Where the Air is Sweet (2 page)

2

T
WO MONTHS AFTER FIRST SETTING FOOT IN
Africa, Raju is living and working in Kampala, the one-time headquarters of Uganda’s colonial administration and a slow, six-hour bus ride northeast from Mbarara.

When the first Englishmen arrived in the area half a century earlier, they found impalas roaming on the slopes of hills. The king of Buganda, the
kabaka,
would come down from his palace on one of these hills and hunt them. One Englishman began to refer to the place, with its abundant greenery and temperate climate, as the “hill of the impala.” Soon, others joined him. Finally, even the Baganda adopted the name. In Luganda this is translated as
kasozi k’impala.
When the
kabaka
would go to hunt, his courtiers would say, “Kabaka has gone to
k’impala
to hunt.”

Hussein told Raju this eight days after he arrived in Mbarara.

“I have a shop in Kampala. You will run this shop, so that very quickly you will come to know Swahili and how to do business in East Africa.”

The shop, called a
duka,
is a stall cut out of a wide, two-storey building that houses two more
dukas
besides Raju’s, plus two Asian families in the flats upstairs.

Raju lives behind the
duka.
The windowless room has a
charpai
bed, on which rests a mattress stuffed with cotton, and a small wooden chest of drawers. The floors are concrete and uneven. A large crack runs vertically, from the ceiling to the floor, on the wall that faces Raju’s bed. The crack is the first thing he sees in the morning when he wakes and the last thing he sees at night, before he puts out the kerosene lamp and drifts off to sleep. Outside the door are a toilet and a small walled-off area where Raju bathes. Above the
duka
lives a Hindu Gujarati family. Raju pays a small fee to the family, handing the cash each month to a wiry old lady with no teeth and hair dyed orange with henna. In return, she provides all of Raju’s meals and takes his dirty clothes and returns them two days later, washed and folded.

From Monday to Saturday, Raju works in the
duka.
For more than ten hours a day he sits on a stool enclosed in a four-by-six-foot-space, gunny sacks full of flour, tea, coffee and sugar pressing against his long legs. Rows of neatly lined-up biscuits, soap and canisters of oil are positioned so close to his head, if he leans back, he will bump into them.

On Fridays after work he walks to
jamat khana
for evening prayers. There, he sits on a
mkeka
mat spread on the floor, his legs crossed and cramped, so close to other men he can feel their breath.

He begins to feel like a bird in a cage. A large bird in a small cage.

On Sundays, the
duka
is closed and Raju is set free. He walks all day. He passes by shuttered shops and children sitting
cross-legged in the red dirt. He walks by the high walls of Fort Lugard. He walks farther, up Nakasero Hill, past the Europeans-only Kampala Club, stopping to admire the English policeman directing traffic in his smart white uniform and watching Englishwomen, small pink lips and ivory chins peeking out beneath broad hats, emerge from black motor cars.

But he prefers to leave the city. He walks beyond it, moving up and down hills until he reaches a wide road leading west, deeper into Africa. There he continues to walk on the side of the road as bicycles, cars and carts, drawn by men or animals, pass him, lifting the red dust from the earth and transferring it onto him.

The rest of the week, Raju’s days are ordered and predictable. He opens the
duka
at 8:00 a.m. He is not tardy like the shopkeepers next to him, who begin their days slowly, some days late, some days very late. At precisely 6:30 p.m. Raju closes the
duka,
checking to ensure that the money in his till matches the reduction in inventory. He carefully enters the sales in a small lined notebook he keeps under his bed, with the money from the shop, when he retires to his room.

Three times a day, the old lady who lives upstairs brings tiffins containing freshly cooked, steaming food to the
duka,
refusing any help from Raju as she carefully manoeuvres the steps, one hand gripping the iron railing, the other holding the stack of stainless-steel tiffins.

She has green tattoos on the backs of her hands and on her forearms, like Raju’s mother has. On his mother’s taut, tanned skin, the tattoos are beautiful, intricate depictions of flowers and trees. On the elderly woman’s wrinkled skin they look like enlarged, broken veins.

“Kha, kha,”
she says, her gnarled fingers raised towards him, gesturing him to eat, her tiny black eyes staring at him as he unstacks the tiffins and begins peering inside. Her back is severely curved and her bones bulge under her skin, but she seems to Raju powerful rather than fragile.

She reminds him of a crow.

The food she cooks is tasty and Raju looks forward to his meals, but the amount of red chili she uses leaves his tongue scalded. Even her
moong dal
makes his nose run and his eyes water. For years afterwards, whenever Raju will think of Kampala, he will reflexively rub his tongue against the roof of his mouth and feel it go numb.

The Crow sits on the floor beside Raju’s stool, folding her small body until she fits into little more than a square foot of space, and watches him as he begins to eat. When she is satisfied that he is eating with relish and therefore approves of the meal, she unfolds herself, stands up and returns to her flat, her
champals
slapping the concrete stairs as she ascends.

A small boy, seven or eight years old, comes down about thirty minutes later to fetch the empty tiffins. The first time the boy comes, Raju smiles and says hello. The boy’s eyes open wide in terror. Then he looks down at his bare, dirty feet and his entire body begins to shake. Raju pats his back in an attempt to comfort him. But the boy turns around and runs.

“Is he your grandson?” Raju asks the Crow later.

She looks at him, raising her chin so high up in the air he can see the grey hairs inside her nose. Then she lowers her chin, fixes her black eyes on him and spits out the words as though they are poison. “He is the son of my son. His mother was a
karki
who died giving birth to him.”

Raju is quiet. He looks closely at the Crow’s eyes and the shape of her nose. “He looks like you.”

She stares at him as if he has slapped her. “He is an abomination,” she says, gathering a handful of white cotton saree in her hand and standing up. “This is why he was born unable to speak or hear.” She turns to leave.

As she reaches the bottom of the stairs leading up to her flat, Raju calls after her. “The boy’s name? Ma! What is he called?”

She turns back and looks at Raju with an expression he has not yet seen on her face. It might be sadness, but because of the distance between them, he is not sure. Then she lets out a sigh and says, almost in resignation, “Prem.”

Two other children live in the flat with the Crow, both of them boys and both of them older than Prem. Raju sees them leave for school in the mornings before he opens the
duka
and return in the afternoons. They wear clean and pressed khaki school uniforms but their hair, though oiled, is often disheveled. The younger boy is barefoot but the older one wears shoes. They are much too large, the heels dragging on the ground when he walks, the shoes sometimes slipping off when he runs. On Saturdays and in the late afternoons, Raju sees the boys playing on the street in front of his
duka,
tossing pebbles back and forth or rolling old bicycle tires around. They say hello to Raju each time they pass his
duka.
But they do not stop to speak, nor does their father, who nods at Raju when he returns from work, a leather case tucked under his arm. Raju never sees the mother of the children. When he asks the Crow about her, she shakes her head and closes her eyes. Raju does not ask her again.

Prem’s hair is matted and his face continually has a coat of grime on it. Raju sees that he sometimes has bruises on his
cheeks and around his eyes. He is darker-skinned than the other boys, darker even than the Crow, who is herself not fair. But his skin is sallow and the whites of his eyes have a yellowish tinge to them. Raju does not see him go to school or play outside. The only time he sees him is when he comes to fetch the tiffins. Every day he wears the same dirty khaki shorts and singlet. The once-white singlet has become a dull yellow and has dark brown stains along the hem. A large tear runs through it, from just below the child’s neck to the middle of his belly, exposing his brown, hollow chest.

When Raju is finished with the tiffins, he stacks them and hands them to Prem. Then without a word he turns away. It seems to be the least painful way for the child to deal with the encounter.

But one evening, after he hands the boy the tiffins, Raju grabs hold of his free hand, pries open his small fist and places a sticky red sweet on his palm. He did not plan to do this. In the moment, he felt an impulse he could not resist. The boy stares at it for almost a minute, peering closely, as if he is examining an insect. Then he clenches his fist again, sweet inside, and runs off, the tiffins rattling against his leg.

Every Friday evening, for months, Raju pries open Prem’s hand and places a sweet inside it. He cannot explain why he is forcing a sweet onto a child. He knows only that if he did not do it, he could not bear to be in the boy’s presence.

It is Friday and Raju is sitting on his stool, leaning against the counter of his
duka.
Mosquitoes buzz around his ears, sweat glues his shirt to his back and he is rubbing the palm of his
hand into his forehead until he feels a burning sensation on his skin. The money he has collected in his till does not add up to the sales he has recorded in his ledger and he cannot figure out why. As he sits there, growing increasingly angry with himself for his inability to sort out the discrepancy, he hears the sound of tiffins rattling beside him. He looks over to see Prem, empty tiffins in his left hand, his right hand clenched in a fist at his side. The boy has returned with the empty tiffins. Or he never left.

“What?” Raju snaps. The boy is grimy, intrusive. Prem shifts his weight from one foot to the other. Raju turns back to his books. Some minutes pass. The boy does not leave. “Go away!” Raju says through his teeth. Prem does not move. Raju barely defeats an urge to strike him. He runs his hands through his hair and looks at Prem again. He is standing exactly as he was earlier, as though Raju has not ordered him to leave, as though Raju is not enraged at his presence. When Raju turns back to his book, his eye catches the jar of sweets at the far end of the counter. He forgot to give him a sweet. He turns back to Prem and begins to laugh. He laughs so loudly and heartily that Prem steps backwards, away from him. But, still, he does not leave.

Raju stops laughing, leans forward and raises his palm towards him, as if to ask
What?
Prem blinks quickly. Raju waits. Slowly, Prem raises his right hand towards Raju. He unclenches his fingers as though it aches to do so, as though the bones are not designed to stretch in this manner. Raju reaches into the jar and lifts out a sweet. He holds it up in front of Prem. “This?” he asks. Prem nods. Raju places the red sweet on the boy’s open hand.

Prem looks at the sweet and then at Raju and, for the first time since Raju has met him, he smiles. His face cracks at the effort. The skin around his eyes and at the sides of his mouth breaks into deep wrinkles, like an old man’s. Crooked lines open up in the dirt on his cheeks so that his skin looks like the earth does when the rains refuse to come. But his small black eyes become bright and his teeth, the two front ones too large for his mouth, shine. As he watches him, Raju feels the way he did the morning after his father died. When the light of the sun, untouched by the calamity that had just struck, shattered the darkness of the suddenly empty house and assured Raju that he could breathe again.

Prem begins to linger near Raju. After he collects the empty tiffins, he sits on the curb in front of Raju’s
duka,
tracing in the dirt on the road with his forefinger. One afternoon, Raju calls him over and holds a piece of muslin in front of him. Then he turns to the back of the
duka,
which is lined with shelves, and lifts cakes of soap, canisters of oil and boxes of matches from one of the shelves, places them on the counter and wipes the wood shelving with the muslin. He hands the muslin to Prem. Immediately the boy steps into the
duka
and wipes the shelf. Raju runs his finger across the shelf, shows it, clean, to Prem and nods. Without being asked, Prem returns each item to the shelf, exactly where it was before Raju removed it.

Every afternoon, when he brings the lunch tiffins, Prem stands and waits until Raju pulls out the muslin and hands it to him. Then, he gets to work.

A week later, as Raju is counting money, Prem appears in
front of the shop with a
fuggio,
a broom made out of long, dried blades of grass, in his hand. He smiles at Raju and then begins sweeping the ground in front of the
duka.
Thereafter, each time he comes downstairs, Prem sweeps. Three times a day. Even if the area is completely clean. The only time he doesn’t is if Raju has a customer standing in front of him. He waits quietly until the customer has left to begin sweeping.

One afternoon while Prem is sweeping, one of Raju’s suppliers arrives. Prem stands back and watches as Raju checks the order and negotiates payment. Once the supplier leaves, Prem helps Raju stock the
duka.

Raju decides to pay him for the work that he is doing, a ten-cent coin each Saturday afternoon. The first time Raju gives the boy a coin, Prem passes it from one hand to the other, back and forth, and then he presses it against his cheek and holds it there with his palm, a smile on his face. Bemused, Raju smiles back.