I had seen Indians before; they were hard to miss, the women in fabrics of gossamer lightness, splashes of colour on Salisbury’s pavements, and, like their men, as brown as we but with hair that slipped and slithered like white people’s. Until I saw Mr Vaswani, I had never been close enough to them to see the colour of their irises. Our school in Chitsa was closed because of the war so that my brother Danai and I were sent to Glen Norah Township in Salisbury to live with my mother’s younger sister, Mainin’Juliana, who shared a house with their brother, our SekuruLazarus. We came to know all about Mainin’Juliana’s Indian. She called him MuIndia wangu, my Indian, shorthand for my Indian employer, to distinguish him from all the other Indians that were not Mr Vaswani. She worked in a shop in town that sold everything an African could possibly need, she said. ‘I stand behind the counter and help the shoppers,’ she told us. ‘And all he does is to stand there ordering me about.
What do You think about An Elegy For Easterly (2009)?
