Night of Power Read online

  ALSO BY ANAR ALI

  Baby Khaki’s Wings

  VIKING

  an imprint of Penguin Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited

  Canada • USA • UK • Ireland • Australia • New Zealand • India • South Africa • China

  First published 2019

  Copyright © 2019 by Anar Ali

  “Genius in short.” by Barney Hoskyns, from The Guardian. Web. 19 Feb 2006.

  Courtesy of Guardian News & Media Ltd.

  “Out beyond ideas…”, “You are an ocean…” from RUMI: THE BOOK OF LOVE: POEMS OF ECSTASY AND LONGING, TRANSLATIONS & COMMENTARY by COLEMAN BARKS. Copyright © 2003 by Coleman Barks.

  Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.

  Rumi, excerpt from “Whispers of Love,” translated by Kabir Helminski, from The Rumi Collection, edited by Kabir Helminski. Copyright © 1998 by Kabir Helminski. Reprinted by arrangement with The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of Shambhala Publications Inc., Boulder, Colorado, www.shambhala.com.

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  www.penguinrandomhouse.ca

  Publisher’s note: This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

  Title: Night of power / Anar Ali

  Names: Ali, Anar, author.

  Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20190043547 | Canadiana (ebook) 20190043563 | ISBN 9780670064267 (softcover) | ISBN 9780735234208 (PDF)

  Classification: LCC PS8601.L41 N54 2019 | DDC C813/.6—dc23

  Cover design by Rachel Cooper

  Cover images: (field) Lynn Villalba / EyeEm / Getty Images; (lattice) DmitriyRazinkov / Shutterstock

  v5.3.2

  a

  for my family

  y mi familia

  Contents

  Cover

  Also by Anar Ali

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Part One

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Part Two

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Works Cited

  Acknowledgments

  Prologue

  MANSOOR VISRAM WAKES TO a fluting sound, a distant melody like a muezzin’s call. He half-opens his eyes. Dark fields extend to the horizon and merge seamlessly with the night sky. A perfect circle. The prairie hills are massive frozen waves. He feels something pecking at his feet. He lifts his head. A small domed shape bobs up and down at his feet, hammering at his icy body. The bird flies up and hovers over his chest. Her body is brilliant blue; her crown golden. Her breast is plump and glazed with rhinestone tassels instead of feathers. Mansoor is amazed that she can fly. He swipes the air and tries to catch her, but she flies up and out of reach. He plants his hands on the snow and struggles to stand, his veins a map of frozen rivers. The bird flies ahead of him and waits, like a siren willing him forward. A few steps and he falls to his knees. His clothes are an armour of ice. In the distance, the city lights are a pale smudge in the sky. He tries to stand again but his body jars, like a ship caught in icy waters. “Get up, Visram!” he orders himself. “Move!” Instead he falls, curls in the soft snow, and drifts off again. The bird lands on his shoulder. She nudges her way up to his ear and begins to sing.

  Chapter 1

  MANSOOR TRIES TO CLEAR the frost from the glass door of his store with a handkerchief. Instead, he creates a pattern of semicircles over the front sign, M.G. Visram & Son Dry Cleaners, Inc., Suiting Canada Since 1987. Outside, a thin, sharp snow is falling, the flurries visible only under the street lamps. It’s past seven in the morning and still pitch dark. The winter sun will not rise for at least another hour. Most of the stores in the shopping plaza, located in an upscale neighbourhood in southwest Calgary, are closed: the travel agency, the hairdresser, the dentist’s office, the video store. Only the dry cleaners and the twenty-four-hour convenience store are open, like fluorescent snow globes in the dark.

  Mansoor turns around and inspects his store, just as he does each morning. It’s a small space, only five hundred and fifty-three square feet, but it’s well organized and this gives him a great deal of satisfaction. Gold frames pock the wall above the cash register, like a collage of family photographs. In one, a dollar bill, the first one he earned in Canada, from August 1973. In another, his business licence, and yet another, his pledge to his customers. “I may not have the answer, but I will find it. I may not have the time, but I will make it.” Against another wall, a short bookshelf holds his books with titles like In Search of Excellence and Men’s Strength & Power Training, as well as biographies of men like Henry Ford, Bill Gates, and Neil Armstrong. The front of the store is separated from the back by a glass wall, allowing his customers to see what a well-organized operation he runs. Rows of suits and shirts, swathed in plastic, hang on a conveyor belt like headless men.

  In the backroom, he flips open a calendar to an image of a lone Arctic wolf. A note under today’s date, January 21, has been circled in red and starred. Banker, 3:30 p.m. Mansoor is ready. Fully prepared. He has been for months now. He needs the funds for a dry-cleaning plant, which is central to his new business plan. He has been waiting even longer to share his plan with his son, Ashif. He is the only one who will truly understand its enormity and significance in the marketplace. He is, after all, a brilliant businessman. Just like his father. Tomorrow, Mansoor will finally get his chance. Ashif is coming home for lunch when he is here from Toronto to attend important work meetings.

  Above Mansoor’s desk hangs a massive portrait of his father, a copy of the original photo that hung in all of their stores in Uganda, next to the image of Idi Amin, decreed by law, and one of the Imam, expected by the community. A trinity of men. In the photograph, his father stands proudly in front of his flagship store in Kampala. He is tall and rotund, his body weight proof of his wealth. He is in an ivory three-piece suit; a gold pocket watch, purchased in London, hangs from the vest pocket. His hands rest regally on top of a cane with a silver lion’s head. High above him, the sign reads, Visram P. Govindji & Son, Established 1929.

  * * *

  When Ashif was a child, Mansoor found a magazine cut-out in the boy’s desk with the face of Colonel Sanders wearing thick glasses and that silly beard. Underneath, scribbled in Ashif’s babyish hand, he had written, “Dadabapa.” Mansoor was furious. His father was a distinguished man, and here his son thought he was an American man who fried chicken? Mansoor immediately instituted Saturday morning classes for which he marched his son into his office for a lesson in family history. Ashif would clamber onto his father’s office chair, his feet dangling high above
the floor, as Mansoor told the story. “When your dadabapa arrived in Africa, he had nothing but two rupees to his name. Can you tell me how much that is?”

  “Only enough to buy some bubblegum. But not the whole pack. Only one piece.”

  “Exactly!” He patted his son’s shoulder. “Can you believe it? Your grandfather was a pauper from India. He was barely surviving—” he spun the globe on his desk and pointed at the state “—here in Gujarat. He worked in a quarry, toiling in the hot sun all day, breaking rocks, not to mention his back. And what for? To fill the coffers of other men.” He banged a fist on the desk. “No, sir!”

  Ashif banged his fist on the desk, too. “No, sir!”

  “Dadabapa was thirteen years old—that’s only seven years older than you, son—when he heard that many were building fortunes in Africa, men who were now owners of chain stores and underwriters to Arab, Indian, and Swahili entrepreneurs, whom stranded explorers came to for credit. Africa was their America. Dadabapa decided to take a chance. He saved enough money to buy a one-way ticket out of India and into the new world. He survived the wretched three-month dhow journey—the dysentery, the rats, and who knows what else—and arrived on the shores of Zanzibar in 1912. How long ago was that?” Lessons in math and science were always incorporated into each session.

  Ashif reached for the calculator on his father’s desk; Mansoor slid it away. “No cheating.”

  “Okay,” Ashif giggled. He scrawled sixty-five years on his notebook.

  “Yes, very good! But there were already too many young men with similar dreams and ideas. So what did your dadabapa do? He was very, very smart, you see. He moved inland to seek his fortune. A new frontier: Uganda. There, he apprenticed under an Indian store owner, trading his labour for a space to sleep on the roof of the store and one meal of barazi and mumri, beans in coconut milk and fried bread, served at noon each day. He learned to read and write in Hindi and Gujarati, to balance the books, to negotiate with vendors, to upsell customers. He also learned many new languages: Swahili, English, Kikuyu, and Buganda. He even picked up Japanese after World War II. Imagine! The Japanese were keen on rebuilding their country—good for them. They offered unbeatable quality and prices, making it essential to do business with them. Your grandfather traded his chisel for a pen, his dhoti for a business suit, and became a new man. In a matter of a few years, he changed the course of thousands of years of family history, like turning a steel ship with his bare hands.”

  Ashif bounced on his seat with excitement. “Just like Superman!”

  “Yes, a real-life superhero. Fifteen years after he first set foot in Africa, at the age of twenty-eight, Dadabapa opened his own little dry goods shop in a small village called Tororo on the Ugandan-Kenyan border.”

  “Toronto?” Ashif asked.

  “No,” he laughed. “To-ro-ro. So close in name, yes. But worlds apart. This town wasn’t even the size of your school. Imagine. Once he built up the business in Tororo, he followed the new European railroad across the nation and built a chain, opening new shops at each stop—Busembatia, Iganga, Jinja, and finally Kampala. A small empire. So you see, son, you can do anything. Be anyone you want. But you must never give up. Never! Understand?”

  Ashif nodded.

  “Mark my words, son. We were kings in Uganda, and we will be kings yet again in Canada.”

  “Me, too, Pappa?”

  “Of course!” Mansoor lifted his son up into his arms. “One day everything is going to be yours.”

  * * *

  Mansoor reaches for the stack of business plans on his desk. He sets two aside for his meeting with the banker, then takes another for his son. On it, he scribbles the initials AMV. Ashif M. Visram. There are so many things he wants to share with his son, not just his business plan. If only the boy would let him. He’s not sure when the trouble began, but for some time now, Ashif has erected a wall between them. Whatever happened to change the boy? They used to tell each other everything. Now, when Ashif wants to tell him something, he tells his mother first, then she passes it on to him. What is she—his translator? But he wonders if pieces of information get lost in the exchange like in a game of telephone. He’s not even sure she tells him everything. Maybe she’s deliberately omitting parts of the message. But what bothers him more is the feeling that she is always between them. If it wasn’t for her, he’s sure they’d have the kind of relationship they had when Ashif was a child. When his son thought he was a hero, when he listened to what he had to say, laughed at his jokes, sought out his company. Ashif as a little boy, in his snowsuit and mukluks, running to him with open arms. This image emerges whenever he thinks of his son, even now. Like a parent who freeze frames the last time they saw a child they’d lost.

  The idea for his new business came to him quite simply. He’d been searching for a way to grow his business, make his mark. Then on the day his car was at the shop, it struck him. He had to use public transportation, which he’d never used before, and that’s when he noticed all the dead space in the LRT stations. There was a ticketing office, sometimes a convenience store, but that was it. Nothing else. No business would allow this kind of waste. But then, this was government. Inefficient fools. They had no regard for the bottom line. Why would they? It wasn’t their money they were playing with. Not their name on the line.

  What about a dry-cleaning kiosk? Commuters could drop off their cleaning on their way to work and pick it up on their way home. No one has time to waste, especially not busy professionals, and they are the ones who use dry-cleaning services the most. They need to look good all the time. He should know. It’s why he opened his store here in Canyon Creek, a neighbourhood of young professionals. He’s built his business by catering to them. They understand the value of excellence and are willing to pay for it. Mansoor’s plan offers customers convenience; the city, a way to generate additional revenue; and him, a way to catapult his operation from one location to a chain of fifteen. A win-win for everyone.

  To develop his plan, he conducted extensive market research over several months. He studied foot traffic patterns by station, and demographics by neighbourhood, along with his own reconnaissance missions. He spoke to commuters at train stations about their cleaning needs, their buying preferences. He surveyed the competition in each neighbourhood. He then compiled his data into spreadsheets (using Excel and PowerPoint, new tools he had learned through self-study) to create a cluster graph of the stations with the best potential. These stations formed the basis of his three-phase roll-out plan. Downtown Calgary, then affluent suburbs, and finally all others.

  The key was centralized operations. A dry-cleaning plant that served all the locations. Business pundits called it vertical integration, but he didn’t need a fancy term to understand the inherent sense of it. Instead of paying a supplier, Mansoor would become the supplier, allowing him to lower costs and maximize profits. He’d also take advantage of the latest technologies. A centralized computer system linking each kiosk to the plant via the Internet. Long-term, he imagined customers would even be able to check in their items and pay online. They called it e-commerce. Business was at the edge of a brave new world—unafraid of lightning-speed progress. If it was men like Edison and Bell who spurred the Industrial Revolution, now it was men like Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and Sabeer Bhatia at the helm of the Digital Revolution. He shakes with excitement just thinking about it—he’s going to be a part of it. This must be exactly how his father felt when he landed on the shores of Zanzibar. At the edge of a new frontier.

  His plan is rock-solid, he knows that. The numbers speak for themselves. Now he needs to get in front of the right people at city hall. An arduous process. But it always is when you’re dealing with the government. Here or in Uganda. The same layers of bureaucracy, like a set of gates that need to be pushed open before a bull is allowed into the arena.

  Once he gets his foot in the door, he needs the city to see him as a serious player. Not as a one-man operation, a nobody, but as a big company th
at’s capable of delivering on its business plan. When Federal Express started their operation, they played a recording of phones ringing, doorbells chiming, and crowds of people chatting in the background. Customers calling in were left with the impression that they were calling into a large company. Not a fly-by-night operation, but an organization they could trust. A plant will inspire the same confidence in the city. It will allow Mansoor to flex his muscles. Match power with power.

  In the appendix of the plan, he’s also included a Kiosk Operations Manual, a tool used in franchise operations, using his store as the model of high standards and efficiency. He will replicate his store, like a DNA strand, from one station to the next until the entire map of Calgary is covered. Then he’ll expand beyond the city to Edmonton, Vancouver, Toronto, and Montreal. He sees his name light up across the country. M.G. Visram & Son, Suiting Canada Since 1987. Seen daily by hundreds of commuters. Thousands. Millions. “Then everyone will know my name!” He shoots an arm up in victory.

  A man’s laugh booms through the store.

  Mansoor turns to see his father climbing out of the photograph’s frame, as if it were a window, and into the store. The top of his head grazes the ceiling.

  Mansoor steps back.

  “Time’s running out, boy,” his father says, swinging his gold pocket watch back and forth. Tick-tock, tick-tock.

  He feels the sting of his father’s gaze. He casts his eyes down.

  “How many times can I tell you, boy? A man cannot go out worse off than how he came in.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “The future line of this family depends on you, boy. Your son’s depending on you. You understand that?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Twenty-five years in this country and this is all you’ve got to show for it?” Govindji crosses the store in one giant step. “A store the size of a closet? Pathetic.”