Ignoring my reply, Mrs F pressed on. “Well, since you’re here and you have some money, you may as well put it to good use. I have an ice-cream machine coming from the mainland, one of those where the ice-cream comes out of the spout. I intend to put it in Jamituri Gardens, by the water. There’s nothing for people to buy there except for bits of sugar cane, or the cassava and stew the Africans cook. It’s not a new machine, but it’s perfectly good. All you’ll have to do is buy the supplies and keep track of the money. My nephew Louis will sell the ice-cream for you and you can pay him whatever you think fit. Anything is better than the nothing he earns now. I’d do it myself if I wasn’t so busy. As it is you’re one of the few people I’d trust to make a go of it.” She replenished her breath with a loud inhalation.
The package landed in my hands with a thump, too unexpected to be dropped. While I’d been spending my days dreaming in a sweaty fog, Mrs Fernandez had been busy tying me into place. I was off-balance, hot and bothered. We had reached the oldest part of the city where the houses pressed in closest, and instead of slowing down, she had speeded up. Mummy and I, as her lightweight outriders, were left to contend with the clutter of Zanzibar: the corners of buildings sticking out into the street, stone platforms where shopkeepers used to squat when they still had something to sell, Zanzibar’s famous carved doors, hanging massive and neglected, the occasional palm tree starved for light among the buildings, sauntering men, headscarved women hugging the wall and looking furtive with their shopping, laundry hanging down from lines between the buildings, the odd bicyclist, the odd incongruous road sign—Children Crossing!—left over from the British who had foolishly tried to invent order for us. No cars, of course, no money for them, no room, no petrol. I felt battered, flustered and at a disadvantage. I had been someone in Dar. My taxis took in two thousand shillings—a hundred dollars—a day!
“Mrs F, slow down, please!”
“We can’t slow down, Marcella. Who knows who’s listening?” Mrs F waved airily at the layers of closed shutters reaching up to the sky. “Windows are ears. Have you forgotten everything?”
“I’m not staying in Zanzibar.”
“If you leave, you can sell it back to me. Who can tell when you’ll get your passport?”
“Look!” exclaimed Mummy, from her own world, “the sea!” at the point on the walk where every day we saw the sea.
Our route opened up here, emerging through the city walls into Jamituri Gardens. Beyond the park was the water of our broad harbour, empty of ships these days, except for a couple of stranded hulks. A few sailing dhows showed on the open sea, smaller and shabbier than the ones I remembered from childhood. Zanzibar was going backwards. There were the usual rumours that the Soviet Union or the United States were ready to fight over the use of our harbour as a naval base. We believed that all the world coveted us at the same time that we believed that all the world had forgotten us.
My attention was caught by the African boys making wild, exuberant dives from ruined pilings, then by two carefully dressed and supervised Gujerati children staring at them with intense admiration. The food hawkers were clustered untidily in the centre of the field, and I imagined the ice-cream stall standing on its own by the water’s edge, just where the two Indian children stood.
I said, now I had caught up with Mrs F, “You would need the Party’s permission to put it in the park.”
“I have that.”
She had unexpected influences.
“And what is ice-cream made of anyway? I don’t know anything about ice-cream.”
“I believe milk is important. Zanzibar does have cows. And the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations has sent some Danes to reopen the East German dairy plant. We should visit the Danes. They’re the only other Europeans here.”
I said, “Why are you always saying that, that we are Europeans? We’re not Europeans. I’m sure the Danes don’t think we’re Europeans. We’re Indians. Anyone can see that.”
“We have European names, some of us have European blood. We’ve been European for four hundred years. We eat beef. We drink alcohol. We ballroom dance. We’re European.”
“Just because our ancestors were the first to jump into bed with the Portuguese when they arrived in India, doesn’t make us European.”
Mrs F was not to be diverted from business. “You’ll need petrol of course. For the generator. That will be your biggest problem.”
My success with taxis in Dar had been dependent on my brilliance with petrol and now I reflexively boasted, “I can always get petrol,” only to see a slight smile of victory exercise its way across the face of Mrs F.
In my dull fog of waiting, the ice-cream machine turned out to be a dot of light. The idea was good, I now had to admit. My mind had roused itself from torpor to march briskly around the calculation of costs and revenues, the likely market, the logistical problems to overcome, bringing me back to life. I could find no argument against it.
So it was, some months later, after the cooler monsoon winds from southern Africa had passed on and the heat had steadily increased again through September and October—and my weekly visits to Omar had borne no fruit—that on our first lap of Jamituri Gardens, I walked into Mrs F’s soft, suddenly halted, posterior. I had been admiring with an ambivalent pride the queue tailing back from my stall, now the most cheerful spot in the park, and it had just struck me with satisfaction that the only plastic anywhere in sight was
