Dumisani

            Dumisani stays on the bus for another circle. Rain pelts against the two panes of glass beside him and from time to time he has to lift a weary hand to brush away the fog. He peers through the clear spot he has created. Outside, the lights are already dimming into the odd time of day when the streets are no longer lit by the clouded sun, and the streetlamps have not yet been brightened. A bright red car splashes a puddle into Dumisani’s window as it passes. Maybe he thinks it’s a Mazda. I don’t know what he thinks.

            The bus passes bridges and intersections full of waiting people. Other passengers come onto the bus with wet umbrellas and briefcases and knapsacks, some talking on their cell phones and some carrying small children. Dumisani waves away the fog and watches the buildings whizz past. In his hand he clutches a piece of paper with an address written in carefully guarded ink. Maybe it was written by a family member in a dark cell in Namibia. Maybe it was given to him by a professor of psychology in Nigeria along with twelve thousand US dollars and the task of bringing home a long-lost daughter. Maybe his family has pooled their resources to send the brightest of their sons to study physics here. Maybe I am reaching for the only tale of Africa I know.

            The truth is, all I know about him is he’s black, and he’s wearing a jacket that looks like it could be real leather. His hair is trimmed short and he has a little bit of grey collar sticking out around his neck. I can’t very well see his face, he’s looking so much out the window. He could well be from here, could well be coming home to a loving wife and family, or a husband, or a recorded episode of Breaking Bad. He could have been at work all day stamping and sorting letters, or answering phone calls with curt to-the-point reminders yes, he is interested in setting up a meeting and no, he will not discuss things like this over the phone.

            But then, he could be from the other side of the Atlantic. He could have been born in Rwanada and been in his twenties during the genocide. He could have seen his childhood playmates slaughtered and strewn on the side of the road and he could have even been among the refugees in the Hôtel des Milles Collines. He could have been a child soldier in Somalia. Although he doesn’t look Somali. Maybe he’s Jamaican. Maybe he’s just visiting a colder place because the sun and green gets old from time to time. Or his sister, who lives in the Junction with an astronaut husband and a german shepherd, has just given birth to Dumisani’s niece.

            He pulls a cell phone from out of his pocket and I imagine the letters on the screen, lists of contacts back in Chad, some of his friends from his time at the Sorbonne, and after scrolling finally the number he was looking for: François DuMaron, his tutor of classics and history from a long time ago when Dumisani was just a boy. His father had insisted on a proper rounded education, and had hired François through an agency to help supplement his children’s school learning. Dumisani and his sisters loved their tutor from the first lesson. He was a young man with a French passport and a Chadian mother, and a bag full of secret treats for when the kids were especially friendly. When the children had grown out of candy bribes, François moved to Canada, but from time to time wrote back to check in on their lives.

Dumisani was game for a working correspondence, so of the siblings he became the official scribe. His sisters on occasion would write their own little notes and slip them into the envelope just as Dumisani was about to seal it, but for the most part it was he that scrawled long accounts of high school, Mother’s eccentric political convictions, the neighbour’s fire and the injustice of two sisters taking up all the television time watching Days of Our Lives.

When he studied in Paris, he kept in contact with François and his old tutor offered excellent advice on where to go for after-class wine, and were best to hide from old lovers whilst trying to finish coursework in the afternoons. François wrote that thinking about these places in Paris made him miss it more. Although he himself had been from Nantes.

After four years of studying classics and literature and a doctorat in political science at Université de N’Djamena, Dumisani was back in his hometown, with his sisters (both of whom were working in the medical field as nurses, although the older one was putting herself through school to be a pharmaceutical researcher) and his aging parents all back in his childhood abode. He was at an impasse. There was no great need for a Paris-educated political theorist in N’Djamena. It was a bit of a useless profession if you really thought about it, as Dumisani’s father would remind him whenever he had the chance. Nevertheless it was what made the young man happy, and though he made his wage cleaning tables and fed himself from left-over scraps of restaurant dishes, Dumisani went home to read avidly up on the day’s news, sometimes staying up until four in the morning collecting pieces of the puzzle from dozens of websites as well as his mother’s reviews.

It was barely a year ago that he first heard from François about the position at the University of Toronto. It wouldn’t pay a lot and it wasn’t glamorous, it was just an assistant’s job in Peace and Conflict Studies, mostly helping to organize research and on occasion tutoring undergraduates with baby bibs still strung around their necks. But he would be assisting his old tutor. Prof. DuMaron, the great success, the great benevolent candy-giver. And Dumisani had never been to Canada before.

The plane ride had been uneventful, except for the long process of visa verification and passport checking (the tip of the iceberg to the year-long quest to gain permission for work in François’ new country) and the pleasant surprise of The Princess Bride as the in-flight movie. When he arrived at Pearson just three hours ago, the passport control line had been full of Chadians scrambling for their visas and in hurried whispers asking one another how to say “Personal” in English. Dumisani’s control guard happened to speak a broken kind of French. But no one after understood a word that he was saying. The man at the wheel of the shuttle bus to Kipling had simply shrugged his shoulders and said, “Sorry” when Dumisani tried to verify that this was the right vehicle. So he sat down anyway and hoped for the best.

The bus had gotten him to Kipling indeed, and in the meantime he had called François to let him know that he had landed.

“Excellent,” François had said, “Tu n’as pas d’hôtel ce soir?”

“Non”, said Dumisani. “Je vais trouver un chambre quand même, à Holiday Inn peut-être…”

“Sois pas fou, tu vas rester chez moi. T’as un stylo?”

Dumisani rustled around for his notebook. He scrawled down the address and promised to call his tutor when he was on the Keele bus.

That’s where I met him. Well, from a distance. I was getting on at Keele and he was already sitting by the window when the bus rolled up. Strange, I thought, he must have missed his stop and decided to stay on.

His head turns to the door for a second, and I have to awkwardly pretend I haven’t been staring at his neck for the past six minutes. If he has noticed me, he makes no sign of it. The rain still pelts against the second pane of glass and Dumisani scratches the fog away one last time before reaching up to pull the stop-string. The bus screeches to a splashing halt at Keele and Dundas, and he carries just one shoulder bag into the pouring rain.