We Are All Birds of Uganda

by Hafsa Zayyan

  It’s only in the evening that Sameer is finally alone with his parents, when Zara has taken Amira Ben and her children to the hospital for the final visiting slot of the day. He forces his parents to sit in the front room and says: ‘I really need to talk to you now.’ His mother looks anxious; his father nonchalant, looking around as if the room is far more interesting than anything Sameer has to say.

  Sameer is surprised to hear his heart beating loud and fast and his voice is almost shaking when he speaks: ‘I’ve done some serious thinking in my time off.’

  His father’s arms are crossed and he glances at his watch.

  Sameer closes his eyes briefly. ‘I’m quitting my job. I’m going to hand my notice in tomorrow.’

  Immediately his father’s eyes snap up. In an instant, the anger has dissolved, those five weeks of silence mean nothing. His father’s eyes are shining: Sameer is forgiven, all is forgiven. ‘Well, my son –’ his father’s voice trembles with emotion – ‘you’ve finally seen sense, I am so proud of you.’

  ‘Dad – no –’

  ‘You are a smart young boy – you always took after me in that way. What you and I, son, will make of this business, we’ll be such a success together. To know that there is someone who will take over the legacy that we have worked so hard to create …’ he breathes, almost overcome. ‘I can’t put into words how happy you have made me today, Sameer.’

  Sameer shakes his head disbelievingly: how is it already going so wrong? But he lets his father finish because there is no use in trying to interrupt him. When his father finally stops, looking at Sameer with anticipation, Sameer looks straight back. He steels himself. ‘I’m not quitting to join the family business, Dad,’ he says. ‘I’m quitting because I’m going to move to Uganda.’

  It is as if he has slapped his father in the face; he is now deflated, confused. Sameer’s mother’s voice pipes up, small and vulnerable: ‘What are you saying, beta? Is this some kind of joke?’

  ‘No.’ He explains that he has seen a gap in the market that he wants to exploit, that he has some capital and he’ll use a loan to fund some of it, and if it doesn’t work out, there’s nothing to stop him from coming back. ‘It’s not a permanent move,’ he says.

  ‘It’s a bloody stupid idea,’ his father snaps. ‘You’ve spent one short holiday there. You know nothing about that country, nothing about what it put us through. That country is not safe for people like us. They resent us. You think you’re so high and mighty now that you would be insulated from all that, huh?’

  ‘Well, there is one other thing,’ Sameer says, and this time he averts his eyes, so he’s looking beyond his parents and at a spot on the wall. ‘I’ve met someone.’ Silence. ‘Who I want to marry,’ he adds.

  His mother’s face expands with excitement; the tears have dried instantaneously. ‘It’s the Shahs’ daughter, isn’t it?!’ she yelps. ‘Now, she is a bit young, but she comes from a very good family, a very rich family –’ a high-pitched giggle – ‘oh, it all makes sense now, but you don’t need to move to Uganda for her, she will easily come here. She’s already studying in London, at the SOAS.’

  Sameer bites his lip. Why do his parents have to do this? ‘Mum,’ he says, ‘it’s not Aliyah. It’s a lady called Maryam.’

  ‘Maryam?’ his mother’s eyes narrow with suspicion; the drawbridge is going up.

  ‘Dad,’ he turns to his father. ‘Do you remember a man called Abdullah? He was friends with Dada.’ His father says nothing. ‘Well,’ Sameer continues, ‘his family are living in our family’s old house. Maryam is one of his granddaughters.’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ his mother says, looking at his father.

  There is silence for a few moments and then, abruptly, Sameer’s father stands up. ‘Abdullah was our house servant,’ he spits.

  ‘Yes – was,’ Sameer begins, but he is cut off again by his father.

  ‘A servant whose family took everything from mine. They took our house, our business. They took my father,’ and he chokes on the last word. ‘Your grandfather went back to that godforsaken country and died in the care of those people. That’s the family your son wants to marry into,’ he says to Sameer’s mother.

  Sameer looks at his father and tries to force himself to feel pity – he imagines what it might feel like to lose your father at the tender age of twenty-one, to lose him to a country that had so clearly rejected him, yet a country to which he had returned. He tries to feel the anger, the hurt. Mhota Papa’s voice comes unprompted to his head: Your dada loved that man more than anyone else in the world. He exhales slowly. ‘Abdullah was Dada’s friend above everything,’ he says. ‘Yes, he was a servant, but then he became a businessman. He worked with Dada. He was a Muslim. Maryam is a Muslim. And yes, she is a black Ugandan.’

  He looks at his parents’ horrified faces and his heart becomes cold. They look pathetic, almost stupid. ‘Is there a problem?’

  ‘Astaghfirullah,’ his mother whispers. May Allah forgive us. ‘So this is the real reason you want to move to Uganda, huh?’ she lets out a sob. ‘Ensnared by some black witch!’

  ‘What the fuck, Mum. What are you saying?’

  ‘Don’t you dare use that language with your mother,’ his father warns, voice dangerously quiet. He is still standing; perhaps he had made up his mind to leave, but something had stopped him, trapped him to the scene of the unfolding drama. His mother sobs softly in the background. Then his father says calmly: ‘Sameer, it is inappropriate. We will not accept it.’

  ‘How is it inappropriate?’ Sameer challenges. ‘There’s nothing inappropriate about it.’ He knows that they cannot bring themselves to spell it out, why they disapprove, why they don’t want this for their good Asian son. ‘And I don’t need you to accept it. But I would love for you to be a part of it.’

  ‘We will never be a part of such a thing,’ his father says bitterly. ‘She will never understand our family, she will never understand our culture. There are plenty of lovely women at the mosque who you could marry. If you’re feeling ready, then we can help you satisfy that need. You don’t have to go off to Uganda to do that.’

  ‘But I love her,’ Sameer says bluntly, annoyed that it has come to this because he knows they will interpret this statement as childish and whining.

  ‘You don’t know what love is – you’ve barely known her a month!’

  ‘Oh, and you both knew, did you, before you had your arranged marriage? You didn’t know each other at all!’

  There is silence after this comment, and in a way this is worse than any response they could have given him.

  ‘Look,’ he tries again softly, ‘Samah married John and that was fine –’ ignoring the mutter from his mother that Samah’s not our daughter – ‘we live in a multicultural world now, you can’t expect me – or Zara – to marry someone from the same village in India that your ancestors were from. And it doesn’t make sense anyway.’ There is the sound of a car in the driveway, the chatter of voices: Amira Ben and Zara have returned from the hospital. ‘Just meet her once,’ he says quickly, eyes imploring. ‘I’m going to hand in my notice tomorrow and then I’m going back to Uganda. Come with me. Meet her.’

  22

  To my first love, my beloved

  18th July 1974

  Shabnam has been on strike for two months now. That beautiful brown package that she would bring home to my eager waiting hands at the end of each month has stopped coming; the money has all but dried up. We are dependent now on the family’s general pot, and once the money has filtered through the needy hands and greedy pockets of the younger generation, there is little left to spare for the frivolities of the older generation: six children to put through school, one child soon to go to university, Zakir for whom we must find a wife (the lazy bastard is still not working), and Fatma for whom we need to save up a dowry. I will admit that priority is given to the matter of my medication, but at this stage, I hardly care whether I live or die. (Shabnam, for your informatio
n, is well, no health problems so to speak. Indeed, she has never been better it seems.) I have said several times to Shabnam that we should follow my Farah and move to London, where Noor’s wealthy family will be able to provide for us. But Shabnam did not want to take our children – ‘You really want to make them move again, Hasan? They have only just settled in their schools. And I’m not going without them. My babies need me.’ But they are not babies. The lot of them are old enough to be married. ‘I’ll just go without you then,’ I grumbled back. But I have not contacted Farah yet.

  Well, there is one thing Shabnam is wrong about. The children are not settled. Rizwan came home with a broken nose last week, blood dripping down his little zip-up jacket, face swollen with snot and tears. Shabnam screamed when she saw him. She stood up from the floor where she had been painting a picket sign and scooped him into her arms, rocking him and asking: ‘What did they do to you, beta?’ I was in my armchair and I called for Shahzeb; then, remembering that of course he would not be in the house, I called for Tasneem. ‘See what is wrong with him.’ Tasneem took him from Shabnam and tilted his head towards the single yellow bulb. ‘His nose looks broken, Papa,’ she said to me. ‘I will take him to the hospital.’ We don’t have a car, of course, so off they went in the bus, Shabnam, Tasneem and Rizwan, leaving me with a half-painted picket sign and an uncontrollable itch.

  Tasneem told me later that Rizwan had been walking home from the bus stop, minding his own business, when he was kicked in the back of the knees and stumbled. He righted himself, and turned to face two boys, no older than him – perhaps even younger, he said. ‘Wogs out!’ one of the boys shouted and smacked him so hard in the face that he fell to the floor. Who knew small children could carry such brute force?

  When they finally returned from the hospital, it was two o’clock in the morning. They had been gone for ten hours. I had not moved from the armchair; in fact, I had fallen asleep on it in front of the flickering television set. Rizwan’s nose was bandaged; in one hand he held on to a boiled sweet.

  ‘I don’t want to go to school tomorrow, Papa,’ he said in a muffled voice.

  ‘You will go,’ I responded curtly.

  Shabnam put a hand on his head, and said gently: ‘If you do not go to school, you will not become clever like your papa. That’s what they want, isn’t it, the people who did this to you? They don’t want you to become clever. So if you don’t go to school, you are letting them win.’

  ‘I d-don’t w-want to go!’ Rizwan burst into noisy tears and ran up the stairs. Tasneem sighed heavily and followed him. I wanted Shabnam to stay with me; I tried to grab her hand as she walked past my armchair, but I could not reach her. I wanted to tell her that she had found the words I had wanted to say, that she had said the right thing. But she walked straight past me, and I did not say anything at all.

  Shabnam despises me now; I am certain of it. That is fine; I also despise her. There is no need for privacy now and there is no room for it anyway: we share a room with two of our children; the other children share with Shahzeb’s youngest son; Samir and Tasneem share a room with their two children. Shahzeb, his wife and their two daughters live in the adjoining house, together with Ahmed and his wife and their two children, and Aisha and her husband. I tell no lie! – all twenty-three of us, squeezed into two three-bedroomed houses, squashed together under the same adjoining roof, along the same suffocating road.

  Belgrave is a far cry from Nakasero; my heart longs for its trim lawns and wide-open spaces. This street is run-down, England’s equivalent of a slum, where, instead of karia, brown children run barefoot along the pavements, houses reeking of fried onions. Leicester has many brown areas, and – just like Kampala – has its white areas also. We are in what I am told is the best of the brown areas – because we were fortunate enough to know the Mehtas, whom Shabnam diligently contacted as soon as she arrived. There is already a community here, and yes, they are mainly Hindu, but I do not mind – I would still rather live here than in the depths of Spinney Hill, mixing with immigrants from the Caribbean and elsewhere. At least here we are all Asian.

  Signs of the Asian occupation are already starting to show; Belgrave Road has the beginnings of the facade of Old Kampala, though none of its spirit. Samir and Shahzeb used our export relationships to bring goods from India into the country. They had no money, so they had to borrow it, and they had no credit history, so they had to invent one. But the good news was that rent was cheap. And, in my brief absence, they opened a shop, doing just what Papa did all those years ago when he first arrived in Uganda. Saeed’s Saris. I was so proud of them when the store launched. If I have done nothing, Amira, I have succeeded in one thing. Instilling business in the blood of my children.

  Oh, how I long for the warm air of Kampala! Sometimes I think that if I can just want it enough, Allah will find a way of taking me there. I suspect Allah may be quite angry with me though. We have not spoken for some time, because I feel too guilty to face him. The Quran says that alcohol has some good and some evil, but the evil is greater than the good and we should therefore abstain. You know me, and I swear to you that until I came to England, I never touched a drop of that haraam liquid. But these British public houses are places where you can ‘drown your sorrows’ and it is easy, so easy, to forget with drink.

  ‘We are worried about you, Papa,’ Samir says to me, sitting me down on my armchair and looking me in the eyes. Musty old second-hand armchair in the corner of the small, insipid room. I close my eyes and I remember the grandeur of our house in Kampala, where five families could live comfortably under that roof and not complain for space. ‘Are you taking your medication?’ Of course I am taking my medication, you idiots. I need to keep myself alive so I can get back to Uganda. I’m just in need of a drink.

  Shabnam looks at me with a combination of pity and disgust. I have pulled her hair, grabbed and pinched the flesh of her arms, trying to make her see what I am feeling. When I arrived in England, I noticed that she was different somehow; hardened. Gone were the soft rolls; there was steel in her eyes. She had taken up a job. A woman who had never worked a day in her life, and within a month of being in Leicester, she and Aisha were working in a local factory.

  But I tell you, this strike business is a stupid injustice. Like most things now, it makes no sense to me: I am both proud of her and angry at her. We are a desperate people, so we are not in a position to be making demands. Yes, I understand that it is not fair, that she is being paid less than her white counterparts, that she is not getting the promotions or the better roles. But since when was life fair? And since when were Asians in this country in a good bargaining position? We have nothing; now is not the time to be negotiating. For as long as she strikes, she brings me no money, and for as long as I have no money, my throat stays dry. She spends her days painting placards and protesting in front of the factory. It is a dangerous business, I have warned her – there are women who have been arrested by the police, women who have been attacked by the National Front. She thrust a newspaper in front of me with a quote from the trade union official in response to the strike: ‘They’ve got no legitimate grounds for complaint. They’ve got to learn to fit in with our ways, we haven’t got to learn to fit in with theirs. In a civilised society the majority view will prevail.’ She says she will not live like this.

  From where has she imbibed this stronghold attitude? There is perhaps more of a community here than there was in Kampala; here there are no barbed-wire fences or sky-high hedges, we live atop one another, and there is no way of avoiding having your business known by everyone. Shabnam has formed a friendship with the striking ladies that runs deeper than any friendship she has ever known: they rise together, eat together, strike together. I have told her that we need the money (‘To fund your drinking habit, astaghfirullah!’ she screamed at me as I grabbed her wrist), that beggars cannot be choosers. But she will not return to work.

  There is a part of me that watches her determination every day, her
purpose, a part of me that watches the rest of them getting on with their lives whilst I flounder and stumble, and I loathe them all and wish that I had never joined them. I had imagined that they would be lost without me, that they had spent their days waiting for me to join them, that they could not survive without me. But by the time I arrived in Leicester last summer, they were already settled into their new lives. It was as if my arrival was an inconvenience; Shabnam had been living with Aisha, but there was no space for me to live in that house too – Samir offered to take me, but they had to rearrange their sleeping arrangements to accommodate me. The young children were excited to see me at first and I unloaded my pockets with treats from Belgium; but then they quickly forgot about their old papa as they returned to their new world. Samir and Shahzeb had already begun to rent the shop, and I realised that they did not need their papa’s help to start their own success stories.

  I tried to work, you know. At first, when I arrived, I applied for seven different jobs. And I received seven different rejection letters. No one has the need for a man of my age – I am not fit to work in a factory, nor quick enough to work in an office. I wanted to help Samir and Shahzeb with the store – the thing I know above all else – but pride held me back. They had gone ahead and done it all without me; well, if they did not need me, then I would not impose myself upon them. When Samir asked me if I might be able to watch the shop for the day, I declined – sorry, I told him, but I was meeting an old friend.