The Gunny Sack (27 page)

Then there were of course the demagogues out to provoke reaction against the Asians. “The Asians are not integrating enough!” thundered one. “If you want to stay in Africa, you must learn to live with Africans … the days of your dukas are numbered!”

“Foul!” murmured the gathering of shopkeepers at Diamond Jubilee Hall. “Didn’t we only recently give a gift of four sewing machines to the women’s movement?”

“They have their eyes on our daughters, mind you,” Hassan Uncle gravely muttered.

“This flag,” roared the commissioner, “it has the colours of Africa! This black and green and yellow flag—what does the black signify, eh jamani?” He held up his arm and pinched his black skin for all to see. “This. And the green is the beautiful land of Africa. Eh? And what is this yellow stripe in the middle? Eh?”

“The Indians! The Mhindis!” shouts an unknown voice.

Uproar. Laughter. Gleeful self-congratulation. And an angry commissioner. How to pacify a furious commissioner? “E e TANU ya jenga nchi …” someone started. Everyone joined in, clapping hands, “E e TANU ya jenga nchi …”

The commissioner was escorted to his car.

“Never invite him again. First he eats our food, then he lambasts us!”

Dear Sir. In this newly free and democratic country of ours there are certain rights and privileges due to its citizens, i.e. a respect for privacy and consideration for the majority. I would like to use this space in your esteemed newspaper to lodge a complaint about a disturbance that has been going around in my street at an ungodly hour when the respectable and working population of this country sleeps. I talk not of the anopheles mosquito, of which there are plenty in my street, nor of djinns, of which there may or may not be in the same. I draw attention to a certain person who goes about the streets at four
in the morning making incomprehensible utterances to wake people up to go and pray. Now those who wish to go and pray at this hour may prefer to be shouted at from the street, but what, I pray, is the fault of the majority who wish not to be disturbed? I have proof that from the twenty buildings surrounding mine, only two people get up and follow this person to the mosque. This is a clear breach of democratic principles, and I beg the authorities to persuade the person concerned to cease his disturbance immediately. A. A. Raghavji
.

A. A. Raghavji—Nuru Poni—who in his younger days had been one of the first to wake up and walk to mosque at four, as his nickname “Nuru” attested, now preferred to sleep through the night, having been taken over—relatively speaking—by an agnostic phase not unrelated to the changes taking place in the country.

Every morning A. A. Raghavji’s son, Alu Poni, waited for Sona and me outside the Moonlight Restaurant which blared Arab music and rattled with tea cups. The three of us would then begin the first part of our trek to Boys’ School, along pot-holed, dusty Viongozi Street. It was cool, at seven in the morning, the sun still behind the white-washed mud houses on the right. There would be a steady trickle of business at the Arab corner stores.

Exactly halfway on our journey, just before Viongozi Street opened into sun-drenched Morogoro Road and joined former Cameron (now United Nations) Road, we stopped to pick up Jogo. Sitting at the front, in the store that was more a stall outside a mudhouse, sat Jogo’s father, the subject of A. A. Raghavji’s letter, his meagre goods within easy reach of him. He would be perched on his seat at the till, serving jiggers of kerosene to his African customers, or packets of tea and sugar or matches. Occasionally he would yawn loudly and sigh, “Oh God, make me good!” He had a dirty, unshaven face and wore thick glasses that magnified his eyes. Ever since the letter
appeared in the
Herald
, he had begun to be called “The Disturbance.” What he shouted in the morning were not “incomprehensible utterances,” as A. A. Raghavji well knew. He began with Arabic verses in his old and croaky voice, horribly mispronouncing, and then, perhaps bored of saying words he did not understand, made up prayers and poetry first in Gujarati, and recently in Swahili. But A. A. Raghavji, as his son reported, could not sleep. He woke up and waited for the first utterances in the distance to begin, and thenceforth agonized as they approached, relentless until they reached a peak under his window and then receded. After which he could not go back to sleep. His letter’s notoriety and its fame spread. It was said, especially by those who could not read English, that he had called old Jogo a machar, a mosquito and a djinn. Neighbours refused to sign his petition, and he became short-tempered and testy.

“He is brushing his teeth, he’ll be out in a moment,” Jogo’s mother would announce when we asked for him in the morning, and shout, “Abdul! Your friends are here!” Politely we would decline the offer of breakfast, and when the wait got too long, accepted a drink of water. Finally Jogo would emerge, grinning, swinging his school bag, his wet hair hastily combed, with gummy eyes. He was watched by his fat mother. He was solid, round and dirty. Except on Mondays, his shorts were never clean or pressed, his collars were always frayed, his shoes, when he wore them, dirty. He set the pace for the rest of our journey, telling bawdy jokes and inventing stories. He was our educator in sex. To learn from him was to hear dialogues among insects and fruits that had visited wonderful and hair-raising places in the anatomy, and had lived to tell the tale.

They were earth and ether, Jogo and Alu, but their fathers’ quarrel had not rubbed off on them.

My friend Alu, I would have to coax him to come to films with me whenever I could wrestle a permission out of Kulsum … He
was tall and frail. With puberty he became awkward and bespectacled, sweating from his palms and back. He carried a handkerchief in his hand when he wrote, which he also used to sniff with. When he shook hands, which he rarely did, he pocketed the drenched hankie and proffered a limp hand. In those days, with an Elvis hairstyle kept in place with a ready comb, his one dream was to be able to play the guitar and sing. From somewhere he obtained the specs for an electric guitar and had a piece of wood cut to shape by a carpenter. For a few weeks he bored us with talk of frets and bridges and keys as he waited for the equipment to arrive at the music shop. It never arrived, and he refused to consider another instrument. The wood with the bridge stuck on it lay near his bed while he waited, until gradually he gave up the project. An image of dead seriousness clung to him. A wraith. Awkward and gawking, giving off a faint odour of damp garlic, but obstinately persistent: a future professor, yes, but Elvis, no.

We were treated to our first and last tea at the house of our neighbour Uncle Goa. He brought the invitation shyly one day, a message from Madam.

“A birthday?” smiled Kulsum knowingly.

“No. Goodbye,” he smiled back from the doorway.

“The world has changed too rapidly for us,” he said when we were there that Sunday. “We have decided to go to Lourenço Marques.”

“We cannot watch our servants turning around and throwing insults at us.” Madam spoke as she stiffly brought the tea and accessories on a large tray, which she proceeded to unload on the centre table. She was a big woman, bigger than Uncle Goa, and a little exertion left her breathless. Kulsum watched with interest as she placed the faded beer mats on the quarter-circle serving stools and brought the cups one by one, aided by her son Brian. (Brian with the blue-green eyes, who was not allowed to play with us.)

“But we have nowhere to go,” said Kulsum. “We were all born here.”

“Yes, yes,” Uncle Goa said hastily. “For you it’s different.”

Gentle Uncle Goa. Kulsum had called upon him only rarely, in emergencies, but then he served with devotion, single-mindedly. He had taken me to school on my first day, when there was no one else to do it. (And together we had bungled my last name.) On the day I went with Edward on our Maulidi excursion at Illala he had driven all over town for a few hours looking for me. He recalled the incident. “Don’t run off again and worry your mother!”

(Well, Uncle Goa, if only you could see me now … from wherever you are …)

“So,” said Madam. “I am asking fifty shillings for all the kitchenware and one hundred and fifty for the Singer. The fridge I am selling to someone else.” Kulsum agreed. She had already made other arrangements with Uncle Goa.

 … I sit in the shop, behind Kulsum, tinkering with Kulsum’s “zigzag,” hidden from view by the raised cabinet cover, the bobbin case open in front of me. Kulsum sits on her high stool behind the counter, commanding the two doorways. At this languorous afternoon hour Uncle Goa comes in, in his best uniform, white shorts and shirt and stockings, and black shoes.

“Well, Mrs. Juma,” he says awkwardly. “I have come to say goodbye.” There is a pause, and they shake hands.

“Give my regards to Madam,” says Kulsum. “And remember us sometimes.”

“Thank you.”

“And thank you for all the help you have given me.”

“Ah, it was nothing …” He takes two steps, stops and turns around hesitantly. “Mrs. Juma … I have developed a deep respect for you—”

“I am only a woman, but I do my best …”

“Something I find hard to say …”

“Thank you for what you’ve done.”

“I just wanted you to know.”

“I know.”

“Then … goodbye, Mrs. Juma. Give my regards to your children.”

“Goodbye, Mr. Menezes.”

“It’s done!” I shout. “The bobbin is fixed!”

To see your mother from a distance … Past forty, the body is thickening, bitter experience etched in those furrows on her forehead, visited by several illnesses that would never leave her, her medicine box getting more crowded every year with jostling pill bottles, the pills gradually eroding her grief and memory. Think of all those wooers, those men Hassan Uncle would bring during those initial years on some pretext. The first one was surely Mahmed Bhai, the book-keeper, into whose hairy ears we would poke thin long strands from the bathroom broom for fun. Why else would he stand this punishment … perhaps
we
drove him away. And the others, big and small, thin and fat, mostly it seemed from the interior, they would come, sit for some time, have tea and leave. She accepted no offers, memory was her husband. But she knew how fragile was the reputation of a widow, and she never went to town without either Sona or me with her … long walks to the Downtown wholesalers which we both hated, because there was no reward in them.

Sir Richard Turnbull, then Governor General, left; a torch was lit on the summit of Mount Kilimanjaro as promised, but its light not as glorious. The country was poor, we were told, and we have waved mother England goodbye. Per capita incomes were thrown about for comparison in political speeches, in the newspapers and finally in school. The enemies of the country were identified. Poverty, illiteracy and disease. Freedom from Hunger! Uhuru na kazi! Self-help schemes went under way.

Every Sunday a lorry would stop at Kichwele and Viongozi to pick up volunteers from our corner, and people who had never
wielded a spade before, Nuru Poni, Ramzan Daya, Nurdin Samji, went happily to build schools and housing schemes wearing khanga shirts and singing ‘E e TANU ya jenga nchi!’

Those who had waited for Uhuru to throw riches at their feet were frustrated. Hassam Punja still owned his ten or more buildings, new bungalows were going up in Upanga, the new buildings going up on Msimbazi and Kichwele were mostly Indian … and Indian girls were still not forthcoming. The judges were Europeans, the managers of the big companies were Europeans, the headmasters in the schools were also Europeans. What had changed?

There will be those who remember the three kofias, who gained a brief notoriety at the time of Chief Abdalla’s trial. The Swahili daily,
Ngurumo
, showed a picture of one of them, with his hand in a peanut vendor’s basket. This was at the rally in support of the chief, outside the High Court. “Is this what they think the kofia is for?” asked the caption. Who else but Jogo? He discovered the photograph himself (who else among us flipped the pages of
Ngurumo?)
and showed it around, even to the teachers.

The kofia episode began with a haircut, inspired by Ji Bai’s revelations and the euphoria of Uhuru …

One afternoon I went to Madhu Bhai’s shop and asked him to cut my hair short, to the scalp. A short koché-koché.

“What! A new hairstyle this? What new actor or actress dictates this fashion now? Elvis is going bald?”

“No, no, I just want it short.”

“Aré—when it grows back, you will look like a real kalidas. Already it is colour you have lack of.”

“Please cut it, now!”

“Have you asked Ba?”

“Yes. She sent me.”

“Acha. Could be a matter of religion. But you don’t have lice, now? If so, first put kerosene and then come back!”

“No, no! I don’t have any lice!”

Madhu Bhai began humming and selecting scissors while I watched myself front and back in the infinite images of the two facing mirrors.

Madhu Bhai was introduced to Kulsum by Hassan Uncle as a reasonable barber. He first cut my hair on the sidewalk outside my grandmother’s shop in Msimbazi. Then he still went around on foot with his leather case and in “barber’s uniform” of white bush shirt over white trousers, and black cap. You could spot a barber a good half a mile off in his uniform, patiently trudging along or pushing a bicycle, and if you had rather not sit still for half an hour and experience a burning hairline afterwards, you disappeared. Barbers knew when the month was up for their charges and came to remind and set appointments. Then they came looking for you under the staircase or on the roof terrace or wherever it was you were seeking asylum. Madhu Bhai promised his old discounts when he opened his New Empire Hairdressing Saloon. Here we could read old issues of
Filmfare
and the
Illustrated London News
. And Madhu Bhai still entertained, with Gujarati bhajans and proverbs and his phenomenal double fart. “Bosch!” he would exclaim in mild surprise at the first release, and then greet the second one with a satisfied “Red Cross!”

“There,” he said, when he finished. “Fresh as a hot chapati! It will soon grow back. Next time you come, my son Ashok will be here. I am leaving.”