively brimming with hair.’ He explained that thousands of pilgrims went to Tirumala every day, inching along in winding queues to offer gifts to Lord Venkateswara. They gave their weight in money and jewels but mostly they gave their hair, through the practice known as tonsure. Devotees, young and old, crowded into the Kalyana Katta that dotted the hill below the temple to sit with bowed heads before
barbers who shaved their heads and passed their hair on to the god. A young Balaji had picked up the trade from his father and quickly learned the importance of a sharp razor and a fearless arcing stroke from the base of the skull to the crown and forehead.
‘But I had no real talent for barbering,’ he admitted. ‘And no real interest either. You see, I was a businessboy long before I became a businessman.’ His eyebrows danced.
When young Balaji had been caught selling scraps of hair on the side to wig traders, his precocious business acumen had been punished, then leveraged. As soon as he came of age, Balaji had been sent to live and study with his uncle, who profited off the leftovers, all of the masses of hair that Venkateswara didn’t need.
‘Big-wig business!’ Balaji grinned, ‘in South America and China and Hollywood, too. But the biggest wig biz,’ he snapped his fingers snazzily, ‘is with the blacks.’
He had grown up in Tirupati with his Uncle Andhra and Aunt Pavithra, then moved abroad with them, first to Kenya, then to South Africa, and finally landing in Zambia in the 1980s.
‘Ten years later, and the Africans are still thirsty for hair. And Zambia is a good-good country. The politics do not interfere with business here.’
The Colonel, who had plenty to say about the political interferences he had suffered while building Kariba Dam, might have objected to this, but he had fallen asleep in his chair, his empty stein nestled in his lap. Balaji kept talking anyway. Isa nodded blankly beside him. Sibilla looked at the pair of them, her daughter with those grey eyes as vague and vacuous as rainclouds and this boisterous man nearly twice her age, riddling the air with his doublets and triplets of words. How funny that boring little Isa should have chosen such a man!
The Old Drift Page 33