Amriika (28 page)

“I have a temporary job with a Senate foreign relations subcommittee on Africa, as a translator. It’s not going to last long, though. I’m not sure whether to go back to school or not.”

They arrived at the bookstore, and before entering it, he paused at the door and pointed in the direction of the grey brick ivy-covered walls visible further ahead up the road: “Someone I knew long ago went to Glenmore College.”

“Who?” she asked.

He shook his head, lied: “Too long ago — I barely remember her.”

For a good hour they browsed among the aisles of the large and well-stocked bookstore and selected some books to give as presents.

Finally over coffees at the upper storey of the store, he said to Rumina: “I must confess I may not be able to help you much with this —” he indicated the buff envelope she’d brought along. “It’s been such a long time since I looked at Swahili poetry.” Better come clean, he said to himself.

“That’s all right. You can try,” she replied.

“So I may have brought you here under false pretenses.”

“Oh, did you now? I thought it was I who brought you here.” Her eyes flashed at him mischievously.

“I guess you did,” he conceded.

Is she hinting at something — or is she merely a tease, likes to see them make fools of themselves. She seems delightfully — breathtakingly — fresh and young, smooth-skinned (now, now, hold that old lecher’s eye …); unburdened and sprightly; still in her twenties, I guess. All those years she’s got ahead of her, like money in the bank.

“I’ll keep this copy then,” he told her. “I’ll read it, and maybe write to you —”

“I would like that, thank you.”

The material she had brought for him was a long Swahili poem written in the sixteenth century, during a time of distress, when the town of Mombasa was under foreign attack. It had seen numerous assaults from the sea by Portuguese and Arabs, and had earned the appellation Mvita, or “wars.” She had edited and commented on the poem. He could still be able to say a few things on the subject, he thought. He had, after all, at one time studied several varieties of the Swahili language, going to Boston University in the evenings, and had been versed in the academic literature.

“You know, Milton mentions both Mombasa and Kilwa in his
Paradise Lost
. I wonder where, in what texts, that knowledge
existed … Portuguese accounts, I suppose. I picture the angel Michael and Adam kneeling on top of a mountain, at the edge of Paradise, and Michael pointing out Kilwa and Mombasa along the Indian Ocean coast, dhows bobbing in the harbour … and Adam looking at the whole panorama of East Africa.…Maybe that’s where the angel then sent him, and Louis Leakey found his remains in the Zinjanthropus!”

She had been staring at him, and he felt embarrassed, exposed, by his excitement.

“Have you ever been back?” she asked, indulgently.

“Regretfully, no. Never. I could have gone while I was still a student, I suppose. I never managed it.”

“Why? … An overactive and — what was it? — fruitless love life?”

“That, too,” he said to her beaming face, “but.…” And he explained to her patiently the difficult political climate of that period; and even how, when the Asians were afraid that their daughters would be taken away by African politicians as brides, his grandmother had sent him a photograph of a cousin and asked him to marry her. “Of course, as you can see, I didn’t.” He told her of the death of his grandmother, and that he had nobody left there.

It was, he thought, a wonderful thing talking to a young person outside business, outside family, outside the
sansara
of daily life, the
janjaara
, the hustle-bustle. So was she an angel, come to remind him, Harken! Wake up to life! He smiled at himself.

“A penny for your thoughts,” she said.

He smiled even more broadly. “I used to read that phrase in Enid Blyton. Did you read her?”

Yes, she had. And no, Elvis and the Beatles were not big in her time, it was Michael Jackson.

“
Rumina mimina
 …,” he murmured. “You wouldn’t know that.”

“Repeat that, please.”

“It is a ditty some African girls used to sing at the back of our house while skipping rope —
Rumina mimina/maziwa na sukari
,” he recited with the proper stresses. It meant “Rumina pour out/the milk and the sugar.”

His grandmother’s house had been the old-fashioned kind, low, with a corrugated metal roof, mud walls, and cement plaster. Behind the backyard fence was an African settlement where his grandmother would send him to buy vitumbua or maandazi, sweet breads fried by the women, for breakfast. There would always be a group of young girls staring warily at him, having stopped their game of skipping rope to do so.

“Well, I’m half African,” she said, “as you’ve guessed.”

“Not really.”

“But I
am
half African,” she said, leaning forward to press her point. “In school they called me
nusu
, for ‘half’ — I’m half-caste.”

He stared at her. “Does anybody ever use that word anymore — ‘half-caste’?”

“Oh, it’s common. All us half-castes were lumped together. My father was the African.”

“And your mother?”

“I don’t remember her.”

He wanted to ask why, but he didn’t. That would be prying.

As they walked back, a feeling of contentment infused him. He hadn’t felt so with himself in a very long time.

R
amji and Zuli had planned to spend the next two days with their kids in New York before returning to Glenmore on the eve of Jamila’s “mustardseed” party. A few months ago a former school chum had called up Zuli from Long Island, where she’d moved from England, and an old, almost forgotten friendship had been re-established. This would be their first meeting in twenty-three years, with families, and there was some apprehension about that. The twins for their part were dying to see Gotham, the Big Apple, the city of everything big and notorious, “cool” and “nasty.” And so Zuli with Sara and Rahim left by the Thursday morning Amtrak train, with Ramji staying back to attend to chores (a business call from his partner Stan, for one thing) and to follow in the family car later in the day.

Having dropped off Zuli and the twins at the train station, Ramji drove to Glenmore’s popular Le Coffee Break to meet Rumina. He had read her material late the previous night and had jotted down some observations. In this he was perhaps (why “perhaps”?) cheating a little; he didn’t have to do this, he had already promised to send her his comments by mail. But Rumina
was leaving this afternoon, and he’d felt a sudden craving to see her one more time. (He didn’t want to admit that this was perhaps his real reason for wanting to stay on.) Family life seemed such a closed world, a relentlessly single track cluttered with routines, and predictable even in its upheavals and recoveries, that the prospect of a mere flutter, an ephemeral, fleeting moment of verbal seduction and daydreaming, was irresistible.

Rumina had already arrived and found a table, and she looked up with a large smile as Ramji approached.

“You certainly know how to keep a girl waiting, don’t you,” she said impishly.

She had been delighted, he would even have said flattered, when he’d called her earlier this morning and told her he could meet her later to discuss her thesis. Iqbal and Susan were gone, to Providence, and she had been alone in their friends’ house, packed up and biding her time before she left for the train station. She had no desire to wait for Jamila’s party on Sunday. “I think I’ve had enough of this company.” “Oh?” “I don’t mean you, of course,” she laughed.

“It’s quite a rendezvous, isn’t it — this place.” He gave a quick look around as he sat down. The café seemed full but not crowded, and there was an air of suburban gentility to it, reinforced by Vivaldi playing in the background.

“Yes. I was just thinking there must be a lot of affairs being arranged here!”

She giggled when he gave another look around as if to check out her surmise, then stopped abruptly and blushed a little, her hands clasped in front of her on the table.

“I see you’re in a naughty mood today, on the day you’re leaving. I think we look quite respectable, though.”

“I think so too,” she said.

She beamed. Her hair was now gathered back from her face and held with a barrette, a red and white beaded disk. She wore jeans and a long white and green cotton shirt, the front of which was decorated with a solid black map of Africa facing a silhouette of Nefertiti in profile.

The waitress came, they gave their orders, he a large espresso, she a “frostino.”

“Look, I brought your stuff. I’ve read it and made some comments, for what they’re worth. But read them only after you’ve left. I don’t know what you expected of me.”

“Let me be the judge of that. You are too modest. Sona warned me …”

“Yes? What?”

“Never mind,” she replied, and he flinched at these words, which his kids sometimes used, to cut him off, to his great annoyance.

“Well,” she gave in, watching him, “that you were diffident and modest, that’s all.”

What’s she really like? She’s just a girl and I’ve brought her here under false pretenses; a Muslim girl … a lovely girl, really, with a string of admirers I bet ready to jump to attention with a blink of those big round eyes of hers.

The poem she had edited was called “Enerico na Fatima”; it told the story, set in medieval times, of the love of a Portuguese commandant for a young Arab widow in Mombasa. Every afternoon for a few days Enerico would go to sit across the street from the widow’s house, and gaze up at the latticed windows of the women’s quarter; with him would sit an old Swahili poet he had
hired to recite verses relating his love for Fatima. One afternoon the poet arrived alone, but this time, his love verses also told the tale of what had befallen Enerico. The
mreno
had been arrested by his superiors and put in prison. When the poet had finished his recital, a servant appeared from the house and paid him a silver coin, which he accepted as a token of Fatima returning Enerico’s love. In the story, Enerico died shortly afterwards in the prison, from fever.

In her introduction to the manuscript, Rumina had narrated the story with quite a bit of pathos, assuming rather naively — in Ramji’s opinion — that it had a factual basis.

She was eyeing him.

“Why did you take the hijab off — did you wear it always?”

That caught her by surprise, she coloured, paused, then she answered him softly: “Since I was a teenager …”; and then, speaking up but just a little more: “I guess I was ready to take it off.”

“I guess you were.” He shouldn’t have asked, not now, but perhaps that was simply in self-defence — to maintain a safe distance?

“You’re leaving today,” he announced jovially, to make up, and sat back like a proud uncle, watching her.

“Yes,” she answered brightly. Then, leaning forward, she said earnestly, to his unbelieving ears: “Listen, why don’t you come along? How long will you stay in Glenmore; aren’t you tired already of this suburbia?”

He felt a tremor in his hand; he put his cup down. This was an actual invitation he’d just heard. There was nothing better he would have liked, then. Nevertheless, …

“The suburb’s nice, actually,” he said, sounding confident and strong, “but anyway, I’m going to New York later in the day. Just
pounding the pavement there again will be worth this whole trip. Zuli and the kids are already there — I’ll join them, and then, after we return, Jamila’s party. Then home.”

That seemed to deflate her for a while. He watched her sit back and sip her iced concoction through a straw, having stirred in three sugars — gathering strength, as it were. Then once more, intensely, she implored him: “Look —
come
to Washington. Seriously, why don’t you come? There’s a taarab concert, at a private house; you do like taarab?”

The restaurant across from their house in Dar es Salaam used to play taarab on the radio — lively coastal music, with harmonium, tambourine, drums, and Swahili lyrics sung to Indian film songs, about the wiles of women for one thing …

“Yes I do, though I’ve never exactly been to a concert.”

His heart was leaping. He had not expected this … hoped, maybe, for something … and here it was. This invitation to do something crazy, something that would liberate and rejuvenate —
revivify
— him. He wanted it, and he didn’t. But he had lost control over himself, it was all up to her.

“You can take a train to New York tomorrow, early in the morning. It’s called —”

“The Early Bird, or something like that.” He laughed.

“… and meet your family,” she continued, on a lower note, watching him expectantly. Victoriously.

They stared, eye to eye, gauging each other. And he thought: Well, why not? “Perhaps we can ask Sona to come along, surely he loves taarab,” he said, unconvincingly.

“Yes, we’ll ask him,” she replied with a smile as they got up to go. “And thank you for looking at this,” she said, picking up her manuscript. “That means a lot to me.”

He dropped her off at the suburban train station, promising to meet her at the main railway station in Philadelphia in the afternoon, where they would catch the Amtrak to D.C.