Kololo Hill Read online

  Motichand was pissing against the tree trunk.

  *

  ‘That’s all? Etlooj?’ said Nileshbhai the barber, holding his index finger and thumb in the air and frowning at the space between them.

  ‘That’s all,’ Vijay said apologetically. Swaddled in a white cotton cloth as he sat in the barber’s chair, he looked at Nileshbhai through the reflection in the mirror.

  ‘What sort of fashion-bashion is this?’ Nileshbhai looked at Motichand, who was sitting in the chair next to them, waiting his turn.

  On the other side of the barbershop, a worker was busy sweeping the floor and wiping mirrors. The air smelt of herby hair oil and hair cream. The walls were lined with framed photos of various white men with neat, short hair directing their most winsome grins at some happy scene in the distance. Vijay was pretty sure a white man had never even entered the barber’s; it was usually filled with Asians and a few Ugandans. But it was difficult to find magazines filled with pictures of Asian men – at least those with decent haircuts – so Nileshbhai used these instead. There was also a photo of Queen Elizabeth, but as far as he knew, none of the men asked to look like her.

  Outside, the street was quieter than usual. Some shops had their shutters closed; a few had a cluster of people outside, hoping to take over a business that had already been vacated. The same people who might have queued to pay for their goods were now waiting to take the dukan itself. Through the government lists that reallocated the businesses, no money even needed to change hands, except bribes for the officials, of course.

  Opposite the barber stood Lalji General Store, where years ago Vinodbhai had given young Vijay a free bag of sweets or shooed him away to get some peace, depending on his mood. The dukan had already been taken over by a man whom Vijay had never seen before. Now it was this man who swept the floor, pulled open the metal gates on the door each morning, who stared out into the street waiting for customers in the same place that Vinodbhai had done a couple of weeks before.

  ‘Don’t leave your hair so long. Let me cut a little more off.’ Nileshbhai waved his scissors around in the air.

  ‘No, honestly, that’s all I want.’

  A pause, a sigh. A begrudging snip. A sliver of hair on the floor.

  Vijay and Motichand had decided to get their hair cut while they could, knowing there’d be more important things to think about after they left Uganda. Motichand browsed the newspaper, licking his finger to turn each page, shaking his head at the headlines that affronted him.

  Nileshbhai lowered his voice. ‘You’re all making plans?’ He was referring to the expulsion, but by calling them ‘plans’, the barber made it sound more like they were booking a short trip away.

  Vijay nodded as Nileshbhai ran his black plastic comb through his hair, never an easy business as it snagged on endless tangles. No point telling Nileshbhai everything. Best not to go into too many details: you didn’t know for sure who you could trust. And if the army knew when you were leaving, they’d descend like locusts before you’d slammed the car door shut. ‘How about you?’

  ‘We are sorting it all out now. Paperwork, passports and more paperwork. What good is it though, Motichandbhai? What good is paper? You can tear it up, you can burn it in a flame—’

  ‘You can wipe it on your arse!’ Motichand put out his hand and Nileshbhai slapped it in amusement.

  ‘Exactly, no one cares what your passports say! We are being shoved out of this country but where will we go? You, Vijaybhai, what does your passport say?’

  ‘British.’

  ‘Good luck, my friend, they don’t want you either. They’ve conveniently forgotten everything us Asians did to bring them wealth in the first place.’ Nileshbhai gestured with his hand. ‘And you, Motichandbhai?’

  ‘Indian, what else?’

  ‘I am the luckiest one then,’ said Nileshbhai. ‘I have one of this fine country’s passports. What use is it now? They said I could stay, then they said I couldn’t.’ He waved his head from side to side as he said it. ‘As if I’d stay in this place anyway, without my family.’

  ‘It’s terrible, Nileshbhai, terrible.’ Motichand shook his head.

  Nileshbhai’s thick moustache twitched, followed by his equally thick eyebrows. ‘And we still have to get out of this country in one piece.’ Nileshbhai raised his chubby hand to his forehead as though he was taking his own temperature. ‘All these money-grabbing karas with their guns.’ Nileshbhai’s worker looked up from the sweeping when he said the word ‘kara’. He probably couldn’t have understood most Gujarati, but he likely knew the derogatory word for black people that Nileshbhai had used.

  ‘They have been stopping the buses at the checkpoints,’ said Motichand. ‘Three or four checkpoints, at each one they make them stop. Make them all get off—’

  ‘And rob them.’ Nileshbhai’s scissor-waving was more animated than ever. Vijay leant forward a little in his chair in case he caught a particularly energetic swerve of steel. ‘Wait a minute, they’ve taken everything from me at the first checkpoint, what am I supposed to give you at the next checkpoint? The stupid salas. And he tells us we can leave with one thousand shillings – what’s that, fifty pounds sterling? What does it matter? Guns are the currency, weapons are the government now. Money means nothing. You know, we should have fought back when that sala president first said it. The Punjabis, they fought alongside the British during both the world wars. They know how to go to battle.’

  ‘But they were trained for generations, Nileshbhai,’ said Motichand. ‘We don’t know how to fight.’

  Vijay decided not to remind them that those Punjabis were older than any of them now. They’d never stand a chance against Amin’s soldiers.

  ‘And even if we did, how many of us are there?’ said Motichand. ‘Seventy, eighty thousand maybe?’

  Vijay shifted in his seat, thinking of Pran still insisting that he was going to find a way to stay in the country, as though he could somehow fend off an entire army on his own. ‘We’re a minority. We’d have no chance.’

  Nileshbhai’s face puffed up more the angrier he got. ‘We were a minority all these years and we controlled most of this country. Me, I’m closing the barbershop this week. And once I sort our papers out, I’m taking all the family out for the biggest meal, the best meal. We will order a bottle of imported whisky and the most expensive things on the menu.’

  Motichand chuckled along and Nileshbhai played up to the attention. ‘If we can’t take it with us, well, I’ll show their precious president. I’ll rub the money I earned all these years into their faces.’

  The barber poured hair oil on his hands and rubbed them together, making a slippery whick-whick sound, then smoothed it through Vijay’s hair before he had a chance to stop him. ‘In fact, Motichandbhai, why don’t you all come along? It’s on me. No, wait, it’s on Amin Dada. After all, it is his money now.’

  10

  Jaya

  Across the sky, a wash of pink faded away, giving in to the rising sun. Jaya paused in the driveway while Motichand locked up the house and the children made their way to the car. Over the road, the ornate iron gate that led to their neighbour Jaswinder Singh’s house was wide open. Jaya moved a few steps closer. The mint-green front door was also wide open.

  ‘Come on, Jaya, let’s go,’ Motichand called out, raising his voice over the fuzzy car radio as he tried to find his station.

  ‘They’ve gone.’ Jaya climbed into the back seat. ‘They’ve all left.’

  Everyone looked over towards the house. It was difficult to tell whether Jaswinder had simply decided that there was no point in locking the door on the way out for the last time, or whether looters had broken in and helped themselves, taking their chance before the government association had a chance to reallocate the home to a Ugandan family.

  ‘They didn’t even say goodbye,’ Jaya said, her tone sombre.

  Pran started the car. ‘People are terrified, Ba, it’s not their fault.’

  �
�Did Kushwant say anything?’ Jaya turned to Vijay. For years, her boys had played together with Jaswinder’s son Kushwant, running up and down the street all day till long after dark. Motichand and Jaswinder had often reminisced about the good old days in India over an evening whisky, and Jaya whiled away long afternoons with Jaswinder’s wife, Nimrat, sitting on the veranda drinking chai.

  ‘Not seen him in a while.’ Vijay shook his head. ‘Not sure where they were going.’

  ‘Canada, didn’t he say?’ Motichand continued to fiddle with the radio.

  ‘I thought it was England?’ said Pran.

  ‘I was going to go and see them, I wanted to give them all some of the dhokra I made,’ Jaya said, looking down at her hands.

  ‘Perhaps one of the other neighbours knows,’ Asha said. ‘We’ll go and ask later.’

  This is how it went now, houses abandoned in the night, cars left by the kerb, keys still in the ignition, turning the area into a ghost town. All these tiny losses, day after day, piling up inside Jaya’s heart, filling it with sorrow. How long before it burst?

  They fell silent. Even Motichand had given up trying to find a radio station and turned it off. As the car progressed slowly towards the city centre, they watched a tall man with a tight-cropped Afro trying to start a car by the roadside. It made a sickly noise, coughing and spluttering, but the man persisted in trying to drive it as it juddered down the street.

  ‘Why’s he trying to drive it?’ Asha asked. ‘It’s clearly broken.’

  ‘Someone must have put sugar in the engine,’ said Vijay. ‘Nileshbhai was telling me about it. “If these gandas want my car after I’ve left, they can have it, but they won’t be driving it far!” ’

  They watched the man with the struggling car until he got to the corner of the road. He got out, kicking the wheels before wandering off.

  When they arrived at the British High Commission there was already a long queue. All were expected to leave the country, but no one was making it easy for them.

  ‘Where’s the British efficiency now?’ Motichand muttered. ‘We should try India, like I said.’

  ‘They won’t let us in, Papa, you know that,’ Vijay said. ‘Our best chance together is England. We have three passports between us.’

  ‘That’s if they let you in,’ Pran sneered. ‘And there won’t be much of a welcome when you get there, you saw the paper the other day.’ There had been advertisements that an English council had put in the Ugandan Argus, telling people not to come to Leicester, where many had gone because they already had family there.

  Motichand had laughed when he’d seen it: ‘Imagine, this Leicester place has so much money they can put these advertisements in the paper! There must be lots of jobs there if they can afford this.’

  Pran shook his head. ‘We helped them build this country up, made Britain wealthy too, but they’ve forgotten all that Commonwealth business now.’

  ‘But if they only let those of us with British passports in, what’s going to happen to you and Papa?’ said Jaya, looking at Pran.

  ‘They wouldn’t split up a family.’ Vijay shook his head.

  ‘I’ve not even decided if I’m going yet,’ said Pran.

  ‘How are you going to fight them?’ said Vijay.

  ‘I’m working on it.’

  Asha whispered. ‘They’re talking about rounding up anyone who doesn’t leave and putting them in the old army barracks. You can’t stay.’

  Jaya stared at Pran. There was no way she’d let him stay in this country. Who knew what would happen to him?

  They carried on waiting, wilting in the heat.

  Hours passed. She tried to catch the faint breeze on her face, felt the sweat pooling on her chest and in her armpits. There was nothing to do but stay as still as possible and watch people go by. It had been a while since Jaya had come to the city centre. It was too dangerous to leave the house after dark, and even during the day there was a new edge, a volatility that cut through the air, a feeling that at any minute someone could do or say anything to you, emboldened by Idi Amin’s decree. She watched two women hurrying along the wide street, past the bakery, the tailors, the fabric shops and the pili pili bazaar with the piles of spices, hurdur, chutni and jeeroo. The women were wrapped in ten kitenges each, their bodies swathed in a mass of patterned cotton, walking as fast as they could with their newly acquired haul. Motichand had come home with stories of the looters; some of them had been friendly with the old owners of the dukans for years. It was not uncommon, Motichand told her, to see people walking down the street, arms piled up with goods so high they couldn’t see in front of them. Jaya took it all in, but reminded herself that for every dishonest person, there were the ordinary Ugandans, many of Motichand’s customers and people like December, who faced despair just like them.

  Across the street, she saw two children playing. They were putting little pebbles into holes in a wall. It was only when she looked again that Jaya realized: it was a rainbow of bullet holes. She quickly turned away, looking further down the broad road, where she and Motichand had strolled for hours with the children on Sunday afternoons, for festivals, Divari, Eid, Vaisakhi and Ugandan Independence a few years back. They’d stop for snacks of sliced green mango scattered with chilli powder, saying hello to friends while firecrackers and fireworks went off around them. Hindus, Jains, Sikhs, Muslims, Parsis, Christian Asians together; sometimes it felt like being back in India, even though, in truth, India had never been like that. This was a dreamlike version of what India might have been like for her. She had to admit that however bad Motichand had been with money, her life in Kampala was far easier than it could ever have been in Gujarat. Uganda offered more opportunities to improve their lives – that was why he’d left in the first place. And now here she was on the same street, saying goodbye to yet another life.

  Dusk began to settle over the city. They were close to the front of the line, but when a security man with a green uniform came outside, they all knew what he was going to say. They’d have to start all over again the next day. They decided that Pran and Vijay would keep their place until the morning. The army seemed too busy harassing people on their way to the airport or looting recently abandoned homes to worry about anyone else.

  That evening, as Jaya walked across the veranda towards her bedroom, the questions whirred in her head. Where would they all go? Could they get out safely? Would they see December again? And now, images of the house flooded her mind, as she remembered when the boys were little.

  Pran and Vijay had come home from school but they wouldn’t listen to her, buzzing with energy like little wind-up toys. They’d been on a school trip to Entebbe zoo that week and Vijay kept doing impressions of a snake, slithering around the floor, covering his school clothes in red earth. Meanwhile, Pran jumped around and roared like a lion.

  ‘Chup! Quiet now!’ said Jaya. She had a mountain of sewing to do and her eyes were still streaming from a morning spent pounding green chillies. Vijay stood and wrapped his arms around her yellow cotton sari, leaving a fine pink film across the fabric. ‘Vijay!’

  He grinned and ran away before she could catch him, getting back down on the floor and slithering off to the shade of a mango tree.

  ‘Raaaauw,’ Pran roared again, hanging off the edge of the veranda. ‘Look, Vijay. Raauw!’

  ‘Ssss,’ said Vijay. ‘I’m going to bite you! Ssssss.’

  Pran, louder now: ‘Raaaauw! Raaauw! Raaaauw!’

  ‘Ssssssssssssssssssssss.’

  ‘Stop that. Go and sit quietly and read your books!’ The boys ignored her. Her voice withering in the heat, arms swelling, cotton blouse digging into her skin. She longed to take it all off and lie down. Why couldn’t she have one minute on her own? A single minute, no grasping little hands, no irritating noise, no incessant questions. A moment to think about no one but herself? Just one. ‘Please stop now,’ she said. The exhaustion frayed her voice but still they would not stop.

  ‘Boys, come here, te
ll me what you saw at the zoo.’ December walked over from the sitting room where he’d been tidying.

  A roar. A slither, a trail of red earth. The boys carried on.

  ‘Boys!’ said Jaya. No response.

  December looked at Jaya and smiled. A look that told her he understood. ‘What are you supposed to be? Is it a gazelle?’ he said, pointing at Pran.

  ‘No! I’m a lion. Not a gazelle!’ Pran pouted.

  ‘And you’re a . . .’ December rubbed his chin, pretending to think, ‘a hippo?’

  Vijay looked up. ‘I’m a snake. A snake!’

  ‘You tell me what you saw at the zoo,’ December said. ‘And then I will tell you about some other animals. Ones you might not even have heard of before.’ He beckoned the children over to the corner of the veranda. ‘Let’s leave your mother in peace.’

  She watched them. They kept running around, but every so often they would stop to listen to December and his stories as he tidied the yard. She went back to the kitchen.

  By the time Motichand came home that evening, the children had eaten dinner, still enthralled by December’s stories. He’d told them about hyenas and crocodiles and buffaloes with horns that dipped in the middle of their heads like centre partings. He’d told them about creatures he’d never seen himself because he’d never seen the sea: octopuses and whales and sharks.

  ‘What’s for dinner?’ Motichand boomed, pulling out boiled sweets from his pocket like a magician.

  ‘Papa!’ the boys shouted, running up to him and snatching at the sweets. Motichand picked up Vijay and flung the boy across his shoulders. Pran laughed and jumped, trying to tap Vijay on the head. Jaya exchanged a look with December. Between the sugar and the excitement, they both knew how long it would take to settle the children again.

  ‘There’s ringra nu shaak,’ said Jaya, putting the aubergine curry on the table. ‘And the bundhi I made yesterday.’