Don’t speak too loudly.
Cover your legs, your arms, your face.
Don’t run.
Hurry.
Walk slowly.
Don’t let your nail polish chip.
Perfume your body.
Cover your mouth when you laugh.
She walked, skirting the sea when there was light, because spying eyes had multiplied, ready to accuse her of some wrongdoing.
Her restlessness was mirrored in the lives of her peers, but they, unlike her, acted loud, and confident. They rapped modern songs in words she did not have access to. Ayaana had returned to school so that she might register for her standard eight exams. Muhidin’s lessons had given her advantages over the whole class and made her a much-sought lesson companion especially in English and math. She relished this space of belonging among her peers even though she knew it would not last.
Her body grew and stretched and curved and developed bumps and smelled of otherness, and tasted of salt and something else, and wanted invisible, impossible things; her body was now the target of so many restrictions and bindings and shroudings, incited such a complexity of looks, an array of snide smiles and extra commands for decorum. The women in her mother’s house pinched her body’s various parts; they called her a young woman now. Her body was a puzzle, her thoughts a protest. A legion of unfamiliar shadows had emerged to scare her. Her dreams rearranged themselves and, to her embarrassment, invited in the image of the awful Suleiman, so that every day Ayaana’s heart softened at the idea of him.
She noticed his height, and how he outraced everybody. She began to show up at the scene of the boys’ evening football game just so that she could gaze at him. She was not surprised that he served as coach, referee, captain, and goalkeeper.
Ayaana now edited her conversations with Munira, because, despite her best intentions, these twisted into arguments.
Now racing toward the path that would lead to her house, she heard a scraping noise. Ayaana fixed her eyes on the bald-headed man from China, Mzee Kitwana Kipifit.
Squinting from under her veil, Ayaana spied the man sitting still and solid, next to the island’s dome-shaped tombs. What was he doing?
“Ayaaaana!” A husky summons from a darkened doorway interrupted her musings. Amina “Mama Suleiman” Mahmoud, who weeks ago had returned from her tenth pilgrimage to Mecca and hosted a party to celebrate that milestone. Now she smoldered in the doorway like a Turkish soap opera diva, eyes fierce, head angled, a voluptuous, concentrated object of craving. Breasts thrust forward, everything about her promised indulgence, suggesting that, with her, no human hungers would be left unfulfilled. Seductive in her loftiness, she was married, but it was not clear to whom, or in which of the realms of earth her husband lived. Mama Suleiman was wealthy, with six commercial jahazis sailing northward to Oman carrying smuggled cloves from Pemba, to return laden with contraband goods, including duty-free pasta, which wound up in Zanzibar and Mombasa shops. In the underground chambers of her grand house, she traded in gold and jewels, outside the purview of the Kenya Revenue Authority. It was also murmured that she was a tributary in a supply chain of girls sent to Saudi Arabia, to which she went twice a year. Her body poured out its jewel-adorned flesh. She was always incensed, perfumed, and painted. Today her hair was in a topknot, and she channeled something arcane, bewitching, and decomposing from the innards of the land, giving it voice and chilling pale brown eyes.
Mama Suleiman often sought out Ayaana in order to predict bleakness in her future—an ongoing proxy war against Munira, whom Amina Mahmoud had despised from the time their childhood friendship had broken up in a squabble over dolls. Mama Suleiman would tell Ayaana, “I see the future, little girl, and when I contemplate yours I am terrified.” Or mock her fatherlessness: “How tall you are. I think, mami, your real father must be a Maasai.” A cold titter. Their last encounter: “Too thin. Eat more, small girl. People will say you’re sick with ukimwi.” Dulcet toned, “Do you know your status?”
Her loathing for Ayaana was entrenched after the primary-school examination results listed Ayaana’s as the best in the district. Ayaana had outshone her son, Suleiman. “Ajidhaniye amesimama, aangalie asianguke,” she had cautioned Ayaana—Beware those who stand tall, lest they fall.
Mama Suleiman’s specialty was seeding conflict by twisting stories—she displaced characters and spread innuendo that guaranteed, after she had finished her telling, that a quarter of the island would stop talking to another quarter, while the rest dithered over truth and illusion. It continued this way until someone, a week later, asked the dissenting parties to recite the Ayat al-Kursi. This dissolved vitriol—no one wanted to be accused of idolizing the human temperament over God’s omnipotence—though sediments of suspicion lingered in the storehouse of human hearts.
Ayaana, strangely enough, saw in the contorted femininity of Mama Suleiman something she wanted, an invitation to become more like fire.
Mama Suleiman now cooed, “Ayaan-oo!”
Ayaana cringed, caught between fear and the regret of her near escape. She shuffled over and stuttered, “Shi-Shikamoo?” An excess of Bint El Sudan perfume attacked her nose as Mama Suleiman stretched out a hand, wiggling her fingers for Ayaana to kiss. Ayaana bent over the scented limb and imagined slobbering over it.
Mama Suleiman demanded, “Ayaana, idle insect, do I, a busy, busy woman, have all day to wait for you? Answer me.”
Within Ayaana a spasmodic pang of terror: had Mama Suleiman seen her in the ocean last night? Ayaana had succumbed to the tug of the quarter-moon and sneaked out after midnight to jump into the sea. She curled her arms around her stomach and scowled at the woman’s hennaed feet. Lacelike whorls, as from a peacock’s tail feathers, feathered curves—Ayaana’s own work. She should have painted snake fangs.
Mama Suleiman’s kohled eyes glowered. “Time squanderer. Time is money. What am I saying? Money is not something you know, time squanderer.” She uncovered her hennaed arms. “Chokochoko mchokoe pweza, binadamu hutamweza”—Provoke an octopus, you can’t handle me. “Look at my limbs. Are these lotuses?”
Ayaana’s heart convulsed, and she clamped down on her retort. Oh, beastliness, she thought. She mumbled so that it sounded like an incoherent apology. She knew that her mother’s services depended on the supercilious goodwill of women such as these. Mama Suleiman now informed the skies, seas, and seasons that she had wanted the Lotus of the Nile design, the specific purpose for which she had bought expensive Yemeni henna, which Ayaana had spilled on her like saliva.
Lotuses! Ayaana rolled her eyes. The foolish squid wouldn’t know a lotus from a catfish. Though Ayaana averted her gaze, she also wondered why she had ignored an instinct to add extra lavender oil or clove buds to this woman’s henna. When she had touched Mama Suleiman’s clammy skin, the tips of her fingers had felt the skin’s indents and imperceptible bumps, and when she touched these, Mama Suleiman’s eyes had flickered open to reveal, for a split second, a petrified sadness. Ayaana had known she should boost the henna with the oils. But in front of Mama Suleiman’s omniscient commands, her ever-evolving expectations, and the exaggerated value of her henna from Yemen, Ayaana had doubted her intuition. Now Mama Suleiman bayed, “Tell your mother I won’t pay for fifth-rate efforts. I’m not an experiment. From now on, she alone may touch my body. I gave you a chance, but you failed. Failed. Leave me now.” Mama Suleiman huffed and swung her voluptuous being away, gesticulating so the gold bangles on her arms glittered and clanged in the light of this lush and restive season.
Ayaana stood as still as stone, waiting for the waves of shame to settle in her middle, where other deformed feelings collected and turned into a stomachache. Why hadn’t she added the oils? She knew what to do, so why hadn’t she done it? She then allowed herself a second of longing for hips and bosoms as remarkable as Mama Suleiman’s. Passersby glanced at her; some laughed. A hu
rrying man pushing a cart almost bumped her, and as she leapt away, the package of lentil flour dropped and split open. Ayaana gathered her niqab to her face, wanting to disappear, tearful, wishing she could retreat into the safe darkness of her Bombay cupboard.
Would Muhidin be awake?
He had taken to extending the hours of his afternoon siestas. She chewed on her finger. Muhidin worried her. His skin was dry; his thoughts were scattered. He always had a smile for her, but it was such a lonely smile. She kicked the heap of spilled lentil flour.
The truth.
Both she and Muhidin had lost their moorings to the ongoing fixation between Munira and Ziriyab. Ever since Ziriyab had returned from the storm, he and Munira were never apart. They cooked together, and Munira often went fishing with Ziriyab on his boat. Ayaana knew, to her disgust, that they even bathed together. Their unguarded eroticism was confusing for Ayaana, distancing and embarassing, especially when she realized how much it paralyzed Muhidin. She faked indifference, but every day, before she slept, she muttered imprecations over Ziriyab’s name.
Yet. Was this the meaning of man and woman together? She chewed on her lips. There were questions she was suddenly shy about asking Muhidin. Now, when they sat together, they rarely spoke. They read books or listened to music or focused on the sea.
Cawing crows.
The lentil flour was unsalvageable. Ayaana stepped over it. She dragged her feet, mind churning, heart burning, and new tears of annoyance in her eyes.
Footsteps. Ayaana stepped aside to let their owner pass.
“Hallo, hallo.” Mzee Kitwana Kipifit.
Startled, Ayaana rubbed her eyes. He did the same, then chortled and stretched out his right palm to show her a dried pink rose petal. She stared at the fragile, beautiful thing. He raised his palm, as if he would let the petal fall to the dust. She cupped open both hands, and the petal fell into them. The man’s laugh was so tender that Ayaana looked upward at him, eyes wide and searching. Eyes on her, eyes like hers, and for a fleeting moment something familiar settled within her as a sweet sensation, as if fate had unexpectedly revealed its secret hand before restoring the world to old order. Ayaana did not realize she was crying until she pivoted to watch the old man stroll away. He was shimmering. She decided to trail him, wanting to ask him questions she had not yet formulated. Years later, looking out into another sea, she wondered if something of destiny had been transferred in a rose petal falling from a stranger’s hands into hers.
* * *
Pate Island had seeped into Mzee Kitwana Kipifit’s soul. Now he was struggling with the question of leaving Pate. Every day he honored the needs of the ghost sailors he now felt were his own. When he was not fishing, he tended to the tombs that he now suspected dated from the Tang dynasty era, not just the Ming. An older legacy. His shadow community. Looking after the tombs allowed him to believe he was atoning for the lost phantoms he had created through his previous work. Another time, another world. And every day he found another reason to linger. But he knew his self-distancing from China was not as complete as it could have been. With the violent arrival of crude military interlopers, he was stirred to act. In Pate, he thought, perhaps there was a way to secure a heritage of rightful belonging. His mind raced.
Much later, in a formal letter home to a high-level party man, titled “Belt and Road, Culture and Opportunity,” he spelled out all he had known and seen on Pate Island. He alluded to crescent tombs, energy, and gem prospectors from other nations who reaped where the empire had historically sown. He wrote of Admiral Zheng He, referring to uncompleted voyages. “Our emissaries are here,” he added. Then he signed his name. Days later, he took a slow boat to Lamu, where he mailed the letter himself.
* * *
—
Beginnings. Life had splintered in Beijing for this man at exactly three o’clock, one Friday afternoon in 1997, Year of the Ox. He was a specialist in sleep deprivation and simulated drowning methods, a fine artist of human pain thresholds. Though he was a good employee, he also accumulated toxins from the melancholy created by his delivery of suffering to others. He was also entrusted with profound secrets he could no longer endure. On that day, a Hui teenager, connected with an offender against the state, was brought to him, and the administration of electricity caused his unintended death. In the tedium of filling out forms to explain yet another fatality in custody that should have been unremarkable, everything short-circuited within the man. He had glanced out of his office window at the autumn foliage and recognized his own ephemerality. In the next instant, as papers fluttered about him, and his black chair twirled on its fulcrum, he fled from his room, howling at his comrades. His retirement plans were expedited, and by that evening his work as an interrogator for the party’s shuanggui ended.
He did not go home, bewildered as he was by the distorted images of his life: a most enterprising wife in the export business, a concubine who tolerated him, a grown-up son who spoke to him only in complete, grammatically correct sentences. Unyoking himself, he hurried away from everything he knew, including himself. He traveled to Wuhan, in Hubei. Intensely crowded there among so many bodies, close to the Yangtze, he thought he might render himself invisible. And this portion of the world became his monastery. Among struggling humans mesmerized by their needs, he sought to barter his guilt for solitude. A broken Hui boy, and the 118 men and 13 women whose lives he had ripped apart, could gaze upon him with pity. Stillness. Those who might have searched for him were reassured by his new habits, the performance of insanity—the sustenance of silence. Any alley aunties with roving eyes and quick tongues would have confirmed this to their handlers. He did not need the money; he sought only to salvage life. Wherever he was, he studied human gestures and habits. During the night, he wept. A year went by.
One overcast morning, the seeker stepped off a bus and stubbed his toe on a rock. He stooped to look. It was an imitation stone, a discarded, ubiquitous “Made in China” thing made for tourists. He was about to hurl it away when he saw what had been etched into it.
We have traversed more than 100,000 li of immense water spaces and have beheld in the ocean huge waves like mountains rising in the sky…
“We.” He knew who “we” were. The commander of the Ghost Fleet, the immense Admiral Zheng He. The man interpreted this as a message. So he sought out libraries and museums where he could pore over old images and chronicles. He read journeys and seaways. He studied maps of destinations with tongue-turning names: Palembang, Malacca, Samudera, Mogadishu, Malindi, Ganbali, and Calicut. A thought acquired shape. He would undertake a recovery voyage and create a soul-harmonizing postscript for the great admiral’s disastrous seventh voyage, in which a third of the fleet was lost to East African storms. He would go to stand in a different place in the world. Two months later, with a new name—one of five he had set aside for himself—and dodgy papers, he stepped onto a plane to Kenya, East Africa. Destination: Pate Island.
Dunia ni maji ya utumbwi.
The world is like water in the canoe.
[ 21 ]
One morning, two years after the tsunami, as matlai dragonflies were on tiptoes waiting to catch the tail end of the kaskazi on which to cross the ocean, they took Ziriyab Raamis away. Three of them had leapt from beneath waves—beings in black. They seized him from the boat he had launched for an early fisherman’s jaunt. Ziriyab had been humming old songs with contentment, rowing his reconditioned boat, feeling the new power of his body. He experienced his muscles’ strain as he hauled in fish and grappled with the ocean—the tussle of a new friendship. Life sparkled. Some days, he just allowed the boat to drift so he could watch the world, and imagine his Munira, his Buthayna, his Ghazalah, his soaring Huma. He would reach for shores in the delectable knowledge that all his dreams were real, and were waiting for him scented with jasmine and oudhi, as was his ring with the ruby strip, which he usually left in the house whenever he went f
ishing in uncertain weather, and which his wife solemnly slipped on his finger every night, as if choosing him again.
* * *
—
However, today black-clad beings twisted his limbs, tied them up, covered his head with a black cloth, and threw him into a waiting launch that would ply waves heading to far-off giant foot-shaped Diego Garcia, in the Chagos Archipelago—where the Chagossian people used to live before the War of Contempt dispossessed them. They would take him there to smash up his body without opening skin, and to drown him to the point just before death so they could resurrect him, to begin the drowning again, until his soul might break, until he could, with his own voice, accuse and rename himself “terrorist.” The invasion was intimate and brutal and so sudden that Ziriyab did not have time to wonder what had happened to him. He did not even cry out. They took Ziriyab Raamis away. They also sank his boat, with its fine fishing gear acquired from the one and only All Goods Supplies Store in Mombasa with money scrupulously saved from the proceeds of fishing and moonlight accounting, and from credit. What they left behind was decay and a void filled with grim clouds of suspicion and sadness, which swirled into the lives of a small makeshift family.
[ 22 ]
Neighbors sometimes heard the family weeping. Some understood. Most suppressed their reactions: the distressed looks and angry words that could be interpreted as betrayal or sympathy. The old days were over, when sorrow could be sheltered by the empathy of the many, confronted by imported rage, a most foreign beast at war with a human emotion—terror. The invaders, such angry strangers steeped in madness, paraded the island as if they were its new and infernal overlords. How fathomless was Fazul the Egyptian’s betrayal of Pate and its people. The amorphous war he had stimulated cascaded over so many simple lives. It seized the best of Pate’s men, implicated in this sickness only because they were the best of men. Most of the taken would never return, not even as corpses. Those they left behind were forced to learn the languages of eternal hauntedness and silence. The shadows of a thousand thousand nonexistences changed Pate again: new boundaries, new walls, new forts of the heart. So, when Pate saw Muhidin race from his house and break down and weep by the old jetty, it quietly cast its fate to God and waited for sky light to see.
The Dragonfly Sea Page 13