Petina Gappah - An Elegy for Easterly

The new elections put Mr Vaswani out of our minds. Everyone said this would mean real independence. My grandmother found herself singing the songs of the moment. ‘ Na nana ayiyaye Zimbabwe. Africa ayiawo Zimbabwe ’ along with Bob Marley became one of the familiar sounds of our house. She was not the only one with Zimbabwe on her lips.

‘From tomorrow onwards,’ our neighbour on the left informed Sekuru Lazarus, ‘my business will no longer be called Trymore Panel Beaters, but Zimbabwe Panel Beaters.’ Not to be outdone, the man who collected bottles from Mufakose to Glen Norah followed suit, but could only manage Zimbab above the already present Bottle Collectors, unable to fit the rest on the small space of his pushcart.

Throughout the changes visible and invisible that were occurring all around us, my uncle continued kupaumba . ‘I will never vote for UANC,’ he said, ‘ZAPU is the party to beat. Joshua Nkomo was there from the beginning. Imagine it, Prime Minister Joshua Nkomo, hela! ’

Not even Sekuru Lazarus swallowed independence with such gasping thirst as my aunt Juliana. She told us of the gutsaruzhinji that the guerrillas would bring, the socialism, she said, that meant that there would be no servants and masters, no oppression because everyone would be the same. ‘There will be none of this business like you and your madam,’ she said to Susan. ‘ Mu India had better be careful. If he doesn’t watch it, something will happen.’

Mainin ’Juliana planned all the things that would happen. ‘He will have to give us higher wages. We will not work on Saturdays. And with more money, I can do my secretarial.’

‘Juliana, I smell a burning pot,’ said my grandmother.

We ate our sadza and leaf vegetables with charred black meat that night, but we dreamed along with Mainin ’Juliana and shared Sekuru Lazarus’s certainty that the Prime Minister would be Joshua Nkomo. Only Susan doubted that the changes would change her life. ‘It may well be that there will be this socialism, Juliana,’ she said, ‘but I can tell you right now that no amount of socialism will make my madam wash her own underwear.’

Two days before the elections, we went back to Mr Vaswani’s shop to buy shoes for Danai. ‘It’s like you have fertiliser in your feet,’ Sekuru Lazarus said to him. Mainin ’Juliana had promised us pork pies, and we were looking forward to this treat.

Mr Vaswani’s voice stopped us as we left. ‘Now, now, Juliana, what is this, where are you going?’

‘You said I could leave early today, I have to take the children home,’ she said.

‘Well, yes, but you look now, there are so wary many customers.’

‘I am going,’ Mainin ’Juliana said. ‘That was the agreement.’

As she turned to go, Mr Vaswani pulled on the sleeve of her jersey. There was a cry from Mrs Vaswani. The next thing we saw was Mr Vaswani lying on the floor of the shop, blood streaming from his nose, his spectacles beside him, the right eyeglass smashed. Still crying, Mr Vaswani’s wife ran out of the shop, a bright pink whirl into the street. She returned just minutes later with a policeman who marched us all to the Charge Office, Mr Vaswani with a handkerchief to his nose, Mrs Vaswani clucking beside him, Mainin ’Juliana on the policeman’s arm and Danai and I following, Danai clutching his shoes to his chest.

The Charge Office was a confused mass of policemen in red-brown shining shoes and khaki uniforms, and people complaining about crime, people accused of crime, and people enquiring about people accused of crime. ‘Just sign an admission of guilt, and the whole thing will be over,’ the policeman who arrested Juliana said to her in Shona.

The old Mainin ’Juliana may have done that, but this new Mainin ’Juliana was drunk on gutsaruzhinji . ‘ Handina mhosva ,’ she shouted. ‘I have done no wrong. This is Zimbabwe this, we left Rhodesia behind. I will do it again if I have to.’

‘You see how she is threatening me,’ said Mr Vaswani. He glowered at Juliana through the still intact left eyeglass. ‘Arrest her, arrest her.’

‘Arrest me, arrest me,’ said Mainin ’Juliana. ‘If you don’t, ndinomuita kanyama kanyama , you will have to sweep him from these Charge Office floors. Arrest me, arrest me.’

She was arrested.

And this is how Mainin ’Juliana spent three of Rhodesia’s dying days at Salisbury Remand Prison.

Sekuru Lazarus was wrong: the new Prime Minister was not Joshua Nkomo after all. After the results were announced, the people on our street crowded into our neighbour’s house to watch Prime Minister Robert Mugabe on television. He said it was a time for reconciliation, for turning swords into ploughshares. He said we should reach out our hands in friendship so that black and white could work together to build the new country. Perhaps Mr Vaswani, though neither black nor white, watched the Prime Minister’s address too, because two weeks later, he sent Timothy to tell Mainin ’Juliana that she could have her job back if she wanted it.

‘ Ende futi Mu India thinks he is funny,’ she said after her first day back in the shop. ‘He is now saying to people that if they steal, he will set me on them. She will beat you like she beat me, he says.’

It took her another three years to achieve her dream, but eventually, Mainin ’Juliana got a job as a typist at the Ministry of Employment Creation. Mr Vaswani was there with his wife, clapping beside Timothy, Sekuru Lazarus, my grandmother, my parents and Danai and me when Mainin ’Juliana received her secretarial diploma.

‘No room for layabouts in this world,’ he said again to Danai and me. ‘See how hard your auntie works.’

We continued to remind Mainin ’Juliana about the day she punched Mr Vaswani. Even after she married, and put violence behind her as a staunch pillar of the Anointed Church of the Sacred Lamb, she never quite shook off the reaches of the past, so that even her husband used the incident to cajole their children into behaving. ‘Your mother is a boxer,’ he said. ‘She will deck you like she decked that Indian.’

Mr Vaswani became as much a part of her children’s lives as he had been a part of ours. She took them to the shop like she had taken us, only she went as a valued customer the week before the school term. She often came back complaining that Mr Vaswani was getting soft in his old age. ‘It is bad management practice to give so many freedoms to employees,’ she said.

When she died, Mr Vaswani came to her funeral. He sat with the men of the family while the women whispered his name. When the mourning became too heavy, we laughed at the many ridiculous episodes of her life. We asked one of the family daughters-in-law to imitate the actions of the deceased. Her fist punched the air and the room rang with our laughter as she acted out, without prompting, the right hook that Mainin ’Juliana gave to Mr Vaswani.

The wedding guests look upon the cracked, pink lips of Rosie’s bridegroom. They look at Rosie’s own lips that owe their reddish pinkness to artifice, they think, and not disease. Can Rosie see what they see, they wonder, that her newly made husband’s sickness screams out its presence from every pore? Disease flourishes in the slipperiness of his tufted hair; it is alive in the darkening skin, in the whites of the eyes whiter than nature intended, in the violently pink-red lips, the blood beneath fighting to erupt through the broken skin.