Uncle Peter

Had style

Uncle Peter had style. Everybody said that. Not of course that you would notice it just by looking at the man. I mean not with his height – Uncle Peter liked to say he was four-foot twelve inches tall, and not with that little potbelly, or the  nod of his head whenever he was concentrating on something. That nod of his was so pronounced that even we Indians would laugh at him, and it was little Ganesh who said that Uncle looked just like that Mr Peter Sellers, when he is pretending to be an Indian in the movies, which we all thought extremely funny, and this was when we started to call him ‘Uncle Peter’.

So you see, this style that I have already referred to, had nothing to do with physical appearance, and was certainly not linked to Uncle Peter’s dress sense, which seemed to have been frozen in the time of the British Raj.

Instead, it was all to do with his humbleness, his politeness. How he would give everybody a little of his time, even wishing a ‘good morning madam’ to the beggar woman who permanently stationed herself outside the store, collecting the odd coin in the tin mug she held up between the stumps of leprosy shattered hands.

So, when the extended family received an invitation to fly to India, the men gathered in the office at the back of the Patel Brothers Hardware and Haberdashery Store and consulted with Uncle Peter. Across the world in Bombay, Ghandi Patal was anticipating becoming a father for the 14th time and had written to suggest that the naming ceremony, which would take place 28 days after the birth of a girl and 29 days after a boy, was the perfect opportunity for a reunion. As his new young bride had only just informed him of the good news, there was adequate time to arrange the details, the family not being required in India until early in the New Year.

It came as something of a surprise when Uncle Peter said that he thought we should all go. He was found of using expressions such as ‘a penny saved is a penny in the bank’ and ‘look after the shillings and the pounds will always be there waiting for you’, and, his most popular expression, ‘perhaps this is a little something we should be putting aside for a day when it is raining’. The reason that he was now suggesting they should all fly to Bombay, at considerable expense, was he was becoming somewhat concerned about the Nethanderal army officer who had just installed himself in the Ugandan State House.

If it was not actually raining yet, it looked to Uncle Peter as if dark clouds might be gathering on the horizon.

 ‘And I might suggest,’ he said, ‘although we men must of course come back to tend to our business, it might be prudent to let the women and children stay on for a while, to see which way the wind is breaking.’

I tell you, if other families had been given such wisdom, there would have been a lot less heartbreak in the months ahead.

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Indeed things deteriorated far quicker than anybody could have foreseen and when, a few months later, the family set off for the airport in a fleet of battered taxis Uganda already had a nasty feeling to it. Not that we had any trouble. Uncle Peter and a few of us had gone up to the airport the day before, chattering with the customs and immigration men and discretely handing over envelopes packed with notes. Within an hour we were all in the departure lounge waiting for our flight, which had been delayed by a mere twenty minutes.

 ‘Imagine that,’ said Uncle Peter, ‘all the way from India and just 20 minutes late. That is a fine reflection on Air India. I tell you, we are going to a very civilised country.’

Now, Uncle Peter was fine when he was busy, but waiting was something he was never good at, so he decided to go for a wander round the duty free shops. Not that there was many still open, but the Patel boys were in the final stages of selling up and they even had a couple of cameras left and they said they could make Uncle Peter a good deal for dollars. Uncle had already decided a family reunion of this magnitude merited investment in a camera and he thought why not? Dollars in Kampala or rupee in Bombay, it was all much the same.

 So the Patel boys took out a camera and Uncle put it up to his eye and a fat policeman came over and said the airport was a restricted area for photography and he was under arrest. Now, all the man wanted was a little tea money, but perhaps Uncle was already too relaxed, what with the exit stamp in his passport and the plane about to land. Or perhaps it was too ridiculous, him standing inside a camera shop holding a camera with no film, so he told the man to go away and stop being such a silly fellow.

Was the policeman in a bad mood? I don’t know. Perhaps he had a dislike for Indians. Perhaps he just objected to tiny Uncle Peter standing up for himself. Whatever it was, Uncle Peter was marched off to a room and kept there, and when he heard his name being called for the final time, because the flight was about to leave without him, he realised this was serious and offered the men a little something to settle it here and now. But, unheard of for the Ugandan police at this time, an officer who also was in the room got all high and mighty and said what a serious thing it was to attempt to bribe a policeman. A younger constable was however willing to accept a small ‘gift’ in return for passing on a message to the worried family and Uncle said to all get on the plane and he would follow on the next flight when this silly business was sorted out.

As soon as the family reached Bombay, they phoned Mr Mohamed Khan, a very fine lawyer, even if he was a Muslim gentleman, and Khan, being a good man, went round to the various police stations and found Uncle Peter in Kampala Central, still in his best travelling safari suit and sitting on his suitcase to protect his processions from the other prisoners.

Now Mr Khan was both a top lawyer and a practical man, so he made a few inquires and said ‘look my friend, you seem to have got on the wrong side of these fellows, and there is nothing to be done except sweeten them up.’  So, with Mr. Khan acting as go between, Uncle Peter agreed to sell the shop to a man who, by some strange coincidence, happened to be the Chief of Police’s son-in-law. They had even gone through the motions of bargaining Uncle Peter down to a give away price, which was ridiculous, as everybody knew no money would actually be changing hands.

So, three weeks after he had been arrested at the airport, when, if he had been thinking more clearly, the whole mater would have been settled for a few shillings, Uncle Peter stood before the judge and had to listen to him ranting on about Indians conspiring to destroy Uganda for Ugandans.

To be honest Uncle Peter wasn’t really concentrating, because it was all arranged, and he was waiting to get to the bit when the judge said, ‘however Ugandan justice is merciful…’ But the judge went on and on, getting angrier and angrier and Uncle Peter started to feel the sweat gathering on his collar, because this judge chappie was going to make it very difficult to do an-about-face-turn if he carried on very much longer in this vein.

Then a man in military uniform, whom Uncle had never seen before, stood up and said there was new evidence and he produced photographs of military airbases and fighter planes and claimed these were from photographs that had been found in the camera, the one with no film.

Uncle Peter went cold and knew he had been well and truly stitched up.

Indeed Mr Khan, who had got a glimpse of the photographs over the man shoulder, said although he was no expert in photography, he was of the firm opinion they had been cut out of a magazine. But the judge declared Uncle Peter a spy for Tanzania and the USA and for the Soviet Union as well, these Indians fellows obviously being versatile when it comes to the espionage business, and he ordered him to go to jail forever with all his worldly processions forfeited to the court. 

Then Uncle Peter realised what had happened. Obviously there was some dispute going on between the Chief of Police and the judges, about who had what rights to what perks and this was a territorial dispute between themselves and not really anything to do with him at all.

 Mr Khan visited as soon as he could and Uncle Peter asked if there was any possibility of launching an appeal, but Khan said he was sorry, but this was no longer a country where people of their colour were welcome, and he was leaving tonight to join the rest of the family who were already in England with his brother. In fact, he had only been staying on to see Uncle Peter through the trial. So the Muslim lawyers shock the hand of the Hindu businessman and there was tears flowing down both their checks, and Mr Kan knew his would be the last friendly face Uncle Peter would ever see in his life.

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I can’t describe Kampala jail to you, not at that time. Others have tried and I think those fellows have all failed pretty dismally. What can you say? How the guards would bring in half a dozen prisoners, pick one out, remove the poor mans clothing, place his –you know the bit I am referring to – on the table, take the machete and whack. The poor fellow would be rolling around the floor bleeding to death and they would turn to the others and demand, ‘tell us what we wish to know’. And if you could condemn enough of your friends and neighbours, or if the story you made up amused them sufficiently, perhaps they would let you go back to your cell this time.

Then there were the screams on the night they brought in the University students by the busload. One of the President’s sons, having been thrown out of the Moscow flight school by the Russians for being totally imbecilic, enrolled in Makerere University, once the pride of the African education system. Every night he would march up to the girl’s dormitory with his bodyguards and the students, bless their brave hearts, had finally had enough of this and had put up barricades and made a stand. This kind of disobedience did not go down well in Uganda at the time.

 All this Uncle Peter lived through. The rotted food. The choleric water.

There was AIDS too, although the virus wouldn’t even get a name for another ten years, but the prisoners had seen enough of their number die with the oozing ulcers and skin laying on bone to know it was more than just malaria or mistreatment, and that there was something horrific down there with them.

How Uncle Peter survived all this I do not know. He was quiet and dignified as the guards beat him, or the prisoners tormented him just to break the boredom and somehow his dignity – his style – won through. He acquired a certain respect, usually left alone, except on bad nights when the guards were drunk or the full moon had disturbed the more violent prisoners.

Then the rumours went round that the President was throwing all the Asians out of the country and Uncle Peter packed his old battered case that he had somehow managed to keep and gathered the few things that hadn’t been stolen or bartered – blunt razor, 3 year old much read copy of the Kampala Times – and stood by the cell door waiting. However, it seemed that the President’s order for all the Asians to leave hadn’t included Uncle Peter and when he heard the cocks crowing somewhere far beyond these terrible walls, he unpacked his little case, went back to his spot on the concert floor and prepared to sleep away another day.

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Days pasted.

Years passed.

Then one morning the cell door opened and a soldier was standing there. This is it, thought Uncle, the end. He hoped it would be quick. A bullet, not being hacked to death with blunt machetes.

Then he noticed that although the man’s uniform was very dusty, it was not of the patched up rags the Ugandan guards were wearing at this point. When he dared to look up at the man’s face, he saw something he had never excepted to see – there was kindness behind the soldier’s battle hardened eyes. Then Uncle saw that the patches on the man’s shoulder were the striped flag of Tanzania.

There had been rumours of course. That a year ago Idi the Mad Man had invaded Tanzania and conquered it and would soon invade Kenya and become the black Napoleon of Africa. Instead it was now very much as if the fellow had got his arse a good kicking, for here was the Tanzanian army in Kampala.

After a while Uncle Peter left his cell and followed the stream of prisoners, many in a terrible way, out of the building. He hung around the courtyard for a while, but there was still fighting going on and although the Tanzanian soldiers were kind enough, even sharing their rations with the half starved prisoners, they were obviously too busy to worry about them just now. So Uncle Peter picked up his battered little suitcase and decided it might be best just to sort everything out for himself.

A few days later I got a phone call at my new photography and photo printing studio in an up and coming area of Bombay. It was Uncle Peter and he was wondering, if it wasn’t too much trouble, if somebody could come down to Bombay International Airport and collect him.

How he had done it I will never know.

He had walked across Kampala with gunfire still going on. He had located the old house, recently abandoned and in a terrible state, and in the garden had found one of the tins that had been buried there years before. As I might remind you, ‘perhaps this is a little something we should be putting aside for a day when it is raining’ had always been Uncle’s favourite expression, and with the spare passport and wad of dollars he had walked to the airport and talked his way out of war-ravaged Uganda.

So the whole family piled into the flower decorated minivans and pickups that were waiting for us anyway, and in our best clothes we rushed down to the airport and picked up Uncle Peter and from there it was straight off to the temple.

That’s Uncle Peter for you. He had left Uganda for little Shana’s naming and arrived on the day of her engagement. Didn’t I tell you, the man had style.

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