When She Was Queen Read online

  “Or losing some, Patel, welcome.”

  Ambalal came rolling over, whisky in one hand, soda in the other. “Just a few rounds, John, last time you took the pants off me.”

  Just then Father passed by.

  “Eh, Rashid, just the chap. Come and join us,” John Chacha beckoned him over.

  “Let’s strip the chap naked,” Ambalal whispered with a snicker.

  “Yes, let’s,” said Patel quietly.

  Father hesitated. Ambalal turned on his wheedling voice. “Arré, come neh, be a sport. Enough of chatting up the women. Join the men now. It’s time we rub John’s nose in the dirt.”

  Father took a seat, and started winning.

  As the pile of chips beside him started growing, the wives and other guests gathered around to watch. John Chacha was losing the most, and he had become tense and curt. He was not a good loser. Ambalal was his chirpy self, though far from a winner. Dr. Patel was a few chips down at most. Mother stood quietly behind Father, looking serene. Beside her loomed Dr. Singh next to the African intern he had brought with him to the party. It was about time to break up and leave, only the cue to do so awaited the initiative. It was then that John Chacha made his offer, bidding his palatial residence.

  Khanoo Chachi gave a gasp, saying, “You can’t!”

  Her husband raised a hand to quiet her, throwing her a sharp look, and said: “I have just done so.” He smiled expansively at the players round the table, his edginess suddenly gone.

  “Don’t I only wish I had something of value to bid against that,” Father said, sounding regretful.

  John Chacha beamed at him. “You have! If I have a palace, you have the Queen of Kisumu! You can do better than the Pandavas, surely.”

  The reference was to the five Pandava brothers of mythology, who gambled away their wife in a game of dice.

  “Arré what is he saying, this man,” Khanoo Chachi said in despair. “Have some shame, for God’s sake.” She started crying. She was an emotional, uncomplicated and kind woman, admired and pitied for enduring the trial that was her marriage.

  “Bid her,” said the undeterred John Chacha to my father, “and if you win, this alishaan mansion, this Taj Mahal of Lake Province”—he made a gesture to indicate all its grandeur—”is yours for you and your Mumtaz to move into. If not….”

  “If not?”

  “If not, she’s mine for a night.”

  There was laughter from the spectators.

  “So you think,” Father replied, with pluck. “I’ll beat you this time, Johnny-boy. All right, my wife on the table.” He threw a quick look at my mother, who stood behind him smiling.

  “Can they do this?” the African intern asked Dr. Singh.

  “It’s only a joke,” someone said beside them and chortled with nervous excitement. It was Dr. Patel’s wife. The haughty Dr. Singh threw her a look of scorn.

  The intern turned away with a look of disgust, then turned back again to watch the hand played out.

  Father lost. He got up, his face flushed.

  Dr. Singh and his friend were the first to leave, then all the others started packing up their children and heading for the door. It was a typical leave-taking, with many best wishes and reminders to meet again. Khanoo Chachi had been subdued by the women telling her it was all a joke, and men will be men, John especially. John Chacha stood beside her next to the door, equally subdued and polite in a drunken way. They shook hands with my father, did pranams to my mother. Ambalal and his wife Moti and their three children came out with Mother and Father, and as they separated in the driveway, Ambalal said to Father, “Well, you lost your wife. You have to watch this Johnny, he pulls the pants off you if you give him the chance.”

  When they reached home, my mother and father fought.

  “So you simply gambled me away. Like this,” she snapped her fingers. “What did you think of me?”

  “I was a fool, darling, but it was for you that I was tempted!”

  “And so you sold away my dignity.”

  “You could have stopped me! You could have objected! You allowed it!”

  “We were all watching you to see what you would do! You accepted an insult to your wife! You sold me away! Well, if my husband thinks me dispensable enough a commodity—”

  “We were all a bit tipsy,” Father said desperately. “John especially. I’ll call him tomorrow, tell him it was all a joke. He should apologize. Come on, I am sorry …”

  The next morning he called up John. “I say, my wife’s a bit upset—that joke went a bit too far and I think—”

  “You know I don’t joke when I gamble and when I do business.”

  “But this time you joked, and I think—”

  “I didn’t joke. I bid my house fair and square, with all my honour at stake, and I take it that you too bid fairly. I could have lost, and you would have won my house. As it stands, I won.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I won your wife for a night, Rashid. Tonight I’ll send a car for her.”

  The car came, and she strode out to it, dignified as ever, dressed in her finest.

  “So, did they?” I ask my two sisters.

  On one side of the large deck at Habibeh’s Scarborough home, her husband and son barbecue meat and vegetables in an instance of father-son bonding I find quite touching. Teenagers shoot hoops in the distance, at the far end of the backyard, among them the other children of the family. Mother sits out on the lawn, protected by an umbrella, in the company of a new friend she’s brought with her today and her other son-in-law. And Habibeh, Razia, and I sit huddled together on the deck, transported by our habitual closeness, which my mother and my two brothers-in-law sometimes find tiresome.

  “Did they what,” Razia asks, puckering her lips, sending a devilish glance at Habibeh.

  “You know what I mean—sleep together,” I say, reddening. How the utterly unspeakable finds a voice, given time. My sisters never lost their habit of teasing me mercilessly.

  Now they raise their eyebrows at each other. “You have to ask her,” says Razia.

  “Don’t be silly. How can I ask Mother that? You must know—was John Chacha my real father? The date fits, doesn’t it, more or less?”

  I was born nine and a half months after that eventful night, delivered by Caesarian section.

  “Sometimes you can’t tell,” Habibeh says.

  All three of us look toward our mother, casually conversing, as composed as ever.

  “I thought women could always tell.”

  “Not always. You should get married,” Razia advises.

  “What does that have to do with anything?”

  Mother lives by herself on Don Mills Road. She is too proud to live with me, which is as well, because I too have my own sense of decorum and privacy. Her one-bedroom flat is dizzying in its plethora of colour and objets d’art of the type fashionable in Kenya’s Indian homes in the 1960s—copper and batik hangings, Jack-and-Jill and Bo-Peep glass statuettes, Indian dolls that dance; embroidered cushions crowd the chairs, and the air is faintly perfumed. The place has the feel of a shrine. Left alone here, I often tell myself, I would in a few moments rid it of all its clutter and oppressive aura. My father Rashid’s picture hangs on a wall next to hers. Both photographs are large and full-length; he looks grey and diminutive in his, she, naturally, bright and stately.

  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.

  The Girl on the Bicycle

  “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.
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  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.