The Gunny Sack (41 page)

The union was obvious to the most casual observer. Two teachers. Same interests. Friendly to each other. No competitors in sight. While I smarted from Amina’s betrayal and suffered Mark’s exaggerated courtesies, the two of them plotted to keep us late so we could go home together. While I dutifully escorted Zuleika to her home after dusk, her mother waited up for her and formed ideas, and boys and girls in Upanga East, from Red Cross to the Chinese Embassy, from Upanga to United Nations, started gossiping. Someone whispered the gossip into Kulsum’s ears. Kulsum promised two or three bribes to the gods, I don’t know what she put into my tea, and she got to work.

A teacher. Same interests as mine. Pretty and lively. What was I waiting for? I said yes.

She said yes, and the engagement was announced.

Weddings are fun. Begum writes a tearful letter and Kulsum relents. “Dear daughter Begum, to whom God grant etc. I am a widow and it is not appropriate for me to preside over the wedding of a son, to put on a colourful pachedi and welcome the bride home, this would be inauspicious and in bad taste. You being the eldest and married it is only appropriate that you should take over the task of the mother, you who brought them up while I was in the shop downstairs …” And Begum arrives fat but jolly with all kinds of luxurious gifts that she has spent a considerable part of her savings to buy, and bringing with her two enchanting, beautiful children with whom Kulsum cannot communicate except through gestures and broken English. And there are tears of joy, joy too much to contain, “I wish he were here,” Kulsum sobs, remembering him, he whose name she
never uttered, he who was and is always
he
, he whom she addressed simply with, “Listen …”: her husband.

Weddings are fun, they bathe you in milk and anoint you with saffron and shower you with rice while they sing folksy songs in hoarse voices … they fuss over you and they tease you (Will you forget them when she comes?) and make sexual innuendoes that you don’t know how to respond to … and finally you emerge, in your best suit from My Tailor and braced with Old Spice and put yourself in the hands of the best man, who accompanies you to the mosque … and she comes shy and tense in her white dress and glittering with jewels, her hair set high, hands painted with henna, tottering on her high heels, looking down … all afternoon having sat in front of a brazier being saturated in halud vapour, so that by the time you get her alone in the room at the Kilimanjaro, the family friends having left after examining the marriage bed for springiness and softness and taking that inane picture with your arm around her which you once swore you would never have taken, you can hardly wait and she can hardly wait but she lies down stiff and expectant, hard and full and fragrant as a ripe mango ready to burst, waiting with a fluttering heart for you to claim her.

Weddings are fun.

The morality campaign was on, Green Guard cadres went about town with a morality meter: this was a simple device, nothing more than a king-size Coca Cola bottle, which had to be able to pass through your trouser legs before they could be pronounced decent. Thus the fight against “drainpipe” pants and jeans. There were many quarrels and near fights. Officials were not willing to stand by and let their wives’ skirts be measured. And girls and boys out on Independence Avenue simply ducked into a store or restaurant when they saw a cadre approaching; and the tourists and expatriates simply ignored these guardians of public morality.

At about this time—Hassan Uncle had left a few months before—there came a visitor to Dar called Nasir Bunzai, from the mountainous district of Bunza in the north of Pakistan. Ever since the
Daily Reporter
of Nairobi did a series on the enchanting land of Bunza a few years before, the Shamsis in East Africa stood in awe of anything Bunzai. Bunza, it was said, was a land where people routinely lived up to more than a hundred years eating yogurt and nuts, breathing fresh mountain air, and possessed such a high degree of spirituality that they would wrap a newborn infant in fur and roll it down a mountain to test its sturdiness and spiritual power. Nasir was a Sufi from Bunza, a small man with a round face and thick spectacles, among whose feats was a night spent in a Chinese jail. He soon acquired a following, primarily among the women, chief among whom was Kulsum’s sister Fatu.

My Fatu Auntie, who would have made an excellent tragedienne, was in a spiritual phase, having elevated her father Mitha Kanji, who had predicted the fall of Zanzibar in the 1920s, to the level of a pir. In this she was joined by several women whose fathers or grandfathers had followed my grandfather, then called Mad Mitha, out of Zanzibar to Mombasa and Dar. This group then embraced Nasir the Sufi, still keeping their loyalty to Mitha Kanji (whose photograph, showing him in a turban, had been produced). From Nasir they learnt the science of meditation, or dhikr, the Bunza way. At eight every evening they met at my aunt’s, they sat in a circle on a mat, with Nasir at the head, and they held hands and chanted “Allah! Allah!” Overcome with emotion and exuberance, several of the participants would weep.

Needless to say, there were many who viewed the whole affair with disapproval, to the point of casting doubt on the Sufi’s moral integrity and on Bunza’s spiritual pre-eminence. He too left, soon thereafter, to serve the more needy souls in Canada.

This left Fatu Auntie with Mad Mitha. What future for this fledgling sect? That remains to be seen.

The last time I saw Amina …

Across the street from Amina’s house was a barber’s shop, with the sign

where two barbers worked. I don’t know if it ever changed hands, but I remember always seeing it, from the very first days I started taking that route to school. Next to the Matumbi was a nameless tea kiosk. Here one morning a neatly dressed man in a grey Kaunda suit, after impressing his credentials upon the owner, took a seat with a bunch of newspapers and began drinking tea, a procedure he followed for several days thereafter.

It was evening, after a reading by Abdel Latif Kodi at Jangwani. As I stepped into the dark corridor of the house I bumped into a stomach.

“Watch it,” I murmured in irritation, “you’re not looking where you’re going!”

“Weh, Juma!”

Shivji Shame in mufti.

“What are you doing here at this time—you’re a married man!”

“Yes.”

“And you are a father. What’s the child’s name?”

“Amina.”

“Aah! A girl.”

“What are
you
doing here? Without uniform—”

“Visiting. We want her to give a lecture. In camp.”

Shivji Shame was now in the army, but had not earned his mkasis yet, the major’s scissors. He was still a sergeant. He
brought his head close to mine and whispered, forefinger raised: “You watch me, I’ll make it yet. I’ve been to Uganda.” Out he stomped into the dark night.

Amina was in the sitting room, sitting on a pillow on the mat, back against the wall, feet stretched in front of her, hands in her lap … Abdel Latif Kodi likewise against the opposite wall. A resigned, almost serene look on both faces, as if they had left everything in the hands of some higher authority, of fate, chance whatever. What did they know?

“Our conscience,” smiled Amina, bidding me sit. The poet smiled graciously. “No,” I said,
“there’s
our conscience,” and pointed to him.

“A stifled conscience,” she said.

The poet left soon afterwards.

“Where is everyone else? I thought they were coming here.”

“Dancing. Drinking. Whoring, for all I know.”

“I was passing by—”

“It’s late, Salum. Your wife can’t keep you?”

“Where’s Mark?”

I, too, had heard rumours.

“He’s left. For Nairobi and Lamu. There are enough hippies there. We have work to do here.”

We sat and talked late into the night. No banter and baiting this time. What had come between us before was now no longer there: too much had passed. Now a mellow Amina and a mellow Salim, unburdened of the pure rough-edged ideals of youth, the cockiness of the youth of a youthful country. Man and woman, we had known closeness before, we slipped easily into its embraces, a tremor to our voices, a tremble in our taut bodies, infinitely happy at this rediscovery. We loved that night but did not make love. And when I got up to go, that exchange of looks, What will happen now, and the barest brush of her arm against mine. “Be careful,” she said.

Oh sweet love, if only you didn’t hurt as much …

At the end of the street, at Morogoro Road, a GT Land Rover was parked. A policeman got out and I nervously looked up.

“Jambo.”

“Jambo.”

“Where to, at this hour?”

“Home. I was visiting a friend.”

“A girlfriend, no doubt! You should be careful at this hour.”

“Yes. Asante.”

“Kwa heri.”

I took the lighted United Nations Road, then crossed into Upanga on Malik Road. Soundlessly I unlocked the door and tiptoed to bed on the sofa.

Anatomy of a marriage.

She never forgave me Amina. Amina the girl and Amina the name. When Beverley St. George the Crazy Canadian said something about her being married on the rebound, the foreign phrase stayed on her mind, undigested, before it finally sank in with the bite of an acid. Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned. Zuleika took control with a vengeance. Within weeks Kulsum had fled to Tanga, to Mehroon. And then slowly came the attack … if not I, then everything I stood for … the very lifestyle, the commitment that had brought us together in the first place, the semi-bohemian simplicity and denial of everything foreign, the carefree intellectual existence free from the shackles of family and community …

But then, she had not
really
belonged, she had been more a sympathetic figure who belonged nowhere really, neither with the wives of the dukas, nor with those of the new mercenaries, she did not want to go abroad … and of our Viongozi group, she did not take it seriously (except Abdel Latif Kodi): Mbogo chasing Bev St. George, Rashid and Tamim forever planning their book but not getting anywhere, Layla fighting
windmills (all men, except a handful), Alex reading like a windmill, and Amina: what was she
doing
, sitting there like a queen bee at the end of the hive? And I, she said, I went there only to see Amina and to impress her …

When the child was born, she would have her be named by a local religious personage (the same one who had prophesied to Alu Poni), who besides foretelling the coming apocalypse could successfully split hairs over the differences between Aisha, Asha and Ashia (outside whose house, which was guarded by a dog, boys had recently changed the sign to read: Beware of God), who cast a horoscope and pronounced: A name with an “m” in it—what better music to the ears than the gentle pleasing sound of the name of the Prophet’s mother? Amina. Zuleika looked up in disbelief, turned to me for the dissenting voice to escape my usually sceptical lips. An alternative name could have been requested, but I accepted Amina almost too readily, in the process admitting to the guilt she made me pay for. Of course, she could have accepted the name happily, and let the new Amina, kicking and screaming with fresh energy overshadow the old one. But no. Such philosophical patience was not forthcoming, and I offer it only in hindsight.

She was the woman twice scorned. Hatred seething below the surface at every domestic function. My every visit to that house on Viongozi would end with a quarrel which would destabilise us for the next forty-eight hours. Chained to a volcano, I would whisper to myself, sleeping with a land mine. At dinner, we were at each other’s throats like alley cats while little Amina looked in wonder from her imported high chair before joining in with her own screams.

The next evening, at nine, a lull in the hostilities at home, and in the activities outside—the nearby mosque had emptied—Zuleika was putting the little Amina to bed, and I sat with the
Herald
and a cup of tea, thinking periodically of the other Amina—what to
do?
—when there came a pounding on the
door. A soft pounding made by a large fist. Shivji Shame simply pushed his way in as soon as the locks were unbolted. Again, without uniform.

“Ah, Juma. What news? I was passing by, I thought I should come and meet you.”

“Good of you to come, Shivji.”

“Fanta?” He asked.

His armpits were stained with sweat, there were beads of perspiration on his face. But it was the same Shivji, a little weatherbeaten, perhaps.

“No,” I said. “Water.”

“All right. Then tea, please. Sweet, army tea.”

He had been to Uganda, he said when he was relaxed and slurping the tea. One of the rebel forces on their way to Uganda from Tanzania had passed by Kaboya, in the dead of night, in fact the Kaboya men had assisted it. But then the excitement was too much for them to bear, who for several years now had carried weapons and sang of fighting, and some of them simply joined the Ugandan force on its way to Masaka. “When the shooting started—we were faced with tanks and a prepared army—aaiiiiii! we were scared … it was the first time we had seen any real fighting … killing … I tell you Juma, we were happy when the order came for retreat.”