The Gunny Sack (17 page)

Mzee Pipa, Old Barrel, was the oldest resident on the corner. In Anand Bhavan was short, fiery Nuru Poni the pawnbroker who also wrote letters to the Editor; his store was next to Moonlight Restaurant, which belonged to an Arab. Salama Building boasted Daya’s wife, the rumour-monger, and the
Mawanis, whose son Snivelling Alnasir was my classmate.

Thus was constituted, in the main, the corner of Kichwele and Viongozi, also called the Pipa Corner after its most illustrious resident. You could miss knowing where Viongozi was, because all streets that took off from Kichwele looked alike, the downtown visitors insisted, but everyone knew the corner with its small “keep left” where Mzee Pipa kept shop.

Mzee Pipa, Nurmohamed Pipa, would descend the stairs every morning to his shop, fat and weak-legged, leaning on the shoulder of a servant, wheezing and coughing all the while, suffering from some interminable disease which might just as well have been the condition he lived in. His was also a corner store and our entrances on Viongozi faced each other. All day long he would sit in a white singlet and a worn-out loincloth, perched on a car-seat atop a wooden crate, so that surrounded by all his wares, he looked on the two streets. Crates heaped with grain and spices formed an uneven checkerboard facing Kichwele on one side; a wood-topped counter with a fly-specked glass front, containing old yellowing items, closed off most of the other side, leaving a small passageway behind him. Tufts of grey hair jutted out from under his soft, fat arms. His uncovered chest was a jungle of grey hair, his layered chin had a white stubble, his white head was cropped close. He looked sweaty and dirty, a part of his shop; it seemed you could rub layers and layers of turmeric or coriander, or whatever else he sold, off his skin, he breathed in and breathed out nothing but musty air with the odour of grain and spice, gunny and cockroach egg. Inside, the store was dark and cool. A large and dirty green tarpaulin sheet hung from an awning on the Viongozi side. Behind him were stacks of old newspapers—
News of the World
, the
Illustrated London News
, the
Observer
—for sale by the pound to neighbouring stores. Behind the papers were gunny sacks filled with grain, and behind these, in the storeroom, was complete darkness, where no light, natural or electric, ever reached, where only the servant ventured. There were cupboards on the walls
that had not been opened for years. On the door of one of them was a faded sign showing two pictures side by side: one, a man at his desk, holding his head in despair, his safe open and spilling over with useless scraps of paper and rats running amok among them, with the caption: “I sold on credit”; the other, a smug gentleman counting money in a neat office: “I sold for cash.” Both English gentlemen looked upon scruffy Mzee on his car-seat, selling for cash, not giving anything away. Scrooge in Kariakoo. His hands would be in continuous motion. He would put a handful of spice or gum on a piece of square paper, then fold it rapidly, twice, to make a cone, then a third time, and finally tuck the remaining edge in and throw the finished packet into a basket. It would fetch ten cents from some African woman out to buy the day’s groceries. Ten cents collected in a rusty metal tray with a handle, and deposited into the wooden cashbox that stood under his eyes next to his stomach in front of him on a table. Drop by drop, they said, you can fill an ocean. With clink after patient clink of ten-cent coppers in the cashbox he had acquired his wealth, brick by brick Amin Mansion had gone up over the mud and lime dwelling on Kichwele and Viongozi, named after Amin the son who came after a curse of seven daughters patiently suffered through, all now married.

Oh yes. Our nickname. Pipa Corner was kind to us, we were new and had committed no great folly yet. We were all named after Begum, whom we ourselves sometimes called King George’s daughter. They called Begum “Nairobi”; and sometimes, for her imperious ways, “Victoria.” In Kichwele they denoted more or less the same thing. Of course, any name can be used with a contemptuous twist. Instead of saying, She is like Victoria (a queen), they could (and did) say, She
thinks
she is Rani Victoria. Hunh.

There was a feud on in Pipa Corner, between Pipa’s wife and Roshan Mattress, a quiet heat that remained of an old quarrel, which from time to time rekindled.

In the days before Habib Mansion and Amin Mansion and the other brick buildings went up on the Corner, Nurmohamed Pipa and Roshan’s father had lived across from each other in their shop-houses. Roshan Mattress and Roshan Pipa, the eldest of the seven daughters, were bosom friends, what are called jedels, both fair and with ample bouncy bodies, both high spirited and friendly with all neighbours. They would do their lessons together and walk side by side and sometimes even hand in hand to school. The kind of friendship girls vow to keep for their lifetimes, husband or no husband. Then came a man. Nurdin Samji was fair and handsome, from a respectable downtown family, educated, and worked in a European firm. Sometimes in the late afternoons, when business in the shops was in the doldrums, he would come to Kariakoo collecting for the family firm. One day the word was abroad that the affluent Samjis of downtown had their eyes open for a prospective daughter-in-law. Which of the two Roshans would they pick? One afternoon two Samji matrons descended on Kichwele and Viongozi as it lay drenched in sunlight, barely awake. As soon as they had stepped out of the car and were sighted surveying the territory, a servant was dispatched from the mattress shop and duly brought the two ladies back with him. This was all observed from the produce shop, which was in confusion. By the time the Samji ladies emerged, a deal had been struck, and Roshan Pipa had lost. Even before the two Samji women had left the neighbourhood, the first quarrel had begun.

Now Roshan Mattress lived in Downtown and was dropped by car at her shop every morning by her husband. And Roshan Pipa, in a somewhat hasty face-saving move, had been married into a family whose fortunes were taking one tumble after another. Mrs. Pipa had an endless supply of the choicest invective against her daughter’s former best friend. The sight of Roshan Mattress burned up her insides. “Eh, Haram Zadi, you bastard-bitch!” “She’s not satisfied with stealing one woman’s man. She has the whole town going through her lap!”

Roshan Mattress had retaliated twice against the Pipas. One of the men Pipa’s wife was alluding to was Virendra Kumar, inspector in the CID. One afternoon at two, just after Mzee Pipa returned from lunch and nap, Inspector Kumar arrived with two askaris to search the place for stolen goods. The neighbourhood gossip went that just at that time Mzee Pipa had in his keep a stolen necklace. It was not only from patient acquisition of coppers that Amin Mansion had gone up. Well, Inspector Kumar wanted to search the dark storeroom behind Pipa’s shop, and coughing, spluttering, wheezing Pipa obliged the inspector by sending the servant with the police and giving them a small wick lamp to light their way. The search was fruitless, of course. And they said that the necklace was hidden in the very lamp that the suave Punjabi officer took with him into the rat-infested interior. Mzee Pipa did not give something for nothing. The second time, Inspector Kumar was tipped off about some forged currency. Mzee Pipa had on him one such note when the police car parked outside. As the inspector ducked his balding head under the awning, the Queen’s fair head was negotiating the throaty passage into Mzee Pipa’s ample abdomen. Soon after the two fruitless swoops upon Pipa Store, handsome Inspector Kumar turned his efforts to something more fruitful: Roshan Mattress.

Our welcome into Habib Mansion. A lorry has brought our Nairobi furniture from the customs warehouse. Loud, impatient, sweating men are negotiating the bunk beds and the dining table inch by inch up the stairs, others down below are heaving the display counters into the shop. Elsewhere locks are being installed, a heavy dresser with thief-proof compartments awaits attention, a carpenter oblivious to the din around him patiently takes measurements for a sofa, trunks of clothes and kitchenware are carried inside the flat. And a harried Kulsum, having screamed herself hoarse, finally orders Mehroon to take Sona and me out of her hair, so the three of
us go upstairs to the roof terrace. First we run around the pentagon area several times to get a feel for its dimensions, to imagine the numberless games that could be played here. Then we look over the walls at terraces of other two-storey buildings, we catch a glimpse of Hassam Punja’s tallest building in town. Then we raise ourselves hesitantly over the wall and look down at Dar es Salaam; at the traffic below, the crisscrossing unpaved streets and squat African dwellings that make up most of Kariakoo up to Msimbazi, the long Kichwele Street running all the way from the Railway Station near the harbour to Illala beyond Msimbazi. Finally, using dressmaker’s chalk, hesitantly—because it’s a new building—we make hopscotch squares on the floor and prepare to play. We are still in sandals, in clean clothes, and Mehroon has a ribbon in her hair. All proper.

Thump-thump-thump, in comes a terrible threesome, all barefoot, the eldest a heavy-set girl in a rather short dress, with scraggly hair, thick lips and large mouth from which come hoarse nonsensical syllables the likes of which we have never heard, trailed by a boy and girl closer to my age and also making strange sounds with their mouths. We stand still in terror, while they thump along from wall to wall, as we ourselves had finished doing, before finally coming to a halt before us, the eldest with her arms akimbo. All the while hoarse syllables of meaningless sound falling topsy-turvy from their throats. But the message is clear: this is their territory. By rights we believe it is ours, since it is directly on our ceiling; they are standing on top of our flat. This day we let ourselves be bullied by this mute trio, we walk down the stairs frightened out of our wits; but we will claim it, this terrace, we pay rent, they don’t.

This was our first sight of our neighbours the Bubus, the mutes, who lived below us in Habib Mansion. They were a family of five orphans, three of whom could not speak but let out loud horrifying howls when they quarrelled. In their saner
moments they used gestures and made soft sounds that were almost a pleasure to hear. Then you could almost make out the words they struggled to dislodge so painfully from their mouths. To call them everyone simply hooted: “Hoo!” and they responded. The eldest of the five was a girl, normal, and all neighbourhood complaints were directed to her. Then came fierce Varaa, who had terrorized us on the terrace. Her real name was Gulshan, but Varaa was her warcry, she was the loudest of the lot. She howled in sorrow and in anger, she could bring the whole building down with her cry, Varaa, Varaa, Varaa. Then came Ahmed, also normal, but a bully, two years older than I.

To go down to the shop from our flat we had to pass their floor, and when a fight was in progress we trod it with special care, even gingerly. There would be howls and screams, objects smashing, bodies falling. It would not have taken much provocation, it seemed, for the whole lot of them to stop fighting among themselves and fall on you like a pack of wild monkeys.

How memory makes monkeys out of our enemies … We thought of them only as howls of madness, of a family gone collectively berserk, but now I think of the sorrow, the frustration. Eh, Shehru—what, no better memories? Not a word of kindness or understanding? Only the bitterness, Ahmed sitting at the bottom of the staircase, legs stretched out, daring you to step over, the howls under the dark staircase, the ambushes on the stairs at night … and Kulsum would complain to their grandfather the landlord, to the numerous uncles and aunts. Periodically, the grandfather came to mete out punishment. He was a small, thin man in a crumpled white suit and a black fez. He brought with him a stick which he held firmly and with obvious purpose. When the doors closed behind him the howls became ferocious, interspersed with the old man’s imprecations. It seemed then that the rest of Kichwele and Viongozi held their breath, throwing glances towards the bedlam, as if to say, What now?

No, the reconciliation came later, a truce really, and it had to be paid for, in cash.

My cousin Shamim, after a few months with Fatu Auntie who would scrub her body with Vim to make her whiter, came to stay with us. There were then six of us, with Kulsum, in the two rooms. There was Begum, of course. Then Mehroon and Yasmin who were my Aunt Gula’s; and finally Shamim, Sona and I. Mehroon was now ours; but Yasmin by a family decision belonged to Bahdur Uncle, Shamim’s father who was seeking a fortune in the interior.

In the sitting room, which was brightened with tube lights, was Kulsum’s big double bed on which she would sit in the evenings cutting patterns from bolts of cloth for the next day’s sewing. The radio would be on, turned low, and home-works done in various corners. Sona and I would be sent to bed, and when the rest of the family turned in, the one of us whose turn it was would be taken to Kulsum’s bed to sleep with her. The other would sleep with one of the older girls.

We fought, Sona and I, we fought, and cheated, and cried, to share our mother’s bed, to feel her tight smothering embrace as she murmured endearments at us …

In the afternoon, after school, the girls helped in the store, while Sona and I were put to bed and locked in, upstairs. When we awoke after the nap, it would already be getting dark, most of the day was over, and in a panic we would rush to the window and cry for our release. Downstairs there would be more of us than customers, fighting over snacks of roasted cassava and corn and the occasional bottle of Coke, as the three tailors came in before closing time bringing their day’s work, which would be tallied and noted down against their names in a big ledger and their thumb-prints or signatures taken against the entries. Hassan Uncle had advised Kulsum to take a signature for everything.

At the month’s end, or in the days preceding the Eid, the store stayed open late and everyone was downstairs at once;
all were needed, to show customers, to wrap, give change, or simply to watch out for the 420s. Kulsum always sat at the head of the store, behind the big centre display counter watching over the cashbox, on a high stool … and when business was slack she would be looking out, straight ahead, brooding, picking her chin …