The Magic of Saida (8 page)

But one day she surprised him, and all his fragility was exposed. All his orphan shallowness, his want of inner anchor. He would often wonder how much smarter she was than him; surely she had toyed with him even at that young age. But never out of malice, only mischief; and humility.

They had gone over the silly line “A man, a pan, a man and a pan,” from her English reader, over which they had had many a laugh, she mangling it in her African accent, “A many and a pany and a many and a pany” in the nasal voice that he could always recall. Wasn’t his own accent the same as hers, that way of saying
ende
for
and
? It must have been. Now he gave her a division problem, 9999 divided by 11, which impressed him no end about his own capabilities and terrified her by its monstrous morphology. While she was attempting this impossible sum, he helped his mother pick an egg
from the vendor. There was a science to picking a good egg: you dropped it into a pan of water; if it sank, it was bad, if it floated, it was good. The puzzle was that intermediate case, hanging undecidedly, between here and there, and he would help her guess. There was no money-back guarantee, of course. There were women who had run chasing after the vendor, cheated by an egg. As Kamal and Mama debated the buoyancy of eggs, from behind them came Saida’s voice, low and irresistibly sweet. Absorbed in herself, she was singing a verse.

“Weh Saida!” Mama shrieked. “Who taught you that? And beautifully too!”

“My Bibi …” Grandmother.

Mwana Juma herself, as everyone knew, was a poet’s daughter from Lindi.

“Sing that again.”

And Saida sang:

Later he could not recall the words exactly, he had to find them in a book, the first lines of a famous poem written by a woman from Lamu called Mwana Kupona.

Kamal and Mama standing at the door with the vendor, a stained egg half-floating in the bowl of water in her hands, Saida’s voice delicate and soft, the words clear, the modulations beautiful; in that moment there was not another sound in the world, not a stray thought, his heart had stopped beating. And he felt cheated.

“Weh shetani, weh,” Mama said simply. “You little devil. What do you hide in that head of yours?”

He could not believe she was that same girl—his pupil, whom he
had considered inferior. All the while she had been playing dumb. She had a depth he was not aware of, a dimension hidden from him. He did not know her after all.

He kicked her in the shins. She went home crying. And Mama punished him by beating him on his calves with a stick. He cried. He cried because he had hurt his only companion besides Mama; he ached because he felt so alien. She was a proper Swahili, an aristocrat, granddaughter of two poets; he a chotara, a mixed-blood, as he was called in school.

The next week she was back, sent by Bi Kulthum. Kusoma—to learn, she admitted shyly. A many and a pany. The two of them went around in circles laughing, chanting, A many ende a pany, a pany ende a many …

“Sing!” he would command. “Mm-mm.” No. Her grandmother Mwana Juma had forbidden her to sing. She was not ready. But she wrote for him the Arabic alphabet, told him how to read the letters and the words.

Mwana Juma was a mysterious one. Small and dark with staring eyes, she did not leave her house often. And she was devout, and did not like Mama, because Mama was modern and assertive, was not in the care of a man and did not drape herself with the black bui-bui—even though she covered her head when appropriate.

Mama did not send Kamal to the madrassa to learn Arabic and Quran, because his father had wished him to study in the Asian school. English and arithmetic, geography, history of India and England. He had to go far. But now, after he learned the rudiments of Arabic writing from Saida, he went and bought from an Asian store the Juzu, the elementary Arabic reader, with its cardboard cover and thin, flimsy pages, and he read it with Saida. After “a many ende a pany,” they went, “an-fataha-tin, in-kisira-tin, un-zamu-tin …” An
alif
with two strokes above it becomes
an
, and so on.

A new world—an inkling of another world—was offered him in this strange, sensual script that he could now falteringly read. It was the physical face of the Quran. Laying out these wonderful magical letters, the tall
alif
, the
lam
like a reflected L, the
mim
like a tadpole, and so on, Mzee Omari wrote his poetry; it was these that Gabriel commanded the Prophet to read, in the name of God—
iqra bismi
rabbi-ka
—thus revealing to him the Book. It was what the other African boys read in the madrassas, sitting on the ground in their kanzus and kofias, chanting. These new wonderful letters, written from right to left, in books that began at the back made him feel a part of a world he had been denied.

Mama was aware of his new learning, and that sometimes her teacher son became the pupil, but she seemed not to pay any attention.

Kamalu and Saida grew close; he was kinder to her than before, more caring and tender. If she was not quicker on the uptake, at least she tried harder—or feigned better. Her affection for him was implicit in her mischievous smile and easy amusement, her yielding to his attentions; the way she leaned forward, as he bent over a piece of paper to do a sum or read to her, to flick a stray thread from his shirt or blow a something from his hair with a quick puff from her lips. They were growing older. The poem she had recited, Mwana Kupona’s advice to her daughter, indicated that she might have been made more aware of her role as a young woman.

Once he composed some lines for her, mimicking Mwana Kupona’s advice, encouraging her to study:
Sikiza sana Saida / a many ende a pany / jifunze kiengereza
 … Listen well, Saida, teach yourself English. And she corrected him, “Not
Saida
, but
Sa-i-da
!” The lines had to scan properly.

When her lesson with him ended, she returned home, and he set off to play. Sometimes he accompanied her partway, to the monument; a few times they wandered off from there, past the boma to the shore. Once, with the money Mama had given him to buy a packet of sugar, he bought a coconut and they drank the water together. Mama was furious when he returned without the sugar and told her that instead he’d bought Saida a coconut. He went to bed in tears and without food, until Mama woke him up and fed him some hard maize meal.

After a light rain in the night, the morning appeared fresh and clear. Harsh new sunlight streamed uninhibited into the hotel lounge. It was the third day since Kamal’s arrival. Today he would begin his search proper. He was the only one present for breakfast. The prospectors had left at dawn, all five of them; the two hunters and their invisible bodyguards had driven off the previous afternoon in their mammoth Land Cruiser for the joys of the chase and the kill. The morning flight had brought no tourist. News was that the rain had been heavy upcountry, part of the highway from the capital was unpassable, and some guests had to spend the night on the road.

Kamal asked only for tea—he would be having breakfast later in Kilwa.

“Ah. Going native, are we,” said Markham, shuffling over from the bar.

“Yes, we are.”

“Well, we’ll have a brand-new mosquito net waiting for you in your room when you return. Look.”

On the floor in front of the bar, under the watchful eyes of barman John, lay a pile of pure white cotton nets like a heap of fresh snow. They all stared at it as though at a miracle.

“Brand-new, arrived this morning,” Markham explained. “The entire town is getting them, free of charge.”

“Oh yeah? From where?”

“Courtesy of a certain Millicent Cole, American actress. Recently our great leader announced to a world conference in Singapore that
we are so poor, we cannot afford mosquito nets. Voila—here they are. Ms. Cole, all by herself, has donated nets to the nation. How gracious of her.”

“And how beggarly of us?” Kamal replied, provoked by the oozing cynicism in Markham’s voice.

“You object, Doctor?”

“Surely the nation can afford mosquito nets. And there are enough wealthy people locally, if a donation were required?”

“In Africa, Doc, you don’t look a gift horse in the mouth.”

Seeing me smile as he related this to me, Kamal admitted, “I know, I know, I’m outdated. And who am I to come here and judge, having gone away and made my life elsewhere in comfort? Still, let me express a thought. Weren’t we
exhorted
, as the future generation of this country, Help yourself, we are not beggars? Be proud? Where’s all that pride gone?”

He had put his question mildly, even excusing himself as he did so, but he waited for my answer. It is a touchy question, especially to those of our generation here, and we talk about it rarely, but when we do, always after a sufficiency of drink late in the evening, we go on and on.

He was, as he confessed, out of date in his concern, and out of place. But he was right too. Where indeed has that old idealism, that uhuru spirit, gone?

The answer is that it didn’t last long after he left. That idealism and pride, the hope of independence that some of us remember so wistfully as the heyday of uhuru, was taken to ideological extremes that finally brought us to this state. All this bustle that you see in our capital, the wonderful dollar consumerism, runs on the rails of foreign aid. I could have told him my own personal truth—that I happen to be one of those ideologues who railed in the past against capitalists and imperialists. Even in those shrill days my publishing business could survive only on foreign generosity, and it’s still foreign patronage that keeps me in comfort. That’s what became of our pride. We swallowed it, along with all the gifts we received. An Oliver Twist nation: Sir, can I have some more?

All I said was, “Times have changed, my friend.”

He nodded as though he understood. But his new net was welcome,
he told me; the old one had a hole in it and was spotted with bloodstains.

Later that morning Kamal met Lateef at Kilwa’s taxi stop at the monument, from where they walked to a chai shop on the former street of the Indian shops. The menu, written on a board, was extensive and hopeful, but there were no other customers around. The oil-painted cement porch and walls were a leftover from a previous, more prosperous era; this had been an Indian establishment once, selling bhajias and samosas. The two men sat at a table on the porch, looking out on the street with their chai and mandazi, objects of curious, passing attention.

Across from them was the market, looking desolate, three women sitting idly before their meagre heaps of mangoes. It had thrived once, with varieties of vegetables, fruits, and grains. Next to the market a small and crowded store purveyed Islamic music videos. On their side of the street, next door, was a Sufi madrassa. Two smiling little girls, heads modestly covered, entered the establishment, as a chaotic high-pitched chorus let loose inside. Kamal had noticed that he had hardly seen a woman wearing the traditional black bui-bui, of the kind Bi Kulthum and most other Muslim women used to wear; the fashion now was a coloured chador, wrapped tightly round the face and draping the shoulders, over a long dress; it was what the girls in the imported music videos across the street wore (he’d had a peek), what the girls next door in the madrassa wore. The other style was still the khanga going over the head when desired, the way Mama used to wear it.

He realized he did not feel alien—he spoke the language like a native—but was a returned native nevertheless, and he surely must look alien to an extent, with his grooming, the design of his shirt, the leather in his track shoes; merely from his bearing. Everyone knew everyone else here; he knew not a soul, except Lateef. This had been his haunt, his place, his front yard, where he used to roam around with his kashata tray, she with her tambi. They would sit outside that market to rest during their rounds. He had known everyone here, every shopkeeper, every boy at school, every man and
woman sitting outside on their porch. He had returned to it like a ghost.

“Let’s go see the family,” he said to Lateef.

Mzee Omari’s descendants ran the little medical shop two doors away, on the other side of the madrassa. The painted sign over the open serving window named Ali Hasni as the proprietor and gave a postbox number. A poster on one side of the window displayed a happy young couple and recommended a single partner as a preventative against HIV; on the other side some organization extolled the virtues of solar power. This place had been the site of the tailor’s shop, which had supplied Mama with piecework.

They had been expected, for as soon as she saw them, the woman at the window came out, adjusting her scarf, and went around to the back of the shop, then immediately returned. A man, who seemed to be in his fifties, wearing a cap and his shirt flopping over his trousers, followed her and came to stand with them outside the shop. He was Ali of the nameboard.

“Ali will help you,” said the woman.

After the greetings, Kamal said, “I am from these parts, Bwana Ali—I was born in Kilwa. I used to know Mzee Omari.”

Ali said nothing, wiped his hands in his shirttails.

“I used to hear him recite. He was a great poet. Was he your grandfather?”

“We don’t have any of his things,” Ali replied. “No papers, nothing.” He paused, then inquired: “Are you from Dar es Salaam?”

Kamal nodded.

“Others have come before you, searching for his papers; white people have come too, from overseas, and I’ve told them we have nothing here.”

“I just need information, Bwana Ali. I don’t seek papers or anything else. Mzee had a daughter—Bi Kulthum. Did you know her?”