What You Are

by M G Vassanji

  * * *

  —

  Amyn returns home and has leftover curry for dinner. She’d frozen it for him the day before. Curry the next day always tastes better. That’s an old adage and it’s true. It’s Friday and she’s gone, having texted him earlier that she found a flight to DC that she could take today instead of Saturday. His first instinct upon entering the empty house was to give her a call, but he resisted. She should have her time. He’s jealous, of course. With the boys gone, they’re as free as a young couple now, and there’s a lot they could do together but they lack the will. That inertia—all the karma of a marriage weighing them down. It seems she couldn’t wait to get away. And Layla is pure mischief, he recalls. He reads a new book by a young author from Togo he likes, makes notes in the margins while listening to music. Then he listlessly turns his laptop on and checks his emails. Casually—so he thinks—he Googles a name. And there it is. Nilufer Somani. Nilu.

  After what, thirty-three years? Still pretty, he thinks, staring hard at the three-quarter-length photo on the screen. In a business suit now, hair short as before but styled. Perhaps dyed. What would he say to her? I survived, Nilu.

  He had gone to Cambridge, Mass, from Ithaca, New York, and stayed at his friend Adil’s, where he met Nilu at a dinner. One of those expatriate gatherings in a student house, she from the Congo and speaking French too. All of them new graduates in their twenties, from “back there” and not more than a few years in the US, scattered across the northeast, excited to be where they were and doing what they did. Linked by Amtrak, they met regularly in their different cities. This time someone new was present, discovered by Adil in Cambridge, and Amyn was sitting beside her on the floor and they got into a passionate discussion—about Kierkegaard, he remembers that—while the rest were on about Nixon and the Watergate hearings that had preoccupied the entire nation. He had never felt such a connection to anyone before, never met anyone so empathetic, with interests so close to his. Even as they talked, he trembled, staring into her eyes, thinking, this is surely it. Back in Ithaca he would call her often, and they had long conversations that became progressively intimate.

  Two months later she invited him to Cambridge, and he stayed again with Adil. Having arrived Friday evening, he agreed to meet her for coffee Saturday morning at a place called the Blue Parrot. When they met, he was surprised to find her edgy and in a hurry. She had to go soon. This was to be their rendezvous, what happened? “Wait, what’s the hurry? I want to tell you something,” he insisted. She blushed. “Me too,” she said softly. “But later.” He had imagined that the two of them would go out for dinner, but instead she invited him and Adil to a dinner with her friends that evening. They met at a Chinese restaurant called Mayflower. She had come with five other people, and there was a guy with her, a Pakistani businessman their age from New York, wearing smart clothes that stood out, brash and offensive, everything Amyn could never be. Would never want to be. His name was Nawaz and he sat next to Nilu, his arm wrapped possessively behind her chair, with an air of triumph directed at Amyn across the table.

  She never met his accusing eye. But she had crucified him, before a pitying gallery. His fortune cookie said something like, If you fail try and try again. He read it out and everyone laughed. It took him months to recover. Where had he gone wrong to let her slip away? A letter arrived saying she had gotten engaged. And he replied with a soppy one, the thought of which still embarrasses him, saying he would always be her friend. Friend! He heard of her wedding that same year from her sister, and later that she had moved to California. Where, he sees, she’s now an estate agent in San Jose. Selling dreams. Why the maiden name? Had that married surname proved too burdensome in the end? Or the man? She did not belong with that sort, not the girl who read Kierkegaard and was so concerned about the world. He smiles. She made the right choice: safety. Finger poised: should he contact her? No.

  The next morning he watches English soccer on television. Nadia doesn’t care about watching sports, but Amyn always excuses himself Saturday mornings, saying that after a week of books and papers he deserves this escape. At halftime, disappointed for his team, he picks up his iPad and is stunned by a flurry of emails with the news that Professor Appadurai, “Appa,” had suddenly collapsed in a restaurant the previous night and died. He was sixty.

  Amyn had known Appa for thirty years, ever since Appa arrived from Vancouver to take up a job at Trinity, two years after Amyn. Appa was from Sri Lanka. The two of them had sat in meetings, taught classes together, organized seminars and conferences. Edited two books. They would disagree and argue, Appa with passion and Amyn calmly, but they always reached a compromise. And Appa would say, “You always do this to me, Amyn, I forget which side I was on!” But he had been reckless in stating his opinions and despite his popularity with students he had missed a promotion. He became bitter, took to railing against institutional racism. Amyn calls up Appa’s wife, Anita, who’s weeping, and gives her his condolences. The next afternoon he drives to a hall in High Park to view the body and embraces Anita, who’s with her son and daughter and their partners. Appa looks handsome in a grey suit, as he always did for his classes. They’ve put a shine on his bald head. His published books are displayed in a glass case at the hall entrance. They include the two he edited with Amyn.

  Monday morning Nadia calls and says she’s arriving that afternoon.

  “I’ll pick you up. I have taken the day off,” he tells her.

  “No need to.”

  “I’ll come. But…”

  He tells her about Appa. She gasps, “Oh my God!” and there’s a long silence between them.

  “Funeral is this morning. I’m just off there, then I’ll come and pick you up. The airport’s close by.”

  “Okay. Are you all right?”

  “Yes, I’m all right.”

  * * *

  —

  She did not miss him. But she realizes that he’d been there somehow in the shadow of their life together. She had appreciated that he had not called her, that he had left her alone.

  He comes to bed late and lies on his back. Appa’s death has hit him hard, she can tell, though he tries not to show it. They were not so very close, not as close as he is to some of his high school buddies in the city, but Appa was a constant factor in his life. Close in a special way. She can sense his breathing, just manages to hear a suppressed sigh. He does not move closer as he often does to put his arm around her. She turns to face him instead, and she stares at him.

  WHAT YOU ARE

  Zakia

  I always believed I was African American. After all, who has doubts about what they are? True, my mom is Tanzanian Swahili, but Dad is true-blue Black American. With a capital B. I took pride in my early roots in America, not forgetting the heritage of Black oppression, and that many of our ancestors came as slaves, and that we resisted and fought back. Malcolm X and MLK, the Black Panthers. I’ve often recalled them and others as a young Black person growing up. And we’ve produced geniuses, given culture to the entire world. Music. Fashion. Idiom. A President whose image and accomplishments will live on when most of the others are forgotten.

  Imagine my astonishment, my rage, my every negative feeling, the poison welling up inside me, when I discovered—was told blithely—just like that!—that in actual fact I was totally, absolutely one-hundred-percent Indian. A low-caste Indian woman, to boot, though caste means nothing to me because I am American first.

  How do I cope with that? What do I do with myself now? I touch my skin, I scratch it with my nails, watch the red blood creeping out; I grab my hair; I look at my eyes up close. What am I? What am I?

  “We thought the past had best be forgotten; it would only confuse you. You were ours, more than ours.”

  “How can I be more than yours, Mom, unless I am not yours in the first place?”

  “That’s not what I meant. You were ours and that was
that. Why should it make a difference now?”

  “Then why bring it up now?”

  “We thought you were old enough…anyway, your dad…”

  I turned to my dad. Big and looming, professorial, with his drawl and considered speech; until recently he smoked a pipe. He can quote pages of Baldwin and Langston Hughes. Sported an Afro once. Marched on Washington in Sixty-three. And I was no longer a part of that? Was excluded? He could probably read my thoughts; standing next to Mom, his hand on her shoulder, watching our exchange.

  Mom stood up and brought in a tray of tea from the kitchen. She’s one for tea. Ultra-sweet chai, with maandazi for breakfast, my favourite, the Swahili sweet fried pockets. Soft brown crust, hollow inside.

  “That’s right,” he said. “We thought you were old enough…to know your other heritage.”

  “Which is what?”

  “The Indian one, as Mom told you. Gujarat. That much I know.”

  “You must know more.”

  What is Gujarat, I don’t want to be Gujarat. I am African American. I am Black, and proud, as he used to say when I was a kid.

  For God’s sake. I have a grandmother in Philadelphia, who loves me. I have cousins, one of whom plays basketball for Kentucky, another a nerd at Cornell.

  My thoughts must have blazed out in garish neon in that silence. How could they not see them, they who introduced me, made me a part of a family? African American. We did not say more on the subject. I went up to my room to be alone. I tried to read, and look at some reports from my work, but how do you distract your mind from that one question, What am I now? Who am I? Has anything changed? Was there someone else in the world whom I had been stolen from? Bought from? Who loved me but had to let me go to rich America? Why? What would I have become, had I stayed back there, in Tanzania? I couldn’t get the picture out of my head, a vague picture of a woman without a face but with a headscarf, sitting on the floor somewhere. Why on the floor? Search me. Would I wear that sari thing or a hijab—like that woman, my real mother?

  The father didn’t even come to my mind.

  The next morning I came down feeling like a zombie. I must have looked it. Mom came over and gave me a hug, which I reciprocated, but not enough, I think. Dad squeezed my arm.

  “We have to talk,” he drawled.

  “I think I’ll postpone my return—take the train tomorrow.”

  “That’s a good idea. Breakfast first, then we go to the living room and talk. All right?”

  He looked deep into my eyes. I nodded. “All right, Dad.” How could he be anything else to me?

  * * *

  —

  So this is my story. Martin Stewart, native of Philadelphia, arrived in Tanzania as a Peace Corps volunteer in 1967, a rare Black specimen—most of them tended to be whites—sporting an Afro. He had been assigned to teach history and English at a high school which taught both girls and boys at the higher levels. The lower grades taught only boys. His eye fell on a chemistry teacher called Salma. That the name resonated with recent events back home did not escape him, it intrigued him further. “I thought it was fate,” he explains drily, his hand adjusting the ghost of a tobacco pipe at his mouth. “But she was pretty—wow! And she still is.” My mother smiles an acknowledgement, and he looks away, pleased with himself. It took time and much effort to woo Salma, Miss Tamim. She would not go out with him, always coming up with a cheerful refusal and some bland excuse. One day, finally, she declared to him what should have been obvious: “My family would not like me going out at night, and especially with a man.” “Because I’m not a Muslim?” he asked. “Any man,” she replied. Especially a foreigner, but she did not tell him that. Her grandfather was a well-known sheikh, forever preaching morals to his flock. But it was evident that she liked him. All the girls and even the boys liked him: he was American, with an easy confidence and a way of speaking they found funny but charming, having heard it only in the movies. Frank Sinatra, Elvis, John Wayne, Sidney Poitier. The girls nicknamed him Sidney Poitier, though with his round face he looked nothing like the actor. He took the compliment.

  His chance came not long after that exchange. The Crucible was playing at the appropriately named Little Theatre, the only one in town, and the schools received invitations to send their English classes to see it. Martin would need a female teacher to go with his girls, and he applied to the headmaster for help. He suggested Miss Tamim’s name as the possible escort. Salma had no choice. At the theatre he lavished her with attention. After the play he drove her home in the little car he had bought, but first they stopped over at the Palm Beach Hotel for soft drinks and halal snacks. They discussed the play. They discussed America. Civil rights. Malcolm X had travelled in Africa, though he missed Tanzania, and Stokely Carmichael had only recently visited. Chinua Achebe was expected very soon.

  “I was smitten,” she says wistfully. “I had liked him anyway, but now I was truly in love. I had never met a person, man or woman, so considerate. So passionate about the world, and about Black-ness…Of course, he was courting me then, but still.”

  These two have maintained that electricity between them. The wattage may be low, but it keeps on glowing. My eyes hold hers. She’s greyed and seems smaller now but has retained her long face and lean features. We never mention the Arab blood in her ancestry. We always celebrate Christmas, and in Philadelphia she attends church with my grandmother, but she says her Muslim prayer as soon as she wakes up every day and keeps a Quran by her bedside. Dad used to join her in her prayer sometimes, but he’s given up. I used to join her too when I was little.

  “Where do I come in?” I ask and break the silence.

  “Coming to that,” says Dad. “We thought you should know the full story.”

  There followed clandestine meetings, after school and early in the morning at a tea shack behind the school. They wanted to get married. You should talk to my folks, she said. So one bright Sunday morning at around eleven Martin went to see Sheikh Bushiri Tamim to ask for his granddaughter’s hand. The sheikh had already been told by Salma’s mother that the Black American was to come. He sat on an old sofa before a coffee table having his kahawa; he told Dad to sit down opposite and offered him a cup. And then my dad spoke, in broken Swahili; the old man knew some English, and Salma’s father was the standby. The sheikh wanted to know everything about Dad, his family, his ancestry, his religion and politics. He asked him why he wanted to marry someone outside his culture. Dad told him he loved Salma, and he believed there was a strong bond in their both being African. The old man smiled; neither Mom nor Dad can say what could have been in his mind, but he told Dad to return the following Friday, after the midday prayer.

  “I was annoyed, but she told me I must have made a good impression. He could have dismissed me straightaway as a nonbeliever and fake African.”

  On Friday my dad went to Salma’s house, this time taking a gift of a Quran with him. Both my dad and the sheikh had done their research; the sheikh had sent his spies to find out everything they could about this American teacher; and Martin had inquired about Qurans and bought a calligraphed copy he could hardly afford from an Indian trader. Sheikh Tamim asked Dad if he was willing to become a Muslim. Dad had discussed this with Salma; he was an agnostic, but figured that if Malcolm could become Malik Shabazz, and Cassius Clay was now Muhammad Ali, why couldn’t Martin Stewart adopt a Muslim name for love’s sake? He became Baraka Stewart. And they had a proper Swahili wedding, with jasmine flowers and ululations and a trumpet procession through Salma’s neighbourhood.

  Now comes my story proper. Dad pauses, and Mom stirs in her seat and looks away, then turns to me with affection. She stretches her hand out towards me, I take it.

  She became pregnant, but delivered a stillborn at the local hospital. As they sat in her ward, grief-stricken at the news, a junior nurse approached them.

  “She told us there was a young Indian mo
ther with a child she could not afford to keep,” Dad says, slowly.

  “Why?”

  “She was single and poor. There were social considerations.”

  “So you took me to replace your dead baby? It was that easy?”

  “The doctor was not there—too busy or simply looked away—and the nurse simply brought in the child in a bassinet. A beautiful baby.”

  “And the other baby?”

  That catches him short. “A boy.” Their child. But what could they have done, he was dead. If he had lived, he would be the one with a grandmother in Philadelphia, and all those relations, he would not be conflicted like I am now.

  Immediately after Salma was discharged, they started having qualms. They found out about the girl’s parents and went to visit them, taking with them the child. Me. The girl’s father was a local shoemaker. Mom reads out his name from a small piece of paper and hands it to me: Jairam Solanki and Shanti Behn. My real grandparents. My hand starts to shake uncontrollably, and I seize it with the other and clamp it down. I am crying for a reason I cannot understand, and they watch me helplessly.

  “Mr. and Mrs. Solanki were grateful to us,” Dad says. “We were a godsend. The girl would have been ostracized, the child too, and he would have had no future.”

  I look at the paper in my hand. Under the couple’s name is another one, in crooked writing. “And this one under it—is that a name?”

  They both nod.

  “My mother?”

  Dad says, “Yes. Your biological mother.”