The Magic of Saida (28 page)

It was easier, Kamal discovered soon enough, to conform to mischief, be among the other misfits, the poor and the half-castes, generally the darker hued. Smoking was sin and therefore a forbidden pleasure. Where else could you smoke undetected than at the cinema,
where the misfits would sneak in during khano time, though at risk of painful penalty. The cinemas were the Empire, the Empress, and the Avalon. At the side of the Empress was an alley where you could hide and smoke away, and when the bell rang and the lights went out inside, as the flag came up on the screen and the national anthem played, you snuck into the theatre to watch the latest fantasy extravaganza,
Ben Hur, Tarzan, Shane
, or whatever. And try not fidgeting in case a flashlight approached and found you out, and chased you up the aisle to the lobby to receive a cuff from fat Mahesh the manager. Sometimes the religious monitors would show up while you smoked and take down your names, to report next day in school for a reckoning with the fearsome Rahim Master.

Over the religious lives of boys in Dar es Salaam ruled the great dictator Rahim Master.

“I never realized what a colourful and exciting life you Asians lived,” I said to him and could have bitten off my tongue for my affront. I surely knew that the whole point of his story was what a difficult and how incomplete and unsuccessful a conversion he went through from African to Asian—more precisely, Indian.

“I didn’t mean it quite that way,” I apologized.

“I know.” He looked around. “You know, at this moment I could do with a smoke. I gave up a long time ago.”

We were sitting by candlelight at the Seacliffe, situated at the promontory of Oyster Bay, where the local nouveau riche mingle with the tourists and the foreign-aid expatriates. Before us a half-finished South African red. He’d had tilapia, I a steak. I partake in such privilege only when offered it. As I sat there I couldn’t help musing how far my host had come, having undergone in his adulthood yet another unfinished conversion, into a Canadian. Was it resentment at his situation that brought out my ostensibly unintended barb?

“Tell me about this dictator—this Rahim Master.”

He grinned.

“Even now,” he said, “there are those who recall him fondly despite the canes and blows they received, because he taught the faith, and
above all, drummed into them the holy ginans, those hymns which they will never forget. He kept the tradition alive. For me he was terror personified.”

How could this Golo, with the dark chotara skin and curly hair that screamed “Unteachable!” and “Donkey!” learn to sing the Indian ginans whose ragas were stranger than the film tunes that came on the radio, which at least he learned to recognize and to like and hum to himself? “I will drum these holy ginans into you!” the teacher would thunder at him, landing a thump on his back. “Copy down all the verses fifty times in your notebook, and stand up on the table! Your mark, E!” And Kamal would join the other “donkeys,” some of them punished simply because they couldn’t carry a tune, and stand up on his desk, grinning back at his classmates, but humiliated nevertheless. How he dreaded those religion classes, especially on the days when a ginan had to be recited. Then Rahim Master, always in one of his two faded suits, would come in and begin the inquisition, walk down the aisles, ask each boy in turn to recite a verse from the prescribed ginan, always starting from the beginning of the first row, next to the window. He loved his ginans, there would be a smile on his face at the start, a fragile smile ready to explode at the first failure to recite. Verse after verse, the master approached, bringing judgment, and Kamal sweated; it would be over soon, but not soon enough. While he waited he would count and predict what verse would fall on him to recite; he would go over it in his mind. But the master had an antenna sensitive just to that extra heartbeat, the tingle in the nerve of the less than fully prepared; homing in, he would skip a few verses when your turn came, stand in front of you and calmly ask you to recite that impossible one. You spluttered, you failed, you shrank inside your sweaty white shirt and waited for the blow to fall. You simply had to learn all the six, or twelve, or twenty-one verses by heart.

“In Kilwa we were never religious. Rather, Islam was all around us, it was in the way we lived, even the language we spoke, the name people gave to a donkey or a boat. We lived under the benign gaze of Allah—so to speak. Mama would pray when she got up in the morning; the shopkeeper opened his store, Mzee Omari began his utenzis, always invoking His name; people went to mosque on Friday,
wearing kanzu and kofia; during Eid we put on new clothes … It was all implicit and effortless. Now in Dar I was with a community whose faith was a musical, an ongoing Bollywood epic, with singing and food and dramatic characters, beginning with the great dictator Rahim Master. There were the preachers, who could stand up for an hour and draw tears from the congregation; the fanatics on the lookout for deviants—the stinking, foul-mouthed crazies who were tolerated and fed, the embezzlers headed for the Inferno, people with funny nicknames, men with a roving eye. All the gossip.”

There was a mskiti, a simple African mosque, that Kamal would pass on his way home from school. It lay on one of several different routes he would take, in a block of African houses, and was marked only by its whitewashed outer wall, the open door, and its aura of utter serenity; the sheikh, a lean man with a stooping frame, would be standing framed by the entrance, looking out, or sitting outside on the stone bench against the wall, and Kamal would greet him, “Shikamoo, Baba.” “Marahaba,” would come the appropriate reply, with a pleasant smile. He would think of Mzee Omari then. On Friday afternoons a handful of people would be going in and out. One day, impulsively, when the sheikh was not around, Kamal stepped inside the mskiti, away from the raging sun, and stood in the empty hall until its stillness filled him, its air cooled him and his eyes had adjusted; without a thought he went down on his knees and began the ritual prayer he had not performed in more than a year. More than a prayer to God, this was a communion with his previous life. When he had finished and stood up and turned around, he saw the old sheikh standing at the back in the shadows, watching him. Kamal returned whenever the whim took him—when he had no one walking with him, when the street was quiet—and felt elated afterwards. After his stint inside, he would sit briefly outside on the bench with Sheikh Hemedi, who kept a bottle of water ready for him to drink, filled from a tap. He told the sheikh all about himself. Kamal asked him once why there was no azan called at this mskiti. It was too small, the sheikh replied; those who wished to come needed no reminder. However, one day as Kamal approached the mosque,
he was thrilled to hear the azan being called out, just for his sake, in the sheikh’s voice.

One afternoon he was observed by a schoolmate. The next day two boys watched him enter the mskiti. He was reported not to his uncle but to Rahim Master, into whose office he was called, where he received the expected bawling out for his deviancy from the true faith. But it was the pained silence at the dinner table, and schoolmates muttering behind his back, that persuaded Kamal to abandon his brief escapes into what had become his memory-life. He would pass by the mskiti and greet the sheikh when he saw him, and the old man responded pleasantly as though nothing were the matter. Soon Kamal avoided that street altogether. Zera Auntie asked him if he had asked forgiveness at the khano; he said that he had.

The boyhood games and the narrow escapes, the stolen smokes, the sneak viewings of movies, and listening to the tailor Sabini’s stories while standing before his Pfaff machine and laughing till the tears came to his eyes, or receiving a whole shilling from a furtive Zera Auntie to spend in school on Coca-Cola and peanuts. Instances such as these would give a happy glow to his Dar days when he recalled them; they brought him a sense of belonging to a community, a growing comfort in his surroundings. His deviation into the austere familiarity of an African mskiti was one lapse from this new life. The pain and bitterness of that episode only highlighted how much he had been accepted by his Asian community.

Still, he was different. His features announced it plainly, spoke of provenance, posed questions. There were the reminders, the small and large ones, accidental or aimed to wound. He had his memories, his private world to turn to at night. No one could interfere with his memories, they were his solace, his hope for some future resolution in his life. They chained him to his past.

But one evening even this sanctum was violated, when any remaining wholeness he carried within him was shattered. After khano the neighbourhood streets briefly filled up in the dark—people briskly strolling in twos and threes, and women shuffling together in animated groups with little children and all the time in the world, and
noisy youths standing around at the street vendors. On Jamat Street, Uncle would partially open the store and sit outside, shooting the breeze with neighbours. Sometimes the men played cards. The children and Zera Auntie would be upstairs, drinking their milk, listening to music on the radio, Indian filmi or British and American pop.

That fateful night Kamal brought from upstairs a pudding for his uncle, but he did not see him sitting with his friends outside.

“Eh, Kamalu, what do you want?” one of the men asked.

“This pudding is for Jaffu Uncle, and Auntie asks if he wants tea—but where is he?”

A man muttered under his breath and the three of them laughed softly.

“Go, Kamalu, he is eating to his heart’s content. Pudding and everything.”

“He is eating pudding already?”

“Go now.”

On his way to go upstairs, however, walking through the shop, Kamal saw a young African woman emerge from the storeroom at the back. She was in a khanga and barefoot. As she walked out, the men called out “Kwa heri!” just as Uncle emerged, tying up his pyjamas. He always wore a pyjama in the evening.

“What—”

“Auntie said to bring pudding for you—”

Roars of laughter erupted behind him.

“All right. Go upstairs now.”

As Kamal went out he heard one of the men say, “A total joy, isn’t she? Pudding!”

“Total joy,” said Uncle. “Tonight was pudding.”

Kamal understood. Excited as any teenager at this lascivious account of a sexual encounter, and yet … she was a bought one; a young African girl.

Total joy. How repugnant.

The thought kept plaguing his mind: Was this how his father had seen Mama? Is this what she had meant to him? That couldn’t have been the case, his father had had a studio photo taken with him and his mama; acknowledging togetherness, he had left money for them in a post office account. But he had gone away. How much of what
Mama had told him about his father was true, how much fanciful? And Mama herself, who had been paid for him … who never wrote to him—was she true?

Was there anything certain in his life to call his own?

He lay in bed that night, in tears, facing the embrace of the cool, hard brick wall, talking to his imaginary comforter.

How did he imagine her? Had she grown with him, now a teenager?

He looked embarrassed. “I imagined her as she had been, and yet older so she could understand me. I would tell her, ‘Thank God I have you, Saida. Tonight I feel most miserable, and I have no one else.’ And I would say other things that are too embarrassing for me to relate.”

Dr. Navroz Engineer had come to Tanzania as a child in the 1960s with his communist Indian parents, both of them doctors and disenchanted with India but ardent admirers of Julius Nyerere, Tanzania’s president, and his brand of African socialism. Navroz’s father still practised in Dar, his mother had died. He had two uncles, who also immigrated to Tanzania. He didn’t know why he himself didn’t go overseas for better prospects and a comfortable lifestyle, he simply got stuck practising. There was always so much to be done, day to day, he explained to Kamal.

They’d come to sit at a table in the lounge and waited to be served. A thin drizzle pattered on the roof and outside on the beach. It was cool by tropical standards, and Navroz wore a light sports sweater, of the type favoured by tennis players. How long was it since he’d had a game of tennis, Kamal wondered.

“How about your own family?” he asked Navroz.

“Two kids, boys. They are with my wife in Dar. School and so on.”

“Why Kilwa?”

“Why Kilwa?” Navroz grinned. “I belong to a consortium of doctors—we have clinics in various towns across the country. We try to rotate our assignments.”

“How long will you be in Kilwa, then?”

“A few more months, perhaps more. We lost a doctor recently to a more lucrative practice. Too busy to get lonely here, but there’s a flight to Dar every day. And it’s frustrating when you’re limited by means. I try not to think too much about it … and avoid this”—he swirled the Scotch in his glass—“as much as possible.”

They were served their dinner. The chef had finally acceded to Kamal’s request for spinach on the menu, having overcome the slight that the guest should insist on peasant and servant fare instead of a culinary adventure from the local sea catch.

“Over here I’m afraid we are not very disciplined in what we eat,” Navroz confessed, without sounding in the least apologetic. He put a soggy chip—the national delicacy, Kamal had decided—into his mouth. “Too tempting. Have some—though as a doctor, I wouldn’t advise you to.”

Kamal watched the round face, the cropped greying hair, the stooped shoulders. There was an unaffectedness in the local doctor that he rather liked. He tried to imagine Navroz’s life, at home in Dar, or here in Kilwa, but couldn’t. I only have the past to cling to. I belong here, speak the language, but move around unconnected like a ghost.

“I understand you are from Kilwa originally,” Navroz said. “This is home?”

“I was born here,” Kamal replied. “This is my village, I guess—my mother’s place.”

“But you don’t belong anymore …”

“Is that a question?”

“Yes.”