When She Was Queen (3 page)

We left Kenya for Toronto a year after the Asians of neighbouring Uganda were expelled by the dictator Idi Amin, in the early seventies. It was a traumatic, uncertain time for the Asians of East Africa. Fearing impending disaster, John Chacha had wound down his business, sold the Rose Hotel, and left Kisumu; my father was again out of a job. Five years after our arrival in Toronto, my father suffered a heart attack. He was taken to hospital and there died from surgical complications. What was remarkable about his death was that we accepted it so readily; there was no great show of grief. Now I realize that this was so because we all knew that a good part of him had already died. He always carried with him the sadness of his humiliation at the gaming table; and then, in Canada, his active life was over, he was in a city that was alien to his nature, where he had nothing to do.

Once a week in the afternoon I come visit my mother, and immediately, for she’s ready and waiting for me, we go for a walk along Don Mills Road, by the Science Centre; when the weather is good we sit by the fountain there. How peaceful, she might say, regaining her breath, taking in the scenery. How beautiful this city is. When we return to her apartment she will put on some tea and place savouries before me, and she might probe me on my private life. What happened to that Jane? she will ask. She was so nice; or, That Anita, she turned out no good? Too outspoken, if you ask me. On several occasions, though, through some clever manipulation, I have led her back to the past, in Kisumu, when she was queen. But that night of revelry, when this queen was gambled away,
and the following night, its dark aftermath, always prove elusive to my probings of her.

One day, in sheer exasperation, I ask her point-blank: “Tell me about this John Chacha of ours. Was he completely no good? Was he really an evil man, beyond common decency? What was he capable of?”

She eyes me a moment, then speaks quietly: “You listen to your sisters too much. They were all the same, those men. Johnny was no worse than the rest. But he was an arrogant man … and he had his good sides too.”

It is time to meet the man himself.

John Karmally lives with his wife in Scarborough, not far from Habibeh. Word is that the couple tried living with each of their two sons in Canada, and this is where they’ve ended up, in an apartment by themselves. As I enter, having made an appointment first, I am taken to the living room by Khanoo Chachi—a diminutive old woman now. They’ve been watching a Bombay musical, which John Chacha, standing up, puts on low volume. Khanoo Chachi disappears, and I take this to be a meaningful sign.

The room is decorated with choice African motifs. Carvings on display tables, a pair of spears crossed on a wall, a large drum of animal skin, an almost full-size statue of a Masai. John Chacha stands bent and arthritic next to the muscular, upright warrior of gleaming, polished, red wood. Of his previously abundant mane, there remains only a thin strawy patch on the pate.

“How’s your mother?” he asks. He has a way of looking from the sides of his eyes, which makes me wonder if
he is squint-eyed. There is an intermittent shaking of the head, a symptom of mild Parkinson’s, I gather.

“She’s well,” I reply.

He sits down with a motion of his hand, and I follow suit, across from him.

“And your sisters—they are all right?”

“Yes.”

A moment’s stillness. Then: “Your father—a pity, he died suddenly. A good man, Rashid.”

“Was he my father?” I ask without ado, for I have come determined to take some answer with me.

He looks at me, trying desperately to control a fit of shaking in his upper body. “Your father.”

I take it he did not hear me well.

“Rashid, my father—”

“Yes.”

“Was he my father, John Chacha?”

He pauses a very brief moment. “It’s your mother’s business to tell you, isn’t it.”

How can he be my father? If he were, he would want to claim me, wouldn’t he? This man sounds testy, he wants to shrink from me. He knows why I question him, but won’t say any more. I would like to ask him, That evening when you sent a car for my mother….

We turn to stare at each other. In my face must be a plea. I’m not sure what to say, how to proceed. But I don’t want to leave empty-handed.

“Tell me what’s on your mind,” he offers, finally.

“You are not my father,” I say.

“No. Talk to your mother. I did not dishonour her. It’s that night that’s on your mind…. Your father Rashid
and I played a game. It was only a game.”

“Rashid is my father, then, as I always thought.” “Talk to your mother. It was a game, as I told you. She left my house unmolested. Dr. Singh, her physician, took her away, when she called him from my house.”

She called Dr. Singh to pick her up and not my father.

Dr. Singh, who was my biological father, died in Kisumu in 1978. This was two years before Rashid, whom I think of as my real father, died in Toronto. Of their affair, my mother cannot say much to me. But she has revealed that there was love, indeed passion, between them, and it lasted many years. They wrote letters, she more than he, when she first moved to Canada and suffered acute depression. Her husband knew of the affair and that I was not his real child. When he bid my mother at the poker game that night, he knew that she was not his anyway.

“Are you sure?” exclaims Farida
, in disbelief.

“Of course I’m sure.” Am I? Yes I am, unbelievable though my story sounds. “I’m positive she did it, right there in front of my eyes.”

Anaar Dhalla, imperceptible to anyone but me and one other person, spat at a corpse this morning as it lay in state at a funeral in the foyer of the Main Mosque.

The dead man was from a fairly prominent family back in Dar, though he had had his share of knocks as a new immigrant. He wound up, using his family’s money, owning a bicycle factory in the northwest of the city, and more recently was part of a growing investment syndicate and a generous community benefactor.

“I told you I also saw her smiling at the sympathy sitting last night.” Crying tears, too, two fat streams rolling down those white cheeks, in the gathering at the back of the mosque after prayers, where friends, relatives, and anyone else who felt like it sat down on the carpet with the widow and family in a gesture of grief sharing.

Anaar, a few persons away on the widow’s right, had quite suddenly—and briefly—beamed a sunny smile through her tear-stained face, prompting one rather to think of a rainbow. I found myself with a tiny smile too, recalling that sometimes the funniest thoughts intrude on the gravest of moments, such as this one. There was nothing more to be said about that smile, until that event at the funeral.

At funerals, selected members of the extended family, and friends, come forward in threes to pay their last respects to the dead. (Once upon a time, everyone present, even children, did the same, one by one.) They kneel and join hands on one side of the deceased, brought fresh and glistening in a casket straight from the funeral home, and recite the formula asking forgiveness of sins; on the other side of them sits the mukhi, who grants the forgiveness. I am never completely sure if, at this time, one is craving forgiveness from the dead or on behalf of the dead, but I as mukhi have to sprinkle holy
water on him, so I guess it must be the latter. Anaar was one of those selected to come forward for the ceremony, and she took her turn with two other women and knelt by the casket. She had come from work and wore a tan skirt, white blouse, and black waistcoat. A few streaks of red were visible where her shoulder-length wavy hair had been hennaed. I stared perhaps too long at her. It is difficult to keep strictly unworldly when beautiful women kneel in front of you in seductive gravity and grief, and a delicate waft of perfume’s just teased your senses. She was third in the row, closer to the corpse’s feet, and when the other two women got up after the ceremony, she delayed, then moved up on her knees to peer at the face—as if displaying a special closeness or grief—and spat at it. The act was more like a gesture, but a droplet of spit undeniably flew from her pursed lips onto the embalmed face, landing on the nose. My second, sitting beside me, was the only other person to witness this uncanny scene and looked startled, but I reassured him with a nod, saying, “She only choked….”

“What are you thinking?” Farida asks, after a while.

“Nothing much. Only how time’s passed.”

We often sit together in the evenings, and when there’s nothing much on the tube we muse about various things, among which the past figures often.

“Yes,” she agrees, “it has;” and falls into a silent musing of her own.

The thought—or sight—of Anaar never fails to prompt me to recall how I knew her once—at a different time, in another place—as a somewhat sharply featured, fair-skinned girl with a pigtail riding a ladies’
bike, the only woman cyclist in the city of my birth, Dar es Salaam.

“Your uncle was ever so nice,” Anaar said.

“Oh yes?—where did you see him—what happened?” Guli asked, even though Anaar could tell that her friend already knew. Guli’s uncle must have told her about the incident, that altercation with the loafers yesterday.

It was late, past six o’clock and close to grey dusk, the menacing maghrab of evil spirits abroad, and she had been returning from drama practice—on Jamhuri Street past the Odeon and on to Uhuru Street on her bicycle. This was an Indian area, she preferred it to the African area behind it, the unpaved streets beyond the Mnazi Moja grounds, which would have taken her on a straighter route home. Not that anything had happened to her in that area, or to anyone she knew. Africans made her nervous—not the older men, in kanzus, whom she respected and called “Mzee” for grandfather, but the younger men, closer to her age; they seemed to laugh and sneer at you as if they didn’t care two bits what you said or thought, what your life consisted of. Couple of times, couple of years ago, she’d received snide remarks concerning her budding breasts, once with an attempt made to pinch them; and a long time ago during Eid, she’d seen two girls around her age, ten, in charge of two small boys and a little girl, taking a ride on a rickety Ferris wheel, and every time the cradle with the five of them came creaking, rolling down, a couple of African boys waiting at the bottom would attempt to poke their fingers into
the girls’ panties—the older ones shrieked, the little girl looked terrified, all trapped in that cradle. The owner of the wheel was an Indian and simply grinned at the girls.

This time, though, as she started taking the roundabout opposite the Odeon, she noticed four Indian boys sitting on the edge of the pavement, their feet on the road. They looked like the town’s typical loafers—jostling each other shoulder to shoulder, sharing smokes, raucous. Respectable boys didn’t sit outside like that, especially at this hour. Four men were playing whist on the roundabout, a small wick lamp burning near them. Behind the boys, next to the theatre, an African man sat roasting cassava and corn.

As she approached them the boys made a remark so obscene, later she couldn’t even repeat it to herself; reciting “Ya Ali, Ya Ali,” rapidly under her breath, she sped past them. A partly sucked orange came flying, hit her front wheel; she braked, too late realizing she shouldn’t have. The bicycle stopped, keeled over, though Anaar saved herself in time from falling down. Her shame preserved, like Draupadi’s in the legend.

She started telling off the boys: “Aren’t you ashamed of yourselves—don’t you have mothers and sisters of your own—” That always took care of grossness in men, the mention of their mothers and sisters. They laughed, made an obscene remark about sisters, but just then a white Cortina came by and stopped. She knew the driver, her friend Guli’s mamu, Amir Uncle. He got out of the car and told off the boys, not too harshly but quite sternly; and he told off the men, who had been playing cards and not come to her aid. One of them spoke out
impatiently, not even looking up from the game to waste his time, “What does she expect, wearing a skirt and riding a bicycle—and at this time!”

At which Amir Uncle said, “That’s the school uniform, don’t you know that—in which world do you live? Take a close look at the calendar next time and check the year!”

Another man said, “Keep her at home, she’s of age.”

The boys tee-heed. Nevertheless, one of them assisted Amir Uncle to lift the bicycle onto the roof rack, and Amir Uncle drove Anaar home, admonishing her all the way about how late it was for a girl. “Who is the drama teacher, anyway—Mr. Gregory? Mr. Fernandes?”

“Both,” she told him.

Anaar was sixteen years old.