The Magic of Saida (29 page)

“Well. I am of here and these are my people, and yet I have a life and a family elsewhere. In Canada I’ve thought of myself as African—though not African Canadian or African American—attractive illusions for a while. It becomes difficult to say
precisely
what one is anymore. Isn’t that a common condition nowadays?”

He sounded too anxious, too slippery, and they sat in silence together. The lounge was crowded at the bar, buzzed with the chatter and noise of one-day tourists who would depart in the morning. John had turned on dance music, though no one paid heed. Markham was not in sight.

“And what are you?” Kamal asked Navroz, more to test him.

“Me? It’s difficult, as you say. I am called a Tanzanian Asian.” Then he added with a chuckle, “Do you know Kilwa was settled by Persians more than a thousand years ago?”

Kamal nodded, felt somewhat slighted. This was his hometown, after all.

“My own ancestors went from Persia to India,” Navroz said. “I am a Parsi, as you’ve no doubt guessed. A complete circle, you see. My DNA would tell you that I am ethnically related to the Swahili. Amazing world we live in, isn’t it?”

Kamal agreed.

Navroz had a quiet smile on his face, his look saying, at least to Kamal’s tilted interpretation, And now I am the one from here, not you. Neither of them spoke for a while. Kamal found himself still rankled by Navroz’s remarks. The waiter refilled their drinks. They ordered tea. Finally Navroz said, referring to Markham, “If you don’t mind my asking, why take all this trouble for the mzungu, this white man?”

At Kamal’s request, Navroz had booked Markham for a checkup in Dar es Salaam. Kamal would pay the expenses.

“Why not?” Kamal said, which was no answer.

“Just wondered. For that money you could get a year’s malaria medication for a dozen people. More lives saved.”

“It seemed like the thing to do, I guess. I examined him. I could hardly say, Now go ahead and die.”

It had turned quiet now, the music had stopped, and both turned to see that the tourists were gone. As Navroz readied to depart, he said,

“I saw another of your patients this morning. Her name is Fatuma.”

“And? Her backache?”

“Cancer, I suspect. As you no doubt thought too. And long advanced. The pain is going to get worse.”

They said goodbye and agreed to meet again.

Markham was out in the lounge early the next morning, sober and a new man, ready to fly out to the capital for his checkup, wearing a light blue linen jacket, albeit crumpled, and a red tie. The sparse hair had been wetted and combed to one side. His shaved face looked soft and naked.

He finished instructing John, who would be in charge, and arrived at Kamal’s table to join him for breakfast. He picked up his napkin, a nervous, embarrassed look on his face. Like a boy off to a new school.

“All ready?” Kamal asked.

“Ready,” came the growl. “Who’s paying for this examination, you said?”

“There’s a welfare trust for British expatriates that Dr. Engineer has tapped into.” Said with a glibness reserved normally for children to make them take medicines, and Markham bought it with a surprising naïveté.

“Damn generous.”

“You British always took care of your own. Remember, I’m your physician, all queries to be referred to me. You’ve been booked at a small hotel on Mwinyi Road, next to the hospital.”

An old Toyota taxi arrived to take the Englishman to the airstrip. He got up quickly and with a perfunctory wave of the hand departed, in his small shuffling steps, his overnight bag carried for him by John. Soon the previous night’s visitors too departed, in two SUVs. The lounge was suddenly quiet.

Markham would be missed, Kamal observed, as he watched John standing idly at the entrance, looking out to the sea. That growling,
rumbling presence had defined the ambience of the lounge, especially in the evenings.

“He will return soon,” Kamal said a little loudly.

“Yes, bwana,” the barman replied, quickly returning to his post behind the counter.

“He is a very sick man.”

“I know,” came the reply, with a barely perceptible inflexion in the tone, and Kamal gave a startled look at the blank face. John was not a man of visible emotion, and none had been betrayed. He was a mystery, though during Kamal’s illness he was there with the others to tend to him. He was wearing the same black suit he donned daily, except on Sundays when he washed it. It did not have many days left. The shirt was remarkably white and also looked worn. I should tip him well when I leave, but when will that be? Perhaps I should just go and buy him a new shirt.

“John—where in Kenya do you come from?”

“I come from Naivasha, bwana.”

“That’s far. What’s your full name?”

“I am called John Kariuki.”

“Any family? Are you married?”

“Two children, a boy and a girl.”

“Just like me—though mine must be much older. Why don’t you bring them here to be with you?”

“It’s far, bwana.”

Kamal gave a nod to Amina at the pharmacy window, took the side alley to the back and walked into Fatuma’s room like a familiar. This time she was seated on the armchair, and she looked in greater pain than before, holding one hand to her side. She gave him a curious, almost bemused look.

“You saw the other doctor—at the hospital—what did he say?”

“He gave me medicine.” She pointed to a packet on the table. Then she returned her hand to her side.

Instinctively he reached out his hand to feel her pain.

“Fatuma,” he said, “if the pain increases, do you have other medicines to help you? Traditional medicines?”

“There are those.”

Perhaps some plant extracts, he thought. Or opium. He put some money on the table. “Use these for the medicines.”

There was an awkward pause between them. Her quiet look told him that she knew she was beyond a cure, and he felt a compassion for this difficult but dying woman.

“I must know, Fatuma. About Saida and the child.”

She had to tell him. He had reached her soft centre, they’d established a communion through her illness. They were intimate, if only for now. This was the moment.

“There is nothing to know.”

“How can you say that? What is it that keeps her hidden? Tell me.”

“You should go home. It is better for you.”

“This is my home, Fatuma. This was my home. Saida—I promised her I would come.”

She glared at him. “I don’t know who you are, where you come from. I don’t know why you come here to annoy us.”

“I am not a bad man, Fatuma. You know that.”

There followed that significant moment.

“You’ll find her in Minazi Minne, then. But she doesn’t want you to go there.”

“Where is this Minazi Minne?”

“On the Lindi road.”

Until he could prove otherwise, for Golo to get top marks in the predominantly Asian school was thought to be impossible, no less by him. He was African, the Indian part didn’t matter. He couldn’t speak the Indian language correctly, and his English sounded African, was often brutally imitated. He was the dark bonehead who could be detained in an African neighbourhood to play football or banter in Swahili, but give him a simple sum in algebra or geometry and he would put up a dumb Sambo face. His height and large head only made him look stupider. In Kilwa, he had excelled. In Dar, structured and competitive, he was beyond his depth. He could not but believe in his own innate inferiority. What hurt especially, as he entered his teens, was when the girls would take that ever so small step aside as he walked past them. What did they fear, that he would steal their virtue right there on the pavement, with the wild unpredictable blood of Africa coursing through his veins?

One day, seeing him return home, dishevelled and dirty from playing football after school, Sabini the tailor called out to him, “Weh Kamalu, come here!” When Kamal ambled over and asked, “What?” the fundi brought his machine to a stop and looked up from his work.

“Kamalu, I want to tell you something. Now listen carefully. When do you take time to study? It was why your mother sent you here. You know this. It broke her heart, but she wanted you to do well.”

Only Sabini could have told him that. And only to Sabini could he have replied the way he did. Abrasively, though not without an edge
of pain in the voice. Sabini’s truth did cut him. Hadn’t he struggled to do well? Didn’t his twenty percents humiliate him, when others beamed at him proudly with their eighties? Wasn’t he aware of the scorn in the eyes of his teachers as they threw down his test papers on his desk? Then why was Sabini, himself a tailor, sitting outside on the pavement, dressing him down?

“I can’t do well, Sabini,” Kamal said. “I am an African, like you. Sina bongo—I have no brains.”

“So you think we Africans are stupid?”

“Yes. Which is why we were chained and taken as slaves. Africans are the most stupid and uneducated in the world. And I am a mshenzi, the most uncivilized of Africans. My grandmother was a mtumwa, a slave.”

“Ah, Kamalu. You wound me. From where comes this poison in you?” He shook his head and picked up the cloth on his machine.

Uncle was watching them dourly from his chair inside the shop. It would be many years later when Kamal would realize that it might well have been Uncle who had put Sabini up to the task of speaking to him. Speak to the boy, Sabini, he listens to you.

But he had hurt Sabini, and Kamal was sorry. A few days later he went and stood in front of the tailor, silently watched him sew the seams of a dress, then turn its neckline and insert a lace border around it. Sabini ignored him.

“Sabini, you are not talking to me? Now what did I do?”

“You wounded me, Kamalu.”

“I am sorry. Forgive me.”

He told Sabini he had been a teacher once, had instructed Saida in arithmetic and English. He was not stupid, and from now on, he would work hard.

“Who is this Saida, eti? Your girlfriend?” Sabini smiled, laying aside the job he’d finished.

“She is my friend. Her grandfather was Mzee Omari, a great poet, a mshairi!”

“Now Kamalu, what do you know of shairi?”

“I can sing you one!”

“Go on!”

After a long moment of recollection, and a long breath, the opening
words of Mzee Omari’s history of the Kilwa coast came to his lips: Bismil, I begin in the name / of the Merciful the Kind / and Muhammad the Beloved …

He had stumbled; his breaking voice was uneven and he had strayed off-key. But when he finished singing the few lines, Sabini wiped his eyes. “You Kamalu, you really know this? It is our story, we Swahili people.”

Except that I was told by my mother to be a good Indian. A Mhindi. To speak their language, to sing their songs, say their prayers. What then of the African Kamalu?

On his way upstairs through the store, he caught his uncle’s eye, and went and stood before him. “Jaffu Uncle, from now on I will study, and one day you will be proud of me.”

His uncle grunted a barely audible “Good.”

But a teacher started coming home every Sunday afternoon to help him catch up.

When those dull Ds responded, straightened out and reformed into his proud As and Bs, when he cleared the hurdle of the bell curve and felt good about himself, he became the class target. A dumb half-caste good at football was acceptable, even admired, a smart one was an affront. The relentless campaigns against him pushed him to the edge and almost got him thrown out of school.

Mr. Sharma began to write something on the board and a boy threw a piece of chalk at him from behind. When the teacher spun around in a fury to ask, “Who was it?,” all eyes were on Golo, and silly he was caught grinning and received two stinging strokes of the cane on his backside. When someone wrote
DOG
=
GOD
on the board, and a tearful Mr. Bandali asked who had committed the blasphemy, all eyes fell on dark Golo, who could only have the blackest soul. Six of the best from the acting principal, Mr. Haji. He was being beaten back to his former status as the class idiot.

One day Miss Kanga was at the board and the chalk gave a squeak, which she echoed with an exclamation, which some of the boys found irresistibly sweet. One of them threw a prolonged and very audible kiss at her. The teacher paused, then turned around in an
expression of feminine outrage, which the boys found quite erotically delightful.

Miss Kanga, fair and trim, in tight skirt and high heels, her bosom high and pointed, her bottom round and tight, and her hair done in a tall beehive, was the most beautiful woman the boys had seen. There was no doubt of that. One day she had descended like an angel among them, a refugee of the Zanzibar revolution.

“Who was it?” she said, almost in tears.

Silence. Then a voice said, sympathetic and with quiet conviction, “Own up, Kamalu.”

Others followed suit, “Own up, Golo, don’t be a coward!”

“You made poor Miss Kanga cry!”

Miss Kanga clip-clopped off to Mr. Haji’s office to report, and returned with the acting principal, who trundled in behind her wielding his cane.

“Kamalu, I am going to throw you out of the school. But first, come and bend over!”

The cane flexed in the man’s two hands as Kamalu stepped forward to the front, followed by jeering tee-hees from the boys.

“Bend, you rascal!” commanded Mr. Haji.

It was the raised cane that did it to Kamal. The switch that turned the switch, he liked to say afterwards. The prospect of the sting on his buttocks, tears in the eyes, public humiliation, all over again. What did the elders sing in Kilwa—na viboko, alichapa: he whipped us with canes, the colonialist, and humiliated us.

“Thubutu!” he cried, stepped behind the tiny Miss Kanga, and put his arm around her throat. “I will break her neck, I will kill her!”

Did he know how to break a neck? He didn’t think about it. He heard her whimper, smelled her perfume, felt the tickle from a strand of her brown hair on his cheek.

Utter silence in the class. The garden boy watched wide-eyed through the window. Then pleas from Mr. Haji, from one or two of the nicer boys. Be sensible. Don’t do something you will regret.