Where the Air is Sweet (33 page)

They are quiet.

“How did such a wonder come to be?” she asks.

“The earth broke,” Raju says, looking towards the Rwenzori Mountains, towards Uganda.

“You’re right. It did. But the earth survived. And now it has a beautiful crack. It has a magnificent crack.”

36

R
AJU IS STANDING OUTSIDE PARKLANDS
JAMAT
khana.
He is waiting for Mumtaz and the children to emerge. He is smoking a cigarette and looking towards the lights of the building, towards the sounds of children laughing. In the darkness he hears Mumdu’s voice.

“
Ya Ali madad,
Bapa.”

Raju turns to the voice and sees him. He is the same, for the most part. His hair has thinned on the top; it has begun to turn grey. His stomach is fuller, his jowls more plump. But it is Mumdu, his son.

For years after Mumdu left, Raju imagined this moment. He imagined that he would be enraged to see his lost son, or pleased. Now that the moment is here, Raju’s emotions are muted. His mind is quiet.

“You are living in Nairobi?” Raju asks.

Mumdu shakes his head. “I live in Dar es Salaam.”

Raju clears his throat. “But you are here?”

“I have come to see you.”

Raju inhales from his cigarette.

“It was impossible—” Mumdu stops. “It was very difficult to come to Mbarara when Ma was ill. I wanted to come. I tried to come.”

“Your mother was ill for a long time.”

“In the end, the last days, Baku sent me word.”

Raju drops his cigarette to the ground and steps on it. A flood of thoughts and images enters his mind, and with it pain like fire in his chest. So many years Mumdu stayed away. He didn’t write. He didn’t call. He let his mother grieve him. Raju lets the thoughts pass through his mind. He feels the fire move through his chest and up his throat. He clears his throat again; it is burning. He looks at Mumdu and feels his heart pound powerfully. The sensation is not painful, but it is not entirely pleasant.

“Come,” he says. “Eat with us.”

“The girl looks like Jaafar,” Mumdu says, when they are sitting at the dining table, the meal finished. The children are in their bedroom, not yet asleep. Raju can hear their footfalls through the ceiling. “Is she as naughty?”

Mumtaz laughs. “You don’t have children, Mumdubhai?”

Mumdu shakes his head. “My wife has not been well for many years. She is very ill now.”

“Who is looking after Dilshad when you are here?” Raju asks.

“We have a housegirl.”

“Many Asians left Dar es Salaam in the past few years,” Raju says, looking at Mumtaz.

Mumdu nods. “All of Africa is fed up with Asians, it appears.”

“Why didn’t you leave?” Raju asks. “Baku is making a good life in Canada.”

Mumdu shrugs, smiles weakly. “I am content.” He looks at Raju and then quickly lowers his eyes. “But, maybe, one day.”

“Will you stay with us for a while?” Mumtaz asks. “Jaafar will be here on Friday. He will want to see you.”

“I’m staying with my
salla
in Hurlingham. My flight home is tomorrow. I can’t leave Dilshad for long. She doesn’t have much time left in this life. Please give Jaafar my best. I’ll see him another time.” He smiles at Mumtaz. “I see he’s doing well. I knew Jaafar would do well.”

“You have Ma’s smile,” Mumtaz says, her face flushing. She begins to cry. Quietly. Raju can see her eyes welling; he can see her pressing her lips together. She leaves the room. He hears her blow her nose.

Mumdu looks down at his hands, resting on the table. “It would be nice to go to Mbarara and see Ma’s grave. And Bahdur’s.”

“They are not there,” Raju says loudly. “They are gone.”

He sees Mumdu’s shoulders fall, slightly, almost imperceptibly.

“But we are here.” He pats Mumdu’s back. It is the first time he has touched his son in more than twenty-five years. He holds his hand on him. Mumdu looks at him. “We are here.”

It is late Sunday night. Mumtaz is watching Jaafar drink whiskey. He is leaving for Entebbe in the morning and he asked her to stay awake and talk with him, sit with him. She wanted to refuse. But he is drunk and she was afraid if she said no,
he would speak loudly, shout, and the noise would wake the children.

“The Jiwanis never paid me the money they stole. They robbed those Asians who thought they were leaving their money in safe hands. Those Asians who trusted me. Amir is convinced it was the Jiwanis who sent the army after me. And I never got another cent from Mubinga.” He looks at her. “I can’t go to Mbarara and get my money without risking ending up dead in the barracks.” He shakes his head. “I can’t go to my hometown to get a few thousand dollars for all that my father built because a fellow Asian, a fellow Ismaili, has sent Idi Amin’s lunatic soldiers after me.” He rests his head on the back of the sofa. He is slouching so much he looks as though he will slide off it.

“You’re doing all this for Bapa?” Mumtaz asks. She makes no attempt to hide the disgust in her voice.

“Bapa spent so much time putting down the foundation of a house. I’ve never built a house. But I always thought he spent too long on the foundation.”

She stands up. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” She is going to bed. He is no longer coherent.

“At first, I stayed to salvage something of what Bapa had built and what I had helped build up. And now I don’t know what I’m doing.”

She looks at him. His eyes are on his glass. He is shaking it so that the gold liquid inside it moves in waves, like an angry sea.

“I can’t build anything,” he says. “What’s the point when the foundation is sand?”

She begins walking to the stairs. The floor feels warm under the soles of her cold feet.

“Mumtaz,” he says, in almost a whisper. She stops but she does not turn to face him. “How do I stop doing what I know how to do? How do I stop being what I am?”

“I don’t know.” She says the words before any thoughts enter her mind. She closes her mind. She has closed her mind. She walks up the stairs quickly. The rage she has begun to feel towards her husband ebbs and flows, descending on her as suddenly as a thunderstorm on a humid afternoon and disappearing just as quickly.

She climbs immediately into bed. But she is still awake an hour later when he comes into the bedroom and gets into bed beside her. Only when she hears him lightly snoring does she let herself fall asleep.

37

T
HE SKY THIS MORNING IS DARK GREY, NOT A RAY
of sunlight breaking through. When Mumtaz walked out the front door with the children earlier, Karim groaned. Shama smiled.

“Rain clouds look like a big blanket,” Shama told Mumtaz once. “If I am under a big blanket, I can hide. Then bad things can’t hurt me.”

Mumtaz touched the back of Shama’s neck gently. “If you are hiding, you won’t see the good things.”

Shama smiled. “Maybe I can peek sometimes,” she said. Mumtaz is standing now, leaning against the gate, watching her children. They will be late for school if she does not send them off soon. But she does not want to stop looking at them. Karim is squatting like a frog. Concentrating. A warm breeze blows some stray hairs from Shama’s forehead as she sits cross-legged beside him. There is a thickness in the air and on the ground, as though everything in nature, the sky and the trees and the leaves and the flowers, is swollen and ready to burst. Mumtaz can hear the din of traffic. The smell of fumes tickles
the hair in her nostrils. She inhales. The sharp smell of petrol washes through her head and makes her smile. It is a familiar, comforting smell. The smell of Jaafar after work. Karim’s bony thumb and forefinger release a stone. It bounces on the ground next to a lizard. It darts so quickly to the side, Mumtaz doesn’t know how it did it. Did it jump off all its limbs at once? Or did one, then two, then three, then four leave the ground? Karim laughs. He has a high-pitched squeal of a laugh. Shama laughs with him. Her voice is deeper, heavier, coming from farther back in her throat. All of a sudden, the lizard darts towards Shama. She jumps. So quickly Mumtaz doesn’t know which body part left the ground first. She is on her feet. Laughter gone. She is panting. Her hands are out in front of her, slightly opened, ready to fight. The lizard darts again, away from her. Mumtaz smiles. She hears Karim squeal, rolling on the earth, his white shirt picking up the red dust, his large knobby knees in the air as he rocks from side to side on his back. Laughing.

And then the rain comes down.

All morning the thunder is relentless and the rain punishing. Mumtaz is stepping out of the shower when she hears the telephone ringing in the sitting room. She runs down the stairs, a towel wrapped around her, and picks it up. Jaafar is talking quickly. The line is not clear. She hears a clap of thunder. She asks him to repeat himself. When he is finished, her mind processes his words and then slowly creates a series of images, each of which sucks more and more air from her lungs, until she is on the floor, lying on her side, her hand clinging to the receiver so tightly her arm is shaking.

Jaafar cleared customs at Embakasi Airport, he was walking to the car in the pouring rain, a soaked newspaper over his head. He did not reach the car. He was arrested.

Mumtaz drives as though someone else has inhabited her body. She does not know who is making the decision to shift gears, to press down on the brake, to turn the steering wheel. Somehow, she arrives at the police station in the suburb of Embakasi, near the airport.

She looks at Jaafar through iron bars. He is talking rapidly.

“The police have my leather case. It contains a cache of open airline tickets, my passport, our documents, marriage certificate, the children’s birth certificates, the deeds to our seized properties.”

Mumtaz breathes slowly to counter the force of Jaafar’s energy, which is pulling her in, stealing her strength. She reaches forward and holds the bars to balance herself. He wraps his hands tightly around hers, so tightly the pain in her fingers is unbearable.

“Please, Jaafar,” she says. “Let go.”

From memory he recites a telephone number. The man who will answer the phone can arrange to deliver cash to their house, Jaafar explains. Mumtaz is to bring the money to the police station in the morning so that Jaafar can be released. She has no paper. She has no pen. She reaches into her purse and pulls out her lipstick. She lifts the sleeve of her blouse up to her elbow and writes the telephone number on the inside of her arm with the lipstick. Jaafar smiles.

Mumtaz knocks on Raju’s bedroom door. He had been drawing the curtains when he heard her. He stops, leaving the moon to throw its light into the room. She comes in and sits down on his bed. Her skin is pulled tight and ghostly pale. Something has happened.

Earlier, she told Raju about Jaafar’s arrest. He distracted the children while she spoke with a slight, short, bald Asian man who handed her an envelope of cash. Now, the children are asleep. The man is gone.

“What is it?” he asks.

“A detective from the Bank of Kenya came while you were in the bath. He took my passport.”

Raju sits down heavily on the bed next to her.

“We are trapped. I am trapped.”

“You will be fine. Everything will be fine.”

“How can it be?” Her voice is thick.

“Wait until tomorrow. Jaafar will know what to do. You must trust him.”

“You can say that to me,” she says. “Now?”

“What choice do you have?
Beta,
Jaafar will know how to get out of Kenya.”

“And then I will drag my children to yet another land where they will be outsiders.” She covers her face with her hands. “I’m sorry, Bapa. I am so tired.” She drops her hands and stares straight ahead, out the window. “We belong nowhere.”

“Nowhere? Then why did God put us on this earth?”

She drops her hands and looks at him, her eyes sunken into her face, her lips bloodless, the moon serving only to reinforce the paleness of her skin.

The next morning, Mumtaz returns to the police station with the envelope of money. She waits while Jaafar gives his statement. Within two hours he is released on two sureties of 50,000 shillings each.

They leave the police station and drive into downtown Nairobi, where they meet with an Asian businessman whose brother works for the Bank of Kenya.

“My brother has spoken to a colleague at the investigative branch of the bank. The colleague says you broke no law by possessing open airline tickets. You have not even violated foreign exchange restrictions. But you will be deported to your country of citizenship, Uganda. There, you will be at the mercy of Idi Amin’s legal system.”

Mumtaz feels suddenly gripped by nausea.

“His advice is for you to get out of Kenya and to stay out of Uganda.”

Mumtaz looks at Jaafar. His brow is knitted, as though he is contemplating something. As though there is something to contemplate.

“We’ll never be able to come back,” Jaafar says.

“Come back?” she asks. “Isn’t it obvious to you yet? We are finished with Africa.”

“You mean Africa is finished with us,” he says slowly. He turns to face the businessman. “We’ll need passports.” He is slumping in his chair. “Kenyan passports.”

“I’ll make the arrangements. You’ll have them in hand this afternoon.”

“We will have to drive out of Kenya,” Jaafar tells Mumtaz on the way home. “The children and Bapa will fly. But not right away.”

“I thought they would be with us.”

“Mumtaz, we have to go on the run. How can we take them? Bapa will fly with them directly to Canada. And then we’ll join them.”

She presses her hand over her mouth and looks out her window.

“As soon as the police realize I’ve jumped bail, they will look for us at the airport,” Jaafar says. “So Bapa and the children can’t travel immediately. They will need to stay somewhere for a week or two, maybe longer. But not with your relatives. The police will look there first.”

“When?” Mumtaz whispers. “What will we tell the children?”

Jaafar reaches over and puts his hand on her knee. “We’ll need to move quickly. A day or two. We’ll come up with something to tell them.”