Where the Air is Sweet (28 page)

That night, after Raju and the children have gone to bed, Jaafar and Mumtaz sit at the dining table.

“Thank you for taking care of Bapa,” he says.

“He helps me. He has helped me.”

“Good.”

“All this time,” Mumtaz says. “What have you been doing?”

“At first, I was withdrawing money from banks all over Uganda—money that belonged to Asians. The accounts weren’t frozen, after all.”

“How could you withdraw other people’s money?” she asks.

“When I was first here in Canada, when I came to drop you and the children, I met with people in Toronto. They gave me bank drafts they had taken out of Uganda. When I returned, I was able to cash them. I had to bribe bank managers to keep quiet about all the money I was taking out. But I got it out.”

“You were bribing bank managers and driving around Uganda for other people? Why?”

“They are our people, Mumtaz. I was able to help. If you could help our people, wouldn’t you?”

Not if it kept me from my children, she thinks but does not say. Instead, she asks him how much money he took out.

“A little more than 500,000 shillings,” Jaafar says.

“And where is it? Surely, you didn’t bring so much money on the airplane.”

“The money is lost.”

She stares at him.

“A Malia man,
apra gham varo,
who is living in Goma, agreed to keep the cash for me. Then Idi Amin wanted his picture on Uganda’s currency. So, everyone had three months to exchange their old bills for the new ones. The old bills would be worthless.”

“This is how it came to be lost? It wasn’t changed in time and became worthless?”

“No. It was more complicated. I picked up the cash at the border. I delivered the money to a man in Mbarara who had agreed to exchange it. I was to pick up the new cash one week later and take it to Goma again.”

“What happened?”

“This fool in Mbarara who was entrusted with the money, his name is Jiwani, he disappeared. I met his brother and demanded they return the money. He assured me his brother would pay it back.”

“And he hasn’t paid it back?” she asks.

Jaafar shakes his head. “He’ll never pay it back.”

They are quiet.

“Is this why you’ve finally come to Canada?” she asks.

“No. This was in the early months,” he says. “I was doing favours for others then, helping others. Since then I have been focused on our life.”

“Our life?”

“I have found a business. Amir and I are working together. We’re making good money. We need to travel often, but we have a home base in Kampala. I’ve found a house, a flat actually. We have leased two, one for us and one for Amir and Bapa.”

Suddenly hot, she removes the cardigan she is wearing. She does not look at him.

“You’re still angry? I’m sorry. I know it took long. But I needed time: to set up work, contacts, make real money. I wanted to get everything in order. I didn’t want to say anything until everything was ready.”

“We have hardly spoken in four months. And now this?”

“Because you talked nonsense about divorce. I know you don’t want to end our marriage. I know you’re tired and frustrated. This is a crazy situation. Our whole family, our community has lost everything. It isn’t something that I can deal with in a few weeks. Did you think I would abandon you? Our children?”

“We have been alone, I and your children, almost since the time we left Uganda.”

“You wouldn’t accept money from me.”

“What about your promises, that you were moving here in a few weeks?”

“The plan
was
to move here, but then Amir and I began to realize things were okay in Uganda, in Kampala. Day-to-day life is okay.”

She looks at him. She isn’t angry. She is confused. She is tired.

“Idi Amin is making mistakes, angering his own army, everyone,” he says. “Another coup will easily take him out, any day now. When he is gone, they will beg Asians to come back. In the meantime, we are doing well. We are making money.”

She turns her head towards the ceiling and closes her eyes.

“I shouldn’t have kept promising, but I didn’t know if it would work there. No one could predict anything. I wanted to
give you hope, something to hang on to because I knew how hard it was for you. So I kept saying I was coming. It was stupid now when I look back. I made it worse. I’m sorry. Please, Mumtaz, I’m so sorry.”

She turns to him. He has been talking quickly, so quickly that his breaths are shallow.

“I’m here. We’re together. You don’t need to work. I’ll work and look after you, the children and Bapa. Karim and Shama have their father again. You have your husband again. Mumtaz, it’s time to go back.”

“If I won’t?”

“Then I’ll stay,” he says quickly. “I won’t go without you.”

She looks at him, at his eyes, probing them, looking for something that will betray his real intentions. She gives up and looks away again.

“I’m a man, Mumtaz. I need to look after my family. There, I can do it. I know how. Let me do it in the way I know.”

A week later, Mumtaz tells Karen that she is moving back to Uganda.

Karen is quiet. She tucks her hair behind her ear. “It will be difficult for Karim and Shama. Can you wait until the school year finishes?”

Mumtaz shakes her head. “It would be too disruptive for my husband’s work.”

“What does he do?”

Mumtaz looks past Karen at the chalkboard. She doesn’t know. “He imports. He exports,” she says, repeating Jaafar’s phrases.

“Is it safe there?”

“Uganda is not Canada. But I’ll have my family together. The children will have their father.”

“Shama is in kindergarten so the change might be less jarring. But Karim is in second grade—he likes it here. He’s made friends. His teacher says he speaks up in class. Finally. He is really thriving.”

“He needs his father,” Mumtaz says quickly. “Children need their parents more than a nice teacher.”

“I’m not suggesting you don’t go.” Karen’s face has become pink, the pink growing beyond her face, down her neck, forming a patch on her pale chest. The patch is the shape, Mumtaz thinks with some amusement, of Africa on a map, deep, jagged, coming to a point. “I think if Karim and Shama could somehow finish their year, it would really help. It would give them some stability to have had one full year in the same school.”

“I know you mean well,” Mumtaz says. “You have been nothing but good to me and my children. But I know the cost of growing up without a proper family. I can’t let my children bear what I have borne.”

Karen straightens her skirt and clears her throat. “You have been taking care of your children on your own. You know you don’t need your husband. Why are you clinging to him?”

“It isn’t only about me and my husband. It isn’t so simple.”

Karen lowers her eyes.

“My husband is trying to look after his family. He could have handled things differently, it’s true. He’s made mistakes. But he has come to us now. He wants to take care of us. I must go with him.”

Karen shakes her head.

“I won’t destroy our family.”

“But what about you?” Karen asks. “What’s best for you?”

Mumtaz knows that no matter what she says, Karen will not understand. A Canadian woman who lives alone and sleeps with her lover on weekends cannot understand. But she says it anyways. “What’s best for me is what’s best for my children. Alone, I can work to feed and clothe my children. I can keep a roof over their heads. But they will be vulnerable in other ways. He’s not a bad man. He’s a good father. I won’t be the one to take their father from them. I could never forgive myself.”

“Vulnerable? Do you mean they won’t be respectable? Mumtaz, it isn’t like that here, not anymore.”

“But it is for us, for my family, for my people, no matter where we are.”

“Then leave your family. Leave your people. Won’t you do that for your children?”

“Leave them? How can we leave them? Where will we belong then? If I am forced to choose between my family and a country in which I am an outsider, I choose my family.”

“Mumtaz—”

“What happens when people here begin to hate us? When they believe we are taking what is theirs?”

“Canada will not throw you out. People here are educated. We have laws, protections. Once you get your citizenship they can never throw you out.”

“My husband needs to live in Uganda,” she says, punctuating each word. “It’s what he knows. It’s where he is strong. I don’t know if he’s right, if things will return to normal. I know it will never be the same. We can never trust Africans again. But who can we trust? Only our family. I will keep my family intact. I will do that for my children.”

Mumtaz walks towards the door.

“What will you do if your family turns on you?” Karen asks. “When it’s your family that hurts your children?”

Mumtaz stops at the threshold of the classroom. She closes her eyes. The question does not penetrate her mind. She will not let it. She smiles. “Thank you, Karen. For everything.”

As the plane begins to move down the runway, Mumtaz pats Karim’s hand. He is staring out the window at the rain falling onto the tarmac. She can hear Shama giggling in front of them, sitting between her father and her grandfather. “We’ll find you a better school in Kampala,” she tells him. “Everything will be fine. We’re going home.”

“Kampala is not home.” His voice is flat. He does not turn to look at her.

She opens her mouth to speak, to refute him, and then closes it again. The plane accelerates and pushes her against her seat. She closes her eyes, relaxes her body and surrenders to the invisible force shoving her backwards.

30

T
HE MOMENT MUMTAZ STEPS OFF THE AIRPLANE,
a gust of thick, warm air rushes towards her. Her mouth is slightly open and she has no choice but to suck the air into her lungs. The sensation momentarily disorients her and she stops moving. She closes her eyes and reminds herself that she has arrived. That she is home. Slowly, she begins to walk down the steps, one hand on the railing, the other clutching Shama’s hand. When they reach the ground, the girl pulls free and sprints to catch up to Jaafar, Raju and Karim, who are walking ahead.

Mumtaz looks around. The terminal building is intact. The trees in the distance are as lush as she remembers them. But it is different. It is quiet.

The airport looks hollowed out. No planes are taking off or landing. No army Jeeps patrol the tarmac. Inside the terminal, no families are gathered, chattering, waiting for loved ones. When Mumtaz stands in front of the customs officer, he barely lifts his eyes to look at her. He says nothing as he stamps her passport.

The car park is almost empty. Burezu, the family driver, is standing next to a small red Peugeot 204, his eyes on the ground in front of him. Mumtaz stops when she sees him. They are five, plus Burezu. How will they fit in that car? In response to her silent question, a taxi appears. Jaafar raises his hand, a cigarette tucked between his first and second fingers, and gestures to Burezu, who begins to load the suitcases into the taxi.

A few minutes later, Jaafar is driving the Peugeot northeast on Entebbe Road, towards Kampala. Mumtaz is sitting beside him in the passenger seat, the children in the back seat. Raju is following in the taxi with Burezu. Even after an exhausting cross-Atlantic flight, Jaafar will not relinquish the steering wheel. He is driving quickly. The roadblocks have disappeared. Mumtaz no longer needs to worry about soldiers pointing Kalashnikovs into the car, near her pounding chest, next to her children’s small faces. She stares out the window at the red soil sprouting rows of plantain trees and corrugated-iron shacks. Everything is smaller than she remembers it, as though she has grown, as though when she left sixteen months earlier she was a child and now she has returned a woman.

When they reach Kampala, the car slows at the clock-tower roundabout. Mumtaz watches a man walking on the side of the road. His shirt is filthy. It billows on his slender frame like a flag on a mast. He walks with his head lowered, his shoulders drawn inward. Like a beaten dog.

Jaafar shifts gears. The Peugeot picks up pace, moving quickly again, and the man disappears.

Mumtaz turns to glance at the back seat. Jaafar catches her eye and smiles. She cannot manage a smile. Her husband is beside her. Their family is together again. She made the right
decision to leave Canada and return to Uganda. But the silence that has descended here is heavy, fraught. It is drowning her.

Over the next few days, Mumtaz brings plants into their new flat in the suburb of Rubaga. She changes the bedding. She hires a seamstress to make curtains for all the windows in her flat and in the adjacent flat where Raju and Amir are staying. She makes regular trips to the market, where a seemingly endless supply of fruits and vegetables is thrown onto the backs of wooden carts, onto the ground, wilting, spoiling, the smell of rot seeping into the tarmac, into the air. Shops advertising everything else—dry goods, medicine, hardware, clothing, shoes, toys, cleaning products, electronics—are almost completely empty, their shelves covered in dust. Still, proprietors sit behind the counters, ready to accept payment for goods they do not offer.

One day, Mumtaz enters Hirji Camera and Supplies. In the dimly lit shop, she sees no cameras, no film, nothing to indicate what this shop sells or once sold. Damp clothes hang on a rope strung across the length of the room; an empty kerosene container lies on its side on the floor. When Mumtaz turns to leave, she accidentally kicks a small
sagri
placed next to the door. It tips over. She crouches down to set it upright, expecting to find spilled coals and ash. But she finds nothing; the
sagri
was empty. She sees a young woman in the back corner of the shop, gripping an aluminum saucepan in her hand. The woman is looking at her. She is squinting, her hand held up to shield her eyes from the sunlight streaming into the shop. Mumtaz stands and leaves.

Each time she goes out, Mumtaz drives herself, refusing to let Burezu take her. But she is frightened. Why she is frightened,
she cannot say. She has seen only two or three soldiers, and they paid no attention to her. No one looks at her or seems to notice her presence, though she is the only Asian on the street. People avoid her, but it is not only her they avoid. They avoid one another, their eyes sharply averted as they walk. It is as though they are trying to hide, trying to disappear into themselves. But things are better than they were, she tells herself, just as Jaafar promised her.