Where the Air is Sweet (27 page)

“I will not let you go.” The words, the posture Baku assumes when he says them, back straight, arms stiffly at his sides, are more suited to his father. He looks, Mumtaz thinks, like a child’s drawing of Raju. Sweet, earnest, but not at all like the original. “How can you? It’s bad enough you’re working at night. But a woman living alone. We are a respectable family.” He sits down on an armchair.

Mumtaz does not want to insult him. She does not want to say anything that might imply he is not taking care of her and the children properly.

“When Jaafar comes,” she says, sitting down on the sofa
across from him, “we’ll need a home. These people at the welfare office, they have said if I use one week’s paycheque for rent, they will pay the rest. And they will help pay for used furniture.”

Baku looks at her. She sees that his face has softened, become Baku again.

“It has two bedrooms,” Mumtaz continues. “Shama can sleep with me and Karim can sleep with Bapa. When Jaafar comes, we’ll have to make different sleeping arrangements.” She expects Baku to protest, to insist that his father will stay with him, the elder son. But he does not. He merely nods and tells her he will help her in any way he can.

Raju has decided Shama must learn to speak Hindi. For the past few weeks, he has been teaching her to read and write in Gujarati. She cannot yet read or write in English. But he knows she will learn this in school when she begins attending in September.

“You speak Gujarati, Punjabi, and Kutchi with your cousins.” He is holding up a finger for each language. But her eyes are on her paper. “And Swahili.” Shama is sitting at the dining table with Raju. Karim is at school and Mumtaz is sleeping.

“And English. I speak English.” She is speaking with Raju in Gujarati, as she always does.

“Yes,” he says. “You must learn Hindi as well.”

“Why?” She looks up at him.

“If you have many tongues, you can say many things many ways. You have greater understanding, a bigger mind.” He holds his hands above his head, cradling a giant, imaginary head.

She smiles.

“And then the world becomes a smaller place.”

She turns back to her paper.

“And Shama,” he says, staring at her until she looks up at him, “you must become a child of the earth. You must feel that the world is your home.”

For her first Hindi lesson Raju teaches Shama to say,
“Mera naam Shama hai. Tumhara naam kya hai?”
My name is Shama. What is your name? She learns quickly, Raju has discovered with great satisfaction. She has Bahdur’s memory.

When they are finished, she sits in front of the television and watches
Sesame Street,
her daily reward for completing her language lessons, while he stands at the open window behind her and smokes two cigarettes. Then they go for a walk. Train tracks run behind the apartment. Shama and Raju follow them, heading towards old King Street to step onto an open field. She begins walking on the rails, balancing herself, her arms held out at her sides. Raju is walking alongside her in the coarse, yellow-green grass.

“Where do these train tracks go, Dadabapa?”

“Through the city, across Ontario, across Canada, all the way to the sea, to two seas.”

“Do trains always go to the sea?”

“Usually. They do in Africa. They don’t in India, not all of them.”

She jumps off the rails and bends down, picking up small, jagged stones. “Why did you leave India?” She stands up, pushes stones into the pockets of her trousers and looks at him. “Did someone throw you out?”

“No one threw me out. I wanted to leave.”

“Why? Wasn’t it nice?”

“It was nice,” he says. “But India wasn’t giving me what I needed.”

“What did you need?”

He bends down in the grass. She walks towards him and crouches beside him. He pushes his fingers into the ground. It is hard, harder than he expected it to be. He presses down until it yields, and pulls up some brown earth, holding it out in the flat of his hand. “Do you know what a farmer does?” he asks.

“He grows food.”

“What happens if, one day, food on the farmer’s land does not grow anymore? What is the farmer to do?”

Shama stares at him blankly.

“He must move, mustn’t he? And look for new land. So that he can eat, so that he can feed his family. When that land stops giving him what he needs to live, he must move again.”

“Or he will be hungry and his family will be hungry?”

Raju nods.

“Were you hungry in India?”

Raju smiles. “My belly was full, but, yes, I was hungry.”

“And Uganda fed you.” She looks at him. “Until Idi Amin threw us out.”

Raju stands up.

“Will Canada feed us?” Shama asks, standing up as well.

“I think it will.”

She nods, looks at her feet for a moment and then at Raju. “If Canada doesn’t feed us, or if someone throws us out, will there be somewhere we can move? So we won’t be hungry?”

“Yes,” he says. “Always. And we will move until we find such a place.”

“Where we can eat?”

He nods. “And where we are happy. Where we are safe. Where you can play.”

“Where the air is sweet,” she adds in English, smiling, stepping onto the rails again. “Where everything’s A-okay.”

He smiles, then laughs.

When they return home, Raju gets them each a glass of water from the tap and reaches into the cupboard for the package of Peek Freans biscuits, limiting Shama to two, and, despite her protests, taking three for himself.

28

I
T HAS BEEN CLOSE TO SIX MONTHS SINCE JAAFAR
returned to Uganda. He calls Mumtaz once a week, on Sundays. During each conversation, the children ask him when he is coming. “In a few weeks,” he tells them. When Mumtaz takes the phone and asks for clarification, he tells her to be patient, he’s moving as quickly as he can. He tells her things are complicated in Kampala, but he will come. As soon as possible, he will come.

As the weeks pass, Mumtaz has trouble sleeping. In the mornings, when it is her time to sleep, she cannot. She lies awake, the sun forcing its way through the curtains, flashing an enormous light on her building rage. She sleeps only one or two hours each day.

Every time Karim refuses to go to bed, refuses to turn off the television, refuses to pick up his clothes, a madness grips her, an anger of a magnitude which she did not know she was capable.

One day, he asks her to buy him a bicycle. When she tells him they cannot afford it, he begins to demand she buy one, shouting, pounding the kitchen table with his fist.

“I can’t buy you a bicycle. I don’t have enough money. Do you understand?”

“Yes, you can!” he says, his voice getting higher. “You just don’t want to. They don’t cost that much money.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. You don’t know how much a bicycle costs.”

“Do you know? Do you know anything? You don’t even know how to speak English properly.”

“That’s enough,” she says.

He lowers his eyes, and she turns to walk away.

“You’re so stupid,” he mutters.

She turns back and slaps him forcefully across the face. He looks at her for a moment, his hand on his cheek. Then he runs to his bedroom.

The slaps become regular. But they fail to improve Karim’s behaviour, and instead increase both Mumtaz’s anger and his insolence. She begins to warn him he will feel the sting of her
pooté hath
—the back of her hand. When he sneers, calling her bluff, she screams at him to get out of her sight.

One afternoon, Shama is singing loudly. She wakes Mumtaz, who had finally fallen asleep only minutes earlier. She storms out of her bedroom, grabs Shama’s arm and pulls her towards her. She smacks her bum and goes back into her room, slamming the door behind her. She hears Raju saying something to Shama, who is crying. She cannot make out his words. Then she hears the front door open and shut. She walks out of her bedroom into the silence and towards the kitchen to make lunch.
A pile of dandelions is strewn on the kitchen table. Did Shama bring them in? She must have. She thinks they are pretty, even though Mumtaz has told her they are weeds. “Stupid girl,” Mumtaz mutters. She raises her eyes and sees Karim sitting in front of the television, staring at pictures, the volume turned down so low there is no sound.

Mumtaz has not heard from Jaafar in three weeks. Whether he is dead or has forgotten he has a family, Mumtaz can no longer deny what she has known for months: she doesn’t have a husband. Left behind, again. This time with two small children. Pieces of her flesh, of her blood. Of course they, too, would be discarded like rubbish.

When finally Jaafar phones, on a Sunday, he phones at an unusual time, ten in the evening, when it is very early in the morning in Kampala. Raju and the children are asleep. Her responses to his questions are curt, perfunctory. She asks him nothing.

“I know money is a problem,” he says. “I’m sending some cash, it will be US so you’ll need to exchange it. Don’t do it all at once. I’m sending a large amount. Zaver Khanji’s cousin is travelling to Toronto and he will bring it. I need to arrange to get it to Kitchener.”

“I don’t want cash made God-knows-how. I don’t want anything from you.”

“Mumtaz, I know you are angry I’m not there.”

“I’m not angry. I’m finished. Our marriage is finished. I can’t wait for you. It’s making me into a crazy person.”

He is quiet.

“I want only one thing. My children.”

He begins laughing. “Don’t be so dramatic.”

“I want a divorce.”

He stops laughing.

“I don’t want money. I want to stop this pretending. You are torturing me, and I am in turn torturing them.”

“Mumtaz—”

“Why don’t you admit this is what you want? To be free of me and of Karim and Shama?”

“How dare you tell me what I want? Who do you think you are?”

“I don’t know who I am. I know only that I am not your wife. I have a job. I can take care of my children. The schools are free. The doctors are free. The government helps people here. It’s safe. It’s not a perfect life but it’s a good life. It’s my life.”

“He will come.” Raju is sitting on the sofa beside Mumtaz. She has told him she and Jaafar have separated. He shook his head when she started speaking. He has not stopped. “You cannot stop being his wife.”

“But he has stopped being my husband.”

“
Beta,
he has not left you. He has not left us. He is struggling. He is finding a way to look after his family. A man must look after his family. Don’t take this from him. He is nothing without you. You are his wife.”

“And so I should walk through fire for him?”

“You are strong. You are stronger than him.” He clenches his fist as though to demonstrate, holding it in front of his face. His wrist has become thin, the veins oversized, the skin translucent.
She reaches out and takes his hand. He unclenches his fist. “
Amari khandan ni dhikri,
” he says. Our family’s daughter.

She smiles.

“My daughter.” He nods and places his free hand on her head. “You are my daughter.”

She presses her forehead against the palm of his hand and cries.

Mumtaz hands her Super 8 camera to Karim. He holds it delicately in the palms of both hands, as though it is a dying bird, and looks up at her, his eyes wide, his mouth slightly open.

“I’ll show you how to use it,” she says. “It’s not hard. You can make films. Movies. You can make movies with your friends. I’m sure none of your friends has a Super 8 camera of his own.”

“Where did you get it?” he asks, bringing the camera up to his face, examining it. “I can have it?”

“Bapa brought it for me from Mbarara. I am too busy to make any films right now. You can use it and, if you are very careful with it, you can keep it in your room.”

He is nodding, his eyes on the camera. “I promise. Thank you, Mummy.”

Shama sits on the toilet seat while Raju shaves. She watches him closely, sucking in her breath when he nicks himself. He sees her later, in the bathroom, playing with his shaving brush, stirring it inside the empty stainless-steel bowl he brought with him from Malia and then from Mbarara, and rubbing the bristles against her delicate cheek.

Raju begins to make lunch every day so that Mumtaz can sleep longer. He makes omelettes with cheese for the children and with onions for himself. He fries all-beef frankfurters in a pan, using a fork to move them around the hot butter. In the oven, he warms chapatis that Mumtaz made the evening before. He reheats leftover
saak
on the stove, careful to stir it so that it does not burn.

When Karim returns to school after lunch, Raju takes Shama for long walks along the railroad and then stops at the playground, where he sits on a bench, smokes a cigarette and watches her climb and swing and slide.

When Shama scrapes her knee, Raju cleans the wound and wipes her tears. He tells Karim and Shama when it is time to turn off the television, when it is time to get into the bath. He pulls their blankets up to their chins after they fall asleep.

29

J
AAFAR IS STANDING AT MUMTAZ’S DOOR. BAKU,
who picked him up from the airport in Toronto, is behind him, a satisfied grin on his plump face, as though he is Father Christmas and Jaafar the long-awaited gift. Mumtaz has not seen her husband in eleven months. She has known for three days that he was coming. But she did not believe it. Now that he is here she is angry with herself for the relief that is sweeping through her body. She wants to fall into his arms; she wants him to catch her. Instead, she stands stiffly and asks him how his flight was. When he leans towards her, she turns her face so that he is forced to kiss her cheek, on the bone where her cheek meets her ear. She steps aside and lets him enter.

An hour later, Baku has returned home and Jaafar is sitting on the linoleum floor with Shama, who is demonstrating her Gujarati writing skills. Karim is a few feet away, leaning against the wall, watching. Karim has yet to utter more than single-word answers to his father; the children have yet to touch him. Mumtaz and Raju are at the dining table. While Mumtaz pours tea into cups,
Raju goes to the kitchen and removes the biscuits from the cupboard. He arranges them on a plate and brings it to the table. Jaafar watches him. He turns to look at Mumtaz, his eyebrows raised. She lowers her eyes and stirs her tea.