The Gunny Sack (40 page)

It started with a rumour. There is a certain ship. It can take you to Pakistan. And, with the proper bribery, all your goods and assets. The rumour circulated and soon became fact, passages on this mysterious saviour of a ship were sold like lottery tickets, through private agents and a certain travel agent. Over a few days, old heavy furniture, closets, refrigerators, radios, even TVs from Nairobi, were lowered into the ship. Hassan Uncle and Zera Auntie came to say goodbye. Where will you go? Karachi. Do you know anyone there? No. Will you be all right there? God willing … our people are there. From where this blind trust? “Our people” were certainly there, many of them ready to scalp these African Asians who, they had always believed, were rich and proud. But this contingent did not make it. One day before departure, at about eleven in the morning, an old Ignis refrigerator hung suspended from a crane making its way into the hold of the saviour ship. But some silly passenger had secured the door of the fridge with a tape … which snapped at one point and then rapidly at several others and the door swung open. Out dropped manna for the dock workers below, notes in several currencies, and jewellery. The police were called, impounded the ship and found: fridges overflowing with currency, iceboxes stashed with dollars and pounds and rupees, butter and cheese compartments containing jewellery. Come and claim your property, said the police.

It was now, not before, when Ushirika House was nationalized, that Hassan Uncle was wiped out. Not completely, shopkeepers are indomitable, Hassan Uncle had other assets, but positively his last. He had five children, three of them
overseas, including Mehboob, who had shown Charlie Chaplin films on their bedroom linen in Msimbazi so many years ago, for ten cents a show per person. Mehboob, after several false starts in Toronto, had rediscovered his vocation; he showed Indian films, first in school halls on weekends, and later in a full-fledged cinema house. And with the new name of Mehboob Khan, he came to claim his parents, one of whom, my uncle, had suffered a nervous breakdown.

The last time I saw Hassan Uncle.

The family had come to say goodbye. The sitting room was almost empty, except for two rows of chairs which had formed from a broken circle, and a table with tea and snacks. It was after the tea, Fatu Auntie had been going on and on about her life in Zanzibar forty years ago, and everyone was now in the mood for discussing the past. Hassan Uncle was silent, listening with a long serious face, arms folded. He wore, as always, a long-sleeved shirt with tails hanging out. Then Kulsum started talking about her Kariakoo shop, and naturally Hassan Uncle’s name came up, and his face lit up with a smile and he joined in. He got up and said, “Remember, I would go on my bicycle from Msimbazi to Kichwele like this …” And standing up, he went around the room, and then between the rows of chairs in figures of eight, his two hands in front of him as if he were walking the bicycle, which he had often done instead of riding it. At which point Mehboob Khan got up and brought his father back to his chair, and the goodbyes and the tears started, the loudest and the most prolonged naturally from Fatu Auntie.

Zera Auntie went around making elaborate goodbyes, telling long stories, and slipping hundred-shilling notes into hands and bosoms, in a last extravagant act of charity. She looked rather odd, in fact aged and toothless. There was a simple reason for this. Zera Auntie had been due for several fillings and a couple of extractions. Mehboob Khan came up with
a simple, one-stroke money-saving solution: since all the teeth would go some day, anyway, and dentures being expensive in Canada, why not have the dentures fitted before departure? At the time of goodbye, poor pink-gummed philanthropic Zera Auntie, her hair in curls, was still waiting for her dentures.

As I was leaving, and he stood at the door shaking hands and giving hugs, Hassan Uncle said, in his usual cryptic fashion:

“Like the king.”

“What king, Hassan Uncle?” I asked, half expecting: Aré, what world are you all living in? and a contemptuous glare from the stony face. But he was kinder.

“Bruce … Bruce! The king with the spider!”

The tube light clicked on, as they say. “Yes, yes, King Bruce!”

“Like him, we’ll make it.”

Shamas Pir had promised the Shamsis a saviour from the west, and they had waited for hundreds of years. Now it seemed to some that he had come, not a pir, but a Pierre, Trudeau of Canada, promising a cold Eldorado in the north. He will take us, they said, as he took the Ugandans, leave it to Pierre True-do! And they, who had renounced the Queen’s rule for a new future, abandoned hope and returned to her, still close but separated by an ocean.

Sona left, and Amina returned. A triumphant Amina, full of the world: a sober, mature Amina, a feminist Amina, still a Marxist-Leninist; a bigger, heavier Amina, hamburgers and chips had gone well with her, but for that a more imposing Amina, Amina who came with a man, and note this, not a black but a white American, Mark, of slight build and full red beard, the same politics, soft-spoken and very attentive and caring. They had come via Cuba.

Amina attracted neophytes, men and women to sit at her feet and learn about the reality and all-pervasiveness of politics. Life without politics was an illusion; so was commitment without activism, for this woman who had been through peace marches and campus occupations. She gave two lectures when she came; one on politics and the African novel, the other on feminism and Africa. So radical she looked, so eclectic
was her knowledge, so much authority was exuded by the kitenge maxi dresses and the Afro hairstyle—immediately, she established a following.

She took a job as a teacher at Jangwani, and set up house on Viongozi Street, not far from where Jogo used to live. (Jogo, of course, had moved up, to Upanga.) The house became famous, and was filled with visitors. In the reception room books lined the walls and newspapers lay on the floor, where also Amina sat, on one of the pillows. It was impossible to go there without meeting someone coming out or preparing to leave after an audience. The outside door—old, wooden, discoloured and twisted by the ravages of alternate rain and sun—opened into a long corridor on each side of which, almost immediately you stepped in, were two large bedrooms with very small windows. At the end of the corridor was the sitting-reception room.

Here came all kinds of people, the original SNAFU, and recently the poet Abdel Latif Kodi, and some overseas students. The poet was quiet and looked rather ordinary, and only with some difficulty could one induce him to recite any verses. It was only with the Zanzibari Zuleika, now a Swahili teacher, that he really sat down to talk seriously. It seemed that there was another existence that he lived, where he was quite eloquent, for in his country he had been in prison for his views … an existence that Amina obviously shared. Then there was Beverley St. George, also a teacher at Jangwani, a short Canadian girl with a rather freckled round face, who let herself be the butt of jokes sometimes, but who could hold her own quite well; and the Caribbean Indian student and poet Alex Ramdas, and Rashid and Layla, and Brother Zahir.

Rashid was born in Durban and brought up in Glasgow, taught political economy at the University, and never failed to rouse wonder in his listeners when, from his dark brown face and gold-toothed mouth, emerged an impeccably precise English accent, which earned him the title of “Call Me Bwana.”
Layla was his English wife, a red-pigtailed girl in long, dumpy skirts, rather like the picture of a maid on a Danish biscuit tin. But appearances were deceptive: she was a volatile feminist, whose reason for her peculiar dressing, beside the evident comfort, was to drown in them the leery eyes of men. Layla was a social anthropologist, and one day she read what she had observed and concluded about our mixed-race group, with the result that she was almost beaten up.

Alex, the Caribbean poet, had a strange habit of reading—from a paper or book in his left hand, the right hand held up in front of the audience, executing a circular motion, like a strange little machine spewing forth words. A poor reader, who is to say how good a poet? One poem everybody definitely considered bad: it had “Ujamaa” appearing seven times, but it brought him opportunities to read at several University functions.

Then our own Brother Zahir, bespectacled, small and professorial—who, years before, would intercept us (Sona, Alu, Jogo and I) on United Nations Road on our way to school, emerging from behind a bush (for everybody avoided him) and asking, “Brother, did you say your prayers today?” This had earned him the nickname. He had, by way of Moral Rearmament and Gandhiism, now arrived at a cold-blooded theoretical Marxism, throwing every historical event to the cogs of a class struggle machinery, letting it churn out the conclusion. Thus Idi Amin, whose bloody deeds came splattered regularly in the news reports, was simply a monster produced by the structures left behind by colonialism. How could one disagree with such generalities? And what good were they to those who were literally battered to death? To Brother Zahir and Amina (and the two could go on for ages, talking of case histories like doctors), the political economist Rashid, interminably reading Durrell, was a mere romantic: he loved everybody, good or bad, and laughed at and with them, and at himself. He was most like the “Shehe,” Ali Tamim, and the two
were planning a book on the life and economy of Kilwa when the Portuguese came.

Of course, it was not only for politics that they came to sit at her feet—these teachers, lecturers and students. There were always two sides to Amina—the theoretician scholar to whom the government measures seemed non-vigorous, slow, half-baked, its socialist vocabulary lacking commitment and real meaning; and the person, the warm, passionate and even fragile Amina, who needed people, who could lure them unawares to her causes as she had once lured me in Kaboya. Without her that group was nothing. She provided the place, the atmosphere and the agenda. For most of us that place on Viongozi was more—a club for like-minded people, always open, always hospitable.

And every evening a gang of noisy young boys waited expectantly outside this bustling house, then Mark would emerge in his shorts and colourful T-shirt and they would follow him at a distance as he jogged on Morogoro Road, in the direction of Morogoro, down the hill and then back up again, the only American to have lived this side of Mnazi Moja.

I taught at BOSS, my old school, where once the only important things were to get first grade in Senior Cambridge, for the school to win the Christopher Cup in cricket and the Youth Drama Festival trophy. Like other schools we now had a farm, to which every afternoon a few classes were assigned. Mr. Kabir, Mr. Khan, Mr. Sardar, once respective heads of departments, now you could see carrying the odd panga or jembe, desperately waiting for their retirement dates. None of them lasted till then, they went on to Zambia, these men who had simply come to teach but then had nowhere to go, who belonged nowhere. (Sona traced another of our Indian teachers in New York, Mr. Patwekar, who lived in a single room and taught maths in a ghetto school.) At BOSS the basketball court was overgrown, the tennis racquets were taken away by the
last tennis captain, the cricket ground was becoming a Serengeti without lions. Perhaps this was how it had looked when the school was not built and there
were
lions in the area. (Looking out of the door of Form IA I would imagine sometimes a maize field there … and the ghosts of past cricketers Gumji Junior, Goani, Abuani Solanki running through it, picking maize … or slashing at the grass with their bats.) Jangwani was not far and I would sometimes have lunch there with Amina and Mark (who taught biology there); their house was a further five minutes away. At Zanaki, the former Agakhan Girls’ School, Zuleika Kassam, quiet SNAFU member, taught literature and Swahili. She also lived in Upanga. On two occasions we returned together rather late from Amina’s house. The second time her mother was waiting for her. She spoke the Zanzibari Cutchi-Swahili mix.

“Weh Zuli, mbona umerudi so late-late, basi?”

“Mummy, I was at a meeting.”

“Ah!” She was visibly vexed. “Why didn’t you tell me, then?”

“I didn’t know it would be so late, Mummy.”

The occasion had been the Uganda expulsion, its announcement, and the debate at Amina’s was heated.

“To come this late, and walking tena, and with a man in the dark … ah-ah-ah … I could have sent Mahmoud …”

“But he’s only Kulsum Bai’s son!”

“Which Kulsum Bai?”

She came to peer at me, I was still in the garden, Zuleika was at the door defending her virtue.

“Hebu, basi. Kulsum Dhanji?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Whose son is in America and writes to her in Gujarati?”

“Yes, my brother.”

“It is true, eti? In Gujarati? They teach that there?”

“Yes.”

He had only learnt the script, which Kulsum had written down for him. The language of course he spoke!

“Come in. You will have tea?”

“No, I must go. My mother must be worrying.” I watched her go back in: like most Indian women her age she had a roll to her walk from unduly large hips, a result of successive child deliveries.