Uhuru Street (12 page)

‘Are you hungry?’ he asked.

‘No. I will just have tea … perhaps a small cake …’

‘Righto! Two teas, one cake and one sikisti!’ he called out.

She raised an eyebrow when the sikisti arrived. It was an egg omelette between two inch-thick slices of bread.

‘It’s called sikisti because of its price. Sixty cents!’

She laughed.

‘That’s the truth, believe me!’

Akoto was a professor of sociology, on loan from the Government of Ghana.

‘What is your major?’ he asked her after some time. ‘What subject are you taking?’

‘Literature.’

‘Literature?’

‘Yes.’
Now he thinks we are all shopkeepers.

‘Tell me: any African writers?’

‘Yes. Soyinka … Achebe …’

‘Things fall apart …’

‘The centre cannot hold.’

He laughed. ‘Ngũgĩ? Palangyo? Omari?’

She shook her head. She hadn’t heard of them.

‘Local writers. Budding. You should read Omari. Nuru Omari. She writes about the Coast – your territory.
Wait for Me
: that’s her first book. I could lend it to you if you want.’

‘It’s okay … I’ll borrow it from the library.’

He looked astonished. ‘But it will take time before the library acquires it!’

‘I’ll wait … I don’t have much time right now.’

‘All right.’ He was miffed.

‘Now that I have made up for my rudeness,’ he said at last, seeing her a little restless, ‘I hope – having apologised and so on – perhaps we can go.’

I am studying literature and I have no time to read the most recent books.
She felt guilty.

When she saw him again it was after several days and he did not appear to notice her. He’s got my message, she thought. I am not interested. Why did I go to the teashop with him, then? … Because he’s so different. What confidence, what grace … so civilised, such a gentleman! That’s it! she thought. He said we Asians are so westernised … aping the Europeans … mesmerised … what about him? All that external polish: he was a proper English gentleman himself! She would tell him so!

‘Dear Professor Akoto,’ she wrote, ‘I wanted to tell you something. I thought I should tell it to you before I forget it completely. You called us Asians colonised. We are mesmerised with the West, you said. Well, have you observed yourself carefully lately? All those European mannerisms, language, clothes – suits even in hot weather: you are so much the English gentleman yourself! Yours sincerely, Yasmin Rajan. P.S. Could I borrow Omari’s
Wait for Me
from you after all? Thanx.’ She slipped the note under his office door.

He repeated his previous performance at lunchtime the next day, edging out her friends from the table.

‘Your point is well taken,’ he said. ‘Touché and so on. But I thought we had forgiven all that. Still, I don’t quite agree with you. And the reason is this: I know my situation. I struggle. In any case … Let’s not argue. Let me show you my library. You can borrow any book you like.’

‘You have your own library?’ she murmured.

When she saw it she was dazzled. Three walls were covered with books. She had never before seen so many books belonging to one person – in a sitting room, part of the furniture as it were.

‘You’ve read all these books?’ she asked.

‘Well … I wouldn’t …’

‘I envy you. You must be so knowledgeable.’

‘Let’s not get carried away now.’

‘Do you also write?’

‘Yes. But nothing out yet.’

He had a theory about African literature. ‘It is at present digging up the roots,’ he said. And that’s what he was trying to do. Dig. ‘So you can understand my obsession with authenticity. Even my name is a burden, an imposition.’

At The Matumbi, where they went that evening, she had her first sikisti. She talked about her background.

‘My father was a pawnbroker,’ she said, ‘but pawnshops are no longer allowed, so now he has a tailoring shop. Hardly a westernised background …’

He smiled. ‘Aren’t you ever going to forgive me?’

‘Tell me, do you think pawnshops are exploitative?’ she asked him.

‘Well, they tempt the poor and they do charge awfully high interest.’

‘Yes, but where else can the poor get loans? Would the banks give them? And as for the high interest – do you know the kind of things they bring to pawn off? Old watches, broken bicycles, clothes sometimes. We have three unclaimed antique gramophones at home that we can’t sell.’

‘Is that right? Can I look at them? I might buy one. I like old things that are out of fashion.’

‘Sure you can.’

He played badminton with the Asian girls one day, bringing along a shy young man from Norway. It was at a time (though they did not tell him) when they usually went to the mosque. After the game there was a heated discussion about China. And they arranged to play the next time a little later in the evening.

One afternoon, as agreed previously, Yasmin took him to her father’s shop to show him the antique gramophones. They went in his car and he dropped her off outside the shop and went to park.

When he entered the shop her father met him.

‘Come in, Bwana. What can I get for you?’

He was a short thin man with green eyes, wearing a long white shirt over his striped pyjamas.

‘I came with Yasmin,’ Akoto explained in his broken Swahili.

‘Yes? You want to buy something?’

‘I came for a gramophone –’

‘Ah, yes! The professor! Sit, sit.’

Akoto sat on the bench uncomfortably and waited, looking around inside the shop. The shelves lining the walls were filled with suiting, the glass showcases displayed shirts. Yasmin’s father went about his work. The girl soon arrived from the back door carrying an old gramophone. Behind her was a servant carrying two, one on top of the other, and behind the servant followed a tall thin woman: Yasmin’s mother. While her father showed Akoto the gramophone, Yasmin and her mother went back inside.

‘How can you bring him here like this?’ said her mother angrily. ‘What will the neighbours think? And the servants? It’s shameful!’

‘But Mummy, he is a professor!’

‘I don’t care if he’s a professor’s father!’

When they went back to the store the purchase was completed, Akoto and her father were chatting amiably about politics. Akoto was grinning, carrying a gramophone in his arms. He looked enquiringly at her.

Outside the store a few boys and girls from the neighbourhood walked by, throwing quick curious glances inside at the guest.

‘Yasmin will stay with us tonight,’ said her mother a little too loudly from the back doorway where she stood. ‘She’ll come back tomorrow. But she won’t miss her classes – I hope that is alright.’

‘Don’t worry, Mama. It’s perfectly alright.’

It was more than a week before they met again, briefly, in a corridor.

‘Where do you eat lunch these days? You’re the perfect salesman,’ he said in good humour. ‘You sell me an old gramophone
and disappear. You afraid I’ll return it?’ She gave some excuse.

Later she returned the books she had borrowed from him and declined an invitation to The Matumbi.

The sight of Akoto in her shop that day had driven her mother into a fit. By the time he had left the shop hugging the gramophone she was raging with fury. ‘There are no friendships with men – not with men we don’t know …’ She said to Yasmin.

‘The world is not ready for it,’ her father said quietly.

‘You stay out of it!’ screamed his wife. ‘This is between us two.’

He remained quiet but stayed within hearing distance, measuring out cloth for his tailors. If Yasmin expected any understanding, or even a reasoned discussion with an adult, experienced voice, it was from her father. But ever since she could remember, she had been her mother’s business. And her mother, she believed, hated her for this, for being a girl. Yasmin was not the only child, there were three brothers. But ever since she could remember her mother was always admonishing, chiding, warning her – as if believing her capable of the worst. Now it seemed that all the horrors she had imagined possible from her daughter – against her, against the name and dignity of the family – were on the verge of coming true.

‘What do you know of him?’ She had been uncontrollable, obsessive, had gone on and on until she was hoarse and breathless. ‘With an Asian man, even if he’s evil, you know what to expect. But with
him
?’

At the end of the day the girl felt as if her bones had been picked dry.

Yasmin did not go to the end-of-year dance on campus. From her friends she heard of the one notable event that took place there. Professor Akoto, after sitting at a table all alone for some time and apparently after a little too much to drink, had got into a
brawl with Mr Sharp of the Boys’ School, calling him a CIA agent. Then he’d staggered out.

India was not just the past, or the community, or even the jealous Indian communities of Dar. India was a continent, a civilisation, a political entity in the world. Only recently it had emerged from a long struggle for independence.

During the holidays Yasmin discovered her world. She read avidly about India, quizzed her father about it. India came as a revelation. Here in Africa she was an Asian, an Indian. Yet she had been a stranger to even the most recent Indian history. All she had received from her people about India were ancient customs, unchanged for generations, remotely related to the world around her. At first her acknowledgement of her origins seemed to her a reaction against Akoto, the African; yet it seemed to be harking back to the authenticity he had been talking about. In a strange and diabolical way it seemed to be bringing her closer to the man, as if what she was discovering was at his bidding, as if she had to go and discuss her findings with him, answer his challenges.

The world seemed a smaller place when she went back to the University. Smaller but exciting; teeming with people struggling, fighting, loving: surviving. And she was one of those people. People, bound by their own histories and traditions, seemed to her like puppets tied to strings: but then a new mutant broke loose, an event occurred, and lives changed, the world changed. She was, she decided, a new mutant.

Yasmin’s father collapsed with a heart attack under the weight of two bolts of suiting in his shop, one month after the University reopened. A servant was dispatched to fetch a doctor, who arrived an hour and a half later. By that time the former pawnbroker had died.

Daniel Akoto attended the funeral. He sat among the men, initially on the ground, trying to fold his legs, sweating profusely,
pressed from all sides. A black face in a sea of patient brown Asian faces. He was not wearing a suit, just a very clean white shirt, but this time some of the other men were in jackets. A servant saw the discomfited man and placed a chair for him against the wall adjacent to the door. Now Akoto could see clearly across the room. The body was lying on a low table behind which two men sat on the floor administering the last rites to the dead. The widow sat beside the dead man, sobbing, comforted by her daughter, occasionally breaking into a wail and joined by other women. Mrs Rajan looked away from Akoto when their eyes first met. She moaned and started weeping. She saw him again through a film of tears, lost control and gave a loud wail.

‘You!’ she screamed, ‘what are you doing here? What kind of man are you, who comes to take away my daughter even in my grief … Who asked you to come? Go away!’ She wept.

Akoto, understanding only partly her speech but fully the intent, tried to smile apologetically at the men and women now turning to stare at him.

‘Go!’ said the distraught woman pointing a finger at the door beside him.

No one else said a word. Akoto stood up, gave a respectful bow towards the dead man and left.

A week later Yasmin knocked on his door late in the evening and caught him in.

‘Come in,’ he said, putting away his pipe.

‘I’ve come to apologise about that day.’

‘It’s all right. A funeral is not exactly where people are at their best … perhaps they are more honest though.’ He eyed her.

‘You could have us arrested! You could …’