A Creature of Smokeless Flame

by Margaret Ball

  “These are great!” I told Victor, snagging the last triangular coconut-flavored thingie off the communal plate. Apart from not having a hole in the middle and not being glazed, it was almost like a doughnut.

  “Mahamri,” Victor contributed, beaming. “And the little round things with them are gungo peas cooked in coconut milk.”

  “Gungo?”

  “I don’t know another name for them.”

  “Doesn’t matter. They’re delicious.”

  I began to understand my new friends’ emphasis on coconut processing. The people of this city could do wonderful things with coconuts.

  “And the spicy pastries are kachori. They’re more of an Indian thing; Mrs. Prajapati makes them herself. The others come from a nearby bakery.”

  “Well, let’s keep them coming by all means.”

  Victor watched as I licked my fingers. “Too many of those mahamri, and you’ll start to look like Mama Aesha,” he warned.

  “Piffle.” I chased down a crumbly bit of kachori that had somehow been overlooked. “I hardly got anything to eat last night.”

  Not that the dinner had been inadequate – everything had looked, and smelled, wonderful, and there’d been plenty of it – but I wasn’t up to speed on the local table manners. A huge tray of white rice had been the centerpiece of the meal. You were supposed to dip the first two fingers of your right hand into the rice, come out with a perfectly cohesive ball of sticky rice, dip this into one of the delicious-smelling dishes of anonymous glop, and pop the whole thing into your mouth without dropping anything. I didn’t have anything like the fine motor coordination required to pull this off. As a result, I’d eaten hardly anything until, way too late in the meal, it occurred to me that this was an excellent situation for small object manipulation. Applying the appropriate topology got me at least a taste of goat curry, spiced chickpeas, and other delightful things. Unfortunately, by then it was too late to make the most of my suddenly developed “skill.”

  Victor, of course, had eaten with the men of the house. Indoors. First. So he hadn’t actually observed my struggles with the rice platter.

  “Anyway,” I added when the plates on the table were completely bare, “I burn a lot of energy.” Applying topology, especially for major jobs like teleportation, is extremely calorie-intensive; one of the primary responsibilities of Ben’s girlfriend, the receptionist at the Center, is keeping a supply of doughnuts available for topologists who’ve overdone it and need a quick blood-sugar fix. But Ben and I hadn’t exactly discussed that part of our skill set with Victor, and Lensky would probably disapprove if I tried to explain.

  I leaned back with my third cup of coffee. (They were very small cups.) “So, Brad. Did you and Ben get anything new out of that video last night?”

  “Well, it wasn’t made here in Mombasa,” Lensky said. “At least, we don’t think so.”

  That got my attention. “Wait a minute. Fadiya said Omar had come back to Mombasa, and the reaction at Mama Aesha’s supported that.”

  “What reaction?” Victor demanded. “Did you spook my informants? How – dammit, you don’t even speak Swahili!”

  Shed a different light on his generous offer to let me sit in the courtyard all evening, didn’t it? He’d expected I would be totally unable to communicate.

  I waved a placatory hand at him. “I didn’t spook anybody. Mama Aesha took exception to something Zawadi said, that’s all.” True, she’d said it in response to my questioning, but there was no need to bother our touchy anthropologist with that minor detail.

  “Zawadi… oh, yes. One of the younger women, isn’t she? How do you know what she said, anyway?”

  I took great pleasure in informing him that Zawadi had studied in America for two years and spoke fluent English. From the look on Victor’s face, it was clear this was news to him. Hmm. Even if Swahili social customs prevented him from spending much time with the women of the household, I’d have thought a competent anthropologist would at least have compiled a list of family members and some basic biographical data.

  I told Lensky and Ben what I’d gleaned from the evening out, and in return they told me what they’d learned about the Rashiduni.

  “They may organize and recruit here in Mombasa,” Brad summarized, “but their real power base is on the offshore islands between here and Zanzibar. The fact that jurisdiction over those islands is split three ways doubtless helps; some of them are under Kenyan control, some are governed from mainland Tanzania, and others are so close to Zanzibar that they’re treated as part of the big island for official purposes. While the Rashiduni have been keeping a low profile here, they’ve consolidated control over a whole set of those little islands in just the past few months. That’s one reason we think the video wasn’t made here.”

  Several months ago, when Omar al-Zanji split off from al-Shabaab, he’d taken a crack fighting unit made up of Kenyan and Tanzanian recruits with him. Now they were part of the Jeshi-la-Rashiduni, but just to make things more confusing they frequently used their old title, Jeshi-la-Amani.

  “The Army of Peace,” Victor interpolated.

  As the elite fighting arm of the Rashiduni, the Army of Peace had launched simultaneous attacks on police stations, schools and government buildings all across the southern islands. Those attacks had won huge prestige for the Rashiduni in Mombasa and Dar-es-Salaam. They had also essentially paralyzed the underpaid, poorly supported government services of the little islands sprinkled between here and Zanzibar. Most of the schools were completely closed; the surviving teachers had this strange reluctance to work in places where their colleagues had been beheaded.

  An elder on one of the islands was quoted as saying that the Jeshi-la-Amani had told them the children should not go to government schools where they were taught only lies. The Rashiduni would start their own classes in Islamic education and other matters that true men of the Swahili ought to master.

  There didn’t seem to be any concern about educating true women of the Swahili. Why was I not surprised?

  “Why hasn’t the government gone after them?”

  Victor shook his head knowingly. “Do you have any idea how difficult it is to get the governments of Kenya and Tanzania to cooperate? Not to mention the Revolutionary Government of Zanzibar, which routinely opposes the mainland Tanzanian government on principle. They can’t even get on the same page for a basic anti-piracy policy, and that’s a lot less of a political hot potato than putting down an insurgency. It could take years for them to organize a joint military action on the islands. And in the meantime—” He spread his hands and shrugged.

  “If Kenya makes a show of force, they can flee to the Tanzanian islands. If Tanzania strikes at them, they can reverse direction. And since neither government is eager to get into another guerrilla war on the Swahili coast, the easiest thing is to ignore the whole problem,” Lensky summarized.

  “Wait, another guerrilla war?”

  “Mozambique – ah, that’s the next country south of Tanzania, and their coast is also Swahili-dominated – had a remarkably nasty guerrilla war against the Portuguese in the sixties and seventies. After they got independence in ’75, that turned into a civil war that lasted all the way into the nineties. And as if that weren’t enough, a new insurgency flared up about five years ago over contested elections. The country is a basket case, and you’d better believe Nairobi and Dar-es-Salaam have made note of the trouble a war with the coastal families can cause.”

  All these wars and rumors of war made my head hurt. I desperately wanted to bury myself in something nice and straightforward like Introduction to Homotopic Topology, where definitions were consistent and theorems followed naturally from axioms. I mentally chalked up yet another way in which pure mathematics was vastly superior to all other callings: nobody in the history of mathematics had ever tried to settle a dispute with a Korean-made AK-47.

  Yes, the guys had gone straight from civil war stories to an animated discussion of what arms the Rashi
duni were most likely using. I think the jumping-off point had been Brad’s assertion that he’d recognized the weapon hoisted by a guard in the background of the video as the North Korean version of an AK-47, but both Ben and Victor had plunged into the discussion as though they actually knew what they were talking about. Well, possibly Victor did. But I knew Ben was winging it; he’d once asked me, of all people, to explain the difference between a shotgun and a rifle.

  I decided to go downstairs and see if Mr. Prajapati happened to have notepads and pens among his stock. I prefer a yellow legal pad and black ink for thinking about topology, but in emergency I could settle for a lined composition book and anything that would make marks.

  I never made it past the front door of the apartment, though, because a girl swathed in black nylon was scampering up the stairs, about ten times more gracefully than I ever expected to manage under the handicap of all those layers of fabric.

  “Hodi, Saliya! Hujambo?” It was Zawadi. She’d come to invite me on a shopping expedition. I felt just slightly guilty about abandoning the guys at this impasse. But what the heck – from all appearances, they were going to be doing Gun Talk for the rest of the morning. Going to the sandal shop with Zawadi could hardly be less productive than that.

  And it turned out to be a lot more fun. Zawadi wasn’t actually in the market for sandals for herself; she just thought I needed something to give me a little flash under the bui-bui, maybe some sandals with gold straps or some pretty beads for my ankles.

  Walking with Zawadi was a lot more pleasant than being towed through Old Town by Victor, because most of the time she was as relaxed about our bui-buis as the women I’d seen on the street yesterday. With the waist vee of the bui-bui hitched up into the belt of my one respectable dress and the top half of the thing floating freely from the head strap, I could navigate better than before and had far better opportunities to take in the Old Town scene.

  The sandal-maker took a good look at my feet, sent his assistant to rummage through the stock on the top shelves at the back of the shop, and produced a display of brilliant, glitzy footwear. We spent a very pleasant hour trying everything on. With some reluctance, I passed on a pair of high-heeled sandals with huge fake rubies embedded in the heels. They added three much-needed inches to my height, and Zawadi giggled that they imparted a very interesting sway to my walk, but realism interfered. I’d already come close to breaking my neck just trying to manage the bui-bui in flats; in these puppies, I probably wouldn’t make it down the block.

  “You can wear them when you go to mzungu places like the Royal Court Hotel,” Zawadi suggested, “or when you go home to America.”

  Very true. And Lensky’s eyes tended to light up in a very interesting way whenever I wore my high-heeled black patent leather sandals. It would be – scientific – to find out whether the ruby-heeled gilt ones affected him the same way. I left that shop with both my old American sandals and the new high-heeled ones in a plastic bag. On my feet I was sporting modest flats whose scalloped red straps were stamped with gilt elephants.

  Zawadi’s veils went up and down, back and forth, as we sashayed to the perfumer’s store that was to be our next stop. “Oh, there’s my cousin!” she would exclaim as we turned a corner, and like magic the headdress flipped into place while she exchanged prolonged but modest greetings with a young man. Half a block farther on we would meet somebody else she knew, but this time she would drop the veil entirely. “It’s all right, Saliya,” she didn’t exactly explain, “he’s my cousin.”

  Too bad I wasn’t an anthropologist like Victor. It seemed to me that the rules about wearing the veil in Mombasa were complex enough to be worth a dissertation in their own right.

  On the way to the perfumer’s Zawadi explained that everybody who was anybody in Mombasa had her own personally blended scent. We wouldn’t be bringing my perfume home with us today; this was a preliminary sitting, where the designer would dab samples of various scents on my skin, wait a few minutes, and observe how my personal bodily spirits reacted. “The old women think it’s a kind of magic, but it is actually very scientific,” she told me.

  It was also slow. I wasn’t in training for this sort of thing; at home I don’t spend a lot of time on stuff like cosmetics and hairstyling. The perfumer’s stall had a generous shaded area out front, with chairs for customers who liked that sort of thing and plenty of squatting space for the more traditionally minded. From a social/anthropological standpoint, it seemed to serve the same function as the beauty parlor where my mother got her Greek hair tamed into a bulletproof helmet once a week. Women could get out of the house, spend hours in the shade chatting with their friends, give the gossip of the day a good stir and put it back in the pot newly enriched. And husbands didn’t dare complain because everybody knew that a quality perfume job couldn’t be achieved in a hurry. At least so Zawadi and the other girls at the perfumer’s assured me.

  After a quick introduction, Zawadi started chattering to a chance-met friend while the perfumer got down to work dabbing one of my wrists with jasmine, orchid and citron essence, all of which I liked. The inside of my elbow got sandalwood and cedar, which I thought were kind of heavy until he got hold of the other arm and laid on the really heavy stuff like patchouli, musk and civet.

  It took forever; each little sample required a wait of several minutes before he sniffed my skin and made notes in a little leather-bound notebook. I squinted at the notes, but they didn’t look like writing so much as a series of occult symbols. Zawadi explained that his notes were encoded to prevent anybody from stealing his trade secrets. Apparently being a perfumer in Mombasa was a cutthroat profession.

  Even though Zawadi kept assuring me that our time there was well spent, it seemed to me that she was getting more and more nervous as the perfumer went on with his work. She glanced out at the sunny street every few minutes, and her chatter with her friend got more and more shrill and strained. I asked if she was going to be in trouble for spending too much time shopping with me, and she assured me again that everybody understood you couldn’t spend too much time getting a good, professional perfume job. But there was a fine line between her eyebrows now, and her eyes kept flickering towards the street.

  Finally, just as the perfumer announced that his research was done and that he would have my own personal scent compounded and ready for me in a few days, Zawadi stood up and waved at someone across the street.

  Yet another young man.

  “Saliya, this is my cousin Khamisi,” Zawadi announced, practically hauling me out of the perfume shop while I clutched at my bui-bui. “What a coincidence to see you here, Khamisi!”

  Khamisi was about my age, medium height with a pleasant enough face sporting a thin mustache, and dressed in Western-style shirt and pants. “Show some respect, Zawadi!”

  Zawadi giggled and explained that technically Khamisi was her uncle, not her cousin. “I bow before your white beard, mzee!” They went through the same semi-formal ritual that Zawadi had done with the other two ‘cousins,’ inquiring about a long list of relatives by name and exclaiming, “Thanks be to Allah!” after the assertion that each one was well. This time they did it in English, rather than Swahili, which was nice of them, but the greeting formula still didn’t mean a lot to me. And I didn’t think I was picking up any lover-like overtones between them. Though I wasn’t totally sure about that; breathing in all those scents had left me feeling a bit light-headed. I really wanted to go home and wash all the samples off.

  “Yes, I think that is a very good idea,” Zawadi said when I suggested it. “Khamisi will walk you home; I should be getting back now.”

  “Oh, he doesn’t need—” I started, before realizing that unless I could casually slip out of their sight to teleport, somebody did need to take me home. Somewhere between the sandal shop and the perfumer’s I had become completely turned around, and I had no clue how to navigate the maze of narrow streets back to Prajapati General Merchandise and the apartment above the
store.

  “It will not be improper for him to walk with you,” Zawadi assured me, “everybody knows that wazungu have different rules for their women. In fact, perhaps it would be best if you do not wear the bui-bui on the way back. If everybody can see that you are mzungu, they will think nothing of Khamisi’s escorting you.”

  It was almost noon, and the tapering streets cut off any possibility of a cooling sea breeze. I was fine with the idea of shedding my yards of black nylon. I stepped into the shelter of the perfumer’s stall to take off my bui-bui and roll it up, stuffed it into the plastic bag with the sandals, and thanked Zawadi for a most entertaining morning.

  On the way back to the apartment I found out what the real point of the morning’s excursion had been.

  Khamisi wasn’t Zawadi’s boyfriend.

  He was the connection to Omar al-Zanji I’d asked for.

  Via the Rashiduni.

  Khamisi promised to wait on Grand Mosque Road while I ran up the back stairs to see who else was home. He probably thought I was worried about being caught by my husband with a strange man in our apartment; actually, of course, it was Victor I wanted to avoid. I wanted to hire Khamisi to spy on the Rashiduni for us, and Victor would probably throw seven kinds of fits about that notion.

  Either he wasn’t home, though, or he was in his room transcribing interview notes. I told Lensky and Ben to grab chairs and wait in the big bedroom at the back. (Two degrees of separation from Victor seemed a prudent minimum.)

  Khamisi had a strange expression when I led him up the stairs and invited him into a room that was dominated by an outsize bed, but he relaxed when he saw that there were already two other men there. Not only that, but Lensky had had the forethought to snag an extra chair for the visitor.

  “Khamisi, this is my husband Brad.”

  “Biradi.” Khamisi nodded.

  “And our friend Ben… um, Benjamin.” Seemed like his full name might translate better into Swahili. It had more vowels.

  “Binyamini.”

  I settled down on the end of the bed, facing the men, to get as comfortable as possible. I’d have preferred to sit crosslegged, but the skirt of this respectable dress was so short I’d have wound up flashing the guys. I should have hung on to the bui-bui.