No New Land (21 page)

“An office in Lisbon for what?” Nanji asked.

“Many of them are illegal, and those who are legal have families there. Not to mention friends.”

“So we don’t know now if Nurdin is innocent or not.”

“I think he is. These are fisherfolk. If he was guilty, they would have knifed him – or me when I followed the girl. You should see them with their knives.”

That was your quicksilver Jamal, walking on a precipice. What if those Portuguese brothers had trapped him? While he, Nanji, was watching the gum being masticated and wondering what Nurdin saw in the girl, Jamal was probably measuring her up and deciding his next move.

“That’s not a bad idea, opening an office in Lisbon,” Nanji said. “So what are you now, a roving Statue of Liberty?”

“Yeah, give me your tired and oppressed,” Jamal grinned. “I may not open an office in Lisbon, but I have one now in London. And next week I fly to Singapore. There’s a minority Muslim community there that wants to emigrate.”

Across the valley, which lay comatose under the weight of a heavily overcast November evening, the CN Tower peeping over the curtain of shadowy trees blinked its cryptic message at Nurdin Lalani. Behind him in the kitchen his wife’s wooden ladle thudded familiarly on her Zanzibari saucepan. The children, Fatima and Hanif, would be back soon for dinner.

Missionary had gone, was visiting the smaller centres around Toronto, and at the Lalanis’ home the quiet, though still a little unfamiliar after four weeks of tumult, was welcome. During this period
the phone had rung constantly, visitors it seemed were hanging at their door frame with petitions and ailments spiritual and material. After the announcement of the engagement, it seemed the whirlwind had suddenly stopped; Missionary cancelled all appointments and went on tour, announcing that he would at the same time be looking for his own place to stay in some small Ontario town not far from the city.

The charge against Nurdin had been dropped, and some couldn’t help noticing Missionary, bidding his farewells, basking in this victory, which was not really his but Jamal’s. For Nurdin now there was the job to think of, which he would resume soon. He was not going to let a mere embarrassment rob him of the security the job brought him. There was the several weeks’ lost pay to make up, Fatima’s university fees to save for. The girl had decided that Arts and Science wasn’t so bad after all. She now had her eye on medical school. And Hanif had a sister who was already nagging him about his future prospects.

It seemed to Nurdin that, with the dust settled, some kind of commitment had been wrought from him in the proceedings of the past few weeks. Missionary had exorcized the past, yet how firmly he had also entrenched it in their hearts. Before, the past tried to fix you from a distance, and you looked away; but Missionary had brought it across the chasm, vivid, devoid of mystery. Now it was all over you. And with this past before you, all around you, you take on the future more evenly matched.

That afternoon of opportunity, the tryst he had almost agreed to – and the freedom it would have led him to – now seemed remote and unreal, had receded into the distance, into another and unknowable world.

M.G. Vassanji was born in Kenya and raised in Tanzania. Before coming to Canada in 1978, he attended M.I.T., and later was writer-in-residence at the University of Iowa in their prestigious International Writing Program. Vassanji’s fiction to date comprises five novels and two books of short stories:
The Gunny Sack
(1989), which won a Regional Commonwealth Writers’ Prize;
No New Land
(1991);
Uhuru Street
(short stories, 1992);
The Book of Secrets
(1994), a national bestseller and the winner of the inaugural Giller Prize;
Amriika
(1999);
The In-Between World of Vikram Lall
(2003), which won The Giller Prize;
When She Was Queen
(short stories, 2005); and, most recently,
The Assassin’s Song
(2007).

Vassanji was awarded the Harbourfront Festival Prize in 1994, in recognition of his achievement in and contribution to the world of letters, and was in that same year chosen as one of twelve Canadians on
Maclean’s
Honour Roll.

M.G. Vassanji lives in Toronto.