Uhuru Street Read Free Page A

order once more.
    Mother summoned Omari, the tailor at Parmar’s Tailoring Mart nearby, who moonlighted sometimes by sewing our school uniforms and other clothes. Yes, he said, his brother was in town and looking for work. The next morning he brought Ali with him; the Ali who stood somewhat diffidently before Mother’s doubtful gaze from her position on the high stool behind the counter. ‘Same mother, same father?’ was her first question, it being the commonbelief that among the Africans the definition of brother – or mother, or father, for that matter – stretched somewhat to suit occasions.
    ‘Ah, Mama, you jest!’ laughed Omari good naturedly. ‘He is the son of my younger mother – he’s my brother, no doubt!’
    This belied appearance. The two could not have looked more different. Beside the tall and stately Omari, in his clean white muslin kanzu over his black trousers and checked red shirt, his hand-stitched cloth cap, and his sandals, stood a proper mshamba – a man from the farms, from the interior. Short, though thin, with ruffled, thick hair, and barefoot – toenails broken, soles fissured where they turned up, like those of someone who has never worn shoes even under the hottest sun. Ali was coal black, and beside him Omari could even pass off as fair. His cutoffs were in tatters, his shirt had no buttons and was tied in front in a knot. He looked sullen and gave mumbling answers to Mother’s pointed questions. But he looked honest, if only for his oafishness. You could not easily mistake him for one of those shifty characters who made a living by unpegging some item hanging for sale in a crowded store and making a dash for it. For this reason, on recommendation, and with no other choice, Mother hired Ali.
    One more village boy would have to be house-trained. And after that, how long would he last? If he was smart enough, he would pick up the requisite skills and sooner or later move on to employment in a richer home, finally even with a European family – who could tell? We all wished though that we could afford the well-trained servants who could run a household as smoothly as a well-oiled machine, without being visible. As Grandmother’s Chagan and Magan did. Her servants, she said, were gems. Everyone agreed. You only had to go to her home to see what a good servant could do. She got their nicknames from the old ditty that runs, ‘My Chagan and Magan are of gold …’ Their cooking was famed: on rare occasions she would loan them for a communityfeast. Everyone knew then that the feast would be something special. Remtibai’s Chagan and Magan were cooking it. Her grillings of prospective servants were also legendary. Can you sweep? she would ask a nervous applicant. Can you do beds? Can you cook biriyani? Come on, tell me how! My sons, when they return from work, require a clean house, like those of the Europeans. Do you clean latrines? Yes Mama, yes Mama, yes Mama, he would answer; and then, only if she liked him, she’d come out with: ‘And can you steal?’ catching his ‘Yes Mama’ with a mischievous glint in her eye before he could quite suppress it.
    But our Ali caught on fast, barring the first few days of anxiety and amusement: as when, at Firoz’s suggestion, he tried to sip hot tea from the spout of the teapot to taste it for sugar; or, again at a similar suggestion, when he stood expectantly holding up the plug of the electric iron in his outstretched hand, imagining the electricity to flow from his body to heat the iron. On this second occasion it was only when Mother asked him rather sharply, ‘But what are you
doing
, standing there like that?’ that he realised something was out of order. But such incidents became rare, and soon everybody depended on him. His appearance changed too, and for the better as it only could. Gone were his initial surliness and embarrassment. He turned out to be of a more cheerful and lively disposition than we could have guessed.
    At six