What You Are

by M G Vassanji

  “Yes.”

  HOW TO LIVE LONGER

  He reaches out and hands me a peanut, then pops one into his own mouth. I return a smile, for he means well, our food monitor. Or should I say, our health monitor. He wants to make sure we’ll be together for as long as possible. We’re at our daily quality time, when we sit on the couch in the evening and watch a movie before going to bed. A comic street scene in Mumbai with a mouthwatering display of Indian sweets is the cause of our distraction. “Would you like a sip of my water?” he gestures to the bottle on the coffee table. “No thanks, Zool. But I’ll go and make myself some chai.” He starts to say something but thinks better of it. He would like the tea, but disciplined as he is he will resist. He takes a pinch of sesame seeds to follow his solo peanut and places the nut bowl back on the table. I put the movie on pause and walk to the kitchen and prepare the masala chai, adding a surreptitious half teaspoon of sugar. That can do no harm, surely. Reflected in the microwave door, I don’t look too bad. Rather proud of myself, lost sixteen pounds already in the last year. But Zool’s lost forty, and he’s a new man. I pull out the cookie jar from its shelf and grab a saffron-topped nankhatai, dip it in the chai until it’s just so, and take a nibble. It’s gone just in time, the sweet taste still teasing the mouth as Zool walks in, using the break to take a quick jaunt through the downstairs rooms. A round is exactly ninety-six steps; he makes ten rounds every night, adding four steps each time for an even thousand. That’s in addition to the yoga at six in the morning, the cycling at ten, the evening walk, and going up and down the stairs throughout the day. I always join him for the walk, four thousand and ninety-six steps exactly. He likes that number. It’s the sixth power of four. He was an engineer.

  He takes a fleeting look at the cookie jar, which I forgot to put away, but says nothing and I pretend not to notice. I’m still thirty pounds over from ten years ago but—not something to tell him—does it matter? I’m a grandmother now. And healthy. But when Zool reached that magical—I should call it cursed—milestone of sixty, his attitude towards life changed. During the surprise birthday party that I arranged for him, he was unusually reserved and hardly ate. The party was a mistake, he did not enjoy being reminded of his years. Since then he’s like the cautious driver on the road, always nervous about getting hit. His friends are the same, and they compare their bp, sugar, and cholesterol levels as jealously as they would compare their grades back in school.

  “Look at us,” he said to me one day, soon after that party. “We were as handsome as a film couple. They called you Nutan, and me Ashok Kumar. We were trim and fit. We played badminton, we swam. What’s happened to us?”

  We also sang love duets at parties. What happened was that the kids grew up and left. The house had been paid off, and there was change to spare. We were less active, enjoyed food, and the pounds sneaked up until we were what our mothers used to call “healthy.” We had always loved to eat. My cooking was a sensation anytime, just like my mother’s back in Meza, the town on the coast of Tanzania where we grew up. Here in Toronto, people will call me up sometimes with an order for a biriyani or a trifle pudding for a party. I decline. I no longer cater, as I did when we first arrived in Toronto and had no jobs. Look, I reply, I’m writing a cookbook, wait for it. It will have all our classic recipes and more. I should have finished it, before Zool pulled me by the hand after that birthday party to stand with him in front of the hallway mirror. “Look.” He patted his stomach a few times like a drum, lifted a fold of flesh and let it drop with a wobble. He eyed my waistline but knew better than to put his hand on me then. “Look,” he said. “It was not there before, it should not be there now.” He revealed to me the result of the long hours he’d spent buried in his study the past several weeks. It was a complete program for living healthy called ELMO—eat less, more often. He’d done the numbers. If we followed his program, Zool said, we would live longer minus those extra pounds. And so I put aside my best recipes for biriyani, kuku paka, and gulab jamun. If you eat them in micro quantities, you might as well forgo them. Food is to be relished. But Zool’s numbers were right and he is back to his Ashok Kumar look—trim straight figure, thin moustache, cropped curly hair (though dyed), and our women friends already cast glances at him. I worry sometimes.

  “You should get a tummy tuck,” he said one day.

  “No way,” I replied. “I’ll lose weight my own way.”

  “Look at Moez and Sara. I’m sure she’s done it, and they both had facelifts during their so-called trip to Thailand. Do you notice how their faces have that gleaming look?”

  “Yes, but his is also more creased. And she can barely smile.”

  “You say you’ll lose it and you don’t and then you complain you don’t fit into your winter coat.”

  “It’s twenty years old!”

  He knows I would love to fit into it again, a pure wool, royal blue, full-length coat. He is helping me get there.

  I return to the living room with my tea and let him have a sip. He will not have more, and so much the better, masala chai is not something you squander. Some things you can’t give up, or life’s not worth living. I don’t know how I’ve been able to give up so much good food. Cooking is an art, they say. It’s an art I no longer practice. “We’re losing our culture!” I protested one day. He wouldn’t budge. I thought the culture bit would get to him, hung up as he is on our lost history as Asians in Africa. Before ELMO he was obsessed with collecting family stories about back there. Mostly fantasies, in my opinion, but that didn’t bother him. How someone’s grandmother fought off a lion in Tanzania outside her home, that one’s ancestor was hanged by the Germans for spying, someone else’s father assisted the Mau Mau fighters in Kenya. People were only too happy to provide them for him. That collection is now posted on the internet. Since retiring, my husband has desperately needed to keep occupied.

  The film we are watching is Dabangg, with Salman Khan with the ripped body. When I watch him I get the shivers. Zool is nowhere like him, but then Ashok Kumar too looked different. In those days actors didn’t have ripped bodies, they were more your romantic, handsome gentlemen who serenaded pretty ladies with love songs. And Zool was romantic and a gentleman. He sang, I was pretty.

  * * *

  —

  Back in Meza, boys and girls always hung around separately. We had eyes for each other, of course, and there were the rumours and the teasings and the love letters passed on by the “interpinters”—our go-betweens. One afternoon I was delayed in school and found myself hurrying behind my gang, who were well on their way home. The trail was muddy, mango trees all around, and the occasional baobab looming above, looking as if its head were buried in the ground. Soon dusk would fall, and the djinns would emerge. Meza is an ancient Swahili town known for its hauntings. There are many stories I could tell about that. Just as I buckled my school bag and prepared to make a dash to join the girls, whom I could hear chattering in the distance, someone emerged from behind a tree, giving me the scare of my life, and started walking beside me. Immediately I started whispering the naad-e-ali, the most powerful prayer there is and for emergencies only, but I recovered, seeing it was Zool, and found myself blushing deeply.

  “Mr. Moses wanted to see me after school and so I got delayed,” I explained to him. Mr. Moses was our English teacher from India. He liked me and would detain me for the lamest of reasons, and I would be flattered. But he never laid hands on me. It was said that he was a Jesuit. I don’t know if that explains anything.

  Zool was walking quietly beside me, looking ahead. He wore a cloth shoulder bag of books and idly played with a shiny cricket ball in one hand. After about a minute of silence between us, I glanced at him curiously, which startled him, and he said quickly but quite softly, “I love you.”

  “What did you say?” I replied after a moment.

  “Anita, I want to say I love you.”

  We con
tinued walking, as normal. What did he know of me? Enough, I guess, we came from similar families, our fathers ran businesses in our small town, his a grocery store, mine a clothing store. We attended our prayer house, the khano, regularly. I admired another boy at the time, about whom the girls teased me, but Zool was here with words of love, and he was handsome.

  “Let me think about it,” I said primly, not losing a step, but my heart was pounding. I felt nervous and afraid and elated at the same time. Certainly none of my friends would have had anyone declare to them so openly that he loved her. That happened in films, both Hindi and English. I love you! What a bold statement! I felt privileged. That night I had a hard time falling asleep, debating with myself: yes or no? The next day at school when Zool and I passed each other and he raised an eyebrow at me, I smiled at him and said softly, “Okay.” I forgot about the other boy, who had been only a fantasy. But that’s not completely true.

  Soon everyone knew about us, our families, friends, and neighbours, and even our teachers. We were the lovebirds of the town. It surprises me now that no one raised objections to our daring. We would wait for each other after school, sometimes taking the long and lonely walk back home, past the German war cemetery with its broken mildewed graves. Sometimes we did our homework together. He was always good in math, I in geography and history. After high school we both went to university in Nairobi on government scholarships. No one else attracted either of us, we simply remained together, in love. And we are still together.

  After we finish watching the film, I go up to bed and he goes to his study, which is our older boy’s former bedroom. He will work for one hour, then return downstairs and walk two times round the rooms to complete his thousand, and come up to bed. He has no problems sleeping.

  * * *

  —

  Our friend Moez, also from Meza, has taken the India route to health and longevity. There’s been a rivalry between him and Zool ever since they were in school. It used to be grades, now it’s the wellness quotients. Who tackles his numbers better. They’ve always had their distinct ways, just as back then, when Zool entered the science stream and Moez went into commerce. Moez is the wealthier one now, he drives a Mercedes to our more modest vehicle, and walks with a swagger. A show-off. At restaurants he will chat up the servers and call out the chef; he will speak to other tables, blind to their annoyance. And when he finds his body getting the better of him, when the paunch becomes pronounced and stairs are a strain, he will check in at the Amarapur Clinic in Kerala. The first thing they do to you there is take away all your pills; then on it’s hunger, enemas, yoga, meditation, and daily long walks. The Enema Games, I call it. The first time Moez returned from Amarapur, after a month’s stay, he had shrunk, having lost twenty pounds. Is that really you, Moez, we joked, or are you his younger brother? It was as if he had time-travelled back to his youth, while here we were, his friends the ageing heavyweights. He had even shaved off his moustache and dyed his hair jet black. But to tell the whole truth, that face had lost its distinction, it was a baby face with creases. Still, there was all this new energy in him to do something new and exciting. Tour vineyards, go to the Shaw Festival, try a new restaurant in Collingwood. It took him two years to regain the weight, then he set off for Amarapur once more to be serviced.

  Sara doesn’t check in with him but meets him later somewhere like Bangalore or Goa. They take a big tour together and, possessed by cravings, he binges, as Sara let out quietly once. Fish turns to seafood, and he gorges on shrimp, crab cakes, and lobster. In the right company, he’ll attack a lamb shank. But Sara herself eats like a bird and she exercises and looks years younger than me, though I’m sure it’s Botox and tummy tuck too. And lots of makeup. They both have personal trainers. How can they not live forever? I am jealous, that should go without saying.

  “When we’re both dead,” I said to Zool, “these two will smirk every time they remember us…We should go to Amarapur.” He refused. He’s an engineer, and what they can do there, he says, he can do here. And cheaply. “I can figure it out. Don’t worry, Anita. We’re going to be around yet…”

  * * *

  —

  Zool’s weight plan, ELMO, is actually based on common sense, it sounds like advice that my grandfather used to give. Eat anything, but eat less and frequently and your body will learn to crave less. I stopped reminding him of my dear bapa after the first couple of times, when he didn’t see the humour. He is right, of course, ELMO is a complete system and not just folk advice. He provides exercise and activity regimens. If you follow it, your sugar levels, blood pressure, and cholesterol will plummet and so will your weight. Guaranteed. You’ll feel younger. It’s all described with impressive numbers and charts in a slim volume he uploaded on Amazon, for sale at $1.99, proceeds to go to our alma mater, Rustomjee High School in Meza. We’re still attached to where we come from. Where he declared his love to me. There’s a bonus chapter on how to manage your retirement. It became a bestseller in its category.

  I’m proud of my Zool, really. He’s low on the humour quotient, but he’s sensible. With that scientific mind of his, he can make any subject look easy.

  Even poetry, who would believe? He’s not a poetry person, even novels he disdains, but one day a few months ago while surfing the net he came across “Ode to a Nightingale” by John Keats. “Listen to this, Anita,” he said, coming halfway down the stairs, and read it out aloud. We had studied it in school under Mr. Moses, and it all came back, that excitement of discovering poetry, the teacher declaiming it in his throaty voice. That night during quality time, we sat down and discussed the poem instead of watching an Indian movie for the nth time. And just like that, poetry became Zool’s new obsession. I would hear him recite a verse aloud to himself, repeat it over in different ways, sometimes a few lines. Occasionally a single word would explode behind his closed door. “Hark!” He was like a scientist examining specimens, or Archimedes when he made his discovery. Finally, after a day of blissful silence for me, he came down for breakfast and announced his golden rules for writing poetry. His method is called FIRM, for Feeling, Invention, Rhythm, and Metaphor. Be a Firm Poet also went on Amazon, though it was not a bestseller. Poetry can’t compete with weight loss, for sure.

  * * *

  —

  Zool and Vyas had an argument regarding poetry one evening. Vyas is the third member of our trio of geniuses and fast friends from Rustomjee High (or Secondary, as we called it) School. As luck would have it, they were chosen to go to different universities, Zool to Nairobi, Moez to Dar, and Vyas to Kampala. They came to Toronto soon after graduation, the year following Idi Amin’s expulsion of Asians from Uganda. In those days when you came to Canada you took whatever job you were offered, usually well below your qualifications: Zool became a draughtsman in a government surveying office but rose up eventually to become senior engineer in the highways department; Moez, after a year as a teller in a Bank of Montreal branch downtown, went into real estate and made a fortune; Vyas became a Toyota salesman and is now a partner at the same dealership that took him on. But he’s always been a literary soul, ever since our school days. He missed his calling, as many did who emigrated.

  Moez and Sara had organized a ghazal program, showcasing the Indian vocal maestro Pandit Shivkumar from the city of Agra. The recital was by invitation only, at a banquet hall in Markham well known for wedding receptions. It was a bitterly cold night in December, a week before Christmas; everywhere looked desolate, and snow squalls swirled on the roads like dancing dervishes. Still, most of our friends and acquaintances were present, dressed in their finest Indian costumes.

  Pandit Shivkumar is a favourite of Moez’s and he invites him from India whenever he gets the craving for culture, which is about once a year. Moez says there is no one to compare with Pandit on the Indian classical music scene. We never knew such music back in our little town, but Moez now claims authority, and we humour him. The
buffet was very good that night but the wine was poor. But for most people we know, wine is wine, usually red and Shiraz. There were a few Johnnie Walkers under the counter, reserved for Moez’s friends. Zool and I sat at a table with Vyas and Yasmin. After we had queued up for the food and sat down, the MC came forward and welcomed the singer with heaps of flowery praises. Pandit looked on and smiled humbly where he sat on the floor. When the MC had finished, Pandit joined his hands and began his flattery. He thanked Moez and Sara, his patrons and great connoisseurs of music, and thanked the enthusiastic and knowledgeable audience. He then nodded to the tanpura player, who began to play the drone, and himself started with “O Canada” on the harmonium and received warm applause. With a grateful smile he adjusted his posture and began to sing ghazals, one after another, all favourites with those present. Slowly people dragged their chairs forward to be closer to the maestro. And at our table, Zool and Vyas started their argument.

  As the audience began to clap their hands and rock ecstatically from side to side, Vyas began muttering, “Is this poetry—‘your house and my house,’ ‘you are the candle and I am the moth’? What do these people know about ghazals? They applaud everything, and he patronizes them. He must take them for idiots.”

  “There are actually a few very simple rules to writing poetry,” my husband put in slyly, taking his cue here to make a plug for his new obsession. “FIRM,” he said with glazed eyes and held up four fingers as he began to explain. Both men had had a few glasses of Scotch, neat, and Johnnie Walker loomed ominously over our table. “I know that, but…!” Vyas would start, as Zool drawled on, oblivious. He does tend to go on nonstop after a few glasses. I said, “Zool, he knows that. Don’t forget, he was our poet in Meza. And be quiet now.” My dear husband believes that he discovered America when he placed his right foot on the runner at the Toronto airport. Or, as Moez once said, Zool would try to teach Newton the laws of gravity. It goes this way, Isaac.