We Are All Birds of Uganda

by Hafsa Zayyan

  Sameer swivels on his chair, looking around the office, not dissimilar to his own back in London but brighter for some reason, happier; perhaps because of the way the windows let in the yellow light of the sun, perhaps because of the sheer amount of space – with only six employees on the floor, it felt enormous, liberating. A wave of melancholy washes over him now that it is time to say goodbye. ‘I’ve learned so much, thank you,’ he says, and he wishes he’d got Mr Shah a gift to show his appreciation, something his mother would have reminded him to do if she were here (although God only knew what you could get a man who had everything).

  ‘We should be thanking you – you’ve been a huge help,’ Mr Shah replies. ‘Although I’m not sure it’s been much of a holiday for you coming to the office with me!’

  ‘Honestly – I’ve loved it. I didn’t know work could be so … well, fun,’ Sameer says, laughing and simultaneously cringing at himself for saying it.

  ‘Well, son, this is Uganda. It’s really easy to make money here – all you need is a little capital and the right idea.’

  Sameer swallows. ‘I did have this one idea,’ he says.

  Mr Shah raises an eyebrow. ‘I’m intrigued.’

  Hesitantly, Sameer begins to explain what he’s discovered in the two short weeks he’s been in Uganda: an East African Asian fusion, good for mind and body – turmeric and orange immuno-booster, tamarind and watermelon hangover cure, chilli and mango aphrodisiac, mint and lime cleanse and refresh. He’s making it up now but the list could go on and on – any tag line you want, as long as it has some broad relation to the ingredients, and he’s convinced it would sell. All natural, locally sourced ingredients, no preservatives, no added sugar – and not just delicious, but actually does what it says on the tin: it cured my hangover! When he is finished, he forces himself to look nonchalant, although his palms are sweating.

  ‘Brilliant,’ Mr Shah says. ‘Absolutely brilliant. I could help you establish links with the retailers where we sell our sugar products – you could rent a commercial kitchen space at quite a low cost – oh, also we know some excellent local packaging manufacturers for the bottles – were you thinking glass or plastic?’

  Sameer’s heart pounds as his body courses with adrenaline; he wasn’t expecting this response, not at all. ‘Uncle,’ he says, ‘it was just an idea – I’m moving to Singapore, remember?’

  ‘Of course, of course,’ Mr Shah bats away this comment with a wave of his hand. ‘Pull up an Excel, come on – let’s model it.’

  Over the course of the next few hours, and with Mr Shah’s input, Sameer draws up a spreadsheet to see what it would cost to start producing and selling Saeed & Sons juices in Kampala: renting a kitchen and machinery, purchasing the fruit and packaging, arranging transportation to retail outlets. The spreadsheet spews out the numbers: he could run the business for a year and not make a single shilling of profit, and it would still only cost him half his savings. He stares at the numbers and checks the formulas again, verifying the assumptions with Mr Shah. By the time they are finished it is evening, and Sameer’s heart is fluttering with a new kind of excitement: the excitement of possibility, of adventure. He feels renewed, powerful, like he could conquer the world.

  Mr Shah drops him off outside Maryam’s house (politely declining Sameer’s suggestion that he come inside) and Sameer is welcomed at the door by the smiling members of the family. His feet cross the threshold of his father’s old house with a new and strange sense of belonging: this is his home, Musa had said, and today he feels like it is. It feels the way he has always imagined home should feel: happy and comfortable, somewhere you can be unashamedly you.

  And Maryam was right: the food is even better than the first time he came. Over dinner, Musa tells them the story of how he met Maryam’s mother, when he came off a boda boda near Kitange, falling right at her mother’s feet – ‘I literally fell for her,’ he says, laughing – and she went with him to the hospital and stayed until he regained consciousness. Maryam must have heard this story a million times before, but Sameer watches her eager face turned up in Musa’s direction.

  At one point during the evening, Ibrahim asks him if he has read the papers that his grandfather left in the house. Sameer shakes his head slowly, swallowing a piece of meat. ‘I haven’t had the chance to yet,’ he lies – catching Maryam’s eye; she raises an eyebrow. They are not seated next to each other this time; she is diagonally opposite him, but he is glad because it means that he can look at her without it being obvious. ‘I’ve been so busy and everything,’ he continues, ‘I’ll probably read them when I’m back home in England.’ Ibrahim nods and says of course, but Sameer can sense disappointment. Did he really want to know what the papers were? In that case, was it really true that in all these years he had never read them?

  ‘Why did you lie?’ Maryam asks him later, when they are alone on the porch after everyone has said goodbye.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  She says nothing, standing in front of the doorway, weight resting on one hip, arms wrapped around her waist as if she were feeling cold. Her expression is unreadable.

  ‘Some of the things he says embarrass me,’ he says quietly.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  He’s read half a dozen of the letters. There is a beauty and pain in those letters which is written into his history and towards which he feels a strange responsibility. This is the seed from which his father’s expectations sprang, the bedrock of the traditionalism of his Mhota Papa – who he has tried and failed several times to reconcile with the politically engaged Shahzeb. It fascinates him to dig deeper into the family psyche, to unroot its foundations. But this is not without consequence: there are also things that have been bothering him, sitting at the edge of his mind, awkward and horrible, which he can’t seem to shake off. He says: ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Your grandfather was a wonderful man,’ she says gently. ‘He did a wonderful thing –’

  ‘He’s not as great as you think,’ he blurts out, reddening for speaking ill of his grandfather – it seems wrong, somehow, to criticise him, but at the same time – ‘He never saw your great-grandfather as an equal, and refused to make him a shareholder in his business essentially because he was black. He believed himself to be superior to black people. He was a hypocrite, he was selfish, he –’

  Maryam moves at last, throwing her hands up and causing him to stop. ‘OK,’ she says. ‘I get it.’

  Sameer hangs his head while they stand there in silence. ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘There’s nothing to be sorry about,’ she says softly. ‘Everything your grandfather thought or did was a result of his personal experiences, his own personal circumstances. He was a product of his time,’ she shrugs. ‘Just like we’re a product of ours.’

  Sameer frowns. ‘It just feels so strange to have your whole family always applauding him,’ he says, ‘when you didn’t really know him.’

  Maryam looks at him with an expression he can’t decipher; and then, so quickly that he might have imagined it, her eyes say: Well, I don’t really know you. On this look – which has already disappeared – Sameer suddenly feels queasy as he remembers, with painful intensity, his own thoughts, red and hot, when he had first met her. What would she think of him if she knew? He stares at his feet, almost wanting to cry.

  ‘Well, you can’t change the past,’ she says at last. ‘But it doesn’t have to define your future. And anyway, whatever he was like, you’re not him, are you?’ and these last words are said gently, coaxing him to lift his head without touching him.

  He looks up and she is smiling. She is radiant. He exhales, her words causing the demons in his head to scatter and flee. He’ll never read another one of those letters again. He’ll take them to a flame until they crumble to nothing, he’ll erase that part of his family’s history. He’ll be a better man.

  20

  It is Sameer’s penultimate night in Kampala, and he still can’t quite believe that Maryam sits i
n front of him.

  He’d thought their time together had run out; he’d accepted that he wasn’t going to see her again. But in the Uber as he drove away from her house for the last time, he’d realised he had nothing to lose from trying, and he’d messaged and asked if she would have dinner with him the following night. She said yes.

  He had spent over an hour researching where he might take her for dinner. There were upmarket restaurants in Nakasero and Kololo, but he’d walked past them in the evenings and seen old white men sitting with two or three young and beautiful Ugandan women, which made him uncomfortable. At the same time, he wanted the night to be special, to be memorable. He didn’t just want to take her to any old restaurant in downtown Kampala. In the end, he settled on a steakhouse in a complex close to Kabalagala; it wasn’t perfect, but it would do.

  The restaurant is almost empty, which might have been a bad sign in London, but here Sameer is grateful for the privacy. They sit at a table scattered with tea-light candles and shadowed by a huge leafy plant; exposed, slanted wooden beams form a canopy over their heads. The menu is French and Belgian; he orders steak, she orders fish, and they fall into comfortable chatter like old friends. What made you want to go to Singapore? she asks, and he tells her that it will offer him a straightforward route to partnership. She asks him if that’s what he wants – to be a partner. He shrugs – it’s the next logical step, it’s what everyone in this job works towards, the pay jump is huge. He admits that a part of him is just ready to leave London; that his friends have left, or moved onto newer, more exciting things, and he feels left behind. As if, by staying in his successful job, living in his penthouse apartment, he is somehow stagnating, failing to develop. As he speaks, he feels stupid. He wonders why he feels the need to do something different just because his friends have. But she says that she understands, that sometimes it all seems pointless: the same routine every day, the same frustrations every day, and that it feels like nothing will ever change. He can’t remember the last time he talked to anyone – even Jeremiah – like this. Why is she so easy to talk to? Is it because she doesn’t come from his world?

  ‘The thing that always grounds me, though, is my faith,’ she says. The waiter has already taken away their empty plates and brought the dessert menu with a smile. ‘However frustrated I feel. Does it really matter what you achieve, or just that you tried to achieve something? Life is short and so, so temporary, you know?’

  He thinks about this for a moment. ‘I wasn’t brought up in a particularly religious household. I mean, my mum prays, but it’s always been more about community and culture than religion,’ he says, and then, delicately: ‘I’ve noticed Ugandans pray a lot.’

  ‘It’s a part of our culture,’ she shrugs, ‘to believe that whatever you’re doing in any given moment, you’re only doing it by the grace of God. So you can interrupt it for prayer. This may sound strange, but it’s the one thing we all do. You get Muslims who pray but then go out gambling and drinking.’

  This surprises him and he thinks triumphantly: well, at least we’re not hypocrites. But he doesn’t say this, he just looks at her and then says: ‘Why do you wear the hijab? None of the other women in your family wear it.’

  ‘I started wearing a head tie when I was a teenager,’ she says slowly. ‘My hair is really brittle and it just kept breaking,’ she steals a glance at his hair and smiles. ‘You probably have more hair than me. And then, well … I never took it off.’

  ‘So it’s not a religious thing?’

  ‘It didn’t start as a religious thing,’ she frowns. ‘I didn’t grow up in a house where it was considered mandatory that women should wear it. But I started wearing it and it’s a part of my identity now. I’m happy to be identified as a Muslim because of it. Does that make any sense?’

  He nods. The way she speaks makes the world make sense. He thinks of the things in his life that he struggles with; he imagines the twisted labyrinth of these thoughts being straightened and corrected through conversation with her, if only they had more time. But the waiter arrives to take their order; they are already onto their final course.

  ‘A partner at work once asked me why I fasted,’ he says after the waiter has gone. ‘I didn’t know what to say.’

  ‘Why do you fast?’

  ‘I don’t know. Habit? Because I was raised fasting in Ramadan. Because it’s just what I’ve done my whole life.’

  ‘So much of what we do comes from how we were raised,’ she says, tracing her finger along a crack in the table slowly. ‘There comes a point when you stop doing things because of your family and you start thinking independently, right?’

  Sameer nods uncertainly; independent thought is a betrayal of his family’s values.

  ‘And then it becomes a question of why we do any of these things – fast, not drink, pray,’ she smiles as her eyes meet his. ‘So, Ramadan. God says that we should do it because it is better for us – we don’t know it, but He does. So I fast because I am God conscious. I fast out of humility. Whatever I was given in this life came from God.’

  He is receptive to this idea, the idea that all he has – his health and his wealth and his life – was not of his own making, but was allotted to him by a higher power. But then he thinks of the sickly Ugandan children he has seen squatting at the side of the road, barely clothed, dirt-streaked ribs protruding above their abnormally enlarged bellies; he thinks of Maryam’s mother’s family living in a slum in Kisenyi. What made God give him this life and give others so little? He wants to challenge her now, to push her to see how far she will go.

  ‘So we just do what God says blindly even if it’s dangerous for us?’ He thinks of the stupid errors fasting cost him at work, wonders how Maryam can fast in a job like hers where lives might be at risk.

  ‘Of course not,’ she replies without missing a beat, signalling that she is ready to be challenged and that she will relish it. Sameer is aroused by the way her lips part as she speaks; it seems wrong that he has found their discussion about God a turn-on, but the idea that it is wrong only makes her seem sexier. ‘Allah isn’t trying to make us suffer,’ she says, and then, as if she has read his mind: ‘I won’t fast if I’m operating. If you genuinely can’t fast, you don’t have to. But if you have faith in Allah, you’ll believe it when He says that He knows what is best for you.’

  If you have faith in Allah. There is much more that could be said, but he is also aware that his knowledge is limited (whereas hers seems vast) and so he settles for: ‘You make God sound like an annoying parent.’

  ‘Maybe that’s the way to look at it.’

  ‘I guess fasting is humbling. I do always feel so grateful when Ramadan is over.’

  They look at each other for a moment and then burst out laughing.

  As the evening draws on, time begins to slip through his fingers like sand. Before he knows it, they are back at her house and he is standing on the porch, saying goodbye to her family and promising to come back to Uganda again soon. One by one, Maryam’s family retreat inside the house until only Ibrahim, Maryam and Sameer remain.

  Ibrahim has already said his goodbyes, but there is something else, and he takes Sameer’s hand in his own, searching for the words. ‘I never knew if we had done something to anger your family,’ he says. ‘They came to take the body back to England, but they never came to this house – their house.’

  Sameer looks to Maryam for explanation, but she has wandered a safe distance along the porch: this is between Sameer and Ibrahim alone. ‘The body?’

  ‘Your grandfather’s,’ Ibrahim says.

  ‘I thought my grandfather died in England?’ Both of Sameer’s paternal grandparents – who had died before he was born – are buried in the Leicester Muslim Cemetery; the family goes to visit their graves several times a year. But now that Sameer comes to think of it, his parents have never mentioned where his grandfather died, or – for that matter – how. Sameer had always assumed that his grandfather had died in Leicester, of s
omething related to old age. He’d never thought to ask and his father had never brought it up.

  Ibrahim shakes his head. ‘My child, your grandfather died here, in this house, in 1981 when he came from England to visit. On the first night of his trip, he died here in his sleep.’

  At this, Sameer knows immediately what his father’s thought process would have been: he wouldn’t have died if he hadn’t gone back to Uganda. No wonder his father had never talked about it.

  ‘I found him in the morning,’ Ibrahim says, looking past Sameer and into the distance. ‘There was a letter on his bedside table, and a stack of papers – other letters, I’m guessing. I put them all together and I waited for someone to come for them. But no one came until you. I never knew if they were upset with us.’

  ‘There’s no reason for them to be,’ Sameer says carefully. He leans forward and embraces Ibrahim, feeling the fragility of old age.

  ‘May Allah bless you, Sameer Saeed,’ Ibrahim says, gently patting Sameer on the head. He gives him one last look and then hobbles inside, closing the door behind him.

  The sound of the porch creaking underfoot makes Sameer turn his head: Maryam has returned to him. ‘Are you OK?’ she asks.

  He nods. He doesn’t want to think about his grandfather, or his father, or his family right now. He wants to focus on her. They talk light-heartedly for a few minutes about meeting in the future – he tells her that she should seek him out if she’s ever in Singapore and she promises that she will, although they both know that she will not come. He makes a bad joke about seeing each other next at each other’s weddings, it being the only reason people travel any more, and she grimaces, telling him that she will never get married.