Amriika (25 page)

“How lucky they are,” Zuli said, at length. “They have the world ready-made for them. We came with nothing, more or less … had to make it on our own.”

“Yes, but we had a greater sense of adventure,” Jamila said spiritedly, “which they won’t have. They won’t have to fight, they won’t have a lot of choice. In a sense I feel sorry for them, poor kids!”

“Well, in some ways the sky’s the limit for them, I suppose,” Ramji said. “But we did arrive
somewhere
— and we haven’t done badly at all.” The last comment was aimed at his wife. He was a
little piqued, first at her narration of their garden’s recent woes, and then at that tone of regret that could reveal so much to an alert Jamila.

Ramji got up to go, to meet Sona, who had called earlier, and Zuli had said she would look after the kids. Jamila had offered to take her for lunch and fabulous shopping later, reminding her that there was no sales tax in Pennsylvania.

“They do go back a long way, don’t they,” Jamila murmured at his back, “him and Sona …”

“Yes. That’s one past relationship that doesn’t bother me at all —” They exchanged a look, and Zuli backed away a bit. “I mean, the first thing they want to do when they’re both in town is to sit down together and have a long chat, bring each other up to date, I suppose. It’s enviable, really.”

“It is.”

They sat quietly for a while. Both took time to exchange words with the kids. And then Jamila asked, softly, with a twinkle in her eyes: “And his other past relationships? How do they bother you?”

“You tell me,” Zuli said. When Jamila didn’t respond, Zuli went further: “What
exactly
was there between you two? May I ask? Or isn’t anyone ever going to tell me?” She had spoken with feeling, but the expression in her eyes was hidden by a sudden glare of the sun that made her first squint, then look away.

“Nothing,” Jamila lied. “There was exactly nothing between us. There was just this group of friends, most of whom are here this week, and we were part of that. There were a few rumours, but that was that. Hasn’t he told you that?”

“Yes. But maybe
he
felt something for you — some sort of look would come over his face whenever your name came up. Anyway, it was all a long time ago.”

“And, as I told you, there was nothing. Listen, when I met my Prince Charming from Egypt, that was it. I had no doubts.”

Zuli seemed to brood on that and Jamila thought, Perhaps I’ve said the wrong thing.…I’m sounding happier and chirpier than I actually feel, and she’s wondering where
she
went wrong. So she told Zuli about her recent problems with Nabil, to say, Look, my dear, life ain’t exactly a bowl of cherries for me either, but I’m still in there.

“Anyway,” Jamila said at length, “don’t you think this reunion is going to be special, that our lives may not be the same afterwards? I felt it even as I sent the e-mail to Ramji telling you all to please come — you knew I did that?” It was before she had called and spoken to both Zuli and Ramji.

“No,” Zuli said, “but never mind, that doesn’t matter. What did you mean, our lives may not be the same afterwards?”

“I’m not sure … but the last time we were all together the kids were still young and we were so preoccupied with them, so this time around feels like a watershed of sorts, don’t you think?”

Zuli got up thoughtfully. “I don’t know — maybe … perhaps. But shouldn’t we be going? I do want to check out the stores.”

They packed their four kids into the back of Jamila’s car.

Ramji walked to the shopping plaza along a narrow road called The Winding Way, and it was just that, with tall trees on either side
and small residential streets all leading away from it on the right. The corner houses he met were large, stone-built. He passed a parkland to his left, with a little wooden bridge in the middle, presumably to cross a stream, and further up on the same side there was a school, closed for the summer, then a seminary, also deserted. A solid, well-established neighbourhood, he thought. There was no one else out walking, though once a kid on a bicycle meandered past him. Cars drove by speedily, familiarly. Imported cars are all the rage here, he thought; Japanese and German. He became conscious of himself and wondered if he looked respectable; a strange face was likely to be stopped anytime. Who had told him about such a place, this very location, a long time ago? Where a black face was likely to be that of a house maid? … It had been Lucy-Anne Miller.

Where was she — Lucy-Anne? He wondered whatever became of her.

One day about five years ago, in the course of his work, inspecting publications submitted to the company for distribution, he came across the title
Dissent to Nowhere
; the author: Shawn M. Hennessy, from a college in Iowa. With a strange feeling of excitement, and an eerie sense of déjà vu, he flipped through the pages, avidly poring over the words written by his former roommate. All sorts of memories, recollections of arguments they’d had, demonstrations they’d attended, flooded into his head. But this book was a confession, repudiating the sixties’ student movements as the excesses of crazed, misguided, and spoilt middle-class youth. Shawn the fiery radical who would march for the rights of cleaning ladies and tenement dwellers, and all the poor of the world, now saying this! There he was, the new Shawn, full-length on the back cover:
a stern long face, with close-cropped hair and a higher forehead than Ramji remembered, in jeans and jacket, feet spread apart, arms crossed in front: a new certainty, a commanding presence.

How easy for these rich American kids to renege and say it was all misguided, a mistake. We’re home, repentant, and all’s forgiven. He had come to view the sixties as his period of rebirth, from ignorance and narrow-mindedness into enlightenment and an awareness of the world; what a bitter pill to see it repudiated thus. It was as if the priests themselves, who had been the most fanatical, had turned against the faith — giving it a bad name, so you couldn’t talk of Third World exploitation or the growing difference between rich and poor without looking utterly ridiculous.

In 1979 he had joined Stan Allen in a partnership pledged to distribute publications aimed at keeping alive the radical spirit by which they had both been touched; and here they were now, promoting and selling academic books written to trash that spirit. Which was marginally better than their even more recent sales initiative, placing do-it-yourself, occult, and get-rich-quick titles in the bookstores, along with
CD-ROM
s and war videos. Welcome to the nineties.

He couldn’t help but send a letter to Shawn, saying how he’d come across the book and asking what he’d been up to since they last saw each other. Back came a prompt but rather controlled cheery response: What a surprise, a letter from his former roommate! How time had flown! They were all older and wiser now! Shawn was divorced with two children, a boy and a girl aged twelve and fourteen. Kate Webber lived in Chicago and wrote for
Harper’s
; would Ramji mind if Shawn gave her his address, she was at work on a book about the sixties. They should stay in touch!

And that was that. No phone call from Shawn, though Ramji had sent him his own phone number and an invitation to call.

Sona was seated at a corner table of Le Coffee Break, a fashionable (by Jamila’s report) local hangout, with his
New York Times
in front of him, very much in the manner one would find him Sunday mornings at the Pewter Pot or the Blue Parrot in Cambridge. There was vanity in that egghead, some pretense, too, but he was a good, reputable scholar.

Sona was shorter and better built than the gawking Ramji. He had never been chubby, but his face had grown fuller in recent years. He had started to bald, and there were white strands in his goatee, which went well with his reading glasses and crimson cardigan. He looks rather like a devil, Ramji thought, sitting down. Then another, fleeting thought went through his mind —
Is he going crazy, with that single-mindedness of his?

“You’re wondering if I’m crazy,” Sona said with a twinkle in his eyes.

“The thought does cross the mind periodically,” Ramji said, trying to sound flippant, and pulled up a chair.

They had been to high school together, had arrived on the same plane twenty-five years ago one rainy August evening in Boston. Besides Amy, his wife until recently, and perhaps more than her, Ramji was his one confidant in the matter that seemed to dominate his life above everything else. Every time they met or spoke over the telephone, Ramji would be brought up to date on discoveries, controversies, frustrations.

Sona’s cause had to do with the history and beliefs of their people, who over the last few centuries had maintained intact a
syncretistic belief, combining Islam and Hinduism. Recently, though, the community had chosen as a matter of policy to purify itself of so-called Hindu idolatry and move closer to a cleaner, mainstream Islam. Sona, as an influential professor, had — somewhat rhetorically — called the new trend a submission to Arabism and Arabic Islamic imperialism. He had gone one step further: For their faith to take root in this new country, the Shamsis must adopt the values and icons of America, and he suggested Emerson, Lincoln, and Martin Luther King as examples. Now, he said, e-mails were arriving full of hatred for him and he had even received threats.

“Nonsense,” said Ramji. “Our people are benign — they don’t carry out such threats. For one thing, they are cowards.”

“My grandfather was killed in a community feud,” Sona said, referring to a celebrated case of a hundred years before. His ancestor, an immigrant from India, had been stabbed to death by several assassins while returning from mosque early one morning, in a small coastal town in Tanzania.

“That was a different time and place.”

Though what do I mean by that, Ramji thought. There was a time, in their student days, when Ramji felt not only annoyance but also … a little contempt … at his friend’s lack of commitment to the political issues of the day. And yet all the while Sona had been as political as anybody could be; only his politics were of a different sort.

“They are rewriting history —
my
history,
our
history. They are hiding books and manuscripts, burying them away, either out of ignorance or fear of the orthodox, mainstream reaction. Someone has got to speak out —”

There
was
a madness in his single-mindedness; but was it something noble or simply pigheaded? In the matters of the world, what
did this religious argument among a small people signify? But to Sona, it was everything, it was his life. Amy had presumably tired of this obsession, to which she obviously came second place … and now this girl he’d brought along?

“And your companion — Rumina.…” Ramji pictured the mysterious girl in the hijab-headcover, surely a symbol of Middle Eastern orthodoxy if anything, and a far cry from Amy, with whom Sona had lived in sin for a year before they got married. “What does
she
think of your mad obsession?”

Sona laughed. “She’s a former student of mine, from back home, Tanzania. There’s nothing between us. Actually, I’ve brought her here for
you
.”

A sly look, gleaming eyes.

“Well, thank you, the wife will appreciate this —”

“No, seriously. She’s interested in your work in Swahili philology. I always wished you had carried on with it — instead of dropping out and getting into that useless business of yours.”

Hardly useless, Ramji wanted to say; very useful, someone had to do it, and we have achieved a lot …

“After the press I’ve given you,” Sona was saying, “she’s determined to talk to you. In all of America there must be not more than three people she can talk to about her work, and one of them happens to be you! And don’t let her innocent looks fool you. She’s very bright — and charming. You’ll have to be careful!”

“M
itumba,” Rumina said, to Iqbal, and turned to Ramji and caught his gaze on her.

It sounded like a musical note, the way she said it — “Mi–tumm-ba” — a string plucked, then released, her voice rich and very lovely.