The Gunny Sack (23 page)

Through the 20s and into the 30s, the years of boom, when the big mosque with the clock tower went up, all in stone, with huge wooden doors and iron gates, when the Indian population swelled and Dar grew and grew, they carried the shame, afraid to look people in the eye, to get into an argument, for fear of a taunt.

There was one incident Ji Bai never forgot. Her son Kassim, ten years old, was playing in the street with other boys. She sat minding the store, looking out over the groceries, it was a dull humid afternoon right after a brief rainfall, the
ground was wet on the surface although the sand underneath was dry … A sudden commotion woke her up from her reverie: Kassim was racing furiously towards her, bare feet thumping on the ground, kicking up dust, chased with even greater thumps of larger bare feet by a grown woman: Sheru Bai of the Indian shop across the road. Kassim raced inside, panting loudly, and looked at his mother in relief. No sanctuary. Sheru Bai without losing the slightest speed raced right into the store, caught hold of the boy by the hair, shook him a few times and slapped him twice. Then without a word or a look at his mother she stomped off.

A kid’s fight, perhaps. But wasn’t I, the boy’s mother, the proper authority to be told? Kher. Never mind. We survived this and other insults. The people forgot, but it took them twenty, twenty-five years to do so. Sheru Bai and I are friends now. We’ve both seen hardships.

In the 1930s Gulam became a missionary. He joined a group of young men, many of them freshly off the boat from Bombay, who went on car trips to the interior to keep their brethren in line and to teach the faith to the African. In the first purpose they were phenomenally successful: few intermarriages, fewer concubines or multiple wives, mosques and schools going up everywhere. In the second, they proved a miserable failure: instead of promising rewards both here and in the hereafter, instead of providing education (which they couldn’t, themselves having none) or hospitals or shoes and clothes, they spoke of punishment: Every grain of sin the Lord will carefully weigh: bongo ya kichwa itatokea sikioni they translated freely—the brain of the head will pour out from your ears. And no-one was willing to buy that, even as insurance. In 1938, one day on the road from Morogoro to Iringa (later to be known as the Hell Run), their car skidded into a ravine. All the five young missionaries inside died on the spot. And became instant martyrs. At first the bodies were to be brought back to Dar. But that was decided against and they
were buried at a roadside grave close to the spot where they were killed, with inscriptions in stone commemorating the event in three languages. Until recently, said Ji Bai, cars and lorries on the highway slowed down in deference to the five martyrs who died there, and those that raced past did so at their own peril.

Thus Gulam saved the family name. And slowly the family began to prosper—there was food on the table, creditors left satisfied if not jubilant, children went to school, there were clothes to wear. But there was nothing like the old glory.

All the while, she watched Juma in her crystal ball, she knew when he was married, and she grieved when he died, and one day it told her that Juma’s family had arrived in Dar. How to contact them? How to speak to this stern young woman Kulsum, who had lived in the home of the great Hassam Pirbhai, and what to tell her? Of the shame—the
double
shame of sin against community and sin against God?

Then Providence played its part. It was Juma himself who brought about the meeting—follow the train of events: the dream, the forbidden fruit, the sin, the lapse, the search for redemption, and history bloomed, knowledge was victorious.

Kulsum, of course, would have none of this. “The budhi is demented,” was her verdict.

“Aré, Ma, the boys’ father comes from a good family,” she told Ji Bai impatiently over a cup of tea, the one and only time she went to see the old woman. “The Merchants in Pakistan are his uncles—”

“Precisely so, Beta,” affirmed Ji Bai, “the same family …”

“Even so,” Kulsum would later say, “the past is done with. Who can say what really happened, what the budhi is not making up … Think of the future …”

But I was given a new look, the carbuncle in the family, vague evidence of a long-ago temptation.

Ji Bai triumphant.

This was when Kulsum was at her lowest point since her husband’s death, she could not have survived the tragedy that loomed overhead, when the milkman was told simply to keep away and I kept in the background lest Providence select me as an agent for one of its unpleasant deeds.

Mrs. Pipa came on a call of sympathy and left, her blackened pachedi and all, a portent of death and disaster.

Kulsum never forgave Mrs. Pipa that call.

First, the Pipas. One son, Amin, after a long curse of seven daughters, when the couple were well past middle age. Amin had nieces and nephews much older than him. All except one or two daughters were unhappy in marriage, none got along with their mother. Some were married into poverty, one was married to a milksop, and Roshan was married off in haste to a drunkard. The problem with being married to a drunkard is that he spends all the money and he beats you. The whole community knows your story, and the more you try to hide your shame and disappointment, the more difficult it is to think of divorce, the beatings get worse, your eyes puff up, your hair turns grey, your face takes on a haggard look, your body loses shape, and he beats you like a drum, you tell your parents, but they send you away with prayers for remedies, the beatings continue until there is only one way out …

Amin, the delicate child, obviously, for whom the light green Ford Taunus was bought and the chauffeur hired, to take him to school, who liked to hang out with tough boys who took from him not only marbles and shillings but something else as well. Of the goings-on in the small space behind the Pipas’ courtyard, we found out from Ahmed downstairs. Ahmed sold information and thrills. This was the payoff, his price to stop harassment in the streets and under staircases. For that shilling you also got the most titillating pieces of information, something you hadn’t even dreamt of. For example, the sight of
Roshan Mattress and the inspector in action in the back room behind her store—all you did was to climb onto the sewer pipe from the Bubus’ balcony, walk along it against the wall, a twenty-foot drop under you, to the storeroom roof in the building courtyard, and then climb down to the courtyard floor and peep in through the iron bars to watch the fat lady offer her milk-white behind to the inspector. This opportunity was declined because the storeroom roof was layered with broken glass against just such an intrusion, and who wanted to be caught with his back against the wall, standing on a sewer pipe, with wrathful Boadicea watching from the top? To see Amin’s sin was easier, you had to go to the Pipas’ courtyard with your guide Ahmed, climb on some crates soundlessly, hold your breath, and watch. Which is what we did, Alu and Shiraz and I, our hearts pounding: raw flesh, raw sin, buggery in a cubicle reeking of urine and bird droppings and rotting pawpaws.

One night a single scream pierced the silence outside, after which normality returned, with the elder Jogo hobbling along with his call to prayer and Kulsa Thauki’s gang shuffling along on their way to prayer. In the morning we heard that Amin had been taken to the hospital at night with a fever. Within a few days he was dead from a mysterious illness, and then the screams and weeping and sobbing were continuous for a few nights: Mrs. Pipa and the seven sisters.

From that time onwards, the Pipas’ lives were more or less over. When a few months later their daughter Roshan jumped to her death from a second-storey window of a friend’s flat, God, as far as the old couple were concerned, was flogging a dead horse. Amin Mansion stood like a mausoleum over Pipa Store, and old Mzee Pipa counted away his hours throwing package after package of spice into the basket in front of him, like grains of sand. But the green Ford Taunus continued to take boys to school every day and brought them back, fifteen shillings a month for each boy, and every Friday
two stale chapatis and a fifty-cent thumuni landed in front of Pipa’s sister who sat with begging bowl outside the mosque.

When Sona’s fever would not go away and his eyeballs and nails turned an ominous yellow and he passed brown water, Kulsum took him to Dr. Vellani, who put her in a taxi and sent her home, promising to come himself to give the injections every day. But Sona would not get better. Kulsum bribed the gods and promised more bribes, but the heavens remained silent. Dr. Vellani started bringing on his rounds his Madrasi wife, who was also a renowned doctor. Kulsum sat up all night on a mat beside her large bed on which Sona lay comatose, her tasbih rattling impatiently and her mouth whispering urgent prayers … and finally her two elder sisters joined her in the vigil. It was then that the neighbours started coming, Mrs. Daya, Uncle Goa and Madam, Alzira, Nuru Poni, and finally Mrs. Pipa, who, as she left, said, “My son Amin had the same illness.” It was for this remark, which so cut her to the quick, that Kulsum never forgave Mrs. Pipa.

At this point the situation resembled, although somewhat imperfectly, the scenario of many a massala movie from Bombay, as they are called, in which a poor innocent lies dying on spotless white sheets, attached to a blood transfusion device, while somewhere a bearded Musulman is saying “Allah, Allah” to the click of beads, a Catholic woman (nurse) is crying in front of a crucifix, and a woman in a sari plays a sitar to a Hindu god reposing on his cushion. The sheets were soiled, the room was dark and there was no transfusion device pumping away. But Alzira had promised to pray to her God, and the three sisters were clicking beads and moving their mouths in a mixture of Hindu and Muslim prayers. Fatu Auntie started the first few bars of a hymn, which Kulsum immediately put to a stop with a sharp “Stop these sad songs. There will be plenty of time to forgive sins …”

(Fatu Auntie, a born tragedienne of the Zanzibari school, never missed a dramatic opportunity. When she arrived, she had taken Kulsum in a tight, tearful embrace accompanied by an audible sob, thus lowering the cloud of gloom even further on our household. When my grandmother Hirbai had died, several months before, and the men were taking away the body for burial, Fatu Auntie, who had not got along with her mother for the last ten years or so, had let out a terrifying shriek, “Oh, villains you, where do you take my beloved mother—” To the cemetery, of course, Fatu Masi, but the men, frozen in mid-stride with the coffin bearing down heavily on their shoulders, could not of course say this.)

Thus Fatu Auntie, who sat back smarting from her younger sister’s sharp retort.

When enter Ji Bai, leaning on my shoulder, having greeted Mrs. Pipa on the staircase. I had in one hand a small bundle tied up with a piece of cloth. Ji Bai threw one long look at Kulsum on the floor, then at Sona on the bed, and proceeded with her work. She opened the bundle and took out a small brass bowl, the kind used by barbers, and handed it to me: “Water. About half full.” I brought the water. Meanwhile Ji Bai had found some sewing needles. She sat beside Sona and felt his body. “How are you, my boy?” she muttered. She pressed his hot forehead, all his limbs, and finally his stomach, in a kneading motion, with one hand. Then she took a needle from the other hand, and in one sweeping but slow motion moved it along one arm, from the shoulder down, whispering something, and dropped it into the bowl. This she repeated with the other arm and the legs. Finally she ran a needle from his forehead down to the back of his head. Every day she came to inspect the five needles lying under water in the brass bowl. Slowly the water turned yellow, and Sona’s fever came down.

Now you may say that it was only the rust from the needles that turned the water yellow, that what she did was all mumbo jumbo. But admit it—deep inside, you know that it
just might be possible, that it was her medicine that had worked. Would you take a chance—that all the people who swore by her medicine were a superstitious lot and misguided?

Ji Bai said that she had learnt her art of healing from her sister-in-law in her hometown, when she was still a girl. It was a woman’s art, handed down from woman to woman on the eve of Hindu Diwali … yet the prayers were all ayats from the Quran, she insisted: sort it out, you purists.

One afternoon, while Begum and the rest were downstairs in the shop, entertaining and being entertained by Alzira, sharing the meagre portions of roasted steaming white mhogo, Shamim and I went upstairs to conduct an experiment. “Let’s find out if you are a man yet.”

I lay on my belly on the lower half of a bunk bed, her bed, and standing on the floor beside me she goaded: “Rub, Kala, rub. Harder, and it will come out if you are a man—” I rubbed and I rubbed, a fly button came in the way, yet I rubbed—“It’s not coming, are you sure?” “Rub, Kala, rub—” “But it’s not coming, I tell you … it’s hurting, this stupid button—” “Maybe in a few months more …” And then release, sweet sticky discharge. “You’re a man, Kala!” And who should turn up then: “SALAAA!” Boadicea.

Kulsum knew better than to rail against nature. She pretended she did not know of the event. But that night she wrote to her brother Bahdur: “My boys are now getting to that age, and I think it advisable that you take your daughters in your care …”