The Dragonfly Sea

by Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor

  Ayaana looked around her, just breathing, as the island welcome-and-hospitality machinery took over. Men offloaded her luggage at the jetty, exclaiming their greetings: “Could this be you, Ayaana?” Word passed down the island trails: Ayaana had returned. Ayaana had returned as Chinese. Those who came to see, and sought it, did find a hint of the old creature, like the light rose fragrance that still suffused her.

  “Ayaaana!”

  Mwalimu Juma reached Ayaana. He took both her hands in his. Merits from her school exam results had eventually caught up with him and brought him ample reward. When the time came, he had been made county education officer. He exclaimed, with a wide grin that showed his gums, “You have returned to us.” He noticed the new lines on her face, the cloak of weariness she wore. The world had worked her hard. “Alhamdulillah,” he added.

  Ayaana lowered her sunglasses to gaze into her old teacher’s eyes to say, “I’m here.”

  One of the passing fishermen sang, “Angepaa kipungu, marejeo ni mtini…”—An eagle may soar, but must return to its tree.

  Ayaana laughed. And there were prayers and songs, exhalations and exclamations. Pole kwa safari—Sympathies for the traveler. Dips in the conversation to accommodate the griefs, all the losses. A young imam announced that he was praying for Muhidin’s return. “The ocean is a cipher.” Assent. “We can only wait.”

  True.

  They walked an hour and a half southwestward to Pate Town, this welcome delegation and their returnee. Stepping over ruins, and rubble. The familiarity of decay: the Nabahani ruins, the graves and tombs of the many. The inscriptions of Pate’s poets, its scholars, its saints, its wanderers.

  Ayaana crossed into the market hub where a hollow-cheeked, voguish woman in gold and brown who was about to bite into a stick of oudi pivoted to glare at Ayaana. “You! You are back?” she huffed.

  Mama Suleiman.

  Within Ayaana, a mosaic of emotions, vestiges of childhood fears. The woman looked Ayaana up and down. “You look like a boy, China,” she noted. “So thin. What? Dog and snake do not a meal make?” Mama Suleiman tittered. “They deported you?”

  Ayaana sniffed. From a tree, some of the island’s omnipresent crows serenaded them. The scent of sea mingled with that of wild jasmine; the rhythm of the tides was a familiar tune. Well-being. Ayaana exhaled with care. “Good to see you again, Bi Amina. You look well.” She resumed her unhurried passage along the path leading to her mother’s boarded-up house. Hudhaifa bolted the doors to his shop to hurry toward her, waving the tinkling house keys that Muhidin’s workmen had left behind. In the manner of unsupervised workmen everywhere, they had abandoned their repair of the houses to take up other commissions.

  * * *

  —

  Ayaana exclaimed Mashallah! when she glimpsed her childhood home. It still looked as if it had sprouted from the coral of the land. How small it was. How…old. A short distance away, the now wild plants of her mother’s garden drenched her with their unbridled scents. The pawpaw tree was heavy with overripe fruit. Ayaana took the key from Hudhaifa and inserted it. The lock turned. She pulled open the door and entered the house, the accumulated dust anointing her head. Within the dark and musty space of the house, Ayaana set down her bags. She dropped to the ground. Struggling with words. Ayaana wrapped her arms about her chest. Pain: home.

  * * *

  —

  In a land like this, of arrivals and departures, there were many ways of reconnection. An embrace. Laughter. Prayers. Food and drink: tea, coconut water, mkate wa mofa. Others showed up, welcoming, commiserating. “Your father,” they said, and left it at that. An elder prayed for Muhidin’s return. He added that they were grateful for Ayaana’s safe return. The day slipped to darkness, and someone lit three hurricane lamps. The scent of smoke from hidden fires. Home.

  A woman’s question: “So, child, how is China?”

  Ayaana paused. “Good,” she answered three seconds later.

  “Did they like you?”

  Ayaan smiled, implying nothing.

  “Are they really like us?”

  Ayaana resisted the urge of the traveler to embellish tales. “They are themselves.”

  “Will you be going back?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Duu!” The questioner was disappointed.

  Ayaana added, “There was nothing for me to do there.” Within her breathing, the truth: If I had stayed, I would have evaporated. My heart is tired. Now my dreams speak to me in Mandarin. Even my demons have become red dragons.

  “Tell us about the plane—the one that still cannot be found.”

  Ayaana frowned. Then she remembered Flight MH370. She had seen how its disappearance had crushed hearts in China. As a class, they had studied the process of seafloor sonar surveys being undertaken to locate it.

  “A riddle,” she answered.

  A man said, “They should consult our prophets.” “Or fishermen,” a woman piped up. Laughter.

  “You have heard that a sea dog has visited us?”

  “Yes,” Ayaana answered, eyes bright.

  “What did this China want of you?”

  From Ayaana, wordlessness.

  “What is your degree?”

  “Bachelor of science, nautical studies.”

  “What does it mean?”

  “I can bring a ship home.”

  “You?”

  “Yes, me.”

  “Duu!”

  Stillness.

  They watched her.

  So Ayaana asked after old acquaintances. Some had died. Some had left for Mombasa or Nairobi or Oman or Zanzibar or Dubai or elsewhere. She was told of the persistence of the ignorant, heavy, deaf, blind, stupid hand of the state, the open-ended “War on Terror” they had adopted as their own. Executions, murders, Friday roundups in Mombasa. The slaughter of the sheep by the shepherds to feed the lust of strangers. Yes, some of the young had gone over to al-Qaeda, al-Shabaab, al-Dawlah, imagining paradise. Stillness: the formlessness of futile rage. Now subdued voices. Ayaana heard of betrayal, death, and anguish. Life, and other people’s wars. Cold crept over her body when she was informed that the eternal Mkanda Channel might be closed, that a new harbor was to be built by the Chinese. An oil pipeline to traverse Lamu was to be built by the Chinese. A coal factory would rise in pristine Lamu and turn the island black and bleak. The Chinese would build that, too, and Ayaana remembered her vision of a spider weaving a net over worlds.

  “Will you speak to them for us?”

  Ayaana bent her head and shifted to sit on her heels.

  Giant shadows on the wall: the shape of the hungry, hungry world she had thought to leave behind. A specter, and she recognized the open, stench-filled mouth salivating at the promise of her island. Gas. Oil. Coal. Her seas. “Will you speak to them for us?” Upward glance, glimpsing her people. What could she say? What language could she use? Here was the smell of kerosene, the familiar gurgle of sweet water in the djierbas. Small crimson lights of charcoal fires. The honey smell of fried mahamri. Here the timbre of the sea. She stared at her people, these remnants with their sea-borne dreams, their hospitable, uncomplicated eyes. If they were to be scattered, what distant crossroads would ever understand their luster? Ayaana looked away, fresh tears causing her eyes to smart. She wiped them. She would say nothing about the disarraying forces marching toward them. She blinked away her thoughts, then straightened her spine. On Pate, there was always another way, wasn’t there?

  “Will you speak to them for us?”

  “I will try,” she answered.

  Next topic. The more confident, always renewable anti-Lamu grumblings, soap-opera episodes from an ancient bickering that was pleasurable to recall. In the retelling, the Pate of memory was a distinguished place, renowned for enterprise, civilization, and scholarship—the Swahili seas’ trends
etter. Pity about time’s ruthlessness, pity about Lamu’s perfidy. Then that silence that ghosts use to assert their presence descended upon the gathering. Outside, a wind bubbled like a brook. Birdcall, and then, at last, Ayaana heard the sound of the sea of home. She wiped away silent tears. This time, though, she did not weep alone. Her island snuggled around Ayaana. It nestled within her heart. It returned her to belonging. A child laughed. There was more bread to break. What is to become of them all? A low-whistling wind. She listened and remembered that other sinister forces had entered Pate many times before. But Pate had survived the lusts of the bloodthirsty.

  * * *

  —

  It was close to a new morning when the last of Ayaana’s welcomers left. She then settled into Pate’s particular lonelinesses, among its drifting primordial ghosts. To these she could show the contours of a densely populated inner topography, the portions of China she had brought back to her island. Reaching through clouds, grasping at…nothing. It was only then that she realized that all her musings had been in Mandarin.

  Ayaana stood at once to go into her old bedroom.

  Small, bare, deficient by the standards of the places from which she had come. She stopped by the old desk with its objects: Rabi’a’s poetry, the last Basmallah she had traced on Pate, Suleiman’s pearl; a beachcomber’s plastic duck; fading photos of Munira and Muhidin. She touched these. The note from long, long ago left to her by Muhidin. His scrawl still dark, and replete with promise: “Abeerah, I’ve gone to find our Ziriyab. I shall return. Be brave. Protect your mother. Study hard. It is I who am your father, Muhidin.” A sensation struck her like a cold knife under her ribs, and she gasped. The words “It is I who am your father, Muhidin.”

  * * *

  —

  And then Ayaana wept.

  * * *

  —

  Afterward.

  * * *

  —

  Ayaana slept naked. She would not have done so before. She listened to her sea, tempted by its moaning to go to it. She waited. Listened as the house creaked in new places. After Ayaana shut her swollen eyes, she did not wake up till the evening of the next day.

  [ 94 ]

  Tuning in to the cool landscape—it had been drizzling, and sea smells pervaded the atmosphere. Jumping puddles. Ayaana was wrapped in her mother’s peach shawl when she reached the water’s edge. She carried a squashed scrap of paper. Otherworlds. She waded in, leapt, and landed on rocks jutting from the water. Listening in. Sea nocturnes, boom of distant deep-water waves. She had been here before. When she raised her arms to throw out feelers across the sea for the sense of Muhidin Baadawi, her father, her only father, she did so with the familiarity of ritual. She sensed other night watchers, night listeners, night gazers, the susurrus of night ghosts who knew the hiding places of the absent. Climbing to the promontory. Her neck craned toward the stars, summoning a wind. She wanted a whirlwind to carry to Muhidin his portion of a guiding yellowing fragment that had been living in the insides of a dark brown book. A slow breeze eased the fragment from her open hand. The fragment spiraled. It spun. It soared and scaled altitudes in order to circle the land. It plummeted to the sea.

  * * *

  —

  In the daytime, she would return to comb the beach, searching for spoors—was that a man’s footprint?—crossing dunes, poking into crevices for something that might have fallen from Muhidin’s pockets. I am here; you come back—that was the tune to which her heart was beating.

  * * *

  —

  She called Munira to let her know she had returned to Pate Island.

  Munira listened to her daughter. And then, emphatic: “But you will return to China?”

  Ayaana replied, “Don’t know.”

  Silence. “You are there to look for him, aren’t you?” Munira murmured.

  “Yes.”

  Munira said, “Think of your future.”

  Ayaana did not answer.

  Munira asked, “What will you do?”

  “Maybe find work at the port. For a while. Till I can decide.”

  “Ayaana!” Munira was exasperated. A sigh. “At least go to Mombasa. Don’t molder on Pate, you hear me?”

  Ayaana chewed on her lower lip, saying nothing.

  * * *

  —

  The next day, Ayaana hired three ngarawas so she could imagine Muhidin’s trail and follow it. And there—on calm blue sea, with a view of forested islands and white beach, under a stark sky in which a single bird soared, amid the rhythm in the voices of the men, her people, who rowed with her on seasoned wooden boats, souls reading the water for clues of life—in all this, something of beauty, that blazing event, flooded Ayaana’s deep self, and, without her expecting it, she started to wail and she seized the thing to herself, pressing it to her heart, and her assent emerged as a wordless prayer.

  Seeking Muhidin.

  Her focus absolute.

  They would search the seas for a full day. They returned to the water the next day and the next, when they returned to shore in the early afternoon because the seas were restless.

  On the fifth day after her return to Pate Island, Ayaana walked from house to house, asking people what they had seen and what they knew. Mwalimu Juma told her that Muhidin had vowed, “This realm shall be known again,” as he handed over his old books to the school.

  Muhidin had told Hudhaifa that he now knew the answer to the riddle of happiness. “He hated no one,” Hudhaifa told Ayaana.

  The tailor said, “Your father returned to us a sun. Pemba is good for him.”

  Dura told Ayaana of how Muhidin had attempted to reassure Bi Amina about Suleiman her son.

  On the seventh day, Ayaana walked to the cove to speak to Mehdi.

  He would have the most to offer.

  Almazi Mehdi had set aside two pieces of driftwood: one for Muhidin, the other for Mzee Kitwana. “Place markers,” he told Ayaana. “Muhidin had wanted a dau to be built for his wife. Am working on it.”

  Ayaana touched the hull, and the prow. Mehdi continued, “Wanted me to go to Pemba. Couldn’t leave Mzee Kitwana. Has no one of his own, you see.” Pause. Fleeting sorrow. “Couldn’t go.” Mehdi turned to Ayaana, a speculative look on his face.

  They watched the return of the boats at dusk, and with these, the calm that filled such evenings. Mehdi then added, “He spoke of Ziriyab.” He coughed. “Dreamed of his boy. In the dream, he said he had handed over his heart.”

  Ayaana stroked the boat. Mehdi said, “A prophecy of sacrifice.” Quietly: “How could we know? Would have told Kitwana to wait.” Suddenly Mehdi buckled into himself. A single sob eased out of him. But, just as suddenly, he stopped. They then watched the raven family that had moved into Mehdi’s territory. The three adults and four juveniles strutted nearby, confident of their place. One of them had taken to bringing pale pebbles to Mehdi. “Couldn’t keep driving them away, could I?” he told Ayaana.

  She watched the birds.

  “Your father. Spoke of water. Spoke of his uncle. Terrible man. Remember him playing the zumari. Had a sacred quotation for everything. Yet what human can claim to know the innermost truth of a man, tell me?”

  Cawing.

  Mehdi waved the birds away. They barely lifted their wings. “Your father went to sea,” Mehdi told Ayaana. “Craving mystery. Mzee Kitwana went with him. They sat there when they decided to go.” Mehdi pointed at two places near to him. He then squinted at the sea. “ ‘Bahari usichungue, utajitia wahaka,’ ” he recited, recalling an old sea minstrel’s poem about the mysterious seas. “They have not returned.”

  Silence.

  The pair watched the silver-streaked water. “Went to look for them myself.” Mehdi paused. “Asked the winds; they are not talking. Had to call your mother. Tell her. Terrible day.” Mehdi stared at the ground as the tide news r
esumed. Ayaana and Mehdi heard that high tide was expected at 1947 hours.

  * * *

  —

  Ayaana sat close to Muhidin’s driftwood and picked up a torn sail Mzee Kitwana had been repairing before he disappeared. She looked for the thick needle with which to complete the work. Mehdi watched her for a while. He studied the bent head, the life-marked face, short hair stirring in the wind, the slender woman of unusual beauty. His glance shifted to the pockmarked sail and the large needle in her hands. He said nothing. He said nothing when she returned after dawn and stayed by his side until the evening. The owners of the sail were from Unguja. He reasoned to himself that they would never know it was a woman who had worked on their sail. A sense of mischief lit up his mouth. He had always delighted in Ayaana’s company.

  Mehdi told Ayaana, “We shall look. Until we know. We shall look. Even after we die.”

  She continued with her work. It is I who am your father, Muhidin. Her tears stained the sail.

  [ 95 ]

  Migrant fishing boats from other ports, beached on Pate Island to wait out a quick approaching storm. Like the other islanders, Ayaana wandered over to hear tales of their seas. Echoes of the same cries: declining fish stock, the gluttony of ocean-emptying trawlers from the ravenous lands, the silence of authorities, a nostalgia for the season of the Somali pirates, the heroes, who had scared away the ocean plunderers and restored the run of the billfish. Ayaana then asked the visitors if they had any news of a seaman named Mlingoti. They said not recently. They had heard rumors, though, that one with such a name had, about two years ago, commissioned seafaring acquaintances with piracy as sidelines to look out for and detain a vessel named Bathsheba, should it ever be seen to approach the East African coastline. His seafaring friends were to put the vessel’s souls to compulsory work somewhere unseen, for minimum wages, for as long as they wanted. Beyond this, these fishermen had not heard anything more about the man Mlingoti. Ayaana hugged this news to her soul: a lost father’s protective canopy reaching in to erase a daughter’s fears. Wa Mashriq were not ever likely to show up on these shores again.