‘They accused me of assaulting an eight-year-old boy,’ he said through gritted teeth. ‘A half-wit boy that slept in the streets.’ He waited for me, but I made no sign. I knew I was rejecting an appeal but I was too young then to understand the cost of such things. He walked back to the window and stood there for a moment.
‘I was innocent,’ he said, looking at me with wide, appealing eyes. ‘They just wanted some nobody to blame. Do you understand?’
I nodded. He sighed.
‘They let me out after three months,’ he said. ‘That proves it, doesn’t it? Then we came to live here, with thieves and prostitutes, in this dirt. These people don’t forget.’
He glanced at his watch and looked out of the window, looking down the street. ‘I must have a wash,’ he said, sighing. ‘Your mother . . . she was a great comfort to me. She was beautiful. She was really beautiful,’ he repeated softly. ‘Did you know she was about as old as you are when I married her?’
He nodded and muttered something I did not hear. He leant against the wall, looking out of the window and saying nothing for a long time. A warm puff of air came into the room: the land breeze, slipping swiftly, bringing relief to our dusty cell. Twilight gloom was beginning to gather. He turned back to me and I saw that he was smiling.
‘She was a great comfort,’ he said.
A car stopped outside and hooted twice, its radio blaring. He looked out of the window and waved. ‘I must change. Go and tell him to wait for a few minutes,’ he told me.
She was beautiful and he turned her into a creature that lived on pain. Said, you wounded little fucker, did you know that she was a great comfort to him? Now he found his comfort where he could. I did not believe him, and I feared that the truth of what had happened did not matter any more. For as long as I had known him he had spent his nights whoring and drinking, and we all acted as if we did not know where he went while he was out. We ate and lived as if nobody was absent. And when he came home in the early hours, stumbling against the door, shouting obscene abuse, beating my mother, we all acted asleep. At times I thought I should do something to stop him. I was the eldest, and only a few inches shorter than him. Perhaps we were all as pathetic as he thought we were, but I was afraid to shame my mother. Even little Saida knew what was expected of her. Nobody had taught us to do this. We did it to save our mother from the shame that we knew she felt, and that we felt with her. In the day, nothing was said of the nights. It was as if they never happened. We did not speak of his drinking or his violence even in passing. He did not often bruise her where it showed – and even then all that we did was avoid looking at it. During the day, our father was the wrathful master, whose word had the authority of the sanction of God. I think our fear of him, and the pretence of respect, only made him loathe us more.
I wondered what he would have done if he had discovered Zakiya’s pregnancy. His sense of honour would have demanded some retribution. It was what would have been expected of a father – and a brother, come to that. As it was, they kept it all from my father. Bi Mkubwa, my grandmother, took her away for a few days, to stay with a friend, she said, and Zakiya came back cleansed and chastened, at least for a while.
Zakiya had been precocious. At an early age she had abandoned her role as the household skivvy, the customary lot of the girl child. The first hints of her budding womanhood had come when she was only nine. She had then been forced into a buibui, the black shroud of modesty, and been forbidden to play in the streets. My grandmother started to talk about atomic bombs and men in the sky. She started talking about finding a husband and Zakiya had laughed in her face, running away from her as she tried to smack her for her disrespect. None of this was enough to suppress her obvious and aggressive charms, and she found ways of escaping the attentions of my grandmother and my mother, her chaperones. She wanted to act in a school play but my grandmother forbade it. She wanted to ride a bicycle but she was refused permission. She was told she should learn how to cook first. When she was twelve she was taken out of school, because she failed to gain a place in a government secondary school and my father did not see the point of sending her to a fee-paying school. Sometimes she borrowed my books. I remember she cried while she read Romeo and Juliet.
It was only later, after her pregnancy was discovered and quickly disposed of, that she told me of the man who had become her lover. He was one of the teachers at her old school, a boy from the country in his first job. He was no older than I was at the time. Zakiya said she did not know what had happened to him, and she was afraid to ask. She asked me to find out for her. I wonder now that she did not think that I would seek to protest her dishonour by taking a stick to him, or at least giving him away. I asked for her, and discovered that he had requested a transfer to the country.
They kept it from my father, but for Zakiya it was as if all self-esteem were lost. Now, at sixteen, she moved from one affair to another with the cynism of a much older person, abandoning all discretion. As my initial shock at her behaviour lessened, I began to see the pleasure she took in what she did. In the streets she was brazen with her beauty and was proud of the admiration she aroused. In quiet moments she knew the consequences of her freedom. I tried to find a way of speaking to her, but what was there to tell her that she did not already know? That her actions were as close to self-destruction as a woman could manage? That her maddened rage would eventually leave her rejected and abused? She brushed my attempts away, and smiled with the flush of her conquests and the joy of her new powers. Her future was already mapped. Sooner or later, when times were hard enough, she would become somebody’s mistress, if she was lucky.
My mother pleaded with her. Some evenings as I lay sprawled on a mat in the backyard, revising for the examinations, I heard them whispering, huddled over the light of a hurricane lamp, in another part of the yard. My mother would start to sob in her misery, and in the end Zakiya would join in. I wanted to go and be with them, but I was afraid they would reject my offer of comfort. Zakiya became something else we did not speak about.
They tried to keep all this from me because it was not the kind of thing men should involve themselves with. They were afraid of any affection I attempted to show because it made me seem soft and suspect. I had seen the suspicious glint in my grandmother’s eye when I had once stroked Zakiya’s hair in her presence.
The passport conspiracy between my father and me ended with our afternoon conversation. There were no more meaningful looks and whispered reports about immigration officials. I put in an official application for a passport, knowing that there was little chance of getting one. The examinations, in any case, were drawing near and overtaking all other anxieties. I spent my afternoons at school, revising and then going for exhausting runs on the track. There was contentment in the rigour of the regime. Time was accounted for and given over to one narrow purpose. I did not dwell on the futility of this labour, that our results would probably not even be published, for fear that we might decide to seek better fortunes elsewhere. At school, examination students strutted around, indulged by the teachers and held in awe by the younger boys. Our revision times were monitored by the younger boys, who created myths about our diligence, as we had done with those who had gone before us.
I came home in the early evening, and often the house was empty. My mother and Bi Mkubwa usually went visiting in the afternoon, or were attending one of the endless women’s functions. Saida, my youngest sister, sometimes went with them but more often would be playing with the other children in the clearing. I would sit on my mat in the backyard, reading or leaning against the hot wall in an exhausted stupor. My grandmother liked to creep up on me when I was in such a state and say something charming and encouraging. You’ll fail.
With the passage of years, her cruelty had become ridiculous, clownish. Nobody took any notice of her any more, and she crept round the house, all eyes and ears, alert to any disrespect. They’ll put you in a madhouse, she liked to say. I used to think it was too cruel to laugh.
Sometimes she wagged her finger at me, then retreated to her room, smacking the door against the frame before bolting it. Yet whenever she came back from the functions that they attended, she brought me a piece of cake or a sweet. Feeding the animal, she used to say, laughing the strained wheezing laughter of ailing lungs.
The functions and the visits were important to my mother. They were part of the respectability that my father’s new job had given us. She took trouble over her clothes now, at least when she went out. And there was Zakiya to chide her into excess. Aa-ah, don’t make me ridiculous, girl, she would say, but now she wore perfume and darkened her eyelids with kohl. She visited a dressmaker with her bundles of poplin and taffeta and silk that she had acquired from the door-to-door man. In the evenings she would change into her rags again and fuss about the yard with our supper. At the end of the long day, she said her evening prayers on a mat in the yard and then rolled over into an exhausted nap. It was then that I would hear her moaning in her sleep, while I lay a few feet away, peering at my books in the light of the oil lamp.
When she woke, after an hour or so, we talked for a while. She would ask me deliberately leading questions about school, insultingly obvious in their intent, but I could not resist showing off my knowledge. Sometimes she dozed while I talked, and I mercilessly shook her awake because I had not finished recounting the laboratory process of manufacturing chlorine or some such. I knew I had to talk to her about leaving but was always consumed with cowardice when the moment came to speak. I waited for an evening when she had not been out in the afternoon, and would not be so tired and preoccupied.
I found her in the backyard one evening when I returned from school. She was squatting on the ground, lighting the fire. I squatted near her. It seemed the wrong moment. The thought of leaving to seek a better life elsewhere had started to seem an irresponsible ambition, and in any case, unlikely to be realised. She glanced at the sky then busied herself with the pots.
‘Will it rain do you think?’ she asked eventually.
The skies had been gloomy for several days, and during the day the humidity was unbearable. We had had one dry storm already, when the wind had whipped the dust into angry devils that hurtled frenziedly in all directions.
‘No,’ I said. ‘A few more days yet.’
She glanced again at the sky then looked at me.
‘It will rain tonight,’ she said. ‘What do you know about it? All this dust and heat has been with us for such a long time. It’s the season for rain now. They’ll be praying for it in the country. It’ll rain, I know about such things,’ she said with a hint of teasing in her voice.
‘What are you cooking?’ I asked her.
She blinked with long-suffering slowness. Bananas again. Was it that times were that hard? She had by then lost interest in making ends meet, in producing clever meals out of tripe and sardines. On some evenings she gave us a few pennies each to go to the tea-house for some buns and beans. She accepted any complaints we made with silent and guilty resentment. She rarely ate anything herself at night, but always cooked something if my father was in. I don’t think I minded the buns and beans quite as much as the bananas, and I don’t think I blamed her for refusing to skivvy for the rest of us. Sometimes, though, as the heavy banana stodge rumbled its way through the coils I wondered if the money could not be better spent than on clothes and perfumes and booze.
‘Are you hungry?’ she asked. ‘You’re always hungry.’
She pulled the bunch of green bananas towards her and started breaking them off. She paused to clean something off the skin, as if it mattered. Her head was low over her work, tilted slightly towards one side. I was sorry about making her feel guilty about the food.
‘I like bananas,’ I said.
She looked up and smiled. Liar!
‘Have you prayed tonight?’ she asked, clicking the conversation into a different gear. ‘I don’t suppose you’ve had time. These days you’re too busy to spare any time for God.’ She looked again at the sky and sighed. ‘They used to make sacrifices for rain. The old people in the village took rice, or flour, sometimes an animal, to the shrine on the cliff. You could hear the spirits at night. That’s what we used to think when we were children, my brother and I. Sometimes we heard them walking through the village, dragging their baskets for offerings behind them. My brother wanted us to go and spend the night at the shrine, to try and see them. I told him we would be struck blind. My father said they were just savage customs.’
‘Did the rains come?’ I asked.
‘Eh?’ she asked, looking at me from a long distance. ‘It’ll rain tonight. Look at the sky.’
She peeled the bananas with a sharp stick and threw them into a pot of water by her feet. Every time she threw a banana in, the splash wet her feet. She did not seem to notice.
‘Have you heard about bin Said?’ she asked.
My resolution was weakening, and I was tempted to give up the conversation and wander the streets. She seemed so vulnerable, so sad, and I was reluctant to add to her misery with talk of departure. That was the explanation I gave myself for my cowardice.
‘He killed his dog today. He drove his car right over it and it popped like a tomato. I saw it, I was there. It got up and dragged itself away . . .’
I stood up to leave. She looked up and smiled. ‘You were always soft-hearted,’ she said, laughing at me.
‘What will happen to him?’ I asked, preparing an exit.
‘They’ll put him in jail,’ she sneered. ‘They’re just like animals, his whole family. Look at the bastards they’ve produced between them.’
There was a rumour that bin Said had pursued my mother for years, had written letters to her – she who cannot read – which she had passed on to my father. There was good blood in bin Said. He was descended from the Busaid family, the rulers of Zanzibar until the revolution, and the sultans of Oman until this day. He was the grandson of the original slave-drivers, a man of distinction. In his youth he had terrorised the streets, and the colonial authorities had turned a blind eye to him, not wishing to damage their relations with his powerful family. He even killed a man once, an English sailor. The authorities turned a blind eye to that too. But times had changed, and bin Said had turned to having long conversations with his gin bottle and leaning out of his window shouting abuse at passers-by. His forays into the outdoors always ended with some act of unprovoked arrogance. The new authorities were still indulgent with him. They assumed he was mad and only locked him up in the madhouse overnight to calm him down.
‘I’ll just go out for a while,’ I said.
I walked down the alley by the side of the house. The old man brothel-keeper was at his window, sitting behind the bars, looking out into the dark alley. He often did that, sitting with the window-shutters open, staring at the wall of our house. His window was at an angle to the window in my grandmother’s room. His vigils angered my grandmother to distraction. At times he burnt incense, and often played bagpipe on record.
When I was a child he used to pamper me, hold me in his arms and stroke my cheeks. My mother was too afraid of him to express her horror. She warned me off him, telling me he was a dirty man, and making me swear that I would not tell him what she had said. In the end she had told my father of the old man’s fondness for me. My father had ranted at me first, calling me a little whore. What does he do? Tell me the truth! Then he had gone round to the old man and threatened him with everything from castration to God’s vengeance. He came back angry and humiliated, for the old man had not been silent and the customers had come to his aid. The old man never spoke to me after that, and I avoided the alleyway whenever I could.
As I walked past the window the old man sniggered, as he always did. Once I turned to look after I had walked past and had seen on his face a grimace of such loathing that I had never dared do it again. I dreamed of those fierce, watery eyes gazing out of the darkness of the dank alleyway.
In the clearing under the old mzambarau tree,
tilly-lamps were spluttering to life as people prepared for the evening. Under one of the lamps, the interminable card game was still going on. Scattered round the edge of the clearing were the trolleys of the kabab-sellers and the peanut- and sweet-vendors. The radio of the Adusi Restaurant was blaring its mixture of songs and endless best wishes to friends and relatives. Saida came running out of the shadows and took my hand.
‘Where you going?’ she asked, making childish faces of pleasure at me. I did not answer but instead tried to pull the two wiry bunches of hair that thrust out on either side of her head. She beat my hands away and belted back into the knot of children from which she had appeared. She was then nearly ten years old, just the age to be hidden away from the gaze of men. It was her childishness that still saved her from that fate. She was the luckiest of us. She had always been able to withdraw herself from the turmoils at home, and always with a kind of contentment that had nothing to do with what was going on around her. My mother called her dreamy and often became frustrated with her inattention. Saida would be hurt by this, and for a day or two would remember to help with the washing. She would fold her school uniform, put her books away and offer to make people cups of tea. It would only last for a short while, then she would revert to her careless self, too preoccupied with the joy of her inner dramas to worry about being good.
The night was very quickly in control. Shadows stretched out on the road. Street-lamps glowed dimly, dotting the road through the township. Kerosene lamps threw squares of light out of barred windows. The shadows that I passed moved and flickered, staring. In the pallid glow of the lamps, the world seemed like a plain of rubble and boulders on the sea-bed – not the real world. As I walked past empty garage yards and locked-up warehouses it seemed as if I was strolling round the abandoned camp fires of a great host . . . a place that had been arbitrarily and expediently picked for a bivouac on the road to other places. I caught sight of a fleeting image of a half-clad girl, moving away into the early evening shadows. Her head swayed gracefully as she hurried, her step so certain.
Memory of Departure Page 4