Hiding in Plain Sight

by Nuruddin Farah

  “It’s okay, I know what you are doing,” says Dahaba.

  “I am trying to get a grip on how it works.”

  “Please don’t mind about me. Do what you must do.”

  “I won’t give you a fright, I promise,” says Bella.

  “I won’t take fright now I know what you are doing.”

  Then Bella works the brakes, relieved that Dahaba has stopped yattering and promising she won’t take fright. If you asked Bella how she feels right this instant or if she is scared driving back at night from her Nairobi hotel, she will admit that she is a little fearful. The car is new to her, this is the first time she has been behind the wheel here, and the city streets are unfamiliar to her, and from her previous memory, drivers in Nairobi are in the habit of using their full-beam lights and are very likely to blind the drivers in the oncoming vehicles. And you have to look out for pedestrians crossing the roads at any time and there are deadly obstructions on the sides of these narrow roads. You would be mad not to be cautious, very cautious.

  Salif joins them in the car, and without the slightest fuss, he sits in the back and presciently says aloud, “Everything is under control,” perhaps meaning that he has set the alarm and all is well. Bella, however, feels it is time she had a paper map and also wonders if either of them knows how to set up the GPS in the car. Salif says, “Do you need to set up a GPS on top of Cawrala?”

  “Who is Cawrala?” Bella asks.

  Dahaba explains that it is the nickname Somalis have given to the female voice of the GPS, which is beginning to gain currency here, just as it has in North America. And she shows Bella how to use it.

  When Bella asks for the address of their favorite McDonald’s drive-thru, Dahaba has no idea because she is bad with addresses and doesn’t know the names of any of the city’s streets, and Salif is about to start teasing her about this.

  “Salif, dear, not a word more from you,” says Bella, displaying a moment’s irritability. “Just give me the address of the drive-thru.” And he does so.

  “Let us get your food,” says Bella, moving.

  And voilà, the GPS makes contact with the satellite, which is now ready to guide her and Cawrala, the woman whose voice she is familiar with, as she has heard it in a variety of cities, in different languages, and in different continents. The voice has a temper of such meanness that it reminds Bella of her first-grade teacher, who was often cross with her. Cawrala tells Bella to turn left and she does so, and then after a couple of hundred meters, Cawrala tells her to turn right. Because Bella is intent on testing Cawrala’s patience, she takes a left turn, contrary to the woman’s instructions. The woman’s bad temper is back, albeit still in control, as she recalculates before coming back with renewed advice on how to set matters right so they can get to the mall where the drive-thru is located. Salif, irritated at Dahaba’s yattering about things to do with GPSs and satellites, offers to lead Bella to their favorite McDonald’s if only Auntie would silence Cawrala and tell Dahaba to “shut her gob too.”

  Bella pulls off the road, stops the car, turns to Salif in the back, and says, “I’ll remind you again, my dear, of the promise you made to me earlier today that you would show patience, which you and I know would stand you in better stead in good and bad times.”

  “My apologies, Auntie,” says Salif.

  Dahaba says, “It’s okay, Auntie, he can’t help it.”

  Despite not liking what Dahaba is doing, always speaking in protective defense of Salif whenever she tells him off, Bella makes no comment and gets back on the road, with Cawrala taking a few moments to come back on. A left turn, followed by a right turn and a long silence, leads her to think about her upcoming encounter with Valerie in an hour or so. And Bella discovers that she cannot dislodge a worry about whether she will tell Valerie that she is driving Aar’s car and then give her and Padmini a lift to the restaurant. Bella decides that it is unwise to complicate an uncomplicated situation; she won’t say much about the children at this first encounter, nor will she offer to drive them to the restaurant; let the damn women get to the rendezvous their own way. Bella decides she should be worrying about how she is going to make this thing get her to the hotel and back to where the children are. Having guided them to the drive-thru, Cawrala says, “We’ve arrived at your destination, to your right.”

  The service is fast and Salif and Dahaba are happy with their respective orders. On the way back to their home, Bella, with Dahaba’s tutoring and Salif’s insistent encouragement, masters how to make the GPS function, including feeding in the street name of the hotel and Aar’s home address.

  When they get back to the house, Bella goes upstairs, and having no other dress to change into, she brushes her hair, borrowing Dahaba’s comb, which she has to clean on account of the girl’s hair that is there from previous use. And before leaving for the hotel, Bella touches base with Dahaba and Salif, who are having their takeaway meal in the kitchen.

  “Please remember to call me at the slightest worry.”

  “We will, Auntie.”

  Dahaba says, “We’ll set the alarm if there is need.”

  “We can take care of ourselves,” Salif assures her.

  Bella remembers how too much unnecessary fretting takes one to an early grave and how anxious Hurdo always was about her children’s well-being to the extent that she couldn’t sleep when one of them was out of the house. She spoke constantly of her worries, which provided her with the partner she often lacked, what with the doubts about Aar’s father’s companionability and Bella’s dad living far away in Italy. Bella mustn’t be like that.

  Then she leaves, saying, “Back in a couple of hours.”

  7.

  Now that she has made it out of the gate alone for the first time since reuniting with her niece and nephew, Bella is overwhelmed by the sorrow she has given no release to in front of them. Her eyes overflow with tears, her chest heaving, her entire body trembling; she weeps loudly. She realizes, as if for the first time, that the loss is permanent. It isn’t easy to fall back on her Somali hardiness—hardiness being practically the definition of Somaliness, Somalis being a practical people with sufficient backbone to pull through anything. While Bella admits there is no shame in being distraught or even suffering a total breakdown after the death of a loved one, she is aware that it is wiser to adopt a quiet dignity to ennoble Aar’s memory and mourn his death with solemnity. Only then would he feel adequately honored and only then will he be proud of her.

  Being back in Aar’s house has reduced the children’s anxiety, she could see instantly. She left them holed up in their respective rooms, Salif playing solitaire, Dahaba reading yet another novel. What follows, however, will not be easy, Bella knows. And she knows too that when she gets back to her hotel, there will be several messages from Valerie already waiting for her under the door, where the DO NOT DISTURB sign still hangs.

  Bella gets back on the road, driving with renewed confidence. She takes a few moments to think about what information about the children she is willing to share with Valerie, at least until she figures out what Valerie’s aims are. She is not in the habit of lying, but she knows that there is nothing to gain by telling Valerie the full truth. If possible, she decides, she will be evasive, buying time until she figures out where Valerie’s devious mind is headed.

  She knows that she could do with all the help she can get from Gunilla, who knows the legal side of things, and, of course, from Mahdi and Fatima; the former affording Bella a guide through the troubled waters of UN bureaucracy; the latter directly and through their children providing her and the children with the support they require.

  Finally, Bella parks the car in a public open-air lot after going through a boom gate and picking up a ticket. Once at the reception desk to inquire if there are messages, she asks the concierge to send a valet to take the car and park it in the section reserved for hotel clients. Then she goes
up to her room and, using the hotel phone, calls Valerie’s room.

  A woman answers, but she doesn’t sound like how Bella remembers Valerie, so she takes the safe option of asking to speak to Valerie. The voice says, “A moment, please.”

  Valerie comes on the line, and the voice is overwhelmingly, unpleasantly familiar and abrasive. “Where are you? Where have you been? I’ve been calling and calling. And where are the children?”

  Bella will not be rushed. When answering Valerie’s questions, she takes her time thinking about what to say. One needs to compose and recompose oneself when one is dealing with Valerie. What’s more, Bella wants to prove to herself and her sister-in-law that Valerie cannot exercise power over her. When Aar was alive, he was the focus of Valerie’s maneuvering; now, Bella thinks, it is her and the children’s turn to be the victims of Valerie’s blackmailing ploys. Bella is no pushover; it is time Valerie came to accept this as fact and get accustomed to it.

  “Come on, Valerie. You haven’t even said hello or offered condolences.” She asks where Valerie is staying, which turns out to be in one of the upmarket chalet-style accommodations the hotel offers nearby, and Bella ascertains that Padmini is with her. She gives Valerie her room number and floor and warns her to come alone. Then she hangs up.

  Not fifteen minutes later, she hears a knocking at the door, but she does not answer immediately. When she judges that she has made Valerie wait long enough, she goes to the door and looks through the peephole. Standing there is a woman she no longer recognizes. Valerie is wearing a cotton hip sari, but her body has spread with the unforgiving weight gain of middle age. Nevertheless, her bulging midriff boasts a jeweled belly button, and her nose rings are further evidence of a taste that has been acquired since they last met.

  When Bella opens the door, Valerie smiles up at her, but Bella simply meets her eyes, neither overtly friendly nor openly hostile. She doesn’t immediately show Valerie into the room, but instead looks her up and down, as if measuring her for a coffin. As if Bella’s stare literally undoes her, Valerie’s sari starts to come undone, and in her attempt to pull herself together, she drops her handbag, which spills its contents on the floor—tampons, a packet of condoms, toothpicks, a hairbrush. Bella doesn’t look away; she simply waits, saying nothing, as Valerie gathers her things. Then at long last Bella motions for Valerie to enter and closes the door behind her.

  “How was your flight?”

  Valerie pulls a face, as if unready to answer the question. Then after a very long pause, she says, “Not too bad, actually, considering it could’ve been a lot worse.”

  “I hear you were in Uganda,” Bella says.

  Valerie says, “Word travels fast.”

  Bella asks, “What’s the story about Uganda?”

  “It’s a beautiful country.”

  “And they eat mattock every day, don’t they?”

  “Mashed plantain with peanut stew.”

  “Anything happen there?”

  “They said you’d be mean to me,” Valerie says.

  Bella does not rise to the bait, does not even stop to wonder who “they” are. But she does wonder yet again what a man as gentle, loving, and generous as Aar found in such a woman and what held them together for so long. She remembers once asking Aar this directly. As he was prone to do, he took refuge in a piece of Somali wisdom, this one a caution against outsiders placing themselves between “the penis and the vagina of a couple.”

  Bella pressed him. “Not a good enough answer.”

  “Maybe sex holds us together,” Aar said.

  And at that, Bella had fallen silent, defeated.

  Now Bella tries another tack. “Who gave you the sad news?” she asks.

  “My mother did,” says Valerie. She still does not offer her condolences, even when Bella says, by way of apology, “I had no way of reaching you.” Yet Bella knows that she herself has been equally rude—she hasn’t greeted her sister-in-law with any real warmth or grace, nor has she so much as offered her something to drink. Her words sound stilted to her ears. The English phrase that one closes a letter with, “Yours sincerely,” comes to mind—a phrase that is not always meant to represent sincerity.

  She watches with annoyance as Valerie looks askance at her, as if she wouldn’t want to be seen in such company. And rather than feel sad at how their mutual hatred has blossomed over the years, Bella gives in to the impulse to be nasty.

  “Why were you in Uganda?” she asks.

  “What a question to ask!”

  Bella is relieved to discover that neither Helene nor Gunilla seems to have shared Bella’s involvement in paying Valerie’s legal fees. “Did you mistake Uganda for Kenya,” she asks, “and go there by mistake?” Valerie’s ignorance of geography is legendary.

  “I know better than that,” Valerie says.

  “Oh?”

  “Yes,” says Valerie. “It happens that Padmini was born there.”

  “Still, that doesn’t explain why you were there.”

  “I went with her—to recover some family property in Nakasero, the center of the city,” Valerie says. “Her family was among the Asians expelled by Idi Amin. Remember those Dukawallahs?”

  Bella does. The Dukawallahs were small-business men and shopkeepers hailing principally from the Indian subcontinent. Many had originally come to work on the Ugandan railway. Often they set up general stores in hard-to-reach localities in the African countries where they settled—just as the Somalis in South Africa are doing these days—but as they thrived, they moved to the bigger cities. Idi Amin ejected them from Uganda in 1972, but in Kenya, they still account for ten percent of the population.

  “And why are you here?” asks Bella at last, turning to the matter that must be on both of their minds.

  But Valerie is evasive. “Here, as in Nairobi here?”

  She seems to be stalling, and as Bella waits for an answer, unpleasant memories of their previous encounters surge up in her, crowding out her few pleasant memories of Valerie. Of course, she has little impulse to dwell on pleasant memories anyway, at a time when she is at peace neither with herself nor with the world at large.

  “Yes,” she says. “What brings you to Nairobi?”

  “My husband’s death,” Valerie says.

  “Aar’s death has brought you here?”

  “That’s right.”

  “But he didn’t die here.”

  “And my children, of course.”

  Bella waits, and Valerie continues. “And if I am honest with you, it’s also about the guilt I’ve felt over these years, even though I pushed it back and did not attend to it; this brings me here too. I hope you understand where I am coming from.”

  Bella disregards this last—her sister-in-law, she believes, has no understanding of the concept of guilt and its ramifications and attendant responsibilities—and goes for the jugular: “How do you mean, you’re here for your children? You haven’t seen or communicated with them all these many years.”

  “I am their only living parent,” Valerie says.

  And before Bella knows it, she has lost it despite all her resolve. “Parent, you call yourself a parent? Not to these children you aren’t, and you haven’t been for many years.”

  But Valerie isn’t backing down. “Now that their father has been killed and I am still among the living, it falls to me, as their mother, to have them come to me so I can look after them.”

  The woman is clearly insane, Bella thinks. Look at her, dressed as though she were on her way to a Bollywood party. Beware of the middle-aged woman who doesn’t behave or think like one! It isn’t going to be easy to do battle with Valerie, Bella thinks.

  “When was the last time you spoke to them?” she asks. “The last time you sent them a birthday present or penned a letter or sent an e-mail to congratulate them on their excellent achievements in sports or
school. When?”

  Valerie pauses. “Still, they are my children from my own blood.”

  “Have you been in touch with them since you arrived?” Bella says. She does not divulge the fact that the children are in fact at home, where she left them.

  “Mum has given me their numbers,” Valerie says.

  “You tried to speak to them, did you?”

  “I did speak with them,” says Valerie, not offering more.

  Bella lets the half-truth stand. What kind of reception did Valerie expect when her own children haven’t heard from her or set eyes on her for years? This madwoman does not seem to remember that just as infants look like one parent one day and then seemingly overnight change their features, as though at will, so that they look like the other, children aren’t consistent when it comes to which of their parents they love more. And thanks to Valerie’s absence from their lives, Salif and Dahaba have little reason to revert to their earlier intimacy with her. What chance does she have to win back their hearts—not in the courts, surely, having deserted her family, even if she is still technically Aar’s wife—or, rather, his widow? But Bella is no legal expert, and she doesn’t know what a judge in a Kenyan court would make of Valerie’s situation.

  “I’ll do the best I can,” Valerie says.

  Bella stares at her in disbelief. “And what if they don’t wish to see you?”

  “I’ll take my chances.”

  The two lock eyes, and for the first time since they began to talk, Bella really looks at her, taking in the face spotted with pimples—or are those mosquito bites?—and what seems to be an atypical paleness. Has she had malaria? Bella wonders. Perhaps it’s not that her skin is pale but that her eyes seem jaundiced.

  “How long do you plan to stay in Nairobi?” she asks.

  “It depends,” says Valerie.

  “On what?”

  Valerie looks around, as though others might overhear her, and when she speaks, it is almost in a whisper. “On how things pan out.”