The Dragonfly Sea E-Book

Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor

• Herausgeber: September Publishing
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Beschreibung

'One of the most unforgettable books I have read in the last few years... What a writer! What a thinker! What a woman!' Fiammetta RoccoFrom the award-winning author of Dust comes a magical, sea-saturated, coming-of-age novel that transports readers from Kenya to China and Turkey.On an island in the Lamu Archipelago lives a solitary, stubborn child called Ayaana and her mother, Munira. When a sailor, Muhidin, enters their lives, the child finds something she has never had before: a father. But as Ayaana grows into adulthood, forces of nature and history begin to reshape her life, leading her to distant countries and fraught choices. Selected as a descendant of long-ago Chinese shipwrecked sailors Ayaana is sent to study in China. Leaving her resourceful single mother, she is forced to grow up fast.Whether it's the scarred captain of the Chinese shipping container that transports Ayaana or the son of Turkish shipping magnate who trades in refugees, Owuor never loses a profound sense of empathy for her characters. She evokes a fascinating kind of beauty in this dangerous, chaotic world and its ever-shifting oceans and trade.Told with a glorious lyricism, The Dragonfly Sea is a transcendent story of love and adventure, and of the inexorable need for shelter in a dangerous world.'One of Africa's most exciting voices ... The Dragonfly Sea is a continent-hopping novel of epic proportions.' Refinery29'In its omnivorous interest in the world, The Dragonfly Sea is a paean to both cultural diffusion and difference . . . as much as [the novel] traces the globe, it also depicts an internal pilgrimage, its heroine in rose attar a broken saint.' New York Times'Owuor continues to break ground among contemporary African writers.' Vanity Fair

Leseprobe

iii

the dragonfly sea

yvonne adhiambo owuor

v

For you, La Soledad.

&

As always,

The Family

Matriarch, Mary Sero Owuor

&

The father we dearly miss.

&

My siblings,

&

the most iridescent of lights:

Hera, Hawi, Gweth, Sungu, Diju, Detta, and Sero.

vi

Author’s Note

In 2005, also the six hundredth anniversary of the Ming dynasty’s great Admiral (Haji Mahmud Shamsuddin) Zheng He’s (1371–1435) first voyage around the Western (Indian) Ocean, a young woman from Pate Island, Kenya, obtained a scholarship to study in China. The award was given based on family claims and DNA tests that suggested that she was indeed a descendant of a Ming-dynasty sailor who had survived a storm-wrought shipwreck, who, with others, had found refuge and a sense of belonging on Pate Island. The Dragonfly Sea is inspired by this historical incident, but it is necessary to emphasize that it is not this young woman’s story, lest the character plot points be ascribed to her. Though the story incorporates current news and historical events, this is a work of fiction, and the chronology of several events has been altered. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, or persons living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

vii

Take this amulet, child, and secure it with cord and honor.

I will make you a chain of radiant pearl and coral.

I will give you a clasp, fine without flaw, to wear on your neck …

Wash and perfume yourself and braid your hair;

string jasmine and lay it on the counterpane.

Adorn yourself in clothes like a bride, and wear anklets and bracelets …

Sprinkle rosewater on yourself. Have rings on your fingers and, always, henna on the palms of your hands …

—Mwana Kupona binti Msham, translated by J. W. Allen and adapted by Yvonne Adhiambo Owuorviii

Contents

Title PageDedication Author’s Note The Dragonfly SeaAcknowledgments Also By Yvonne Adhiambo OwuorCopyright

1

The Dragonfly Sea

Roho ni mgeni.

The soul is a visitor (stranger).

2

[ 1 ]

To cross the vast ocean to their south, water-chasing dragonflies with forebears in Northern India had hitched a ride on a sedate “in-between seasons” morning wind, one of the monsoon’s introits, the matlai. One day in 1992, four generations later, under dark-purplish-blue clouds, these fleeting beings settled on the mangrove-fringed southwest coast of a little girl’s island. The matlai conspired with a shimmering full moon to charge the island, its fishermen, prophets, traders, seamen, seawomen, healers, shipbuilders, dreamers, tailors, madmen, teachers, mothers, and fathers with a fretfulness that mirrored the slow-churning turquoise sea.

Dusk stalked the Lamu Archipelago’s largest and sullenest island, trudging from Siyu on the north coast, upending Kizingitini’s fishing fleets before swooping southwest to brood over a Pate Town that was already moldering in the malaise of unrequited yearnings. Bruised by endless deeds of guile, siege, war, and seduction, like the island that contained it, Pate Town marked melancholic time. A leaden sky poured dull-red light over a crowd of petulant ghosts, dormant feuds, forfeited glories, invisible roads, and congealing millennia-old conspiracies. Weaker light leached into ancient crevices, tombs, and ruins, and signaled to a people who were willing to cohabit with tragedy, trusting that time transformed even cataclysms into echoes.

Deep inside Pate, a cock crowed, and from the depths of space a summons, the Adhan, crescendoed. Sea winds tugged at a little girl’s 3lemon-green headscarf, revealing dense, black curly hair that blew into her eyes. From within her mangrove hideout, the scrawny seven-year-old, wearing an oversized floral dress that she was supposed to grow into, watched dense storm clouds hobble inland. She decided that these were a monster’s footsteps, a monster whose strides left streaks of pink light on the sky. Seawater lapped at her knees, and her bare feet sank into the black sand as she clutched another scrawny being, a purring dirty-white kitten. She was betting that the storm—her monster—would reach land before a passenger-laden dau now muddling its way toward the cracked wharf to the right of her. She held her breath. “Home-comers,” she called all passengers. Wajio. The child could rely on such home-comers to be jolted like marionettes whenever there was a hint of rain. She giggled in anticipation as the midsized dau, with Bi Kidude painted in flaking yellow, eased into the creek.

Scattered, soft raindrops.

The thunder’s spirited rumbling caused every home-comer to raise his or her eyes skyward and squawk like a hornbill. The watching girl sniggered as she stroked her kitten, pinching its fur in her thrill. It mewled. “Shhh,” she whispered back as she peered through mangrove leaves, the better to study the passengers’ drizzle-blurred faces—a child looking for and gathering words, images, sounds, moods, colors, conversations, and shapes, which she could store in one of the shelves of her soul, to retrieve later and reflect upon.

Every day, in secret, she went to and stood by the portals of this sea, her sea. She was waiting for Someone.

The girl now moved the kitten from her right to her left shoulder. Its extra-large blue eyes followed the dance of eight golden dragonflies hovering close by. Thunder. The dau drew parallel to the girl, and she fixated on a man in a cream-colored suit who was slumped over the vessel’s edge. She was about to cackle at his discomfort when a high and harried voice intruded:

“Ayaaaana!”

Her surveillance of the man was interrupted as lightning split the sky.

“Ayaaaana!”

It was her mother.

“Ayaaaana!” 4

At first, the little girl froze. Then she crouched low, almost kneeling in the water, and stroked her kitten. She whispered to it, “Haidhuru”—Don’t mind. “She can’t see us.”

Ayaana was supposed to be recovering from a morning asthma attack. Bi Munira, her mother, had rubbed clove oil over her tightened chest and stuffed the all-ailment-treating black kalonji seeds into her mouth. They had sat together, naked under a blanket, while a pot of steaming herbs, which included eucalyptus and mint, decongested their lungs. Ayaana had gulped down air and blocked her breath to swallow six full tablespoons of cod-liver oil. She had gurgled a bitter concoction and been lulled to sleep by her mother’s dulcet “do-do-do.” She had woken up to the sounds of her mother at work: the tinkle of glass, brass, and ceramic; the aroma of rose, clove, langilangi, and moonflower; and the lilts of women’s voices inside her mother’s rudimentary home-based beauty salon.

Ayaana had tried. She had half napped until a high-pitched sea wind pierced and scattered her reverie. She had heard far-off thunder, but she had pinned herself to the bed until the persistent beckoning of the storm proved irresistible. Then she rolled out of bed, arranged extra pillows to simulate a body, and covered these with sheets. She squeezed out of a high window and shimmied down drainpipes clamped to the crumbling coral wall. On the ground, she found the kitten she had rescued from a muddy drain several days ago, stretched out on their doorstep. She picked it up and planted it on her right shoulder, dashed off to the seafront, and finally swung north to the mangrove section of the creek, from where she could spy on the world unseen.

“Ayaaaana!”

The wind cooled her face. The kitten purred. Ayaana watched the dau. The cream-suited elderly stranger lifted his head. Their eyes connected. Ayaana ducked, pressing into the mangrove shadows, her heart racing. How had that happened?

“Ayaaaana!” Her mother’s voice was closer. “Where’s that child? Ayaaana? Must I talk to God?”

Ayaana looked toward the boat and again at the blackening skies. She would never know what landed first, the boat or the storm. She remembered the eyes that had struck hers. Would their owner tell on her? She scanned the passageway, looking for those eyes again. The kitten on her shoulder pressed its face into her neck. 5

“Ayaaaana! Haki ya Mungu … aieee!” The threat-drenched contralto came from the bushes to the left of the mangroves. “Aii, mwanangu, mbona wanitesa?” Too close. The girl abandoned her cover, splashed through the low tide to reach open sands. Ayaana scrambled from stone to stone, with the kitten clinging to her neck. She dropped out of sight.

The stranger, a man from Nanjing, saw a small creature soar against the backdrop of a black sky, hover, and then fall like a broken-off bough; as she did so, a long chortle erupted out of him. His fellow travelers, already sympathetic about his chronic seasickness, glanced at him with unease. It was not uncommon for seasickness to turn previously sane persons into lunatics. The man focused on the land, eyes active in his placid face. A cataract in his right eye gave it a luminosity in his balding head on his tendon-lined neck. He turned at the sound of a woman’s voice calling, “Ayaaaana!” Stomach roil. Craving the sense of land, he tried to measure the distance between the boat and the jetty, hoping that they would dock soon.

Fifteen minutes later, ill-fitting suit aflutter, the visitor stepped off the boat. He had to wade through shallow water to reach the black sand shore. Even though anonymous hands helped him forward, he stumbled. His hands touched the soil. He swallowed air. Here were the rustlings of ghosts. Here was the lonely humming of those who had died far from home and had for too long been neither sought nor remembered. A brown hand dangled in front of his face. He took it. One of the sailors helped him up before handing over his single gray bag. The man intoned, “Itifaki imezingatiwa,” and then chortled at a secret joke.

The traveler blinked, uneasy and engulfed by redolent evening scents; oudhi spattered enchantment. His breath discerned bitter orange, sweet balsam, and the sweat of the sea blended in a dense air that also heated his bones. Succumbing, inhaling. He then tilted his head toward the hubbub of human arrivals. He heard the music of a rolling tide. He glimpsed an almost storm hovering on the horizon. What was this place? He ambled forward, heels rotating as if his toes had roving eyes. Pale light shone on a pink petal falling from a solitary 6 and slender wild-rose bush. The man faltered. He waited for the petal to settle on the ground before reaching for it. Only then did he lift it to his lips, enclosing it in one hand while the other adjusted the condensed contents of a life that fit into the canvas bag hanging from his shoulder.

7

Mwenda Pate harudi, Kijacho ni kilio.

One who goes to Pate does not return; only a wail resounds.

8

[ 2 ]

The morning when the man from China entered Kenya—inside a spacious lime-washed bedroom within a wood-and-coral two-story house located in a twelve-house maze in Pate Town still chiseled by trade winds named kusi, matlai, malelezi, and kaskazi—an aging seaman, Muhidin Baadawi Mlingoti, dreamed, again, that he was circumnavigating a gigantic sapphire mountain at the bottom of the sea. He carried a map in the dream. It was inside a dark brown book, and contained arcane words that lit up as if inflamed. The real version of his dream map was under his bed, inside an ornate mahogany Lamu chest, bundled up in a dark green cloth.

Five years back, Muhidin, the sun-blackened, salt-water-seared, bug-eyed, and brawny descendant of Pate Island fishermen and boatbuilders, had swiped this book from one of thousands in the private library of a Dubai-based war and sea bounty collector to whom Muhidin would sometimes sell contraband artifacts. Inside the book’s pages he had found a beguiling yellow-brown parchment with maplike markings in a cryptic language that featured the emblem of an archaic compass that indicated the east as the starting point for movement. When Muhidin first examined the parchment, he had imagined it was written out in musical notation. Later, he saw that, when exposed to dusk’s light, the parchment emitted an intimate attar that evoked sandalwood. What was it? A memory map’s paean to trade winds, ports, and travelers? What if the fragment was a flavored piece from a foolish tale, one of those interminable Alfa Lela Ulela—Thousand and One Nights—gossip sheets? It is nothing, Muhidin told himself to assuage 9his lust to know. It is nothing. Still, whenever Muhidin fell foul of the haunted realms of his heart, he would automatically reach under the bed to retrieve the book and touch the parchment for reassurance.

Long, long ago, when Muhidin was no more than a boy, a fierce song had burned into his being. It had clung to him like an earth-stranded ghost. It would later re-emerge as dreams that woke him up with a craving for unnamable things. The song would turn an illiterate island boy into a seeker, traveler, reader, and sleuth—a hungry truth-hunter. Muhidin Khamis Mlingoti wa Baadawi had been orphaned when a Likoni South Coast ferry sank with his parents and five siblings. Through this tragedy, his childless relatives—Uncle Hamid, a zumari player and master boatman, and his wife, Zainab—acquired a punching bag and an indentured servant. However, during a four-day fishing trip with his uncle, in the middle of a thrashing, rolling, wrestling match with an enraged giant black marlin, goaded by his uncle’s baleful threats—“Dare you lose my fish, dare you”—the terror-stricken fourteen-year-old had slipped into a state of high concentration, inside of which whisperings, as if from the Source of Life, bubbled forth. In these he heard a palpable sea-song, which sucked him into the soul of a single wet note made out of the contents of time. The song penetrated his young heart, which proceeded to shatter and scatter as portions of infinite sun across chilled worlds. From that moment, Muhidin would be struck with perpetual homesickness for an unknown place.

Suddenly docile, the fish had yielded its life.

Afterward, a desultory silence. Then Muhidin had tumbled about the boat, keening, the bitter sound drenching his wrinkled uncle Hamid, who contemplated Muhidin with very old, very dark, very cheerless eyes. “It’s nothing,” the uncle grunted five nights later. “The disarray of wind.” But the uncle and his wife never touched Muhidin again.

The emotion of the event had later pressed Muhidin into the sea’s service, where he would work nonstop, an enchanted captive. Whenever he reached land, he darted after illusions as if they were fireflies. He dredged dark nooks in port cities, buying, bartering, stealing, and scrounging for maps and riddles. He scoured arcane notations, hoping 10 to signpost existence. Destination: certainty. In this quest, Muhidin rubbed skin with both man and matter, and, finally, they, not the sea, would rip the fabric of his being.

So many sea years later, a world-bruised Muhidin, buffeted by endless solitude, would again encounter reverberations from that odd day. He was aboard his merchant vessel on a frigid, vile-tempered, night-blackened Atlantic. He had, as usual, assumed duty on the ship’s storm watch when, from within seething seas, he glimpsed blue spherical lights gamboling on water. He had blinked as they disintegrated into fractions of the ghost song he had once heard. He had leaned over the railings, baying, “Who are you?” A two-story wave had swamped the ship’s deck and drenched him before retreating. Muhidin was at once overcome by a yearning for the island home he had abandoned. Everything he had found so far only hinted at what the ocean’s formless song was not. He had no high faith to find shelter in either. This he had earlier offloaded in an Alexandrian souk where an alabaster-skinned vendor of everything, with a sepulchral hawk-nose, had delicately avoided contact with Muhidin’s skin.

The souk.

A call to prayer had resounded. The warm-voiced invitation to souls to gather clashed with the chaos of small, bad human habits. Like the word that the trader whose goods Muhidin had spurned had then let slip: Abd. Slave. And inside Muhidin, something had detonated. He had ground his teeth. “Bloodthirsty djinn! Executioner! Gobbler of souls.”

The trader’s glassy-eyed smile. His stuttered, “Abd … my friend … You know … my friend, brother, it means … means … submission to the will …”

Muhidin had roared: “Stop, thief! Atone! Stink of putrefaction beneath white robes, walking cemetery. Mtu mwovu. Imbiber of human blood … Atone! Parasite! So you won’t touch my hand? Its blackness condemns you? Atone! Thief of land and soul! Atone!”

Fear had distorted the trader’s face. Licking his lips, he had whispered to Muhidin, “Look! Look!” He zigzagged backward. He did not close his stall. His arms pointed in all directions. But the others in the market pretended neither to see nor to hear, their faces lowered to avoid Muhidin’s incandescent gaze. Muhidin had stomped away, clutching his halua. His body’s trembling had dislodged the vestiges of faith to which he had clung. 11

Abd.

Muhidin’s uncle had called him Abd for most of his life, until the day of the fishing trip. It was the name he knew from growing up on an island where spoken words could become a covenant and a bond. “Kuffar,” his uncle had added—“heathen.” Using such soft tones while he thrashed Muhidin, and Aunt Zainab just looked at the bleeding boy as she slurped down heavily sugared ginger coffee. This was the face of loneliness, then, the substance of his present disquiet. Images: Uncle Hamid, musical fisherman crouching in white-robed prayer, a zabiba on his forehead, hiding the truth of a bloodthirsty will.

Abd.

Muhidin had stridden through that souk, the halua perfuming him with sweetness, and a vow on his tongue: Between religion and my black skin there shall be a sky’s distance until the day I hear the Call to Atonement. Inner weightlessness had followed his vow. Restlessness. He began to pace like the caged black leopard he had seen in a Qatari oilman’s vanity zoo, neither happy nor sad. While he was hauling goods or raising chains, he observed himself, as if detached, and wondered why he did what he did. Loading, securing, stowing, unloading, Muhidin clamped down on his thoughts and refused to consider meaning. Unfettered, he soaked his senses in unlimited indulgences: wine, women, words, drugs of assorted flavors, and ceaseless political discourse. He developed an opinion about everything. In this way, Muhidin massaged his unease until the day when, after twenty-eight years, three months, eight days, and seven hours of fealty to the sea, on a simple humid June morning in 1992, his Panama-registered ship reached Zanzibar Harbor.

The morning sun on Unguja Island had been golden and fierce, and its piercing had caused Muhidin to cover his eyes. When he could look, he gaped at Zanzibar Island as if seeing it anew. On the docks below, at least twenty-six emaciated, runny-nosed harbor cats purr-meowed while the flimsy veils between worlds made time brittle. Colonizing crows, wind, warmth, and voices. Muhidin glimpsed a forgotten self amid all the others he had accumulated: fisherman, stevedore, able-bodied seaman, junior engineer, utility man, lover, temporary husband, man with nothing to graft himself on to, salt on his face as the 12East African air entered him. Two translucent insects chased light in front of him, and a nameless merchant, into whose body numerous worlds had embedded their stories as deep wrinkles, pointed at him and waved. Tears had dribbled down Muhidin’s bearded jowls and fallen into the oil-stained water of the Zanzibar port. Muhidin clutched the guardrails, and a preternatural desolation gnawed him. A second later, a large piece of machinery clanged. His shipmates’ voices called him, wrapping his name in fond abuse. The chief officer yelled at him from a height. He turned to grab the nearest out-of-place object, a half-empty water tank, to heft up, carry away, and use to hide his face.

Yet, later, under obsidian darkness, Muhidin slunk away from his life at sea. Muhidin bribed two harbor “rats”—boys of unknown age, who scrounged for anything, and who circled the harbor like djinns bound to one place—to help him haul down five gunnysacks laden with the repositories of his sea exile: books, maps, bottled attars, calligraphy ink and brushes, incense, dried perfumed blood, dried herbs, tree resin including frankincense, two shirts, shorts, a hat, and a large coat. He carried his money in a thick leather pouch strapped to his body. Muhidin and the “rats” had skulked along the shadows and depressions of the new harbor to cross into Stone Town through a hole in the fence. They huddled along coral walls, and re-entered the labyrinths of in-between worldliness to the sound of Algerian raï. He remembered the perfumed, wide-eyed women wearing black buibuis. Now they glided past him with the single fluttering gaze and bracelet-tinkling seduction perfected here. Food smells. Muhidin inhaled biryani, pilau, coconut-flavored aromas; chutney, pickles, yogurts, peppers, mbaazi, and mahamri; custard apple and avocado juice offered by a baby-faced vendor. “Shikamoo,” a pigtailed girl said in greeting as she curtsied before an older rotund man dressed in a gleaming white kanzu; he heard Kiswahili cadences and ubiquitous whispers, reggae by Bob Marley and Peter Tosh; he saw dim doorways that veered off the maze. Muhidin’s sudden laugh had been a basset hound’s bark. They hurried toward Old Dhow Harbor, and stopped along an ancient stone ledge that skirted the sea unevenly.

Muhidin saw a lantern-lit midsized vessel floating a short distance from the docks—a dismal behemoth bulging out in unusual places. It looked as if it should have been burned as an act of mercy 13at least a century ago. It had been hopefully named Umm Kulthum. Its nahodha—or captain—stood in silhouette as if welded to his vessel. “Masalkheri”—Good evening—Muhidin called, his voice a grit-speckled gravel of underuse.

The nahodha, a colossus, detached himself from his boat, slipped into water that came up to the top of his thighs; as he waded toward Muhidin, he asked, in singsong mellifluence, “Nani mwenzangu?”—Who is my companion?

“Muhidin Khamis Mlingoti wa Baadawi.”

“Du! Such a name! What do you want?”

“To spout poetry to the stars with you. What do you think, man? To go.”

“What’s your problem? Where?”

Pate. A phantom-calling invocation. Memories crawled over Muhidin like arachnids sneaking out of forgotten crypts. “Pate.” Muhidin shuddered. Surf breaking, speckled light-in-darkness sea spray filled holes of decrepit silences.

The captain had grumbled, “Only fools and criminals cross the sea in this season.”

“Then I’m a fool,” Muhidin had growled.

The boatman grunted. “True. What’ll you pay?”

“Anything.”

“Passport?”

“You need one?” Muhidin countered.

“No.”

“Neither do I.”

“What’re you carrying?”

“Simple things.”

“Don’t want trouble.”

“None from me.”

“We leave at dawn.” The boatman had turned toward the bobbing Umm Kulthum.

Muhidin had called, “Wait for me. I’ll be in the boat.”

“You’re mad, man.”

“Maybe.”

Muhidin and the urchins had hauled his goods into the dau. Before dawn, six other travelers and three deckhands had joined them on board. They set off with the morning’s high tide. 14

. . .

Some of the passengers had disembarked at some of the small half-living ports along the way—Tumbatu, Pemba, Kilifi, and Shimoni—but when together, the men shared the crew’s tasks of balancing or patching up the vessel, and bailing out water over the six days and nights required to navigate changing currents and tides, trusting in the goodwill of winds and reaching Northern Kenya waters. At around 2:00 p.m. of the sixth day, the nahodha turned the Umm Kulthum toward an old sign on a protruding rock that indicated the way to Pate Island. This also marked the waterway that elephants once used to island-hop at low tide. They had turned into the Mkanda Channel, avoiding the riskier deep-sea passage. When they passed the mighty mangrove thicket, Muhidin’s heart started to ache. The white tips of sandbars. Faza, reshaped by a fire, Ndau Island, and, before long, the black sand shore of Ras Mtangawanda. Soon Muhidin became one of few arrivals stepping onto Pate Island. Returning to what? His knees had weakened as he crisscrossed invisible boundaries that outlined the past, his and the island’s. Then easy laughter, the relativity of time. He walked and stared at the frontiers that marked crumbling graves, shrines to scholarship, vestiges of shipbuilding yards, tombs of saints, the syncretic signs of previously confident gods; a sturdy mosque that shared its space with all other worship. The people, his people. An old face crossed his path, and it was familiar. Seconds later, Muhidin’s heart had burst; it let out a howl. Children playing close by stopped their game. Three brave boys ran over to see what had caused the sound and discovered a supplicating man on his knees, a man who had just learned that a long, twisted road through vast realms had arched right back home.

That was then.

As for the yellow-brown parchment Muhidin breathed on, today he was certain of only two things: all it offered was that he had it, and, like everything else he touched, it was crumbling before he could decipher it. 15

. . .

“Allahu Akbar …”

Another day, night, day. Herald of promise, easing an ancient brooding island into wakefulness.

“Allahu Akbar …”

The song ripened.

“Al-salaatu khayrun min al-nawm …”

And a high-pitched wind from the sea whipped up sand particles. It sprinkled these on the things of life. Crowing cockerels. The tunes of morning jammed Muhidin’s recurrent dream-reel of returning to Pate, which ended with a question he needed to ask but could never articulate. Even though Muhidin had given up God, he attended to these summons to life with the pleasure of an aesthete.

“Allahu Akbar …”

From the balcony of a top-floor gallery in his coral house, Muhidin watched a ngarawa flotilla. Early-morning fishermen crouched and rose, crouched and rose, digging long mangrove-wood oars into the ocean to the pulse of the dawn’s light, which spilled like molten silver over the water. He adjusted his embroidered barghashia and casually wondered if he should open up the downstairs window into his shop, Vitabu na Kadhalika—Books and Other Things. The morning sun was an intimate touch on hands that gripped the balcony’s worn rails. He listened to the quavering bass echoes from the muezzin’s dawn hymn. The salt aroma from the ocean was sprinkled with a blend of spices, seaweed, and unknown ocean herbs.

Allahu Akbar …

The Adhan here was still borne in the voice of a man, two men—Omar Abdulrauf and Abasi Rashid—to be precise. Rivals, each bore a rock-hard conviction of his particular vocal giftedness while offering faint praise for the other’s efforts. The island still resisted the taped, exact, and washed-out coats of sound offerings made in dour Saudi Arabia that elsewhere had replaced that timbre of truth that a living voice offered.

“Ash-hadu an-la ilaha illa llah …”

Muhidin climbed down broad steps, ears buzzing from Omar Abdulrauf’s bayed summons: “As-salatu Khayrun Minan-nawm …”

Muhidin wondered about offering a honey-clove-ginger gel to 16the crier, whose baleful countertenor suggested the mating of whales. Muhidin hastened across the inner courtyard and shaded his eyes from the light pouring in.

He waited.

Three minutes.

There it was.

Patter of footsteps behind the north-facing house. After a few minutes, a child’s voice chanted: “Kereng’ende … mavuvu na kereng’ende …”

Kereng’ende? Muhidin scratched his beard. Dragonfly season. He glanced skyward. The short rains were coming. The air was thick with humidity, the clouds sat high in the sky, and large shoals of fish were showing up from spawning grounds. There were new currents and undercurrents. Muhidin turned to the sea.

Splash!

A child gurgled, piling on laughter. Muhidin listened for a while before rubbing his whiskers as he wandered into his lower-floor kitchen, and switched on the kettle. He laid out a chunk of honey halua and mahamri ya mbaazi on a rusting round tray that had once featured pictures of kittens. He poured hot milk into a large mug, added a spoonful of masala, and imagined that the evening dhow from Lamu would come bearing some mkate wa mofa, which he needed to get. Somewhere in the water, the child laughed again. Her glee crinkled Muhidin’s eyes. Secret laughter for Muhidin meant that a secret could be transferred with a glance across a gallery’s turquoise balcony. A secret could be born when a man witnessed a dance that the rest of the world would never see. A secret could be felt or held in a minuscule smile that was no more than a tic on an aging man’s upper lip, or a glimmer of starlight in a bastard child’s eyes. Before the child had seen him, she used to twirl in the ocean’s shallows and sing a loud song of children at ease:

“Ukuti, Ukuti

Wa mnazi, wa mnazi

Ukipata Upepo

Watete … watete … watetemeka …”

Unseen, he would listen. Other times, he saw her just combing the beach. She hauled in driftwood, dead eels, dead birds, dead starfish, 17 a sealed bag of pasta, a hockey stick, a baby doll’s head, and a blue plastic turtle. Then she had discovered he was at the balcony at dawn. So she sang in softer tones, but the morning breeze still brought her tune to him.

“Sisimizi mwaenda wapi?

Twaenda msibani

Aliyekufa ni nani? …”

He had seen her long before her dawn adventures entered his life. It was over an oil-exuding, large, lobed, scaly fat creature, the size of a short man, with four leglike lower fins that one Yusuf Juma, fisherman, had hauled in and dumped on the jetty. People had gathered to stare, and some fishermen remembered that a similar beast had been found before. The little girl had appeared. She had crawled under the assembled adults’ arms, and was kneeling close to the thing, arms looped across her knees, when Muhidin, who was on his evening walk, the tap-tap of brogues with steel heel and toe caps announcing his approach, had pronounced, “Ni kisukuku. Alieishi tangu enzi za dinasaria.” He repeated a message from a poster he had seen about the coelacanth. He added, “Netted one once when I was at sea. Can’t eat it. Return it to the water. The sharks will rejoice.” As he glanced over, he briefly noted the intense wide-eyed, openmouthed gawking of the girl in oversized rags. His eyes had glazed over, preoccupied as he was with completing his evening stroll.

As the kettle now hissed and spat water at Muhidin, he heard her voice:

“Sisimizi mwaenda wapi?

Twaenda msibani …”

He knocked the kettle’s head as if it were a disobedient pet, and poured the dark, bitter coffee into the mug. Chewing on coffee grounds mixed with cardamom, cloves, and cinnamon, he carried his tray upstairs to his room. He looked over the balcony to scan the sea, scrutinizing the red-edged clouds and uneven blue waters. Storm tonight over water, he predicted. The girl was playing in white-froth 18waters. She dived under the surface. The current, he worried. Muhidin counted the beats of his heart, looking for telltale dark, rippled signals of an undertow. Then the child popped up. She had surpassed her previous two-minute underwater feat by seventeen seconds. Muhidin wiped his nose on his sleeve. Wasn’t as if it should matter to him. Not his business. Mouth twitch. Two minutes seventeen seconds!

An early-morning creaking and shuffling had disturbed Muhidin’s sleep one night more than a year ago. It had been dark when he reached for a watch he had put together from the remains of past watches. It chirped, cricketlike, and pinged once every three hours. Restless for the usual unremembered reasons, he had retired to his balcony to wait for the sunrise. He had noticed the glimmer of light in the magenta slashing across the sky. In that luster, he had glimpsed a being leaping in the ocean, cavorting like a baby pomboo, a dolphin. It had dived under water and emerged several meters away. It was not that Muhidin believed in the existence of djinns, but, as an explanation for the specter in the water at that hour, the shadow of the idea crossed the wall of his mind. He hurried downstairs, crossed an inner courtyard, cut through the reception space he used as his shop and dispensing booth, walked past the foyer and out through the porch. On the street, he trotted down to a corner that would lead to the beach. Then he recognized the waif.

His disappointment had surprised him. Desperate for ghosts, Muhidin? he chided himself. Kweli avumaye baharini papa kumbe wengi wapo—many kinds of fish in the sea. He had scowled as an inner debate curdled his thoughts. Should he haul the child out? There were unstated rules about who could and could not swim in the sea. A child: not without supervision. A girl: hardly ever. But. He also knew how the sea was with certain people, how it needed them, and they it. It was like that for him. But it had been expected of him. His late father, and his father before him, had been sea keepers—they had read the water in all its seasons, and had kept its rites and rituals. Even though they had died before he could learn from them, he had retained an instinct for the calling. In his youth, he had been one of only seven who could dive in the middle of the night to find fish, oysters, and crabs from the deep with only lanterns on boats to 19light their way. He had been stung by jellyfish and electric eels, and lived. He could name swells, tides, and currents by look or sensation. When a riptide had swept him into deep seas, he had not been afraid, merely curious. Ever since he had returned to Pate, three times he had snapped awake, only to find himself in the water at night, without knowing how he had left his bed and house to reach the tides.

[ 3 ]

The dirty-white kitten wrapped itself around the little girl’s tiny shoulders as she watched passenger boats dock. She was waiting for her father. She had never seen her father, nor did she know what he looked like. Everything she believed he was had arisen from her imagination, where she had demanded that he reveal himself in a tangible form today.

Just as she had expected that he would yesterday.

And the day before.

Whooshing winds, the murmur of the tide.

Today, her father was not among the disembarking home-comers of the morning, or among those who tumbled out of the evening dhow. He did not disembark from either of the two matatus that traversed Pate Island. Ayaana had waited till she heard the night crickets chirp, until there was sudden stillness, as if the world were waiting for her to speak. She whispered to her kitten that she would give her father only one more chance. Tomorrow was his very last chance to find her. The cat faux-scratched the girl’s head and purred.

[ 4 ]

Time-dissolving floating. Solitude and wordlessness, and everything traveled toward an unknown beckoning. Even she did. But underwater she did not need to worry about labeling things in order to 20contain them. Feeling, sensing, experiencing—that was enough for knowledge. The sea had many eyes, and, now hers were another pair. A passing fish stared. A human looked back. She drifted with the currents, with the things of the current. She drifted until it was necessary to surface for air.

Laughter echoed.

Muhidin leaned over the balcony to listen to the child with the sea, the child in the sea. Would she learn that the ocean, like the world, was unpredictable? But. Not his business. He had returned to his house that first morning. Still, he looked out for the child every dawn. On some mornings, she did not show. On others, she shimmered into view before cockcrow, tiptoeing into the water, bouncing through the shallows if the sea was in ebb, and jumping into waves when the sea flowed. Months later, as she scurried back to her house, she had tilted her head up at him as if she knew he would be there. He withdrew from the balcony. A month later, she slowed down as she crossed the area below his balcony, walking with her head low. Days later, she stopped and breathed. She caught his look. She then pulled her ears down, crossed her eyes, and stuck out her tongue. And then she was gone, making tiny holes in the sand, as if a duiker were crossing.

When she reappeared the following week, Muhidin returned her salutation in full. As he did, her eyes grew bigger, and then she clutched her stomach and screeched, before covering her mouth. Her mirth made her execute three cartwheels and then collapse on the beach, overwhelmed by the too-much-ness. Her merriment inside dawn’s protective shadows had infected Muhidin, who started to guffaw as he clung to his balcony railings. Then she was gone. Paff! Tiny steps on dark brown sand.

Ayaana.

The child’s name was not common to Pate. Ayaana—“God’s gift.” Of course, Muhidin knew her story. Everybody did. The child had come to the island one high tide seven years ago. She arrived in the arms of her then skeletal, mostly vanquished, on-the-tail-end-of-a-scandal mother, Munira, daughter of prestige—pale-skinned, narrow-eyed, as slender as a bird’s foot, and just as delicate. Her previous haughty, loudmouthed, angular, and feral beauty had been sheared off and dimmed by whatever it was she had tangled with in two and 21a half years of life away from the island. She had drifted back home, a broken, rusting anchor. Ayaana was Munira’s only explanation for the raw-skinned thing she carried. It bawled at a wild, fire-streaked dusk as its mother disembarked from the leaky fisherman’s ngarawa she had chartered from Lamu in exchange for her last two gold bangles. When Munira landed on Pate Island, “Ayaana” was a plea for mercy on her lips. Those who witnessed their arrival, as they would an approaching cortege, did not renounce “God’s gift,” the babbling evidence of one woman’s washed-away dreams.

“Who is the father?”

“…”

“The father, Munira?”

“The wind,” she cried out, harrowed, hollow. “He is a shadow of wind.”

And the answer, throbbing with the hint of horror, incited the family to organize schemes that would cause the situation to vanish. They promptly identified a groom for Munira: an austere scholar with a thin beard that touched his concave stomach, whose numerous attempts at serial marriages had failed—each bride fled and was never seen again. His first and only wife had also willed herself into muteness. The man was determined to merge with Munira’s patrician family and enter into its ancient, intricate, and extended business tentacles, which touched most port cities of the world. He was already starting the process of changing his name to theirs—a part of the deal.

In response, Munira had rushed to the promontory, clutching Ayaana to her body. She prepared to jump. Her suicide threat compounded the scandal, entrenching the certainty of her incorrigible madness, her cursedness. Many, many years later, in one of their lucent moments, Munira would tell Muhidin the smaller details from that time: how she had handed her heart over to nothing—“I don’t believe in man”; how at every moon tide she would vomit out hope; how she rated some days’ quality by the quantity of insults received—the fewer the kinder. “But you can’t outrun your shadow,” she would say to Muhidin. He would reply, “You can ignore it.” She would scoff, “Stop it. We know the truth. Even as we lie.” She would say, “We will speak of death before we dare to speak of our loneliness. Dua la kuku halimpati mwewe. But I’m alive. Isn’t that good?” She would laugh at herself. 22

After Munira threatened suicide, her cherished father, to save face, declared her maharimu—anathema. He had also preceded her name with the word mahua—the deceased—saying, “You, my firstborn, you trampled on my holiest dreams, you, to whom I gave everything. You have squandered your right to our name.” His eyes had been red with grief. Munira’s father, to the resentful regret of the archipelago—he had been a significant job-creator—had at once moved his harborage business and household five hundred kilometers away, to Zanzibar. Munira’s spurned suitor and his family went with them. “Please, die,” her stepmother suggested to her on their way out, “but do it after we’ve gone.”

They abandoned Munira in Pate with her child.

Munira mourned them. She would live, but her name became a byword for faults, a caution used to threaten bold or rebellious girls, a reason to remember why there were fewer jobs available on the archipelago. She was kidonda—a walking wound.

In spite of his anguish, Munira’s father had, supposedly in error, left behind the keys to one of the family’s smaller houses. Munira had cautiously moved in and waited to be evicted. That did not happen. She retreated into its shelter with her daughter. She emerged in the early light with the child wrapped on her back and cleaned houses, cooked, washed and braided hair for pitiful shillings, with which she fed herself. She then started a garden of flowers, spices, and herbs, which she tended one plant at a time, burying her hand into the difficult loam and churning it with manure until it became fruitful again. Her beauty-therapeutics work sprang gently from this.

Munira was marooned on her island. But twice a month, and only at night, she wandered over to a cove or sought out one of four large sea-facing rocks from which to look out at dark horizons into which she could implant secret dreams, safe from the jagged, gnashing teeth of an unappeasable world. There, within the shelter of night, Muhidin had thrice glimpsed Munira. Two years into his return to Pate, Muhidin, wandering in the darkness, had sighted a fluid shadow under the silver-light moon. The vision had frosted his soul. Then, to his breath-restoring relief, a human body glided after it, an unveiled moonstone woman. In another month of another year, in an equally dense hour, Muhidin’s and Munira’s sea-sprayed shadows crisscrossed, merged, and separated again: two isolations tiptoeing on an ocean’s boundaries, 23 ears tilted inward, straining toward unknown phantoms and old promises that tempted them into an interiority where they could rest. Muhidin again spotted Munira crouched within an onyx-shaded hollow close to the sea. Not once did either of them acknowledge the presence of the other. At the previous New Year’s, while trying to strip himself of the ocean’s hold on his soul—he had, again, woken up to find himself in the water—Muhidin had run toward Munira’s house for no reason. He had leaned his head against the pillars of her door. Ever since then, he had tried to avoid even the thought of her.

[ 5 ]

On some Pate Island nights, conversations among men converged on the island square. In the absence of a reliable television service, these mabaraza were Muhidin’s news roundups. The men, mostly retired civil servants with rolled-up two-day-old newspapers whose every word they pored over, merchants, nondescript workers and scholars talked. Children played, and women murmured and tittered, and voices gentled by the day’s end debated Kenya’s contorted politics, its brothel-opened approach to everything, and English Premier League scores. There were three main groups unfairly distributed in support of Arsenal, Manchester United, and Chelsea. A few clung to a much-mocked nostalgia for Liverpool. They spoke often of Kenya as if they mattered to it, as if it had not at once lost its memory of their existence.

Muhidin gobbled sweetmeats with these men, sipped hot, bitter coffee, played dominoes, mocked nearby Lamu Island’s self-importance—Pate had once dominated these seas, had been a maritime hub, making and selling warships to the nations of the ocean. The men outdid one another’s monster-and-mermaid tales, and dissected visitors, such as the old man from China who had taken over a fishing hut and was planting a vegetable garden. They clucked about scavenging watu wa bara, mainlanders, and the native-born nyang’au who were Kenyan politicians. They whispered about secret oil and gas and gold finds on the island. They traversed the memories of their broken 24island; picked up shards of fragmented, shattered, potent yesterdays. They exchanged tales of happenings in ports and sniffed the aromas of white flowers—lady of the night, orange blossom, lilies, jasmine—under the trillion eavesdropping stars. These Pate nights had reduced the volume of the thousand and one moans plaguing Muhidin from hidden places of his soul. The men would often rib Muhidin about his flirtations with heresy and his wild-tempered avoidance of public prayers and sacred events. “The Apostate,” they had nicknamed him. Yet Muhidin was also treated with cautionary wonder. Not only was he an augur who soothed secretly proffered fears with mysterious elixirs, but also, with one Pate eye perpetually cast on imagined worlds beyond the sea, the men saw in Muhidin one who had lived their every unmet dream.

In the mabaraza, after their evisceration of politicians who, they agreed, went to Nairobi garlanded in dreams and promises and returned to them as shape-shifting djinns—devious, untruthful, and ravenous—the chattering men would often target an island resident to broil, roast, and chew over. To Muhidin’s suddenly increasing dismay, he observed how often Munira, the little girl’s mother, was fodder. Kidonda entwined with major human follies, with a focus on lust, mannerlessness, sloth, and vanity. Kambare mzuri kwa mwili, ndani machafu. She had outer beauty but inside dirt, proclaimed a middle-aged merchant with a penchant for watermelons and lewd insights: “Have you seen how that one spins her head?”

“How?” Muhidin barked, irritated by his irritation. Not my business, he scolded himself.

The merchant’s eyes roamed as he said, “Nose high up. Scandalous daughter of fire, she even speaks with her hands.” He lowered his voice. “You’ve seen the gap between her front teeth? She ensnares men with potions.” His head moved in an arc that pointed northward.

Munira had been seen wandering in the direction of the arc, where Fundi Almazi Mehdi lived. He was the almost mute shipbuilder and long-ago wind-whistler—one of the few who could summon sea winds by intent and melody—whose grandfather had moved to Siyu from Kiwayuu. Mehdi repaired broken sea vessels. His wife, sons, and daughters had lives elsewhere, in the Middle East, where Mehdi had 25also been before returning to Pate alone. He was sometimes heard to whistle to the memory of sea winds. His radio knob was permanently set to the meteorological channel, with which he kept abreast of the state of tides.

“Fundi Mehdi?” Muhidin restrained his amusement.

“God protect us,” the merchant sighed.

Muhidin let go a belly chortle. “Dear man, you sound thwarted. Were you hoping to be ‘ensnared’?” The others laughed at the man. Muhidin added, “Du! Yet that woman’s garden is alluring. The soil loves her hand. What flowers! What herbs! What spices!”

The island’s mobile-phone services provider protested. “But have you asked yourself what sort of person cultivates plants near a grave, eh? I swear she employs djinns, eh?”

Djinns? Muhidin said, “Decayed flesh is also manure, brother!”

The man sniffed.

A week later, Muhidin felt his body edging away from these night conversations. He had been about to jump into the conclusion of a debate about Arsenal versus Manchester United, in praise of the Chelsea Football Club, when he realized he was on the outside looking in. The same thing happened three nights later. As the island’s oldest tailor was boasting and calling his wife “a flower of flowers,” Muhidin had stretched his arms. Faking casualness, he pursed his lips to whistle. He wandered off, looking about him as if for a pee bush. But as soon as he was out of sight of his companions, he dashed all the way back to his house.

Muhidin felt his way up the stairs and into his bedroom. There he showered before falling into bed, where an odd electric sensation seized him. What am I doing? He tossed about in dampening sheets. “Where is your wife?” those men had once asked him. He had lied. He had looked roguish when he said he had made full use of misyar, the traveler’s marriage—a legal temporary arrangement between a consenting man and woman. “Countless Nikah mutʿah,” he announced. The men gaped at him in wonder. He had compounded the lie to extract sympathy: “The one I most loved … she got sick. To spare me grief, she left me”—he dropped his head and choked—“to die.” 26

The men made sympathetic sounds.

One observed, “It is good you are here now; our women are beautiful.”

Now, lying in his bed, Muhidin evoked the women who had been actual intimates in his life. After his first wife, he had temporarily married three others—lush beings. He had disappeared on them. One was in Pondicherry, another in Mocha, and another in … was it Beira? Far too many gaps, he grunted. He had lost the threads of the lies he told to gain access to soft, scented, sultry bodies, and the lies he wove to extricate himself. With a piercing pang, he wondered about his children—those he knew about, the ones he had abandoned. A shuddering in his heart: condensation of unspoken fears. He murmured into that night: “Am I, then, to die alone?” He had lived hard and unfettered. He had sought this way—preferring it to the possessive disorders of erratic jealousies, overwrought demands that passed for love and its suffering. He had never been able to give himself over to stifling domesticity. He read it as insanity. Fortunately for him, fresh horizons always beckoned. He was a man most himself when roaming the contours of life’s riddles. But time had turned on him. Time had handed him over to the shapes of his ghosts. They were of the texture of his unchosen life.

Now—“What am I waiting for?” An opposing proposal—“Who am I waiting for?” Muhidin turned over in his bed, leaning away from the encroachment of memory, but not succeeding.

Raziya, his first wife: he had divorced her when he was nineteen and she eighteen. Raziya was a sweet, trusting, overprotected island girl, vulnerable to the potent flattery—mndani, and mpenzi wangu—that Muhidin ladled. They had eloped and gone to Malindi, then returned to the island married. Seven months later, she gave birth to twin boys, Tawfiq and Ziriyab.

Three days later, Kenya, the restarted country, lowered the Union Jack and raised a red, green, black, and white standard. Raziya’s father, Haroun, an erudite man striving for tolerance, who had almost studied at Oxford University, had tried to embrace his rough-hewn fisherman son-in-law. He turned over one of his houses to his daughter, hoping the cultured environment would have both a cleansing and an enlightening effect on the man, to whom he insisted on speaking in English. The house had indoor ablutions. “Dowry,” the father-in-law had told Muhidin. 27

The house’s elegant lines and spaces, rows of bookshelves, and old, delicate Chinese plates had scared Muhidin, who stumbled into and broke a two-hundred-year-old Persian vase on his foray across the threshold. He took to spending days and nights at sea to avoid being near the house. He darted hither and thither to avoid the father-in-law, who was always seeking to improve him. “We are now Kenya,” Father-in-Law once said of the new flag fluttering on the pole of the repainted administrative shed.

“So?” Muhidin had replied in Kibajuni. “Will it improve the supply of fish?” He was not being rude; he had simply wanted to understand what “Kenya” meant.

Father-in-Law had tried for two more years before giving up and arranging a more suitable affiliation for his daughter, with a widower, a respectable merchant cousin from Yemen. Father-in-Law then contrived a dawn fishing trip with Muhidin. He had camped next to Muhidin’s boat from midnight, waiting for him. “Let’s go,” he told Muhidin. Mid-sea, Haroun had produced an envelope with eight thousand shillings and an introduction to a ship captain in Mombasa. In exchange, he pleaded with Muhidin to divorce his daughter—“Be merciful in God’s name; you are surely most unworthy of my child and her children”—and effect a permanent disappearance from the vicinity of the territories of the East African coast forever. Muhidin had sputtered before squelching a plea to Haroun, to explain that he had been poring over a dictionary of English words, that he listened to the BBC on shortwave radio even at sea. Instead, Muhidin had exhaled, deflated. None of his efforts would ever be good enough for them. Muhidin told Haroun that he was bored with the island anyway, that he was tired of everybody’s improvement schemes for him. He grabbed the money and left, cursing the island and its people. He told the scrawny boatman with whom he rowed to Lamu that he would become a beached octopus before he returned to Pate.

Yet, years later, Muhidin had drifted back to Pate, and it looked smaller, shabbier, more derelict, isolated, and even more preoccupied with trivialities. The nation of Kenya’s half-century of neglect had consumed the soul out of the land, just as ocean-bed trawlers of many nations sucked up migrating yellowfin tuna and marlin unchecked, leaving the fishermen with scraps and the stocks of fish depleted. Most conversations now were about departures—intended, hoped for, planned, or executed. What still thrived were Pate’s teeming ghosts, 28who jockeyed with residents for the right of abode. What still flourished were those in-between-space realms, their history, memory, and stories—it is to these that most who stumbled back to Pate returned.

What lingered was Muhidin’s restlessness.

But that night in his bed, inside the gloom of the decayed glory of a coral house he had once shunned, he mulled over an unforeseen reality: in all his fleeing, seeking, tricking, escaping, negotiating, working, whoring, wondering, reading, lying, learning, wrestling, questioning, seeing, tasting, hearing, and journeying, nothing had suggested a vision of “home” or “belonging” until that light-spattered dawn when he glimpsed a little creature dancing with the sparkling Pate sea.

[ 6 ]

Weeks later, within those cryptic violet-orange moments before sunrise, Muhidin was startled into wakefulness by a grating voice hurling “Ayaaana?” It was Abasi, the other muezzin.

Abasi was a one-man morality police who modeled himself on a Saudi mutawwa—policing morals—and might have given himself over to bearded Wahhabism were it not for his heart and gut’s helpless devotion to his island’s saints. Today, it seemed, Abasi had glimpsed the ocean’s dawn companion. Muhidin threw on an old gray kikoi and stumbled down uneven stairs as outside, Abasi bayed, “Eiii! Mtoooto wa nyoka ni … ni nyokaaa!”—The child of a snake is a snake! Words as blows. Muhidin reached for his carved door. Abasi was cawing like a starved raven, “Nazi mbovu haribu ya nzima, weeee mwanaharamu!” Hearing light footsteps on the pavement outside, Muhidin flung open his door. There she was. Little, thin, doe-eyed, intense, shivering, dripping water from a tiny pink T-shirt, wearing faded blue leggings. Her damp bangs covered half her face. Upturned nose. Her eyes were red with sea salt, and fear mingled with mischief inside them. The child opened and closed her mouth like a stranded fish.

“Mwanaharamuuu!” Approaching footsteps. The child hunched over. 29

Muhidin beckoned her into the house as he stepped backward. He pointed to a cavernous engraved hardwood cupboard—made in Bombay before Bombay became Mumbai. It had come via Oman. Its main purpose was to aid concealment. There was a deep shelf inside where Muhidin stored his best books, his attar and blossoms; spice-incense experiments lined up several drawers. Four hidden compartments kept his other secrets. Inside, a two-person red velvet bench snapped into place to create a temporary yet comfortable hideaway. Ayaana scrambled and disappeared inside the cupboard. Muhidin closed his door. He stepped into the room to lock the cupboard, pulled out its long key, and lifted his barghashia to place the key in the middle of his head. He restored the barghashia. Muhidin heard the grumbling outside—“Today I’ve caught you!”—followed by a shuffle and an impatient knock. Muhidin took his time releasing the latch, ignoring the flutter in the pit of his stomach. There he was: squat, squint-eyed, big-toothed Abasi, chirping, “She was here,” as he pecked at the ground with a twisted stick. Leaning over to look, Muhidin saw tiny, fading footsteps in sand and water leading across the porch and into his shop-home.

“Ma’alim Abasi! Salaam aleikum, mzee! A day of sunshine! Who was here?” Muhidin asked, but, moving sideways with a surreptitious gesture, he swept a hand over a shelf weighted down with maps, magazines, and books. These fell with a bang to create a small hill that cluttered the entrance. Muhidin huffed, “A thousand possessed books!” He bent to pick up a book, clutching his back with a grimace. “Oh, my back! Good you are here. Please. Help me capture my many, many vagabonds as we talk …”

Abasi lifted up clean hands. He also tried to peer over Muhidin’s shoulder to scan the room. “I wondered … em … I saw … Did you see? Babu, forgive me, I’d like to help you … Did you see a curs-ed child, this high?” He estimated Ayaana’s height with his hand. “What? The books? Understand … were it not … Yes … You know Farouk, the agro-supplies man … not good. The tumor has spread to his forehead. Not good …” He was on surer ground now. “I must go.”

Muhidin blew the dust from the jacket of another book into Abasi’s face. His voice wheedled: “Just a little?”

Abasi sneezed, rubbed his eyes, and took four steps back. “Understand …” He was very firm. He hurried off, down the coiling street. 30

The morning returned to its former stillness.

There was the smell of the sea—a whiff of the illuminated things of life. A bird with a low-pitched voice lifted the morning with a punctuation mark—tong, tong, phee! Muhidin unlocked the Bombay cupboard’s door. “You may emerge, Abeerah,” Muhidin said. “A lazy camel has vaporized at the thought of labor.”

After four ticking minutes of nothing, a small creature flung the cupboard door aside, leapt out, and ran smack into Muhidin. It knelt and wrapped its arms around his knees. “I am Ayaana,” it breathed.

“I know, Abeerah.”

Five ticking seconds.

“Nitakupenda.”—I shall love you—the small being shrieked, before it sailed over mounds of books on its way out, dashing into a narrow alleyway where it merged with lean shadows.

[ 7 ]

She stuffed small pink petals into her mouth, chewing damask roses, while her mother, Munira, was distracted by the buzzing of secret thoughts. The girl studied her mother’s faraway look as she tasted the rose hip, its thorniness. Sucking rose water from her fingers, treating scent as taste, and remembering how her mother sometimes dropped twelve perfect globules into their tea, their milk, and, always, the halua she made. Sliver of a shadow as the girl’s thoughts skipped. Many nights, her mother, struggling in a net of fear of unknown things, would call her child over to her bed. There Munira would unseal a tiny long-necked blue metal mrashi, stored under her pillow, and sprinkle its rose water over the both of them as a prayer shroud.

Before the girl found a way to this moment of roses, she had been weeping. She had wanted to fix the terribleness of her existence. That day had collapsed over her. In the morning, during the madrassa session, the recitation had all of a sudden pierced her very core. Lost in the feeling, she had been unaware of a gradual silence enfolding the room. She had not seen the usually immobile and monotone Mwalimu Idris stir and then rise like a fire-fed phoenix. Neither had she heard his pained “Subhan Allah!” 31

Ayaana had not expected that the tip of her teacher’s stick would beat a tattoo on her head to snap her out of her trance.

Mwalimu Idris had then lowered his head, the better to scrutinize her. He adjusted the lenses of round glasses that made his eyes huge and asked Ayaana, “Are you a djinn?”

Ayaana froze, not understanding. The teacher’s stick poked her forehead. “Only the unholy dead yowl as you did; only the damned would sully these, the sweetest of words, with such a caterwauling.” He had enunciated his judgment: “You will leave my class. You will not return until such time as I decree that I have recovered from this assault.”

Ayaana had fled the room amid the titters. She sobbed, then determined that she would not cry.

Big people!