The Magic of Saida (34 page)

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They lined up, the Asians of Uganda. From Kampala, and from the small towns across the country where they ran their little shops—Mbale, Mengo, Masindi Port, Tororo, Jinja—they came and formed long queues outside the embassies of Britain, Canada, the United States, clutching their passports. Take us in. We’ve lost our home. Those who found even Kampala daunting, too big and sophisticated for their simple lives, were begging to be let into London, Toronto, Philadelphia. Any place would do, each foreign embassy a watering hole during a desperate drought, drawing hundreds on the basis even of a rumour of goodwill. Not every country was welcoming. Australia announced—“Let’s be perfectly honest”—that its interests would be served best only with people of European background. Denmark too announced that it did not want Asians. Those who went to India had to reach Mombasa, but Kenya would allow them overland passage only in closed trains, an episode eerily reminiscent of the horrors of Europe.

Meanwhile, other queues were forming, of Africans ready to take over Asian businesses.

In Kampala prayer houses became caravanserais where the communities met to discuss their futures, and people came seeking advice and comfort, among them widows, the aged, and the simple folk from upcountry, speaking no English, their only skill how to run a shop or a kitchen, their second language Luganda or Acholi. Here gathered all the bitterness, pain, and grief of a people ordered to leave their homes and life’s savings behind and simply go away. Here was the heartache of families whose fate it was to be dispersed over several countries, as they devised schemes to stay in touch and ultimately reunite somewhere on the globe. Those headed for refugee camps did not know on what continent they would end up. There were horror stories to be heard, of home invasions, molestations, and abductions. The khano was raided by the army and over a million shillings were discovered hidden in sandwiches. The
Argus
gloated: here were the engineers of corruption busily devising the country’s downfall. Kamal, witnessing all this at the khano where he volunteered with Shamim, was embarrassed to recall his silent cheer for Idi Amin. A half cheer from a half-caste. He came some mornings to the khano, where he helped people with their paperwork before
taking some sad individual or elderly couple to a lawyer to sign an affidavit or to one of the long lines of people outside the embassies. In these long queues some fainted from shock or heat, men jostled for spaces and broke into fights like boys, old quarrels revived suddenly into vicious abuse, so that the partly trained medical student was sometimes useful as an impartial young and rational voice.

Idi Amin’s three-month deadline approached but the lines were still long.

One day when Shamim and he were returning to campus, where half a long night’s academic catching up awaited them, she said, “You know, when I was at the Canadian consulate something strange happened.”

“What?”

“I was helping a family from Masindi Port, and this man, Mr. McDougal, said to me, ‘Why don’t you apply for a visa for yourself.’ Can you believe that?”

“If you had been Ugandan, this would have been your day.”

“Yes. But when I told him I was Tanzanian, you know what he said? He said, ‘We don’t ask questions!’ ”

“And they reject so many others.”

“We could go,” she said softly. Then looked intently at him: “Why don’t we go?”

“Where? To Canada? You must be crazy—we are Tanzanians. We have families there. That’s our country.”

What a thought. To go away, kabisa—forever. It was impossible, he would never do that. He could not imagine himself anywhere else but in the streets of Dar es Salaam; or Kilwa, though perhaps not, it would seem too small. One crazy general in Uganda didn’t mean Asians had to leave Tanzania too. He had not met any Asian happy to be going away. Why should anyone volunteer? And he was an African.

“We are Tanzanians,” he said.

“This McDougal said Asians have no future in Africa.”

“He knew you were studying to be a doctor and they need doctors in Canada. Remember, Tanzania needs doctors more.”

In the following days in her typical manner she kept up her campaign, without sulking or getting angry, and he knew a resolution
had to come. “I say, there are good hospitals in Canada, you know … I say, we could return when things are better, what do you think?” And yet he knew she was not entirely crazy. She was an Asian, and what happened in Uganda could happen elsewhere. The Canadian could be right. And no Asian could forget how, only a few months before, some old men of the Zanzibar Revolutionary Council had forcibly married Asian teenagers, one of whom had subsequently killed herself.

And yet, you don’t just go. He recalled what he had said to Mr. Fernandes about the country needing doctors—how haughty and self-assured he had sounded—and he recalled Mr. Fernandes’s idealism, invoking the soul of the nation. These were vital times for his country, his place was there.

“You know, we have signed a bond,” he said to Shamim. “We have promised that in return for our free schooling and university, we will serve in the country for three years.”

“Oh, bonds, ponds! There must be ways around these bonds.”

He could not tell her to go by herself; they were committed, now that they occasionally shared her bed, doing “things,” as she coyly put it. As a lover she was manipulative, the very opposite of Saida, and always the one in charge; how far they went was up to her initiative, not his passion, for it was understood that it was she who was breaking rules, going beyond the bounds, for his sake.

When he called his folks in Dar, it was obvious to him that his uncle and aunt had been told about Shamim’s proposal, but they let him bring up the subject. Zera Auntie encouraged him to go on and settle down with Shamim and be happy. “How nice!—you will be in Vilayat, among all the whites! You will become a white! All that snow!” She worked from her instincts, which was what made her kind, but it was useless to spring ideas and ideals on her, to tell her about his objections. But Jaffu Uncle, who had watched him silently over the years, understood him more than anyone else. He begged Kamal to go.

“Times will get worse, Kamal,” he said. “In Tanzania, our government doesn’t know where its arse is. There is no education to speak of anymore. Children go to school, sweep the floors, and return not learning anything. Bribery everywhere. And blame the Asian.
Kamal, I know you love this country. We all do. But they will not allow you to do what you want here. All your classmates are looking for ways to escape. And remember, if things get worse, you might not get such an opportunity again.”

He would make money available to them, Uncle said. Under the socialist regime, it was impossible to send money out of the country. However, there was a certain gentleman from Tanzania who had made his fortune in Congo. He owed Uncle a good sum of money which he would be instructed to send to Kamal in Canada. Kamal could use what he needed and hold the rest for the family.

If it had been anyone else attempting to convince him, Kamal might not have listened. But it was Uncle, who always spoke straight.

“I was wrong,” he said to me, these many years later in Dar. “My uncle was hiding something from me.”

There was a song that National Servicemen sang during political processions in the streets of Dar es Salaam, as they marched in uniform. It was a silly-sounding song that the schoolboys who shuffled behind them in the processions put their own words to, and it went: Tanzania, I love you so much, your name is sweet and brings joy to my heart … This song now played punishingly in Kamal’s head, its sentimental patriotism—as he would describe it later—as false and empty and saccharine as his promises to Saida. What was true was that he was taking the easy way out, abandoning his country, absconding to another world via Mr. McDougal’s office in the Canadian consulate.

McDougal was a clean-shaven man in his thirties, strong-jawed and athletic, and not very tall. He shook hands and eyed the couple, and said to Shamim with a smile,

“The offer was to you, not to the both of you.”

Shamim replied charmingly, “We are engaged, John. It’s not allowed in our culture to be separated.”

McDougal stamped their applications, gave them medical forms, and said, “Your permits should be ready in a week.” He gave Shamim his address in Ottawa where he would be returning shortly.

“I say, it wasn’t so bad, was it?”

“Because he likes you.”

“Are you jealous?”

“Yes.”

She smiled, and he put his arm around her.

She was his perfect complement. He with his easygoing Swahili ways, hakuna haraka, as they said on the coast, there’s no hurry; and she with the initiatives always, and that insouciance, the courage of the innocent, as he thought of it, hiding a tender core that brought out the protective instinct in him. And his love for her. He would always recall her persistent answers to those soldiers on the road, revealing not a trace of her fear.

Early one morning at his clinic in Edmonton, Kamal received a phone call from his cousin Azim, who happened, he said, to be passing through. And so later that day the two of them met at a restaurant, embraced, and sat down for dinner. Shamim had taken Hanif to a tennis meet; Karima was at home from university. It was summer. After dinner, they sat with their coffees, chatting.

Kamal was ever Azim’s hero and “older brother.” To Azim, his cousin’s African features were simply attributes, like a cool haircut or a fine physique. This open-eyed acceptance of his difference had lasted into adulthood, when others might look briefly in surprise at the woolly-haired dark Indian among them. There had grown a strong, affectionate bond between the two. Back in Dar, Kamal would hardly speak about his early years in Kilwa; he had nursed his pain in private, then gradually adjusted to his new life. But there had been a period when, while he and Azim returned together from school, he would tell stories to his cousin. They were funny anecdotes, about the wily Sungura-rabbit, and Kamal would narrate them the Swahili way, with pauses and exclamations. Pa! Pa! Alhamdullillah! … Sungura akafa! Eh-he! The rabbit died. Little Azim would laugh all the way home, tears in his eyes, and Kamal would be proud and happy beside him.

First Yasmin with her husband, then Shenaz, and finally Azim had all followed Kamal to Canada during the peak of socialism in Tanzania, in the 1970s. A good part of the Indian population had left, having seen the door to Canada left ajar following the Uganda Asian expulsions. But Uncle, who had griped about “them” and pleaded
with Kamal to go, himself never left, saying loftily, “I was born here, I will die here.” So he did, eventually, and now Zera Auntie was with Shenaz in Toronto, a shadow of her previous irrepressible self. Whenever Kamal called her, she would utter her stock refrain, “Busy-busy? How busy you must be, no, the doctor!”

Kamal was aware that his three cousins kept in close touch with each other in Toronto and thereabouts. Out in the west and away from them, he had drifted into what he thought was his natural role: belonging, yet not quite one of them. He always felt that Yasmin and he could have gotten to know each other better. Behind that animus, the cat-and-dog hostility, as Uncle would describe it, there had lurked an understanding that never got the chance to flourish. During his final year in Dar, the ice seemed to thaw between them, but then he had gone away. And pretty, delicate Shenaz, once with a ponytail, had short hair now; she was polite, still a little wonderstruck by him, but distant. He came to realize at some point what a major disruption he had caused in all their lives by his arrival at their home that morning in Jamat Street in Dar. Perhaps they still talked about it, how the strange half-caste boy from Kilwa had come into their midst, and the lives they had known had forever altered.

A tearful Azim had called him for advice some years ago from Toronto, a congenital heart disorder having been discovered in his daughter. Kamal had confirmed the options, advised that a heart procedure, however dreadful the idea, was the best among them, from a probabilistic point of view. One had to think that way, even with a child’s life. And he recommended a couple of specialists. The procedure had been successful.

Now Azim was back in Edmonton, sitting across the table, the indulged little boy still present in that dapper clean-cut look; he was an accountant. They had discussed families, a little politics. Then Azim made a strange request. He had been travelling for his company and wanted to be tested for HIV. “Don’t worry,” he reassured Kamal, “I don’t expect anything, but just in case.”

“The test can be done in Toronto,” Kamal said tersely, puzzled, annoyed as a big brother should be at whatever indiscretion Azim had committed.

“I need absolute secrecy, Kamal. My doctor’s a community man,
his wife’s his secretary—they could blow the whistle. And anywhere else … they could call home with the results—imagine that! I can’t take the chance.”

“I don’t have to tell you,” Kamal said with some concern, “but—”

“Just a mistake, Kamal. One mistake. I don’t want it to ruin me. As I said, I expect a negative result, but just in case …”

Kamal told him to come the next day to one of the clinics of which he was a partner.

And then Azim said, “
You
had a secret girlfriend, didn’t you?”

“What on earth are you talking about? Maybe it’s your head that needs checking? Not your … your—”

“Come on, brother. You had someone back there … a native … an African girl?”

Kamal was silenced. He couldn’t know that, he thought. There is no way on earth Azim could know about her. No one but Uncle—

“What exactly are you saying? Stop making innuendoes and speak clearly.”

“The African girl—she came to our shop one day asking for you when you were at Makerere. Was she your girlfriend?”

“How do you know this? What did she say—were you there?”

“Yes, I was there. Yasmin too. And it was the day of your engagement to Shamim. We were shortly to be on our way to visit Shamim’s house to celebrate. She spoke to Daddy, this African girl.” His eyes twinkled, and he stopped short of making a comment about her.