The Magic of Saida (35 page)

“And what did she say?” Kamal asked.

She asked for you: “Kamalu yupo? Nitamkuta wapi?”

“And?”

“Daddy said you were in Uganda. Then he sent me away, but I know that he gave this girl some money.”

“That’s all?”

“Yes. But who was this girl? What was her name? Where did you find her?”

Kamal did not reply. “What did she look like?” he asked quietly.

“She wore a khanga. I remember her clearly, because we were so surprised. And her voice—it was thin—like a …”

“And you’ve kept this from me all these years? All of you?”

“It never came up. And you were getting married, weren’t you? And then we were all here. Who was she?”

They got up. “Come tomorrow to the clinic,” Kamal told Azim. “And don’t do silly things with your life that you need an AIDS test.”

“I won’t, brother.”

How does one respond, Kamal asked himself driving home that night. All these years later. I am a different man now, inside and out, I have transformed, I have moulted. I have acquired an accent and an idiom, and a way of dressing and grooming, a liking for Scotch, an appreciation for wine and good food; everything that goes with wealth and standing. My world view, my faith are different. She would not know me now. Would I know her? Three decades—and more—have passed. I have worked through a marriage, wasted it, raising two children, which was for the duration the sole purpose of life besides earning.

Suppose Uncle had told me about her visit—would I be here now? Would I have come to Canada with Shamim?

Their marriage was wrong from the start. It was not meant to work. He always easygoing, she on the go, living by schedules and plans, by the dictates of form and image. She became more religious and communal over the years; and he, someone with nothing to command his loyalty or hold his attention except his practice and the children, until he wandered into a bookstore in Toronto and discovered that old book about Kilwa. Recriminations between him and Shamim had begun early on: You were always, You never, ad nauseam. What in them had seemed beautifully complementary in Kampala, in their new country became points of conflagration. It had been too easy, their union, too convenient. They were beginning to love and accommodate each other, but had never loved each other with a passion. As he saw it later, there had been no pain, no longing, no moments of sheer heartwarming ecstasy in their relationship. And so the regrets, his of the past, someone he had left behind, and hers of wanting to have been in love, of getting older without even a memory of a proper passionate romance.

They had arrived in Toronto in spring, found a small apartment, and immediately applied to medical schools to complete their training.
To their delight, the wait was short and both were admitted to the university in Saskatoon for the fall term. Far from people like them, they were isolated and lonely, but also excited at starting out together like pioneers, surviving in a new land, learning the rudiments of living differently from what they had been used to. They had been welcomed into Canada, and given opportunities, for which they were grateful, though it was evident that they were of an inferior status, by virtue of where they came from, their accents, their skin colour. At med school, when Kamal did the hospital rounds with the senior doctors, there had been patients who refused to be touched by “that man.” Shamim would repeatedly be taken for a maid. Later they would wonder at how much the country had changed before their eyes. They had become Canadians, and, as he liked to say, Canada had become them. They carried no bitterness for past insults, because they had been so successful. Shamim was a pediatrician at Edmonton’s children’s hospital. He, with three other doctors, owned three private clinics, and there was ironic satisfaction in seeing the appointment books full, people clamouring for the most intimate cosmetic surgeries. That was business, though; his heart was in his general practice. His patients sat for hours waiting to see only him. He spent time with them, talked with them, which was why his manager despaired, and why his accountant—an Asian from Dar—kept reminding him he could easily bring in twice the money by seeing twice the patients in the same amount of time.

Their children had been raised by the book, according to the latest trends in child psychology. Sometimes he had pitied them for not being able to run about barefoot outside, splash in the mud, receive an occasional slap or shout from an angry parent. Eat a glob of butter. Zera Auntie would swipe up some butter with her finger and shove it into Azim’s mouth as he left for school. Not Hanif and Karima, brought up with care, like creatures in a test tube, their diets, their education, their reading and entertainment strictly controlled; every childish response to be attended to thoughtfully, according to the manuals. But special attention and theories of child-rearing notwithstanding, they had turned out normal in the end, typical immigrant doctors’ spoiled, bright private-school kids who would inherit a lot and earn a lot more. Here’s to the next generation.

He sat for a long time that night in his study, his drink at hand.
How does one respond to what Azim had revealed? He didn’t know. He didn’t know because the feelings that could be invoked, the nerve that could be awoken, lay well buried inside him, under layers of life lived.

Hanif had come second in the tennis tourney earlier that evening; he would be applying to prestigious colleges down south. Had Kamal shown enough excitement, as a father should? That could be a bone of conjugal contention in the morning. Karima, the older one, was hovering outside the door, waiting perhaps to pop in and bait her father on some feminist issue his generation was ignorant about. And Shamim was already in bed.

He looked up, caught his daughter’s eye. “Come in, Karima,” he said. “What’s up? How’s it going?”

The children, the children, he had heard a colleague say, wistfully eyeing a pretty nurse. And so it had been, he and Shamim inhabiting their private worlds, but keeping their home running, regrets and all—who didn’t have them?—for the sake of the children. And secondly—there was no denying this—for the sake of convenience and continuity; they had memories that still occasionally tugged; they had an engaging social circle of other professionals, mostly doctors. The apple was not ready to fall yet. He liked that expression.

Over the years Shamim had identified more with her Indianness. She went to khano Friday evenings, dressed up in a shalwar-kameez or something exotic, taking the kids with her. He would wait for them, in the company of a drink, dipping into his collection of Africana in his glazed isolation. They would return from khano radiant, having met people they knew, participated in familiar rituals, and he would be envious, feeling incomplete, unfulfilled. An outcast in his own home, though it was nobody’s fault. His attempts to write family history for the children, and in the process revive a secret ambition, had met with stiff resistance from all. No point harping about Africa, the children are Canadians, she said, and so are you, don’t forget that. But Canadians come from somewhere? And your khano and shalwar-kameez? And your Bollywood and Shahrukh Khan? Glamorous India. What did he offer as a heritage: a dusty
town in Africa, a slave ancestor, an absconded Indian grandfather. He would have embellished his history with accounts of wars and resistance, poetry and folk tales, but it all sounded so distant and destitute. What would Hanif and Karima rather claim (if anything): a hut in the bush or the glorious Taj Mahal? No choice.

They would have clung to each other this way, out of need and necessity and for the sake of the children and possible grandchildren, but for a wind of religious euphoria that rippled through the lives of the Shamsis of their generation from Africa. They were all doing well, the children grown and mostly in university, the houses were paid off, there was money to spend. A Year of Celebration was inaugurated in which like groupies they travelled the world’s cities in the thousands following their imam on a tour of the faithful. It was a wave of revivalist nostalgia drawing people in their middle age, feeling spiritually empty, into a tight community network of the sort that had once existed in Africa, into which he had been adopted as a boy, but which could not engage him any longer. Once the Year of Celebration was over, alumni of the tours continued to keep up the euphoric momentum, gathering in different cities for reunions. It was during one such trip that Shamim apparently became involved with a fellow groupie, called Bhagat, who must represent all she had missed in her agnostic African husband. Bhagat was, naturally, from East Africa; more, he was from Dar. Shamim denied an affair, and perhaps the relationship was only platonic. But Kamal had observed the catch in her voice when she spoke to Bhagat on the phone, her eagerness to attend the reunions, that extra telltale touch of an accessory: a scarf, a pendant, a new Asiatic perfume. He had not observed her this way in a long time. After some months she seemed back to normal again, perhaps her infatuation was over; but that holy wave had removed all their remaining faith in the worth of their relationship, and they decided finally to separate.

That winter he attended a medical conference in the Bahamas, away from the bleak Edmonton skies and the acrimony of a broken home. It was, he had told himself, just the kind of breezy hiatus he needed before beginning life anew. As he sat with a few associates at the opening-day luncheon, under a sun umbrella atop a rock cliff, the ocean below them and scantily clad waitresses hovering around,
there came the crash of a tray falling, followed by a momentary stillness. That was all he needed. As he would think of it, the clattering dissonance of the falling silverware recombined in his head to produce one resonating echo:
Kinjikitilé
. He knew he was called. He must go and find her.

It was late Sunday evening, Kamal and I among those few unable to unglue ourselves from the Africana’s friendly bar. Sporadically the farther door would swing open and a frenetic hum from the casino next door would waft in, ushering out a bunch of people seeking respite from their obsessions. Women in saris and the latest European fashions, men in suits. Outside, one floor below, the streets were wet and empty from a rainfall. Stretching your neck you would see the harbour lights. Over the past eight weeks we had spoken of many things; I had apprised him of some recent history of the country: the successful though debilitating war against Idi Amin; the confounding new multiparty system; corruption scandals of such a scale and blatancy as to require a sense of the comic to live with. But all that was mere leavening, to give him the space in which to unravel. We had gone well beyond the therapeutic imperative we started with, when he had simply wished to talk about himself following his drug-induced catastrophe and I made myself available to listen. His was the story of a castaway who finally found his way home; at its heart, what drove him back, was a strange, a bizarre love story haunted by the figure—or spectre—of his childhood sweetheart, Saida, whom he believed he had deserted. That quest landed him in the hospital, at the edge of madness, where I found him, his Canadian son and daughter distraught by his side. It was at this bar that I had sat later that evening comforting the young people.

“You went to India,” I said. “Your ancestral place. How was that?”

“Yes,” he replied slowly. “To Gujarat, where it all began, the family odyssey on my father’s side. I saw it for myself.”

“What was it like—this experience? A profound one?”

“I think I’ve put India to rest—and come to terms with my father … Not an easy thing, growing up with the memory of a father who abandoned you.”

It was then that I finally put to him what had been on my mind all along. What about Mama? He had insisted that he had not forgiven her, and she did not need him, and I could just believe that. But he had not broken with her, I knew that too. How vividly had I heard him recall her.

He said nothing for a long time.

“Fatuma knew her, in the 1970s. She was in Lindi, then perhaps in Songea or Tabora. She’s most likely dead by now … I’ve thought of putting a notice in the Swahili papers, see if I could trace her, or her family.”

I told him I knew a reporter or two who would be happy to do a story. There are six or more Swahili newspapers in the country. Not as widely read as one would like, especially in the smaller centres, but you never know.

Like other well-heeled professionals of middle age, with money to spend, Kamal and Shamim travelled frequently, “doing” different places in quick time. India was special, and they visited it with two other couples, doctors and accountants also originally from Dar. India had thrilled them and they all agreed Mumbai felt like home—meaning Dar—but multiplied a hundredfold.

Leaving Shamim and the others to shop to their hearts’ content, Kamal had set off for a destination of interest only to himself, the town in Gujarat where his great-grandfather Punja Devraj had hailed from. The story of Punja the Lion had captured his imagination in Kilwa; he heard greater detail in Dar, where the story in embellished versions was well known. Jaffu Uncle, too, liked to throw off a bragging mention or two of the ancestor to impress his card-playing cronies of Jamat Street. There was such a specificity to that legend, it gave to Kamal a piece of land on the subcontinent to imagine as a place of distant—and partial—origin: Verawal, in a far-flung corner of Gujarat. It was where his father had last been heard from. It was
where Jaffu Uncle had told him once a long time ago that he should visit.

He took a flight to Ahmedabad, where he checked into a hotel and spent the night. Early the next morning he departed by taxi towards the western peninsula of Kathiawad and the town of Verawal on the Arabian Sea. The day was hot and the air warm and dusty, the landscape dry and plain. This was an area prone to drought, which was why young men historically left its shores to seek their fortunes on the coast of East Africa. All the Asians Kamal had known in Dar had their origins in this peninsula. They passed women trekking along the roadside, road vendors with pushcarts, a gang of orthodox Muslim young men on their way presumably to madrassa, a troupe of transvestites on their way to a temple, according to his driver. They stopped at a roadstand for lunch. He had left the certainty of his overblown tourist’s itinerary, described in the brochures as “Glorious India,” back in Mumbai and as he headed deeper into this quotidian and yet alien existence he felt twinges of nervousness. Yes, he’d been impulsive. But he was in India, how could he not try to find that ancestral town, ask for the man who had fathered him, carried him in his arms, before going away completely, leaving a complex knot of feelings inside him. The baba whose photo he had always had with him, ever since Mama packed it in his bag with which she had dispatched him to his uncle.