Where the Air is Sweet (7 page)

The next morning, Raju is looking at a glowing white cloud. It is blocking the morning sun and he can stare into the sky without shielding his eyes. It is Sunday and the family is resting. Raju is sitting in front of the mud house with Bahdur and Mumdu. The brothers are huddled side by side. Raju is sitting apart from them.

“I am twelve years, ten months and three days old,” Raju hears Bahdur say. Bahdur explains he will be thirteen only on the day of his birthday. If he says he is thirteen now, it is a lie. The day after his birthday he will be thirteen years and one day old. Time marches on, at its pace, always the same, he explains to Mumdu. “How can we rush time? How can we stop time?”

“No one cares,” Mumdu says, rolling an unlit cigarette over the fingers of his left hand. “No one really cares how old, exactly, anyone is. In the past, you wouldn’t even know when you were born. It doesn’t matter, Bahdur.”

At this, Bahdur folds his arms and turns away from his brother. Mumdu tucks the cigarette behind his ear, then wraps his arm around his little brother’s neck in a mock stranglehold, and they laugh.

The twins, chattering and giggling, arrive.

“Bapa! Bapa! Let us ride on your back! Please!” They climb on top of Raju, grabbing at his shirt. He pushes them away, as though they are puppies. And like puppies they keep climbing
back on top of him. He stands up and swings them playfully, one at a time, asking which one is Amir, which one is Jaafar. He hears Bahdur and Mumdu laugh.

Raju once asked Rehmat to part the twins’ hair differently, one on the right, one on the left, to help him distinguish them. But then he forgot which boy’s was parted on which side. He turned to Bahdur for help. Bahdur furrowed his brow in disapproval and Raju laughed, his big hearty laugh. “What does it matter? You are all my sons,” he said, the tip of his forefinger on his chest. “You are all the sons of Rajabali Ismail.”

“But we are so different,” Bahdur said softly, his head lowered. “We are all so different.”

Raju looked down at him. He touched the boy’s head gently with his fingers. He wanted to ease his mind. It seemed in this moment to be carrying too much, more than a child should bear.

“I know,” he said. “
Beta,
I know.”

The next afternoon, Rehmat calls to Bahdur, who is walking away with Amir and Jaafar, “Look after your brothers!”

The boys were going to play after lunch, as they do each day. But seconds after they walked away from Rehmat and Raju, the tea she was making boiled over, the light brown milky liquid spilling over the sides of the saucepan and onto the ground, darkening the red earth in an ever-expanding puddle. The ill omen made Rehmat stand up, made her shout these words to Bahdur, who had already begun to lead his brothers away. The twins are so small and so mischievous she always fears for their safety, but the spilled tea has sent her into a panic and she is standing, her bare feet sinking into the earth, her hands gripping
her hair. Raju is laughing. But his amusement, he can see, is not alleviating her fear.

Bahdur turns back. He gives his mother a look, a look that calms her, that makes her smile and allows her to return to her work. The reassuring look of an adult who has seen many years of life, not the look of a boy who has seen so few. A look that says,
Everything will be all right. Trust me. Trust in me.
It is the last look Raju will see on his child’s face.

That evening, as the sun is beginning to set, Raju is standing with a foreman. They are planning the next day’s schedule. It will be busy. Raju set off a number of explosives late in the afternoon. He looks up and sees Mumdu walking towards them. His head is bowed and he is moving slowly, with enormous effort, as though he is walking through water. Baku walks behind him at a short distance, his face flushed, his hands thrust deep into his pockets.

“Tell me,” Raju commands, a thickness gripping his throat. Mumdu speaks clearly and nothing is obstructing the sound between them, but the words, all the words save one, that leave his lips fail to reach Raju. The words speak of something unspeakable, of something incomprehensible, and Raju’s mind fights to reject them. The words hang in the air. Attached to nothing. Later, in time, they will come together, make sense. Now there is no sense. There are only words. Only one word.

Bahdur.

Raju shakes his head. He feels as though he is no longer real. That he is becoming vapour. That the earth beneath him is shifting, beginning to open up, beginning to reveal the emptiness it conceals.

He looks up. Darkness surrounds him. The sun has gone from the sky. Baku is crouched beside him, gripping his arm at the elbow. Raju is sitting on the ground. The soft earth near him, the black sky far away. All is still. And he has fallen.

“I am fine,” he whispers, pulling his arm away, beginning to stand upright. But his hands are shaking. He sees Mumdu, who has walked away, sobbing into his hands, and feels a fire ignite in his chest. “Have some strength!” he shouts. The voice he hears sounds strange, the voice of a stranger. He wants to add,
You are a man!
But his throat has gone dry and no words reach his lips. His mouth hanging open, the unspoken words stuck inside him, he clenches his fists to stop his hands from shaking.

Raju drives his son’s body to Mbarara in his open-back truck. When he reaches the town, he asks Hussein’s son Pyarali to drive to the mine and bring the family home.

Late that night he stands in the front room of the Mbarara house alone, Bahdur laid out in front of him. The boy’s gangly limbs are hidden under a white sheet. Only his face is visible. There is a purple protrusion on his forehead, above his swollen left eye. His nose is twisted unnaturally. His small, round face is pale. He has been washed already, ritually cleansed. Raju is not permitted to touch the
lash
—the corpse; but his hand reaches instinctively for his child’s cheek. When his fingers reach it, he quickly pulls them away. It is as though he touched concrete. “Where is my boy?” he asks, looking around the empty room. In the distance he hears wailing. He walks out.

The next morning, Raju shovels earth onto his son’s body mechanically. He focuses on the plank of wood separating him
from Bahdur’s body, wrapped tightly in a
khafan,
until it disappears under the dark earth.

That night, Rehmat sits on the edge of the bed, her face ashen and her eyes vacant. Raju is sitting beside her. He does not recall when he came and sat beside her, or if she came to sit beside him. Somehow they are here together. It is after midnight and the house is silent.

They lie side by side for hours in darkness. A rooster crows. It crows again and again. Others join it. Soon a faint light, like a reluctant but dutiful bride, quietly enters the room. Raju looks at his wife. She is so still he wonders if she, too, has died and become stone. Why doesn’t she scream? Why doesn’t she wail? She turns to him. Their eyes meet for a moment. No words pass between them and then they look away, each at the same time, and stare at the emptiness.

Jaafar tells Raju what happened. Again and again he tells him, repeating the words until his frantic, high-pitched voice is out of breath. “Amir ran from Bahdur
bhai
and then from me. I chased him. I reached him. I grabbed hold of his shirt. Bahdur
bhai
screamed at us to stop. I heard him. But I couldn’t stop. I couldn’t let go of Amir. We ran. And then the explosion went off and the rock was falling. It was falling. I put my hands over me. Bahdur
bhai
pushed me and Amir. He pushed us. Nothing fell on us. Nothing touched us. Like magic, Bapa, like magic. It all fell on him.”

Raju says nothing. He can say nothing.

When the forty-day mourning period ends, Mumdu announces that Dilshad is expecting a baby. Raju, who was looking at a tree in front of the house as Mumdu spoke, turns to look at him. His heart feels light and he moves to stand up, but before he is fully upright, Mumdu tells him that he and his wife are moving to Kampala, where he intends to work at a coffee mill, where he intends to start a new life, his own life. The weight of the words pushes Raju down into his chair. He turns back to the tree, stares at a jackfruit as big as a newborn baby and asks Mumdu about his work at the mine.

“I am your worst employee, Bapa. You won’t miss me.”

“Don’t tell me what I will and won’t miss!” Raju snaps, turning to look at Mumdu. “You are my son. You belong there with me.” He turns to look at the jackfruit. The fruit grows so large the branches of the tree cannot bear its weight and so it can grow to ripeness only by clinging to the trunk. Raju told Mumdu this when Mumdu was a boy, a small boy. When Mumdu asked his father why jackfruit doesn’t hang far out on the branches, like the fruit of other trees.

Mumdu releases an unintelligible sound from his throat. The sound fills Raju’s mouth with the taste of bile.

“Go, then,” Raju says quietly, his lips barely moving, his eyes fixed on the jackfruit. “Get out.”

PART TWO

The Good Years

1966–1971

8

I
SMALL AND SONS
.

The words are embossed on a brass plate that is mounted high above the front door, smaller but higher than the main sign: RAJABALI AUTO REPAIRS. Raju is standing on McAllister Road in Mbarara, looking at the plate. Over the years, the brass has dulled. But the words are legible. The plate was his idea. He mounted it himself sixteen years earlier when he opened the garage. The garage was small then, covering only one plot and housing two bays. Now, Rajabali Auto Repairs runs half the street, spanning four plots and accommodating seven bays, a spare parts shop and a showroom for new automobiles. From the first day Raju set up shop here, business has been brisk. To meet demand, he twice built extensions: once in 1958, when the plots next to the original garage came up for lease; and again in 1962, to mark Uhuru, Uganda’s independence.

Raju looks down at his right hand, at the small scar on the skin between the thumb and forefinger. The day he mounted it, the corner of the brass plate caught the delicate skin and ripped it. He refused to see the doctor. The bleeding eventually
stopped, but the scar remains. Raju feels a swell of pride rise through him each time he sees the sign, each time he sees how he has honoured his father, his sons. He feels it now as he looks up at the words. But there is a hole in him somewhere, a small hole, where the swell is slowly losing its strength.

It is 1966. Raju is sixty-five and his sons Baku and Jaafar are running the day-to-day operations of the family business. He visits the garage each day, advising his sons, talking to customers. And he looks after the books, his careful Gujarati script lining pages and pages, accounting for each cent spent and each cent earned. Baku is the official bookkeeper. But Raju and Jaafar do not trust him. He makes too many mistakes. He is content to let inaccuracies and inconsistencies remain on the books.

A mzee now, the respectful Swahili term meaning “old man,” Raju is the proud, ubiquitous figure who walks around town every day, his hands clasped behind him, his grey hat perched on his greying head, nodding at those he passes, stopping to chat with shopkeepers, a welcome, familiar sight. One of Mbarara’s beloved sons, now one of its proud fathers.

Raju turns away from the garage and begins walking towards the centre of town. He will take a walk before circling back and heading home for lunch. He looks at his watch. It is almost eleven. He must time his walk to ensure that he is home by twelve, when he has decreed lunch must be served daily. From the garage to his house, it is a twenty-minute walk, left on McAllister and then right on Constantino Lobo Road. He can wander through town for forty minutes. Jaafar and Baku will drive, as they do every day, and they will meet him at home, as they do every day.

Baku eats lunch at his father’s house, where Jaafar still lives, next door to his own. Numbers 34 and 36 on Constantino Lobo
Road. Raju acquired the plots one year after he acquired the extra plots for the garage. Like the garage, Raju built these houses with his hands. And like the garage, he built the houses to last. He constructed the roofs using reinforced concrete. He made the walls with bricks and coated them with concrete. The floors are concrete. Even the counters in the kitchen are concrete. Water is pumped in through galvanized pipes. Raju did not do the work alone. He hired subcontractors and workers, but he planned and measured and lifted and poured until his bones ached, until calluses formed on his fingers.

Sometimes, before entering his house, Raju stops and places the palm of his hand on the white wall next to the front door. Then he presses with all his strength. He does not know what compels him to do this; he knows the wall can withstand his strength. And yet he pushes it. He tests it.

One afternoon, after he had been living on Constantino Lobo Road for close to a decade, Raju was with Rehmat in their bedroom. He had just woken from his nap and she was folding clothes. They were sitting on opposite sides of the bed, back to back.

“Sherbanu
bai
ordered tiles for her kitchen walls,” Rehmat said quickly. “She made a mistake and there are too many. She offered to give the extra tiles to us.”

Raju shook his head. What use are tiles in a kitchen? he thought, turning to look at his wife, preparing to scold her, to mock her and her friend. Her head was bowed. He saw the hair on the back of her neck, grey and black and henna-dyed orange, pulled almost cruelly into one thick, tight braid. She turned her head to add another singlet to the neatly folded pile beside her. He watched her profile. She was blinking quickly, as
though in terror. The belittling words he had prepared for her evaporated.

“We don’t need them. They aren’t necessary,” she said. “I will tell her to return them to the shop.”

“They won’t be able to get back as much money as they paid for them,” Raju said. “I will pay Hussein
bhai
for them. We can afford it.”