The Gunny Sack (36 page)

That was our first visit, Amina’s and mine, to Kaboya together on official business. There would be one more. I never went to the Jaffer household again.

On Thursdays at camp, during the hours before lunch, Amina was asked to give lectures on politics and culture. She decided she would read to her class. First she gave them Abdel Latif Kodi, then Shaban Robert. She translated excerpts from Chinua Achebe. She read Nyerere, Nkrumah,
Lincoln, Martin Luther King, Lenin and Marx. I was enlisted as assistant and the two of us were excused regular duty and never learnt to fight with weapons. On our first trip to Kaboya we went in search of
The Merchant of Venice
at the local school library. This turned out to be one cupboard in the staff room, with no Shakespeare.

Two weeks later we returned, in search of former high school students who had been educated elsewhere and might still have a copy of the play with them. We found one at the house of Ali Ramzan, former student of Shakespeare in Dar, now shopkeeper. It was lunchtime, and Mr. Ramzan, a bearded Indian, made us sit down to eat with him. His wife did not appear from the kitchen and a servant brought the food. After lunch, Mr. Ramzan, after reminiscing about his Shakespeare days at Dar, parted a little hesitantly with the book, as if with a little of his life. His name was scrawled in ink on the first page, Ali Mohamed Ramzan, Standard XIB.

On our way back, on the lonely road that came up from the lake, Amina was looking for Shylock’s famous defence, when a noisy truck full of Indian boys celebrating a victory drove in front of us on a crossroad and stopped. Out came rowdy adolescents looking for fun and ran straight for Amina. “Come on, dada! Give us some, too!” The usually fiery Amina looked at me in terror: “What do we
do
, Indian?” And she started screaming, running down the hill. The boys then came at me. From their midst, Zainab’s brother Faruq stepped out. “Listen,” he shouted as if at a mosque gathering. “This ill-begotten half-caste son of a dog has spoken ill of my sister after eating from our house. What shall we do with him?”

“Kill him!”

There is one thing I have always dreaded, an irrational perhaps primal fear for the safety of my cranium, the very thought of which makes me cringe … a solid-wood made-in-England cricket bat aimed at my head. The hysterical Faruq now screamed, cricket bat raised … 
She told me she had fetched Mr. Ali Ramzan and the two had run up the hill to save me. The boys ran off, leaving me bruised and bleeding.

Faruq had called me a half-caste, so obviously he knew of my background. What else did Jaffer Meghji know … did he meet Dhanji Govindji on his travels or the other way round … I never got around to asking (the slippery old man only skirted the subject) … and then it was too late. So much information simply hoarded for years and now lost … And the gunny sack is reduced to silence on the subject.

 … The back of a Land Rover on a bumpy road, Amina still clutching
The Merchant of Venice
. “Listen,” she says. “Here it is. ‘If you prick us do we not bleed? If you—’ ”

“Yeah, we bleed, we bleed all right. Can’t you see I’m dying?”

“Why don’t you lie down, Salum? Rest.”

“On this?” I point to the grooved metal floor in disbelief. “And split my skull completely? If you hit our skulls—aah—don’t they crack …”

“Here. Put your head on my leg and lie down.” She stretches her legs out and straightens her skirt. “Here.”

There. I put my head where she indicated. Above the knee. The clouds overhead throw down a wicked glare and I turn my head. “It’s hard here.” I move my head up and into the warm embrace, the sweet enclosure of her lap.

“Hey, Indian,” she says. “Watch out. You’re no better than the others.”

“If you tempt us, don’t we fall …”

“Weh Amina,” chuckles the driver in front. “He’s got you now!”

I heaved and embraced her waist, pressing deeper … I’d got her … and her legs moved apart ever so slightly to receive me.

And I swear that the Kaboya skies that never rain after noon rained some to celebrate.

I fell asleep.

The bush telegraph, they say, is slower than the electric, but it is more thorough. It begins as a whisper in the air. Carelessly, easily it travels, then it grows, acquires and gathers momentum, a current of whispers, then a murmur in motion. It delivers not one cryptic line in a khaki envelope but a resonance: mass of fact, opinion, speculation and pure fabrication. The news is in the air: Did you hear about Kala, the so-and-so who did the such-and-such … How did they know about us, Amina and me, in Dar? The message buzzed in Kaboya from man to man and woman to woman until it could not be contained, and from thence via bus and railway and lake steamer, through couriers, Post Office and word of mouth to Kulsum.

Edward met me at the railway station. An older-looking Edward in the usual bush shirt and sandals, fatter, and because fatter looking taller and a little dissipated. He almost
missed me, not recognizing me in military uniform and moustache. We shook hands and walked to the taxi he had reserved.

Edward was Kulsum’s envoy.

“What’s this I hear? You have an African girl?”

“Sort of …” I grinned. “Yes …”

“It’s true, then! Salum, weh! now why do you have to go and do a thing like that? First Begum, now you—” He was angry. Not angry to hurt me but angry to be hurt, disappointed.

“Why do you object?”

“It’s not proper, Salum, it’s not time yet … Africans and Asians are different … its like the story of—”

Edward propounding his theory of separate development of the races.

“You talk like Verwoerd! Like Smith! Salazar! It’s because of people like you that the Africans are screwed in South Africa …”

“Ah Salum, weh! Stop it.”

A few months later, that August, Alu Poni left for Massachusetts to study engineering. His departure was kept secret until the last few days because he was leaving without permission of the Ministry of Education. Someone could always go to the Ministry and say, “But so-and-so is going to America, why can’t my daughter go?” “Which so-and-so?” the officer would ask. “That so-and-so.” “We will not let him.”

The National Service turned Alu Poni into an avowed anti-Communist. Perhaps it merely affirmed a tendency in him … and the change I saw in him was partly a mirror image of how I myself had deviated. The six months in Service, away from our families and normal ways, changed all of us, not only into boys who could now easily run a few miles or grow a moustache, but also into boys who asserted themselves and their ideas, boys who thought about the world. The world came to the Poni household via
Newsweek
now. The Vietnam war was raging. America was bracing for a presidential election, and
the race to the moon was on … One Sunday, a few days before he left, Alu’s mother invited all his friends to lunch, to wish him goodbye. There were Jogo and me, his bosom buddies, Hassam, of the rock group Iblis, Walji who had got a place in Dar to study law, Nathoo and Bandali who were going to Nairobi to study engineering.

From the head of the dining table Alu gave us his vision of the world which he would be taking with him to America. The Domino Theory: if Vietnam goes, so will Cambodia and the rest of Indochina, and there would be one huge Communist menace in the East, ready to pounce upon the rest of the world. There was a certain personage, he said, learned in the books, who had definite proof from the scriptures that the last great battle between God and Satan would be the coming Third World War. The Devil will rise from the East, he said. “And which great power is rising from the East?” he asked. “China! The Devil will have an army of six-point-six million men, it is said—and which country could possibly have that many people? China!” China, he said, and therefore Communism and its godlessness were the dreaded Daitya.

Daitya, by which name Kulsum would curse at Sona and me sometimes. Alias Azazil, Iblis. His coming would mark the climax of Kali Yuga … he would raise the dead, make bread from air to feed a starving world … and the people would flock to him in error and abandon God … The Kali Yuga was already upon us, said Alu. Soon we would be faced with the great war between the powers, the forces of good and evil.

“But where will this great war be fought? In Africa? The Middle East?”

“It could be anywhere, bana! Even in space …”

All this while his mother served samosas and lapsi and biriyani. Discomfited, Nuru Poni simply grinned from the side of the table, showing his teeth, at the sight of the apocalyptic Alu. Nuru Poni, who by Government decree could no longer do business as a pawnbroker, but a staunch party
member who happily sold Chinese polyester suiting, drank tea from a pink Chinese thermos and wrote with a Chinese Parker pen look-alike.

Nuru Poni had kept up with the times. In slow sure steps he had progressed and departed from traditional beliefs, becoming more rational and political, so that he admired Mao and Tito, Nkrumah and Nehru. A progressive man in a progressive country. But that day, a lonely man: an Asian, out of step with his community. His two older sons had aspired to nothing more than Kariakoo shops and Kariakoo brides immediately after high school, and now his favourite and brightest son was going off to America thinking that the CIA were God’s emissaries.

We sat at the table, all envious of Alu. He was so sure of himself, going out into the big world to fight big problems, to join the forces of good against the forces of evil, while we remained here in a small country fighting our small problems. We saw him in America making rockets, at Cape Kennedy, at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Alu Poni, he was simply pulled into another orbit and never came back.

After lunch, Hassam, former Elvis and now Beatle fan, sang us some songs. To bring us back from the apocalyptic mood he sang with a grin “May the Good Lord Bless and Keep You,” with which we had wished Miss Penny Mrs. Gaunt goodbye, and now we sang it for our friend, not as fairies but as young men recently returned from service. After which Hassam went into a Beatle medley, refusing to sing Elvis or Jim Reeves, but agreeing to end with “Kwa Heri.”

It was a month after Alu Poni had left. A Monday morning. At five o’clock people found themselves looking out from their windows. What had woken them up? The sound of voices this early, of doors opening or shutting, of too many vehicles on the road, a scream perhaps. Outside the Ponis’ store were parked
four Land Rovers. The voices were low and all activity was hidden behind the shadows of the vehicles. No-one went back to sleep and sufuriyas of tea were put to boil.

The next morning word was abroad about the “passport detentions.” Eighteen people had been taken into preventive detention for frauds involving the immigration office. That morning the Ponis’ store remained closed, as if somebody had died in their home. But Nuru Poni’s detention was a mistake, as everyone on our corner could have sworn. That afternoon a little after lunchtime he wearily stepped off a bus, in his crumpled white drill pants and white shirt and opened his store. The keys, it seemed, were with him.

When Nuru Poni returned he found that his own son Firoz was in detention. Firoz was married and had his store a little down the road on Kichwele. Under his bed were found blank passports already signed and endorsed by the immigration office, which he could simply make out in the names of whoever could pay him. The fee was 200 shillings. Alu Poni probably left carrying one such passport.

The greatest thrill of being young and at university is the discovery of your own mind and thoughts, the limitless possibilities; and the belief that what you think matters. We thought the country was listening, Africa needed us. We formed SNAFU, Students for a New Africa. Every Friday this think tank met in the Nkrumah Room. We considered papers, examined the week’s news, issued communiqués, organized debates and seminars, published bulletins. Yes, we did stir up the campus while we lasted, and the membership reflected a cross section that would encourage anyone who had hopes in the new Africa.

Aloysius Mbogo, chairman. He played Mr. Turton in
A Passage to India
, when it was produced at Boyschool with black actors playing the whites and Indians playing Indians. His one love was to preside. “Gentlemen, gentlemen! Now this
is a serious matter. We will settle it by consensus.” And settle it he did.

Amina Saidi, chief thinker. The fiery Amina of Kaboya fame, whose anti-imperialist and humanist ideas were now steeped in the colours of Marxist-Leninist theory. Amina called the shots: scrutinized the politics of suggested speakers, quizzed the speakers after they spoke, especially when she was disappointed, wrote the draft editorial for the newsletter: in short, the life of the organization. She skirted rather dangerous territory sometimes, even then: “Is African Socialism all romantic hot air without theoretical (i.e. scientific) underpinnings?” This debate drew a huge crowd, including local officials, and she was not quite ready to go all-out in support of the motion (“It is said that all peasant societies have some form of joint ownership in theory, but in fact—”). The motion was soundly defeated. “Industry or Agriculture?” was the heading of one editorial. Her vision then was of a modern, small industrialized African nation along the lines of one of the Soviet satellites.