Where the Air is Sweet (35 page)

Authors: Tasneem Jamal

BOOK: Where the Air is Sweet

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The next morning, Jaafar sleeps late. Mumtaz is having tea when Amir walks into the dining room. He has shaved off his beard. She greets him and then watches while the housegirl brings him a cup of tea.

They sit across from each other in silence.

“I tipped off the Bank of Kenya detectives. That’s why Jaafar was arrested.”

Mumtaz does not look at him. She cannot move.

“This hell Uganda has become would have kept pulling him back here until it killed him.”

She looks at him. She wants to slap his smug, stupid face.

“He never learned how to do what’s best for himself.”

“He does only what’s best for himself. Like you.”

“You can be angry at me. You can hate me. But he is my brother. I owed it to him to save him.”

“Are you drunk? Were you drunk when you did this?”

He is silent.

“Because it would have been nice to have had some warning before we had to run. Before we had to abandon our children.” A sob breaks free from her throat. “Did you think to put some more money in that foreign bank for him, for us. For Bapa?”

He is staring at her. He looks so much like Jaafar she cannot bear to look at him. She turns away.

“Bhabi, I’m sorry. But I was pulling him with me. He couldn’t, he wouldn’t let go. I had to push him out of here. I didn’t think. I only knew—” He stops.

She looks at him. He lowers his head until his forehead is almost touching the table.

“I knew even if I couldn’t stop, I had to make him stop. I didn’t think of anything else. Or anyone else.”

The immigration agent at Dorval looks at their passports for so long that Mumtaz begins to dig her fingernails into Jaafar’s arm.
“You left Canada well over a year ago with Ugandan passports,” the agent says. “You are returning with Kenyan passports.” He pauses and looks at Jaafar. “Did you buy these documents?”

Mumtaz looks at Jaafar. His shoulders are pulled forward. “Yes,” he says. “I bought them.”

Mumtaz sucks in her breath. He has lost his mind.

The agent looks back down at the passports. He flips through the pages. He examines the cover. Mumtaz’s mind becomes clear. She will tell the immigration agent that Jaafar did this against her will. If he wants to be arrested again, if he wants to be sent back to Africa, let him go. She will not go with him. She releases his arm.

“Your visas must be accompanied by a valid travelling document.”

Jaafar nods.

The agent stamps their passports. “These are travelling documents.” He holds them towards Jaafar. “And they look valid to me.” He smiles. “Welcome to Canada.”

Jaafar does not move. He is staring at the agent. Mumtaz reaches forward, takes the passports and puts them into her purse.

“To hell with Idi Amin,” the agent says, his eyes on Jaafar. He is not sneering. He is not mocking. He is not holding his hand out for money.

Mumtaz begins walking away. After a few moments, Jaafar follows her, walking briskly to catch up.

F
IVE MONTHS AFTER ARRIVING WITH KARIM
and Shama in Canada, Raju is walking on Confederation Drive in Kitchener, his hands clasped behind him, a black bowler hat perched on his grey head, a heavy, black overcoat covering his barrel chest. It is cold but spring has come to southern Ontario. Buds are pushing their way open on the birch trees that line the road while sheets of thin white bark peel off their slender trunks: the ravages of a cruel winter. Shama, half-submerged in an oversized red parka, flits around Raju like a gnat, jumping, bouncing, running circles, but he is steady, like a deep underlying rhythm to her frenetic young life.

“Dadabapa!” she shouts, slowing down momentarily to speak. “Let’s please walk on the sidewalk today. The ice melted a long time ago.”

He smiles and carries on, his black shoes treading the smooth tarmac. Already at six, thinks Raju, she has been cowed by life. He watches her racing around him, trying to run faster than her terror of speeding cars, of wayward bicycles, of taunts of
“Paki, go home!” He reaches out and takes her hand, pulls her towards him, beside him. They walk, side by side, slowly, on the side of the road. He does not look at her. He is looking towards the sun resting low on the horizon, preparing for its descent.

When Raju and Shama left for their walk, Mumtaz was in the kitchen making chicken
saak
and rice. She had arrived home from her job at the Arrow Shirt Factory at 4:30 p.m., as she does every day. Jaafar is still working at his garage. He will come home late, after 9:00 p.m., as he does every day, as he will do every day until he builds enough of a customer base to hire another full-time mechanic. Karim was in front of their two-storey townhouse, playing hockey on the road with a group of boys who live in the same housing complex. He was laughing.

Raju can see their house. They have come full circle. They are returning home.

“The bedroom windows on the second floor look like two wide-open eyes,” Shama says, pointing. “The sitting room window looks like a flat nose, the front door a mouth.”

She loves her house. Before she leaves for school, Raju watches her stand at the entrance, spread her arms out and hug the air inside it. Shama has lived in this house for two months. Already, she has begun to ask him when they must leave. Every day, she asks him.

“Shama.” There is no inflection in Raju’s voice when he says her name. He is not calling her name. He is declaring it. She looks at him. “The day your grandmother went to heaven and the day after were bright and clear and good.” He smiles at her, his hand gently tightening its grip on hers. He is nodding. “Like today. Like this day.”

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

T
HOUGH THIS BOOK IS A WORK OF FICTION, IT IS
framed by historical events. Because of this, I have done my utmost to be accurate with respect to the politics of the period. I relied, in particular, on two books for background on the Idi Amin years:
General Amin
by David Martin and
A State of Blood
by Henry Kyemba. I made extensive use, as well, of microfiche files from
The Globe and Mail
for 1972 and 1973.

On page 338, the lines from the soundtrack of the 1973 Hindi film
Aa Gale Lag Jaa
are my own rendering.

I would like to thank my agent, Dean Cooke, and everyone at the Cooke Agency for their enthusiasm for and belief in my book. I am indebted to my editors, Iris Tupholme and Jane Warren, and everyone at HarperCollins Canada for helping me bring the book to this, its final form.

I am especially grateful to my late grandfather, Kassamali Jamal, and to my parents, Sadru and Habiba Jamal, for sharing their stories so I could tell mine.

And finally, I want to thank Craig Daniels, my husband, my champion, my gentle critic. Without him this book would not exist.

About the Author

TASNEEM JAMAL
was born in Mbarara, Uganda, and immigrated to Canada with her family in 1975. She has worked for over a decade as an editor at
The Globe and Mail
and the
National Post
. Her fiction and non-fiction have been featured in the
Toronto Review of Contemporary Writing Abroad, Saturday Night
magazine and the
Literary Review of Canada
. She lives in Kitchener with her husband and two daughters. Visit her online at tasneemjamal.ca or on Twitter @tasneem_jamal.

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Paise for
WHERE THE AIR IS SWEET

“Big of heart and mind, Tasneem Jamal’s powerful debut novel exposes the fragility of belonging and, with its sweeping historical eye, brings home the true meaning of Canada.”
CARRIE SNYDER,
AUTHOR OF THE
G
OVERNOR
G
ENERAL’S
A
WARD FINALIST
The Juliet Stories

“Enthralling, moving and beautifully written, Tasneem Jamal’s remarkable debut reveals the joys, heartaches and fragilities of human connection, the relationships people forge with a land, the promises they make to each other. With her graceful, confident prose, Jamal creates a world so real it pulsates with vitality and tenderness. Her characters straddle the permeable, ever-shifting line between homes, between overlapping identities, between longing and belonging, desire and hope.”
AYELET TSABARI,
AUTHOR OF
The Best Place on Earth

“Tasneem Jamal’s tale of the travels and travails of a multigenerational Asian family, from India to Uganda, to the UK, to Kitchener, Ontario, contains a powerful truth—at the end of the day it is family that allows individuals to endure and recover from the refugee experience.”
MICHAEL MOLLOY, P
RESIDENT,
C
ANADIAN
I
MMIGRATION
H
ISTORICAL
S
OCIETY, AND FORMER
C
ANADIAN
A
MBASSADOR TO
J
ORDAN

Where the Air Is Sweet
Copyright © 2014 by Tasneem Jamal.

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EPUB Edition May 2014 ISBN 9781443408196

Published by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd

FIRST EDITION

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