Beginnings

by Tikiri

  Most of my teachers were foreign expatriates like my parents. They worked in international schools for a year or two before moving onto another country, another continent, or often back to their homelands. I liked most of them, but my favorite teacher was Ms. Stacy from Canada, who taught grade six at the International School of Dar es Salaam.

  She was the youngest teacher in school that year. With a happy-go-lucky smile on her face, she was friendly and approachable. In in her early twenties, fair, and plump with a blonde bob cut, she couldn’t have been more different from me, but we shared one common bond. Our love for reading. She was the one who, whenever she visited the school library, brought down juicy books from the top shelves for me. It was she who introduced me to Oliver Twist and Robin Hood. And, looking back, it was she who taught me how to think for myself, something that came in handy later in life.

  I still remembered the day I handed in my first book review to her.

  “I didn’t want you to summarize the book, Asha. I wanted you to critique it,” she said.

  I looked at her, worried. She looked at me, worried. My heart sank. My parents expected me to do well in school. No, they demanded it. They gave me time to adjust to a new school, but from previous experience, I knew three months was pushing it.

  “But Papa said Jules Verne’s the best writer in the world. There’s nothing to critique.”

  She gave me a thoughtful look. “Whether he’s right or wrong, you need to come up with your own idea of it. Don’t follow anyone’s opinion blindly.”

  How could she imagine Papa could be wrong? I didn’t like everything my parents made me do, like when they made me go to bed by nine every night, but I was confident they knew everything there was to know about the world. They were scientists, after all.

  “I’ll give you two extra days to rethink this, okay?” Ms. Stacy said. “Give me something new. Tell me how you would write this book.”

  I took a look at the book on my desk, an old copy of Around the World in Eighty Days, its title hardly visible on the faded cover. When I announced my need for a good storybook for homework over supper, my father rooted through his small library to find the “perfect” one. He carried several books with him wherever we moved — tattered tomes, barely readable, most torn, but his treasures. This one was his favorite, so I had turned the first page with great expectations.

  “Once upon a time,” the book began, and with those four magical words the room around me receded and I slipped into another world. Once upon a time, the book said, an English man named Phileas Fogg decided to travel the world to win a bet he’d made with friends. Together with his French valet Passepartout, he rescues a young Indian princess called Aouda who’d been on her way to die by fire at her dead husband’s pyre. The three band together and cross continents to arrive safely back home in time to win the wager.

  By the time I’d turned the last page, I had become Princess Aouda. With her raven hair and chocolate-colored skin, she looked just like me, I imagined. It was the perfect story to get lost in, a story of places beyond imagination, one that only the greatest writer in the world could conjure. It had become my favorite book too, and for the life of me, I couldn’t find anything to criticize.

  After two sleepless nights and a chewed-up pencil, I wrote a one-page essay to Ms. Stacy. The adventures of Fogg and his friends had mesmerized me, but one thing was glaringly missing. I was certain Fogg loved his plum puddings, Princess Aouda her gulab jamuns, and Passepartout his cherry crêpes, but imagine the exotic culinary adventures they must have encountered along the way, just as my parents and I did on our travels. I salivated at the possibilities.

  That oversight was pretty careless of the mighty Verne—a missed opportunity to spice up his book. Somebody, I wrote, should put a recipe book together for the countries Fogg and his companions had seen. Better yet, I wrote, somebody should make the best sweet desserts from each country they traveled to and sell them at the Saturday market, like my mother did with her fairy cakes. Ms. Stacy liked my answer. “Good work, Asha. I see entrepreneurship in your future,” she wrote on my paper with a smiley face next to it. I had to look that word up in the dictionary that day.

  “Papa,” I said, “If my school is so good, why can’t Chanda come too?” I imagined the two of us playing in the schoolyard and at the gym, huddling over books in my secret corner of the library, even sharing my onion buns. At last, I’d have a friend to hang out with.

  Silence in the front seats.

  “Do you know why Papa teaches at the university after work?” my mother said finally. “And why I make cakes for the market and why we save every penny we earn?”

  I gave an obstinate shrug. “Nope.”

  “It is so we can make extra money to send you to the best school in this country. Poor little Chanda can’t go to school at all because Mrs. Ngozi doesn’t have much. If we could afford to pay for her school, we would do that in a heartbeat.”

  “Asha,” my father said, using his serious voice, “I want you to promise me something.”

  I waited.

  “I want you to promise me that you will finish school no matter what. Do you understand?”

  That, I knew, wasn’t a request. “Yes, Papa.”

  “Promise?”

  But my mother was already changing the topic. “Let’s invite Mrs. Ngozi and Chanda for supper next Sunday.”

  “Now that is a very good idea,” my father said, nodding. “It’s time we had them over.”

  Chapter FIVE

  My parents never broke their promises.

  On my birthday morning, I received my very own pair of red sandals they’d found at a department store in town. When I showed them to Chanda later that day at the market, her eyes grew wide. “Wow! So beautiful,” she said, running her fingers across the straps, “so beautiful.”

  After that, she stopped me every twenty feet to examine my new shoes and say, “You’re so lucky.” Every once in a while, she also stooped to wistfully look at her own broken sandals barely held together with string. I realized then how much she wanted what I had, just like I always wished for what my well-to-do classmates had. I couldn’t bear the thought of us having this difference, a difference that was going to separate us and hurt our friendship, I was sure.

  It took me only half an hour to make up my mind. I was sure of what I had to do.

  I pulled her by the hand and ran over to the edge of the market, the forbidden place where the old man had his stall. I told my friend in a firm voice to stay at our usual hiding spot behind the tree stump until I give her a signal. My instructions had been clear. I was on a serious mission.

  While Chanda stayed behind, burning with curiosity, I tiptoed over to the edge of the old man’s kiosk. He was muttering his mantras as usual, eyes closed, head hung over his book. The candy jars were laid out in a row on the table to his right. In the middle of the kiosk was a plastic table piled with a jumble of electronic gadgets of every kind. On his right was a treasure trove of shoes. Beautiful shoes. There were yellow ones, blue ones, black ones, with buckles, bows, and polka dots, and even a purple pair with two-inch heels. But my eyes were trained on the ruby red sandals in the corner, the ones that looked a lot like the new pair I got from my parents that morning.

  The man muttered to himself as he turned a page in his book. I froze. But he didn’t see me or seem to have heard me. I turned my head to look back at Chanda. I glimpsed a scared brown eye peeking from behind the tree stump and lifted my hand up, which meant “stay exactly where you are.”

  The old man was still bent low over his book. I was so close, I could see the stringy lines strung across the pages, looking like fancy art rather than words I recognized. I waited another minute.

  The man soon nodded over his book. He was falling asleep. It was now or never. I took one step forward. Then another. If he opened his eyes now, he’d see me. I didn’t have time. I reached out in a flash and clawed the smallest pair of sandals. A thundering crash made me ju
mp. I’d pulled the entire shoe rack to the ground.

  I fled.

  “Oi!”

  I didn’t look back.

  “You rascals! I will kill you!” the man’s furious voice came from behind me.

  “Run!” I yelled. Chanda darted out of her hiding spot like a bullet.

  “Wait till I get my hands on you filthy black mongrels!”

  Chanda and I didn’t stop to find out. We ran through the stalls, dodging people, benches, umbrellas and dogs. We ran without stopping until we got to the other end of the market, until we could run no longer.

  Then, behind the safety of an acacia tree at the outskirts of the market, we stopped to catch our breath. My heart was pounding and I was trembling from having committed such an incredibly bad deed. Chanda’s eyes popped open wide when she saw the stolen treasure in my shaking hands.

  “Oh!” she said in a scared whisper. “Oh! Oh! Oh! What did you do?” She looked at me partly in awe, partly in shock.

  “These are for you,” I said, offering them to her with a shaky smile. “Now you can have your own red sandals too.” It took a whole hour to convince her to take those shoes, but finally, she did.

  That was the first time I committed a crime. But it was not the last time.

  I never knew if Chanda dared to wear those new slippers of hers, because that was the last I saw of her for a very long time. And also because the very next day, the world as I’d known it ended.

  Chapter SIX

  The day my world ended started innocently enough.

  “Get in the car, Asha,” my father said, hauling the family suitcase into the trunk.

  I jumped inside our little Fiat, carrying my backpack filled with more books than clothes, and rolled down the window. Next to me was a stack of Tupperware, each holding twelve tiny cakes I could bite down in one minute or less. It took iron will to not open these boxes, especially the one with the dark chocolate cake and creamy swirls on top, made with my mother’s secret recipe. “Don’t eat these now,” my mother said, appearing next to me, startling me. She reached through my window and deposited a brown paper bag in the backseat beside me.

  I peeked inside the bag to see five onion buns. These were made with onions, chili, cane sugar, Maldive fish bits and spiced with curry leaves and tamarind pulp, all baked inside a homemade butterball bun. Tasty treats, but they smelled to high heaven. The sharp, tangy odor of the sticky tamarind overpowered everything in the vicinity. Fast to make and easy to eat, my mother liked to say, but by then, I’d had a lifetime’s worth—twelve whole years—of this smelly snack.

  We were on our way to a safari, our annual week-long getaway hosted by the company where both my parents worked in Dar es Salaam. I looked forward to it every year because it was not often my parents got away from their research and endless talk of mining, sanitation, and environmental devastation. I knew their work was important, but sometimes it felt like they lived in their lab coats.

  Every year, I circled the date for the safari on the fridge calendar using the biggest sharpie I could find. I packed my bags three weeks ahead and spent the rest of the time telling everyone of our trip. Those were the days filled with sweet anticipation. I’d drift off to sleep at night dreaming of rhinos, warthogs, zebras and giraffes congregated around a water hole, like I’d seen on previous trips to the savannah lands. It was always exciting to pile into our trusty green car, and to tell the truth, I never cared where we were headed as long as it was far away from school.

  The adrenaline rush from my ever first attempt at crime had cooled and an uneasy feeling was settling in my stomach. I didn’t feel the full effect of it then, because we were finally heading out on our safari trip. It was pictures of giraffes and zebras that crowded my mind.

  Once we passed the city, there was nothing much to see, other than remote villages dotted along the road. After a while, the villages disappeared and the only vista for miles on end was fields of dry grass on both sides of the road. From inside the car, it was hard to see how tall this grass truly was, but I found out when I needed an emergency bathroom break and had to push through the elephant-high grass.

  We were three hours into our drive, my parents were talking in hushed tones up front, and I was falling asleep in the back. It was late in the afternoon and the sun was a gigantic globe of fire on the horizon. The sky was painted in hues of red, yellow, and tangerine, as if a firestorm was raging in the heavens. To my child’s eye, everything was big in Africa—the sun, the people, the animals, the trees, and, yes, even the grass. I remembered how this grassy landscape went on for hours, like we were sailing through an endless green ocean. Tiring of it, I’d decided to take a nap when I spotted the baobab tree silhouetted against the disappearing sun.

  I used to call these the “upside-down trees” because of how their ancient, leafless branches twisted into spindly roots on top. These trees were immense—even elephants found shelter under them. Seeing wildlife on road trips was a rare treat. Seeing them under a baobab was even rarer. That day, a troupe of sandy-colored antelope were standing silently under the giant baobab, their curved horns making them look magnificent and menacing. They made an impressive sight against the blood-red sky.

  My father slowed down and stopped the car on the side of the road, so we could take in the view. There, we sat and watched the scene without a word. The antelope also stood completely still, watching us, listening, only their ears twitching. They seemed to be anticipating something.

  Then, without warning, they scattered in panic, jumping several feet high. What frightened them? Was it the grunt of a cheetah? A sharp burst from our old car?

  I remember, fleetingly, the black Jeep suddenly appearing next to us. I remember hearing the grinding of its tires on the dusty road and the loud bang. With a violent jolt, our small car swung sideways. I heard my mother scream, but I don’t remember much after that, because we ended up in the dark thicket of that elephant grass, and all I could hear was the swoosh, swoosh of it against the windows.

  When the car stopped moving and I finally pried my eyes open, a fire was raging around us. My parents were eerily silent up front.

  Thank you for reading this short story!

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