The Dragonfly Sea

by Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor

  A rush of liquid inside his skull; he was struggling to breathe. She was changing him. He felt himself changing. She said something else. It must have been a question. It stopped on a high note. Then she was silent.

  This child.

  In his arms.

  Sighing and drifting to sleep.

  He sighed, too. He turned his head just in time to see the red-eyed dragonfly shake itself alert, crawl to the end of a small table, spread gossamer wings out, and fly away through an open window. It blended with the evening’s touch-of-red light that dappled the room.

  * * *

  —

  He would learn to always stoop to meet her eyes. She expected this: eye-to-eye conversations. She needed to see everything his soul suggested. She kept her vow: she loved him as he was. Ayaana told everyone—except her mother—that Muhidin was now her father.

  [ 10 ]

  The next dawn, wearing her school uniform and carrying a tattered canvas schoolbag, Ayaana showed up at Muhidin’s door.

  “You teach me school,” Ayaana declared.

  “Go away,” Muhidin said. “Go to school.” He closed the door on her.

  When he stepped out two hours later, Ayaana was still there.

  “What do you want?” growled Muhidin.

  “You teach me.” Her eyes were clear.

  “Go to school.”

  “No! School is bad.”

  “I’m going to Lamu.”

  “I coming with you.”

  “You are not.”

  “You teach me.”

  “No. Look…now I’m going to miss my boat.” With Ayaana trailing him, he hobbled in the direction of the matatu stop, shouting to others to stop the van for him. “Dereva! I’m already late.”

  * * *

  When Muhidin returned that evening, he found Ayaana’s charcoal lines, curves, shapes, and math sums drawn across the steps leading to his door. Muhidin waited for her the next day with a cloth and a bucket of soapy water. She appeared, with a scrawny dirty-white creature purring on her shoulders. She stared up at his thunderous features. Her voice shook. “Ayaana did bad?”

  Muhidin’s face softened. “No. Just the wrong medium.”

  She had to put the kitten down. “What is ‘medium’?”

  “I’ll show you when my stones are spotless again.”

  After she finished wiping the stonework, Muhidin brought down a patched-together calligraphy set. He had once intended to explore the difference between Thuluth and Naskh forms for himself. He gave her the books and several large white sheets of paper. Ayaana clutched these. “Mine?” she exclaimed.

  Muhidin scowled. “Now you can indulge the words you love; at least make them beautiful,” he said in their island dialect.

  “Kujiingiza.” Indulge: a word to capture.

  So, almost by mistake, Muhidin began to tutor Ayaana’s gush of hows, whens, and whos. He told her to take her whys to books, retrieving one or another from amid a dark clutter. He read to her from Hafiz.

  “What it means?” Ayaana asked. “In three languages?”

  He told her to seek answers in her own words, which was better than speaking three languages. Muhidin told her, “Books are emissaries from other worlds.”

  “Atoka wapi?”

  “When you cross this threshold,” he said, entering his new role with relish, “English. ‘Threshold.’ ” Ayaana learned that this meant kizingiti. Another word to keep. Ayaana asked, “Why?”

  Muhidin sighed, “School rules.” Ayaana nodded. Muhidin continued. “In the world, English has the biggest ears.”

  Ayaana pulled at her ears, testing them for size. Muhidin then told her that the words of the world were collecting in his shop and plotting to form a single perfect expression, which could contain the meaning of life.

  Ayaana believed him. “Is it doned? The word? Has it finished?”

  “ ‘Done,’ ” Muhidin corrected.

  “Yes?”

  “No,” Muhidin said, “say, ‘Is it done?’ ”

  “Done.” She repeated “done” as she tiptoed into the room with books.

  Muhidin inclined his head to listen, then shook his head.

  “Lini?”—When?—she whispered.

  Muhidin told Ayaana to take her whens into silence.

  She returned to his house the next day, and the next. In two months, she was rushing to his house at dawn to tell him of characters in the storybooks she consumed, what they did and thought and said as if these were souls about whom a friend might boast.

  * * *

  —

  Ayaana gobbled up everything Muhidin offered.

  “Where are you?” he asked her one day, showing her a torn map.

  “Don’t know.”

  Here he pointed. She stared at his finger and at the spot it touched.

  “Here,” she repeated.

  “Pate Island: Faza, Pate, Siyu, Kizingitini…and Shanga,” Muhidin intoned.

  Ayaana was transfixed by the spot to which his finger pointed. Her thoughts were in turmoil. There was such mystery in the idea that a whole island and all its people could be reduced to a spot on a page.

  * * *

  —

  Muhidin, spurred on by Ayaana’s hunger for knowledge, prepared for their lessons in advance and rediscovered things for himself: basic classical mathematics, geography, history, poetry, astronomy, as mediated in Kiswahili, English, sailor Portuguese, Arabic, old Persian, and some Gujarati. Ayaana always wanted to know about the sea. Every day she asked, “How you read water?” One Friday, she picked up an atlas to, again, find out where she was in the world. On the map she looked at, there was no place marker for Pate Island. No color brown or color green to suggest her own existence within the sea. So she wanted to know about places that could be rendered invisible.

  Muhidin told her that the best and biggest mountains of the earth lived under the sea, unseen. Ayaana contemplated this and her eyes grew round with insight. She asked Muhidin: “Where I am before I am borned? Under the sea?”

  Muhidin’s lips twitched. Though tempted to laugh, he replied, “Somewhere.”

  “Where ‘somewhere’?”

  Muhidin put a finger to his lips.

  “Silent?” she whispered.

  Muhidin suppressed his chuckle.

  “Where…” She turned to Muhidin.

  “Shhhh,” he shushed.

  She waited. Only afterward did Muhidin explain to her that wheres were tricky things. They wanted to be experienced. They were never, ever to be explained.

  * * *

  —

  Music amplified what they could not find in books. Ecumenical music lessons. Algerian raï, Bangla, kora, the symphonies of Gholam-Reza Minbashian and Mehdi Hosseini, and every sample of taarab they could get their hands on. No contemporary outpourings, which, Muhidin told Ayaana, were the residues of the disordered screechings of Ibilisi. Thus they roamed soundscapes. Hearing a melody, Ayaana often cried out, “What she sing?” or “Read,” while pressing clenched fists to her heart, where a stranger’s musical yearnings throbbed. Mid-afternoon, one Tuesday, Muhidin reread to her the poetry of Hafiz. First in broken Farsi, followed by his Kiswahili translation: “ ‘O heart, if only once you experience the light of purity, / Like a laughing candle, you can abandon the life you live in your head…’ ”

  “What it is saying?” she asked.

  “One day you’ll know. Today just listen.”

  * * *

  —

  Ayaana spoke to the books she read, some of which lived under her pillow. “You sit here. Hide, she’s coming.” Most nights, Ayaana read under her sheets with a flashlight long after saying good night to her mother.

  * * *

  —

  Lurking in Muhidin’s home-shop mo
st of the day, Ayaana also saw Muhidin dispense under-the-counter remedies to furtive people who whispered their needs through shuttered windows, pleading for help in love, hope, fecundity, peace, acceptance, mercy, exorcism, wealth, and health.

  Ayaana told him, “Teach me.”

  “No.”

  “Yes. Yes. Yes.”

  “Watch me, then,” he sighed.

  Ayaana watched Muhidin ease out the inner life of seed, fruit, root, bark, berry, crushed leaves, and crushed petals. She saw him blend anise, basil, chamomile; kisibiti, kalpasi, kurundu; pilipili manga, pilipili hoho; tangawizi, cafarani, nanaa; langilangi, lavani, kiluwa, karafuu. Later, she told him that her mother worked with flowers and water and oil, and that on their rooftop tiny white night-jasmine petals—collected at night and drowned in distilled water—were giving up their essence under the sun. She asked if he had ever eaten rose petals, and the next day she fed him four. He told her that the rose was a prophetess among flowers, that when flowers were created the rose was sent to seduce humanity’s heart for God. Then Muhidin showed Ayaana how to replenish the drooping heart of herbs with a drop of rose oil.

  * * *

  Muhidin had decided to cobble together the trailing parts of his almost-color television set, which was still attached to an ancient VHS, to prepare a lesson for Ayaana. He rummaged through a pyramid of books, layered with enough dust to grow an herb garden, and retrieved his favorite videos. In these new lessons, just as Muhidin had twenty-three years ago, Ayaana discovered Bollywood.

  Haathi Mere Saathi.

  She watched it once. Twice. Four times. Muhidin rewound the tape. They sang with Kishore Kumar. They caterwauled every day: “Chal chal chal mere haathi, o mere saathi.” Muhidin sounded like a bullfrog inside a clogged drainpipe. That did not stop them. They danced. They sang: “Hai hai oho ho.”

  * * *

  —

  Weeks later, having been worn down by her incessant need to know, Muhidin agreed to teach Ayaana something of what he understood about the sea. They left at dawn to experience how, with the other senses as well as touch, she could discover dimensions in liquid, place, space, and timelessness; how to tell the mood of water, and discern some of its intentions; how to intuit with inner eyes. In their aquatic world, in conversations with water, feeling the currents on her skin and tasting its salt on her tongue, she learned one of the ways of tides, sensed hidden routes, and understood that it was possible to imagine a destination by following the flight path of birds. She sensed something of what the winds desired, heard the variety of their refrains, and felt in these something of what Almazi Mehdi had known to whistle to summon them.

  “The ocean I am / How can I drown,” Muhidin sang to the water one morning.

  Ayaana sang with him. The next moonlit evening, Ayaana felt in her skin how she was drawn to the moon. She went to tell Muhidin.

  Muhidin sat with her on the steps to his door beneath a starlit sky. “Iron in our blood,” he said. “The moon is sometimes a deranged magnet.”

  Ebbing: disappearing, becoming of the sea. Flowing: returning, rolling on the sands, returned to earth. Ayaana saw that the sky was a mirror for the waters, and that there were places that could be reached by reading the night; that the texture of the day to come was written in stars: Kilimia kikizama kwa jua huzuka kwa mvua, kikizama kwa mvua huzuka kwa jua. When the Pleiades set in clear sun, they rise in rain; when the Pleiades set in rain, they rise in clear sun. Watching ships make their ways to various harbors, Muhidin told Ayaana, “A boat is a bridge.”

  Ayaana considered this for days.

  But, though she started to insist, Muhidin would not show her how to hunt deepwater fish with night lanterns.

  “If your mother heard…”

  “She never know.”

  “Not yet, Abeerah.”

  She sulked.

  He shrugged.

  “Fundi Mehdi will show me,” she threatened.

  “No, he won’t,” countered Muhidin.

  Ayaana knew he was right. “Can you make a boat?”

  “No.”

  “Fundi Mehdi can.”

  “Go to Fundi Mehdi, then.”

  “No!” she yelped.

  But, later that afternoon, with Ayaana’s kitten following them, they wandered over to the part of the island where the vestiges of its shipbuilding memory still lingered. In the decrepitude caused by time and fate lurked Fundi Almazi Mehdi’s cove and the wood scent of boats built and boats to be built from templates resting in old memories. Hammer-on-wood echoes bounced in the air. Mangrove poles lay scattered on the ground, scorched in preparation for their destiny. A radio announcer offered the tide reports. Ayaana saw a solitary man. She dashed forward toward Fundi Mehdi as he worked on the hollowed prow of a mtungwi, pouring into it coconut oil followed by fire.

  Muhidin caught up with her. Before he could greet the craftsman, Ayaana announced, “A boat is a bridge.” She watched the flames scorch the prow. “Why fire?” She leaned over.

  Mehdi tried to flap her away.

  Muhidin lifted Ayaana into the remains of a nearby sand-stranded, barnacled formerly seagoing boat. The kitten jumped into the boat with her. From inside the vessel, Ayaana squawked to Mehdi, “Why oil? Why fire?”

  Fundi Mehdi sighed.

  “Why oil? Why fire?” Ayaana sang.

  Muhidin then told Mehdi, as he settled himself on a stump, “Greetings, brother. Forgive this imposition. I have no problem extending my torment to you. Now she’ll hound you. She’ll interrogate you. If you have an answer, deliver it to her, lest you babble out deeper secrets in desperate surrender.”

  Mehdi glowered at Muhidin. Muhidin shrugged. Mehdi turned to look at Ayaana, who was resting on her belly to dangle off the edges of the jettisoned boat. She then lifted up her hands as if she were about to soar and intoned, “Why fire? Why oil?”

  He returned to his firework with the smallest of smiles sitting at the edge of his mouth. Almazi Mehdi started. “So listen. When…this boat meets fire…on water…one day…’twill know…what to do.”

  Stillness.

  Ayaana’s voice, shrill with awe: “I seened you drowned boats. Many, many, many time.” She had spied on Mehdi as he seasoned boats by submerging them in the sea, keeping them underwater for weeks. Ayaana continued. “And so…and so, when the boats they drown, and afterward when the water comes inside”—she shook her head—“even them now they don’t drown, isentitit?”

  Mehdi’s exasperated breath came through his hairy nostrils. With an audible harrumphing, he turned to Muhidin, eyes frantic. Muhidin turned to face the sea and closed his eyes. He clamped his mouth shut to stop himself from cackling as Ayaana swung her body to and fro on her boat, asking, “You build a jahazi?”

  “No,” Mehdi grunted after a minute.

  Cawing crows. Wood-on-oil scent. Wood shavings on sand. Ayaana reached for and seized a twig, with which she poked holes in the sand, interfering with the passage of ants. “You build a mtungwi?” she asked.

  Mehdi stared at his wizened hands on the vessel he was repairing with fire. He murmured, “This.”

  Ayaana’s kitten jumped onto her head. She tilted herself the right way up and tumbled out of the boat. She stroked the kitten as Muhidin studied the waves. “You build a mashua?”

  “Mhh,” answered Mehdi.

  “A ngarawa is small to build, yes?”

  “Mhh.”

  “How many utumbwis you have make?”

  Mehdi waited thirty seconds.

  “Three.”

  “A dau?”

  He gnashed his teeth, shifted his body, and grabbed a small brownish-white sail to stitch up. “Many.”

  “A mtepe?”

  A pause. A wistfulness crept over Mehdi. The mtepe was the emblematic Bajuni vessel; it had made his family’s original fortune. “K
ila chombo kwa wimblile”—Every vessel makes its own waves. “This one…is our blood.” He tapped his head. “Many of them…”

  “Even my blood?” Ayaana now poked at her skin. She patted her head.

  Muhidin intervened: “Abeerah, you are now drowning Fundi Mehdi with words. In order to be born, boats prefer silence. Enough, girl!”

  The kitten mewed and purred and, leaving Ayaana, wandered over to Mehdi, twirling its tail around him. Mehdi paused in his work. A finger stroked the small animal’s head. “Name?” Mehdi asked, his voice soft.

  “Yaaaakuti,” whispered Ayaana.

  “Good name,” he said. Abruptly, “One day I make a mashua for you.”

  Ayaana whirled. “For me?” Her eyes turned into two bright moons. Still attempting to whisper: “Me and you, we make it?”

  Mehdi’s two brows met. He scratched his jawbone. “Yes.”

  She patted her chest. “And then we go and go and go, me and you and Babu and Yakuti and…and…me. I will drive the ship. Babu, you heared Mehdi and me, us will make and drive a boat, and you can go with us, and also…and also Yakuti.”

  Mehdi’s mouth twitched.

  * * *

  —

  Minutes before Muhidin and Ayaana left Fundi Mehdi to his solitude, Mehdi had retreated to a work shed, re-emerged with an object, and approached Ayaana with it, mumbling something. Soon she was cupping a compass set in greening brass that had been passed down from ship to ship.

  “Dira!” she had exclaimed.

  “Yes,” Mehdi murmured. “Start with ‘nowhere.’ ” He pointed at the compass, and then at their surroundings. “This line—north.” He adjusted her hand so the compass was flat in it. “Ask yourself: Where am I going? When you know, go.”

  Ayaana’s eyes were glued to the compass. Muhidin chortled at her expression.

  * * *

  —