The men in the camp were down and depressed on some days, upbeat most of the time. They already saw infinite possibilities: âAree , you know they shut down at five oâclock â we will be OK here. We will be rich.â âFeeling very hopeful. We shopkeepers have joined a nation of shopkeepers, nothing to worry.â âWe came, saw and opened all-day food shops, that is what they will say one day. Our dukans in the hard jungle didnât frighten us. Do you think this place will? Business is in the blood. We will make it big again. Africaâs loss their gain.â The busy bees remade their honeycombs.
And the ones who could not forget never forgave. They looked across at their old homeland with treacherous disdain, scorning the people and the land. You still hear them from London to Vancouver, Leicester to Texas, claiming all credit for progress in East Africa and none of the responsibility for the subsequent ruin: âSee what happened when we left? The junglees , see how they made a mess of paradise, heaven on earth.â âWe tried so hard to teach them correct things, good business ways, but no, telling you easier to teach the monkeys than the blacks.â Later, when news arrived of Ugandans being massacred and tortured, there was little pity they could spare. Only junglees killing each other, whatâs to say? They claimed they had no more thoughts of back home. They lied.
TLâs family, who had faithfully opted for Ugandan passports, were taken to Canada. Half of those folk, including Nazira, went to Vancouver, the rest to Toronto. Moss and Poss went to some hick town in South Carolina and for some years broke their backs doing dirt labour in an industrial bakery. Feriyal took off for Pittsburgh to marry Barry, an American she had met back in Kampala. There are people who were dispersed then whom I have never found. Some of Jenaâs oldest friends are among them.
The loss of our homeland, empty longings linger on and on. Sometimes seem to be getting worse. We got the houses and cars and businesses and gold â bigger and better than most ever had in Africa. But how to remake the inner landscapes of beauty, the pictures imbibed as a child? The only time I have returned to Uganda, I rushed back to London after four days. I was acutely distressed. My country was gone, burned away in the violent years.
In Ealing, where my family lived, a small mosque was opened up in a back street. In other places converted sheds and garages were turned into temples and mosques. During those early years these were packed out. Immigrants call upon much divine goodwill as they struggle to make it. Windows had to be shut and double-locked and the broken panes covered with paper. The airless, miasmic atmosphere brought out the best and worst in worshippers. Sometimes they called on each other when they couldnât manage, and, just like my mum had found back in Kampala, someone always provided. But under pressure people turned bitchy too, and envious. Sometimes unseemly rows broke out on the womenâs side, and the men were embarrassed. I witnessed one of these on the evening we all went to pray for a relative who had died in Canada. A woman sitting next to me hissed across to another sitting in the row in front, âYour son is living with his girlfriend in Earls Court, unmarried and she is black, Khusabai, so donât tell me about sin.â âYou have no shame, stupid girl? Besharam , wearing so many tasbis and talking back? To me? You are talking to an elder like that? Making black stories about my son, when look at you, burnt matchstick, jealous of everyone. Not even a kala houseboy would marry you?â Khusabai swept herself up from the mat, discharged the elaichi she had been chewing on throughout the evening. The spitty cardamom pod landed in her adversaryâs hair, though she only found it later, lodged in her spindly plait.
Inside the mosque they tried to keep the singing soft and the prayers short. They tried not to take up seats on buses taking them there. They staggered arrival and departure times, but still they were abused and mocked, pushed around and sometimes slapped by the natives. In shops and bars (too soon to know they were called pubs), sullen service was the norm, unspoken hatred that took time to hit and then hurt longer than straightforward invective. Or jokes. Sundays were the hardest. How come the streets were empty on this day of fun? Why were there no crowds walking up and down or driving round and round to greet, meet and be jolly? It was death in life, the English Sunday, they moaned, turning to the mosque to give them a couple of hours of crowd warmth.
Bit by bit, TL and I withdrew from these people, no longer our people, the huddled masses. So many were struggling â in small rooms with no heating, bathing every other day using bowls and cups. The old and the young both had to learn humility. Most realized for the first time that for white Britain they were black and here on sufferance. Sure, we pitied the expelled, but what good was that kind of pity without connection? I remember being embarrassed when my mother visited and the times when I enjoyed demeaning programmes like Mind your Language .
In Oxford, supremely detached from all reality, we believed we could drop our past identities, dump them as we did our old clothes from back home, home-made and embarrassing. The college house we shared with other students could have been an eccentric directorâs film set. Takashi, a Japanese economist, cooked wearing a cotton headscarf and stir-boiled tea towels to destruction. There were various young women. Earnestly Christian Susanâs ship came in the day I took her to a resettlement camp, where she prayed on her knees and handed out sweets to the brown babies. Amanda was a bulimic who stole food and resembled members of the Addams family â lanky black hair, pale face. With incense sticks in her hand she traversed the corridors and stairs. Linda was a short American with good teeth who memorized pages from the Shorter Oxford Dictionary with her tall fiancĂ©. They just adored the old university and the English. And I adored them, so untainted by history. Then there was blonde and vivacious Kathy, my first proper English friend. She had an innocence about her. Later she married a TV mogul and became very grand. All these women were mad about TL, and his vanity was daily warmed by their hot girlie breath. It took him ages to climb up the three floors to our door â there were always plugs, broken heels and hairdryers to fix, or Amanda to rescue from herself.
Superior exotics were sought after in Oxford. Benazir Bhutto and Tariq Ali and spoiled children of pampered, erstwhile maharajahs were A-list. But we too were different enough to appeal to a generation seeking new cultural thrills. For us, tri-cultural Britons, it was and always is a matter of precise calculation which identity is most useful when. Laura Ashley Victorian gowns and straw hats with plastic strawberries were for times when I wanted to erase any ethnicity (as if that is so easily done), saris came out for those occasions when white people lusted for Eastern promise and mystique, and my few African patterned tops featuring ferocious masks were good for hanging out with hippy freeloaders and dopeheads. Food too had meaning and purpose. At summer parties and punting picnics it was best not to mention samosas. That was the time to impress your friends with the perfect Victoria sponge and scones. But invite people in for some Indian, and it was all incense sticks and Ravi Shankar.
I was fooling myself. In the English department they barely tolerated me. The arts faculties werenât yet prepared for foreign sorts. Science, economics and the law had always had students and experts from around the world; the English department was very much for the English-speaking first world. At my entry interview, I had said I was keen on V. S. Naipaul. They looked askance, and one said patronizingly, âFor that sort of thing, you should have applied to Leeds or somewhere like that. I believe they do African stuff up there.â And then in a dozen different ways they enquired why someone like me would be interested in Victorian studies.
It is extraordinary how much hurt you can feel when you are the only postgrad student never offered a sherry in the tutorâs den, never invited to Sunday lunch by men and women paid to provide pastoral care. Most of the other postgrads on my course spoke like they were masters of the universe, and I could barely get to form a tentative opinion. Tutorials were purgatory. Maybe I really am no good, I soon thought. Just as they thought. There were friends â Scots, American and Irish â who were managing well in this airless world. I wasnât. Lectures were less oppressive because I could be anonymous, but they were mostly a waste of time and enthusiasm. The temple of scholars turned out to be shambolic and indifferent, clung to rites and status like fading aristocratic families. Most of the lecturers were fumblers who would not, could not, communicate. Students to them were a nuisance, post-grads more so because some were a threat. Oxford academics always had better things to do â concentrate on the tome or the perfect poem that had already taken six years, drink with their own sort, tend rose gardens and dine heartily in colleges, rounding off with the best port in the world. (Is it passed from left to right or the other way?)
A few in the faculty were brilliant, no question, and knew it too. There was the trendy lefty Terry Eagleton, whose radical literary criticism made my pulse race. Hungry, sexy young females were always at his feet in the Kingâs Arms, and I didnât dare approach. But there was one, only one â John Carey â who was inspirational, like my favourite lecturers in Uganda. With sharp, glinting eyes and beautifully modulated language, Carey saved my intellectual life, kept the flame burning. My gratitude to him is immense and forever.
In the Bodleian Library, for hours on end, I withdrew and read. I discovered Anthony Trollope and went through all his novels in a few weeks. They took me into a provincial, petty, heathery England that kept to itself. Still does. Carey inspired me to revisit Dickens, and I found the courage to read Wordsworth. When I finally got âTintern Abbeyâ, it was like the most pleasurable orgasm. My micro suede skirts gave similar pleasure to the men who lived and probably died in the same library seats, speaking only to old leather-bound books.
The college, Linacre, was different, new, internationalist and unpretentious, very 1970s. One woman arrived chaste as a nun and was ravished by an American with the beautiful physique of a horse. She fast made up for lost time. A gorgeous Welshman with a deep valley voice seduced all who were willing, and many were. A Muslim imam and a Catholic priest were brought down by the same Syrian vixen with hot red lips.
Linacre had a croquet lawn, and TL was a natural when it came to physical sport. His squash was fast and furious, his tennis beautifully pacey, his legs were like Ilie NÄastaseâs, and by this time he played croquet like he was born to it. One scene comes to mind. He is out there knocking about with three men. One, letâs call him Charles, struts, smokes disdainfully and has that look of ennui only old money can buy. He asks the two white guys if they want a drink and ignores TL, who is beating them all. Again. The Empire strikes back on the playing fields. TL asks anyway: âA Coke please.â Charles ignores the request, and so I rush up and call him a rude bastard. He laughs, grabs my hair and kisses my lips as if he owns me, as if I am some milkmaid on his estate. I feign outrage but am flattered and excited â a thoroughbred Englishmanâs kiss, my first ever.
So here we were, a married Asian couple surrounded by wild sex, drugs and rock ânâ roll, the real thing, not the tame copycat stuff back home. What made it so electrifying was that there was no guilt, no shame, no censure. Couples passed partners faster than a Scottish reel, and a dalliance was already too long. We declined the drugs and excessive drink (TL was a proper Muslim then, refusing even liquid food supplements with traces of alcohol; I always drank wine), but the wild times did catch up with us, and we lost our bearings then. I flirted but could never abandon myself enough to betray the vows I had made. Barely a year after our marriage, TL confessed that he had been spending an awful lot of time on a filthy mattress with a sexy woman with long hair who wore calico, didnât wash that much and lived in a squat. Her feral sex consumed him for a while. I canât blame him. We had no compass. The past was not even another country; it had been dissipated, and we were in a place without restraint. Values drummed into us in East Africa would once again be reconfigured and formulated but at this time were scraps flying in the wind. By the time I recovered direction and constraint, years later, TL was gone. Sex gave migrants one way to belong. Food was the other.
By then I had mastered ten recipes, and new chums were filling our North Oxford flat to eat with their plates on their laps. The kitchen had a small, old electric cooker and a little fridge. It was easy to impress then â nobody knew much about Eastern food, and they couldnât tell I was no expert. It was just a damn sight better than spag bol. And even though we were always struggling to pay the bills, these cheap feasts made us feel like somebodies. We were artless and eager to please our new best friends. Most have since vanished, and I miss them. For exiles those first bonds in the unexpected afterlife mean so much more than they do to those who ever so kindly befriend them.
Carrot halva was much appreciated by our skint guests, cheap, buttery and wickedly sweet. Advanced cannabis users always requested some to take back. Anne, our beloved Scottish friend, taken too young by cancer, used to eat it spread thin on brown toast to slow the sugar rush.
