Authors: M.G. Vassanji
“Leave the telephone now,” she said to Fatima, who, startled by the edge in the voice, instantly obeyed.
The door opened, Hanif came in. At fourteen he was as tall as his sister, but bigger: broad and muscular. He went straight to the dining table, saw it to be clear, and turned to his mother: “Oh, you ate.”
“No, we are waiting for Daddy. Where were you?” Over him Zera made the greater claim. Their daughter they had perhaps lost already, but she would never lose Hanif. No, not him.
“Oh, at Eeyore’s.… ” He opened the fridge for a snack. Having extracted what he needed, he sat down at the table, surrounded by food.
“Pig,” said his sister.
“Pig yourself. I thought we were not speaking.”
“Why can’t you wait for the rest of us?”
“Because I’m hungry. Where’s the old man gone?”
“Ask Mum.”
“Hey, Mum, where’s Dad?”
His mother turned to look at him. “He’s going to be late.”
The boy ate and watched her restlessness. Sitting, getting up to do something, forgetting what it was … lips pursed, hands clasped in front of her, head raised in a momentary faraway look, in hastily snatched prayer, the large – immense – bosom heaving. He cleared the table and left the room, having thrown a glance at the letter in Fatima’s hand. She followed.
“Hey, aren’t you going to ask me what it says?”
“No. You can tell me if you want to. Besides, I know what it says.”
Then he arrived, much later than usual. He shuffled in, dragging his feet, after fumbling with the lock. Dejection and defeat written all over his face, confirming Zera’s dread. He looked like a shrunken version of himself, red eyed and weary, his clothes crumpled, the day’s growth of beard bristly on his face. Immediately he was attacked by a barrage of questions and semi-accusations. “Where have you been? What happened? … Do you know? … We were all …”
“Oh, nothing,” Nurdin answered hoarsely. He went straight for his armchair and sat down, staring in front of him through the window at the darkness outside, ignoring all further attention. Zera went
about setting the table with a little more clatter than usual, and then came and stood in his view, expectantly. He had gathered himself and turned to face her with a pleading look.
“They say I attacked a girl.”
“Who?”
“The police … and – oh – everyone at work … except Romesh.”
She realized then it was Romesh who had called her. The kids stood at the doorway now, looking in. They were all quiet for some moments. Finally Hanif broke in.
“She must have done something. Was she rude, Dad? Did she insult you?”
“Your father is not one to attack girls.”
“Did you?” the boy asked him.
“Did you?” echoed his wife.
“What kind of question is that?” Nurdin asked irritably.
“Well, what girl?” Fatima exploded. “Where? What happened? Tell us!”
“Later,” said Nurdin wearily, refusing to be baited.
Another momentary quiet followed. “What now?” “What now?” The girl and boy asked.
“We must call Jamal,” said Zera.
It was some time late that night before husband and wife, alone, found their friend – their former friend, they had to remind themselves, now that he’d moved
up in the world – the lawyer Jamal at home, in an irate mood at being called this late. He promised to come the next day.
There was in Nurdin, Zera observed – even after she had heard him relate the incident at work and had heard him answer the children’s probing questions – a certain reserve, a disturbing uneasiness, as if he was not telling all, as if he was skirting a certain area, a part of his experience, some part of his life. What was he hiding? Was he guilty? She had never believed she knew all his thoughts, but if called upon she would have guessed his mind, and guessed close enough to satisfy herself. This time was different. He was beyond her and she felt left out. They sat for a long time in silence, side by side, immersed in their own thoughts.
We are but creatures of our origins, and however stalwartly we march forward, paving new roads, seeking new worlds, the ghosts from our pasts stand not far behind and are not easily shaken off. An account of Nurdin Lalani’s predicaments must therefore go back in time and begin at a different place.
On a stone bench in Dar, at Oyster Bay overlooking the Indian Ocean, two men would quietly sit every afternoon enjoying the cool breeze and each other’s company. They were in high spirits and chatty enough when they arrived, but the vastness of the ocean and the rhythm of the wind and the waves and the rustle of the leaves overhead soon drew them in separately, lulling them to stillness, until each man sat motionless, contemplating the expanse in front of them and what lay across it: the land of their birth which they had left a long time ago, to which even the longing to return had been muted, although memories still persisted.
One afternoon the older of the two men breathed deeply from his thoughts, sat back as if exhausted, and then fell sideways towards his companion. The companion let out a startled “Ha!” and then with quick recognition set the old man’s head to rest on the bench and quickly took off towards the road to seek help. He was tall, almost bald, and portly in a light blue suit, with a bearing that used to earn the description of “gentleman” in those parts. He was a preacher who had tried his hand at conversion, and was simply called “Missionary” by those who knew him. With a crumpled handkerchief he extracted from his breast pocket he proceeded to flag down the first car that came by. It was driven by a European man and ignored him. Similarly the second. When the third car showed not the slightest indication of slowing down, Missionary simply stepped onto the road. The car braked, and an awkwardly built, gangly European, red faced and in crumpled white trousers and shirt, got out in irritation. It was Mr. Fletcher, the English teacher at the Boys’ School, whom he instantly recognized since both his boys went there. Missionary, wiping his face with the handkerchief before putting it away, explained to the teacher what had happened and hastened with him to the bench. They lifted and carried the dead man, Haji Lalani, and lay him on the back seat of the car before proceeding to the nearest hospital, until recently called “European Hospital.”
Haji Lalani left behind him three sons, four daughters, and an ailing business. At the time of his death his eldest son was in the Congo, where his fortunes had risen and fallen in recent years with the political fortunes of that newly independent country, and were on the rise again. Nurdin, the middle son, had just given up a hopeless salesmanship up-country. The youngest son was a mechanic, a not entirely honourable profession. The old man, approaching death, had not counted himself very accomplished materially.
Haji Lalani went to Tanganyika as a young man of sixteen in 1906 at the time when the German government there was recruiting Britain’s Indian subjects to help build the German empire in Africa. Young Haji apprenticed at an eminent Indian firm in the old slave capital of Bagamoyo. The name Bagamoyo meant “pour your hearts,” but no one could say what that referred to – the slaves’ grief at having arrived at the market to be sold away to foreigners or simply their relief at having reached the end of the long march. On the east coast of Africa, Bagamoyo was rivalled in eminence only by Mombasa, which was now part of the British colony to the north. In the last fifty years bustling Bagamoyo had received and dispatched slaves in the thousands; it had opened its arms to sultans, slave traders, ivory merchants, missionaries, explorers, and shopkeeper-moneylenders. All roads to the interior departed from here. When Stanley went looking for Livingstone, he left from here; when Burton and Speke
went searching for the source of the Nile, they too were waved off at Bagamoyo. But the Germans decided to let the old oriental capital go its way and to build a new European city, at a neglected village with the beautiful name of Dar es Salaam, which would come to be known as Dar. In a parallel move to the north, the British delivered the same fate to Mombasa and developed a railway depot into a European capital city, Nairobi. But Bagamoyo had not given up heart, not as yet. Its citizens, its elders, the imams and the merchants, watched and waited.
Haji went on to become manager of the firm and finally to acquire a shop of his own. He became a man of strict disposition, to whom the harsh German justice – epitomized in the whip made of hippo hide and the name “Hand of Blood” given its wielder by the natives – was not alien in spirit. He could easily have bought a black woman, or acquired one, as some of his compatriots did to while away the lonely nights. He could have taken into his protection a discarded slave woman without a home and fathered a half-breed or two to join the small band that already made up some of the town’s youth. Instead he prayed and fasted and became friendly with the fathers at the German Catholic Mission. Any time he could spare from his shop, he spent in theological discussions and friendly debate with the fathers at the mission or with the sheikhs at the mosques.
He himself came from an Indian Muslim sect, the Shamsis, somewhat unorthodox, hence insecure.
Aware that in his good-natured adversaries he had representatives of great and ancient institutions, he would hold his own by maintaining that the truth was known to the few and not the many; its seekers were individuals and not institutions.
One day a young fräulein stopping over at the mission came into the shop to look for gifts for her servants in the European settlement of Wilhelmstal up north, whence she came. She carried a parasol and had the most delicate features. As she stepped in from the glare of sunlight outside, it took a while for her presence to materialize in the relative darkness inside the shop, where Haji Lalani sat with his servant. The girl was accompanied by one of the fathers, who stopped at the doorway to chat, and a servant girl, who carried her shopping. As the fräulein raised her arm to point to a string of beads hanging from a nail, Haji found himself staring at her – she was flushed with the heat, her face lightly perspiring, and her armpit a delicate wet patch – and he felt the faint stirrings of a desire inside him. They did not go very far, in fact he would have quashed these forbidden shadows of thoughts there and then had not his face been brought alive by a stinging slap from the girl’s hand. “I am sorry, Fräulein,” murmured Haji, eyes smarting, cheeks burning, and the German missionary took the girl away.
“I should have been whipped,” Haji later told the church father, who listened in silence. Even saints have been guilty of desire, mused the padre, but of course the crime was not as simple as that.
Many years later Haji told the story to his friend, Missionary, who also listened in silence, perhaps with the same thought as his German counterpart.
Haji Lalani took the advice of the sheikhs of the mosques: to get married and have children is more than half God’s religion. He asked the elders of his community to find him a bride. They told him to go to Dar, where he went and approved the daughter of a respectable shopkeeper of modest means. Their first child, a daughter, was born in Bagamoyo. With the German fathers he could no longer consider himself at par, he who had made a virtue of his desire, who was now doubly and would soon be multiply tied to the material world.
War broke out, and the British attacked the German colony from the north, by land. On the ocean British man-of-wars chased German ships and bombarded the towns on the coast. The war on land moved southwards, the bombardments by sea increased, and finally Dar was taken. Haji Lalani and family, British subjects, marched to the capital that was now secure.
The shop of Haji Lalani on Market Street in Dar became a landmark among the busy side streets of the Indian quarter: not for its size or location but because everyone had had occasion to find in it something or other no one else carried. It was the only place where one was guaranteed to find the button of choice, or thread or needle or buckle; it also carried
soaps and shampoos, cough mixtures, tonics, vitamin compounds, tooth powders and pastes, laxatives and herb leaves – all from India and England. In all these years it underwent one change in appearance: in 1934, the old mud-and-limestone building was demolished and replaced by a one-storey structure, with two flats above the store, one of which was rented out. As the years went by the white paint blackened and peeled, and nearby two- and three-storey structures, more solid looking and broader based, went up around it, but his building remained a landmark and Haji Lalani one of the prominent citizens, if known only inside the Indian community.
He was known for his sternness, which brooked no nonsense. He went early to mosque, a man slight of build with weathered face, in his white drill suit and red fez. He sat quietly against the back wall except when required to come forward to recite or announce, which he did simply and without hesitation, and returned home early. If ever he stayed late, his response to the foolery that men generally engage in while awaiting their more leisurely paced women would be an acid, cutting remark that would put the head fool out of commission. Very early he was made a mukhi, presider of the mosque, for a few years, and Mukhi Haji Lalani he remained to the townfolk long after the other mukhis were forgotten.
Haji Lalani’s renown and the respect in which he was held allowed him a certain licence over the community. He would not hesitate to send away a loud or rude boy with a cuff, or to scold a girl who
had compromised her modesty by even a glance at a man. So, of his sons, he made examples. Of these, the eldest, Akber, was a textbook case, with whom the father set precedents, often with the help of a cane. The youngest boy, Shamshu, could hide behind female skirts, while the middle son, Nurdin, cowered before his father’s wrath, afraid to dare, aware beforehand of the repercussions that would follow.
Above the store, in the flat across from the Lalanis, lived a Hindu family, not Brahmins but humble cobblers, dealers in cowhide. Narandas had two daughters and a younger son. With the second daughter, Nurdin and Shamshu often played. The older daughter was tall and dusky, with a prominent jewelled nose-stud, and a mischievously suppressed smile on her puckered lips as she passed the playing children, holding on to her headscarf. She was liked by the children and talked to them all. Sometimes they could cajole her into casting aside modesty and playing with them. She did not talk to Akber, of course, because Akber was an adult. He was sixteen. A big sixteen with hair on his chest, which you could see because he kept his shirt button open, and who smoked, in secret, affecting styles from the latest Hollywood and Indian films. He was in love with her and pretty certain his affection was returned. For one thing, when he gazed hard at her as she stood at a window she did not look away. And when he was bold enough then to sing out loud “Oh your face among your tresses like the full moon in
the night” from a film song, no offence was taken. This form of lovemaking and serenading went on for a few months. Then Akber wrote a note – beginning with a ghazal and ending with “Will you marry me?” He sent it with a servant with specific instructions as to whom it should be handed. The servant headed straight for the opposite flat, without a moment’s thought, and the first person he saw there was Narandas’s wife. “What do you want?” she asked. He handed her the note. The note ended up on Haji Lalani’s lap.