Amriika (35 page)

A
fterwards, when he would recall this brief span of a few months, and when it seemed to him there was nowhere to turn but to the writing paper or the computer screen in front of him, it was his time together with Rumina that became the most vivid, the most painfully real: tender moments of love, a romance opening like a fairy tale; her touch, her smell of fresh soap or, in the evening, of a faint perfume or (to tease him) a seductive Zanzibari attar — the eyes twinkling, a sarong hugging the contours of her body —, her various hairstyles, the dimples on her cheeks … all the pleasurable details of her presence and being. What else was she to him besides her sensual presence, which so thrilled him? After a long time, and perhaps for the first time, he felt actually loved, by a woman. He adored her for that, and he was grateful. And also, with Rumina he was finally living an existence which he did not feel was alien to him, and so, in a manner of speaking, she had brought him home.

In their spare time he and Rumina would sometimes drive around and explore the vast metropolis that is Los Angeles in all its diversity. So many of the places had a mythic feel to them, simply
from their names, long familiar to him through movies and television and the detective fiction of his youth. And yet here they were — Sunset Boulevard, the soaring office towers of Century City (in one of which he went to visit an old classmate of his, a lawyer), the palatial properties of Beverley Hills.

They loved to cook together, elaborately: something traditionally Zanzibari — a rice bread and coconut-based curry with cilantro, green chillies, and ginger, or a vegetarian Gujarati thali with an assortment of greens and daals elaborately served with pickles on gleaming aluminum trays, or a lush saffroned biryani or pilau, or goat trotters, or brain fried in the richest spices.

Their landlord was a Swede with the large proportions and bearing of the stereotypical Nordic woodsman: Svend Nilsson — also gruff and good-natured — had an occupation not far off the mark either, that of a designer of furniture. He occupied the floor below them, with his French girlfriend Josie, using the backyard and its shed for his practical work space. The apartment was small, opening at the back where the kitchen was; it had two bedrooms on one side of the main corridor, which opened into the living room in front, with a four-foot bay window that gave an unhampered view of the western sky and portions of the beach. Between the kitchen and the living room was a partition of half-height shelves. Rumina had been induced by discounts into furnishing this room with Svend’s designs, some still in their provisional stages, using Scandinavian pine and glass, and black and white veneers — a starkness she had cleverly subverted by using appropriately placed African hangings with warm greens, yellows, and reds. Svend would visit, to check out the wear on his hinges and joints, he said, but also to chat, and he would never turn down an invitation to a meal.

Twice a week Rumina went to
UCLA
to teach Swahili, which she loved with a passion. Three days a week she did the morning shift at an espresso bar run by a women’s co-operative in a quiet part of Santa Monica where the only steady clientele came from the nearby daycare centre and supermarket. A partnership in the enterprise was hers for the asking. In her spare time Rumina pursued another passion, a study of traditional Zanzibari door designs. Meticulously, while Ramji read or watched television, she would reproduce, with pencil on paper, from photographs and from memory, and from drawings she received by mail, doors covered with intricate floral and abstract motifs.

On Fridays she would come to the Company offices in Santa Monica after work, and if it was late they would sit outside on a bench and watch people emerge from the Shamsi mosque next door. A couple of times, if it was early enough, she urged him to go in — saying, They are your people — and he did. At times she brought food for the mosque, this being the Shamsi tradition, though quite alien to hers. The prayer hall had been converted from a warehouse, using wood panelling, broadloom, and drapes, and minimalist furniture consisting of low tables for ceremonies, and a podium; at the entrance were display cabinets, a notice board, and a book table. Sometimes, as Ramji and Rumina sat watching, older folks in their walking shoes would emerge from the mosque and gather outside, then walk around the parking lot a few times, to practise for a walkathon that was scheduled for some weeks away. This was a far cry from the little mosque they used to run in the music library at the Tech in Cambridge, Massachusetts, when a presence of twelve was considered a crowd, and Sona was mukhi, the presider. Nowadays a presence of a hundred was considered paltry and lamentable. People of the Community all over America
were questioning their identities, reading up on their history, and even — as Sona claimed — rewriting it.

Is one entitled to this happiness? I was taught of second chances but only when the outcome was spiritual. The world is a prison, we were taught, existence is bondage to the body. Those who are wise opt out of involvement in it, and so they escape the endless cycle of birth and rebirth.
That
was your second chance — to opt out. But a happy rebirth, a second chance to a life of
this
world, to sensual, homely happiness? It goes against everything we believed in.

But one cannot completely detach oneself from one’s previous existence, he knew that. He had had a wife, and a home, for thirteen years, they had a set of twins who would soon reach their teenage years. He could recall vividly the first news of their conception, the first sight of them on ultrasound, their first day in school. He could not pass by a sporting or a children’s clothing store without, instinctively, thinking of their needs. They were a part of him. He now called them on Sundays; Zuli would pick up the phone and, answering his query with a curt, “I’m fine, thank you, and you?” hand over the phone to Sara or Rahim. He hoped he would be able to spend some time with them before they grew up, that Zuli would not come in his way. What influence he’d had she had not much cared for.

Gradually over the weeks Ramji and Rumina began to reconcile themselves to that past, which had once caused a painful rift between them — a past involving the violent revolution in Zanzibar and her father Sheikh Abdala, who had been one of its leaders; together they began to undo the potency of their memories of that terrible episode of the forced marriages, which had installed the Sheikh as an embodiment of evil in Ramji’s mind.

When Ramji was growing up, the island of Zanzibar, although it had exotic associations elsewhere, did not capture the imaginations of those who lived on the mainland across from it, in Dar es Salaam. Its importance had been in the past, in the days of its slave market, when it was an urban commercial centre, while the mainland was still tribes and villages. When he was a boy, Zanzibar,
Jungbar
, was a laid-back kind of place, an island in the sun some fifty miles away, where the ships stopped on their way to Mombasa, Aden, and Bombay. It had the distinction that its Indians spoke a curious blend of Swahili and the Indian language Cutchi. There was the vague knowledge around that it had an American tracking station, and it was a free port. But it was basically a backwater, which routinely got trounced in soccer by the other East African countries. Then one morning in January 1964, Zanzibar — tiny, friendly
Jungbar
— was on everybody’s lips: it had become the site of a bloody revolution, every radio station had carried that news. And the amiable voice on Zanzibar Radio itself had been replaced by the harsh tones of someone calling himself the Field Marshall, giving notice: All you imperialists, your days are numbered.

Worried faces appeared everywhere on the street where Ramji lived — a lot of people had relatives on the island. Many of the older folk, including his grandmother, had in fact immigrated to Zanzibar from India, before going on to Dar and other places on
the mainland. What Ramji recalled clearly of that January morning of the revolution was that the Arab restaurant down the road where he went to buy bread or maandazi for breakfast did not open.

The days that followed were filled with news and rumours about the revolution. The new government was African; the ousted one had been backed by Arabs, who had ruled the island for more than a century, so there seemed to be some justice to the change that had taken place. But the refugees who came pouring in to their relations’ homes brought stories of rapes and killings and plunder. According to the newspapers, Cubans, East Germans, and Russians had been sighted on the island. Not long afterwards, Tanganyika, the neighbouring mainland country, formed a federation with Zanzibar, perhaps to neutralize a communist threat, but the new country so formed, Tanzania, rapidly turned socialist. The Chinese soon arrived and were best friends. And the American ambassador in Nairobi, William Atwood, wrote a book called
The Reds and the Blacks
to explain the situation back to his people; it was banned in East Africa.

One of the leaders of the Zanzibari revolution was Sheikh Omari Abdala. Ramji remembered reading the issue of
Time
that had given the Sheikh’s biography and called him one of Africa’s most brilliant politicians. Apparently Sheikh Abdala had gone to university in Moscow, and a few days prior to the revolution he had returned home with a Russian wife.

And then, some years later — after so many people had fled the island in fear (and when so many still continued to flee it), after the seizure of so many properties and businesses by a dictatorship, and when so many languished in jails —
that
happened: the forced marriages. It was 1972 and Ramji was in Boston when he read
about them in the newspaper clippings his grandmother sent him. Five members of the Revolutionary Council had each claimed for themselves, by decree, a young teenage girl from the Indian community as a bride. The youngest of the men was Sheikh Abdala, in his thirties; it was he who had announced this first bold step in a bid to integrate the races. The oldest of the men was in his sixties. All were married, some had more than one wife. In the weeks that followed, two of the girls, including Abdala’s coerced bride, killed themselves. Finally, some months later, Sheikh Abdala was assassinated by a brother of the girl he had married by force; the killer was shot dead by bodyguards.

Sheikh Abdala left behind a daughter. Her mother, Elena, had gone back to Russia in 1967, when Rumina was two.

Late one night, they were sitting on the sofa, side by side; she with her back against the cushion, her legs crossed under her, and he having turned to face her, caressing her knee.

The past swirls in dark eddies around us, he thought, but we have to take the menace out if it …

I don’t believe in murder or assassination for any cause, but when I heard of your father’s killing, I quietly celebrated: a warm feeling in the heart, like a glass of eggnog on a chilly December night. Can you believe that, Rumina? I could have stood a round of drinks were I so inclined, I felt like running out into the street and shouting for joy, O my wish has been fulfilled, someone finally went and got one of those lecherous bastards. And it is his daughter I’m making love to
 …

“He loved me,” she said of her father. “He played games with me and told me stories. And I loved him. I remember him clearly — I was six when he was killed. It happened at the airport, he had
just returned from Dar es Salaam. They rushed me to the hospital, from home. I had never seen him in pain before, and there he was, helpless on a hospital bed, doctors and nurses around him, and tubes coming out of him. He held my hand and I climbed on a stool so we could see each other.”

“And …?” Gently — we’re talking of Sheikh Abdala, but he was also her father.

“I looked into his eyes. They were wet, gleaming … I knew my father was crying. I still wish I could know what he was trying to tell me.”

Two tears rolled down her cheeks. She wiped her eyes and he took her hand. She looked at him gratefully.

He asked, after a while, “And the girl he married … do you remember her?”

“Yes, I remember her. At meals, and sometimes playing with her. She was a lovely girl, Zainab, thin, with long hair down to her waist which always took a long time to wash. I wanted her so much to be my sister. My father loved her, I know that.”

Did
she
love him? — Ramji wanted to ask. That man whose memory I’ve hated for more than half my life. Instead he said quietly: “But can you justify taking a girl by force — at gunpoint?”

Rumina’s eyes widened and she drew a quick breath — Is this the end of our relationship, Ramji thought in a moment of alarm — but she recovered.

“No. But in a year or two she would have been married off by her father, against her will, most likely. I’m just giving you another side to the event. You don’t know her family, I did. And my father had known the family a long time, they used to be neighbours, he had seen Zainab and liked her …”

She was crying now, and Ramji took her in his arms and held her. “It’s all right, Rumina — we have to be able to talk about it …”