Published in Geometry, Issue 4

Gaddha

Your grandfather was born in Uganda shortly before Idi Amin came into power. I was born in Vancouver shortly after the Canucks lost the Stanley Cup to the New York Rangers. Which would you rather hear about: Dadapa and his life across the ocean or hockey, boy? Grandpa. Of course. Your grandpa’s family, Muslim-Indians from Gujarat, had been coerced to the African country through British colonization efforts. By the time anti-Indian sentiments forced any remaining non-natives out, they had left for Pakistan. Later, your dadapa would tell his children about the end of Indian-Uganda, when well-dressed Indians fleeing the country would approach random passerbys and say:

            “You see that car over there?”

            “Sure?”

            “You like it?”

            “Sure.”

            “It’s yours.” And then the well-dressed man tossed the pedestrian a set of keys for a

silver BMW and disappear.

            All of that is true. Your grandfather would later settle down in Canada to raise a family and teach English to other immigrants. He would tell me and your aunt and your uncle a story that was not as true. In it, a Gujarat man in Uganda searched for Idi Amin’s lost treasure. But it bears no truth. None whatsoever. So be sure not to believe it, boy.

Aasav, the hero of this story, developed a knack for rolling cigarettes on the freighter. A line of dried tobacco split a slip of paper, a deft thumb and forefinger, a wetted tongue, and there you had it. He rarely smoked and opted instead to trade them with the sailors for swigs from the rum barrel. But his reputation as the designated roller grew on the shipping barge. British sailors called “Paki!” and rushed to him with tins of snuff and papers. Aasav didn’t mind the task, especially since the sailors never caught on when he cursed at them.

            “Ben chot,” he called a sailor, and the pasty face beamed back at him. Tobacco sprinkled along paper, twist at each end, a line of saliva to hold.

            Aasav kept company with the barrelled rum and warm Indian Pale Ales that took so long to sour. He rolled cigarettes, drank, swore at sailors, and vomited over the ship’s rail when seasickness or drunkenness came on too strong. A week of this went by before the translator came to him. The traces of a white beard and skin leathered and crinkled by the sun, he found Aasav rolling smokes below deck.

            “So you’re the black stowaway,” he said.

            “Paid,” Aasav said. Sprinkle tobacco. “Fair, square.”

            “What do you speak in your motherland?”

            “Urdu.” Twist the paper.

            “I know enough Hindi. If it’ll help the conversation?”

            Saliva to hold.

            “I have rum as well. If it’ll help the conversation.”

            Two tin mugs held out. Placid, brown rum. Aasav had time for conversation.

            The Hindi-speaker ousted himself as the ship’s translator. Other than English and Hindi, he spoke Afrikaans, Swahili, French, and a few traces of Latin.

            “Dead a language as those who spoke it,” he said, and spilled brown liquor into the curl of hair beneath his lip. “But you: what takes you to Uganda? Or back to?”

            “Treasure, bartanvi,” Aasav said. “A great, lost treasure. The hidden fortune of Idi Amin.”

            The translator snorted into his drink. “Treasure, aye? I’ve heard many rumours about Mr. Amin. Some claimed he practiced cannibalism and ate the flesh of his enemies. Others called him a voodoo shaman. Idi Amin named himself president for life, but he is still alive, and he isn’t king anymore.”

            Aasav let the rum buzz around his skull for a moment more and then leaned in towards the translator with a booze-laced whisper. “My father, I never met him, but my mother was told about Amin’s treasure by him. She was a shudra, but practiced as a brahmin with liquor to alter her mind. I never heard much of my father himself, but he ran from Uganda with the knowledge of the president’s fortune teasing his thoughts. Amin, paranoid and jumping between personalities daily, feared that his enemies, wives, ex-wives, even his followers would take all that he had. So he hid his treasure trove in Uganda’s jungles with his own hands.”

            The translator hesitated. “Blackie, that’s the most insane notion I’ve heard yet. Small a country as she is, you’d have to scour Uganda for your entire life. Where do you even begin?”

            Aasav shrugged and downed the dregs from his mug. “Start digging.”

Your dadapa had stories from his childhood to share with his children, same as any father. There was the time he almost blinded a neighbour with a BB gun. The tales of childhood friends lost and rediscovered in time. There were stories, rumours really, of the remaining Ugandans that built campfires in their exiled employers’ kitchens, unable to work an oven or stove. Nowadays I doubt those stories, but when I was young they seemed like immense tales of the struggles Dad escaped.

            Conversely, whenever your aunt or I were instructed to do chores we reminded your grandpa that he had African servants in Uganda to do his work for him. But Dadapa had all but assimilated to North America’s way of life: devout Canucks fan, avid barbequer, fluid in Candian-English. I always found it intolerable when he corrected my grammar. Him, an Urdu speaker first, and me, a writer entwined in the English language and its stories. Listen up, boy. The ride won’t be much longer. We’ll be there soon.

The bus curved around the national park that seeped between Kenya and Uganda and stopped in a small depot in Tororo. Aasav, weary from nights in bunks that rumbled and prompted motion sickness, stumbled from the bus and found a choice garbage can to vomit into and a street vendor to buy meat and bread from.

            Uganda. Identical to the Kenyan countryside he had just drifted through, with nuanced differences that any foreigner would assumedly ignore. Arid and framed by greenery that lined the roads and not much else, the streets were sand-coloured and draped with dust like packaged sugarcane. Slab bricks sanded down by wind and sprinkled over every surface. Aasav passed enough half-constructed buildings to assume that the concrete made up most of the landscape. The horizon was the same as Gujarat, perhaps a stronger shade of orange that swallowed up the natural blue. But just as flat and stretched, save for the odd pop of flora.

            The bread was dry and the meat overcooked but it was something to fill Aasav’s stomach and push back the acidic flavour coated over his throat and tongue. The streets, busy for such a small town, boasted hazardous-orange apartment blocks that followed the roads to the hill at the horizon. Tororo Rock, if the maps Aasav had scanned were still accurate. Grey-skinned citizens ducked out of alleyways, avoided khaki-clad police, lugged baskets of fruit, vegetables, slit-throat chickens. A line of taxis sat stagnant just a block down: white vans gilded with baggage racks and girdles and a bright, blue decal that wrapped around the length. The newspaper that held the last of Aasav’s meat and bread fell into the gutter as he made his way towards the vehicles.

            A group of men in black vests emblazoned with ‘POLICE’ and blue outlines of crested cranes on their shoulders turned out of the adjacent street and stopped dead in front of Aasav. Stony machine guns hung over their tan pants.

            The first Ugandan looked over Aasav, eyes a yellow-red. “Dukawalla!”

            The two other men stalked over and surrounded Aasav, hands on his shoulders and their weapons. Swahili spat into Aasav’s ears.

            “Hindi? Urdu?” he begged.

            The first policeman glowered over Aasav and jabbed a finger at him. “Dukawalla!”

            Aasav shrank, scraped his pockets for a few thousand shillings, and held it up as an offer. The man with yellow eyes flipped through the bills with a licked thumb and forefinger then flicked his head and the other policemen unhanded Aasav. The first Ugandan pushed Aasav back along the path he had been walking, and all three shoved their way past him and down the street.  

            “Teri ma ko kuttey chodein!” Aasav called after them.

            Aasav dug out a wad of bills stored in his sock, entered the first taxi he could reach, and sat passenger to a skinny, dark Ugandan with a pair of plastic sunglasses hung from his ears.

            “Where to, dukawalla?”

Idi Dada Amin, His Excellency President for Life, Field Marshal Alhaji Dr. Idi Amin Dada visited the eastern region of the country in the summer of 1977, just a few months before the Uganda-Tanzania War ended his lifelong presidency. Amin and his escort – twenty-something high ranking officers, several jeeps and caravans, and three purebred stallions – traversed along Lake Victoria through dusty towns, slums that drowned in mud and malaria, and past small shanties in the towers of greenery. Eventually, the party reached the thick of jungle that bordered Kenya and bled into the roots of Mount Elgon. Chasms swallowed the ground like mass graves and spat fountains of waterfalls thousands of feet into the earth. The roads became thinner, rarer and bent trees swallowed the manmade devices of paths, vehicles, guns, servants, followers, medals, and titles. The rumours said they took all that Amin possessed and reduced him to a naked beggar that crawled with the beetles through the dirt. The rumors said the jungles of Uganda were too much for even the commander of the country to bear, that nature itself overtook whatever immense power Idi wielded. His escort disappeared into the woods: many said they died, many others say they were humbled into lives of philosophical solitude. In the northern section of the forest, a man of God – drunk on homemade wine – swore he saw Amin emerge from the forest on horseback, a bundle under one arm as he whipped the gilded and feathered beast into a frenzy. The man, at first unable to place Amin without uniform and hat, swore it to be the president, dressed only in his underclothes with a sheen of sweat over his eyes, as if he had just woken from a unknowable nightmare. Amin dismounted and disappeared into a lone building, one of the many in the area. The man who sighted him would never recall which it was, as he searched for the bundle Amin disposed of for the rest of his life. That specific corner of Uganda was condensed with Roman Catholic churches, Pentecostal churches, Apostolic churches, Bubuyi churches, Kalawa churches, and mosques, spattered over the same stretch of land. All Aasav had to do was find the right place of worship.

            The roads outside of Budadiri were hardly dirt paths, more so clay-coloured gullies. Despite Wagagi Resort’s cardboard beds and rooms that swam with mosquitos, Aasav found that he missed the town’s dilapidated homeliness and the throngs of schoolchildren in white-red uniforms – shaved heads all – that crowded Aasav and laughed at his facial hair and orange skin. Patches of ferns and a woolen blanket on the side of the road paired with arms that crawled with bug bite welts didn’t make for such enjoyable nights.

            The churches and mosques never impressed, as many as Aasav visited so far. Flat buildings that heaved sadness from their concrete walls or metal slats. Preachers in loose-fit collared shirts wielded handshakes and weary grins and conversations of gods. But no long-lost treasure. Other than in towns and places of worship, Aasav hadn’t met another human being in the bush yet. Occasionally, wildlife darted from the jungle: a dust-grey warthog, lizards that skittered over tree trunks, primates that leapt from branches several stories overhead. Aasav kept busy spotting and naming birds as he walked; his pack a weight on his shoulders and his fingers busy with rolls of tobacco, twenty-four cigarettes stored away by now. Guineafowls poked their heads from underbrush. The black shapes of bateleurs flashed red and yellow beaks against the grey smudges of sky through the foliage. Whistling ducks could sometimes be found nestled in tall grass if he was close to wetlands. Not even a glimpse of the grey crowned cranes famed for their presence in Uganda, but there was time.

            Blue-camo soldiers found Aasav on a paved road as he stumbled from the forest. Their jeep was pulled into a ditch, the four men pissing into the underbrush. Shouts of “Dukawalla!” when they spotted and circled him. The soldiers pulled his pack away from him, spilled his rolled and unrolled cigarettes onto the dirty, grey road. He found himself in the backseat of their vehicle while the four men smoked his cigarettes and left ashy clouds that swirled around the interior. Aasav rolled more, unrolled them, rerolled them, and passed them to the troopers. Shoved around from shoulder to shoulder as the jeep hit bumps and potholes, he wished for a moment to step back out onto the road and empty his stomach with waves of nausea.

            The grey crowned crane stepped out onto the clay path as the sun began to set. A ridiculous creature in its own right: crested with a mohawk of straw-like feathers, frightened eyes rimmed with white and black, and loose, red skin that hung from its chin. The jeep hit it as soon as the bird was glimpsed in the headlights. The driver shocked the brakes, the passengers yelled at the driver, the driver yelled back. All four soldiers burst from the doors, ran back to inspect the corpse. Aasav, stunned for a moment, ran into the trees and left a pile of papers and loose tobacco and the last of his possessions in the backseat. 

Your dadapa listened to Bob Dylan and The Beatles. He had a moustache and a crown of lost hair. He snuck cigarettes and your grandma always found out. He rode a motorcycle, a Harley Davidson. He built a tree fort in the backyard of the house I grew up in and we painted the walls with a mural of animals in jungles and oceans and a stretch of night sky over it all. After his mother passed he cried behind the mosque. Your grandpa and I were both in the room she died in. He wasn’t religious, neither was your dadima. Whenever me or my siblings interrogated our parents on God they denied both allegiance or opinions. But I always felt cold observing funerals in the white halls of mosques. Here, your tie is loose, boy. Pull the knot close to your throat. It isn’t supposed to be comfortable.

The church was scuffed linoleum and glassless windows that ran parallel to faded pews. A bruised podium sat front and center, overlooked by a yellow and bloody Jesus slumped from a cross. Aasav stumbled through the door in the still-dark hours of the morning and fell into the first row of pews and into an exhausted sleep.

            The sky was grey and dusky when he woke to the preacher. An Indian man who spoke Hindi. He brought Aasav a bowl of flavourless ugali porridge and a cup of tea, heavy with sugar and milk, in a ceramic cup. The preacher opened his hands to Aasav, his palms darker than any bit of skin on Aasav’s body. The Ugandan sun had tanned him to black. Aasav spoke into the unfurled hands, comforting as the gesture was, and told the preacher everything. His mother, a drunken untouchable. His father, an enigma. And himself… a drunken enigma. Aasav searched for… what? A fable? A treasure that might not even exist. To become famed, rich beyond imagination. The preacher nodded, silent except for muttered tsks at key points in Aasav’s story.

            The man set down his mug of dregs. “I was a shudra growing up, too. I cleaned bathrooms, averted my eyes from higher-ups. When I came here, as a missionary, it was all behind me. The man who used to preach in this church, before he died and I took his place, he left me with a gift. Something lost here a long time ago.” The preacher left for the backroom of the church and returned with a flask and a bundle of cloth bound in cords of rope.

            “You’ll want this first,” he said, and offered Aasav the flask. Aasav drank from it, grateful for the burn of grain alcohol that cut down his throat. He sipped again as the preacher untied ropes and unwrapped cloth, careful to avoid the touch of the contents he revealed. Another sip. The parcel was a statue of a donkey the size of a small dog, eyes closed and laying on its legs. Gold, but fake. The paint chipped at every edge to reveal the dull copper underneath.

            “This is it?” Aasav sank. Another, deeper sip of the flask. “This is all it is?”

            “So it is, treasure hunter. But it’s yours. All yours.” The preacher leaned back and gestured to the golden donkey. Aasav reached for the statue. He touched it.

A brown-skinned man in a grey suit with a neat moustache threw the keys of a silver BMW to a passerby. The man in a grey suit leaned over the rail of an ocean liner, held the brim of a porkpie hat as the wind whipped his tie over his shoulder. The man with his grey suit jacket hung from a wall, collared shirt buttoned as he stocked shelves in a corner store. The man in an unbuttoned collared shirt, tie over the back of his chair as he pored over and marked maps of Uganda. The man in a grey suit as he turned an aisle to find an Indian woman that mopped the floors, averted her gaze from him. The man and woman behind the corner store with a shared cigarette, her eyes finally meeting his. Laughter, happiness. A pregnant Indian woman. More maps, more notes, more photographs of Idi Amin and a more bewildered and crazed man in a grey suit. A more pregnant Indian woman. Fights, shouts, bruised skin. The Indian woman with a week-old Aasav bundled in cloth. The man in a grey suit stowed away in a ship headed to Africa. Soldiers, armed and camouflaged, that pulled him from the cargo hold. Put him on his knees at the edge of a ditch in the depths of the jungle. Rolled his body into the trees.

Aasav flinched his hand away from the donkey. “Pancho!”

            The preacher, who sat beneath the yellow Christ with the last of his porridge, looked up. “You’re alive again, hm?”

            Aasav blinked at the sunspots that clouded his vision. A pit of nausea swam in his belly. He found the flask underneath the pew, dropped as soon as he’d touched the statue, and swigged from it. “How long …”

            Another sip.

            The preacher scanned the sky outside the window. “Ten minutes? Feels like a lifetime, doesn’t it.”

            Aasav breathed in the muggy air. Sweat pooled at his underarms. “This… I don’t want any of this thing.”

            The preacher shrugged. “Wouldn’t be the first time. If you mind… what did you see?”

            Aasav stood and drained the flask and made to leave.

            “I see a woman I loved, back in Calcutta,” said the preacher. “She’s older now. Much older, but, then again, so am I.”

            Aasav spun on his heel and stared down the statue; a placid, peaceful expression over the donkey’s snout. He wrapped it, tugged the cloth around it and bound it tight with the rope, careful not to even graze the golden paint with his hands. It went under his arm. He set the flask down on the pew.

            “Good luck, treasure hunter,” the preacher said and downed the last of his tea.

            “Ben chot!” Aasav called back as he left the church for the hot soup of Ugandan air, Idi Amin’s lost treasure in the crook of his arm.

Your grandfather never held onto his faith. If that’s an example of his positive characteristics or negative, so be it. Neither my father nor my mother admitted to God. Rather, they allowed their children to learn of life on their own. The two had discovered their own philosophy, their own outlook. It can be said that both of them expected to pass and never see their children again. So be it. Dadapa did what any father would: pass on a story. A story of retreating from Uganda to Pakistan to Canada, with a tale of Aasav the treasure hunter on their lips.

           Leave your jacket on, boy. I know it’s hot. I know the mosque doesn’t allow the luxury of air conditioning, or can’t afford it, but you’ll leave your shoes at the entrance, let the tiles cool your feet. Your grandma is here and she’ll need both of us, even if you and I are as sad as she is. Your dadapa may not have believed in God but in God’s house we’ll remember him, remember his stories.