“Aar guarded his privacy and so does Salif.”
“Not so Dahaba.”
“There is in each of us a secret chamber whose key we offer to those we choose—a husband, a wife, a brother, a sister, a lover, or lovers known to no one but ourselves. I am sure there are personal secrets that Dahaba won’t divulge to anyone, and with age, she will learn to know how to treasure more secrets, keep them hidden.”
“I do hope so.”
“If I may be so bold, might I ask who is the custodian of the key to your secret chamber?” But when Fatima sees the hesitation on Bella’s face, she says, “Consider it unasked.”
“I am no different from Aar, say, who entrusts a password to his computer to Salif, the details of his banks in Europe to me, having also given me power of attorney to them, and who then makes you and Mahdi serve as witnesses to his most recent will. We guard our secrets in different ways and entrust some to those we feel close to.”
“We’ve always wondered why you never married.”
“With a brother like Aar, how could I?”
“I can see where you are coming from,” says Fatima. It seems to be confession time. “Mahdi never tires of telling everyone that Aar was every girl’s favorite boy. But I can tell you he was very hard to get to know, and it was difficult to plumb his persona, a smart, lovely guy like him. It is sad that he ended up with a woman who walked out on him.”
“I may have fancied him too,” says Bella.
Fatima pours Bella more tea, and then asks, “So what are your current plans?”
“I am thinking of moving here,” Bella says.
“There is nothing standing in the way, is there?”
“How do you mean?”
“A love, a mortgage, a professional commitment?”
“Nothing I can’t clear away.”
“It’ll be great for all of us to have you here.”
Ill at ease, knowing what she knows, Bella shifts her position as if awaiting a blow. She stretches her hand to touch Fatima’s, and then tears well up in her eyes and, with words failing her, her Adam’s apple moves up and down and, her breathing agitated, she seizes her opportunity to take Fatima’s hand, which she kisses. Then she says, “Do I hear cancer?”
“Yes,” Fatima says. “We didn’t discover it in time, my fault. I was never in the habit of self-examining. With me, it all started with an unusual swelling of the breasts as well as a lump in the underarm. I consulted my GP, who, after examining me physically, sent me to the breast clinic. The results of the initial biopsy came back showing that mine was in an advanced stage. I was put on a chemotherapy with a drug called Doxorubicin. I am feeling a great deal better, but you can see how the combination of the chemo and the drug has caused my loss of hair, and I am weak and sweat frequently and am moody. Mahdi has been very supportive, my other friends also. We are going to England to see a consultant at Barts, and maybe we will go to France or America later.”
“This is most sad.”
“Aar knew about it even before I told Mahdi, in fact.”
What a touching tribute to their friendship! thinks Bella.
Fatima continues, “He was sorry he wasn’t here with us. He tried to bring his return forward, intending to visit me at the cancer clinic where I had gone for a minor procedure. In a way, I am to blame, though, because I kept postponing my mammogram until it was too late.”
“It’s good you’re getting a second opinion,” says Bella. “When are you off to Barts to see the consultant?”
“In a month or so,” replies Fatima.
Bella clears her throat and says, “I’ll want Zubair and Qamar to stay with us when you do go. And if there is anything else I can do, please let me know.”
“Qamar and Zubair would love that, I am sure.”
“It would excite the children to be together,” says Bella.
“And I hope for their sakes and everyone else’s that Valerie doesn’t cause further upsets in the existing harmony,” says Fatima.
“I’ll make sure she won’t,” promises Bella.
“What are their mother’s prospects in the new setup?”
“None, legally speaking.”
“Is she going back to India or moving here with her partner?”
Has Dahaba been speaking again? Bella asks herself.
“I doubt they will move here,” ventures Bella.
“But it is true that they are trouble?”
Bella changes her position. “They’ve been indiscreet.”
“With movement in the small hours of the night?”
Bella then tells an edited version of the events as they occurred. “For all we know, Padmini may have gone out for a smoke when Dahaba saw the unoccupied couch. Not that it matters in the end.”
“Is it true that Valerie wants Aar’s corpse to be exhumed, brought here, and then cremated? Because in the will we signed as witnesses in London, there is no mention of cremation or where he should be buried.”
“Valerie has the habit of creating confusion.”
“But that’s madness,” Fatima says.
They sit in silence, not knowing how to move on.
Fatima is the first to speak. “What are your plans?”
“I am here to mother Salif and Dahaba.”
“You are relocating—completely?”
“At some stage, I can envisage setting up a freelance photography business when I feel things are more settled,” says Bella. “But not now. I want them to attend universities here. I feel very comfortable in Africa and I am glad I am back on the continent and delighted that I can be of some help to my nephew and niece. It’s been traumatic, a great deal chaotic—but calmness will reign and we’ll all be happy to be together.”
“These are challenging times, aren’t they?” asks Fatima.
In a flash, Bella remembers everything she has done since coming here, but remembers nothing of what happened before that. She thinks there is something amiss and the only way to cope with this sort of personal crisis is to take the tea things into the kitchen and then go to the bathroom, wash her face with cold water, and have a moment of quiet all to herself.
She then takes leave of everyone, shouting to the children upstairs, “I have things to do, my dears.”
14.
Older but not necessarily a great deal wiser, Bella telephones HandsomeBoy Ngulu as soon as she sets off from Fatima and Mahdi’s house. The thought of postponing their meeting until she is in a less delicate state of mind crosses her mind, but this strikes her as a cop-out, and she dismisses it. When Ngulu answers, she pulls over to talk to him.
“Hello, sweetness,” he says. “What is up?”
It takes all her self-control not to tell him that in her current state of mind there are only two people she considers entitled to address her with such an endearment: Dahaba and Salif. True, Ngulu has in the past been in the habit of using that term of affection, both in person and in his texts and e-mails. And indeed, each time he used it (“Is that you, sweetness?”), it seemed to dispossess her of some inner strength, robbing her of the power she always assumed she had over men, quickening her with feelings from the past. Which is all the more reason why she doesn’t want to hear it now. Another day, perhaps, but not today. But how is he to know how fragile she is?
She asks if they are still meeting.
He says, “I’ve been looking forward to it all day.”
“The Serena, right?”
“Right, the Serena.”
“It’ll be good to meet and talk.”
“I’ll be waiting in the back of the café bar, my dearest.”
She wonders if she should call off the tryst. Despite the verbiage, she isn’t picking up the kind of feeling she expects from a lover she is seeing after so long an absence. She senses stress in his voice, maybe dread; he sounds like an
unhappy man. Nor, she notices, does he go the extra mile to express his sorrow for her loss. But she says nothing.
The first time they slept together, she was putting up at a three-star hotel, the Meridian. It was a rainy October night, and she’d come from Rome to do a bit of camera work for Oxfam. She recalls that night with amusement now. He’d climaxed before he even entered her, without so much as bothering to knock on her door. He wasn’t much good as a lover at first, but he was so young and handsome that, ogling his naked body and touching him here and there, her eyes at least felt fully satiated. Hence her nickname for him, Bell’Uomo.
As she drives, she lets Cawrala tell her where to turn while memory leads her by the hand. The second time they’d met, it was by chance, in Edinburgh. Bella had gone to Scotland to spend a romantic weekend with Humboldt. But Ngulu, who was there for a seminar on the causes of famine, spotted her walking in the rain holding hands with the sculptor. He followed them into a restaurant and sat at the bar in the corner, keeping an eye on them until they’d ordered their drinks. At which point he presented himself in a here-I-am sort of way. Bella was startled, but she felt relieved when it became clear he wasn’t going to make a scene. Speaking in Portuguese, she introduced him to Humboldt. He picked up the basics of what she said about him: that he was a Kenyan, working in Nairobi for Norwegian People’s Aid. He made as if to sit and almost pulled up a chair to join them at the table, but when they resumed their conversation in Portuguese and he couldn’t make sense of what either one of them was saying, and with Humboldt staring at him like an undertaker deciding the size of the coffin to put him in, Ngulu withdrew. Bella flew back to Rome that night and Humboldt went to London, where he was having an exhibition of his works.
Amazingly enough, she met Ngulu by chance again the following year in New York. This time she was with Cisse Drahme, her Malian lover, who was doing some research on African astronomical systems at the New York Public Library. They had just checked out of their hotel on a side street near the UN when Ngulu appeared before her and said, “Hi, fancy meeting you here.” On this occasion, Bella walked past him without a look. And when he caught up with her and said, “It is me, Ngulu,” she pretended she didn’t know him and asked him to repeat his name. If he was stalking her, she was determined to put an end to it.
Cisse took possession of Bella’s arm and the two of them walked away from Ngulu with their arms linked. He stood where he was, staring at them pulling away and wondering if he had mistaken another woman for Bella, for a time a woman of his heart.
But the next time she went to Nairobi, she was in a low mood, a big EU-funded project of hers having fallen through. She was again staying at the Meridian. Restless and in need of temporary entertainment, the kind tourists from the moneyed parts of the world enjoy when they are visiting Africa, Bella discovered she still had the landline telephone number Ngulu had given her when they first met, and on a whim, she tried it. A woman answered—his wife, his mother? She left a message with the woman, giving her name and the name of her hotel.
To her surprise and delight, he rang her from the lobby at six. When she came down, he was all spruced up. He was flaunting a well-maintained moustache, had a sports jacket on, a pair of jeans too tight in the crotch, and a silky shirt unbuttoned to display the tuft of hair on his chest. The handsome smile she remembered played around his eyes, his mouth forever parted in a grin. She knew right away that he would not mention either of their two previous encounters, as though he had wised up to the fact that reminding her of them would piss her off. And he didn’t. They talked briefly about what each had done since their last meeting, and in giving an account of his activities, he didn’t refer to either of her two prior putdowns.
At seven, she noticed he was looking ravenous. She took him to the Carnivore, where he ordered a plateful of meats—beef, ostrich, and hippo—which, according to him, had been cooked to perfection; in fact, he suggested she try it. Since she found the idea of a restaurant making an offer of some sixty types of meat revolting, and she had only a salad, there was a moment when she felt ambivalent toward a man who could bear to consume so much meat—and she thought maybe she should terminate her interest in him. But there was a strong feeling toward him and she stayed with him, paid the bill, and he took the rest of the food in a doggy bag, maybe because he could live on it for a few days, given that his salary as an NGO employee wasn’t high.
They jumped into a taxi and she took him back to her hotel, still uncertain whether she wanted anything more than a nightcap with him. But he was still handsome and young, and she was lonely, and when they got to the lobby, she took him up to her room and they made love.
The sex this time was scarcely better than the first. As a lover, Ngulu clearly was no Humboldt. Unhandsome as the sculptor was, rough in manner and uncouth in his comments, Humboldt lived for sex and art. Ngulu has no strong ambition of any sort. Moreover, he fell asleep soon after the evening’s one and only round of lovemaking, stirring only to spread his legs, raise his pelvis, and release a silent malodorous fart then yawning and stretching his limbs one at a time, all the while remaining asleep. And his penis is small. Still, Bella longs to see him. For the first time, she admits to herself that she admires him for what he is: a youthful angel of extraordinary beauty. And with Salif and Dahaba away, what is the harm? If she plays her cards right, she will get what she wants and still have a delicious evening to herself.
And yet she can’t help thinking about the questions Fatima asked about Aar and his attraction to Valerie. What would make an intelligent, loyal, loving, and attractive man link himself to such a woman? “What does he/she find in him/her?” is a question asked the world over. And the answer is “Nobody knows.” Still, she would not marry a man like Ngulu or have children by him. But knowing what she knows about the pull he nevertheless exerts on her, she is more generous toward Aar for having chosen Valerie and by extension toward Valerie, despite all her failings.
Stalled in traffic, she glances in the mirror, unable to decide whether she is any the worse for wear. But what about Ngulu? She wonders if experience has made him any better as a lover. Although the pay for NGO workers like him is modest, the demand for a handsome companion like him is high among the many unattached British, European, and North American female employees, for whom there are few good marriageable men. She is familiar with some of these women, including a former classmate from university she sometimes stays with when she is traveling. In fact, it is that classmate who told her that Ngulu had been taken up by a Canadian woman old enough to be his grandmother, a sugar mummy of exceptional stature, quite literally—a redhead more than six feet tall, with a voice as many-tempered as Paul Robeson’s. How does he address this elderly Amazon, she wonders—“Sweetness”?
Thinking of the unhappiness in his voice just now, she wonders again whether she should have canceled. The idea of being taken for granted makes her uncomfortable. And truly, it is time the man figures out what he wants in life and moves on. She will impress this upon him, she thinks. And at any rate, it is too late to cancel; a few minutes later, she is at the hotel.
—
He is waiting for her in the back of the café bar, just as he said he would be. And if Bella needed confirmation of her feelings, she gets it as she approaches him—his exquisite features no longer stir things up in her, which is how she used to describe his particular appeal to herself. He is like the favorite toy a child holds close to him for years as he falls asleep, touching, kissing, and holding it, drawing physical comfort from it. And now, it seems, the toy is broken or she has tired of it.
But as she comes closer, she sees that he seems eager indeed. He is up on his feet and waving enthusiastically to her. He takes a few steps toward her, meeting her before she reaches the table. They embrace awkwardly, and when their lips meet, his mouth is open and wet, in a more intimate kiss than she is prepared for. She frees herself quickly, saying, “Okay, okay, okay.”
She allows him to lead her by the hand back to his table. He’s been drinking. There is an almost empty whiskey glass—not his first, she guesses—and a couple of empty beer bottles and a can of Coke.
“How have you been doing?” she asks.
“I’ve been doing very well, thank you.”
Bella squirms. She flags down the waiter. Ngulu orders another whiskey with ice, and then the waiter turns to her.
“What about you, madam? What can I get you?”
She says, “I have had a long day, and a longer night is waiting for me. Please get me a bottle of mineral water with a slice of lemon.”
When the waiter leaves, Ngulu takes the hand closest to him and, with a smile in his eyes, says, “Good. A very long night, I like it.”
She doesn’t even bother trying to set him straight.
He says, “My sincere condolences for your loss. Often, I ask myself what this world is coming to. Innocent people getting killed when they are just going about their business and working for an honest living.” He shakes his head and tells her about some of the casualties they’ve suffered in Nairobi at the hands of terrorists acting in the supposed name of religion, nationalism, or ethnic loyalty.
“And did you lose any friends or family in one of those incidents?” she asks.
He shakes his head, but says, “We’re all affected by it, every one of us.”
She knows that a million and a half Kenyans lost their lives in such violence around the elections a couple of years ago, and close to three million joined the ranks of the internally displaced. But she is in no mood to hear her specific, personal loss glibly lumped in with so many others. Granted, she agrees that in a general sort of way we are all affected at least momentarily by the footage of a bomb blast and the grisly carnage that results. But that is no different from coming across the collision of two vehicles in which passengers have died or been injured. We drive with extra caution for another kilometer or two then return to our habitual careless ways. Only when we are affected personally, when a family member or close friend loses his or her life, do we really feel the pain and cruelty in our guts, in the marrow of our bones. That is why in Somalia people pray that God spares those one loves while taking those one does not even know.
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