What You Are

by M G Vassanji

  Pandit was taking requests, the guests sang along, the MC was showing off his Urdu, having spent a few years in Pakistan. It all sounded false. Vyas is so right, I told myself, if also drunk.

  But I had blundered when I said that Vyas was a poet. Our looks met no sooner than I’d uttered those words, and I saw his face turn blank, his lips tighten. I had lit a match and soon enough he exploded. He stood up awkwardly. Unsteady on his feet, in an edgy voice, a finger pointing towards the singer, who was now sitting in the midst of his adulating audience, he uttered, “Excuse me…excuse me, Pandit Shivkumar. Yes—do you call this poetry, what you are singing to this ignorant mass…these trivial love couplets full of age-old clichés…? Hein?”

  The hall fell silent, as though the soundtrack had suddenly switched off. Then someone who did not show his face spoke up, “You ass, who are you calling ignorant?” “Who does he think he is? A poet?” “Some fool from Toyota…”

  Pandit merely smiled like Buddha where he sat.

  “Yes!” shouted Vyas. “A real poet! A living poet!” And he stormed out, followed by Yasmin, who threw a helpless look behind at me. I followed them in a hurry, even as Zool opened his mouth to restrain me.

  I had grabbed my coat. And Vyas’s, and Yasmin’s. The chill outside felt like a sword through me, I gasped for breath. “Here!” I managed to shout to the wind. Yasmin stopped and gratefully put on her coat, and ran after Vyas with his.

  We reached their Camry and I went to sit behind them in the back seat. Yasmin turned to me with pleading eyes. “He’s in his mood.”

  “What’s the matter, Vyas?” I asked him. “You know what these concerts are like, why spoil it? And you shouldn’t take Zool so seriously. He needs a hobby, and…”

  Poetry had been Vyas’s passion. In Uganda, where he went to university and met Yasmin, he was one of a group of young upcoming writers; some of them became famous. Ngugi wa Thiong’o, James Ngugi at that time, was a classmate and friend. We expected much from Vyas. Wole Soyinka, who would win the Nobel Prize, had included Vyas in his anthology of African poets. I still have a copy, with two poems by “V. L.,” signed to me by Vyas at a reading he gave to us in Meza.

  “You are the real poet, Vyas,” I said. “You always were…”

  But what happened to you? Simply, exile and family. When the Asians were expelled from Uganda, Yasmin became stateless. The two of them went to Canada, and the rest of us followed from Tanzania, fearing that now anything could happen in the region.

  “Yes, a good one,” Yasmin said, “no matter what some editor says.” She turned to me. “He sent three of his poems to a magazine for the first time. And got a rejection.”

  “He still writes poetry?”

  “Yes.”

  “Yes,” Vyas muttered. “He still does and he’s pathetic…pathetic…pathetic.”

  * * *

  —

  The following spring Vyas was struck with gout and suffered terribly. Even in the winter he came out limping, wearing sandals and layers of socks. He turned vegetarian, which was how he’d been brought up, but took wine, and Sara, Yasmin, and I supplied him constantly with remedies and advice. When finally, after a year, he had recovered, he was still nervous about his food. Yasmin convinced him that he needed something extreme to clean up his system—he should go to Amarapur. Moez said why didn’t they go together, and the two began to plan their trip, but the rest of us convinced them to go separately or they would argue all the time and return each with a heart attack or a stroke. The prospect of two corpses airlifted from India did not sound too far-fetched. When Vyas returned after a month at Amarapur, he was slim; his face looked firm and fresh, and I was reminded of the boy I had known back in Meza. The one I had my eye on, before Zool struck first.

  “I wrote some poetry while there,” he told me. “I’ll publish it privately. Would you like a copy?”

  “Of course I would!”

  We were at a dinner at a Moroccan restaurant, the six of us. Zool and Moez were both away from the table.

  “I still have that anthology you gave me,” I told him with a smile. “Poems from Black Africa. Do you remember?”

  “Soyinka? You do? Can I have it? I don’t have a copy—with all that moving around we did.”

  “Well you can’t have mine,” I said. “It’s signed.”

  To Anita, with love.

  THE END OF THE WORLD

  One day he was the strong, confident father and husband, protective; easy to laugh and just as easily sober or tender. They came to me for hugs and dug into my flesh, but if they had a problem it was to him they would turn. If it was politics or history, it was him not me. But soon after that fateful day—September 11, why be coy about it?—he became brooding, inward, sometimes paranoid, imagining threats and dire futures. Physically too he seemed older now, there had appeared the suggestion of a stoop, a shadow on his face. Had he always been dark, this scion of the Mughals, as he thought of himself?

  That day on my way home from school I picked him up at a little past four, the hour he had said. As I cruised slowly into Sussex Avenue, he emerged, coming down the steps of Robarts Library with his backpack on him, grinning. It had been a good day of research and writing, apparently. Someone had given him an office to use on the fourteenth floor where he hardly saw anyone.

  “Well? How was your day? Those brats wear you out?”

  “You heard what happened—in New York?” I asked.

  “No. What? Some shooting? Riots?”

  I told him, and he said, “My God.” He repeated it, an invocation to a being he always vehemently denied, and sat back. “No wonder all was quiet there inside…no one using the elevators…” He looked out his window, I at the traffic snarl ahead. And then he muttered, “Who will they go after to wreak their revenge…it’s going to be terrible. Another war.”

  Prescient, but at the time I was startled by his response. Perhaps, now that I think about it, I was frightened too. For him, for us, and for the world. Like everyone else at the time I was in a state of shock. Something so unthinkable had happened, it felt as though the end of the world had just been announced. An alien force had landed on earth; an incurable disease was spreading rapidly across the globe; we could only wait.

  I had watched the two buildings falling, crumbling, on television earlier that day at the school, along with the teachers and students who had rushed in a mob into the assembly hall. In a minute, the hall was jammed full, all of us staring in disbelief at the two screens above our heads. Watching a cataclysm—live, we were told, but the same clip was replayed over and over soundlessly like a silent prayer. The silence on the TV screens, and all around me in the hall. Other than that, I don’t recall anything else until I was in the car on my way to pick him up. This has not happened, I kept telling myself. It has not happened, an attack on New York. I have imagined it entirely; or I’ll soon learn that it has been a hoax. Remember Orson Welles?

  Later in the evening, when we had seen the twin towers collapsing at least three times with the kids, after they had gone up to their rooms, I looked at him questioningly. And he answered in an even tone, “That girl who was abducted, and her body found decomposed in High Park last month. Isn’t that horrific? How many such murders happen every year?”

  This was an act of war, I told him. It was symbolic. He agreed, symbolic because it was America that was attacked. Now there would be actual war. Rockets and bombs and tanks. More lives lost. Didn’t I remember Vietnam?

  “Don’t you feel anything?—for the people who died today? For all that destruction?” I asked.

  “Of course I do. But not more than I did for Rwanda. Or for Cambodia. Think of all the children murdered every year, even in America.”

  He showed no emotion at all at the dreadful sight we had just watched repeatedly on our television. His response was intellectual: one more mass act of violence. Surely tho
usands dying this morning an hour’s flight away was closer than Rwanda ten years ago and Cambodia two decades before that? I told him all this and more and left him alone before the empty television screen to mull by himself.

  Upstairs, alone, I felt uneasy. An attack on New York. Buildings toppling. How many dead? Nothing could alter that. And yet that weight on the heart. A feeling, not articulate enough at the time, that I was a liar, a hypocrite. Only later I allowed myself the clarity to ask myself, how deep was that initial feeling, how genuine? I was a Canadian from a troubled part of the world, where millions lived in dire poverty; in my childhood our country had fought three wars, we had seen horrific violence in our streets. Memories of our subcontinent’s Partition were recent. As many as a million people died at the time. My parents would mention the trainloads of corpses arriving at railway stations, people butchered while crossing the new borders between India and Pakistan. There had been losses in our own family that were never mentioned but still cast a long shadow. Was my response to the New York catastrophe too easy, too expected, and too pat, conditioned by my need to be like others, to belong? And for my children to belong?

  In the following weeks the rhetoric everywhere was the same chorus of stock responses; and when the drumbeats of war sounded down south, I felt fortunate that we had chosen to come to a small and peaceful country.

  * * *

  —

  More years ago than I care to count I watched Aslam at a student rally at the University in Karachi and fell instantly in love. We were demonstrating against the war in Vietnam. I was only a naive freshman but I did not want to miss the thrill of doing something so daring. I was aware that this was an exciting period worldwide, and many people of our age were voicing opinions on the important issues of the day. We were the future. But I had grown up in the belief that communism was godless and despicable, and now here I was at a rally shouting support for the communists in Vietnam. We had stopped outside the entrance of the administration building, chanting our slogans, waiting to be addressed. “Out! Out! America out of Vietnam!” we chanted. Aslam stood on the steps facing us with two other senior students by his side, one of them a woman. He was impressive, not particularly handsome, but he had a certain charisma, with his wavy, ruffled hair tumbling down from his forehead, loose shirt with sleeves rolled partway, thin beard on his chin, and that fire in his eyes. I recall that his voice had become hoarse, I barely heard him in the noise, yet somehow he was still compelling. He raised a fist and we cheered. The woman beside him would periodically shout something in support; she had a thin voice, and was fair and small and delicate and wore pants and an oversized man’s shirt. I could guess that he was having an affair with her. I imagine her clearly and her memory is a twinge that still remains.

  From crumpled torn sheets in his hands Aslam read off messages of solidarity from student groups in Oxford, Paris, Frankfurt, New York, and Berkeley. There followed more cheering, then the rally broke up and the three speakers stood on the steps handing out sheaves of pamphlets to distribute. I walked up to Aslam to receive my share, and for a moment, when our eyes met, I was electrified. “Are you available later to discuss?” I managed, then breathlessly went on, “I’m not quite sure why we should support communists.” “Oh? Sure, we can discuss that,” he replied with a smile. “I’m sure I can convince you.”

  A few days later between morning classes I was sitting in the student canteen with my friends, having tea. The place was filled, everyone speaking at the top of their voice. The cacophony was a character of that place and always reminded me of birds inside a cage. There were four of us around a sticky, rickety table. One of the girls muttered something and I looked up startled to see Aslam Sheikh heading towards us in slow leisurely strides, his head tilted aside as though with a question. I took a deep breath and said to myself, So he’s come. He stood at the opposite end of the table and looked at me.

  “So, Rumi Lakhani, you wanted to know why we should support godless communists…Here I am at your service.”

  There was a hard smile on his face and a grit to his voice. His eyes, I noticed, were green. My friends stood up. One of them made a cheeky comment—“Yaar, this is too intellectual for us…”—and they vamoosed. As soon as they were gone Aslam sat down, then looked around and said, “Let’s go outside where we can hear ourselves.”

  We crossed the road to the grass bank, where a few others had also come to seek refuge from the noise. We sat down on the ground, and he began.

  “Now, the godless communists. Why should we be on their side?”

  I mumbled something in response, and he said, “Don’t worry. You are right, in a way. But we support what we think is the right cause, not one side or another. In the war in Vietnam we support the communists. We always support the oppressed people of the world. However, at the end of the day what we really support is always: Pakistan!”

  “Pakistan! I’m so glad you said that…”

  “Why? Didn’t you think I was a good Pakistani?”

  “No, it’s not that, but…”

  He laughed, and we chatted idly for a while. Too soon, a shadow fell on us and it was Asma, his companion from the rally, with a sweet smile. “Shall we go?” she asked him with a tilt of her head and a glance straight at me. She wore traditional attire that day, I remember in particular the bright pink, starched salwar. “Sure,” he said, standing up and dusting himself. “Well, Rumi, see you around, then! Don’t abandon the struggle!”

  I felt foolish for my infatuation. But I avoided running across him then on. My friends teased me no end for a few weeks, reciting a famous forlorn line by the Urdu poet Ghalib—“it was not to be, our union”—to rile me. At the end of that year he graduated with his degree in journalism, and I didn’t see him again until much later.

  He came from a well-connected family of Lahore. Both his parents were lawyers, and his mother sometimes was in the news as an advocate for the rights of poor abused women. His older brother was on the Cricket Board and appeared in the news whenever the Pakistan national team was selected. Asma was the daughter of a general. And so they both were from our nation’s elite and well-suited for each other. My family was of a modest background. Father worked as a post office bureaucrat, and Mother stayed at home. They had arrived in Karachi as a young refugee couple from Gujarat during the Partition and had a difficult time settling. We were the foreigners. Aslam’s family were pukka Punjabis of the entitled sort, who had owned large tracts of Mughal-endowed land for generations. He would boast that their origins were in Kandahar, in Afghanistan, and his ancestors had come east to India with the army of Babur the Mughal. Sixteenth century.

  After my graduation three years later, I took a job at a primary school in a wealthy neighbourhood. It was a pleasant job, but like most girls in my situation I was waiting to get married, though I also hoped to do a master’s degree eventually. Aslam had become a pleasant memory, jogged whenever I saw—and read—his fiery or acerbic column in the progressive daily Dawn. Marriage proposals duly came, but wherever I showed interest, there was the condition that I not work. Marriage seasons followed one after another, and my parents were getting desperate. One day a pupil in my class was brought to school by both her mother and her uncle, who—to my great surprise—happened to be Aslam. I can only imagine how red I must have turned; he looked unruffled, of course, but we greeted each other warmly and agreed to meet later for coffee.

  There was a café down the road from the school where we met. It was just past four p.m. He said he had travelled, to Norway and East Germany, but not been up to much else. I asked him about Asma. “Ah,” he said, a little embarrassed. “You remember her. That would never have worked. We were too much alike.”

  We continued to meet at the café, usually every Thursday. After a few times he began to drop me home in his little Fiat, and later still we went out Saturday afternoons, when he would come to pick me up. My parents liked him
, though they would have preferred someone more of our sort. But they insisted I should get married and Aslam agreed.

  * * *

  —

  In my extended new family, I was the dark Gujarati, little better than a “Madrasi.” I was always aware of this, you have to be, when fair skin is the chief measure of a woman’s beauty. I could sense an anxiety in the women that my children would come out short, dark, and round-faced and bring shame to the family. More than once I heard the comment “What kind of name is Lakhani?—sounds Hindu…” Noses in the air. They were the fair Mughals, descendants of conquerors; we were the dark “converts” and exiles. And they were all thin and beautiful, the wives of influential Pakistani army people and politicians, educated in exclusive convent schools where they learned to play tennis and squash, and in our gatherings would often break off into exuberant northern Punjabi, so that I felt excluded. Our families hardly spent time together. And so when Aslam received a scholarship to spend a year, and possibly two years, in Michigan, I could hardly contain my excitement. I suppressed the urge to shout, “Yes, let’s go!” and let him make the decision. The offer was a huge surprise. “Why would they give you a scholarship when you have demonstrated and railed against them?” I asked him. “Are you sure it’s not a mistake?” He grinned. “They hope to seduce me to their side. Soft power. But they’ll see, this fool is not so easy to seduce—except by his wife.” The scholarship meant leaving his friends and the troubled country that he loved for two years, and that made him sad. But he was also happy to go to America. Who wasn’t?

  I would now have him all to myself. My feelings were selfish, but as my mother advised me, part of a woman’s job is to wean her husband away from his family and friends. She, for her part, had already given me away at my marriage.