Fatima Chapter 10 | 1949: Johnny-Bhai & Suleiman

The Raj Mahal Hotel sat awkwardly between the main shopping centre and the bus terminal; a large squat building that was devoid of any decoration or flourish. It was, in many ways, a no man’s land within the community, neither here nor there. Only men frequented it, and the ‘hotel’ served more as a hostel for men who had migrated into the neighbourhood from the countryside in search of work. Its primary function was as a beer hall, and it was loved and loathed in equal measure.

It must be said, however, that the Raj Mahal’s bar and kitchen qualified it as an establishment with a little more to offer than your average hostel. Its kitchen offered the finest quality chicken giblets, covered in mixed masala, deep fried and served covered in a curry sauce that had simmered for many hours. If one was really hungry there were mutton, chicken and vegetable curries – with rice – on offer. Alternatively, one could order a curry with roti instead.

The Raj Mahal’s exterior may have been drab and unremarkable, but its bar was lively and animated, serving as the local watering hole for the neighbourhood’s men. Although the local men who frequented the bar knew that there were also ‘ladies of the night’ on offer upstairs, they fiercely denied it to their wives.

It was in that bar that Suleiman first met Johnny-Bhai. At the time, he was a mere twenty four years old, but he had already acquired a world-weary disposure. Johhny-Bhai was slightly older than Suleiman, and – as a teacher at a local school – had the benefit of an education over him. Nonetheless, he quickly recognized the intensity that lay behind Suleiman’s thickly browed eyes. They revealed a man who was beyond his physical years in experience and intellect. His limited education did nothing to hide the vast universe of thoughts and emotions he held within him. He was a proud man, even at his young age, and Johnny-Bhai was intrigued by him.

In turn, Suleiman was struck by Johnny-Bhai’s ability to articulate the affairs of the world with clarity and economy. Despite Suleiman’s usual conceptual fluency, and his ability to deploy cogent arguments, events of late proved of such magnitude that Suleiman struggled to adequately marshal his thoughts about it into speech.

These days, Suleiman seemed restless. Most people put it down to his possession of a mind that was made to do much more outside of the cage that it found itself in. After all, he was already well-known for his endless questioning, and his proclivity for issuing abrupt statements that jumped out at the person he was speaking to, jolting them out of the familiarity of routine exchanges. But to those who knew him well, or were perceptive enough to gauge his character, it was evident that recently, when he put his thoughts into words, they were often delivered too bluntly, devoid of any finesse or subtlety.

To Suleiman, the ability to articulate one’s thoughts was an enviable talent, as it promised a release of a kind, one that now evaded him at every turn. His over-active mind, perpetually characterised by disquiet, never seemed to be able to find a suitable outlet.

The recent turn of events in the country vexed him greatly. There was an unmistakeable heaviness about Suleiman as he went about his daily interactions, and his usual wit had given way to a dark cynicism. He seemed to be searching for an explanation for how things had come to be the way they were, but it was precisely that, that constantly eluded his sensibilities. His emotions rose up and his face reddened whenever he tried to make sense of the inexplicable manner in which change had occasioned itself upon the land.

Suleiman had already indulged in several drinks before introducing himself to Johnny-Bhai at the bar. Perhaps his recent travails had driven him to consume more than his usual amount of alcohol because he was more amorous than his usual self, leaning over to introduce himself to Johnny-Bhai unprompted. Johnny-Bhai had, for the briefest moment, raised his eyebrows when he’d heard the name ‘Suleiman’ being offered. Sensing the nature of his inquiry, Suleiman took a matter-of-fact tone,

“I know, I’m a Muslim, but you know where I’m from it’s not wrong to take a few drinks.  In India people aren’t always as strict as people here think.  You know, we like to have a good time too, and enjoy the same things as everybody else.”

“Oh you’re not alone,” Johnny-Bhai replied, “most of my Muslim friends also take a drink.  I’m no-one to judge you bhai; even my wife gets upset with me for my ‘daroo-love’ she calls it.  She says I come here to see my ‘daroo-love’, my other woman is this bar to her.  She thinks all I do is come here to sit and talk shit with the boys.  Anyways, it’s better if that’s what she thinks.  She’s a good woman my wife.”

“So you don’t come here to talk shit then?” Suleiman joked clumsily, his youthfulness betraying him. His eyes swept across the room as he leaned forward.

“All I hear is people talking shit most of the time!”

He smiled, as if to joke, but there was a distinct cynicism in his voice.  His brow had furrowed and his eyes had glowered when he said it.  There was no doubt.  His contempt for the world had spilled over and breached the facade of his smiling demeanour, his furrowed brow betraying his feelings.

To Johnny-Bhai something was obviously brewing in Suleiman. Its intensity was palpable. He opened his mouth, as if to speak, but he paused instead, inhaling the words that were about to be released. The pause served as an invitation to Suleiman, who burst into a monologue of sorts. Perhaps the alcohol had loosened his tongue because he spoke as though he were actually continuing a monologue that had until now been contained within him.

“You know, where I come from there wasn’t this ‘race classification thing’.  What is this now; this Ghetto Bill?  I escaped the caste system in India to have to deal with this?  What will my children be now?  They won’t be Indian?  They must be something else?  My friend, this world is a crazy place.  For some it is easy, for others it is a battle let me tell you.”

Johnny-Bhai sympathised with this young chap. His sincerity and honesty was indisputable. He asked after Suleiman’s age,

“If you don’t mind me asking bhai, how old are you?”

“I’m 24!” Suleiman blurted out from his bearded chin.

Johnny Bhai’s surprise showed.  Suleiman seemed much older.  His beard and his bearing gave him an age beyond his years. Sensing Johnny-Bhai’s surprise, Suleiman expounded;

“I’ve been on my own since I was ten years old.  I’ve worked most of my life; fourteen years now!”

“That’s a long time bhai!” Johnny-Bhai nodded. 

“Not a lot of people understand” Suleiman sighed. “They don’t even usually want to hear about it.  People don’t really talk; they just want to laugh and joke a bit.  I like to laugh too, but ... I don’t know … sometimes things frustrate me.  Tell me, Johnny-Bhai,” he paused for a while and caught his breath, “why … whyyy these politicians …” he flustered.

His eyes squeezed up tight when he’d said ‘why’. It seemed to lock up his brain.  Johnny-Bhai’s lips pursed, but no words came out. He drew in a breath as Suleiman continued …

“Why they say they going to do something if they don’t?”

“I mean … why?” he pleaded.

Johnny-Bhai sensed that Suleiman’s life had left many scars on him, too many to speak all at once, but all recorded and carried.  When you make every triumph over adversity a mark of strength you carry a record with you, like a memorial of battles fought and lost.  If you forgot them you forgot your way in life, so they had to be carried.  A personal history informs a person’s internal world. Their history – its narrative – becomes a metaphor for their existence. They are indelibly tied to it through struggle, loss and triumph.  As the last survivors of the Nazi death camps still wheel themselves over snow covered roads to the sites of mechanised death every year, so too did the survivors of this new diaspora make constant pilgrimages to the sites of their pain and loss. The painful points of separation and loss – from family, community, their homes and their land – echoed through the ages and were transferred from one generation to the next. It was unavoidable in their world because their every action and reaction was to the past and could be traced back to these events. The events of the past shaped the realities of the present. 

Johnny-Bhai paused for a moment. Speaking in English he asked,

“Solly? You ok with me calling you ‘Solly’ eh?”

“Ya”, Suleiman answered, clearly disinterested in his name. Suleiman nodded to indicate that he wanted to hear what Johnny-Bhai had to say. Johnny-Bhai shifted position on his bar stool and shrugged his shoulders.

“Well, they know that society has a short memory Solly.  You see, they know that they can tell us one thing five years ago and change it to another later because people tend to forget.  With all these different faces all the time one is never quite sure who is promising what and on behalf of whom.  The whites are the most guilty of this because as long as things work out well for them they forget even more quickly, but some of our people behave the same too – especially the merchants.  You see this NIC, ‘congress’; I know Gandhi-ji was involved but it is mainly run by the rich fullahs, the merchant castes.  They negotiate our survival under them with the white man; we get the raw end of the stick again. They are not really for us.”

“My father came here to cut cane bhai; he was like you, started looking after himself very young, a very strong man.  He died after being beaten on the farm one day. It affected his mind and started acting strange, you know, like he was shell-shocked or something. One day he went down to the river and drowned himself.  My mother couldn’t support me after that and I went away to a missionary school.  There was a Christian family on the farm who helped get me in there.  They had good relations with the priests.  That’s why I have the name ‘Johnny’ – the nuns used to call me Johnny coz I was always asking to be baptised when I was little; you know, like John the Baptist. They always used to laugh when I said that, so I kept saying it over and over. You know, fate is strange, that is where I learnt to read and write properly and got a good education. But after I finished school there was nowhere for me to go.  I had to go to India to study further.”

At this point in the conversation the bartender shuffled down the length of the bar – as was his routine – rubbing down the thick wooden bar top with a greyish-brown all-purpose cloth. His large arms ground the cloth so far into the wooden slab that despite the daily dribs and drabs of beer and hot curried chicken giblets that had settled on it over the years, it dutifully shone with a dull gleam when he was done. He tossed the cloth over his right shoulder and stood back to admire his work, before moving down the bar to check on his patrons. That cloth would remain on his right shoulder for the remainder of the day and night, until he departed the bar and headed home for a late supper.

Suleiman studied Johnny-Bhai carefully. His gaze gave the impression that he was both present and absent at the same time; it went into and through Johnny-Bhai, so much so that he felt a bit uncomfortable. Suleiman didn’t trust easily, and it was his way to carefully examine the people he interacted with; to test them with questions, even rhetorical ones, and gauge their responses. He proceeded, gesticulating with his large, spade shaped hands towards the ceiling.

“And why they spend so much money on the army when the war is over instead of building schools for us?  They tax us so why can’t they build some schools for our children.”

“There are two answers to those two questions Solly,” Johnny-Bhai shrugged, tilting his head up from atop his gangly neck so his eyes met Suleiman’s. His left eyebrow raised in unison with the movement of his head. 

Suleiman nodded in expectation. His eyes remained fixed in anticipation on the face of Johnny-Bhai. Johnny Bhai gesticulated upwards from the elbow with a light-bulb screw of the left hand, his long fingers flowering outwards.

“They need us as labour, that’s why they don’t build schools.  And the reason why they are spending so much on the army is that they’ve always had to enforce their civilisation through the barrel of a gun.  It is not a civilisation that spreads naturally; it isn’t even really based on religion but on the greed and ideas of man.  It is based on migrating slave labour to wage labour.  Why school us ... to replace them?” He sniggered at the absurdity of the question.

Suleiman eyed him curiously.  He had answered him with such clarity that Suleiman felt a need to open up to this man with more of the bouncing balls in his head, the ones that bounced highest when he was indoors.

Johnny-Bhai took in the scene around him before moving in closer to Suleiman, as though his words were now for Suleiman’s ears only. He raised the index finger of his right hand for emphasis. It hovered near Suleiman’s left ear,

“Things are going to get worse for us, as bad as it’s been for the native Africans all along.”

“The working man has always been a slave to the capitalists.  Even their own people lived like rats in the sewers of their great industrial revolution.  They created the first ghettoes in their own cities, with the rich infected with pleasure and luxury, the poor working like slaves from a young age.  It’s a pattern that the rich have continued through the ages.  It just takes different forms.”

Johnny-Bhai rested his right hand on his knee, tapping it repeatedly with his long fingers for emphasis while he spoke, his head nodding in agreement with his own words,

“You know, in India the Sidhars promised the Indian indentured labourers a lot! But when they got here they found that laws had been passed that made them little more than slaves.  They could be arrested for straying a distance of more than two miles from the residence of the farm-owner or businessman employing them.  And they used the Africans to arrest us. They know what they’re doing Solly! Even in India they’re busy dividing and conquering.  They are masters at oppression and take-over, of looting and pillaging, not of civilisation.”

Suleiman thirsted after knowledge. His busy, juggling mind was always looking to pick up a new concept to throw into its framework and test it, but he lacked the inputs he needed to develop it. He had spent time teaching himself to read, but his reading was laboured and slow. Johnny-Bhai seemed to have uncovered answers where Suleiman had spent much of his life struggling.  He was always occupied with questions but he rarely produced answers that satisfied him.  He lacked the knowledge of the world around him to be able to take a position on things. 

Until meeting Johnny-Bhai that day he’d been growing inside his own mind, drawing on his own life experience to make judgements about the world he observed around him.  He’d always looked inwards for answers and for strength.  He had to; there was no-one he could turn to.  Perhaps God had put Johnny-Bhai here so that he could satisfy his appetite for questions and help make some order of his jumbled up head.  He wondered if Johnny-Bhai had answers about what alternatives there were and he rather apathetically half-commented and questioned at the same time,

“Well Johnny-Bhai you know a lot! I respect that.  I’m a simple man and for me it feels like the world is a hard place that never changes.  Is there any other way that it will ever work?”

Johnny-Bhai shifted position on his stool, and turned to face Suleiman, his beer in his right hand and a stubby half-drawn cigarette in his left hand.

“That depends on how you look at the situation.  Power is not absolute and it isn’t really controlled through the barrel of a gun.  It is enforced through it but that often renders both powerless to some degree.”

Suleiman listened.  He felt as though all the neurons in his brain were alight at the same time.  He was experiencing the thrill of discovery, when ideas meet reality. He felt elevated, ironically enlightened while sat in the dark recesses of the bar.

“Their economies are built on the backs of the working man.  If the working man manages to unite then he has some power to negotiate changes.  If he doesn’t, he remains divided and conquered; a source of labour and a human being without representation in the world.”

A shadow of someone entering the bar on Johnny-Bhai’s right distracted him for a second, and Suleiman was quick to notice. Despite giving the impression of being somewhat distracted he was always keenly aware of his surroundings. He looked over his left shoulder and saw a short, stout man with a broad grin on his face sauntering in. His nickname was known to Suleiman – “Billy” Pather – and Suleiman quickly registered Johnny-Bhai’s discomfort. Billy was a well-known “sellout” who served as an informant to the police. It was wise to guard one’s words around him.

They surveyed the room, and spotting an empty metal trestle in the corner of the room, made their way over towards it. Suleiman placed an order for some snacks, so it would appear that they had moved to a more comfortable location where they could eat.

Once seated and assured of their privacy, Johnny-Bhai continued his Marxist exposition in Gujerati,

“If the working man can educate himself then he can represent himself.  That is why they deny us opportunities to get educated.  They know that our ignorance is their strength.  They make money from it.”

“So what can the working man do?” asked Suleiman.

“The fact is,” Johnny-Bhai laboured, “if we don’t work their economies don’t run!”

“But then we starve,” said Suleiman.

“Yes,” said Johnny-Bhai, “but we are starving most of the time.  When we stop working they start to starve too, and for the first time they feel vulnerable.  They need to know what kind of power can be demonstrated through mass action of the working classes.  This is what chokes them up; when their pockets are hit.”

He paused, anticipating more questions from Suleiman, but when none came, he continued.

“I don’t think fighting them is the solution.  It only gives them more reason to dig in.  If we fight then they say they are justified in their violence, even though theirs came first.  You see, their society – I told you – has a short memory, but ours is very long. Every generation of ours has suffered worse and worse under the British and we suffer it every day so we don’t forget that easily.”

“You see, what makes us different is simple. The poor man has little to lose but his integrity. A rich man has no need for integrity; he has his wealth, and will sacrifice his integrity to keep it. That’s all there is to it, and that is why we can win against them. Integrity is always worth more than gold. Gold is unreliable.”

Suleiman sat back in his chair.  His beer seemed to draw back into the metal trestle table upon which it rested; it had lunged into the metal surface when he’d drawn himself back into the chair.  He couldn’t really be that drunk, he thought.  Maybe it was that his mind was wobbling from having all these new ideas thrown at it.  It had been pushed beyond a limit, and was now in flux. He would probably not be able to sleep tonight.

Yet, it was only his skitterish eyes that betrayed the impact of this assault of information upon his mind.  The simplicity with which Johnny-Bhai had swept away a vast array of thoughts, ideas and questions that had plagued Suleiman through most of his life left him somewhat unhinged, but optimistic.  He had always been in ‘why’ mode.  Now it seemed there were answers out there.  The world was a big place, and he realised that looking inwards was not the way to grow his understanding of it. 

He knew what excellence was, it was achieved when he could pick up and throw a concept out with ease, intermediating it with a few others before catching it again safely, placed on the ground or launching it into the air again, into the mind-ether of his juggled-up head.  He would have to be able to learn from some of the people around him in order to reach that place.

They paused, and the silence between them grew until Suleiman continued.

“I haven’t met many men like you, you know; educated.  I learnt to read, but I didn’t finish school because I had to work.  I’ve worked hard, with my hands, for years but it doesn’t seem to get any easier bhai.”

“My father died young and my mother was forced to send me away.  Things were very difficult for her and she thought that it was better to send me away to a possibility of an orphan’s future here than the certainty of a beggars future in India.  I didn’t understand it when I was a child but now that I’m a father with two children I am being forced to make the same choice."

"... I fought in the war for this country and now I am being told that my family and I are not the same! I am Indian and they are coloured?  Because of their hair?” he spluttered; with his rage overflowing, his spittle had also welled up in his mouth, edged over the corners of his lips and was now making little flecks appear on the metal table in front of them.  It was as if a fountain had sprayed around Suleiman’s beer.

“What kind of man am I to allow this?”

He was pitiful now, and his pain manifested physically; little trembles developed into patterns and scattered across his cheeks – like spidered aneurisms – his face reddening more all the time. The look of concentration and fixation now long disappeared, the boy in him had begun to show through.  He was still a young man after all and he was churning in a well of pain, trapped in his own mind. 

He downed the dregs of his drink in a single gulp, stood up, and fondly extended his farewell greetings to Johnny Bhai,

“Thank you bhai, thank you, you bring me comfort.  It’s been a long time since I’ve been able to truly speak! I will see you again?” he said, leaning slightly backward again but now standing in his famous posture.

“I’m here most days after work,” he said, “I stop by before going home for supper.  It’s a chance to meet all the men and get an idea of what is going on.”

Their relationship would grow and Johnny-Bhai would be in Suleiman’s life all through the years into his second marriage with Mariam.  It was his meetings with Johnny-Bhai where Suleiman would have a few drinks and Mariam was averse to this.  She harboured no feelings of animosity against Johnny-Bhai, she just preferred that Suleiman wouldn’t drink.  Their friendship though, was never about alcohol.  It was about having someone to talk to.  It was something human.

To view the previous chapter of Fatima click here.