No New Land (10 page)

At 8:20 one spring evening, Nanji had given his class their midterm test, and now stood with the test papers in one hand at the streetcar stop on the corner of College and St. George streets. Characteristically, head lowered, shoulders sagging, he was thinking of one student in particular. A big-bosomed tall girl with remarkably distinguished features – aristocratic was the word that came to mind. Patrician. Why aristocratic – is there such a thing? Nothing plain about that face – notice she uses no makeup, nothing obvious – it could have come, that face, from a long line of careful breeding. A high, prominent forehead;
every feature on that face distinct and prized; smooth skin. Flawless. And the long gold-brown hair. There was a casualness to her clothes that was studied, expensive, there was that ease in her manner, an assurance, that suggested security. A secure past and a secure future. She had a way of making herself noticed, he had observed, by coming to him and asking questions, however trivial, and being satisfied by whatever he said. Not a stupid girl, because some of the questions were sharp. A girl like her, nothing can go wrong with her, In a few years she’ll be in Rosedale, running respectable charities, wife of a Bay Street executive. Would this one, so friendly and deferential now, calling him “professor” and “sir,” even notice or acknowledge him then … and if she did, on what terms?

His students calling him “sir” and coming around him to ask questions after class had Jamal simply bowled over one evening. Jamal had come in to town with him on some pretext and then hung around him, making it impossible for him to gather his thoughts before class. And then, as he gave his lecture, Jamal sat in, high above in the last corner seat, drawing attention every conceivable way. He was irrepressible, a comic foil to Nanji’s high seriousness. He would look deeply interested, apparently hanging on to every word of the professor, and then sit back to grin at him familiarly, as if to say, “Ah, my friend, how good you look! How far you’ve come!” Once he exclaimed, quite audibly, “Ah!” so as not to let a fine point escape his approval or the
notice of everyone else present. Jamal might as well have been sitting at a qawali recital, where such outbursts of approval are appreciated. Nanji could have exploded with frustration. And finally, as if that was not enough, on two occasions Jamal even attempted to start a discussion: “I can see that, sir, but don’t you think in the Bantu languages you have an exception there … because of the long isolation,” looking tremendously earnest and talking completely out of context. After the lecture Nanji told him, “Never again.” But Jamal had been impressed, and it was good to have impressed him, because Jamal would go far.

Nanji was smiling grimly at his own cynicism when the streetcar arrived. He got in and remained seated alone all the way, even when most of the seats were taken and some passengers stood. This happened often to him. Racism, the word kept intruding into his mind and he kept pushing it back. On what basis racism? It could be my face, dark, brooding, scowling, cratered. Perhaps I look like a bum. Professor Nanji? What we have become: suspecting racism, but never certain, touchy as a raw wound, blaming innocent people and letting the guilty walk smugly away because you can never be quick enough with a reply. Feeling angry and frustrated afterwards. I should have said this, if only I had said it … the next time.…

He got off at the College subway station. Inside, he stood by himself on the dimly lighted platform, well away from the draft of the staircase. The trains
were slow that evening, a fair number of people had collected on the platform. Later he would not be able to remember what he had been thinking of, waiting those first few minutes for the train. Memory began with the picture in his mind of three youths running down the stairs mock-fighting with each other, big, in jackets, their boots grating on the gritty floor. Two had crew-cut hair, blond, the third wore a funny hat. In Nanji’s teachers’ vocabulary: three louts.

One of the blond-haired louts was obviously the leader – there was a style, a control (or pretence of it) in his gestures; the funny-hatted one, cackling at every opportunity, was a sidekick. The people on the platform instinctively moved away, giving the youths’ antics more room. The effect of this movement was that of forming a loose circle around them. Perhaps the youths became conscious of this circle, the attitude it reflected; they stood up, defiant, threatening; the circle loosened some more, now with apprehension. But to no avail, they had smelled blood and they struck, baiting the bystanders with taunts and sarcasm. Only youth can appropriately respond to youth. The victims here were mostly older. Mercifully the attackers kept flitting, prancing away. The youths were some distance from Nanji, there were people between. He was aware of their movements, could hear their grating menace, and he was terribly afraid lest through some magnetism he lead them to his direction; his heart beating wildly, pushing back a prayer because he had stopped believing in prayers. Please, not here, let them stop, let a train come.…
The subway tunnels were as dark and endless as a moonless, starless sky. From time to time he swept a glance up and down the platform, pausing briefly to watch the three louts. Once they stopped defiantly in front of a stout lady going home with a package, then in front of a clean-cut young man with a briefcase. They walked up to a young woman, but were less abusive, perhaps because she laughed with them, perhaps because they saw her as closer to their age and background.

During one of these furtive surveys he saw someone he knew, Esmail, standing at the edge of the platform, looking nervously for a train to come. Esmail, a little over average height, looking taller for the thick-soled shoes, which many Dar men wore for that purpose, and in a very conspicuous beige Kaunda suit, which they had all bought in a frenzy of African patriotism in Dar but now wore proudly in Toronto to set themselves apart. Esmail, also resident at Sixty-nine Rosecliffe, was a man of few words. He would be returning from the bakery where he worked, carrying in the package in his hand, presumably, the meat pies he himself had baked.

Nanji began an instinctive step towards his compatriot, but then realized he would draw attention and stopped. At that moment a shiver ran down his spine. The three louts had come up behind Esmail and began their abuse. “Paki!” one of them shouted joyfully. Esmail turned towards them, looking frightened. “What do you have there, Paki? Hey,
hey? Paki-paki-paki.… ” They leered, they jeered, crowding in on him in front, behind him the subway tracks. Bystanders looked away, embarrassed, uncomfortable. It was clear that unless a train quickly came here would begin and end the main mischief of the bullies. A heavy, oppressive feeling overcame Nanji. He wanted to run to Esmail’s aid, to shout at the impassive people to do something, to call the police, to raise the alarm … but his legs didn’t move, his mouth didn’t open. He would make himself stare at the spectacle of three big youths bullying a cowering man, a man he knew, then he would look away, in a mixture of shame and fear, hoping that when his eyes moved back again the ordeal would be over.

Perhaps Esmail had answered them back, or perhaps his silence simply goaded the gloating, prancing youths beyond control. Because at some point Nanji became aware of shouting and pandemonium, the youths shouting, pounding up the stairs and out of the station. An alarm was raised, and suddenly people were gathered where Esmail had stood – but they were looking down onto the tracks.

Esmail, punched in the stomach, had been thrown down and was crying in horrible, pathetic moans, “Save me, save me, I have done nothing.” People shouted encouragements: “Get up! Stand up!” But Esmail couldn’t get up. An attendant arrived, then two policemen from the street. Brakes screeched somewhere along the tracks in a tunnel, in which a
light was now visible. An ambulance arrived, Esmail was removed, taken away on a stretcher.

Nanji went home numb, depressed. The whole brutal incident was shocking, the more so for being wanton and racial, directed at someone who could have been himself. In that very real sense, he too had been attacked. What ached now, and horribly, was the recollection of his own behaviour during the attack. He had not moved an inch, not uttered a syllable, to defend the man. True, neither had anyone else – but what of his idealism, the long hours he had spent formulating it? He had fallen into the hole he had himself dug, setting standards impossible for an ordinary person to follow … and he was a very ordinary man where physical courage was concerned. He was a coward. Until now, what he had suffered was pleasurable pain, an indulgence, a luxury of the idle because he could
talk
of choice. Now he knew he could never make the choice, but simply go on. And the moral standard he had set for himself, through hypothetical examples, he had failed, not out of cold-bloodedness but out of cowardice. He wished Jamal had been there. Jamal would have known how to act, he would have
acted
. Because there was more to the cruelty and rough edge in Jamal, there was also the hot blood of instinct. Jamal would have been roused to an act of courage. Jamal was life, he, Nanji, was death.

In his apartment he sat down on his bed and wept tears of regret, of shame, of hopelessness. Where have we come, what are we becoming? He
wished she were with him, the girl, his nemesis in New York, whom he wryly referred to as “she.” To regain his composure, he made himself some coffee.

Nanji’s parents had both died in a famous accident when he was very young. They had joined a marriage jaan, a procession on the groom’s side, all the way from Dar to Mombasa by bus, leaving the boy with his grandmother. A happy, lively bus, ringing with song and merriment, full of new clothes and spices and nuts and gold jewellery. To get into Mombasa town, the ferry which had to be taken capsized. All sixty passengers and the driver drowned. Only some of the bodies were recovered – the waters were shark-infested. For days loose items of clothing, luggage, or other belongings were washed ashore, which some families used in burial ceremonies. The community was cut deep by the accident, so many families were affected. Nanji’s parents were among those not found.

This was the tragedy buried deep in his memory, which he only rarely invoked. It was something he could not look back on. In any case, he did not have many memories with his parents in them – something he could only turn away from to look ahead. Hence the new schools that were opened in Dar, and the new public library, had occupied him completely. His grandmother did not demand anything from him, as she lived on a pension. But he had to be with her when he could, that was obvious
to him. So he had grown up, the silent brooding type.

When he went to California to study, his grandmother first lived alone, then with one of her sons. It was while Nanji was away that she died; then the great nationalizations back home, and before he knew it half the community was in Canada. He was alone, adrift and floating.

At university he underwent a major transformation. The war was on in Vietnam. He arrived immediately after the great student riots of the late sixties at Kent State and Ohio State, Chicago, Berkeley, Columbia, and Harvard. It was fall, leaflets abounded on the campus announcing a multitude of movements and meetings. What struck him in those early days was the sheer number, the tumult of beliefs, thought systems that seemed to make up America. He realized he could think, should think, on every conceivable issue in the world. He was
of
the world. His was a modest path, reading Nehru and Gandhi, catching up on Indian nationalism, a subject unknown to the colonial Dar syllabuses. Then Hanoi was bombed, and a strike called. Students wearing red bands picketed and chanted, holding hands in solidarity. He had crossed several picket lines, between classes, until a demonstrator once challenged him: “Why don’t you join?” That he could have joined he had never realized, until then. I am against the war, he reasoned. If one side stops it, the other side is not going to start a massacre. He did not cut classes, but every day for a few hours he joined the
picket lines, expressing an opinion. Once, under an astute leader, the demonstration simply found itself marching and took over the
ROTC
building for the night. Nanji was there and appeared in the photo in the student paper the next day. Later from Gandhiism to a loss of faith, and to replace that, the constant search, which is what living had become for him.

He met
her
, the girl whom he would later refer to as “she,” at a party in New York. He lived in Boston then. Shy as he was, he found himself obliged to escort her back to her apartment. A friendship had been struck and they had taken to visiting each other. She was so flighty, as he thought then, so superficial in everything. But that was the key: everything. She would do everything if she could, just to be doing it, not out of a special interest or passion. Like Jamal, she lived with a vengeance, which is why she attracted so many people around her. Unlike Jamal, though, she lacked bite, which made you feel protective towards her. She seemed so fragile, ever since that moment he insisted on accompanying her home, and upstairs to her door, after the party.

She had delighted in him, sensing in him the genuine article. She took him around, in spite of his diffidence, to parties, to people he would never have dreamed of meeting. Everyone – their friends – knew, accepted: Yasmin and Nanji belonged together. But for them, him and her, there was closeness, there were tender moments and mutual concern, no more. Not for her anyway, she couldn’t be drawn closer,
skating away expertly into her busy world of fashionable people. So that every time they parted, every time for a few weeks, he would be in pieces, swearing not to call her, not to see her again, until the next time she called, and his resolve evaporated. They developed their own peculiar brand of friendship.

He had come to Toronto almost by chance. He had obtained his immigrant visa on a trip to Vancouver, automatically, as a citizen of a Commonwealth country, and had not been aware of his new status until Canada was in the news and someone asked him to check. So that the visa would remain valid, he came to Toronto. And stayed. Once on his way to New York, his name was punched into a computer by U.S. Immigration. He was, it was discovered, an undesirable alien. His student days had caught up with him. So he could not go back to New York, at least not on days when he was checked up on. His visits became less frequent. He had not seen her for more than a year, had not heard from her for several months. Meanwhile she had become his “she,” not a name with a face and figure but a composite of emotion and memory, dormant for now but ready to explode. His last phone call to her had ended awkwardly and abruptly. She was obviously busy with her social schedule, and he had no trouble imagining it.