Amriika (21 page)

The Friday night of Lucy-Anne’s arrest marks the end of that period of enchantment for me. I recall the months and years that immediately followed as a period of diminished intensity, of relative calm, both in my personal life and in the scene around me. It was a time in which to observe and to reflect, and to carry on. I recall vividly sitting up half of one hot August night to watch George McGovern secure the Democratic convention to tumultuous cries for peace; then sitting up another night a few months later only to see him lose the presidential election by the greatest margin ever. There was the Watergate Show with Chairman Sam Ervin, and the end of the war; the pathetic I-am-not-a-crook Nixon resigning, and gleeful media pictures of the new president Gerry Ford stumbling. The gullible and gentle Moonies and the gullible and abrasive ESTers offering truths for which the hunger was gone.

For me, there came the years of hard work, when I began to study the philosophy of science, while making annual guilt-ridden resolutions to go back to Africa, to do my bit for nation-building. But instead of going back I took a job at a Cambridge electronics corporation editing brochures. This was a far cry from the career in science I had once dreamed of, but I realized I no longer had a head for the hard-core nitty-gritty of the discipline (as Peter Bowra might have put it), though I remained a believer in its perspective of the world. Gradually I also developed an interest in Swahili philology (perhaps to assuage my guilt), which I studied in the evenings at Boston University. This period of study and employment coincided with a disastrous love affair, and I have often been tempted to put my failed patriotism at least partially at its doorstep.

Sona too remained in Cambridge, and we continued to see each other. He and Amy lived together for a couple of years before getting married, and I rather envied him his settled life. His
scholarly work now preoccupied him completely. He had already resigned from the “musical mosque,” which moved out of the Tech and became a more formal, established affair.

About a year after Ginnie’s death, five months after the
ISS
bombing, I received a letter from John Morris, announcing that he had married a woman in Montclair and had moved in with her. She had three young children, two cats, and a dog, he said, and he was very happy. It had been Ginnie’s wish that he remarry as soon as possible. There was a phone number, but I could never find the will to call him up.

Back home — how haunting is that term
home
— back home times were hard. A mad dictator called Idi Amin had taken over the neighbouring country of Uganda and expelled all Asians, having received instructions from God in a dream. Asians from my own country were being driven out by the rigours of socialism, the whims of arbitrary bureaucrats, nightmares of a local Amin. Now that I had a place of my own, I thought of inviting my grandmother to come and visit. Instead she asked me to come back,
and get married
. Along with her letter and newspaper clippings, she sent me a photograph of a distant cousin in Zanzibar. According to the clippings, five members of the revolutionary council in Zanzibar, led by a sheikh I had always believed to be ruthless and extreme, had each chosen for themselves an Asian girl as a bride. This despotic measure, as announced by the sheikh, was an effort to help along the integration of the races. There were fears of more such forced unions, and many Asians were in extreme anxiety and on the lookout for suitable husbands for their daughters. Now I was being asked to be one such son-in-law. Our girls are in danger, said Grandma in her letter; you must help your cousin. She is a good, decent girl.…I sent Grandma a long and (I now think) callous
lecture to accompany my refusal: If we Asians had integrated with the Africans before this, such problems would not have arisen; I could not marry a girl I had myself not chosen, the world had changed from the day of arranged marriages; and so on. It was half a year before she replied. By this time, the protests were so strong, that it became unlikely that more forced marriages would take place. But I could never escape the guilty feeling that I had disappointed my grandmother, and hurt her. The newspaper reports of the abductions of young girls by African dictators helped me to convince a judge to grant me the status of a permanent resident in the United States.

And so I followed the route of so many visitors to this country. I allowed convenience, the temptation of the good life, and the assurance of safety and freedom to detain me, even as I held on to the image of the errant patriot, needed, missed in his native land.

And then my grandmother died, and home had never seemed so far away.

Lucy-Anne:
You betrayer of your world!

No, I would not come to blame her for subsequent feelings of guilt and betrayal, but she certainly took a hard poke where one day it would hurt.

One Christmas I visited Toronto, where a large number of my people had arrived from East Africa and formed a thriving community. It was 1979, the Shah of Iran had been deposed; Americans had been held for weeks now as hostages in the former embassy in Tehran. On my way back from Canada, I faced a dour immigration officer who seemed far from well-disposed towards dark-skinned foreigners — a sentiment not uncommon at border
checkpoints in the best of times, and this was hardly one of those. He seized the moment (as we used to say), found something wrong with my passport — the photo seemed to be peeling — and questioned me for a long time. My bus left without me, having deposited my luggage in the blustery cold outside the immigration building. I waited in an inner office dreading all sorts of outcomes; now and then someone would peer in through the glass walls to see I was not up to any mischief. And then suddenly, after an hour of detention, my nemesis walked in, handed me my passport, and told me I could go. There was a New York bus early in the morning, for which I could wait. Bristling with embarrassment and humiliation, I resolved to wait outside, lest these watchdogs of the home of the brave change their minds, or sniff out something else.

“I guess you need a ride,” a voice said as I stepped out and faced the chilly air anew.

I turned to my right, from where the voice had come, and eyed the man suspiciously as he stepped forward.

“I vouched for you,” he said. He was taller than I by a couple of inches, in a black duffle coat and holding a woollen cap in one hand as if to show more of himself — balding up front, sunken-eyed, long angular face, and a fluffy pointed beard. A vaguely familiar face, I thought. We stared at each other for a few moments.

“How did you vouch for me?”

He smiled enigmatically.

“I’m going to Boston,” I said.

“So am I.”

“Oh. We must have passed each other — Park Street Station, wherever …” I grinned.

“Ten years ago, and a month maybe — to be more exact. Washington, D.C.”

“You were there?”

“Who wasn’t? But I saw you there.”

His name was Stan Allen, he’d been to Northeastern, and he was two years older than I. We spoke at length and excitedly about those times and how important it was to keep their revolutionary spirit alive. It was time to entrench, we agreed, hang on to the victories won, resist the backlash and the lazy thinking, educate the public, break new ground. By the time we arrived in the gloomy shadows of the Berkshires he had offered me a partnership in a small company dedicated to the distribution of publications put out by alternative and radical presses, those crucibles for new and far-out ideas and truths the mainstream dared not touch.

In the spring I moved to a suburb of Chicago, where our company was based. It was time to move away from the city that had been my cradle in this new land, so to speak, and from a region which carried so many reminders for me of an era now ended, of people disappeared, of a tormenting romance recently ended. I sought a new life in a new place. I began to frequent Toronto, where I met many of my old classmates and acquaintances. But while I could not completely feel part of the community after my long absence from it, I could not help returning to it to try to re-experience what I had lost. One day, I met a vivacious, pretty Dar girl who seemed the perfect complement to me; we were strongly attracted to each other, and after a courtship that lasted a few months, we married. At last, I thought, I was coming home. If only Grandma had been alive to bless my future!

Today it was cool and clear. I went to sit at the Rose Café, a place a few blocks away. Darcy arrived, driven by my intrepid young patrons Hanif, Leila, and Lata (the first two are his grandchildren). The teenagers were treated to sandwiches, after which they hurried off to the beach, which, it being Sunday, promised much (a session of tea-leaf reading, for one), and Darcy and I walked back here, to my place. A brief, unimposing visit, spent mostly in quiet chit-chat. When I see us together now, and juxtapose that image with my memory of when and how I first saw him, I cannot but be struck by a poignant awareness of time. “Don’t think of time that way,” he says, “You’re still young.” His support touches me, for even though I pretend to a certain cold detachment at this juncture of my life, I do need my hand held occasionally. I am utterly alone. I have not recovered from my loss, and I harbour a fanatical hope. I see her around corners or across the street on a bicycle; I hear her humming a taarab and laughing at a joke. Any moment Rumina will come and pause briefly at the doorway with a smile, and walk in.

II
A G
RAND
R
EUNION
1993, a week in midsummer

“What revels are in hand?”

—
SHAKESPEARE
A Midsummer Night’s Dream

W
ell, folks, here we come, Ramji mused to himself as he entered the Schuylkill expressway, sat back, and began heading across Philadelphia towards Glenmore. The Ramji contingent arrives in full force, in modest midsize conveyance, no doubt, but ready to play the reunion game. And who knows what lies in store …