Jimmy Asked, so....
Because we were starting the tour, we had to do publicity.
My friend Jimmy asked me to be on his TV show while
we were in L.A.
When you see people on talk shows, it may seem that the
conversation is random, but it isn’t. Jimmy said he’d ask me
about my new teaching position, and about MagicScore, but we
really didn’t have time to actually rehearse. I had to rehearse
the song I chose to highlight with his orchestra, and we got a
little off track.
I performed “Sabre Dance,” hooking up MagicScore to the
piano. The display of notes as I played always got a great
reaction.
“That’s amazing! How did you do that?” Jimmy asked, as
the applause died down.
“Hours and hours of hard work, and magic,” I responded,
winking.
Jimmy laughed, as did the audience.
“Actually, calculus,” I added.
“So, you’re moving to America, teaching at Northwestern,
a Wildcat.”
“It’s a great academic fit and the love of my life… .”
“You’ve been in Switzerland since 1986. How did you meet
a woman who lived in Chicago?”
“Oh, I’ve always known her. She’s the granddaughter of the
man who bought my father.”
There was a collective gasp from the audience.
“Bought? Seriously?” Jimmy responded, giggling.
“My parents were trafficked. I thought you knew.”
It was as though I had sucked all the air out of the room.
Deafening hush. Jimmy was looking at me with his mouth
open. There were a few twitters in the audience. His director
looked like he was having a heart attack. He motioned Jimmy
to move things along.
“I had no idea. What year was this?” Jimmy enquired.
“Well, it doesn’t often come up in conversation. Sometime
after the end of World War II, the late 1940s, my father
thought. When he was about 14, he got snatched off the street
in Mumbai, and transported to Africa. He was purchased by a
German Jewish businessman, Glazer, in Tanzania. Mara is his
granddaughter. Both my parents were street children.”
“I didn’t know,” Jimmy remarked, looking surprised.
“You see, Europeans didn’t want black Africans as servants
because the African men would only take so much disrespect.
The men wanted wages, partly because of the hut tax. The
European missionaries had this genius idea of ending the slave
trade and making Africans pay cash to live in their own homes.
They were no longer chained, they became wage slaves…”
There was laughter from the audience.
“Seriously,” I said, looking into the audience. “This was
how it was. They’d go back to their homes when they’d had
enough cash. The wazungu, white people, who could afford a
servant, wanted Indian workers because they couldn’t run off.
Where were they going to go? Back across the ocean? To what?
Most were orphans or petty criminals. After they paid off their
contracts, their employers gave them the opportunity to open
or partner in businesses.
“Mara’s father was born in Arusha, but went to school in
the USA. He found a community of South African Jews in
Chicago, and he met Mara’s mother. They returned every few
years to Arusha. Mara knew me before I had a beard.”
“Really,” Jimmy replied, looking surprised, shaking his head.
“When I became a teenager and Mara’s family came to visit,
I decided I wanted her and took advantage of an opportunity,” I
said, raising my eyebrows and smiling.
The audience started laughing again, and Jimmy chuckled.
“I so loved her,” I went on, “but she told me our parents
would not allow it.”
“Because of the difference in race, or what?” Jimmy asked.
“So many reasons. My parents wanted me to marry a Sikh
woman. Mara also told me I had to stay in school as long as I
could; she would not marry a school dropout. She went back to
America. I got a scholarship and met my band mates, the other
Pleasure Seekers, and we were very lucky as a music group.”
There was applause from the audience.
“My father met Sita’s father… .”
“Your first wife,” Jimmy explained.
“Yes. I liked her immediately, and it lasted ten years. Both
of us were unhappy, so we divorced.”
The audience buzzed.
Jimmy paused, and asked, “So… in Africa, is there still
slavery?”
I chuckled. “You know, you Americans think at the end of
your civil war, that was the end of slavery. In Deuteronomy, the
law says a servant must be freed after six years. Your Christian
Bible has Saint Paul telling slaves to obey their masters. There’s
slavery all over. Some people are born slaves. Humans are traf-
ficked from so many countries. People are lied to, told they’ll
get good wages. Their passports are taken away, if they ever had
real passports. Some are brought in by diplomats or other
elites, slaves disguised as relatives.”
Jimmy looked shocked. I rambled on.
“Really, you guys, you allow your politicians to give aid to
countries that ignore human rights.” The audience grew quiet,
but I hardly noticed.
“You’re the greatest country in the world. This really gets
me. You give aid to Tanzania, my country, an economy that can’t
absorb us. We have to leave and become economic refugees. It’s
why I’m working here. Where does it end up? Private autos for
elites, not for improving schools or access to medical care.”
There was a slight twitter again from the audience. Jimmy
hesitated and asked, “What can Americans do?”
“We’re in the modern world now. Email your politicians and
tell them to quit taking money from lobbyists and public
relations people who tell them what to put into foreign aid
appropriations budgets. Take care of Americans first… .”
I got huge applause. I went on: “Tie aid to respect for
human rights and rule of law, improved social indicators.
Women don’t have access to education or family planning
services. You build infrastructure to take our resources and
destroy our environments. You all think you are giving hu-
manitarian aid, but mostly you give military aid, and the
corrupt leaders use it to terrorize their own people. Let me tell
you, missionaries are no help.”
There was a collective gasp from the audience. Jimmy was
nodding his head. I was on a roll. I went on, after taking a
breath, “You’ve elected leaders who are ripping you off! They tell
you that you can’t have single-payer health services, your
‘Medicare for all’ but they take that money and give weapons to
dictators. Then you Americans get involved, on the wrong side,
and you wonder why there are so many refugees.” I shook
my head.
There was laughter in the audience and a bit of applause.
Jimmy continued laughing and nodding.
“Peace Corps is the best foreign aid you can send. Were it
not for them, I would be a servant, not an engineer.”
We went to a commercial, which gave us a little time to
recover. “Are you sorry you asked?”
“Social indicators,” Jimmy responded. “I really had no idea.”
During the break I hooked up the computer to Jimmy’s
trumpet and his orchestra’s bass player. I had tweaked the
program so MagicScore would change color, depending on how
low or high our notes were. We played the Queen song, “Let me
Into Your Heart Again.”
I apologized to the audience, and told them, “This is the
perfect size room to hear music. You’re hearing performers, not
sound system.”
The next day, I got an email from Levine, asking, “What did
you do? I’m getting messages from all over.”
I’ve never known a time I didn’t know the Glazers. My
father managed their business for them, in Arusha, which is
just a few miles west of Mount Kilimanjaro. Mara described
Arusha as a “wild west” town out of 1930s America. Only two
streets were paved back in the 1980s, and where the pavement
ended, the savannah began. There were three main streets in
town, and none of them had names.
My parents’ home, which was burned brick and had a tin
roof that made so much noise when it rained, had belonged to
the Glazers, and was at the end of one of those streets. It was
really an unremarkable crossroads, and didn’t get to be a place
until foreigners started coming from around the world to go on
safari to see the animals. We had the Colgate-Palmolive plant,
which manufactured soaps and toothpaste, and the Philips
plant, which made electrical household appliances and genera-
tors. Those were the first international companies to manufac-
ture in East Africa. Arusha is a big city now, but back in then,
everyone knew everyone.
In the 1970s, when I was a very young child, giraffes and
gazelle grazed meters away from Maasai cows just outside our
windows when school was in session, and skittered off when we
were let out. The golden-shaded savannah rolled on to the
horizon north and west of us, meeting a rich blue sky dotted
with flat topped acacias. Every day was a nice day, even during
the rainy season. I didn’t realize this, of course, until I moved
to the northern hemisphere, with “weather.”
All the boys had to wear white button down shirts with blue
trousers, and shoes. I stood out, though. I was lighter skinned,
with long hair in a bun (in a patka—sort of a scarf on my head)
and kohl around my eyes. They all had shaved heads. Most
Europeans and Asians living in Africa sent their children
abroad. Everyone called me Mhindi, meaning Asian. There were
no white children—wazungu.
Someone had given my school an old, upright piano, but it
could not be played as most of the wires and hammers were
broken. It just fascinated me. A teacher was always calling out,
“Wewe! Mhindi! Singh! Unafanya nini? Ondoka kwenye piano
hiyo. Kaa chini!” (You! Singh! What are you doing? Get away
from the piano and sit down!).
I was a good student because of my brothers. By the time I
was around five, my brothers were in boarding school in Moshi,
a town south of Kili. Avi was ten years older than I was, and
Sodhi eight years. I didn’t understand why they had to go away,
although we had talked about it for weeks. The first days they
were gone, I couldn’t eat I was so upset. It wasn’t until they
returned at the end of the week that I started to understand,
because Baba took me in the truck to fetch them. It was too far
to return every night without a vehicle.
I lived for the weekends they returned. By teaching me,
they reinforced what they learned. Then, they went to Singa-
pore when I turned seven, and were gone for months. It was
exciting getting their letters and postcards every month. Their
first visit home from Singapore, they brought books, which
were still a luxury. They brought my mother a Hindi copy of the
Adi Granth, our scripture. She was overjoyed and couldn’t wait
to learn to read it. We also read the Christian Bible as litera-
ture. Back then, there was no media. Story telling was our
entertainment.
In Arusha, it didn’t matter that we were Sikhi. The Europe-
ans were minorities. The few left were Greek, German Jews,
some dual-citizen English, and Portuguese. There were Arabs,
Indians, lots of mixed race people, and black Africans of many
tribes. Our races and skin colors didn’t matter. We were all
Swahili: People of the coast.
Mara’s father, Ira, visited Arusha every year in the 1970s, to
work with Baba, but he felt without telephones, it would be too
difficult to grow the import/export business in Tanzania. It was
easier to develop a business in the USA. Also, after indepen-
dence in the middle 1960s, African life changed.
With wages to buy things, more people had radios. More
Africans could speak, read, and write European languages, and
they didn’t want to be second-class citizens. The Asians and
the Jews were stuck in the middle. They really could not go
back to where they came from, and they were vital to the
economies of all the African countries. They were others: not
Black Africans, but part of the collateral damage that the
Christian Europeans had brought about. In East Africa, they
were part of Swahili culture.
My parents, who had been servants, moved from servants’
quarters into the brick house when the older Glazers moved to
Nairobi. They had a water pump on the property they lived in;
they had city electricity, rudimentary as it was, for lights. They
had a vehicle at their disposal. They owned a radio (which only
really worked at dawn and dusk), and they could afford a
houseboy and pay local school fees for their sons.
My brothers had taught me so much. In a class of over 40
students, the teachers had to teach to the beginners, so I was
bored much of the time, staring out the window at animals or
just daydreaming. I was doing statistics when my schoolmates
were learning to add and subtract.
The Peace Corps Volunteers, their teachers, suggested to
Avi and Sodhi that they apply for scholarships to boarding
schools abroad. Then, they’d be able to continue to college. The
Peace Corps people helped them fill out applications for both
European and Malaysian schools. My brothers got prompt
replies from Singapore, where schools were secular. They would
be taught in English and not have to learn another language.
Once they got to Singapore, my brothers were encouraged to
concentrate on learning applied physics and engineering.
In reading the applications, they found that although they’d
get room, board and tuition, they had to come up with the
funds for transportation, either by plane or ship.
They went to the hotels in Arusha to see about being
waiters, but the Europeans who were in charge preferred to
hire adults. What the hoteliers suggested, as it would be easy
for us boys to do, was negotiate with the Maasai for honey,
milk, yogurt, and their beaded jewelry to sell in the gift shops.
The Maasai usually avoided Wazungu because they didn’t want
to be proselytized to as they already believed in one God.
In the early 1980s, I also negotiated with the tailors to
make shirts, skirts and bags to sell. Sometimes I could get my
Chagga schoolmates to carve little animals, bracelets, and
bowls, and sell those. They’d hunt, and I could sell skins until
that became illegal. Later, as I was pretty well known around
town, I could get Tanzanite, malachite, and sometimes dia-
monds brought up from South Africa to resell in Singapore.
My brothers got part-time work when school was out, as
interpreters for the Hadzabe men who were hired as game
scouts by the tour companies. Some of these African guys
spoke enough English to get by, but so many white tourists
didn’t feel comfortable with just Africans, and my brothers’
English was so elegant. Also, both my brothers could drive.
They got great tips in hard currency. When not on the safari
lorries, they were smoking ganja with the Morani: teenaged
Maasai boys who had just been circumcised, or with the Peace
Corps Volunteers, teaching them Swahili in exchange for books
and American things we didn’t have access to.
In 1981, when I was about 11-years-old, Ira first brought
his daughters and wife on his visit to Arusha. We were waiting
at the airport when they arrived. Baba and I were shocked to
see, as they walked out of the plane, that they were wearing
miniskirts. We had seen photos of this fashion in magazines
that my brothers had brought back from Singapore. However,
miniskirts would not be permitted in Tanzania. We never, ever
saw women’s legs. To explain, we saw bare breasted women, not
in town so much, but on their bomas: women who were
nursing, and widows, mostly. Rarely did you see a woman’s legs
above the ankle. We explained this to them all on the ride back
into town, that they would have to wear kangas, pieces of cloth,
to cover their legs. These were long legged women, too. Mara
was Sodhi’s age, and Shayla was a three years younger. Anya
was younger than I was.
I wondered if Ira really had to spend a month with Baba.
The work really started at harvest time several months later.
From just listening to them talk, I learned it gave them a
chance to talk with farmers, address fuel costs, and contracts
with the logistics firms. They also had to find places to store
commodities until it was time to ship. I learned a bit about
futures trading, and that helped me when I began trading as
an adult.
If you’re not on safari, there’s not much to do in town. The
girls were disappointed the first time they came that there were
no lions or elephants in town, and the small monkeys stayed in
the trees unless they wanted to steal our things. I taught the
girls to juggle fruit, which all the African kids did, and how to
spell their names in Hindi and helped them learn Swahili.
They brought books, a record player (which we had to wire
to the house as their electricity was different), records, and
board games like Scrabble and Monopoly, and Mad magazines.
Who doesn’t love Mad? Those Mad magazines made me very
popular at school. At first, one of the British ex-pat teachers
called me into the headmaster’s office. They wanted to chastise
me for reading junk, but the Peace Corps Volunteers came
to my defense, explaining that Mad magazine was real Ameri-
can English.
Mara wrote a lot of letters to friends and to her husband.
She had been with the guy since she was fifteen, and now she
was 19. I asked her, “Why didn’t your father bring him?”
“He didn’t have a passport. My father told him to apply, but
I don’t think he wanted to get a yellow fever shot, and he has to
work to pay for school anyway.”
“My brothers buy jewelry and dairy from the Maasai and
resell it to make money,” I told her.
“There are laws regarding trade in food, and people who
make jewelry sell it themselves. Dan’s working as a janitor,
cleaning office buildings overnight. It doesn’t pay well, but
that’s why he’s going to college. When I go back to the USA, I’ll
get a job grooming dogs, washing them and cutting their hair,
to pay for school.”
She showed me photos, and some of those dogs looked like
small sheep. I could not imagine having so much money that
you could spare it to pay for someone to cut your dog’s hair.
When tourist season was over, everyone left. I didn’t realize
how much they all meant to me until they were gone. I felt
lonely, but I had things to do. School was starting. I had to pick
up my brothers’ provisions business because we all needed the
money for our transportation costs and incidental expenses, as
well as clothes and shoes. By the time I was 12, I could ride the
motorcycle, so I could get around.
Mr. Curtis, my main customer, ran the largest hotel in
Arusha and also rented out cottages, where the Glazers stayed.
Bwana Curtis was always busy. He was a wiry Greek mzun-
gu who changed his name because he said it had too many
letters. In his hotel gift shop, he sold the clothes I had the
tailor make, Maasai jewelry, Makonde carvings, and the pillow
slips my mother embroidered. He also got a lot of mambo ya
wazungu: things expatriate wazungu left.
One day, when I brought him jewelry, he said to me,
“Singh, I want to show you something.” He beckoned me to
follow him into his big dining room, and I saw this thing as big
as a small elephant. It was a grand piano. I had only seen
photos of them. It was like a beam of light came from the
heavens, like a spotlight on it, making the dark wood glow. The
angels started vocalizing. I was immediately mesmerized.
“These ex-pats are moving to Hong Kong, and they decided
it made more sense to sell it than pay to have it shipped. You
can probably make good money selling this. I have a piano and
don’t need kitu hivi (this thing). I told the wazungu I’d try to
sell it. I bet with all the people you know you can sell it and
make a good commission.”
I went over to it, lifted the door cover to the keys, struck one,
then another. I struck all the keys, and they all worked. I felt the
sound in my body, an interesting feeling. Now, I’d describe it as
frisson. I lifted the cover to look at the wires and hammers. I
couldn’t think, I was so awestruck. Selling it would be difficult.
It was a big thing. I couldn’t imagine anyone in town having a
place for it or knowing how to play it. The churches? I consid-
ered the commission, but I was interested in both music and this
machine. I couldn’t articulate it to myself at the time, but I
recognized that music was patterns of notes, and had something
to do with mathematics. This was an opportunity.
“How much do they want for it?” I asked.
Bwana C told me what it was in shillings, and I rolled my
eyes. It was something like four hundred dollars. That was
impossible. I had a little more than that saved up, but I needed
to have saved at least the equivalent of a thousand dollars by
Christmas, three months away, to stay on track. My brothers
needed the money, and I would, too, by the next year.
“Tell them I can pay” … It was the equivalent of two
hundred dollars. I don’t remember the exchange rate, the TZ
shilling fluctuated so much. I could only do so much on the
black market. We always feared a currency change, which
meant we’d lose money. Bwana C told me they wanted the
money in pounds sterling, so that meant a conversion fee, but I
knew he wouldn’t rip me off.
I ran home and yelled to Ama as soon as I could catch my
breath, “Amaji! Curtis bwana has a piano. I want to buy it and I
could, but I need to save for our expenses.”
“What’s a piano?” Ama asked, as she was chopping vegeta-
bles for dinner.
“It’s a machine that plays music.”
“You have a machine that plays music.” She meant the
phonograph the Glazers had brought.
“This is a different machine. Not electric. I have to learn to
play it.”
She tried to talk sense to me. “Mtoto, you’ll be going away
to school soon!”
“But I will come back. Don’t you want me to come back
and play the piano for you?”
“I don’t even know what it is!” she responded. She actually
did, she just didn’t know it was called a piano.
I wanted to learn to play it not just to make music, but
because I was interested in how it worked. I hadn’t thought
about what I’d do in school.
I didn’t know it at the time, but Ama was saving for a
generator so she could have a refrigerator. We boys never asked
for anything, so she knew it was important to me. I brought
her to see it and she laughed and asked where we’d put it.
She told me she’d make up the shortfall somehow if I
couldn’t by the time I needed the money, but I’d have to dili-
gently learn to play. It would be another four years before she
could get the generator and fridge, but I did learn. We moved
furniture around to make room for this wonderful thing. My
school teacher found another Peace Corps Volunteer, Jim, and
he taught me how to play in exchange for practicing Kiswahili
with my parents. Once a week, he came and gave me a lesson
and stayed for dinner, and I practiced about four hours a day. I
must have driven my parents crazy, but they never told me to
stop. In fact, one afternoon Baba invited Mr. Curtis for tea while
I was practicing. I was just learning, and let’s say the sound was
dissonant. You can imagine. Mr. C started to get up to leave
after he finished a cup of tea, and Baba asked him to stay for
another cup, and appreciate that I was learning, thanks to him.
I’m sure Mr. C got it.
I really enjoyed playing. It made me so happy. It was very
difficult the first three or so months, but it got easier, and Jim
was a good teacher. He taught me chords, started me on Mozart
and Bach, and taught me to read music. I could hear the notes
in my head as I saw them on the paper score. I particularly
liked Rondo Alla Turca by Mozart.
After school, I’d make the rounds of people I’d have to see
to sell what I got from the Maasai, take orders for what the
hotels wanted, and play piano until dinner, and before bedtime.
In 1983, I started to mature physically. I grew about six
inches in six months, and my hands and feet got larger as well.
My mother stopped making me wear a patka and bought cloth
for a pagri/turban. I had to wear my brothers’ old clothes. I
developed a downy beard, and body hair. My voice? I never knew
what was going to come out of my mouth. I started sweating.
Worse, suddenly I was getting erections. I was a mess, and for
some reason, all I could think about was Mara. I’d be reading,
get tired, my mind would wander, and I’d get hard. I tried to
keep busy, and playing the piano really helped because while I
was learning, I had to really concentrate on that.
By this time, there was a good market for Maasai jewelry
and carved animal trinkets among tourists. The trouble was
that our currency kept losing value, and I had to convert it
quickly to hard currency. We had a currency change in 1984,
which was a huge nightmare. I remember people crowding into
the bank to convert old shillings to new. People paid us watoto
to wait in the bank queues for them, because you could only
convert a limited amount at a time. Thankfully, my father had
an international account and I didn’t have to explain where I
got so much hard currency. The hotels were pretty good about
this: Everyone knew I was saving for school. In a way, they were
overcharging me when converting shillings, but it evened out
because the hard currency didn’t lose value. I told my brothers
in a letter that when and if they could afford it, to buy gold. The
point was to not lose money on the money we made.
The year I turned fourteen, I joined my brothers in Singa-
pore for the next school year. We traveled by steamer, which
would have been boring without books and magazines. There
was not much to see on the open ocean. We couldn’t get off at
the ports of call lest we be snatched.
For me, it was like moving to another planet: Indoor
plumbing (my first experience with flush toilets) and electricity
that worked all the time, telephones. I learned to use a washing
machine and dryer. I had to learn to cross the street in traffic.
I think what I felt was called future shock.
Avi was doing energy-related engineering, and Sodhi was
doing telecommunications. They were moving north to Kuala
Lumpur at the end of the year, several hours north of Singa-
pore, to work.
The first week in Singapore, I was late twice for morning
homeroom, and Dr. Schultz asked me to stay after class. “Mr.
Singh, class starts promptly at eight. Why are you late to class?
This is not Africa. What time do you go to bed?”
I found his question odd, and a bit personal, but I really
didn’t know how prompt I needed to be.
At home, in Africa, it got dark around 18:00. I was usually
in bed by 20:00, because our electricity either went out, or our
40 watt bulb wasn’t enough to read by. Then, we were up at
5:30 when the muezzin called prayers.
In Sing, the electricity didn’t go out, and our lighting was
good. I was falling asleep reading. I had to buy an alarm clock,
and a watch. They were so cheap!
Grocery stores with freezer sections, stores that sold clothes,
stores that sold records and televisions. We never bought cereal
or packaged food in Africa. Not only because of the expense, but
because it took so long for things to come up from South Africa.
Then, as likely as not, there were weevils in it. I got to try lots of
different foods including ice cream and chocolate, and I made
myself sick. The second time they came to take me to dinner,
after I had been in school two months, Sodhi said, upon seeing
me, “Kiboko!” KiSwahili for “hippopotamus.”
“Wapi?” (where)? I responded.
Both my brothers laughed at me.
“Look at you! You’ve gained at least a stone and your skin
looks awful. You’re eating snacks, mzima kabisa,” Avi admon-
ished me. They took me to the gurdwara, the local Sikh temple,
for the langar, the free evening meal, by public bus. “When we
first came to Sing we were also tempted, but you should eat here
at the gurdwara’s langar at least once a week and quit eating
snacks,” Avi directed me. The food was more what I was used to
as well, always a vegetarian meal with dal, potatoes, or rice with
a green vegetable. Some of my schoolmates went with me.
My classes were, first, homeroom for announcements, then
physical education every morning for an hour. I learned about
stretching, body building, tennis, football rules, and how to
swim in a pool. After that, calculus for an hour, then physics,
each twice a week. After lunch, I had world history, geography
or biology. They just glossed over African history. It seemed
they thought we had nothing of importance until the continent
was divided in 1885 among all the Europeans and King Leop-
old. I knew this wasn’t true.
I learned to type 60 words a minute, which was a useful
class. It helped so much when I started to do coding. Two
nights a week I had art history. The other two nights and Friday
afternoon, I interned with an engineering company.
My track was physics, of course, and quickly I moved to
applied physics, then mechanical engineering. I kept taking
tests, and they kept trying to challenge me. I learned to pro-
gram main frame computers with FORTRAN. It was like a
game. At one place, I got a job debugging programs in UNIX for
some side money, and they had electronic piano keyboards. You
could make so many different sounds, and I was able to keep up
what I had learned.
My brothers were still in touch with Dr. Schultz. He told
them that I would be better at a school in Switzerland because
I could start college courses there, and get research assistant-
ships, and better contacts. I would also learn another European
language. I started learning French.
Both my brothers intended to stay in Asia because of the
opportunities. Avi had met Siri, another Sikh, and planned to
marry. Her parents lived in Singapore. Avi and Sodhi invited me
out to dinner towards the end of the school year. I was shocked
that they had cut their hair, and weren’t wearing pagri, or what
the English call turbans. They still had beards, very much
trimmed, but were also dressed western, not in shalwar khameez.
Sodhi said, “Never mind our hair, it will grow back by the
time we go home and we’ll have turbans on, anyways. We want
to tell you Dr. Schultz wants you to transfer to this Swiss
school after the break. He taught us both and we trust him. He
will make sure you are given a scholarship. You need some-
thing more challenging.”
“We’ll miss seeing you, but the way Dr. Schultz put it to us
is that you have a lot of talent, and you’ll benefit,” Avi added.
Avi wrote to my parents that he planned to marry Siri.
There was excitement about Siri. Being modern people, her
parents were happy that Siri had met such a well-educated Sikh
boy. Unfortunately, when the time came, my parents could not
attend the wedding. Travel was too expensive for them, and Avi
didn’t make that much money at that time.
My brothers and I, with Siri, returned for the summer. I
was happy to be back at my piano, but at first, I was concerned
that we wouldn’t make enough money from all our activities to
pay for our transport back to school. My brothers reminded me
that they both had jobs to return to, and to just worry about
myself. Being gone the whole school year, I had missed oppor-
tunities. I explained to my parents, “I am going to have Alfred
come over. He’s Chagga. He carves, and so does his father. Take
what he brings and deal with the hotels and gift shops and give
him a commission. Half would be fair. I was able to sell all the
things I had in a few hours a week, after school, so it’s worth
the time. Also bring cloth to Ngoma, the tailor, to make shirts
and skirts.” My father had plenty of time, so he agreed.
I explained to all my contacts how it would be, and thanked
them all for helping me so much. All the business people were
impressed that I was going to school in Europe.
