And Home Was Kariakoo by M.G. Vassanji

hand, at this patio outside a Toronto Starbucks, is of the cheapest sort—consistent with the manner of the typical Gujarati vania, the business caste: wealth is not for show, but to make. He’s made and lost some millions in hotels and property in Canada, the United States, the Bahamas, and London. He’s currently developing a resort in Zanzibar. And he’s based in Dubai, where he and his partners have written off some twenty condominiums after the real-estate bubble there burst. Time was, he says, when you paid someone to stand in a queue to book a condo for you, and you turned a profit the next day. But now he’s in neutral gear.
    Karim and I went to school together, his family running a produce shop opposite the Dar es Salaam market, next to the post office. Ever since we finished school and went overseas to university, we’ve run into each other by sheer accident in the oddest circumstances, but rarely in Toronto. (This current meeting is an exception, and by arrangement.) The first time was in London, where I was stranded once, a student on my way to or from the United States. It was the 1970s. Soon after finishing his chemical engineering degree, Karim, having grown up amidst the fish smells of the teeming market near his father’s Kariakoo shop, had the audacity to purchase a small supermarket in London. We had met at the Ismaili guest house on Gloucester Road where a bed could be had for five pounds and there was every likelihood of running into someone from back home, on a tourist visa but searching desperately for an accounting articleship, a secretary’s job, or a place in a college. London, after all, had been the centre of our colonial universe, a magnet at a distance; it wouldtake time to wean ourselves away from it. Come and visit me tomorrow, Karim said. I did so, taking the tube next day into Harrow and walking into a typical small English supermarket. That night he and another classmate, who had been a close buddy of his in Dar, took me to the Playboy Club. I was in a somewhat stunned state in that dark and glitzy hall, smiling white bunnies with bouncy breasts and long bare legs hovering around; none of us drank; all three of us were from simple families of the pious variety, and this was definitely not Karim’s beginning on a path of debauchery—he still is the pious, prayerful sort. We soon escaped from the scene. Why had they brought me there? It’s too late to ask, but I would guess it was to demonstrate their success in the world.
    It seems to me that after he left Dar he’s never had a home—a single, permanent dwelling. He’s lived in many places, he’s lived in two places at the same time. The last few times I’ve simply run into him in the streets of Dar. One morning while making my way from my guest house, the depressingly essential and affordable Flamingo, to Uhuru Street and Msimbazi, where Walter Bgoya had his publishing offices, a 4 × 4 stopped ahead of me and gave two sharp hoots. A voice called out my name from the window. You here? It was Karim. Get in, he commanded with a grin. I obeyed and he drove me first to an outlet on Samora Avenue where he took two bundles that could have contained sugar or rice or even books, but they contained instead Tanzanian currency, which had become so devalued it had to be carried in packages and baskets and changed into dollars as quickly as possible. Without asking me, he next whisked me off to KT Shop, where we had vitumbua, kababs, and sweet chai.
    What was he doing here in Dar? Didn’t he have property abroad? I’ve moved here, temporarily, he said. Business is good. InDar he owned oil mills and imported canned condensed milk; he had a partnership in a broadcasting company and a garbage collecting company; he brought in soap from Indonesia, packaging the same variety as detergent and body wash. He had had his life threatened by a competitor. Come, he said, and he drove me to the location of a new venture. To my utter amazement, it was