And Home Was Kariakoo by M.G. Vassanji Page A

on Uhuru Street right across from where my mother had had her shop. As I jumped out of the car, visions from the past assailed me; I gazed up fondly at Mehboob Mansion where I grew up; at Bhanji Daya Building, Salim Mansion. All two-storey buildings. The shop Karim took me to was in an old-style dwelling even in those days—a house with metal roof, a shop front, and living quarters at the back—where Baby Ndogo, famous as the fattest woman in town, had lived with her family. Karim’s business was run by a local relative. It sold “mitumba,” used clothing imported mainly from Canada. A large variety of fashions and sizes hung on racks, and bales marked “Babies,” “Men Shoes,” “Ladies Jeans,” etcetera stood waiting to be slit open. The long rows of shops and the numerous tailors that had supplied the clothing needs of the city for a good three-quarters of a century had been run out of business by this incoming tide of stylish, ready-mades of the sort that once upon a time only the rich could afford. Now the lowliest menial could wear denim, sport Reeboks. Do you see anyone in rags now? Karim asked me with a grin, and answered after a pause, No. These are good clothes, better than what you and I wear. But we don’t wear them, I said to myself.
    Having shown me this latest enterprise, Karim drove me into an unpaved alley nearby, where at the back of a traditional and very modest African house, sitting on low wooden benches we ate bhajias made of ground pulse, a variety rare outside coastal East Africa, eatenwith coconut chutney. He knew I would like them—who wouldn’t, if only for old times’ sake? In our schooldays, a young man used to go around on a bicycle selling bhajias like these; my mother would buy them while I was in school and save them for me.
    Many years later, here at the Starbucks patio in Toronto, he asks rhetorically, would we let our twelve-year-olds go anywhere far? We wouldn’t. When his father was twelve, his grandfather in India put the boy on a dhow and sent him off to Zanzibar, from where he went to Dar and opened a shop. The old man himself followed with another son and the three of them set up trading posts in three different coastal towns, importing cashews to Dar, exporting grain, copra, and oil. When Karim would return from school, his father would get him to sit in the shop and help. Never mind homework, first things first. And so in London when he went to the bank manager to ask for a loan to purchase the supermarket in Harrow, and the bank manager asked him why during a recession should he give him, a young nobody from the colonies, a loan, Karim replied: My father is a businessman; my brother runs a business in Congo; and I always helped out my father in his shop since I was yay high. I know business, it’s in my blood. He got the loan. Soon afterwards he invested in his first piece of real estate, in Calgary.
    I am convinced that it is not greed that drives him and his like; he’s made and lost money, and made it again; real estate in Calgary crashed, but by that time he had property in New Mexico and London. He moved on, and kept moving. People like him don’t really lose money. Business drives him as chess does a grandmaster. It’s his passion. He thinks it, he talks of nothing else but. Opportunities lost, opportunities to gain; moves made; stories of success and tales of failure. He looks around and his mind calculates: rent, costs, profit.Africa, he says, is full of opportunity. Believe me. There are millions to be made … though we are not young anymore.
    Wary of my occupation and curiosity, still he cannot control himself. He looks at me earnestly, and his soft fair features light up with that smile which gives him the look of a simpleton. We’ve run into each other again in Dar, and we’re sitting in the evening outside the old Odeon Cinema on the sidewalk, which every evening is cleared of vendors and cleaned up to convert it into an open-air restaurant;