The Magic of Saida (16 page)

“Saida—let’s get into the water!”

“No … I don’t want to.”

They walked back to the square where Mwana Juma found them and took Saida away.

They met again a few days later. This time, sitting in their hideaway at the lagoon, he asked her, “Saida, can I put my head on your lap? So I can see the sky.” Of course it was too bright to see the sky. But she agreed, and he had to cover his eyes with his hands against the glare. Soon she said, “We must go.” But before they parted she gave him the hand-wrought, silver box with the flutter inside. The tawiz. “You must keep it with you,” she said. “It has a dua.” A prayer. “A dua?” he asked. “What kind?”

She ran and he chased her, back up the path before they slowed down, panting, and parted, he clutching the tawiz in his hand, she with the khanga pulled over her head.

So she knew that day that he was to go away. He didn’t.

“I always imagined,” he said to me, “that the prayer inside the tawiz was something she had herself written down. Why would I think that? I don’t know. That little flutter inside the box … that little heartbeat was an intimate reminder of her. It was her prayer for me. Later I began to wonder if perhaps it was not Mzee Omari who had written the prayer and put the paper inside the box before it was sealed.”

“Or someone else could have written it?” I posed.

He turned thoughtful, and at once I picked up the trail.

“Do you still believe,” I asked him, “that when the half-seeing Mzee Omari wrote, the djinn Idris guided his hand? You are a rational man, Dr. Kamal—do you actually believe there was an Idris?”

He smiled, sheepishly, I think, and said slowly, “It was a comfortable belief to have, which I clung to for many years, without actually confronting it rationally. Everyone believed there was Idris—his
personal djinn and assistant who in the end turned on him and killed him. This neatly explained the mystery of his death. Idris was a part of my life. He had assumed a personality for me. He was the one who slapped me, and tripped me, and threw stones at me.” He became silent. Unconsciously he had gripped the front of his shirt, under which the tawiz hung. He turned to meet my look and said, “If there was no Idris, why did Mzee Omari invoke him as his muse when he wrote those long poems, the wonderful utenzi? That history of the ‘coming of the modern age’ in our country? If there was no Idris, how did Mzee Omari die?”

“And …?”

“The revelation dawned rather slowly.”

The discovery of the truth did not follow a chronology, coming at the end of painstaking research; it did not come as an explosion of light, lux and veritas. Bits of Mzee Omari’s story had already tantalized him as a child; he was a curious boy, often to his mother’s exasperation. After he left Kilwa, he learned the story of his own Indian grandfather. His later obsession with rare books that had anything to do with the town of his birth revealed to him a patchy history of a backwater belonging to the farthest fringes of mainstream interest. But it was his.

Is it too precious to draw a connection between a middle-aged doctor in the wintry isolation of his study in suburban Canada, carefully turning an illustrated page of a rare book, and the boy sitting quietly on a tropical shore at night listening to a verse recitation of a history? On a couple of occasions of conference travel he had entered the hushed preserves of colonial archives. His revelation is what he arrived at gradually, a story of Kilwa. It begins in the distant past and ends with the death of the poet.

We have agreed that this is the best juncture at which to place it, at the end of his own story in Kilwa. It is told in his own words.

It was suddenly revealed to young Punja Devraj, as he sat partaking of a communal meal at Sidi Sayyad’s shrine in Singpur, India, that he should go to Africa. It was summer, sometime in the 1870s. A wish had been fulfilled, a goat had been slaughtered.

Singpur was a long way from the port city of Verawal on the Arabian Sea, in the province of Gujarat, where Punja had come from, walking part of the way on the forest roads and catching rides on farmers’ bullock carts at other times. Africa was not entirely foreign to the western ports of India; since olden times ships had plied the ocean between the two continents, carrying a small but steady trade. More recently an increasing stream of adventurous souls had departed from the port towns to go to work or trade in Africa; those who had returned had acquired conspicuous wealth, and moreover spoke a foreign tongue bizarre enough to brag about. But Singpur, lying in the hinterland, had a different connection to Africa. It was home to the Sidis, the dark people whose ancestors had travelled the other way, from Africa to India, some centuries before and never returned. Their saint, Sidi Sayyad, was known widely for his magical powers. Upon advice, Punja had come to supplicate this saint with a wish. Go to Sidi Sayyad in Singpur and ask, he had been told, ask with open heart and promise him a gift and you will obtain your heart’s desire. And so Punja had brought with him a can of the purest ghee as a gift, and his earnest wish: that he be accepted by the family of a certain pretty and wonderful girl of Verawal, whom he desired for a wife.

When Punja arrived in Singpur, a noisy festival was in progress.
There were black folk, the Sidis, everywhere and there was the sound of drumming the like of which Punja had not heard before. It came from the location of a prominent white dome, at the end of the main street, where a frantic crowd had gathered. He assumed that the dome marked the famous shrine. As he approached it and asked some loitering boys what was going on, he was told that a maanta, a special rite, was in progress. He hurried forward, and reaching the gate of the shrine he threw off his slippers next to a pile of footwear and pushed his way into the crowded compound.

A chaotic procession was heading towards the entrance of the small square building with the dome that was the shrine. This melee was led by four dancers, a lithe bare-chested youth, two older men, and an old woman; behind them came two drummers, one of them lean and with a blind man’s stare. The short black woman in front moved as though in a trance, her feet following the rhythm of the drums in slow dancing steps and her body swaying likewise as she meandered forward. The bare-chested youth leapt about, from side to side and forwards and backwards, collecting the donations of coins thrown down generously by the crowd.

It was a wonderful, magical sight: a procession of black folk, a dance so unlike the ones performed by his folk in Verawal. Behind the dancers and drummers followed a black goat, wearing garlands of bright yellow marigolds, its sides daubed with coloured flour, and goaded forward by two young boys.

What kind of maanta was this?

It had been requested by a family from Junagadh, the nearby princely capital. The belief was that if the saint accepted the maanta, he would fulfill the supplicants’ wishes; to signal this boon, the decorated goat would climb up the steps into the sanctuary of the mausoleum and greet the saint. This was exactly what the goat, shy and confused as a bridegroom, proceeded to do, to much applause, and as was the custom it was taken away to be slaughtered for a communal meal of biriyani.

As the supplicants came away and the mausoleum emptied, Punja entered the small room where the raised grave of Sidi Sayyad lay, covered with a mound of coloured cloths and flowers. A sweet perfume hung heavy in the air. Punja stood humbly before the grave,
eyes lowered, hands raised in prayer, and said, “Pir Bawa, if it is your wish, let Sherbanoo’s father and her elders change their minds and accept my proposal.” He put his can of ghee on the floor and departed, with prayers on his lips and making sure to step respectfully backwards as he left.

Punja came outside into the compound and joined a circle of men seated on the ground awaiting the meal. They were of the supplicating family, and it turned out that the elders among them knew his father, Devraj Madhvani of Verawal, the ghee merchant. Punja learned that the maanta had been requested in aid of a child who lay sick at death’s door in Junagadh. The holy Sidi Sayyad had given them hope.

Punja heard it said that the ancestors of the dark curly-headed folk of Singpur had come originally from a wonderful island called Jangbar in Africa. It had a forest denser than the Gir, and lions more fierce. But in the island’s city there was wealth for the asking. You could trade in spices, cloth, beads, ironware, and, if you possessed the means, in ivory and slaves as well; communities of Khojas, Bhatias, and Shamsis were already thriving in Jangbar. Potmakers, shoemakers, and barbers too had set up there. Food grew plentifully, droughts were unknown, and a dhow could take you there in a few days. The ruler was an Arab sultan, who desired Indians to come and do business in his domain. You returned in a few years, a rich man, speaking a secret foreign language called Sawahili. But the wonder was that here in India the Sidis themselves had forgotten their Sawahili; they spoke only Gujarati and Urdu.

It was as he heard these tales of the spice island of opportunity and its friendly sultan, away from anything he’d known, that the revelation struck Punja: he need not marry Sherbanoo at all, if her folks were against him; they had called him too unsettled, and they were right. He would go to Jangbar. The Pir of Jangbar, Sidi Sayyad himself, had beckoned him. This is what he would always relate. Sidi Sayyad had sent him to Africa to take his greetings to his people.

It turned out that Sidi Sayyad also fulfilled his original wish, for Sherbanoo was given to him in marriage before he sailed away by himself on a dhow bound for Jangbar, which was also known as
Unguja and Zanzibar. Sherbanoo would follow him when he was settled.

A spice-filled fragrance suffused the evening air as they approached the island, grabbing them all in its cloying, clammy embrace; the Muslims among them heeded the evening azan, called by a fellow passenger, and facing north they said their prayer. There followed a farewell meal of fish broth, vegetable curry, and pilau, which was easily the best of the entire journey, incorporating in its tastes all the exotic richness of the surrounding air, after which a drumbeat started and singing began. Finally the immigrants lay down on their mattresses and slept the sleep of the drugged, each to entertain his or her own fantastic dreams of the future. In the morning, smiles accompanying the hot tea after prayer, the
Khadija
’s sails puffed up as the salty sea breeze blew across the bow, and the boards of the ship cracked their joints as if it too had awoken and welcomed the sun, and the palm-fringed tip of the island appeared as in a dream under a light blue sky.

The sight of Zanzibar harbour, where a few dhows lay anchored and smaller vessels of various sizes scurried to and fro, a steamship or two waiting in the horizon, was one to set the heart of any young man on fire who had come to seek a destiny here. Punja alighted on the jetty and pushed through the throngs of porters and people come to receive the passengers. He had no one waiting for him, but he had the address of a merchant, a member of his Shamsi community, who could not possibly deny him assistance, and so he made his way there.

Men of all races mingled in the streets of Zanzibar; you might see a European in white shirt and trousers and white helmet out for a walk, a stick in hand that possibly concealed a blade; a fair-skinned Arab lord in white robe and embroidered vest, and a turban, carried in a litter or out for a walk with a retinue; Sikh policemen in khaki; Baluchi soldiers; Gujaratis and Kutchis from India, in their white dhotis or in trousers and various headgear; Arab or Swahili
womenfolk in veil. There were the Africans, some lordly in demeanour and dressed like the Arabs, others mere servants; and crooked lines of slaves in chains, miserable men and women kidnapped from the mainland, already shorn of all human dignity, scantily dressed, heading towards the market to be sold and transported to wherever fate took them. In this entrepôt there was no pity; you made of your station what you could; those who could help you were your kinfolk. Everyone had a community, except the slave.

Most men who arrived in Zanzibar went onward in due time to the mainland, where they settled in one of the port towns, in Dar es Salaam, Mombasa, Malindi, Bagamoyo, Kilwa, or Lindi, where opportunities were greater, for the city was small and crowded. From the port towns the braver souls headed farther inland into the interior, to live and trade in isolation and gradually start new communities. Punja, whose family were dealers in ghee back in Gujarat, found a job with a merchant of spice and grain. He knew his weights and measures, kept abreast of market prices, could go to the port and negotiate duties on Indian imports.

One day at the harbour, awaiting the release of a newly arrived consignment of goods for his employer, Punja ran into the customs master Tharia Topan. The tall, pale-skinned Tharia in his Khoja turban always cut an imposing, severe figure abetted in its effect by his grey eyes and trimmed beard; he was one of the richest and most powerful men on the island; no ship docked at the harbour, or departed, without his say-so. The sultan, it was said, always owed him money, as did a lot of the city’s traders. Tharia was on his way to board a dhow and noticed his assistant missing. He turned and glared at young Punja.