The Dragonfly Sea

by Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor

  * * *

  —

  Munira did not see Muhidin, who had been waiting out the night near Mehdi’s cove. She did not hear his choking gasp. He had heard from whispers, on this evening of a quiet return on a fisherman’s boat, that Ayaana would be leaving home.

  * * *

  Munira barged into Ayaana’s room at dawn. “Go, lulu! Leave this place. Do not look back.” Ayaana gaped at her mother, whose hair was disheveled, her eyes wild. Munira breathed hard, and her hands fluttered. “We must go to Mombasa for your passport. You are lucky. Others here receive only a death certificate from Kenya.” She panted, leaning against the wall. And suddenly, for Ayaana, four weeks was a lifetime away.

  * * *

  —

  Later that afternoon, Ayaana crept over to Mehdi’s again. She was unused to her new popularity: exuberant greetings, invitations to ceaseless cups of tea and meals, photographs. In all this, the unchanging constant was Mehdi. He had become accustomed to Ayaana’s sudden appearances and soliloquies. These were not unlike the daily news of the tide that he received. “I’m to go to China,” she announced from her old perch in the abandoned dau as Mehdi fired a plank.

  Mehdi lifted the wood. The tiny radio was providing weather reports. The ocean was in flow. It said that low tide would begin at 1743 hours.

  Mehdi muttered, “Muhidin. He has returned, hasn’t he?”

  Ayaana stared.

  He nodded.

  She lay in the broken boat and stared at the sky.

  * * *

  It was night. Ayaana stood outside Muhidin’s house, pounding on his door. Sitting on a low stool, staring at the screen of his old color television, Muhidin clutched one of his books. He had inserted the note she had left him after trashing his house: “You left me,” it said. It leached sorrow. He crumpled the note.

  He heard Ayaana pounding on his door. “Do you want your stupid map back?”

  Muhidin’s fingers tingled where they connected with the note.

  Ayaana sat on Muhidin’s stone step and dialed his phone number.

  “Mteja hapatikani kwa sasa.” No reply.

  Ayaana shouted in Kipate, “Did you find Ziriyab?”

  Muhidin was still.

  Outside, Ayaana rubbed her face. “Chal chal chal mere haathi…” She sang it as a question.

  No reply.

  “When you went away, the bad people came.” She dropped her head to her arm.

  She waited for the moon to move to the lower sky before she set off for her mother’s house. Inside the room, Muhidin wiped his bloody mouth, winced at the cut on the tongue, where he had bitten into it.

  When her voice had faded, the first echo of a child’s “Nitakupenda” reached for him. Abeerah. Muhidin went to his door and hauled it open. Looking out, expecting to see a girl and her kitten, he saw only moon-daubed darkness.

  [ 32 ]

  Muhidin fought through dawn’s riptides into a black day made so by a sky pouring out torrents of stormy rain. The wind flapped his coat, which he huddled into, as he waded in the flowing water of already submerged pathways. He knocked on Munira’s door, ready to tell the truth, to ask for the truth. The doorknob turned. She stood there, her unveiled hair in a single long plait, holding a needle, a thread, and the orange dress she was repairing. As she broke the string with her teeth, she said, without looking, “Naam?”—Yes?

  Muhidin said, “Munira.”

  Her head snapped up.

  She dropped her sewing, and it fell in a heap around her feet.

  Muhidin saw widening eyes that got squeezed in by a hard frown; flaring nostrils; she licked her lips. He observed slender hands that trembled as they touched her right cheek. She gulped in air and said, “You?”

  He answered, “I couldn’t call.”

  He was a wall, she thought, and behind chasmic eyes, some painful witness, some injury. She waited. He repeated, “I couldn’t call.”

  She asked, “Should I have noticed?”

  He bent under the rain in the dismal light. Swirling emotions, an eddy of rage. He had heard of curious visits: Wa Mashriq. The Chinese. Nairobi. Eddies of yearning: straining not to grab the one pined for, not to squeeze body, soul, and heart into her so that he could taste of life again, assuage new thirsts like the homesickness wrought by being at home. Impeded by invisible barriers, he scowled. “Ayaana.”

  Munira was ice. “My daughter.”

  He tried again. “I wanted to come home.”

  “Your wish is now fulfilled.”

  “I am told there were strangers. I want to hear it from you.”

  Munira looked him up and down, and her upper lip was a twist. She scoffed. “As who?”

  A struggle. The fresh scars he carried on his body and soul stung. Through gritted teeth, Muhidin asked, “What are you doing?” Disappointment.

  Still. This face. This beauty. Within new folds, lines, and hardnesses, sadness’s fresh residues. Still, I can find your face even in the grime of the world.

  Munira’s eyes slipped away from Muhidin’s gaze. Guilt-bitten. She focused on Muhidin’s body’s rough, sinewy urgency, how beaten it looked. Haggard in its stooping. She accused him before he could accuse her: “So now, when it is too late, you come.”

  He pleaded, “China?” The fall of water from high roofs drenching him, Munira’s disgust oppressing him: “China, Munira?”

  She gestured. “What do you know of what you don’t know?”

  Even though their tones were civilized, and they stood as close as those mist-shrouded portraits of lovers, their guardedness alone, its undetonated presence, caused passersby to make detours.

  Muhidin said, “Ziriyab…you understand…I had to…”

  Munira intervened, “As now I must. For my child.” Fake smile. “It is good that you understand.”

  “Abeerah…”

  Lightning spiked across the sky.

  Munira huffed, “Ayaana?”

  Muhidin reached for Munira’s arm. “You are…”

  Munira was polite as she slapped his hand away. “You’re good at leaving, my beloved; we learned to manage without you. Nenda zako!”—Get lost.

  The soft slap lacerated Muhidin’s heart. After twenty seconds, after he had restrained his fists from smashing in Munira’s face, he turned to hobble away, his gait bent so that he would not fall to the ground; he tumbled once, but picked himself up. He hurried on, a man whose chest was burning. He was an old man who, single-handedly, had succeeded in losing everyone who had ever tried to love him. Behind him, a door slammed so hard he felt its reverberations beneath his feet.

  * * *

  —

  Four weeks later, a village gathered for prayers and blessings that would lead Ayaana off the island into her destiny. They prepared her for journeys they had only dreamed about: exhortations, directions, things to do, things not to do, the invocation of God. Ayaana listened to these with a sense of distance. She thought of the district administrator, who often threatened the mostly indifferent islanders that one day he would “wipe the dust of this island off his feet.” Now, if Ayaana had been brave enough, she would have informed Pate of her intent to scour its dust off her existence. She would have cursed its rumor-mongering strandedness, and its previous contempt for her and her mother. She was delirious about removing herself from the land’s griefs, quarrels, ghosts, presences, and absences.

  * * *

  —

  Ayaana carried little: her mother’s prayer mat, her calligraphy pens and some ink, two packs of henna from Sudan; three dresses, a pair of jeans, two lesos, a kikoi, two buibuis, some jewelry, Mehdi’s compass, and Muhidin’s map, into which she had attached Mzee Kitwana’s dry rose petal. She left Suleiman’s pearl on her table. Munira added her gold bracelets to her daughter’s collection. She also wrapped five small brown plastic bottles: r
ose essence, rose-hip-seed oil, orange-blossom attar, jasmine oil, and thick clove cream. She added two sets of lesos, printed with the aphorism “Siri ya maisha ni ujasiri”—Courage is the secret of life. They stored these things in a tightly packed medium-sized dark blue cloth suitcase, “Made in China.”

  * * *

  They were two hours late and attempting to outrace the wind and take advantage of the incoming tide. Munira was already waiting aboard the white motorboat with Ayaana’s luggage, her robes flapping, stately in her bearing—the mother of “the Descendant.” This was her hour of triumph. She and Ayaana would be spending a night in Lamu, from where Ayaana would depart with an appointed chaperone for the harbor in Mombasa where her ship waited.

  Ayaana, who had been delayed by the formal introductions to her escort, a Chinese woman from the embassy, was being hurried toward the old wharf when, from amid the milling crowd, Muhidin emerged.

  “Abeeraah!” he hurled, as the wind swept away his barghashia.

  Ayaana twisted away from the woman just as Muhidin reached her. “Where is my map?” he shouted, embracing Ayaana, clutching her to him.

  She sobbed, “I’ll tear it. Half for you, half for me.”

  “How?”

  “We share,” she said.

  He grabbed her shoulders. “Abeerah…” he pleaded. He shook her. “You soiled my home; you stole my treasures.”

  Her eyes were fire. “Where were you?” she howled.

  Reacting to her suffering, Muhidin recoiled. Ayaana said, “The bad thing…he came. You were not here.” She hit his arms. Her head now against his chest, she reverted to childhood cadences: “I do not find you.”

  The wind tossed her black veil this way and that. Muhidin was growling. Run, he thought. He remembered Munira. And Ziriyab. He recalled his recent entanglement with “Kenya.” He peered into the future and saw nothing of substance left for any of them. Run! His eyes grieved, his heart broke. Run, child! “I am here,” he said. “I am here now.”

  * * *

  —

  Muhidin had gone to Nairobi, a citizen asking authorities simply to explain his lost son. Instead, he had been forced to prove he was “not al-Shabaab,” “not al-Qaeda”—that he was not a part of things he had not known. There had been nobody to speak up for him when he was robbed, stripped, accused, charged, and remanded, no one to protest his detention. No voice was raised as a lament against the abuse of his person and the desecration of his dignity, history, profession, and people, the rubbing away of his “Kenyan” identity by those who had the least right to lay claim to its story, who could not even locate Pate on a map of Kenya. No one came to explain to his tormentors that Muhidin’s two-year stunned silence was not evidence of guilt. It was not that he had “something to hide”; he was just oppressed by meaninglessness.

  To escape, he had to sell values he did not know he had. He had no valuables to give or provide access to, no one to call lest this visit trouble on someone’s head. He, and others with whom he shared a charge sheet, had co-opted avarice to assuage the barking leprosy in the hearts of their guards. Money. There were six others in the cells with him, Kenyan Somalis. They had shared court sessions. They connected with Muhidin’s name. They treated him as a brother. They had raised his share of the bribe—seven thousand shillings, the price of a nation’s shriveling soul. Sated, their guards had one visiting day, left their cell doors open. A twelve-minute window was sufficient for the seven remandees to change clothes, walk out of their cells, mingle with guests, and leave the prison. The others then gave Muhidin another four thousand shillings to cover the cost of a ride back to the coast in the cabin of a cargo truck.

  Even now Muhidin still felt putrid, as if a stinking carcass of ugliness, a Kenya-specific demon, clung to his soul. Now, as the wind disheveled their clothes, Muhidin looked at Ayaana, her awkward posture, her hopeful heart-in-eyes. His daughter. He preferred to surrender her to a future that was a dice roll so that she could make deeper, truer, and richer choices. In an uneven tone, he said, “I’ve been to China.” He lied, “You will be so happy there.”

  Two fat tears in her eyes. Afraid she was reading abandonment in his words, Muhidin lied again. “I shall find you, you know that; I always find you.”

  She hiccupped. “I have a passport.” She dug into her new green handbag and pulled out the blue object. She opened it for him to read “Ayaana Abeerah Mlingoti wa Jauza.”

  She said, “Now it is written. You are my father.”

  Muhidin kissed the document. He cleared his throat. “I am sorry I went away. I left you and your mother undefended. Forgive me…” His voice shook.

  Ayaana touched his wind-mauled face. “You mustn’t cry.”

  She cupped his face as she used to when she was little. Then Muhidin wanted to warn Ayaana: Destinations are ephemeral. Nothing lasts, only the voices of the heart and gut count. Instead, he said, “Listen, listen, the most important things are concealed in the unseen; the most essential truths inhabit only the unspoken.” And then he recited, “Greet Yourself / In your thousand other forms / As you mount the hidden tide and travel / Back home…”

  Muhidin paused his invocation of Hafiz. He murmured, “You know, my own, I shall love you.”

  * * *

  —

  Ayaana’s official escort succeeded in unclamping Ayaana’s convulsive grip on Muhidin’s body. Firm and irritated, the escort snapped, “We so late.”

  “Your passport!” Muhidin handed Ayaana her document as her escort dragged her toward the idling speedboat.

  Muhidin tore out his watch. “Abeerah, take this.” He squashed it into Ayaana’s hand.

  “You will find me?” Ayaana cried.

  If he did promise, it was lost in the clamor of Ayaana’s departure and the high tide’s wind. The chattering crowd parted for Ayaana, her mother, and her escort. They boarded the boat. Muhidin’s gaze caught Munira’s. She turned her back on him. She focused on steadying Ayaana, leading her to a corner seat. The captain gunned the boat’s engine.

  “Abeeraaah!” Muhidin howled.

  Ayaana kept him in sight until the boat took a sharp left turn. She heard Muhidin yodel: “Chal chal chal mere haathi, o mere saathi…Hai hai oho ho…” And soon there was only the rumble of a speedboat pushing hard against a muscular neap tide.

  Pweza kwambira ngisi

  Wapitao kimarsi marsi

  Tutwafutwao ni sisi.

  The octopus told the calamari,

  When you see them [humans] churn the waters

  It is us they seek.

  [ 33 ]

  One day in 1995, as a dirty blue fog enshrouded China’s Kinmen Islands, under the watch of a cold moon bleeding borrowed light over Fujian’s waters, a thin man with a bandaged face towered over most of his compatriots as he faced the sea. Hands trembling, Lai Jin had removed his cracked sunglasses to rub out the salt-spray stains from the lenses. Thin-legged birds with drooping brown wings browsed by the shore. Buffeted by yowling winds, here was the should-have-been scion of the Lai family, the only son of the third son (who, in a village scandal, had married a much older, free-spirited part-Uighur, part-Japanese ceramicist named Nara) of the first son of the second wife from the branch with distant, obscured, and unfortunate Japanese roots in the courts of the third emperor.

  * * *

  —

  Lai Jin had just returned from Meizhou Island, where he had followed pilgrims heading to the Temple of Mazu, patroness of the sea, awarder of bounty, turner of tides. She who read the stars and waters was also a bestower of healing. He was not a man given to faith in anything, nor did he wish it for himself. But something had happened when he wandered into the dark, older section of the shrine to retreat from the many Mazu venerators who had gathered to belch their bad spirits away. While he was lurking inside, an unforeseen balmlike softness had seeped into and traveled from
his heart and into his thoughts, stilling their restlessness. When he left the temple, hours later, he did so as one startled by a strange gift he was compelled to bear. Now he felt not so much peace as resolution. The fervid desire to drive and drive without stopping, as he had been doing for two and a half months now, had just simply disappeared. Listening to the ebbing tide and the waves that heaved in solemn interludes along a beige-and-white stone-and-pebble shore, he discovered that his recurring fantasy of entering into the ebbing tides and sinking into the deep had also lost its seductive edge.

  Foghorns.

  Heralds of a fate that would bind Lai Jin to a still-distant land. His memory and sadness flowed toward the three phantom hulks, rust-and-gray ships heading elsewhere as the cold wind drowned itself in the harbor.

  Foghorns.

  Lai Jin rubbed his arms, warming them. There were a few new things about living that Lai Jin had discovered: that the earth still shuffled from west to east; that life did not stop to lament the elephant-foot weight crushing a man’s chest; that existence is disordered, neither symmetric nor harmonious, but woven out of infinite textures and shapes of nothingness that change at whim.

  * * *

  —

  In the beginning, there was fire.

  * * *

  —

  This has been said by others before. In Lai Jin’s second beginning, there was an ordinary fire. A New Year’s conflagration had turned an exclusive, festive Beijing restaurant into charcoal and ash, and in the process had charred Lai Jin’s soul. When the fire and 258 howling escapees were done, there was silence, and what had once been six men and seven women, some of the glittering, youthful icons of China’s “gaige kaifang” epoch, including Lai Jin’s beauteous wife, Mei Xing, were grotesque, smoke-spewing black sculptures, lying on their backs with arms and legs curved upward, their mouths frozen in the grimaces of last words, the extreme opposite of breath.