The Gunny Sack (10 page)

“Haven’t you heard?” the sheth said. “They are making fires out of it. It’s useless, this Deutsch Ost Afrika eine-rupee. The new Government and the banks will not honour it. What
goods
do you have?”

“None,” she said.

We had to start from scratch, borrowing and buying on credit, and we opened a small duka in the African section, selling kerosene by the jigger and packets of spice, and our fortunes never rose again, we were mukhis once, people called us Sharriffu, Germans called us Bwana, but for forty years and more we stayed poor, changing trades, trying this and trying that, moving from here to there. Collectors would shout and wave their hands, making sure the neighbours heard, and we would pay out of shame even if we had to borrow more money to do it. We blamed it on the sin of the old man, my father-in-law, but how can you blame an entire war on the sin of one man?

Before he died Dhanji Govindji probably asked everyone for forgiveness but they laughed. What was his sin, Shehrbanoo, that could be equated to the ravages of war? Only now she begins to tell, to explicate the crime that Ji Bai herself would only hint at … now that the secrets of one green book are unlocked and the accounts of the past lie open …

From Dhanji Govindji Africa exacted a price, she says, nothing but his soul. Listen.

One morning (it is related) a pir and his murid went walking the hills together. The terrain was rocky, the day was hot, but the pir appeared tireless, taking his follower higher and farther as if to some pre-chosen destination. Presently they came upon a snake on a stone. It had been hit by a rock or a stick. It was writhing in agony, beating its head upon the stone first on one side and then the other, and
crawling all over its wounded broken head was a swarm of black ants.

The pir and the murid stopped at the sight.

“What poor soul can this be, for what sin could he be punished like this?” the murid was moved to remark with pity.

“For the sin of stealing the wealth of the community entrusted to him,” replied the pir. “The snake is a former mukhi and the ants are his community come to torment him. He has been punished enough, I have come to release him.” So saying, the pir picked up a stone and put the snake out of its misery.

There is no sin greater, there is no shame deeper. But Dhanji Govindji, for the sake of his half-African son, committed it; dipped into community funds when his own savings had run dry, to pay his numerous informants and agents, to finance his quest. This was the sin Ji Bai mentioned, the guilt which they carried silently in their breasts, with the knowledge that there were people, there were families, who knew of it and could point their fingers at them. And perhaps … perhaps it was not the outsiders who had murdered him after all and there were people in Matamu who had sought revenge, or for the safety of their remaining funds had seen fit to act … and put the suffering mukhi out of his misery.

No wonder then, the mistrust of the past by Ji Bai’s family, the sons and grandsons of Gulam and his brothers. But Ji Bai knew better. There was more to the past than just the sin.

Part 2
.
Kulsum.

Meet Kulsum: hemorrhoid sufferer, a TV commercial might dub her, with a suitable close-up of a woeful expression on an otherwise sprightly face. She will relate her sufferings in the most graphic detail to any stranger who shows the slightest interest. “These headaches,” she will start … “Once I get one it just doesn’t leave, simply incapacitates me.” “A couple of Aspros, perhaps,” the stranger might venture, not wanting to be drawn in but already in the net. “Oh, they have no effect,” she says, “too weak. I’ve had headaches since I was wee high. I’ve had glasses since then, too. I used to sew. Did Singer embroidery, you know; and was clever at it too, won prizes. And we used to do caps, decorate them until late at night, stitching sequins one after another until the eyes seemed to pop with the tension and the pain. And what did we get after all that work—two cents for a cap. Of course, our parents kept
the money … we were poor, hardly had enough to eat, we all had to pitch in—why, chapatis were a luxury and we would jump for joy …” Our stranger gets impatient: “What do you take, then?” “Oh, nothing helps,” she answers. “But I take Panadol. And when I take Panadol, I constipate, and then my hemorrhoids start up.” The stranger is squirming now. He would do anything to get away from this imposed intimacy. “Indeed,” he ventures. “Oh, yes, I’ve had hemorrhoids since Salim here stayed in the stomach. They were so painful, his father brought a tube—you know, the tube of a tire, Dunlop—for me to sit on. And when I’d been to the lavatory my mother would fan me. My mother always came for my deliveries. After he was born, I could have had an operation to have them removed, but the doctor said it was risky.” “Eat vegetables,” the stranger finally ventures, hoping he’s out of the worst. “Oh, you think I don’t? I even don’t eat very much. Can’t.” The stranger starts breathing again.

She’s graduated from laxatives and purges, of which she’s tried all—milk of magnesia, epsom salts, senna, liquid mixtures, tablets, leaves, powders and chocolatey concoctions. Now she’s on to bran and fibre supplements. And in the belief that soft, refined foods will give her smoother motions, she avoids meat until she’s tempted by a plate of samosas or kebabs, and eats marmalade by the spoonful, has cake for lunch and—although she denies it—dislikes vegetables.

Kulsum. In our catalogue of names, where history moves in a noisy parade wearing faces like masks, Kulsum comes along with the generation of Sheru, Zera, Daulat, Rehmat … The generation that to the present age represents age, decay, death. A generation that embarrasses, which does not speak English, whose personal manners make us flinch … Men and women physically shapeless and retarded, old and dying at sixty.

Yet Kulsum was a flower once. And while still unplucked though in full blossom at sixteen, she stood behind the birij of
her father’s shop one Mombasa morning and watched with curious eyes the conference of four adults in the front of the store. The birij was a wall-length wooden shelving that partitioned the store from the rest of the house, leaving room for a narrow, curtained doorway. Her nose stuck first inside one opening and then another in the birij, between piles of bright Indian-made kikoi and msuri, white Marikani no longer from America, and colourful khanga and black kaniki, catching whiffs of newly unpacked and still-unpaid-for cotton and feeling the fine dust over it. She strained her neck and ears to catch a trace of the solemn conversation now in progress in the shop. Below her, among the lower shelves, young Zarina did the same.

“Do you think it’s for Daulat?” asked Zarina, looking up.

Such lengthy discussions conducted with such quiet formality, such straining civility, between her parents and two strangers, so that the one or two customers who stepped in took heed of it and quietly stepped back into the street, could only be about one thing. Marriage.

Mitha “Diwano” Kanji had a problem on his hands; actually, he had seven problems. He had seven daughters (besides four sons), only one of whom, the eldest, Fatu, was married. After Fatu came Daulat, and then Kulsum. The proposal should have been for Daulat. But Kulsum with beating heart knew better.

One of the two women talking with her mother and father was Zera “Sopari” (betel-nut chewer) from the store across the road. The other was a tall, thin woman with a long nose and a serious face. Kulsum had seen them the previous day; that is why she knew. Fate had come to call. The future beckoned with all it held ready for her, and she would have to go. Yesterday morning, her mother had called her into the shop. “Kulsa, these women want to see your embroidery; go and bring something to show.” “Come here in the sun, beta, where we can see better,” Zera beckoned. But it was not her embroidery they wanted to
see. Across the street in the shadows of Zera Sopari’s shop there was a movement; across the street a man got up from a bench, moved casually to the threshold and threw a glance across. A young woman of medium height, fair, and with spectacles on her round face. That’s all he saw. It was enough. Now they had come to bring the proposal.

“Kulsa,” her mother called as before. Kulsum walked in past the rag curtain and stood in front of the birij. At that moment there was a movement across the street and this time the man was framed by the sunlight. Instinctively Kulsum pulled her pachedi across her face, but not before giving one deep and curious look at what had been decided for her. Then she looked at her mother and went inside.

“But he’s so dark,” observed young Zarina from the floor, having watched through the birij.

My grandfather Mitha Diwano, Mad Mitha, was a deeply religious man of the unusual kind: one who practises simply and consistently what the rest profess. Often he would take his blanket and steal away into the night to spend the rest of it in the bosom of his true mistress. With great reverence he would emerge from the mosque walking backwards, so as not to show his back to it, taking twelve springy steps before turning around. And then, with his close-cropped white head stuck forwards, his white suit crumpled, he would stride home, bobbing up and down and muttering a prayer or singing a bhajan. At this time no emergency—no robber, policeman or fire—could have drawn a word from his mouth, until he had reached home and deposited his acquired merits on the household. He was taken by the rest of the people in Membeni in a light-hearted fashion. Beginning with his nickname, which they turned into Mitho Diwano for Sweet Madman, he was treated as a joke, a local phenomenon good for a few laughs. A devotee of his intensity they had only heard of in legends, and obviously could never take seriously in their midst. Businessmen
delighted in enticing him with new stock, which he bought on the basis of a hundi signed to a bank; and when the maturation date approached and the stock languished on the shelves and behind the birij, his wife Hirbai would go around giving it away at discount to raise the money.

The Sweet Madman left Jamnagar in Gujarat with his brother and their wives a few years before the First World War. The two wives were also sisters. Mitha got off at British-protected Zanzibar, and his brother continued on to German-ruled Dar es Salaam. A few years after the war, with one daughter married and three others in line and with two sons, when life was hard and Zanzibar was too small a place to hold everybody, Mitha received a vision. And when Mitha had a vision, people listened, even those who normally ridiculed him. The vision told him that Zanzibar was doomed, that he should go to the mainland. When Mitha and his family took the boat to Mombasa, several other families went with them. They all set up shop in the bustling Indian quarter at Membeni.

My grandfather Mitha had a simple strategy for getting his daughters married. He accepted the first proposal that came. “We will not accept abuse,” he would tell his wife. This was because the proposal always said something like, “We would like your daughter to be our son so-and-so’s wife.” Having called his precious daughter “wife” and so put a smudge on her, my grandfather figured, they would have to accept her as a wife. Which they had come to do anyway. Thus my mother Kulsum almost instantly got engaged to my father Juma.