Where the Air is Sweet (14 page)

“Okay,” he says, “let’s move.”

“Move?”

“Start the car, please.”

“I can’t.”

“But you can. I’ve shown you.”

“Maybe next time we can move. I need to learn this.” She is staring at the sheet of paper.

“There is nothing to be frightened of.”

“I’m not frightened.” She is angry.

“
Polé,
Mama.
Polé.
Next time you will drive.”

Mumtaz learns slowly. Each time she pushes down on the accelerator, she gives up the clutch too quickly and the car stalls. She begins to dread the sight of Eliab standing in the driveway, Jaafar’s pale green BMW next to him.

One morning, she cannot get the car out of the driveway. Each time she tries to move, the car stalls. After the sixth attempt, she sets her jaw. “I can’t do this. I’m finished with the lessons.”

“You can. But you must trust yourself. Do not be afraid.”

“I’m not afraid,” she snaps. “Stop saying that.”

“You are afraid. You are afraid of power.” He does not lower his eyes. He is speaking firmly, almost aggressively. “It’s a beautiful feeling to have power,” he says, his voice softer. “You can handle it. Trust yourself to handle it. Soon, you will get a feel for the car and it will be like your body. And then its power will be yours.”

She looks at him, unable to process what he is or who he is. His eyes are fixed on hers. She tries again, her foot slowly releasing the clutch until she feels the car move. She backs the car out of the driveway, shifts gears and begins driving along Constantino Lobo Road. When she is comfortably driving in third gear, she cannot stop smiling.

“It feels good, doesn’t it?” he asks.

She laughs.

She drives for twenty minutes and grinds the gears only once. When they are back in her driveway, she turns to him. “Eliab, how long have you had this driving school?”

“Two years. I also have a dry cleaning shop and a taxi service.”

“You do all this alone?”

“I have people working for me and my younger brother will soon join me.”

“What does your father do?” she asks.

“He farms land in Rugaaga.”

“You don’t want to work with him?”

“No. He is very poor. He has only one acre of land.”

“But he sent you to school?”

“My uncle paid for my schooling. He has more land than my father, and he has cattle. But I left school after primary. It is a waste. Unless you want to be an unthinking fool, to cram and repeat things you don’t understand so that one day you can be a clerk, a civil servant, live in a posh house and drive a big car owned by the government. I don’t want to serve anyone. I want to be a businessman, like
mhindis.
Your people know how to make money.”

“Your father works hard, surely.”

“Very hard. He grows many things: plantains, yams, beans, groundnuts, vegetables. He sells a little and the remainder the family eats. My father works hard and still he is poor. The Bible says, ‘Blessed are the poor for they shall inherit the earth.’ This is what they teach in school. It is honourable to be poor. What is honourable about choosing to live in hell so you can get to heaven? It’s not honourable. It’s stupid.”

“Then what is honourable?”

“Paying no attention to teachers trained by people who want only to see the African remain poor. Becoming better, bigger, more powerful.” He smiles. “And then making my own heaven, here, in Uganda.”

They laugh.

When Mumtaz asks Jaafar about Eliab, he tells her that he used to work for Hussein Mawji as his
totoboy,
fetching tea, running errands, buying produce from locals. One day he came to Jaafar, asked if he could buy an old car. He would pay him slowly. He could offer no collateral but Jaafar agreed. “I saw something solid in him. He paid me in full, every cent. From nothing, he is building something.”

Eliab comes three times a week to teach Mumtaz. She is becoming a competent driver, but she tells Jaafar that she needs more lessons. She enjoys listening to Eliab. He talks a great deal, about his oversized plans, his oversized dreams. He teaches her about good business practices, about work ethic. He wants to move to Kampala one day to become a Big Man, he tells her. She laughs. This small, slight, soft-spoken man has the spirit of a lion.

In the following weeks, Mumtaz becomes good enough that she can talk casually to Eliab while she drives. She is forced to admit it is time to stop the lessons. “But you must continue to come visit me,” she says, surprising herself. “Does your dry cleaning shop do home delivery?”

“If a customer wants it, I will provide it.”

Once the driving lessons are over, Mumtaz returns to her duties as a wife. She memorizes the schedule of her new home: by what time she is expected to help prepare breakfast, morning
snacks, lunch, afternoon tea and dinner. These times do not waver. Raju demands order. And she is living in her father-in-law’s house.

Mumtaz masters the Khoja art of thin
khadi
and thin chapatis. She learns so well, Raju wants only Mumtaz to prepare his chapatis.

“They are far better than yours,” he tells Khatoun, looking directly in her eyes while Mumtaz stands next to them, crestfallen that her reward for superior skill will be additional cooking duties.

At least once a week during mango season, she helps Rehmat prepare
dal
and
keri nu ras,
rubbing mangoes against gunny sacks until she is panting with exhaustion, until she is cursing under her breath.

When Mumtaz tells Jaafar she is pregnant, he promptly announces to his parents that she must rest and no longer do housework.

“I am having a baby,” Mumtaz says, laughing. “I am not ill.”

The following week she helps Rehmat prepare dinner for her parents’ visit.

Later, she sits stiffly at the dinner table while her father glares at her.

“What the hell is this?” he asks in Punjabi, gesturing with his chin towards the mango pulp. “They can’t serve meat when their pregnant daughter-in-law’s parents come over? They give this ridiculous fruit drink and potatoes?”

Mumtaz looks at Rehmat, who is smiling. Her eyes so big and earnest behind the thick lenses of her glasses that Mumtaz is forced to turn away.

This is married life, she reminds herself daily. It is what she
expected; it is what she was taught to expect. Those magical early days were only that, magic, illusion. She knows they could not have lasted; she knows they were not real. But as she goes through the motions of the life she waited years for, the life she prayed for, she finds herself longing for something else, something more.

13

T
HE DAY KARIM IS BORN MUMTAZ WATCHES
Jaafar dash into her room at Mbarara Hospital’s maternity ward. He hands her a long-stemmed pink rose. She has just finished feeding the baby and has given him to his grandmother. Rehmat is sitting in an armchair, across the room, the newborn in her arms.

Jaafar has not seen his son yet. He sits down on the edge of Mumtaz’s bed, one knee bouncing. She looks at the rose in her hands, holding it with her forefinger and thumb, careful to avoid the thorns. She is propped up on pillows and in pain from the stitches she has received. But she brushed her hair and put powder on her cheeks. She has been waiting for Jaafar. She wants him to be here. She wants him to see her, the mother of his son. From the moment she learned she was pregnant she fantasized about the moment when the baby would come, when she and Jaafar would blossom into a family, their own family. But when he walked in, almost running, thrust the rose in her face and sat on the bed, his weight causing her body to shift slightly towards him, her pain increased.

“Go, look at your son,” she says. “He looks like you.”

He jumps up off the bed and in two large strides is standing over his mother, looking at the baby. Mumtaz notices that he is wearing a suit, a navy blue suit with a narrow brown tie, a white cravat tucked into his breast pocket. She turns to place the rose on the table and when she looks at Jaafar again, he is shaking his head.

“No,” he says. “He looks like you. Right, Ma?” Rehmat tilts her head to the side, examining the baby. Then she looks up at Mumtaz and nods.

“Are you going somewhere?” Mumtaz asks him, her body sagging with disappointment. She thought he had come to spend time with her, with their son.

Jaafar takes the child from his mother, holding him awkwardly, his large hands struggling to manage the small bundle. The baby begins to scream and Jaafar hands him back to Rehmat, who quickly calms him back to sleep.

“Well done, Ma!” he says. “Just meeting some friends for drinks,” he adds, keeping his eyes on the baby, “to celebrate.”

“Celebrate?” Mumtaz repeats.

“I’m a father now,” he says, looking up at her. He laughs.

She nods, a tight smile on her lips. The pain from the stitches is almost unbearable. She winces.

“I should go, and let you rest,” Jaafar says.

She closes her eyes. He walks over, kisses her forehead and walks out.

A few minutes later, a nurse comes in, at Jaafar’s instruction, she explains, and places the rose in a tall white vase.

The first days of Karim’s life are a blur. Mumtaz is awash in her love for him. She holds him in bed, where she spends most of her time, rubbing her cheek against his, marvelling that this perfect creature is hers. She kisses his miniature lips again and again. She lets her love for her child pour over her, swimming in its tenderness, resisting nothing it offers.

Her sister-in-law Gulshi has come to stay to help with the cooking so that the new mother can focus only on her child. Mumtaz sees even less of Jaafar. “This is all ladies’ business,” he says when she asks him why he is gone more than usual.

She smiles. “But he is your son.”

“He is a baby. As long as he is a baby, he needs only you ladies.”

Forty days after his birth, Karim has settled and sleeps in the night, waking only once for a feeding. That evening, Mumtaz takes the baby to
jamat khana,
where she and Karim each will be sprinkled with holy water. It is time for Karim to enter the world and for Mumtaz to re-enter it. Until now, they have hovered in a space above everyday life, above death, above the earth.

Mumtaz feels the shift as a hard, sudden fall.

Shortly after 7:30 p.m., at about the moment holy water was hitting Mumtaz’s face, Baku smashed his Peugeot 404 into a tree.

Earlier, he drank two glasses of Johnnie Walker Red Label with water. But this did not make him drunk. The food he consumed at the Agip Motel, the steaming
matooke
covered in peanut sauce with large, moist pieces of beef swimming in it, filled him up. On a full stomach, two glasses of whiskey does
not make him drunk. But still, he lost control of his car on a smooth tarmac road on a clear night, even though there were no other cars, no people, no animals.

Jaafar, who received a phone call from his brother at 8:15 p.m., minutes after returning home from
jamat khana,
arranged to tow the car into the garage while Baku and his passenger were being treated at Mbarara Hospital.

Baku was not seriously injured. He needed three stitches over his right eye and his right shoulder was bruised. His passenger was shaken but unhurt. Before Baku returned home, he ensured that she rested before being driven home. He did not know where she lived, but she would give directions to the family’s driver, Burezu. They both speak Runyankole. His passenger that night was a woman, an African woman, a local woman.

Mumtaz sits in silence as Jaafar tells her all of this. She is in bed. She finished feeding Karim and was burping him when Jaafar returned home. He is asleep in his cradle beside her bed now. It is after midnight. She looks at her husband but cannot speak. He is removing his shirt. “Baku can be so stupid, sometimes,” Jaafar says. They are both silent as he continues to undress and then gets into bed beside her, wearing only white briefs. He leans over and turns out the lamp. Then he lies on his back.

“Where did she come from?” Mumtaz says in the dark. “This woman. Where did he find her?” She is surprised by how high her voice is. It is almost unrecognizable. Mumtaz knows Jaafar frequents the Agip Motel; she knows Jaafar regularly drinks Johnnie Walker whiskey. Many evenings, now, she doesn’t know where he is.

Jaafar is quiet. He turns his head to look at her. Her eyes, having grown accustomed to the dark now, can make out his face. But she cannot read his expression.

“I don’t know,” he says, quietly. He closes his eyes. In minutes he is breathing heavily, rhythmically.

Mumtaz remains awake for hours. She cannot stop wondering what, of all the silly things Baku did that night, Jaafar found stupid.

In the days after the accident, no one in the family speaks of it. Khatoun comes over each day to help prepare lunch. Baku walks in, a small plaster on his forehead, and sits down to eat, smiling, as he always does, ravenous, as he always is. Raju and Jaafar discus work and politics with Baku, but not the accident. Mumtaz begins to wonder if she imagined the conversation she had with Jaafar.

Then, one morning, while Rehmat rests in her bedroom, Mumtaz is alone with her sister-in-law. They are preparing sarnosas for the men’s morning tea break. They decided late what they were going to send today. The food must be ready for the houseboy to deliver to the garage at 9:50. It is already 9:00. Mumtaz and Khatoun are rushing.

“How are you, Bhabi?”

Khatoun looks up at Mumtaz, startled. They have been sitting together for close to a half hour.

“I’m fine, of course.” Khatoun smiles and resumes her work.

Mumtaz stares at Khatoun’s hands, dexterous in spite of how fat the fingers are. She is folding a narrow strip of paper-thin pastry into a triangular pouch.

“Are you angry with
maro bhai
?” Mumtaz asks, referring to Baku as “my brother,” as is customary, as is respectful.

Khatoun does not look up. She picks up a teaspoon and begins stuffing the samosa she has just finished folding. Mumtaz fills a samosa with spiced ground beef and glues it shut with a flour-water mixture. She sets it on a plate, ready to be fried.