The Gunny Sack (12 page)

From time to time her “other mother-in-law” Mary would turn up with a companion, a basket full of produce slung on her back, hanging by its long leather strap fastened tightly round the forehead. Calling Kulsum over the back gate and shouting for someone to hold back the barking dog, Mary would give my mother a head of lettuce, a cabbage, a bunch of carrots.

The year following their wedding, war was declared in Europe, and Kulsum’s father promptly closed shop in Mombasa, packed, and set forth with his family to Dar es Salaam, where their son Hassan had gone to seek his fortune. In the previous
European war, Mitho Diwano in Zanzibar and his brother in Dar had been separated, without a word exchanged for more than two years. In this war, he decided, he was not going to take any chances. Mad Mitha was not one to draw fine distinctions between the Europeans, especially when they made war.

It was about this time that Kulsum effected her release from the domination of her in-laws. One evening, while the rest of the family drove off to mosque, my mother, smelling of sweet perfume and makeup, her lips red, her cheeks flushed, her contours round and soft in the frock-pachedi, smiled shyly at my father and told him to take her to the cinema. My father did not say a word as he locked the door to their apartment and reminded the servant Karanja to watch the house. Then he looked at her again, and in the best European fashion offered her his arm, and the two walked to the Odeon a few blocks away.

In such circumstances there is no time to confess, to plead extenuating circumstances: a mischievous whim, a romantic mood. The crime is discovered and judgement follows irrevocably. When my parents returned, the sinful couple, the entire family was waiting for them. The matriarch and patriarch on the big sofa, one pair of eyes glowering, the other twinkling. At their flanks the heavenly host: the three pert sisters, the two furious brothers-in-law with their two wives affecting a damaged, suffering look, quieting down with excessive vigour and unnecessary smacks the three cherubim. The family khandaan had been betrayed. First, they had gone together (when she should have waited for the zanana show on Wednesday afternoon); then, they had violated the sacred hour. My father and mother had made the mistake of going to the theatre which the family partly owned. As soon as the manager had counted the show’s takings, he had headed straight for the mosque.

The wrath was delivered to my father, the barbs aimed at my mother.

“Going to picture during maghrab,” the matron began. “With pimps and prostitutes and Bhadalas. Does that suit our reputation—”

“But Ma,” said the Sweet Madman’s sweet daughter. “Even Europeans go, all the communities go—”

“Keep quiet!”

There followed a torrent of abuse such as my mother had never heard; during which Hassam Pirbhai, seeking refuge in an argument with his servant Karanja about his medication, wisely withdrew. My father remained standing, silent—men did not defend their wives from their families—and Kulsum sat on the floor, sobbing.

“Eat, now,” my father would beg her for the next two days. But my mother pushed the plate aside and intermittently sobbed.

The first guerrilla was surely a woman. The ways of a woman are softer but surer. The timing is precise and the target just right. When she strikes, with a force not overly strong, the whole machinery threatens to come to a riotous stop. Scandal and public embarrassment looms not far ahead, while panic takes over. At such a moment whatever she demands, she can walk away with. I talk of course of the traditional, extended family household. There are those—and I can name one—who will maintain that, nevertheless, the war was always lost; only isolated battles were won. In this one my mother carried the day.

My father, of course, had been softened and was no longer the bully who had scoffed at her grief once. He, who could have put a stop to her show, if only by increasing her suffering, therefore simply ignored the suggestions of his sisters and the sarcasm of Awal (“If men would only slap their wives once in a while …”). Saturday turned to Sunday, and when at lunch time my mother’s hunger strike showed no sign of abating, the old man intervened.

“Come, Beta. You must eat. Forget this quarrel.”

“Just because I have no one here … (sob) … they bully me all the time … (sob) … they talk about my family … (sob) …”

My father stood at the door, discomfited, Kulsum talked behind her veil, Hassam Pirbhai sat beside her, solicitous as a physician.

“So you won’t eat, then?”

“No.” Sob. Sob-sob-sob.

“Now … if you feel that badly … that we’ve mistreated you … if you want to live by yourselves …”

“Yes (sob) we want to live by ourselves …”

“Well, Juma, is that what you want?”

“If that’s what she wants,” said my father.

Kulsum, in triumph.

Those were the war years. What they saw of the war were the soldiers in transit to and from the Ethiopian campaign, the shortages of food, the weekly broadcasts, the blackouts. They had a room in Ngara, not far from their previous home. My father had acquired considerable influence through his job. He came to know commissioners, police inspectors and heads of government departments. And the more people he knew, the more indispensable he became in his job.

Still Kulsum failed to conceive a child. Now all of his salary came to her, and what he spent were his commissions. The girl from Mombasa had been taught to save. “Eggs were 33 for a shilling; yet I would not eat one, saving it for him to eat the next day. Chappatis were a luxury. We had no table and chairs, but sat on the kitchen floor across from each other.” At the end of their first year alone she sprang a surprise on him by showing him a sum of money she had saved to pay towards his debt. “His eyes opened.”

In the absence of a child, she took to her old hobby of sewing. And she profited from the war. He would bring in orders for mosquito nets for the army which she would sew during the
day, and in the evenings he would help her to put on the cotton top and border.

Seven years passed; seven years of childless marriage, in which joshis, pandits, sheikhs and pirs were consulted, stars, tea leaves, palm and archaica read, predictions made and proved false. Then came Suleiman Pir. He was a holy man from Bombay who had a strong following in East Africa. Whenever Suleiman Pir came from Bombay, a mela was held. Families gathered in clusters in a big festive field and he, accompanied by attendants bearing his chair and an umbrella, would come and sit in their midst, asking after their health and wealth, blessing their offerings of food and newly announced marriages. Suleiman Pir was short and thin, fair like a Parsee, with a long nose, and he wore a white suit and a topee. Hassam Pirbhai’s clan had gathered with five married children plus my three aunts, now married, and my father, and a horde of grandchildren. Suleiman Pir, having blessed collectively one and all, having blessed the vast trays of fruit and nuts brought before him, was seated, wiping his face, suffering the attentions of the old man and his sons, ready to go to the next family waiting for him. Then he saw my father and mother, sitting together by themselves, and he asked for their children. “Where is the aulaad?”

“No aulaad, Pir Saheb,” said my father.

“No aulaad at all?”

“None at all, Pir Saheb.”

My father did not think it proper to ask, but the pir heard the plea in his voice, he read and understood the beseeching eyes of my mother. He picked up an apple from a nearby fruit tray, whispered a prayer over it, and handed it to my mother. “You will have aulaad,” he said, and left.

In the commotion of attendants rushing after him, the men and women looking with awe as he passed (it was said that you could not meet his eyes), forgetting their restless children meanwhile, and then preparing to leave, the apple
was picked up by one of the wives and put away with the other fruit.

There followed a ruckus. My mother imputed bad faith to Hassam Pirbhai’s family and rushed to gouge out the eyes of Shiri, one of the daughters-in-law. “You bastard-bitch, you born of a pig—” The mela turned into a mêlée.

The females of Hassam Pirbhai’s family converged around the towering Awal, in a show of sisterly solidarity. My father called helplessly from the side, while the other males of the family looked on, confident of their wives. Kulsum had some of Shiri’s skin in her nails and was perhaps in for a good clobbering.

Enter Gula, Kulsum’s sister. Gula was three years my mother’s junior and had moved to Nairobi with her husband. She was big, fat, strong and quarrelsome, and came to stand beside my mother like a bodyguard, putting her hands on her hips, throwing a challenge. “Come,” she called hoarsely.

A war of words followed.

The high culture these ladies had picked up in this most European of East African cities, their new snobbishness, was cast aside, and they were back in their elemental form. Here was not Parklands and Ngara anymore but the alleys of Mombasa and Zanzibar, the villages of Cutch and Kathiawad.

“Just look at her, all blubber.”

“Yes, just look. How her husband finds her hole, God only knows.”

“Probably wide like a cup.”

“Like a sack.”

“That’s none of your business, you bitch—” my aunt Gula screamed. “You button-holed bone-pie! Yes, he sips milk and honey from this cup, do you hear? Milk and honey!” (Here she danced a small jig.) “He sees Mairaj every night—”

“What, that sissy—”

“Oh, yes? Come and play with his tanpura one night and hear his sweet music—”

“Enough!” shouted Hassam Pirbhai with the twinkling eyes, now that there was cheering from the spectators. The mud-wrestlers retired.

Meanwhile the children, like voracious army ants, were all over the food trays and one lonely apple caught Juma’s eye, and he pocketed it before it too got devoured. “Eat it,” he told Kulsum. “If you have faith it will do just as well.”

Nine months later, on May 7, 1945, when the clash and clamour and the boom and thunder in distant Europe seemed finally to show signs of subsiding, as King George was addressing his subjects over the radio and talking of peace, Kulsum went into labour. My grandmother Hirbai was present, flown in by my father from Dar. And as Jenabai Midwife put the little girl in my exultant father’s arms, he slipped her a hundred-shilling note as gift. Thus was born my sister Begum, King George’s daughter. Kulsum had gone without meat for the nine months, and not until every girl in the girls’ school had been fed pilau and sweets, not until Kulsum had been to the mosque, placing coconut and shilling, coconut and shilling, on every step as she descended and came home, did she touch meat.

The rest of us came easily.

Kulsum’s theory of creation.

When God was well and ready after all his exertions finally to create mankind, he sat himself beside a red-hot oven with a plate of dough. From this he fashioned three identical dolls. He put the first doll into the oven to finish it, but, alas, brought it out too soon: it came out white and undone. In this way was born the white race. With this lesson learnt, the Almighty put the second doll into the oven, but this time he kept it in for too long. It came out burnt and black. Thus the black race. Finally the One and Only put the last doll inside the oven, and brought it out at just the right time. It came out golden brown, the Asian, simply perfect.

(Thus our nicknames: Sona for the golden boy, the youngest and favourite, my brother Jamal; Kala for the one who came between, Salim, Salum in Swahili, the overdone.)

There followed the years of contentment, the Eden of our later dreams. We would remember them by the tins of Black Magic and Trebor, Kit-Kats and candyfloss and Pez; school ties, blazers and cardigans; toy trains that ran on steel tracks, prizes won at baby shows. There is a Black Magic box full of old photos in my gunny. A picture of my father shows him drinking a toast with his friends: Juka Chacha and Au Chacha and Babu Chacha and Mithoo Chacha, and two Europeans who could be District Officers, all jovially raising their glasses. A family picture shows my father and mother seated at two extremes, five children in between. Standing between them, three girls in identical pinafores of a dotted material and a bow in front, King George’s daughter Begum with our cousins Mehroon and Yasmin. Sitting in front of the girls, Sona and Kala.

Sunday afternoons, having visited uncles and aunts first, we would drive to City Park in T8016, our black Prefect, for the “band-waja.” Juma would park the car, and we would stroll towards the bandstand and stop some distance away. There would be European couples, and white nannies sitting primly on the few chairs, their knitting on their laps, chatting with each other, and African ayahs sitting on the grass, their bare feet pointing upwards. Surrounding the bandstand would be a wreath of white children playing, running after each other with spades and buckets, bows and arrows and guns, shouting and laughing. The bandsmen, black except for the leader, were in khaki shorts and shirts, red sashes round their middles, red fezzes on their heads. The drummer wore a splendid leopard skin over his front, and he would twirl his sticks round and round on his fingers and catch them at just the right time and thwack his drum. In the centre of the semicircle, conducting, was the white bandleader in a white uniform. At six o’clock sharp there would be a long roll on the drum: the scurrying
European children froze, the nannies climbed stiffly to their feet, arranging their frocks, and closer at hand Kulsum’s sharp eyes kept her children in reasonable control (her perpetual complaint: “How well the European children are behaved! Did you see anyone asking
them
to keep still?”), and with beating hearts we heard the bars of God Save the King announcing the end of our Sunday fun.

Beautiful, beautiful Nairobi. But all was not well in this Eden; there were rumours, rumours in Government offices and the big stores that supplied them, rumours in the bars and the clubs … of an evil secret society … and a fear rustled ever so slightly in the background, rearing its head sporadically like a devil toying with children, with a murder here and a fire there. The dreaded words were Mau Mau.