The Dragonfly Sea

by Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor

  Munira stopped mid-hunt. Her eyes shot spears at him. “Now you decide to starve me and my child of fish!” She flounced away.

  Ziriyab’s head dropped. What? He did not know whether to laugh or to cry. He turned purple instead.

  The next afternoon, he showed up with a carton-load of fish for Munira. He also apologized to her for every wounding word she had endured. He told her that he himself had clouted every fish on the head and enjoyed it.

  Munira glowered at him. “You killed these helpless fish? What did they ever do to you?” Her door slammed.

  Ziriyab’s eyes popped. His mouth dropped open, imitating the look of the fish in his leaking carton. He kicked the box.

  * * *

  —

  Persistent, Ziriyab bombarded Munira with crustaceans, songs, and sugary poems, the songs in styles borrowed from Indian, Turkish, and Egyptian movies. On one occasion, he hired cheap part-time minstrels to sing her these songs, two of which he had composed in what he hoped was the manner of the poetry of Tagore. These ghastly, rhythmless pieces compared Munira to a hibiscus and found the hibiscus wanting.

  When it rained, Ziriyab sought Munira out with an umbrella to escort her wherever she sought to go. When she shopped, he showed up to carry her goods. He waited on her steps when she attended to clients, inhaling assorted scents.

  In quiet moments close to her night sea, Munira contemplated this turn of events in her life: to be sought after and pursued, to be desired, and gazed upon as if she were priceless, so that even her insults were deemed poetry. She had tried to hide, but, in secret, her thirsty heart imbibed this, stealing its nectar, even as she waited for the return of the usual chill and sting.

  And. Qualms.

  In a word,

  Muhidin.

  * * *

  —

  Now.

  His presence. His silence.

  A riddle.

  Her palms sweating, her knees trembling as she crossed paths to go to Muhidin’s house.

  “Hujambo?”

  “Sijambo.”

  A split-second glimpse of truth; a brief unveiling. They stood close together, eyes averted.

  Munira asked, “You approve?”

  “Gives the boy new life.”

  “You approve?”

  “He dreams of you.”

  “You approve?”

  Muhidin never looked at her.

  Munira stood unmoving, diffident.

  Something else, aching to be expressed between them, palpitated.

  Muhidin explained, “Before he saw you, he had willed himself to die.”

  She asked, “And so?”

  “He’s my son,” he said, and his voice was sad.

  She asked, “You approve?”

  Muhidin turned to pretend to reach for an item on his clutter-filled table. “He needs you…to live…He’s still so young…He’s mine.”

  Silence.

  Then she murmured, “Mpenzi,” testing the sound for herself, not for him. Beloved. Muhidin should not have heard it, but when he thought he did, he should have asked what she meant. He did not. Munira veiled her face. She walked out of Muhidin’s coral house.

  * * *

  —

  Four days after Idd-ul-Fitr, on a misty night, Munira relented. Sleepless Ziriyab had taken to standing vigil close to her door at night. He had seen her leave the house and had trailed her during her deferred night wandering. From a safe distance, he watched her as she walked the shoreline. But when she crumbled into hacking tears, he took slow steps toward her. He did not speak. She grieved. He reached over and helped her up. She did not react to the shame of being found unmasked, even though he was part of the provocation for these recent tears. But, to her surprise, she also realized that she was not frightened of Ziriyab seeing her desolation.

  * * *

  —

  They stood shoulder touching shoulder. They wondered if the dawn would come. When it appeared, it was as a backlit gold-and-violet streak in the sky, refulgent. Ziriyab then spoke, and his voice was old, tormented, and deep. “I try to tear off my skin. I try to hide from myself.” He said madness was a refuge that smelled of rust. Then he told Munira that something had happened in October, almost a year back. A foreign naval carrier had been bombed in his hometown.

  Ziriyab said, “One of the…ones…who did it…I know him. His name is…was…Tawfiq.” He paused. “My brother. The other one of me.”

  Stillness. A sliver of dread. Munira shuddered.

  Ziriyab continued: “A scholar, Munira. A good man. Better than me. A good brother.” His voice was serrated, and his tone sank into jarring grooves. “Didn’t see the change.” Tears as his body rocked. “A good brother. A professor. Microbiology. He was cleverer than me.”

  A man’s useless, helpless, hated, unwanted tears. Mucus dripped down Ziriyab’s face, contorting it. His hands gesturing skyward, he whispered, “Why?”

  And the morning sky turned light blue, and dew settled around them.

  As Munira and Ziriyab listened to the bustling of joyful birds. Ziriyab said, “Tawfiq protected even cockroaches. ‘Allah created life to praise Him,’ he would say. ‘These little ones complete our song.’ ” Ziriyab now coughed into his hands. The cough became a dry heaving. Munira leaned into him. She listened to his voiceless weeping. Much later, Ziriyab continued: “When Tawfiq died with those others, when we found out…we couldn’t stay. We left our home.”

  Avoiding a dragnet, a week later, the extended family left in a four-car convoy heading south. Ziriyab was driving the station wagon that carried his wife; his rich mother-in-law; his sister-in-law, Tawfiq’s wife; and six children. They drove nonstop through day and night. Two days later, Ziriyab stopped. They were less than an hour and a half from the village that would be their hideout. He needed to urinate, he said.

  But he had just needed breathing space from the incessant and suffocating put-downs of his mother-in-law, who, as with everything else, knew better than he how to drive, how to see the road ahead. This was interspersed with assorted insults against Tawfiq: his shame, dishonor, and unworthiness. If Ziriyab had not stopped, he said, he would have turned to choke her to death in front of the children. In the fresh evening air, in the cool, cool breeze, Ziriyab had lingered in an overgrown wild coffee thicket, gulping down air. The drivers of the other cars were gunning their engines, impatient to continue. He was doing up his fly when he heard what he imagined was a swarm of bees.

  “There was humming, humming, humming. Then the air exploded.” An angry, fiery, large, and hot thing had tumbled from the sky and obliterated all life within a twelve-meter radius, with a whoosh.

  “Oh,” Munira cried out.

  “The inferno. Then nothing. But, me, I only wondered if shaitan, that mother-in-law, could actually evaporate.”

  Munira and Ziriyab begin to laugh. “My shame,” Ziriyab says. They hold on to their stomachs, guffawing. Then they cling to each other. “My shame,” repeats Ziriyab. Then they are sobbing, cheek to cheek, and Ziriyab murmurs names: Noor, Jibril, Issa, his children; Atiya, Seif, Umi, their cousins; his wife, Durriyah. “You would’ve been friends,” Ziriyab says. “Perfect friends.”

  Munira, inside the tight circle of Ziriyab’s arms, replies, “I’ll marry you.”

  [ 18 ]

  They were sieving orange-blossom water, straining out vagrant florets. They were softening water that would later be scattered over a woman’s body when Munira told Ayaana, “I’ll be marrying Ziriyab.”

  Ayaana had known. She had sensed the meaning of Muhidin’s new silences, his lowered gaze, the sad wrinkle above his lips, his distraction, and his refusal to say her mother’s name. Ayaana studied her hands in the scented water.

  Munira glanced at Ayaana. “A ‘real’ father for you.”

  “No,” Ayaana
said.

  “What?” Munira asked. A terse question.

  Ayaana floated her hands in the water. Her voice was neutral. “I have a father.”

  There were eighty things Munira wanted to shriek. Words jumbled up. “You could try, lulu,” she whispered.

  “No,” replied Ayaana.

  Scented silence.

  * * *

  —

  Two weeks later, on a Thursday, a short, lisping, nerdy kadhi married Munira and Ziriyab in a small, stark nikah ceremony in a corner of the Riyadha al-Jana Mosque in Lamu. An extremely distant uncle of Munira’s, a long-distance truck driver of indifferent reputation, had played wakil and given permission for the nuptials, sight unseen. The idea of the marriage had amused him. Before the ceremony, Munira, Ziriyab, Ayaana, and Muhidin had stopped at the shrine of the saint Ali Habib Swaleh to invite blessings. Later, a mosque attendant, Ayaana, and Muhidin, who walked in step with one another, witnessed the nuptials. Stories are malleable within a person’s feelings: they can be squeezed to acquire the shape of truth. And so Ayaana and Muhidin wandered the island with the intoxicated pair, almost convinced of their own happiness, too.

  * * *

  —

  Ziriyab Raamis’s spirited pursuit of Munira would eventually reach and be retold in Kismaayo sea enclaves as poetry to mock the lovelorn.

  Ayaana called Ziriyab “Ziriyab.”

  Muhidin remained “babangu”—my father.

  Ayaana made a point of pointing out things Muhidin could already see just so that she could repeat “babangu.”

  Munira’s mouth tightened.

  Ziriyab remained oblivious.

  Muhidin suppressed a laugh, even though his look remained troubled.

  “You continue to defy me in this matter,” Munira accosted her daughter one day in their kitchen.

  Washing a pile of dishes, Ayaana let the banging of the pans speak for her.

  Munira asked, “Why?”

  “I already have a father,” replied Ayaana.

  Yapitayo hayageukani; yajayo hayaelimiki.

  The past cannot be changed; the future cannot be known.

  [ 19 ]

  The tide went out, way out, so very quickly. Calm. Alluring. The water disappeared, and suddenly his boat, which had been in the deep sea, was marooned on black-brown sand. A few sparkling fish of splendid form flopped about within arm’s reach. Enchanting. If he had been a fisherman longer, he would not have been mesmerized. He would have known to read the action of fish that had abandoned their feeding grounds that day. He would not have tried to read or wrestle with the whirling, potent current coming in. The secret things of the sea revealed would not have transfixed him. He might have turned his body and boat to face the incoming, speeding, giant waves. He might have understood that he could not make it back to shore in time. He might even have heard the echoes of 250,000 people screaming from the shores along this ocean, as they were swallowed up in five seconds, and he would have heard the howl of broken people trying to hold on to them. Like Ziriyab Raamis, many had forgotten how to decipher the habits of animals that, before dawn, had, in a rush, sought to hide. The second wave caught his boat sideways, and splintered it. He was breathing in water, being whirled in and swept out, and swept in and out and in again. He ached for just one glimpse of Munira, his wife of eighteen months, the wife of his life, his Buthayna, his Ghazalah, his own soaring Huma.

  * * *

  On that Boxing Day Sunday of 2004, a mad, mad current, on an uninhabited atoll where sometimes, once a season, fishermen stopped, vomited Ziriyab Raamis out. He was battered, naked, nameless, and boatless. And after a minute of nothing, he inhaled, he exhaled, he vomited out seawater. And his senses were on fire. And he heard a woman singing. Her voice poured out a name. He remembered that the name was his. And the song was his wife crying him home. Ziriyab Raamis took to swimming out to sea. He thought he and the sea might find and follow the song of his Buthayna, his Ghazalah, his own soaring Huma. And he drank rain water from a puddle and ate raw fish. He had honed a spear-stick with which to hunt and pierce eels. He ate a midsized crab and dreamed of a garlic sauce with which to season it. Eight and a half days later, mid-morning, six fishermen in a skiff from Mogadishu saw, in the distance, a figure thrashing about in the waters. They approached the specter. It turned into a nude human being making incoherent sounds and waving his arms.

  “Salaam aleikum,” the men’s captain called.

  “Alhamdulillah!” Ziriyab groaned. He laughed in small bursts.

  The men in the boat studied the madman. “What brings you this far?” the skiff captain asked.

  Ziriyab croaked, “An idiot current mistook this for my grave.”

  Knowing what had happened, a man threw Ziriyab a rope, and another of the men jumped into the water to help push him into the small boat, where other hands reached for him. “So—how’s life?” deadpanned the fisherman who had dragged him in and covered his body with a stained green kikoi. “Is the fishing any good here?”

  “With or without clothes?” Ziriyab Raamis answered.

  A thunderclap of mirth riddled the boat. They told Ziriyab what had happened to the ocean: “Tsunami.” The word was not rousing enough for him, not after all he had experienced of its effects. So he said, “Dhoruba.”

  “Dhoruba,” they agreed, was the finest of the fathomless words that spoke best of the convulsion of an ocean on one December day. Ziriyab and his rescuers fished all afternoon, throwing nets in arcs that shimmered in the water. Driven by a chill wind, and still jumpy about the waters, they turned sail and set off on a blue, stirring sea in the direction of Pate.

  Ziriyab heard a woman sing. Her voice poured out his name. It sounded like his wife crying him home.

  * * *

  —

  She was waiting for him in the water—as she had been doing for all the hours that he had been away. From the minute the sea had surged and covered the black beach, and fishermen who returned had told her that a wave the size of a hill had grabbed Ziriyab and swept him and his boat away, Munira had gone to the water to hurl prayers into its depths. She pleaded with the sea, parading within its waves. She had insulted those who attempted to haul her in. The islanders confirmed that Munira was unhinged, that her madness had started long ago.

  Muhidin and Ayaana had, at first, stood by the shoreline, keeping Munira within their sights. They watched the sea swirl around her hips. Thick lines wrote themselves into Muhidin’s forehead. His eyes were bloodshot.

  “The ocean is me,” he murmured to Ayaana. “How can it consume my son?”

  Muhidin studied the clouds, watched the rocks, scrutinized the water; he had already searched the ocean with fishermen and returned empty.

  * * *

  —

  Munira called for Ziriyab in a howling-keening chant. Ayaana’s heart pounded; her armpits dampened. She wished that her mother’s habits did not have to mean such humiliation in their lives. Her eyes watered. Here was their nothingness exposed. There was the world, disgusted by it. She shut her eyes tight. Why wouldn’t her mother be like other mothers? She turned to Muhidin. “Make her leave the water.”

  Muhidin just stared.

  Munira turned. She looked straight through Muhidin and Ayaana.

  Ayaana had turned to flee and hide in Muhidin’s house. “I need to leave, I need to leave, I need to leave. I need to leave,” she repeated to herself.

  Muhidin waited. He was praying to Munira’s will; he trusted in its power to resurrect the dead. It was midnight. Some of the island now slept, while Muhidin and Munira stood guard over the sea.

  In the darkness of her Bombay cupboard, Ayaana’s thoughts allowed an image to emerge out of the components of Ziriyab’s absence. In the secret of her dark shelter, Ayaana allowed herself to feel relieved over Ziriyab’s disappearance.

  * * *
>
  —

  Days later, Muhidin and Ayaana watched the blackened sea from his blue balcony. They huddled into the shawl of their fears. And inside Ayaana, whisperings of a strange hope—perhaps Ziriyab had really gone away. Perhaps her sea had purged him from their lives.

  At sunset, a skiff negotiated hidden black rocks to an island. A woman howled out a name. Its command lifted Ziriyab out of the boat and propelled him into his wife’s arms. And amid the rejoicing, a chill wind brought to Muhidin and Ayaana a man’s song: “My Munira, my Buthayna, my Ghazalah, my own soaring Huma.”

  * * *

  “Nothing bad can happen after this,” Munira sobbed into Ziriyab’s sunburned chest that night. “Nothing evil will ever touch us again. We have conquered death.”

  * * *

  —

  She was wrong.

  Dunia mti mkavu, kiumbe usiuelemee.

  The world is a withered tree; rest not your weight upon it.

  [ 20 ]

  Ayaana was racing back to the house, carrying a packet of lentil flour, the contents of which would be made into paste for a pore-cleansing face mask. Her thin limbs jutted out, and she was heavyhearted, still wounded by a snide comment her mother had made about the music she had put on permanent replay. Ayaana sighed. She was plowing through years in which she seemed to do nothing right, and the world, apart from the ocean, had become alien. The days were suffocating her, and everything felt like an obstacle course. No sooner would she take a step outside than somebody would appear to scold, exhort, chastise, warn, reprove her and deliver one more rule or habit she was to acquire: