Abyssinian Chronicles (20 page)

The whites, in their marble fortresses, were locked in their privilege and elitist corporate power. They enjoyed the protection of nuclear arms in silos back home and warships in the Indian Ocean over here. They were the goldfish in mobile aquariums, gawked at as they rolled through the city on the way to their schools, their clubs, their power jobs. Serenity could feel the locusts of envy nibbling at his thorax.

The Indians in “Mini Bombay” were sealed off in their mansions, their schools, their hospitals, ever a mystery to the Africans, certainly a riddle to Serenity, whose feet were heavy with mud as he negotiated the city. The nearest he came to knowing an Indian was his departmental boss, a man who issued orders and directives in a thin high voice. All Serenity knew of his boss’s private life was that the man had ten children and that his parents had come from Gujarat, where he had never been.

Serenity was shocked by the ugliness of tribal strife. All the soldiers he saw were tall, dark sons of northern Uganda. The policemen were a mixture of northerners and easterners. There was palpable hostility toward the people from the central region, his region, and mud sucked at his feet and locusts nibbled at his thorax and gut whenever he saw the armed soldiers. They looked at him with envious annoyance because he was a civil servant, with better pay, a better job and more security. They made him feel like a potential victim of armed frustration, money hunger and tribal hatred. Steeped in village civilities all his life, Serenity found it hard to get used to cosmopolitan hatreds. The forlorn arrogance with which his people tried to defend themselves against accusations of colonial collaboration made him uneasy: Serenity had never been an arrogant man. He had always survived by
making himself inconspicuous. He avoided conflicts, understated his opinions and ducked the limelight. Now it seemed he was onstage all the time, watched by a hostile audience, playing roles he never cared for. It seemed everyone was onstage, playing roles cut out for them by fate or by strangers. He could sense danger brewing.

The Africans were loosely united by their dislike of Indians and Europeans, by their past of building castles and falling off the scaffolds of mansions they never lived in. Race was class, and class was still determined by race. Africans wanted to emerge from the dregs at the bottom to the salubrious air on top. The majority believed that time was on their side, which in a way was true. But with bills piling up, Serenity did not feel comfortable with waiting. He wanted a worry-free future, a better job and a pilgrimage to the land the blackbirds migrated to annually. Thrust into the vortex of competition, hatred and uncertainty, he faltered, he doubted. How would he make enough money to give his children the best education and still save some for himself?

The post-Independence political elite had what he wanted, but the pressure, the gore, the mire they waded through to achieve what they had terrified him. It was the way of hardened thieves. His neighbor and friend Hajj Gimbi often said that change was in the offing, but what was in it for him? Change for the better was for those who waded in gore, and Serenity was not that desperate.

He had always been afraid and suspicious of authority, and Amin terrified him in a special way. A man who came to power in a coup and led thousands of soldiers and was not afraid of death was to be feared. He brought into sharp focus the contrast between book law, social law and armed law. By the look of things, armed law was in, random arrests and detentions were becoming commonplace, and it all frightened him. His main consolation was that Hajj Gimbi had connections, courtesy of his religion and his friendship with people who knew people who mattered. Hajj Gimbi had reassured him that in case he fell into trouble with the army or the police, he would help him.

The news of the Indian expulsion order left Serenity speechless, the balming fingers of euphoria stroking his thorax. He could smell hope in the air as the horizon trembled with the change and the possibilities it suggested. Serenity was shocked to realize that his childhood fantasy had come true. The conspirators in the destruction of his childhood,
and part of his adult life, were leaving! Their dream was over, damaged irreparably! He knew that the Indians would not leave without a fight: the geese that lay golden eggs would claw, and flutter, and bite, and break the eggs if possible. Suddenly things looked different; all the abuse, all the suspicion, all the hatred, all the fear, all the power of money and monopoly, floated uselessly in the air like degraded poison. Suddenly, neither goodness nor evil could save them.

Serenity was puzzled to learn that the British did not want to have the Indians back after all the Indians had done for them, after all the money they had made for them, after the hundreds of years of British occupation of India. For the first time in his life, Serenity realized how precious it was to have a nation, a homeland, a place to go. He fleetingly recalled Padlock’s expulsion from the convent, except that this was a far worse tribulation for those involved. As he watched the tears, the fear, the pain, he realized that he had overestimated the nature and the extent of Indian power.

Rumor was rife of Indians taking their own lives, selling all they had, pouring salt in car engines, giving things away. There were moving sales everywhere, anxious Indians lining up for travel documents outside British Embassy buildings. Watching these people in endless lines, pounded by the iron sun, helpless and confused, made Serenity distrust power even more.

He returned home one evening with a beige-plastic-cased, sixteen-inch black-and-white Toshiba television set, which had the peculiar habit of stinking like a mixture of burned leather and rotten fish after only two hours of service. The stench diminished when the set was switched off, but returned fifteen minutes after it was turned back on. This stench intrigued me, because I was not allowed to watch television. Padlock and Serenity believed that television was a subversive entity which could irreparably damage a mind with a propensity for sin by feeding it better ways of transgressing and rebelling. So, to save me from myself, and to save themselves the extra energy needed to police a sophisticated miscreant, they banned me from watching the box. The shitters were charged with the duty of reporting me if they saw me watching when the despots were away or when they were unaware of my presence.

Consequently, I only got secondhand news and impressions of what went on. The shitters outlined what cartoon heroes, boxers, film
stars or Korean trapeze artists did, and I imagined the details. As I heard the laughter of the shitters or their fights as they dug elbows into each other jockeying to sit nearer the screen, free from obstruction by top-heavy heads, I tried to visualize the action. Sometimes a very smelly, very stealthy fart escaped an anonymous rectum and sparked off accusations and counter-accusations. I would smile to hear Padlock hollering, issuing threats, calling fire and brimstone down on the culprit.

What annoyed me most was that I could not see history in the making. I could not see decrees dropping from Amin’s lips as I had anticipated when I first heard that this technology had penetrated the walls of our pagoda. I longed to see Amin’s face, his demeanor, his mood, as the decrees which influenced the lives of millions of people left his body like magic incantations. I had visions of a nervous Moses trembling as he struck the water with his stick to create a way for the children of Israel. How did Amin differ from that Biblical figure?

I now and then entered the living room on redundant missions and took a few furtive looks. Amin’s face filled the whole screen, and if there was any fear, any inkling of the gravity of the decisions he was airing, it did not show. His was the face of a master, a magician safe in the knowledge that his wand was omnipotent.

After the television, Serenity decided to buy himself a house of dreams: he purchased a library of books from a desperate Indian man who had been rejected by the British, the Canadians and the Americans and was preparing to go to Pakistan. The dreams came with their own history of violence: half the collection belonged to a man who, weeks before, had eaten rat poison, slashed his wrists and bled to death among his books, ruining quite a few, which had to be burned. Serenity’s new acquisition arrived on the back of the puke-yellow Postal Service truck which had brought him to the city. The driver still sported Elvis sideburns, and when he complained that the chests were too heavy, his voice boomed as though it had passed through a fat clay pot.

Serenity discovered Oliver Twist, Madame Defarge, the Artful Dodger and many more ghosts in the Dickensian jungle, but it was the American jungle that stole his heart. American writers, with their migrant’s fascination and obsession with money, success and power, spirited him off into a world of dreams where likeable rogues had it all. Ensconced in their penthouses, they cut deals, sipped champagne, participated in orgies with perfect-bodied nymphos and indulged in excesses
just this side of madness. They gambled, raced sports cars, flew private jets and went on lust-sodden cruises in the Caribbean. Serenity lapped it all up and turned it over and over again in his head, angry that it was all out of his reach.

Serenity was shocked to discover that character was not a monolithic rock which stopped moving somewhere in one’s late twenties, anchored by a wife and children, policed by friends, relatives, colleagues, extended family and strangers. He found himself in flux, and he became aware of unreleased sexual energy in his body. Temptation, liberated by the turbulence of recent events, coursed through him like malarial bacteria waiting to explode into full-blooded fever. He could not remember the last time he had been in bed with a woman whose body attracted him with its power, grace and elegance, combining sight, smell and touch to create a feast of sensory satisfaction.

What was he supposed to make of Loverboy? Was he the reincarnation of the man who had seduced Serenity’s mother and led her to her death? If not that, what did the young man represent? Youth, freedom, innocent flirtation? Or uncommitted love? Serenity was swept back momentarily to his bachelor days when he had raided a few marital beds and partaken of ungratified sexual reserves there, free to come and go, free of responsibility for the women, free to give and take what he wanted without a thought for tomorrow. He resolved to watch the Boy carefully. At the same time, he remembered his wife’s bridal aunt, seeing her rise from the tombs of unpursued possibility with the supercilious grace of a bored goddess.

The imminent departure of the Indians kicked off furious rows in many an office. At that time an office bully lured Serenity into a trap.

“Do you believe that all the Indians are going to leave?” the bully badgered.

“Yes.”

“Catholic, put your money where your mouth is. Some of us believe that you are just pretending, pussyfooting as usual.”

“They have to leave. Amin is serious.”

“Amin can’t do that. The economy will collapse. Britain will bombard him from the air. He can’t take the chance on an embargo. He is also afraid of America: American warships are stationed in the
Indian Ocean very near here. My bet is that a reprieve is imminent within a month. Amin is just scaring these people, trying to show them who is the boss. He probably wants more money from Britain and America.”

Why wouldn’t Britain and America succeed in stopping Amin? Why wouldn’t Amin back down? Serenity had no foolproof answer. He could only trust his hunch, but Cold War politics and the fight against Communism being so hot and unpredictable, should he? He decided to go for broke.

“Britain and America won’t intervene,” he said bravely.

“They will shit on him till he suffocates and relents.”

“No, they won’t.”

“Amin will be hit so hard he will even call back the few Indians who have already left.”

“No, he won’t,” Serenity insisted.

“I give you five hundred dollars if you win; you give me the same amount when you lose.” The man licked his index finger, passed it across his throat in a beheading motion and pointed it in the air, gesturing his oath.

All eyes were on Serenity now. Five hundred dollars was a lot of money for a civil servant: if he lost, he would be in trouble for months. The books and the television and other things would have to go. Why should he cave in to this bully? Self-respect? The thrill of tottering on the brink? The indulgent fantasy of doing what people did in books and got away with? He rolled his head like a calf trapped in a quagmire. He struck the table: once for accepting the challenge, twice to vent disgust, thrice for courting Lady Luck. Much to his dismay, the bully pulled out of his front pocket a typed agreement on yellow paper. It had been a setup. He signed the paper, and a neutral party pocketed it.

It was the fear of losing his bet and the possibility of Amin changing his mind that kept Serenity lecturing Padlock on international politics, global relations, the world economy and the strengths and weaknesses of Western capitalism, caustic subjects which filled her with bile. Padlock tolerated the barrage only because they had agreed never to break the sacred code of despotic harmony in front of the children. By delving into the murky waters of Cold War politics, with its polarization, pragmatism and reincarnation as the Scramble for
Africa, Serenity hoped that fate would pick up the tremors in his voice, the fear in his thorax and the fire in his gut, and side with him.

Padlock, on the other hand, felt like shutting her husband’s irritating mouth with a vicious slap or a whack with her guava switch. On and on he went, damaging the secret power of despotic silence, committing the unforgivable sin of interrupting the news reader, postponing night prayers and the holy rosary, and shattering her peace of mind.

This relentless assault on her mental faculties by Serenity’s obsession with politics reminded her of one crucial matter: her divine duty to break me. She was setting the stage for the first major explosion. She built up an index of misdemeanors, which she recited in full every time she was dissatisfied with my conduct. These days she left many of my sins unpunished. Her tone took on the truculent whine of gathering disaster. She kept on reporting my misdemeanors to Serenity, who, sadly for her, was so wrapped up in the ramifications of the wager that he could not honor his end of the bargain by taking immediate physical action. The more he disappointed her, the more determined she became to see my day of destruction. She started reporting every other evening, at the same time, just before the all-important eight o’clock news, when the stinking antics of the box irritated Serenity and caused a lull in his political soliloquies.