The Gunny Sack

Memory, Ji Bai would say, is this old sack here, this poor dear that nobody has any use for any more.As the novel begins, Salim Juma, in exile from Tanzania, opens up a gunny sack bequeathed to him by a beloved great-aunt. Inside it he discovers the past -- his own family's history and the story of the Asian experience in East Africa. Its relics and artefacts bring with them the lives of Salim's Indian great-grandfather, Dhanji Govindji, his extensive family, and all their loves and betrayals.Dhanji Govindji arrives in Matamu -- from Zanzibar, Porbander, and ultimately Junapur -- and has a son with an African slave named Bibi Taratibu. Later, growing in prosperity, he marries Fatima, the woman who will bear his other children. But when his half-African son Husein disappears, Dhanji Govindji pays out his fortune in trying to find him again. As the tentacles of the First World War reach into Africa, with the local German colonists fighting British invaders,...