Uhuru Street by M. G. Vassanji Page A

his breakfast. They were a poor family, their store a long narrow booth at the front of their house, flush with the street. There his father sat as we arrived, dispensing kerosene and matches and sugar and muttering from time to time, ‘Oh God, make me good!’ His mother was very fair and fat.
    ‘Aloo is sick!’ she observed one day when I arrived alone.
    ‘Yes, Auntie,’ I said, ‘he stepped on a nail.’
    She saw us off as usual from the doorway, hands on her hips, the flesh on her fat arms loose and dangling at the sleeves.
    We had walked past the crossroads, having observed from a distance the clock in the fire station office and decided to quicken our pace, when in his inimitable way Meghji made the revelation.
    ‘Your mother surely gives Aloo a lot of money to keep, bana. He walks like a rich man! A whole wad of dough – he should not show it around.’
    Perhaps his mother had asked him to say this. My heart sank. The doubt that had lurked in my mind like a thin mist whose presence I could barely sense now became concrete and dark and precipitate. I did not say much and we continued on our way, he telling bawdy jokes and I listening.
    That afternoon I told Mother. Her face tightened, becoming white in a gesture we had learnt to recognise as more of sadness than of anger. Mehroon was also there in the store. She was Mother’s chief lieutenant and self-styled executor. Often, a tyrant. The news gave her a particular thrill.
    ‘Salah!’ she exclaimed. ‘How dare he cheat us!’
    And her mind went through all the schemes he could have used to pilfer the cash. She did not hit upon the truth just then. Nothing was said for the next few days about the matter. Mother was noticeably quiet waiting for Aloo’s next move. But neither he nor Razia nor Firoz suspected anything was amiss or the reckoning that lay ahead.
    A few afternoons later, Aloo said he would go to the mnada. First he went upstairs to the flat for a bath. Mehroon’s eyes lit up. She looked at Mother who was behind the counter near the cash box. Ten minutes later, as she timed it, Mehroon took the spare bunch of keys from Mother and followed Aloo upstairs. What happened there we heard from her. She opened the door and went in. The bathroom was to her left, and he wasn’t in it. But she knewexactly where he was. She went to the sitting room which also served as Mother’s bedroom. It ended on one side in a wedge-shaped corner against which was placed a huge wooden closet that closed off a small triangular area at the back. At the back of the closet, in a small access between the bottom and the floor, Mother kept some cash: for emergencies and long-term debts. To get to the cash you had first to climb up over the six-foot closet, crouch under the ceiling and jump down into the small area behind. You had to be small which meant only Aloo and I could be used for the task. In that small area Mehroon found him. How she got him to come out she did not tell us, but we could guess. Her word was command.
    She came downstairs triumphantly, holding him by the hand, and took him towards Mother. All the while he looked down, and I could feel his cheeks burning with the shame.
    ‘Ask him what he was doing!’ Mehroon proclaimed to us, releasing him with a shove.
    That night while the rest of us sat in the sitting room around the radio talking in low tones to ourselves, Mother got up abruptly and went to the other room where with lights off he was in bed, hoping perhaps to fall asleep before the inevitable. He had gone through much during the rest of the afternoon and at dinner – Mehroon’s taunts and questioning as she extracted from him all the accounts of his purchases and the details of his exploits that had now come to an end.
    It turned out that he had bought most of the things downtown at regular prices. The mnada he had used mainly to quote cheap prices. The difference between what he quoted and what he actually paid he had made up by taking from the