Amriika (31 page)

“All in all, it was a success, don’t you think?” Jamila said, looking very pleased.

They all agreed with her. This was the final day of their reunion, the final scene as it were. Iqbal and Susan were gone, Sona would leave that night, Ramji and Zuli the next morning. What happened next was perhaps inevitable, but no one could have foretold how far things would go. But for someone at the edge it takes only a small push to fall into the awaiting abyss.

“I always like to meet your classy friends, Jamila,” Aziz began to tease. “Once they’ve left, I can’t help but feel good about myself.”

“You bet. They’ll probably all be calling up their insurance agents by now,” said Sona in rueful humour. “I’m going to call mine tonight, you’ve convinced me.”

“Couldn’t you talk of anything else besides insurance policies for once,” scolded Salma.

“Oh, come on, I also talked about other things,” Aziz protested, red-faced.

“Such as?” Sona asked.

“Cheap cemetery plots!” Ramji couldn’t resist. He had heard Aziz going on about that too, much to the discomfort of a few of Jamila’s out-of-town friends.

“Well, what do you expect? Swahili?” Aziz retorted, triumphant, grinning broadly; having stung, he was out of the corner and dancing. Ramji felt a chill in the atmosphere. Perhaps the scent of a kill was just irresistible. For Aziz goaded on, relentlessly: “And I see Rumina didn’t come, Jamila. Zuli, you’ve got to watch this husband of yours and his Swahili interest.”

“Actually,” Sona said, matter-of-factly, attempting to steer away the conversation, “Rumina is a fascinating person. Would you guess that she was an expert on Zanzibari doors?”

To which Aziz said: “Really? And what else besides?”

And Ramji, in all seriousness: “Sona, what exactly is her family background?”

A moment of silence fell.

Disaster, disaster, disaster. A shot in the foot. He only wanted to appear casual, unflustered, innocent. But he gave himself away. Guilt was written on his darkening face, in his pounding heart, if anyone cared to listen to it, and now in this clumsy ruse. Sona looked at him in surprise, and Zuli cried out: “Why, doesn’t everyone know? The girl is the daughter of Zanzibar’s Sheikh Abdala.”

“Wha-at?” his voice almost a shriek, uncontrollable. For a moment he couldn’t see anything, until he pushed through the darkness, met Zuli’s eyes, and he knew she knew. She looked pained, enraged — and in the next instant the silent communication between them was also public.

He looked helplessly, searchingly at Sona, who said, simply, “Yes, that’s right.”

Sheikh Abdala, a populist leader of the 1963 Zanzibar revolution, whose specialty had been his verbal attacks and veiled threats against Arabs and Asians. And as a minister in the Revolutionary Council, he had announced the sinister edict —

“Wow! The guy who announced the forced marriages in Zanzibar,” Aziz said.

“Yes,” Ramji said. “Yes, the same one.” And the teenage girl he picked for himself chose to end her own life rather than stick with him. Her brother had finally knifed the Sheikh to death. Ramji, in his room in Boston, upon hearing of the assassination, had drunk to it in celebration.

“And Rumina? —” Ramji asked no one in particular but with a pleading look towards Sona, his voice small, dry. I’m getting into it even further, but there’s nowhere else to go.

“But how did
you
know, Zuli?” Salma asked. “None of
us
did.”

“Amy told me, this afternoon,” Zuli said. “Sona must have known.”

Sona nodded. “It didn’t matter to me whose daughter she was — and it was up to her to tell people if she wanted to.”

“Her mother? —” Ramji asked. But no one answered.

I’m a half-caste, Rumina had said. Now it was all so painfully clear, and also why she was so well known to the African crowd in Washington. She was Sheikh Abdala’s daughter! That is why she was so reticent about her past. She knew it would be hard for him to swallow. He had even gone so far as to explain to her all about the forced-marriage episode and what difficult times those were.

I’ve made an utter fool of myself in front of everybody. He looked pathetically at his wife. Her face was stone. Whatever understanding they had reached over the past few days and the overtures they had made only an hour ago were now shattered.

And Sona — why hadn’t
he
told him about Rumina? His idea of surprise?

“You knew it.…” He was looking at Jamila, saying it to whomever it applied.

“I didn’t, I swear —” Jamila said.

“You see, you should have been insured,” Aziz crowed.

“I would have made a bundle, wouldn’t I.”

Salma and Aziz got up to go. Sona edged towards Ramji, as if by imparting closeness he could give comfort. Aziz, as always, having done more damage than he realized, apologized in a good-natured way.

A dreadful quiet oppressed the household that Sunday evening. Jamila convinced Zuli they should go with the kids to the local park to watch the fireworks. They called up Salma first and agreed to meet her there with her kids. After they had gone, Nabil and Ramji contemplated various options open to them. Jamila had got it right; one needed to escape from the house and its remindful echoes of destruction and unbearable hurt. Nabil proposed they go see Alicia, Abbas’s widow, and Ramji agreed.

On their way to West Philadelphia, they stopped at a supermarket and bought some tea and cheese and a six-pack of cola. Nabil had also brought along food left over from the party.

“She had to move to a smaller apartment,” he explained, parking the car outside an old red-brick duplex, which had a small patch of grass in front enclosed by a short wrought-iron fence. Inside, they went up long narrow stairs — unswept, dark, and creaky, and permeated with the strong odour of recent cooking.

Alicia’s apartment was on the second floor. “Hi,” she said to Nabil shyly at the door. “Come in.” She was a woman in her twenties, short and heavy, and was wearing a loose dress and bedroom slippers. Nabil introduced Ramji, who as he went in almost
stumbled over a baby on the floor; the child was six months old, he guessed.

“What’s his name?” he asked. “It’s a boy?”

“Basheer,” she said, accepting from them the two packages they’d brought. She offered them Seven-Up or tea.

They opted for tea and she went to the kitchen to make it. Nabil went and sat on the stuffed armchair in front of the
TV
, Ramji sat on the bed. The child crawled up in front of them and they started playing with him. Nabil picked him up, put him on Ramji’s lap.

The room was narrow and crowded. The two windows were both completely curtained. On the table, across from Ramji and against a wall, was a framed picture of Alicia and Abbas, and another one of baby Basheer. Ramji put the baby down and went up to take a closer look. In the first one, Alicia wore the blue uniform of a security guard and was sitting on a chair; beside her stood Abbas in shirt sleeves and jeans. The baby photo was close up and charming, taken professionally soon after birth. There was a third photograph, evidently of Alicia’s family, taken a few years ago, judging by how much younger she seemed to be in it.

“My folks,” Alicia said to Ramji, as she brought in the cups of tea. “They’re in New York.”

“They’re close, then. That’s good.”

“Yes. My mother was here last week — but it’s not easy for her to get away, you know, she works.”

Ramji and Nabil stayed a little over half an hour, during which time they watched part of a news broadcast, the baby’s sagging diaper got changed, and, twice, police sirens went howling past on the street below. According to Alicia, her husband’s murderers had still not been captured.

“I know them,” she said, “I see them on Chestnut — by the taco place and —”

“And the police?” Ramji asked.

“It seems the two cops who saw them are on undercover assignment on a much larger operation,” Nabil explained to him. “Don’t worry, they’ll be captured eventually,” he told Alicia. “But we want you to come and visit us. We’d like to see more of the two of you.”

Alicia gave him a sullen look.

“Jamila will call you,” Nabil said, the accusation in her look not lost on him. “Then you can come and visit. You should even think of moving closer to where we are — I am serious.”

It was such a depressing and lonely scene they walked out of that afterwards on the way back they did not have much to say to each other. Even the walk to the parked car in the dark had seemed like a hazardous venture in that area. How easy it had been, Ramji thought, to lose sight of this brutalized world from the heights of sheltered suburbia.

But Alicia and her son were real and they now had a patron in Nabil. He felt envious of Nabil, with his family and his newfound faith, and now this cause. And here he was with his own life a shambles.

When they returned, their families were back. Zuli had excused herself for the night. And once more, as on the first night, Ramji found himself at the kitchen table with Jamila. This time she offered him brandy, saying, “You look terrible.”

“So … what did she — what did Zuli say?” he asked.

“I’ll be honest: she’s raging — mad as hell and insulted. But give
it time,” she said. And after a while: “And this Rumina business — I gather it’s over?”

“It’s over,” he said wearily.

“Good.” She put out her hand and he took it.

“And you — all right?” he asked.

“Me? I think I’ll be all right,” she said and squeezed his hand.

It was much later that night, when everybody had gone to bed, that Ramji called Rumina.

For more than an hour beforehand he had sat by himself, trying to think. Most likely his marriage was broken. Zuli would never forgive today’s humiliation, even if he crawled back to her on his hands and knees. He did not see himself doing that, though he was sorry he had hurt her. The fact was, he hadn’t been able to help himself, he had seen a vision of happiness for himself and made a grab for it, come what may. And what a fall he had taken.

“I thought you’d forgotten about me,” she said, sounding very pleased. “Are you alone there? I mean, can you talk freely?”

“I learned today your father was Sheikh Abdala,” he said, his voice quivering with emotion.

“Oh. I meant to tell you.…I was only waiting —”

“That’s not enough. You should have told me first. I feel horribly cheated. It’s not something you keep secret — it matters.”

“But why? I am still me.”

He was silent.

“Ramji?” Low voice; pleading.

“Yes? … Look — I can’t handle this … this history … any of this … not now, anyway, it’s too much for me.…” Pleading, also.

“Tell me when you’re ready then,” she said.

After a moment’s pained silence, they hung up.

H
ow to continue with this narration, when on one side myriad reminders constantly tug at me, to take me away to relive every moment of the bliss, dwell upon every tender word and sigh and gesture of the love that became my prize; and on the other side, at the end of it all, bereft of that love, I am confronted with a visual reminder of a tragic killing and exhorted to understand it. And understand it I must, that is my responsibility.

Still life, post-destruction: a snapshot of a dwelling above a bombed-out bookstore in the Midwest, in ruins, portions collapsed, contents flung about, a gash in the far wall, shafts of daylight from outside; the vantage point is probably from a corner still supported. In the midst of the debris, the upper portion of a woman’s body, the dress olive green, the hair golden, a hyphen of red lipstick on a smudged pink doll’s face; the rest of her body could be under the broken masonry but isn’t, I know; it’s been blown off by a bomb. Also dead, her husband and child, nowhere in this picture.

The question arises again and again: How did a person like me get involved — however obliquely — with a horror such as
this
?

That’s what he has to find out, says my interlocutor, Federal Agent Will Jones. He eyes me intently as if to gauge my thoughts, then quietly takes the photograph from my hand and slips it back into his collection.

He is the investigator who arrived one morning a few weeks ago, not long after the bombing depicted in the photograph and the events that followed, in the aftermath of which I found myself amidst the shambles of my own life. He is a psychologist, but his job is not to cure me. Rather, he comes with the belief that by digging deep into my background and my mind, he will find some answers to what makes a community of normally law-abiding citizens produce acts of reckless violence. Our interview, he says, by shedding light on the background to that bombing, will be our little contribution to greater peace and harmony in the world; and I have little doubt that I and what he thinks I represent are destined for the government’s data bank of global malcontents and malfunctionaries. Open a window into your mind, says Will, show us your loves and hates, your fears and despairs, your beliefs and history; only then can we understand you. He lumps me with a people, among other small rootless people of the world with grievances. Is he wrong? Can I talk about myself without reference to a group?