Where the Air is Sweet (34 page)

When they reach home, Jaafar instructs Mumtaz to call her uncle for help. He goes back out to fetch Raju from the Aga Khan Sports Club.

Within three hours Mumtaz’s uncle finds a home where Karim and Shama can stay, with a friend of his son-in-law’s. Raju will stay in a small flat with an elderly couple.

“Okay,” says Jaafar, clapping his hands. “We’re okay.”

The children burst through the front door like an unexpected storm, noisy, arguing. As always. Karim’s shirt is untucked and Shama’s braids have come loose. As always.

“Daddy!” Shama shouts, racing into his arms. “You’re home.”

The telephone rings while they are eating dinner. Jaafar gets up to answer it. Mumtaz watches him. He is nodding, saying yes repeatedly, writing something down. He hangs up and gestures for her to follow him into the kitchen.

“I’ve found a car salesman who has agreed, for a fee, to drive us over the border to Moshi in a four-wheel drive. He knows a route, through the bush, that skirts customs.”

Mumtaz nods.

“But we have to leave tonight.”

She doesn’t move.

“Mumtaz, you need to go upstairs and pack. I’ll phone these people and tell them we are dropping the children earlier than planned. Mumtaz, please. Be strong.”

She empties most of the contents of the children’s drawers into the biggest suitcase they own. She does not know what she has packed. She sits on the floor crying silently as she arranges the clothes, swallowing her sobs, wiping her eyes and her nose on Shama’s bedsheet. When she is finished, she packs a smaller suitcase with Raju’s clothes. She does not have time to pack much for herself and Jaafar. In any case, they need to travel light.

Things become blurry. As though a veil has been lowered in front of Mumtaz’s eyes. Karim and Shama are sitting on the sofa. Mumtaz and Jaafar are sitting side by side on the coffee table, facing them. Jaafar has just told the children that he and Mumtaz are leaving for Canada that very night to find a new house. Karim and Shama will fly on an airplane with Raju soon, very soon, and meet them there. But until then they will stay with some nice people. Just for a few days.

“How exciting, isn’t it?” Mumtaz says, smiling, her tongue
thick, her hands trembling. “We will go back to Canada, all of us, but this time we will stay there. We won’t move again. We will never move again.”

Shama does not ask why. Karim does not protest. Their heads are tilted upwards to face their parents. Their backs are ramrod straight. Karim, like Shama, is sitting on the edge of the sofa, his hands clasping the seat cushion so tightly Mumtaz can see that his knuckles have turned white.

Mumtaz feels as though a whirlwind is inside her, hot, long, narrow and fierce, like a fire sucked up a vacuum, running up and down her middle, from her stomach into her throat and back down again. She holds her mouth firmly shut. If she opens it even a fraction, she will howl. And she will never stop. And the fire will burn everything, everyone around her.

The uncleared dinner plates, the half-finished glasses of water and
chaas,
the partially eaten beef
saak,
the platter of rice and three chapatis abandoned on the dining table are the last things Mumtaz sees when she leaves her home.

Mumtaz kisses Karim and Shama repeatedly on their cheeks, their lips, their foreheads, their necks before leaving them at the strangers’ house. She knows she has no choice; she knows this is the safest way to get her family out of Africa.

But, later, as she pictures her children’s faces as she walked away from them, she tightens her fists and presses her fingernails into her palms until they bleed.

The next morning, from a hotel in Moshi, Mumtaz telephones to check on the children. The people keeping them are panicking. They are afraid of the police. They don’t want trouble. The children must go, immediately. Nothing Mumtaz says, nothing Jaafar says sways them. Jaafar calls Raju.

The next day, Raju arranges to have the children picked up and taken to a flat where he once played cards. A widow with a young daughter has agreed to take them in.

Mumtaz cannot talk to her children. The widow does not have a telephone.

Mumtaz closes her eyes and sees Karim. He is wrapping himself in the curtains in their sitting room in Parklands. They are sheer curtains. Each of the three panels is a different colour. Blue. Red. Yellow. Mumtaz bought them to make the room bright.

“Green happens when you mix blue and yellow,” Karim tells Mumtaz.

“Acha?”

“Blue on red makes purple. Red on yellow makes orange.”

He wraps himself inside the curtains, tighter and tighter, until she can’t see him anymore. Until he is gone.

She opens her eyes. She is in a restaurant in the hotel. She can’t eat the food in front of her. She can’t understand the words coming out of Jaafar’s mouth.

That night, lying in bed, Jaafar sleeping beside her, Mumtaz feels a lump in her throat. It is so large the weight of it presses down onto her chest. She closes her eyes, hoping sleep will take away the feeling. She doesn’t sleep. But she goes somewhere else.

Masaka-Mbarara Road.

Jaafar is driving. A ray of afternoon sun slices across his face. It is unusually quiet in the car. Mumtaz turns to the back seat. Karim is looking at a picture book. Shama is staring out
the window. Mumtaz looks out her own window. The soil at the side of the road is dark, deep red. They are driving fast. But everything outside the window is still. It is as though she is looking at photographs. Small shacks with tin roofs dot the landscape. Plantain trees grow in front of the shacks, their large green leaves sloping, sad. Clothes hang drying on lines. Schoolchildren walk along the side of the road, slender brown-black necks reaching out above dirtied white shirts, book bags slung over shoulders, feet kicking up dust. Between the tarmac road and the dark soil, there are ditches. No one lives in the ditches, no one walks on them. They are spaces between. What doesn’t fit elsewhere ends up there.

Garbage. Weeds. Bones of dead animals.

And flowers.

Stark. Almost embarrassing in their misplaced beauty. They look like the ones in the garden at home. The ones that have to be cared for and protected, otherwise they will wither and die.

“But who cares for these flowers?” Shama asks. “How can they reach up to the sky, the sun, when no one is protecting them? How do they grow if they aren’t in someone’s garden where they’re supposed to be?”

Mumtaz looks over her shoulder, laughing. “They must be strong,” she says. She turns to look at the road in front of her and after a moment adds, her laughter finished, “They must be stubborn.”

Mumtaz keeps a photograph in her purse. Their front yard and verandah in Mbarara. And Shama, two years old, standing perfectly straight, unsmiling, hair pulled back from her face, arms stiffly at her sides, clad in a long-sleeved white shirt and long green trousers. Behind her, warm pink bougainvillea
climbs wildly up the verandah. And in front of the verandah, one perfectly formed pink rose sits atop a long thin stem, taller than Shama. Farther down, close to the ground, are more pink roses. Unlike the first, they are not in full bloom. They are separated from one another. Not bunched.

Mumtaz showed Jaafar this photograph earlier that evening, in the restaurant.

“Would you like to go back? Would you like to live in that house in Mbarara again?” he asked.

Mumtaz lowered her head and began crying, trembling, until Jaafar helped her up and led her to their room.

Jaafar spends a large chunk of their cash on a brown Datsun 1600 from an Ismaili dealer in Moshi. The plan is to drive across Tanzania and cross the border into Rwanda. In Kigali, they will meet Amir, who will drive from Mbarara with airplane tickets to Canada.

After two weeks in Moshi, they begin driving. The road to Arusha is tarmac but it is terrible. Jaafar curses each time he fails to swerve in time and hits a pothole. And Mumtaz’s lower back is aching from absorbing the shocks. It is 50 miles to Arusha, but it feels to her like 200.

In Arusha they stop for a night, eat, bathe and fill the tank with petrol. The next morning they set out for Shinyanga. En route they fill the tank, but when they reach the town, seven hours later, they are very low on fuel. They can find no petrol in Shinyanga. Mumtaz throws her head back in frustration.

“I have an idea,” Jaafar says. He buys kerosene and fills the tank. After a few tries the car starts. It runs rough, as though
they are driving on jagged stones, but it runs. They pack four one-gallon containers of kerosene in the trunk and continue driving west, deeper into Africa, leaving a trail of ugly black smoke behind them.

Exhausted, Mumtaz and Jaafar spend the night in a convent near the forest. They lie in a bed that creaks each time they move. The mosquito net draped over them has a large hole in it. Mumtaz tries to pull the net down so she can tuck the hole under the mattress. But it won’t reach. She grabs the hole in her hand and clenches it into a fist. She looks over at Jaafar. The light from the candle throws dancing shadows across him. His face is coated in dust. His shirt is soaked with perspiration. He smells like sweat and kerosene. They can’t bathe. There is only one bucket of cold water for them both to use and they will need it to brush their teeth and wash in the morning.

“When we first married, this was all I wanted, you and me and nothing else. No one else.”

He looks at her. “And now?”

“Now I want my children.”

He looks away from her. He looks straight in front of him at the ceiling. “I’m sorry.”

She continues as though she has not heard him. “A safe country. Tarmac roads. Petrol. Water that comes from taps.”

He smiles and looks at her. “I will build you
mahal
one day, my Taj.”

She turns sharply to face him. “I don’t want a palace. I want a home.” She looks at the ceiling, releases the mosquito net and begins laughing. She can’t stop. She sits up, doubled over. “Did you know, in Canada,” she says, finally able to speak, “they sell
mango pulp in tins? You open it, you pour it and just like that, you have
keri nu ras.
” She stops speaking. She feels suddenly like a madwoman for laughing so much. There is nothing to laugh about. She looks at him. “I could make it for you and Bapa every day, if you want.”

“Or I could make it for you,” he says quietly.

The next morning, they begin driving to Mwanza. The potholes become more frequent, deeper, wider. The dust from the roads and the black smoke from the kerosene fill Mumtaz’s head until it is pounding, until she is nauseated. They stay in a hotel in Mwanza for two nights.

Finally, nearly three weeks after leaving Nairobi, they reach the border at Benako. The Tanzanian customs official questions them, asking where they are going, where they have come from, where they live. He pauses and stares at them after each question, after each answer. He wants money. Jaafar won’t pay him. Mumtaz is angry. She tells him in Gujarati to hand over some cash so they can carry on. He refuses. “Why is this bloody fool giving me trouble? We’re leaving this stupid, petrol-free country and its broken roads.”

Finally, with Mumtaz clawing on his arm, he relents, hands over cash and is allowed to cross the border into Rusumo. They are in Rwanda. The roads are smooth tarmac, free of potholes. There are petrol stations.

In Kigali they stay with Zulfikar Dadani, a car-dealer friend of Jaafar’s. Amir is supposed to meet them here. He has not arrived. Mbarara is only 100 miles from Kigali. Jaafar assures Mumtaz that he will be here any day.

When Raju arrives to fetch Karim and Shama for their flight to Canada, they are standing alone in the hallway, just outside the door of the widow’s flat. Raju hasn’t seen the children in three weeks. Their suitcase is packed and leaning against the door. They walk towards him. He is stunned by what he sees. Their hair is filthy, unkempt. They smell dirty, like stale urine. Their clothes are wrinkled and Shama’s bare legs are streaked with black. He wants to ask them why they haven’t bathed. He wants to shout at them. He wants to slap them. He wants to beat these dirty, pathetic children. He closes his eyes and inhales. But he cannot stem the tide rising through him. He feels his body heave, feels his swollen heart force its way upwards, overwhelming the suddenly pliable bones of his chest, pushing open his throat. He cannot stop it. He can no longer stop it. He is shattering, breaking apart. He opens his mouth. The force of the tide pushes his head back. He sobs. And sobs. And sobs. The sound of his voice, of unrestrained grief, bounces against the high walls of the hallway, returning to him like a relentless fist pounding him, again and again.

Jaafar and Mumtaz have been in Kigali for four weeks and they have not yet heard from Amir.

“He’s not coming,” Mumtaz says. “We have to do something.”

“What can we do? We have hardly any money left. He’ll come.”

“What if something has happened to him?”

“Nothing has happened to him.”

Every week for the past four weeks, Mumtaz and Jaafar have had this same conversation. She is trapped. Thousands of
miles from her babies, she is descending slowly into madness. She spends her days staring at words on the pages of books, refusing to lift her head to look at the deep blue sky, to inhale the scent of jasmine. Every morsel she puts into her mouth scrapes the inside of her throat. Every sound of every bird is the voice of her daughter, of her son. She wakes up repeatedly throughout the night to the sound of Shama crying, of Karim calling for her.

“Let’s beg. Let’s borrow money for tickets,” she says. “You’ve helped Zulfikar so many times with cars. He can help you.”

“We can’t buy tickets to Europe here. They don’t sell them in Kigali. We would have to borrow a lot of money.”

She cannot stand to look at her husband any longer.

Nine days later, Amir appears. He is thin, thinner than Jaafar. His hair is longer than Mumtaz has ever seen it. He has grown a beard; it is sprinkled with grey. He hands them tickets that will fly them first to Brussels and then to Montreal and then to Toronto. He has brought $5,000 US, in cash. He couldn’t bring them more, though he tried. There is a few thousand more in the Brussels account, he says. Not much. He is not coming with them. He will return to Uganda. He is sorry for the delay. He met with trouble. Mumtaz does not want to know. She does not care. She wants only to get to her children. She leaves the brothers alone and goes to bed. For the first time in weeks, she sleeps soundly.