The crowd came closer, their expressions changing from barefaced indifference to total concern. When the epileptic stirred in an agitated way, the spectators, thrown into a mix of fear, shock, and relief, fell back, some invoking several of Allah’s designations, others remaining silent with the panic overwhelming their hearts. Jeebleh, oblivious of their doings, tugged at the epileptic’s limbs one at a time, until the sick man responded with a tremor, like the fury of a madman unchaining himself. The epileptic shook so violently that Jeebleh had difficulty holding him on the ground.
It was in this moment of despondency that Jeebleh heard first the voice of a woman and then a car door being opened and closed. Was he conjuring things, imagining the words “Let go, let go”? When he looked up and found his eyes boring into Bile’s, he relaxed his grip. Finally he let go, happy to leave the epileptic in the capably professional hands of Bile, who would know what to do.
Now he sensed Shanta’s discreet, caring presence. She was saying to him, in the voice of a parent to a frightened child, “Come with me, then.”
Taking a moment to look at her, he was surprised by her unimposing beauty, diminished as it was by her overall expression, which was suggestive of mourning. She was tactful despite the awkwardness of their encounter. It wasn’t lost on him that someone always came to his assistance whenever he committed himself to a clumsy act. Now it was Bile and Shanta’s turn to help deal with the problem. He felt like a mischievous child who kept getting into trouble. Perhaps the time would come when he would run out of people to offer him a lifeline.
“Tell me everything!” Shanta said. But she didn’t even listen. Instead, she led him by the hand, away from where the epileptic had collapsed.
That the hungry dog was gone was a relief to him.
THEY HAD WALKED SCARCELY TWENTY METERS WHEN HIS SENSES AWOKE TO the pervasive smell of excrement and the rotten odor of waste. Shanta’s questions helped take his mind off the overwhelming smell. “Tell me about the dog!” she said.
“Which dog?”
She linked her arm to his and kept pace with his slow gait. “Tell me about the dog and the cruel boy in fancy clothes.”
He told it to her in a short form.
She said, “Has it occurred to you that you cannot be good in a conscientious way in a city in which people are wicked and murderous through and through?”
He let that pass without comment.
“Now tell me about the elders!”
Again, he gave her an abbreviated version.
She said, “Do you realize what you’ve done?”
“What have I done?”
She wondered aloud whether he realized that he was rubbing pepper and salt on the communal wound, reminding them of their human failures. She pointed out that the source of his problem was fundamentally this: He always occupied the moral high ground. She added, “Because of this, you had to be humbled.”
He was having difficulty breathing, not because the smells were new to him—they weren’t—but because they had become even more overpowering. People living in such vile conditions were bound to lose touch with their own humanity, he thought; you couldn’t expect an iota of human kindness from a community coexisting daily with so much putrefaction. Maybe this was why people were so cruel to one another, why they showed little or no kindness to one another, and why they were blind to the needs of a bitch in labor or an epileptic in a convulsive seizure.
They came upon crows partaking of a spread of carrion. Three or four of these grotesque birds separated themselves from their colleagues and caught up with Shanta and Jeebleh in their leisurely walk. Bolder than he remembered them, the crows scoured the road ahead, hopping forward, then slowing down, like dogs on an afternoon stroll with their masters. The crows could equally have been bodyguards, assigned to escort dignitaries across a dangerous terrain. Shanta strode ahead as if unaware of the birds’ presence, even when they flew into the air, in an attempt to keep pace, and croaked reproachfully overhead. They might have been hungry children urging their parents to take them home and feed them.
Jeebleh and Shanta came to a locked gate. Shanta bent down and worried a stone out of its position in a nearby wall. Her hand came away, palm up, maybe to show she had no key in it. The gate opened. Jeebleh recalled how often the city’s residents had to fall back on their own ingenuity. How on earth do you open an automatic gate when electricity is intermittent? People had to find inventive ways of activating electric gates manually, and find them they did. On closer scrutiny, he saw that Shanta had pulled at a string hidden in the wall, to release the gate. There!
She let him go past and pushed the gate shut, then slid the bolt up into the metal frame. As they went on, past what had been the front garden of a two-story house, his sixth sense told him that someone was pointing a gun from the upper floor. He was beginning to feel unsteady in the knees, when he saw a small boy training a toy gun on him. Did the boy belong in the house, and if so, who was he? Was he a squatter, a dangerous species camping in a redoubt? He followed Shanta into the living room, and remained standing and looking around.
“Tea?” she asked.
“Without sugar, please.”
She suggested that he sit in the chair she indicated, and went to prepare tea. He made himself comfortable and took in the contents of the living room. He guessed that a child had occupied the center stage of life in the house, a child whose presence determined the shape of things in it. But the toys were all pushed out of the way into a corner, treated without much regard, abandoned. They made Jeebleh think of the provisional nature of a child’s play left unfinished, after the flagrant defilement of peace.
He couldn’t tell from the contents of the house whether its original occupants had fled before their lives were cut short. From all indications, though, the place had been home to people of different ages, backgrounds, and professional interests, at different times. He deduced this from the titles of the books on the shelves, books now in disorder. One of the former occupants might have been an architect, another a nurse. Several others, younger in age, must have been high school students, some at the Egyptian secondary school, some at the Italian liceo classico, others at Benaadir, where the medium of instruction was English—in short, a house of polyglots.
“Here we are,” Shanta said, “tea and nibbles!”
20.
“LITTLE RAASTA FELT SHE FIGURED OUT FOR HERSELF WHAT MARRIAGE IS like, when she was only four,” said Shanta—given name Shan-Karoon, meaning “better than any five girls anywhere”—her voice drenched with emotion.
She faced him with the demure posture of a woman entertaining a potential in-law. Why was she ill at ease? Her clothes weren’t a mess. In fact, she was smartly dressed. All the same, there was something about her that disturbed him. But he couldn’t say what.
She would have been much younger when he was bundled out of the country. For all he knew, a lot of terrible things about which she spoke to no one, not even Bile, might have happened to her. He was on edge, like a man daring to stand on wet soap. He asked, “How did Raasta manage that?”
“You would know if you’d met her,” she said.
“But I haven’t!” He gave her a sharp glance, and the wells of her eyes filled with tears. He couldn’t tell how she managed to contain them precisely where she liked them, brimming on her lashes. He insisted: “In what way did Raasta work out what marriage is like, at the age of four?”
Like a bird feeding, Shanta moved her lips soundlessly. He sensed then that talking to her would to be an undertaking that needed special skills. She was likely to be evasive when it came to Faahiye, and might be given to improvising or making up stories too. He wouldn’t put it past her to make unsubstantiated innuendos, as many spouses might, when, in self-justification, they talked about their partners. She had trained as a lawyer, and joined the law firm set up together with several colleagues, including Faahiye. She had practiced her profession until the country collapsed into total lawlessness.
“Would you know how to locate Mother’s grave?”
“I’m sure I would,” she said.
But he was not one hundred percent certain she had understood that he was referring to his mother, not hers, and was sorry that he had not been clearer. He waited for her to speak; he didn’t wish to be the one to draw attention to this lapse.
Obliging, she indicated that she had gotten his meaning. “I planted two trees at our mothers’ graves,” she said. “For the unparalleled sweetness of its fruit, I planted a mango tree of the Hinducini variety, imported from India, at your mother’s grave, and a lemon tree at my mother’s. I also placed four medium-to-large stones with your mother’s name written on them. I haven’t been to her grave—or my mother’s—for quite some time, but if I put my mind to it, I am quite sure I’ll find it, no problem at all. We can ask Dajaal to take us there, if you want me to come. He’s useful in that department, and can find anything.”
“You wouldn’t know how to find her housekeeper?”
“Why do you want to find her?”
“Because I would like to know all I can about the old woman’s last days,” he said. “It is important that I talk to her. I have a number of questions that only she might be in a position to answer.”
“I’m afraid I’ve no idea where she might be.”
It was his turn to commiserate with her over the disappearance of Raasta and her companion. And because she snuffled, he felt shut out by the new circle that she now drew around herself. He was relieved that she knew how to locate his mother’s grave if all else failed, and sorry he couldn’t share all he had been told about Raasta’s possible abductors. He intended to talk to her about his plans for his mother: to construct a noble memory for her in some way, gather a few sheikhs to speak words of blessing in remembrance of her—and of Shanta’s mother too. He knew he had to wait until it was appropriate to bring up these matters, trifles in comparison to what Shanta was going through. He hoped there was time yet for his priorities.
She spoke fast, as though she had a dog at her heels, chasing her. “One way of putting it is that I’ve lived in a dark house, with the blinds drawn, and where the air is sour, and where I am alone, even though I haven’t chosen to live by myself. I live in hope, though. I say to myself every hour that one day my daughter will be back, she who worked out for herself what marriage is like, at the age of four, and said so to me.”
Jeebleh sucked at his teeth, sensing there was no point asking the same question for the third time. He suspected she wouldn’t be goaded into giving away more than she wanted.
Now it was Shanta asking a question: “Why do you think Faahiye had a hand in my daughter’s disappearance? I understand from talking to someone that you believe this to be the case.”
“I don’t remember saying any such thing to anyone.”
“You’ve been to see Caloosha,” she said, “and you’ve talked to Af-Laawe, and you’ve also spoken at length with Bile. What are your views? What are your conclusions?”
“I haven’t come to any yet.”
“Has Faahiye kidnapped her? He would need help from one of the Strongmen. Or has he done it on his own? And if so, why?”
He noted this time that she spoke her husband’s name like a curse. Then she lapsed into a ruinous state of mind, appearing overwhelmed with the genuine emotion of a love gone sour, or hate gone seedy. Self-consciously, her hand went close to but dared not touch the well of her eyes. He remembered her as a child, remembered how she used to cry at the slightest pretext. By all accounts, hers was a life of high-flown emotions now, of days filled with incessant weeping.
“We’re under a curse, as a family,” she said.
“What makes you say that?”
“Caloosha had you and Bile, his own brothers, locked up, and is suspected of killing his stepfather. More recently, since our mother’s death, several events, one after another, have turned what I, for one, first imagined to be blessings—the birth I had looked forward to all my life, and freedom for a brother who had been in prison and whom I waited to welcome—into curses. Times being abnormal, Bile touches me where he isn’t supposed to, and does taboo things that he isn’t allowed to. There’s talk of murder, and there’s talk of robbery. My husband questions, I take sides. We quarrel, my husband and I, and he leaves. My brother is hurt, and spends more time sulking than I’ve ever known him to do, telling me in so many words that I’ve brought ruin on our heads. My daughter and her playmate vanish mysteriously. Are they kidnapped? Have they been taken hostage? And if so, who’s got them? Does their disappearance have a political angle? When I was young, not given to reflection and not in the know, I used to think there was something remarkable about our family, something unique. Now it seems we’re uniquely cursed. And things aren’t what they’ve appeared to be for much of my life.”
“Has Faahiye been in touch?” Jeebleh asked.
“The phone rings.”
He stared at her, saying nothing, puzzled.
“My phone rings, and when I pick it up, it falls silent,” she continued, snuffling. “It rings again, and again no one speaks, no one says anything. So I don’t pick it up anymore.”
“Why would the kidnappers call and then say nothing?”
“I’m sure it’s Faahiye!”
“Why would he be doing that?”
“To torture me!”
Jeebleh waited warily for her to explain further, but she ceased speaking altogether, swept away by a violent torrent of emotion. There was a feverish intensity to her behavior. He offered her his handkerchief, which she accepted and held in her hand, staring at it as if she didn’t know what use to put it to. Again snuffling, she said, “Raasta was a wonder child!”
“Why ‘was,’ why not ‘is’?”
“Because when she’s returned to us, she’ll have changed from the child I knew as my baby, and will have become a total stranger to me. She’ll have been tortured. No child can survive this kind of torment. Her days of captivity will haunt her forever. My daughter is living in fear.”
“No hard news about her, none whatsoever?”
“No one tells me anything.”
“Why haven’t you spoken of your worries to Bile?”
“For fear that he might think I am inventing things,” she said.
“I feel certain that he won’t,” Jeebleh said.
“Unless it rings when he is here, he won’t believe me, he’ll assume that I am a distraught mother inventing things, like the ringing of a phone with no one at the other end. It’s possible that someone is keeping an eye on my movements, and on whoever comes here. The phone rings after Bile has come and gone, not when he is here. Am I mad and imagining things? I don’t know. Maybe I hear the phones ringing in my head, because I wish someone to get in touch with me. I am alone for much of the time, you see. I’ve no friends left. Many of them avoid me, because I keep talking about Raasta and Makka. But even in my madness, my daughter wants to come home, to me, away from the deceivers!”
When he heard her say “deceivers,” he concluded that she wasn’t completely mad, for he knew whom she meant. He felt more bound to her now, felt a deeper kinship, as a fellow sufferer at their hands.
She said, “I am a mother, deprived of the company of her loving daughter. It shouldn’t surprise you or anyone else if I follow a bend and go where madness, beckoning to my sense of despair, is the supreme authority.”
“You’re not mad!” he assured her.
“I only have circumstantial evidence,” she said, and the sad memory of what scanty evidence she had made her bend over. She held her head between her knees, sobbing.
They were back in her preteen years, when she used to embark on bouts of intense caterwauling, crying her throat sore until she got what she was after. No
w she was a tantrum-throwing kid. She could contain herself one minute in lawyerese, her syntax perfect, her logic impeccable, and in the next minute burst into tears, and look mad and miserable.
He wouldn’t lose hope. He would badger her until he got some adequate answers out of her: “Has anyone that you know of seen Raasta?”
“Af-Laawe has seen Faahiye!”
Clever at taking advantage of anyone with needs, Af-Laawe qualified as one of the deceivers. He had the knack of turning up to offer a hand. Who was Af-Laawe, and what was his role in all this?
“Have you mentioned this to Bile?”
“I have.”
“And his reaction?”
“He promised he would look into the matter.”
“Will he, do you think?”
“I doubt that he ever will!”
She was on firmer ground now. This was clear from her body language and her voice. She sat facing the curtainless window, now open, and the sun reflected in her eye made her appear less sad, but a trifle sterner.
She said, “Because Af-Laawe sees himself as a rival of Bile’s, and as the other, that’s to say, Bile’s darker side, he’s difficult to catch out. Af-Laawe will tell you that he’s committed to the well-being of the dead, as if the dead cared, and that he buries them at no charge, which isn’t true, of course, and that, like Bile, he came upon a windfall of funds with a mysterious origin. The truth is different. We know where Af-Laawe’s money came from, that he is a devious fellow, and that Caloosha is his mentor—the overall head of what I’d like to call, for lack of a better term, the cartel. And don’t think I’m mad or a raving paranoiac—I’m not, I’ll have you know.”
She was making a convincing case, but he wanted to know: “What cartel? What’re you talking about?”
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