Night of Power Read online

  “I can explain, Pappa…”

  Govindji raises his hand. “No more excuses, boy. I’ve had it up to here with your excuses.”

  “I won’t let you down. Not this time, Pappa. I promise.”

  Tick-tock, tick-tock.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes, sir, Pappa-Sir.”

  “How sure?” His father steps closer. Mansoor’s heart races.

  “One hundred and fifty percent sure. You can trust me.”

  Govindji whacks his cane across the back of Mansoor’s calves. He groans, drops to his knees.

  “Show me what you’re made of, boy!” his father says.

  Mansoor falls to the floor and starts a regimen of military push-ups. Up, down, clap. Up, down, clap.

  His father taps his cane on the floor. “Faster, boy. There’s no time to waste.”

  Mansoor struggles to keep up. Sweat pools under him.

  His father presses a foot on his back. “Can you do it or not?”

  Mansoor’s legs shake, his arms, too. He can barely breathe. “I can…do it, Pa…ppa. I pro…mise. I can.”

  The front doorbell jingles.

  “Hello?” a woman’s voice calls.

  Mansoor collapses to the floor. He turns to see another figure. A customer at the cash counter. He struggles to stand. His legs are weak. His shirt is drenched. But when he gets to her, she’s already out the door.

  “I’m here!” he yells, following her outside but she won’t stop.

  Outside, his shirt stiffens instantly, like ice in a flash freezer. He rushes back inside. Customers! He shakes his head in frustration. One day, they are going to be the death of him.

  Chapter 2

  WHEN LAYLA WAKES, SHE finds a gold pocket watch that’s been dismantled and laid out on the kitchen table in some sort of pattern, like a half-finished puzzle. The face, the hands, the springs and coils. A tiny screwdriver and hammer, too. Maybe the watch isn’t working and Mansoor tried to fix it? She doesn’t know. But she’ll ask around or check the Ismaili phone directory to find someone who can fix it so that he won’t have to.

  Layla prefers Ismailis for all her activities—whether it’s her seamstress (Habiba at Stitch-in-Time Alterations), her grocers (Sultan at Spice Village for her Indian and African goods and Poonjani at P.D. Wholesale Superstore for everything else), or her doctor (Dr. Jenny Kara at the local walk-in clinic). It isn’t a just matter of supporting her community, which, of course, is very important, but it’s also a matter of comfort—she doesn’t have to stumble along and explain what she wants. They already know. Besides, it’s a matter of budget. She receives a special discount at these establishments, just like everybody else in the community—depending on their negotiating skills. Try doing that at a regular store! Mansoor berates her for her attitude, for not “building bridges” with others. “Then what was the use of coming to this country?” he asks. But who said she wanted to come?

  Layla cinches her apron tightly around her tiny waist, making it bellow out over her ample hips. She pins back her short, greying hair, then gets to work. She weaves through the house with an armful of Tupperware containers, setting them down on every available surface she can find. She starts in the kitchen with the counters, then the top of the microwave and a cart that holds onions and potatoes. Next, the dining room, where she works her way from the table and chairs to the hutch that holds her good dinnerware and glasses. Then, the living room with the deep freezer, the size of a coffin, pushed against a wall; the coffee table and side tables. She continues until every surface of her house is covered, not including the bathroom or the bedrooms, of course. A houseful of containers. A small factory for her home-cooking business that specializes in East African–Indian cuisine.

  From her kitchen window, she spots her friends, Shamma and Almas, unmarried sisters who live in the townhouse across from hers. A light snow has settled on the walkways of the townhouse complex. In the dark, the tall, slim houses look like shadows that have been pulled up from the ground and erected to standing. Shamma sees her, too. She waves three fingers in the air. Layla balls her fist and rocks her arm up and down to indicate that she will join them for tea at three. She knows everyone in this complex and everyone knows her, not only because she goes to Headquarters Jamatkhana every day for evening prayers and, when she can, morning prayers, but also because she is well known by Ismailis throughout Calgary, and the country, for that matter, for her famous chicken samosas. Not that anyone has ever tasted them. That recipe is secret. It is reserved for the Imam only. The beloved Aga Khan.

  The sisters look as if they’re just starting their day, too, in their matching pink aprons and caps. They run a hair salon out of their basement. If Mansoor knew that she still goes to The Pink Comb, he would be livid. “They’re running that business illegally, Layla. Just go to a regular salon, will you?” Besides, they are not just her friends. They are like family. They remind her of her sisters. Her mother, too. That’s whom she misses the most. The company of women she loved, women she laughed with, women who knew everything about her. Without them, it feels as though pieces of her are missing.

  When she told Shamma and Almas that Ashif was coming home, they asked her to bring him around for tea. She didn’t have the heart to say no, so she said she would try her best.

  They’ve known Ashif since he was a child; he even calls them masi, the formal name for a mother’s sister. But there would be no time. He was only coming for lunch, even though he was going to be in Calgary for two nights before leaving for Vancouver for two more. Her heart broke when he gave her the news. She had not seen him for over a year now.

  “At least come to jamatkhana with me on Wednesday? It’s such a big night,” she said, holding back her tears. “It’s the Night of Power and everyone will be there.” After all, praying on the Lailatul Qadr is equivalent to one thousand nights of prayer. It’s the most powerful night of Ramadan, the month when Allah revealed the first chapters of the Koran to the Prophet.

  “But I’m there for work, Mummy,” Ashif said. “I’m booked from morning to night.”

  “Why don’t you come after you finish in Vancouver on Friday? Stay with us for the weekend. We’ll have so much fun.”

  “My flight is already booked back to Toronto. The company would never pay for the change fees. And they’re an arm and a leg.”

  “Okay,” she said, though she was not sure exactly what “arm and leg” meant. Her son speaks English with his father and a mix of English and Kutchi with her. Her English is good, but she often finds it difficult to follow what he says—not only because of the words he uses, but also because of his Canadian accent. As if he is from a different country, but of course he is not! She sometimes has to patch his words together. She agrees with him regardless of whether she understands him or not. But if he catches her, he berates her, tells her she has to learn to speak up. “It’s a free country, Mummy! Just say what you want.” She accepts his admonishments. Yet there are times when she wants to remind him that she is his mother.

  “I want to come, Mummy,” Ashif explained. “But I’m so busy. You know that.”

  “Yes, I know, bheta,” she said, though she wasn’t sure why her son is always so busy. She doesn’t fully understand what he does for work. But she knows he has an important job at a big-big company.

  Layla yearns to see her son’s face, to hold him, the way she used to when he was a child. This is, she is sure, how all mothers separated from their children must feel, a constant sense of loss and longing. If only he had stayed here instead of moving so-so far away. “Calgary is better,” she had urged when he told her his plan to stay in Toronto after finishing business school. “But all the big jobs are in Toronto. I have to stay.”

  His father agreed. “Just let him go in peace, will you, Layla? The boy is trying to make something of himself,” he said, before giving his son a thumbs-up.

  Back home, when someone moved to another town, it was only a short drive away. Or a ferry
ride across Lake Victoria. But here, it is a completely different story. It takes nearly five hours on a plane from Calgary to Toronto. Five hours! Toronto might as well be in another country. She has, on more than one occasion, tried to measure this distance on the map that’s still pinned to the wall of what used to be Ashif’s bedroom but is now hers. How often she has walked her extended palm across Canada. Four palms long! Uganda is but an index finger, her hometown of Kisumu in Kenya not even the tip of a fingernail. Add in the different time zones, and you need to book an appointment, it seems, just to talk to someone in another city. Not that she has many people to call. Everyone she cares to know is here in Calgary. It is only her son who is not here. Her brothers are still in Kenya. Her mother, too. Her sister Shenaz in Australia. Her sister Gulnar in Pakistan. Her family spread across the globe like stars across the sky. She hasn’t seen most of them in over twenty-five years. Not even before she left Uganda. There had been no time.

  * * *

  Only days before the deadline General Idi Amin set for Asians to get out of Uganda—November 8, 1972—Layla arrived with the baby at the Royal Air Force refugee camp sixty miles outside London. Months before, the Jewish community had already been thrown out. Then the Asians. Even the Muslims were given ninety days to get out. She had suggested to Mansoor that they could go stay with her family in Kenya. He refused to believe the decree and by the time he did, all countries surrounding Uganda had sealed their borders. “As if he’ll throw us out. We were born in this country, for God’s sake,” he had said. At jamatkhana, many leaders echoed his view. But as each day passed, more stories of Amin’s terror emerged: two men murdered as they filled their cars at a petrol station; a man thrown into a car boot and never seen again; twin sisters, students at Makerere University, kidnapped from their dorm room and gang-raped for days by army officers before one sister finally escaped, her nipples still bleeding when she was found on the side of a road. Panic spread. The community started to pack their bags. The United Nations organized airlifts out of the country. Each refugee was allowed to take one suitcase and £50. Layla smuggled out her wedding jewellery by sewing necklaces into Ashif’s diaper, concealing earrings in his milk bottle, snapping bracelets around his tiny thighs. “At least you have a way out,” Ashif’s ayah, Rose, had said, wiping her eyes on the sleeve of her kanga. “What, Mamma, will the rest of us do?”

  Layla had begged Mansoor to come with them. “Please, they will kill you.” Mansoor refused. He wanted to stay as long as possible, to try and salvage their fortune. Besides, he reminded her, the British Consulate strongly advised against attempts to enter without proper documentation. Illegal entrants, they warned, would be detained indefinitely no matter if your wife and children were British subjects. It is terrible, they said, this expulsion of eighty thousand Asians, but we have no choice: we must stand by our voucher quota system. City councils, like Leicester’s, placed adverts in Ugandan newspapers urging the Asians to stay away from their city. Layla countered Mansoor’s refusal by naming other men who didn’t have British passports but who were still going with their families. “I’m not like other men,” he said matter-of-factly. “Be strong, Layla, for our son’s sake. We’ll be together again before you know it. I promise.”

  In London, she watched enviously as families clustered together at the camp cafeteria, eating and joking. Many of the illegal entrants were detained at the camps, but at least their families were together, and what else mattered? Eventually, many managed to immigrate successfully to countries like Sweden and Argentina after applying to ads posted on the camp’s bulletin board with the headline, “Have You Considered Emigrating?” Mansoor’s three sisters and their families had been on the same flight to London, but she lost track of them in the crowd at Heathrow. When she tracked them down at another camp, they said they wished they could help her, maybe even move in together, but they were unable to leave—their husbands were detainees. Years later, she learned that their husbands had successfully smuggled their fortunes out of Uganda through a travel agent they knew. They had purchased airline tickets that went around and around the world, as if they were spooling the earth with miles of golden thread. Once they were released from the camps, they settled in Birmingham, where they quietly arranged for refunds.

  At the camp, Layla was deeply lonely, the way she had been when she first moved from Kenya to Uganda to marry Mansoor. She didn’t know anyone in Kampala. She hardly knew Mansoor, either. She’d only met him a few times before her father accepted his request for her hand in marriage. Layla never said anything, not even to her own family, about the agony of missing them. She kept her feelings to herself. She understood that a woman can’t expect to be part of the same family she was born into. Her home, like her name, must inevitably shift to that of her husband’s.

  Months passed, and there was still no word from her husband, leaving her in a constant tangle of worry. Would she ever see him again? Was he still alive? In London, the Uganda Resettlement Board began urging people to get jobs; newspapers reported that many refugees were getting too comfortable. Soon, representatives from different employers visited the camps and Layla was offered a job at a dressmaking plant in Manchester. The job included Council housing and child-minding facilities at the plant. But she didn’t want anyone else to take care of her child, and she worried that Mansoor would not be able to find them if they left London. So she stayed put at the camp and prayed daily for his safe return to them. Each night, as she nursed the baby to sleep, she said the same thing to him, like a mantra. “Pappa will be back with us soon.”

  Chapter 3

  ASHIF STANDS AT THE front of the executive boardroom on the fifty-ninth floor of his company’s Canadian head office in downtown Toronto. The room is a wall of windows, like a glass box suspended thousands of feet in the air. He has one hand tucked into the pants pocket of his British-cut, single-breasted, navy blue suit that fits his tall, slim body perfectly, and the other rests on the podium next to him. He’s clean-shaven and his curly dark hair is smoothly combed back with the exception of a small, stubborn curl that refuses to cooperate despite the different products he used this morning, as he does every morning, to try to force it down.

  At the back of the boardroom, on a skirted table, are several white carafes, a glass bowl filled with melting ice and a few bottles of juice, and two silver platters, one with a lone muffin. The executive team sits on plump, black leather chairs around the oval boardroom table. Cups of coffee marked with a soaring blue falcon, the company logo, sit in front of each of them. They listen carefully, some taking copious notes, as Ashif explains his division’s numbers.

  He puts the next slide of his presentation, prepared by his assistant, on the overhead projector that’s perched on a wheeled cart. A colourful chart filled with numbers appears on the white screen behind him. The chart is titled SALES FORECAST & BUDGET, and has labels like SALES VOLUME, PROFIT MARGIN, and GROWTH. The numbers are further broken down into years, quarters, and months. It’s crucial to ensure period-over-period growth, a constant movement upward, like an endless escalator. That’s what the company counts on, what shareholders expect, and what Ashif’s job, like all sales jobs, is based on—delivering bigger and better numbers each and every quarter.

  At the end of his presentation, the team congratulates him on a job well done and approves his budget. Rick beams in the background not only because Ashif achieved their goal, but also because he will, Ashif knows, get marks for mentoring and coaching him well—one of the eight key success factors that all senior managers and executives are tracked on for their performance reviews. Ken, the vice-president of finance, pats Ashif on his back. “Terrific presentation, kid. You’re right on track.” Glenda, the vice-president of marketing, shakes his hand firmly. “Nice work, Ash. We knew we made a good decision with you.” She’s the only woman on the executive team and is often dressed in pantsuits. “I bet she’s got a pair of fucking balls under there, too,” Rick had said in hushed tones to a group o
f men after she hit yet another home run at the annual company baseball tournament. Everyone laughed, Ashif included, even though he didn’t find it funny.

  Rick walks Ashif out. The executive lobby is a lush room with wood panelling, deep leather couches, and walls lined with perfectly hung portraits, like at a museum, of the company’s past CEOs. Old white men in dark suits. Every single one.

  “You ready for this week’s meetings?”

  “Absolutely,” Ashif says.

  “Of course you’re ready. You always are.” Rick pats Ashif on the back. “At this rate, you’re going to be running this place, kid.”

  The company’s laying off close to twenty thousand employees worldwide. Jobs are being made redundant as a result of the sales force being automated. All thanks to the Internet and e-commerce. Ashif has been chosen to lead the company’s restructuring efforts for his division, starting first in Calgary and Vancouver. His job will be to convince targeted employees to take a layoff package. It’s more cost effective than forcing a layoff, which sometimes prompts lawyers to get involved and ends up costing the company more. “It’s one thing to be able to sell externally, but quite another to do it internally. That’s the mark of a true salesman,” Rick had said when he gave Ashif the news of his appointment. It’s a test like the many tests he has passed before. How well he does will determine if he’ll continue on the mid-management track or if his career path will be catapulted to the executive track—the fast track, as his co-workers called it, the goal of every new recruit hired by the company, including Ashif. He had confidently proclaimed that this, too, was what he wanted during each of the five interviews he’d had with progressively more senior managers that it took to land the job. The year he graduated from business school, the company hired one person. He was it.