The Other Language(66)
She actually had always looked forward to her visits to the hardware store. She enjoyed having a chat with her landlord and she liked the smell of sawdust, the dim light filtering from the skylight, the old teak cabinets filled with antiquated brass locks and hinges. Mr. Khan was a chubby man with thick tortoiseshell glasses who seemed always to be sitting in the large chair in the front of his shop, propped up by several pillows because of his bad back. The Khans were a wealthy Gujarati family who’d come to East Africa looking for opportunities and had been successful shopkeepers for generations. Mr. Khan was no longer the one in charge of the shop; his son Kublai had now taken over the business, but the old man still liked to sit by the cashier under the fan, just to sip tea and greet clients while wrapping a pound of nails in a scrap of old newspaper, give out some change, shout an order to one of the younger guys who sawed wood in the backyard. Though balding at the top, he wore dangling white mustaches and kept the rest of his hair rather long, so that he was beginning to look more like a Chinese sage than an Asian shopkeeper.
Young Kublai greeted Anne at the door, smelling of incense and Lifebuoy soap.
“Good morning, Mrs. D’Costa. How are things at the cottage? Did Hamisi manage to fix the faucet or should I send you one of my fundi?”
“No need to, Kublai, thank you very much. Hamisi and I managed. We have a pretty good toolbox. I’ll let you know if it holds, otherwise we’ll have to replace it, I’m afraid.”
“No problem. You know that we are always here to assist you.”
Kublai Khan bore his noble name graciously. Somehow he reminded Mrs. D’Costa of her husband when they’d first met. Kublai too had exquisite manners, a mane of jet-black hair and thick eyebrows. His English was perfect, his words always carefully articulated. He’d been an exceptional student and had spent a few years in England right after high school to study as an engineer but didn’t like it there and had left.
The weather, he’d said laconically. And I missed my folks.
So he’d come back to the family’s empire within the small perimeter that circled the gas station, the tire center and the hardware store, where members of his clan had been undisputed kings for three generations. A melancholic young man, one could have said of Kublai Khan, someone who at some point had followed an impulse in the belief that he could’ve become a completely different person than the rest of his kin. But that sense of a calling had never quite come through. That was part of the reason Mrs. D’Costa felt a special empathy toward him. Like her, he too, had a dent.
Right behind the lumberyard one could get a glimpse of the Khan women dashing around in their starched saris, scurrying back and forth from the kitchen of the house. The smell of roasted cumin, mustard seeds, turmeric and cardamom wafted through the dimly lit shop. A pale little girl with skinny legs brought a bowl of food to her father and grandfather. Fresh chapati and shrimp jeera.
“Would you like to taste some, Mrs. D’Costa?” Kublai asked, placing the bowl on the counter.
“No thank you, Kublai, Hamisi is waiting for me to take my lunch at home.”
“Please. My daughter-in-law is a very good cook,” the elder Mr. Khan interjected.
“I have no doubt about that, Mr. Khan! I can surely tell when a curry powder is homemade and ground with a mortar and pestle.”
The old man laughed. “Of course, of course you can, Mrs. D’Costa. Did you learn your cooking from your mother-in-law?” he asked gently. He knew of course that her in-laws were Goans and that they’d lived in the old town in Mombasa.
“Yes, she taught me everything. When I first came over all I knew was meat, boiled carrots and potatoes!” She started laughing too. “And she was very particular, you know. We had to roast each spice separately, and make fresh powder every morning. She just refused to use the leftover curry from the previous day.”
“That is the way. That is the way,” Mr. Khan said. “In our house it was the same. My late wife also had the same rule.”
He leaned slightly over the dark wood counter and lowered his voice in a complicit tone.
“She made sure the daughters-in-law didn’t use the kind you buy at the duka. You know how the younger ladies now prefer to take shortcuts in the kitchen?”
“Of course. Everything comes in a box, these days. But it surely doesn’t taste the same.”
Mrs. D’Costa slid the envelope filled with banknotes over the counter.
“One day I’d like you to taste my Sunday curry, Mr. Khan. I suspect you won’t be disappointed!” she said in an unusually exuberant voice and, as she heard herself, she felt her cheeks blush as she hadn’t in God knows how many years.
Mr. Khan took the envelope and joined his palms together over his chest.
“It’s always a pleasure to see you, Mrs. D’Costa. And remember, if you have any problems at home, just give us a call and we’ll send someone to fix it for you.”
In the car, on her way home, Mrs. D’Costa thought about Mr. Khan. She felt so at ease in his company; he was such a nice, courteous man and she would’ve liked to get to know him better. She wondered whether she had been too forward mentioning Sunday lunch. She knew the rules, of course, when it came to Asian family etiquette. The upper and lower caste issue—although unspoken—still existed to some degree and her strict mother-in-law would have surely disapproved of her asking a shopkeeper to lunch.