When She Was Queen Read Free Page B

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