Twice Removed Migrant

In January 2018, I went back to Kampala, the capital of Uganda, my birthplace. We Ugandan Asians were exiled from the country in 1972. I settled in London, vibrant, exciting, everchanging. In time that past faded like newsprint on old papers. Decades later, I was back in the land that made and nourished me. The visit was emotional and, at first, disorientating. The country is still lush, green and gorgeous; Ugandans are still calm, stoic, full of laughter and generous. In some parts the city hadn’t changed at all. But the centre was overcome by too many cars, too much noise, vainglorious tall edifices- hotels for the very rich, casinos, big businesses. 

My young driver, John B and I had been educated at the same, excellent primary school. It was demolished, the land sold to developers. A desolate structure stands there, incomplete after ten years. John raged, I cried a little. Outside this eyesore, on the pavement, sat a man selling cut mangoes sprinkled with chilli powder and salt. John and I relished them as our eyes watered. Those old days came alive. As Proust wrote in ‘Swann’s Way’ the first volume of The Remembrance of Things Past

‘When nothing subsists of an old past, after the death of people, after destruction of things, alone, frailer, but more enduring, more immaterial, more persistent, more faithful, smell and taste remain for a long time, like souls remembering, hoping, watching, waiting and hoping for their moment, amid the ruins of all the rest..’ 

At times I felt like an interloper and at others, like a long lost wanderer coming home. I found the tiny flat where I spent my early years. This is where my mother used to cook food for weddings, engagements and birthdays. Funerals too. In that sooty, airless kitchen she produced vats of what East African Shia Muslims call ‘akni’- a subtly spiced rice and meat dish, piquant goat meat, coconut chicken, aubergine and potato dry curry. It was all done on coal fuelled or Primus stoves. Her devoted assistant was Japani, a black Ugandan. They sang Hindi film songs while they worked. His favourite was an anticolonial ditty, ‘Mera Joota Hai Japani’, from the 1955 film, Shree 420. He decided to change his name from ‘John’ to Japani. 

When I was little, I used to run down to the big food bazar near our flat. One of the sellers would drag me back home and deliver me to my frantic mum. They called me ‘toto potea’, lost child, in Swahili. In the market this time I was that toto potea again, touching  mangoes, jackfruits and pineapples, blocking my ears as they beheaded the chickens. Congolese music was playing. I started to dance. People joined in. A blissful moment of belonging. 

In my sunny, hi-tech kitchen in my London flat, one small cupboard keeps cooking paraphernalia I brought over from Kampala in 1972. Why I transported old pots and pans to England I cannot explain. During cleaning fits, I chuck them into a box to be dumped and they return back to the house, just in time.

There is a wooden contraption used  to grate hairy, brown shelled coconuts. The device has not been used on these shores and is mummified with paper and layers of oil to keep it from cracking and rusting. Two slabs of wood are cleverly put together to make a folding stool. A flat, oval, rusting, metal blade sticks out in front, like the head of a tortoise. The coconut was broken, its sweet, cloudy  juice drained into a glass which always went to the favourite child in the extended family, always a boy, always overweight and a bloody nuisance. Then the kitchen servants sat astride the grater, as if on a saddle except it was so low their knees come up almost to the shoulders. With both hands they rolled the half sphere over the blade with a zigzag edge. Sometimes, they slashed their hands and harsh employers abused them for what they thought was native idiocy. Or for contaminating the white flesh with their inferior blood. Boiling water was added to the grated coconut and the mixture was then poured into a straw basket shaped like a long sausage to be squeezed. Imagine the agony.  The burning, pitchy hands added a sweetness you can never reproduce. Now smart machines do the job but never as well. And tinned coconut milk tastes insipid.

Then there is a Formica chapatti patlo, a round block with small legs, previously made of grainy wood to roll out various Indian breads. The new model (1970) was made by Mr Desai, a compulsive modernizer who went from house to house in a tweedy, dank smelling suit to demonstrate the easy-clean properties of this very latest ‘British’ material. My mother bought a FP, as they were known, then had to pay for it in pitifully small weekly sums. I use it often. One day in 1988, it helped me capture the heart of my Englishman, four months after my Ugandan Asian husband flew the nest, took his best clothes and irreplaceable, lived recollections of the old land and England as it was when we came.  

A brass device came too. Shaped like a mug, it has a circulating handle at the top and plates you insert and secure at the bottom. One plate has holes the size of match-heads, another has tinier perforations, another a star. The ‘mug’ was stuffed with a spicy, thick gram flour mix then held over boiling vats of oil, the handle turned by a fearless hand.  Thin or thick threads, looking like wet noodles fell in and were flash fried.  

Some eccentric items I carried over were made by a crooning artisan who called himself Mr Harry Belafonte the Third. The singer has left his song in his handiwork. My rimmed, aluminium bowl shaped like a scarecrow’s hat capers merrily when you put it on a flat surface and a huge karai - an Indian wok- bops on the cooker as the heat warms it. On the coldest days of winter, torpidity appears to enter these metals, the rocking slows down.

Abdullah, a fat and agile man who could bend right down and walk on fours made the colander I brought over, with a handle nearly a foot long. It was noisily hammered out on the street one afternoon. My mum had sent me and my cousin, Alnoor, with exact, memorised instructions for the dexterous metal beater. This was in 1958.  We were eight years old. Abdullah was what we rudely called a ‘chotara’ – a black/brown mix, the son of an old Asian trader and his teenage African servant girl who warmed and received his body before a proper wife, Suraya, arrived from India. She immediately sacked the willing maid, a mother by then of three coffee coloured babies. Suraya, whose belly looked perpetually pregnant, remained barren and turned sullen. Abdullah boasted his father was a fabulously wealthy sugar cane plantation owner who would claim his street son. One day. ‘Man need son. He will call me for sure.’ Abdullah’s clothes were frayed, his eyes droopy and drippy.

He wrapped his creations in newspapers and we knew my mother would find fault with them and send them back at least twice. My own transported relics were also wrapped in newspapers. Over the years I had to throw out the old papers as they disintegrated -  copies of the Uganda Argus. The papers carried many accounts of petty criminals beaten or burnt to death by crowds of excited men, women and laughing children. In the grainy photos taken after the kill, some of the proud slayers had their feet on the pulped prey, just like the white bwana hunters with their trophy lion and leopard scalps.

I remember ululations rising up, the calls of a gathering crowd as a thief was spotted grabbing fruit or bread from some vendor. The mob included honest folk and sprightly felons hoping it would never be their turn. The petrified quarry was almost always strangely silent and curled up small. They kicked him softly, burned his arms with matches, pushed in his face and eyes. Then a gang of big men finished him off. The pack of the poor and disenfranchised briefly exerted power as cruel custodians of virtue. Sometimes the thieves would run into our building. Jena sheltered some of them, gave them sugary tea to stop them shaking. 

Other newspaper pictures were of the latest high cost government folly, posed tableaux of staged political rallies and ministerial weddings, (adolescent brides smiling nervously in white, nylon gowns). On every page were adverts -  Royal Baking Powder, Kenya Gold butter, Bird’s Custard and Instant Whip, Coca Cola, Kraft cheese, fancy kitchens and GEC ovens. Only snobbish, rich Asians bought these made in England goods. We had better stuff to eat. 

Some of the deceased men and women I knew as a child come back to jostle for space in my head, calling from the other side. Particular foods remind me of each individual. During the forty days of mourning after they were sent off to their graves by the chanting congregation, their favourite dishes were brought to mosque by relatives. Love and memory, cooked and blessed. When my mother died in the spring of 2006, aged 85, I made the cakes and curries she loved but refused in her last years as she sought an end to life. After prayers, the sacred victuals are bought for a nominal sum by the poor, lonely, ill and hard pressed whose pleasure upon eating will be transported to the tongues of the departed as they enter the forgiving gates of paradise, so we believe.

After the funeral prayers for Jena, an old auntie from Mombasa shuffled up and gave me some ubani.  ‘Here, take, you liked it so much when you were small, always chewing, even in mosque. Took them from my purse, you naughty girl.’  I stared at the amber nuggets - edible gum resin- and wondered what they were. That naughty girl in mosque exists in the memories of others, gone from mine.    

I see my Maami in my sleep, my mother’s brother’s wife, eating her coriander omelette every morning with two thick slices of white toast. Her life had been hard as a widow with many wayward children. At night after dinner, she sucked on wedges of sharp, acidic oranges to break open the clogged arteries, she said. Her heart gave up anyway and she lies cold and alone in a cemetery in New York where her youngest son had moved on to after many years in Britain.

I dream of Roshan Aunty, a family friend. She had the grace of a gazelle. Her husband, Nazar, adorned her long neck with many strings of creamy Japanese pearls. She made dainty, crisp samosas the size of large Toblerones, eaten in one bite. Wearing her pearls and a pink, quilted housecoat, Roshan hummed as she rolled out the samosa pastry. My generation buys ready-made frozen piles from expert pensioners who supplement their incomes selling foods that take time and patience. That skill will pass into the void within a few years and we will make do with factory produced, spring roll pastry. One of my biggest regrets is that I never learnt to make those, perfect, little samosas.  

The dough is simple enough - hot water, salt and white flour kneaded well. Eight pieces are broken off and rolled to the size and shape of saucers. They are layered, one upon another, with flour and oil smeared between each. Then the rolling begins again, gentle, coaxing. The pastry is slapped on to a hot tawa, iron flat pan, and turned over again and again by  hand. Like firewalkers, experts are immune to the scorching heat. They peel off layers of pastry as it blisters. These are cut into thin strips and folded like posh napkins, stuffed with spicy mince or vegetables, and finally sealed tight to be fried in a vast bubbling wok of oil, big enough to bath a new born.

My once cherished ex-mother in law made excellent samosas too and nobody ever made mince kebabs like Kulsum, my cousin’s wife, and my mother’s coconut dhal is famous in the Diaspora from Vancouver to Cape Town. I can smell out food cooked by East African Asians, in kitchens, on clothes and breaths, on buses and tubes. 

In 1978, on bus number 207 going to Shepherd’s Bush, my mother was told to get off by a conductor because she was smelling like a ‘curry pot’. She replied (without budging) in halting English: ‘Sir not to mind. You must come and taste it one day, my curry. You people love it, isn’t it?’ She was stinking, having gone out in the same cardi she wore when cooking. I have that cooking cardigan still. Still unwashed. When I miss her I smell her and food still in the acrylic fibres. These days, the odours are less strong. Soon they will be gone too.     

To my son and daughter, I am from a sad place in Africa where there are big beasts, safari jeeps, spectacular views, but too much butchery and poverty for their refined western sensibilities. They feel detached from my complicated upbringing and when I insist on reminding them of it they switch off or rebuke me sharply. I speak four non-European languages and tried to pass them on with no success. They, true born Brits, never could be bothered to learn my sweet mother tongue, Kutchi, spoken in parts of India and Singh in Pakistan. In her last years when Jena found it harder to communicate in English, my children never got to know what she said and how she really felt. Perhaps they are apprehensive that to accept their multipart, cluttered heritage is to thin down  their entitlement to be truly, purely, deeply British.

They are gluttons for East African Asian foods though. Favourites are fried mogo (cassava) and kuku paka, a coconut chicken dish originally from Zanzibar. When my daughter was a toddler, I fed her what I had been fed as a child - ‘red rice’, boiled basmati mixed with tomato puree, garlic and butter which she loves to this day and my adult son makes his own version of chilli and sour cream to eat with what we call fish cutlets – the old English fishcake recipe only ‘repaired and much better’ as my mother used to put it. Mashed potatoes and steamed fish are mashed together with salt, turmeric, lime juice, chopped green chilies, coriander and dill. Then they are shaped into patties, dipped in beaten egg, then breadcrumbs and shallow fried. We colonised the British palate while they took everything else. 

While my son and daughter eat, I reminisce, more haltingly these days,  link the dishes to times and places repeatedly, so when I am gone, my voice will echo in their heads to remind them who they really are, that they didn’t arrive on ground zero the day they were born.

Although there are times of immense dislocation and sadness, I now understand our nomadic history has made us into enthusiastic, incorrigible cosmopolitans, winners in a globalised world. Our food bears testimony to this dynamic existence - creative, sometimes impertinent and playful blends of Indian, Pakistani, Arab, African, Chinese and English, now Italian and American  foods too, forever in a flux.

Living in the UK, our food is constantly updated, adapted, altered, recast, much is borrowed. Other British Asians are becoming similarly dynamic, but we were the first to embrace the ceaseless movement of modernity. (There was no choice.) Our place is in the here and now,  which too will change. Inevitably.

Food is intrinsically connected to economics, politics, communication, knowledge, marriages, trade and the movements of peoples. Once upon a time in Britain, East African Asian food expressed both desperate nostalgia and hardship. Happiness then was eating a mango (two if you earned more than barely enough working in factories, hospitals, or for British Rail) or adding an aubergine to spicy potato and making dhal less watery. I can make ten different potato dishes – all invented when I was a poor post-graduate at Oxford. 

Then came the small savings which built up to bigger piles.  East African Asian corner shops became sustainable; more imports were flown over faster. As families began to have small money surpluses, they dressed in best and ventured out together to cafes selling Indian snacks. Food in the home grew varied and more luxuries were added. Our ancestors in East Africa went through this same cycle from deprivation to abundance. You never forget back then. 

Most of us consider it immoral to spend huge amounts of money on food and we pride ourselves on being able to turn wilted vegetables and the cheapest cuts of meat into delightful dishes. We are canny and know where to get vine tomatoes for 12 pence per half kilo, six bunches of fresh, aromatic coriander for a pound, boxes of Alphonso mangoes for a fiver, inexpensive sacks of rice, dhals, chapatti flours, gram flour, rice flour and fresh pickles made by local women. As we become time poor we take short cuts - ready ground spices and pastes, frozen parathas, yam, bhindis and karela (bitter gourd), crushed garlic and ginger and green chillies. 

I used to make bhindi (okra) from scratch. It took nearly an hour to wipe and cook. Now I use frozen bhindi to make a favourite dish, dry cooked bhindi with scrambled eggs in fifteen minutes- a dish I served the doyen Madhur Jaffrey. Being able to make favourite dishes fast and with less hassle. What could be better for an enthusiastic cook?

I got the answer when back in Uganda, as I ate plantain and groundnut sauce, barbequed chicken and corn. We gained much after our forced migration. But lost that deep connection with really fresh, from-the-market, good food. Nothing here will ever taste the same again.