Setting Up Shop
Usilie, Kudra Island, 1996
When Zulfa told Masoud Hamad that she would only be his wife if he divorced the three he had already and gave up all his children, she didn’t think he’d do it. Crouched behind the counter of Our Price Is Your Price Fancy Store, she rocked backwards on her heels and crossed her arms over her chest. Her lips a rosy mound, she bent towards Masoud. When Zulfa spoke, her voice was soft. “If you can do that for me, bwana, then I’ll know you really love me.” The look on Masoud’s face—a young look, younger than he was, mouth pulled back, eyes turned down and glossing up with tears—meant, thought Zulfa, that she had finally crossed a line beyond which his I-want-to-marry-you insistences would stop.
When Masoud regained his voice, he spoke in a ferocious whisper that was no whisper at all. “How can you ask me such a thing?” With a scowl and a clicking of her teeth, Zulfa raised a hand up to her mouth. She warned Masoud to keep his voice down: just outside the shop, Babu Issa’s coffee cups were not clinking in the basin. The drinkers’ voices had gone still.
More quietly, sadly, Masoud said, “No decent woman, no good woman at all, would have me treat my wives so poorly.” Zulfa, tugging at her earlobe with a forefinger and thumb, turned her eyes away. She was no longer listening. “If I leave my wives for you,” Masoud said to the air, “how can you be sure your turn won’t come one day?” Pumping softly at her ear, Zulfa stared right past him at a holographic image of the Kaaba in a frame.
“I love my children, bibiye,” Masoud whimpered. “That’s exactly right,” she said, voice cold and nearly glad. Wiping at his eyes, Masoud crawled to the far wall below the row of hanging dresses they had ordered from Malaysia. Zulfa spread her legs before her on the floor and set to plucking misprints from a new pile of kanga cloths. Zulfa and Masoud stayed quiet in the shadows of the Fancy Store until the muadhin called out at one. Babu Issa and his customers left the coffee stand to pray. Masoud snuck out so stealthily, so glumly, that Zulfa, soothed by all that silence, didn’t see him go.
Alone, she shrugged and put the kanga cloths away. I’m not as I was, she thought. I have things I want to do. She counted out the profits she would hand over to Masoud. She unlocked her private cash box and confirmed she’d taken what was hers.
As Zulfa closed the wooden doors, old Mafunda, who sold uji up the road, ambled past with bowls and ladles in her hands. Mafunda would have liked to hear from Zulfa how things were going with Masoud. Everyone was curious. But Zulfa only nodded, gave a silent smile, and crossed the road into her mother’s house.
Habiba, Zulfa’s mother, had finished doing dishes, and in her front room was watching an Egyptian film on the shining, squat TV. She turned the volume down to ask how things were going at the shop. “Oh, just fine,” said Zulfa, as she washed her hands for lunch. But to herself she thought, Masoud Hamad has finally understood that I won’t play his game. Her flat refusals hadn’t worked. She had won now, hadn’t she?
Masoud Hamad, thirty-seven, handsome, clever, had gone away from Usilie when he was still a boy. Four years before begging Zulfa one last time to be his wife, Masoud had come home to the modest town of Usilie after a long stay in Saudi Arabia and the Emirates, where he’d learned everything to do with oil and electronics. He spoke Arabic and English. His beard was neat and mostly dark. Making everybody proud, he had come back to Usilie because the Arab girls he had encountered in his travels were nothing next to the ones he had grown up with. Or so he said to wizened, too-smart-for-anybody’s-good Mafunda, who knew what was worth knowing. He was done, Masoud told old Mafunda, with the bachelor’s life abroad, with going here and there and only passing through. Home for good, to settle down, he was looking for a wife.
The first bride he tried to stick to was his uncle’s daughter Husna, a pious girl with eyes like zaitun fruit, and—underneath the billowing black buibui coats her father’s friends imported from Dubai—what everyone suspected was a very pleasing figure. Things were as they should be; the families were proud. Women old enough to voice their views in public praised Masoud’s virile look for everyone to hear. Younger ones, who couldn’t speak so baldly, whispered: Masoud’s knees are good, his lower back is strong, just look at how he walks! They saw vitality ahead. Energetic afternoons to whip up healthy babies just as manly as their dad.
Masoud did right by his first wife. Just beyond the bakery, a pretty four-room house was built from pricey cement blocks, then caked in yellow plaster chipping, which (according to Mafunda) was the very latest style. Spending just over four lakhs, Masoud set a tin roof down and ordered electricity. As it should be when a man’s knees are as hard and fine as Masoud’s were, Masoud was at first only seen at prayers, and very briefly at the market in the afternoons, where he often left with fish just enough for two. If Masoud purchased beef, Mafunda, watching from her place before the hardware shop, nodded her old head up and down and said, almost to herself but loud enough so everyone could hear: “And it’s not only that. Our Husna’s also getting fatty meat from her husband’s able tongue.”
People in Usilie told Masoud that they were waiting for the babies, which, just so, they got, on schedule: a sturdy girl after nine months, twin howling boys soon after. Once the house beside the bakery had swollen up with healthy kids (and Husna with experience), Masoud went back to Saudi Arabia for a visit. He stayed away three months. People said, “What a good man Masoud is. He doesn’t want the people who were kind to him to think that he’s forgotten. Just as we care so much for him, he has been beloved abroad.”
Masoud returned with a well-fed look and gifts. Nazir, who manned the Tailoring and Petrol Stand, got a belt with a big buckle. Masoud brought Babu Issa a new radio, which, set beside the coffee urn, plucked tinny taarab tunes from air. Masoud presented Husna with a freezer. He suggested she make fruit ice pops for money. It would be good for her, he told his uncle and his father, to feel a little independent. “See how much he loves her?” other women said.
Even old Mafunda got a gift, an outrageous, flirty gift, which it was all right to give because she was so shameless and so ancient: Masoud brought her a glittering pair of gold-embroidered trousers he had purchased in Oman. Though she swore when she accepted Masoud’s pantaloons that she would only sport them plainly when there was no one there to see, Mafunda soon began appearing at the uji stand with skirts hiked slightly up, stylish leggings on display. It was a chance to demonstrate that she had been on Masoud’s mind. “See?” people said. “He loves us so much here that he remembers the most abject of our elders.”
Mafunda, who, because of the bright trousers, felt her tie to him was special, started making some suggestions. Pressing free bowls of steaming uji on Masoud, she’d say, “It’s selfish keeping all your goodness to yourself. Your wife is tired from the freezer and the babies. She’s a busy woman now. She can’t take care for you alone.” Masoud liked talking to Mafunda. She was quick and funny and always spoke her mind. Masoud liked giving people gifts. He liked making women happy, which was a duty, after all, if you could afford to do it. And women were so warm that falling hard for one of them was easy. He took Mafunda’s words to heart.
The second girl he made a bride, a distant cousin on Masoud’s father’s side, lived several miles away in Hausemeki town. She was younger than the first, quick-footed, and darker. Masoud built a nice house for her, too, right beside her mother’s—which was not usual exactly, but what could you do, when houses were springing up all over, and it was hard to find free land? This one got pink chipping. Mafunda said that it was smart of him to put some miles between the first wife and the second, so they wouldn’t see each other all the time, and so the neighbors wouldn’t tell exactly what soft noises coming from the other’s house had kept them up when by all rights they should have been asleep.
At Hausemeki, where jackfruit grew in plenty and paths were edged in ylang-ylang trees, Masoud paid to have the town’s first power line since 1970 put up. Everyone who could afford it
mounted low-watt lightbulbs on their homes and hooked into his cables. While he didn’t give the second wife a freezer, he opened up a shop for her on the road to Hausemeki town, where she sold multicolored thread, sturdy baskets from the north, and Chinese stones for knives. He spent the same amount on the new wife, it seemed, that he’d spent getting Husna—which was only right. In Hausemeki town, everyone agreed he was the best and brightest husband any of their girls had ever had the luck to find.
The men of Usilie thought Masoud was doing a good thing and that he did it well. Babu Issa at the coffee stand said there were more women in the world than husbands, and those who could should try to give them homes. But though it was a fine idea, a religious duty and all that, he said, it was very hard to do. “The man who keeps two households up without making someone jealous, or losing his own mind, is very, very rare.”
The boys at the garage, who now and then had time to spare, and whose mouths were very clever, made jokes about Masoud. They feared his knees might give out at any moment, what with all that running from the yellow house down to the one he’d painted pink. Mafunda, who was loyal, thought Masoud could manage anything. “He’s really something special,” she declared. “What a man he is.” She did like her new trousers. Babu Omari at the gristmill dozed against the doorjamb, filling up with dreams. He wondered: what would it be like to go from one wife to the other, get loving in two places?
While Masoud was setting up his second house, Zulfa, whom at this time Masoud did not know, was preparing for a marriage of her own to an old, unpleasant man. Kassim Majid had rented Zulfa’s father, Mzee Abeid, thirty hybrid orange trees. The trees would be for keeps, he said, if he could marry Zulfa. Mzee Abeid was of the definite opinion that he could use the money. He himself had taken up a second wife several years before, and for things to be all right had had to buy Habiba the TV. Having two wives was expensive. It was time, Mzee Abeid told Habiba, their Zulfa made a home. Zulfa, busy feeling bitter about her own upcoming spouse, didn’t pay the news of Masoud’s nuptial plans a great deal of attention.
The younger girls of Usilie, who crowded round Habiba’s big TV to watch love films from Bombay and soaps from Argentina, felt it was too bad about Zulfa’s old man, but they didn’t like to say so. Instead they talked about Masoud: the first marriage with Husna was for duty, they averred; the second tie must be for love. They petted one another’s arms and screwed their lips up, kissing loudly at the air. Zulfa had no wish to hear of other people’s happiness just then. It seemed to her that she had better things to do than get married to a man who traded orange trees for love.
Zulfa watched the romance tales like everybody else, but was not taken in. “All men want,” she said, dropping tiny Indian almonds from her fingers to her mouth, “is to be taken care of, and to make a lot of babies.” She wasn’t looking forward to Mzee Kassim. When the girls said they surely wouldn’t mind making babies with a young one like Masoud, Zulfa shrugged, and said, “All you want is getting stuck at home and fatty in the belly? Nothing else but that?” She finished all the almonds, and did not stay for that romantic film’s finale.
These same girls took Zulfa to her new home on a hill, which overlooked a pair of cassia trees and a pretty coffee orchard. Clapping, they serenaded her with songs about kicking soccer balls between the goalposts, and bits of tasty meat that nobody could name. “You didn’t get a young one,” some of them said then, but they did try to console her: “This means he’ll have experience.”
Zulfa took in Kassim’s half-blind, drooling face and his gnarled old bony hands, and could see right away that the thing was a mistake. She was proven right: too busy dodging Kassim’s blows when the warped old man was hale, and healing his diseases when he wasn’t, to notice when Masoud selected a third bride, Zulfa had her hands full. If she’d been able to visit with Habiba, or the girls, they would have told her she’d missed nothing. There had been no music and no luncheon at Masoud’s latest wedding. In fact, the way third weddings can be that first and second wives don’t care for, the union was cemented without fanfare, quickly, in the middle of the night.
Masoud took care of his third wife almost as he had of the first two, though there were some who wondered if he didn’t spend a little less. This one got a sewing machine—a fine black Shanghai Stitcher with well-oiled pedals and a scarlet-emerald butterfly embossed on its round chest. Every month Masoud brought her cloth he’d purchased in Mombasa, where he often went to stock the shops he ran in Kudra’s bigger towns. But after the third wedding, some in Usilie asked themselves if Masoud hadn’t come home in the first place because he’d had troubled loves abroad. Robustness and virility, at decent intervals, with care, were one thing, but this, some people said, might be something else instead. Could he be disturbed?
Mafunda was among them. Maybe he had hoped, by coming back, to cure himself, she said, of an unfortunate propensity. Maybe our Masoud, she said, likes women more than a reliable man should. Babu Issa at the coffee stand was heard to say that if Masoud kept taking wives so quickly, one after another, he might make the men ashamed.
By the time Zulfa finally fled Kassim Majid’s hill house and, with the help of a well-placed purple bruise and some needling from Habiba, convinced Mzee Abeid that she should be divorced, some in Usilie no longer praised Masoud so highly. Oh, they hadn’t turned against him; in fact everyone still liked him. But it was clear by then that Masoud was not simply an able man with riches to bestow on the townsfolk who had raised him: no, Masoud Hamad, they started to agree, was a man who liked to marry. Young girls did still feel a thrill when Masoud passed, and Zulfa’s father in particular remained very much impressed. Babu Omari with his notebook at the gristmill had not married even once, so it was ever awesome for him that a man could do it so relentlessly, with style. But, all in all, Masoud’s reputation underwent a change.
Mafunda—who had given up on the idea that she had a special bond with him, though not yet on her trousers—said, her feelings just a little hurt, “Taking wives is the only work Masoud knows how to do. Some men know how to teach, and some men only farm. Masoud Hamad can marry.” As she handed regulars their bowls of pepper porridge, Mafunda hitched her dress up. “He likes women, that boy does. Women of all kinds. Look, he even gave me these.” She preened there on the stoop, showing off her ankles. Masoud, it was now fashionable to say, was a man enslaved by passions. It was nice that he could give his wives new clothes, and that all of his six children would be sent to school, even, yes, the girls. But how seriously could you regard a man who took three wives in under half a decade, and showed no signs of slowing?
“He’s allowed to marry up to four, remember!” said Mafunda, thumb curled into her right hand, other fingers flailing while her wrist shook. “Four!” She was so vehement about it that she spilled a bowl of porridge to the ground. And so, instead of reveling in electricity, and in how Husna’s sugar pops could ease a too-hot day, people began making bets on who was going to be next. Babu Issa, in particular, liked to make pronouncements. People went to drink and listen. Turning off the radio, Babu Issa would shake coins in his closed fist, to get everyone’s attention. “If I know Masoud Hamad, he’ll push it to the limit. He’ll take the four wives he’s allowed. And when that’s not enough for him, he’ll leave the first one to make room, and do it all again. Who’s it going to be?”
In a way, the thing between Masoud Hamad and Zulfa was Zulfa’s Aunt Khadija’s fault. If not for Aunt Khadija, Zulfa might never have met Masoud Hamad at all. When Khadija came back well rested and plump from a season’s holiday in Oman and the Emirates to her old house in Kiguu, she invited Zulfa to a party. Zulfa, who loved her Aunt Khadija because she was so pretty and had seen so much of the world, was desperate to go.
At Kiguu there was a cove that girls could swim in; there were mibura trees in fruit, and lots of berries in the bushes. There were also kindly people who felt that Zulfa had been wronged in her brief marriage to old Kassim Majid and should be trea
ted gently.
Zulfa saw herself already stretched out on the floor of Khadija’s airy house, rose and jasmine on the breeze. She would lay her head in her aunt’s lap while Khadija combed and twisted at her hair, telling her how pure the air was on the garden slopes of Sharjah. She might meet clever ladies who, swigging cups of bitter coffee, would discuss the weddings they had been to: who was wearing what, who was eyeing whom, and who hadn’t been invited. Oh, she would have a time! Khadija’s girls would refuse to let her help out in the kitchen. They would make her lie down with a pillow and give her cups of mango juice to drink while they did all the work. Little boys, impressed by Zulfa’s looks—she exuded city style, although she’d never lived in one—would collect pink pomelos and lemons for her and leave them gently by her mattress while she slept. But Kiguu was a full day’s walk away. Zulfa didn’t want to walk. She would have to find a ride.
First, Zulfa begged Habiba’s help in sweetening her father: “Please, won’t you talk to Ba, ask him to make Salum find a driver and a car?” Salum, Zulfa’s cousin, hardworking and young, usually did his utmost to give Zulfa some pleasure. But Salum was upstanding: he often wished to know if Zulfa’s plans had Mzee Abeid’s approval. And Mzee Abeid, for his part, thought it was high time his youngest daughter stopped behaving as though she’d never had a husband and still had lots of time to play. Zulfa couldn’t tell her father to his face why she wanted to leave town—not to Kiguu for a party!
Habiba was not keen on Zulfa taking off for several days, not when Zulfa’s sister Warda had come home from the mainland with three small children and a baby and the house was full of stomachs. Habiba, who had unfulfilled desires of her own, didn’t look at Zulfa when she said, “Ask your father by yourself.” She kept on with her washing. Zulfa went over to her mother’s side, wrung three dresses for her and hung them on the line. She wrapped her arms around Habiba’s ample middle and laid her head beneath her mother’s breasts. “Please?” She pressed Habiba’s belly. Habiba shook her daughter off and sniffed. She squeezed the dress she’d taken from the basin hard, making sure the water ran right down her daughter’s toes. Zulfa waited in the courtyard, hoping that Habiba might grow soft and say that she would help her, but Habiba kept hanging up the washing and she didn’t speak again.
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