Petina Gappah - An Elegy for Easterly

Mr Vaswani’s shop was in a building that had carved pillars, and a veranda that read VASWANI BROTHERS GENERAL DEALERS EST. 1921. Above us were rows and rows of bicycles hanging from the ceiling, I had never seen so many Black Beauties assembled in one place. Blankets were stacked in piles while the bolts of Zambia material formed column upon column of riotous colour. There were piles of Kango plates, pots and pans, the metal cups that burned your mouth if you didn’t wait for the tea to cool before you drank; there were grey metal buckets, metal dishes, and columns of heavy bhodho pots. And there, in plastic sheets with ENBEE printed on them, were school uniforms for all the schools in all the townships of Salisbury.

In the middle of all this was Mr Vaswani.

He looked straight at me, and I looked down, but not before I had glimpsed through the smoke that surrounded him the yellowing circles of his eyes, the brown teeth, the shiny buttons on his shirt, and the plastic comb yellow against his hair’s slick blackness.

‘How old are you?’ he said.

I was tongue-tied, I had not expected him to speak to me so directly, but I managed to say, ‘I am eleven and he is nine.’

‘Wary good, wary good,’ he said. ‘You must work wary hard, okay. No room for layabouts in this world. Maybe you work for me, hey, and I employ Juliana’s whole family.’

He did not speak English like we did, but nor did he sound like the white doctor who injected Danai and me at the Mission Hospital near Chitsa. He laughed to show more brown teeth right to the back of his mouth. I wondered whether he did not, after all, eat sadza rerukweza , like my grandmother said he should.

Mainin ’Juliana pointed us to a bench in the corner and Danai and I studied him from there, hoping to see him pick his nose. His wife was with him at the counter. I watched in fascination as she walked behind the counter without once loosening the cloth around her body. I sniffed the air for curry, but all I could smell was Brylcreem and sweat and rubber and Lifebuoy and Perfection soap and the smell of the new things that were sold in the shop.

Like the Devure River near my aunt Vongai’s homestead at Christmas when the rains were at their heaviest, Mr Vaswani’s words were a constant flood. He aimed this flow at Mainin ’Juliana as much as at the customers who took their time scrutinising every purchase before reluctantly handing over the money. ‘Hurry up, hurry up,’ he said. ‘We haven’t got all day.’ His words were so like what Mainin ’Juliana always said he said that I had to stop myself from giggling. Mr Vaswani noticed a woman who was struggling to take the clothes off her squirming son.

‘Now, now, now, what is this, what is this?’ he said. ‘What is this?’

The woman ignored him and made the child strip off his clothes to try on a uniform. He wriggled in embarrassment, while his mother laughed as though she had not heard Mr Vaswani. ‘He is mad, Mu India uyu ,’ she said to Mainin ’Juliana and pointed at Mr Vaswani with her chin. ‘How can I buy a uniform without my son trying it on?’

She yanked off her son’s shirt; he held on to his shorts, and received a tongue-lashing from his mother. When the shorts came off, only his mother seemed unsurprised to find that he wore no underwear, and she talked on, while Danai and I pretended not to have seen the tears of shame that shone in the little boy’s eyes.

Another woman came in with shorts and a shirt in two different sizes. ‘No return, no refund,’ said Mr Vaswani, pointing to a sign that said NO CREDIT NO RETURN NO REFUND in black letters on a white board. ‘You buy the goods foos-toos .’ She only stopped shouting when a white man entered the shop together with a black man dressed in gumboots and a blue boiler suit stiff with newness.

‘Sanjiv,’ the white man said, ‘we want another bike.’

‘Oh, Mr Johnson, you wary, wary good customer.’ Mr Vaswani laughed with his mouth and his arms and his head. He tried to get the bicycle down himself but even on the ladder he could not quite reach it, and Timothy had to go up and help him.

‘Sanjiv, why are Indians not allowed to play football?’ the white man said.

Mr Vaswani revealed his teeth and said, ‘Ah, another good joke, Mr Johnson. Always you tell funny jokes.’

Mr Johnson said, ‘If they are given a corner, they build a shop. Get it, corner, shop, corner shop.’

‘Wary funny, Mr Johnson,’ said Mr Vaswani, ‘Wary good joke indeed. Give a corner, build a shop.’ He laughed again with his mouth and arms and head. Mrs Vaswani sent tinkles in accompaniment. The man in the boiler suit slapped his thigh as he laughed without a sound. Mr Johnson laughed some more as he left the shop. The man in the boiler suit followed with his Black Beauty, the knuckles of his hands prominent as he clutched the handles. As soon as they left, Mr Vaswani’s smile left his face as if it had never been. ‘Hurry up, hurry up,’ he said. ‘We haven’t got all day.’

Soon after our visit to the shop, elections were held in the townships for the first time. There were posters everywhere and placards with Bishop Muzorewa’s four principles: nationalism for the people, democracy for the people, livelihood for the people, peace for the people, with his party’s symbol of a hoe crossing a spear against the background of a shield.

Sekuru Lazarus’s face became sourer with every poster that he saw.

‘This is not true independence,’ he said. ‘They want to bribe us into voting to forever be second-class citizens.’

Danai and I gorged on the packets of crisps and flavoured milk that the election men gave to all the children in the township. Our voices rose as we made a song out of the names of the characters on the crisp packets. ‘ Zsa Zsa the Scarlet, Mama Chompkin, Putzi the Dog, Professor Flubb, Jake the Pirate, Hairy the Hippy .’

Bishop Muzorewa’s voice boomed out across the township. ‘Vote for the internal settlement. Vote for an end to war. Vote for schools, for electricity, for a future for you and me.’ The next time we heard his voice again was on the radio, when he was announced as the new Prime Minister of our new country, Zimbabwe-Rhodesia.

The war continued in the nine months that we lived in Zimbabwe-Rhodesia, and we did not leave Salisbury. Sekuru Lazarus told us that there would be meetings in England to end the war, in a building called Lancaster House, meetings between the guerrillas, and the old white government and the new black and white government. As the year ended, we heard that the talks had ended and there were to be more elections, this time with the guerrillas taking part.

We did not go to Mr Vaswani’s shop again, but Juliana brought us news of the schism that had developed between him and his brother. ‘ Handiti , you know the brother never really comes to the shop,’ Mainin ’Juliana said, ‘but today he was there half the time, and when there were no customers, they were shouting at each other all day.

‘The brother said he wants to go to South Africa. We can’t just leave, this is our home, your son was born here, said Mr Vaswani. Home nothing, look at Uganda said his brother. Don’t take the boy, leave the boy, said Mr Vaswani, and the brother said, he is coming with us, then Mr Vaswani said, who will take over the shops, and the brother said, he is my son, Sanjiv, not my fault you and Suri can’t have children.’

‘They should consult healers to open the wife’s womb,’ my grandmother said and Sekuru Lazarus pulled his mouth into a moue and made a sound of disgust and said all Indians should just go back to India if they were so afraid of our independence.