The Gunny Sack (20 page)

“Excuse me, mama! Excuse me. Aisei! Hodi!”

“What now?” an irate mama would show a face.

“Mama, if you could throw the ball … please.”

“Aaaah! What do you think? You can throw the ball here any time … and suppose it hits one of the children—” Now the whole mama would be visible.

“Polé, mama. Sorry. Forgive us.”

“Didn’t you say polé the last time? And now again … you think this skin is made of stone, it doesn’t hurt—”

“The last time, mama. It will not happen again. Truly, mama. By God.”

“No.”

“I beg you, mama, God will reward you.” Giggles behind him.

“Aa-aa!” No.

Then would begin the bargaining. Ten cents. Forty cents. A deal at twenty-five and the ball came flying across the wall.

There were two ways around paying the ransom. One was to keep quiet and try to retrieve the ball by using coal tongs tied to a long broom. Or Alu or I was lowered behind the wall and then pulled up with the ball. On the other side of the wall was a hut, with a narrow space in between. On one occasion however a mama must have heard my shuffling against the baked mud, for while I was picking my way among the debris a bristly broom-head landed against my own head. With barely stifled cackles, my companions’ heads withdrew behind the wall and I was left alone to face a glaring broom-wielding mama. I took two steps back, emerged into an open space, and started running, chased by the screaming mama. “Catch the Indian, the bastard …” Another mama emerged, her hair wet. I cut across the compound towards the outer door, the two mamas in hot pursuit. But then the wet-haired one tripped on her khanga, and for a fleeting instant I looked behind to see a naked, black body glistening in its wetness, before I emerged into the safety of the street.

“You saw her naked, Kala? Tell me what you saw—did you see her black black fuzz, her arse—”

“I don’t know …”

“Oh God, he saw and he didn’t know what he saw—Oh God,” Firoz walked off, violently scratching his crotch, eyes fastened skyward in despair.

The next day the two brothers had a plan for me. With the promise of a chance to play in their fictitious MCC, the Msimbazi Cricket Club, I went back to the huts with a proposal. There I met a third fat mama.

“I want to see the young mama—” I began.

“Halima!” She screamed. “An Indian boy asks for you!”

Halima came out. “What? Again? You boys have no shame?”

“Mama … my brother sent me … my friend’s brother … Do you want one shilling? Do you have the time, mama?”

I was chased all the way to the Poni home by the furious woman, and the five of us hid in the bedroom. Two mamas talked first to Alu’s mother and then Nuru Poni came to hear them. “They have no respect! They have no manners!” fumed the mamas. And Nuru Poni pacified them in his best Swahili: “You are their mother, mama. True, true. I will punish them. If you want, I will let you punish them. Alu, come. Here, mama—do with him what you will.” They left convinced that justice would be done.

Meanwhile, cricket stumps and bats had been sent into hiding in the neighbour’s home. But Nuru Poni, anticipating the measure, bought a cheap broom, threw away the head and used the handle on the backs of my friends, while Sona and I went home with unrequited guilt on our heads.

Nuru Poni, the philosopher-pawnbroker, who was not averse to using his fists against ruffians who sometimes mixed in with the crowd outside his shop. His were the only Asian boys who learnt to read the Quran, in the original. An African shehe called twice a week, and for an hour each time, the three boys chanted after him from the Juzu. From Nuru Poni came such jewels of wisdom as the adage “Done is done, it cannot be undone, even if you go to London,” and more down to earth advice such as what to do when called by nature at an inopportune moment. In this case you loosened your belt and rubbed your belly right to left; or perhaps it was left to right. That was the problem with this remedy, an error could be disastrous if you were caught, say, in the middle of Mnazi Moja.

Nuru Poni’s actual name was A. A. Raghavji. He came from Zanzibar and was an old acquaintance of Kulsum’s family. He
had been—although his interests had now shifted to civics and politics—a pious young man, a lover of God, like Mad Mitha my mother’s father. When Mad Mitha announced his doomsday vision for the island, Nuru Poni had been one of the first to take a boat out. An African customer once asked him what he hoped to see in the mosque at four in the morning, which he never missed. “Nuru,” he had replied without blinking an eyelid, meaning God’s light, and the cynics of Kariakoo found him his name.

Every evening Kulsum sat on her big bed, feet up, scissors in hand, biting into it night after night, making callouses to last a lifetime: scissors in hand and measuring tape round her neck. Snip, tear … Bend, beend, hold. Snip-snip-snip-sniiiiiip, snippet. Cloth diminished, bolts from Osaka, which carried when new pictures of pretty Japanese ladies or Fujiyama, became thinner and the pile of cutting for the next day’s sewing rose higher. It was family hour. On Mondays and Fridays the Philips oracle held attention, high on the glass case which enclosed the memorabilia from my father’s days. It announced listeners’ requests and throbbed young hearts with the sounds of Pat Boone, Elvis and Cliff. Bedsprings were not insured against the wilder improvisations of rock ‘n’ roll, when “Jailhouse Rock” was played, until finally it seemed that the song was altogether banned from the programmes.

Sometimes the BBC told stories … which we rarely listened to, we had storytellers of our own …

Begum on prime time, standing next to the radio, better than the BBC …

Kulsum supplied us with our daily chapati, but Begum sold us our dreams. Her stories were for the benefit of all but directed at Kulsum. She sat like a goddess on her couch, Kulsum, a few feet away from anyone, surrounded by colourful cloth, measuring tape for garland—and scissors for weapon? She would listen quietly, and there would be something like
a faint smile on her lips, except that we knew it was not a smile but a thought: what thought? what ghostly memory? On the second floor of Habib Mansion as the street below emptied of people and sound, and every building and every lighted flat in it belonged more and more to the surrounding night than to the society of each other, we took lesson and hope from the stories. Wellington and Nelson rode in triumph under our tube light, Portia leant against the toy cabinet in a lawyerly pose smirking at Shylock, and Captain Scott wrote down the words “We must go on,” before going down in an Antarctic blizzard.

Kulsum would have something for our edification, a story from the mythology … How the five Pandava brothers, once having given their word to their mother to share everything, went on to share their wife. How Tara Rani would steal into the night to pray to her Lord against her husband’s wishes, until one day he found her out and with sword in hand waited for her, only to see the evidence in her hand, the meat, turn into grapes and ladoos into oranges. “Rani, show me this path,” he pleaded …

And sometimes, after much cajoling … loading her with a plate of pawpaw and a glass of hot milk … promises of pressing her aching feet and aching head … she would relent and part with a bit of her own past.

Shamim still plied me with fairytales, with Ali Baba and Aladdin … and when she played the Sphinx in a school production, on whom could she practise her lines but me …

And, at the bottom of the stairs, sat one Edward bin Hadith, fundi, tailor. An improbable name, a mixture of English and Arabic, “Edward, son of Story,” but he insisted on its correctness, and at the end of the month he would make an Arabic-looking scrawl in the long black ledger book and take whatever remained of his earnings. He came from a village near Mombasa and occasionally went home and sent letters there. He had been banished under the stairs by Kulsum
because out in front he never ceased chatting (kuru-kuru-kuru-kuru, as she put it) and would not let the customers be heard; or, worse, he would involve them in long convoluted conversations, until, inevitably, they beat a retreat, seeking refuge in the street. In the alcove, the only catch in his wicked snare was I, whom she could spare.

Sometimes, even there, he would call out to a passing woman, “Shoga, do you know the time?”

“As if I carry a watch. Are you a fool or what?”

And he would break into a joyful cackle, thumping on the wooden stand of the sewing machine, at having drawn notice.

“Salum, come here. Come here, come here,” he would wave me over as I came down the stairs.

“What? I want to go.”

“Come here, I tell you. What’s your hurry?”

“So?”

“Listen carefully now at how Abunawas conned his neighbour into exchanging a small saucepan for a huge cauldron.”

“But you’ve told me that already!”

“Okay, then. Do you know why dogs sniff at people’s arses?”

He would relate with gusto, waving his arms, thumping the machine, taking time to vent his cackle, and I stood spellbound, or simply detained forcefully by his hand on my arm. By the time he had finished and wiped tears from his eyes, a pack of African boys and girls would be gathered behind me outside the doorway.

Of the three tailors, Edward took away the least money at the end of the month. Beside him in the alcove sat the master fundi, Omari, who would laugh at Edward’s jokes and chat with him, but never set aside his work. Kulsum gave him the hardest but the most lucrative assignments: men’s shorts, school uniforms on contract, clothes for Sona and me.

Efficient Omari, dreaming Edward. Sometimes in the afternoon Idi, Mzee Pipa’s chauffeur, would drop in for a chat, sitting
at the bottom of the stairs, having brought boys from school—Pipa’s own Amin, and others whose fathers could afford to pay. Idi and Omari went home together, smartly groomed, newspapers under their arms: two men of the world who knew what they wanted, leaving Edward to finish his work.

But every Friday Idi had an errand to run before he left. He drove to mosque with two plates of food; one, rich and fresh, for God, and the other, stale and hard, for Mzee Pipa’s sister, a pauper who sat outside the mosque with a white enamel plate and a begging bowl. One Friday Idi had a joke at the expense of God and switched the two plates, as Mzee Pipa found out when he got the chit that Idi brought with him from the mosque while announcing that he had found a new job. It was with the new Labour Union on Viongozi Street a few blocks away.

If you wanted to point out the meanness of the Pipas, you would point a finger to the old man’s sister, a pauper to whom her brother sent charity in the form of stale chappatis and a fifty-cent coin every Friday, the day when all the twisted-mouthed, the lame, the elephant-headed and -footed, the pock-faced, the noseless, the sightless and others paraded the streets with begging bowls and got theirs too. Yet Idi’s act was considered generally not as charity towards the sister but as a crime against God. The only person who lauded his act was the Pipas’ old enemy Roshan Mattress. But this woman was carrying on an affair in broad daylight with a Punjabi policeman, what could she have to say about good and evil?

What then, did Idi and Omari want? Idi and Omari belonged to the Party … whose office was on Viongozi next to the Labour Union’s and was mysteriously lifeless except in the evenings … the Party which the coalseller celebrated on his rickety Dodge that brought us from school, we who could not afford Pipa’s gleaming green Ford Taunus … the Party with which—as we later realized—Nuru Poni also sympathized. But then, under the two queens, it was only an irritation—it
did not like you calling the servants “boy,” or “golo”—not to be heard, anyway.

The window. It looked down on Kichwele and Viongozi and up at the stars. It had iron bars painted silver that felt cold when I pressed my temples against them. Half-curtains hung from a slack spring.

From this window you could look straight down into the first-floor flat once occupied by the Mawanis and now by a Goan family. As soon as they moved in, Mrs. Daya announced there was something funny about them. They came with a secret to hide. There were five of them, the mother and father, and two girls and a boy. The eldest was Alzira, in her mid-twenties, and she soon won a place in our hearts and a reserved seat on the bench in our shop. Tall and gangly Alzira, with a large mouth and short, straight hair, her long, faded dress hanging loosely on her frame. She was a dressmaker. In the late afternoons she would walk in, with a piece of cloth and a threaded needle in her hands, a large grin on her face, and sit on the bench, chatting with Kulsum, exchanging banter and gossip with the girls when they were around.

But in her home it was all different. No laughter there. The father was a retired civil servant who emerged, it seemed, only to track down a newspaper or a bottle of beer. The mother appeared even less frequently. The brother and sister, Peter and Viviana, had a life outside Kichwele and Viongozi, in the world of the Goan Institute and parties and dances, and were rarely home. But Alzira … Alzira was ours. From my window I could see into all their three rooms, all facing Kichwele, all with large uncurtained windows, all enclosing an unbearable gloom. It was like watching a silent film, an adult film society movie without dialogue where the pain and hurt are screaming through the silence, scene after scene of meaningless, forced activity that I saw from my second-storey perch, temples pressed against the cool metal bars.