The Old Drift

by Namwali Serpell

  And so it was not until the second morning of their marriage, in a hovel for teenagers on a gap year, that Isa and Balaji had sex for the first time. Sunrise pinkened the cheap batik curtains. A ray of light slipped between them, took a stride over the floor, spotlit a dead cockroach – lending it a lovely amber glow – then stretched across their dual-carriage marriage bed. Balaji smiled and rolled over the crack between the two singles towards his bride.

  Isa’s face was so beautiful to him that morning, her skin gleaming in the dawn, her lips soft with sleep, her eyes blurry with weeping, that it would linger in his mind for decades, a lifelong hangover. Over the years, when confidants to his marital distress conjectured that his wife wasn’t worthy of him, when other women came on to him, implying he deserved better, he genuinely believed them all to be wrong. His feel for Isa’s face, the match of her form to his taste, had revised his eyes so he could see nothing else.

  To wit, he had never had to work so hard in his life not to ejaculate. Balaji thought of Vishnu, of his Aunt Pavithra, of cricket matches. He closed his eyes and broke the skin of his lip with self-command. When he could bear it no longer, he finished with a great bellow. He opened his eyes and was only a little surprised to see blood on the sheets. Isa seemed overcome. Well, where there is some buying, there is also some selling, he thought. He kissed his bride’s forehead, shuffled off her body, put on a bathrobe and slippers, and went out to fetch chai for them from the rickety table in the JollyBoys lobby.

  * * *

  Isa knew what sex was, of course. Her parents and their expat friends had not been ones to euphemise during their sundowner conversations. But she hadn’t known that she would feel this way about it, dizzy with the debasement of it. Balaji started off slowly, pecking her lips, embarrassed by their morning breath. But in what seemed like no time at all, he was suddenly above her, hugely erect, crazed with restraint. A penned bull. That familiar resentment of his desire, the how could you? blazing in his eyes. Isa had never felt so beheld. He was awful. He was an animal…and she wanted him. Because, as it turned out, she was an animal too.

  When he pushed himself into her, she could barely locate herself inside the flood of sensation. She closed her eyes as they rocked and bucked together. Behind the buzzing in her ears, she dimly heard Balaji choking on his own roars. The moment he pulled out, the rush of loss sharpened into pain and Isa opened her eyes and instinctively reached for him. His face was gentle and cowering. She smelled the room, her own tang rounding out his alkaline residue.

  ‘It is a little bit bloody, sorry-sorry.’ His caterpillar eyebrows writhed smugly.

  ‘Oh…yes, that makes sense,’ Isa managed.

  Balaji grinned and heaved himself off her and went out to get them some tea. Raw and a little stunned, Isa turned on her side and breathed. So this was sex then. This would be marriage. Out of nowhere, it came to her: the car accident yesterday.

  It had been late in the afternoon when they had come to a village, mud and thatch trickling into view on either side of the big tarmac road. The windscreen had been furred with dead insects and bird shit, but they’d both seen the drunk man at the same time. Isa could still recall the distinctive dance of the bicycle he’d been riding, the wobbling swoop of it into the road. It had happened suddenly: the bumper had made contact with the bicycle and the man had flown off it, landing awkwardly on the road, with a terrible sound.

  Isa had screamed as the car had skidded off the road, tumbling into the pebbly dirt, the car nuzzling into some scrub before it had jolted to a halt. They had breathed a moment. Big brave Balaji had jumped out, telling her to stay inside. Isa, frozen anyway, had stared through the windscreen as the dust drifted right – or was the car drifting left? Up through the haze she had watched as her husband rose, a body in his arms…

  Isa shivered and pulled the thin sheets up over her body – they were still chilly with sweat. Balaji came back into the room with two steaming mugs and set them on the side table. She sat up and leaned back against the wall.

  ‘Do you think that man will be okay?’ she asked. ‘The bicycle man. From yesterday.’

  ‘Oh, yes-yes-yes, only a broken leg,’ he tutted, nestling in next to her.

  ‘You don’t think he will come begging for money?’

  ‘He’d better not,’ he snorted. ‘We left more kwacha than he’s ever seen in his whole life.’

  Balaji put his arm around her and she smelled the heady nutty scent of his armpit. She looked up at him and let him kiss her, waves of sick desire swallowing her worries. Within minutes, they were at it again, their mugs of tea cooling beside them. It was implacable, this sex, this marvellous, strenuous sex between Isa and Balaji. It would never cease, even as they underwent the general turmoil and fade of a long marriage. This was both a gift and a curse.

  1997

  Every family is a war but some are more civil than others. The first front in the war of Isa’s new family was the Battle of the Mosquito Net. It appeared one night like a drowsy apparition, draped over the four-poster bed in the master bedroom of the house in Kamwala. Isa tried to start an argument about it right away but Balaji dragged her inside the translucent cube for their nightly bout of lovemaking. When they were done, panting beside each other, she gestured around them.

  ‘This thing is ridiculous!’ she said. ‘We never used mosquito nets at home.’

  ‘Hm?’ Balaji murmured. ‘It is to protect us, Bella. You can barely see it. Go to sleep.’

  Spent, she did. But she was haunted all night by dreams about a woman sleeping above them, as if the roof of the net were a hammock. It was like being suffocated, she complained to him the next morning.

  ‘By a woman?’ Balaji grinned. ‘Maybe she can join us next time.’

  ‘It’s like being inside a cloud,’ Isa pouted. ‘It’s not necessary.’

  ‘Don’t be absurd,’ Balaji said. Malaria was a real risk and he wasn’t about to go without a mosquito net because of some fanciful dream.

  They bantered about it for a few days, but when Isa had another nightmare – a giant spider weaving a web around them – she took it down herself, sneaking it out of the bedroom and stuffing it in a closet when Balaji was out at the shop. She was furious when it reappeared the very next day, dimpled with wrinkles, a shabbier, friendlier version of itself.

  A silent campaign began. Isa took the net down; Balaji made sure it went back up. Isa raged; Balaji shrugged. Sibilla stayed out of it, protected by her own net of hair, which had always baffled mosquitoes. The servants found it amusing at first and even took bets on how long each bwana would hold out. But they soon grew weary of fobbing off the duty of hanging it up and taking it down. The mosquito net grew poxy and lax. Its holes widened.

  One night, Isa managed to exercise enough self-control to stop Balaji in the middle of sex and force him to take the net down before she would let him back inside her. He gave in, then promptly fell asleep after his orgasm, as she knew he would, and so the bed remained blissfully netless until the morning. Isa woke to the open air and her husband kissing his way up her leg, rising from ankle to shin to knee to…two kisses higher, he stopped. Isa craned her neck to look at him.

  ‘Just playing connect-the-dots,’ Balaji chuckled. ‘Bite-bite-bite,’ he pressed them like a series of buttons. ‘You had better hope you don’t catch a fever, nincompoop.’

  He left her in bed to examine the delirious line of magenta spots in her skin. It was as if something small and injured had stumbled along her leg, dripping a trail of pink blood. Later, under the desultory drip of the shower, she found more bites, in all kinds of places. How infuriating – Balaji was right. She blamed Kamwala. She’d never had trouble with mozzies in Longacres. Then she remembered why.

  In the afternoon, she walked from the house to Patel & Patel Ltd, Inc. Balaji looked up with surprise when she walked in – she hadn’t been here since the wedding. />
  ‘My bride!’ he introduced her to his boys as if they’d never met. The dwanzi boys smiled their marijuana smiles. Isa smiled back daintily, then turned to her husband to place her order.

  Balaji laughed and shook his head. ‘I shouldn’t be selling anything to you,’ he said as he counted out her change. ‘This is my money. And you shouldn’t be lighting fires in my house.’

  Back at home, sitting on the floor of the bedroom, Isa opened the box and a green coil tumbled out and promptly crumbled into uneven pieces: apostrophes and parentheses and an @ sign. She wedged a semicircle into the flimsy metal stand, lit a match, and brought the flame to the green tip. She watched the thin thread of smoke dangle up from it. Then she went and sat by the open window, a novel in her lap. The rain came, bringing with it the velvety scent of wet soil. Isa stared out at it for so long that when she turned back to the page, the letters seemed to drizzle down it. In the corner of the room, the ember tip of the mosquito coil crept slowly along its arc, leaving the scent of myrrh and a pile of cinders.

  When Balaji got home that evening, he came into the bedroom and closed the door. He inhaled and exhaled dramatically: ‘Aaah.’ They looked at each other across the smoky room. She smiled. He smiled. That night, while the net sieved a puddle outside the window, while drugged mosquitoes drifted around as slow and as light as the ash in the air, Isa was kind to her husband with her hands and mouth. And when she fell asleep afterwards, before him this time, her lips were curved in triumph.

  The next morning, Balaji woke to the sound of rain strumming the window and his wife retching in the en suite.

  ‘Okay-okay in there, Bella?’ He tried the door but it was locked.

  Silence. A croak, another gush.

  ‘Now you get sick?’ he said, his chuckle trickling to naught.

  * * *

  Isabella’s first pregnancy was difficult. She vomited every day until the second trimester. She craved fruits that weren’t in season. Her skin was a soupy mess, pimples bubbling up on her chin and brow. At night, the baby often concentrated its weight into a blunt ache on her side. Balaji, having now been promoted to Daddiji, was allowed nowhere below her waist, for which they both suffered. The months passed by in hypochondriacal waves as she conjured two-headed, hare-lipped, fingerless nightmares to scare herself with – to say nothing of hairy ones. What if Sibilla’s condition reappeared, one of those genetic ghosts that skips a generation only to haunt the grandchildren? Isa lavished cajolings upon her belly, willing the baby to be normal. The baby responded in the usual way, resolutely rotating, kicking stoically at its flexible walls.

  Daddiji sat beside Isa in bed, listening to her worrying and feeling with his hand the steady beat of the foot inside her. What a struggle! he thought. The Battle of Schrödinger’s Hairball. The strength of the kicks secretly pleased him, though. He felt like a father, full of inexpressible bloodly solidarity. A boy, an ally! Finally, someone to adjust the gender balance in this house.

  He felt terribly guilty when Isa gave birth to a girl. They had not learned the sex of the baby when they went for their scans at UTH – he had just assumed. All those months of misaddress, like mispronouncing a friend’s name! Daddiji overcompensated for his error by loving little Naila a little too much. He gave her secret treats and protected her from her mother, who was often harsh with Naila as she grew into a toddler, grabbing the girl at random to peer at her pores. But while Naila’s hair was lovely and thick and black, and grew faster than normal, it was largely confined to her scalp.

  Once, when she was four years old, Naila fell asleep with bubblegum still in her mouth. She woke with it tangled in her hair and ran straight to her father, knowing his punishment would be less severe. Used to shaving hair down to the skin for tonsure, Daddiji had left the child near bald when he cut the bubblegum out. As it grew back into a pageboy, Daddiji finally got a chance to see what Naila might have looked like if she had been a boy. But even then, he realised, it was impossible that she could be anyone other than herself. She was Naila! How unwise, he thought, to love someone in advance of knowing them.

  * * *

  It was inevitable that Naila would become a weapon in the next front of the war between her parents: the Battle of the Unborn.

  ‘Kwacha?!’ Daddiji would call to his daughter every morning at breakfast. Dawn has come?!

  ‘Ngweeee…’ she would respond, drawing it out like a true patriot. Light falls over the plains…

  Daddiji would wink. Isa would roll her eyes. This rally call from Independence days was old and musty, as out of date as UNIP itself, which, after nearly thirty years, had been ousted by the Movement for Multi-party Democracy in ’91. Four-year-old Naila just liked the sound of kwacha! and ngweee: the bassdrum prompt, the droning reply.

  For Daddiji, it was all about the money – kwacha in particular, ngwee having long fallen out of circulation. The new president, whom Kaunda had dubbed ‘The Four-Foot Dwarf’, had rejected his precedessor’s socialist principles in favour of privatisation and the free market. Despite somersaulting inflation rates (K4,000 to the pound by 2001), wig was (still) all the rage in Lusaka. The counter at Patel & Patel Ltd, Inc. was stacked high with limp towers of cash – kwacha in the thousands and millions.

  Daddiji was trying to change Isa’s mind about having another baby. She had been using lack of money as an excuse to postpone getting pregnant again. But there was money, plenty-plenty money, he insisted, and therefore no need for clumsy prophylactics or enforced abstinence. There are men who force their wives. Daddiji was not capable of this. Besides, Isa still wanted him, he could sense it when he held his hand above her skin like a dowser. And yet she pushed him away whenever he reached for her at night.

  ‘No! We’re not ready.’

  ‘I am certainly ready, and if I can just…ah, yes, you are quite ready, too.’

  Her eyes slid shut deliriously. She shoved his hand away. ‘We have to be careful.’

  ‘We are careful. Full of care. Look at how much care I have for you, just look.’

  ‘We have other cares, too.’ She tore her eyes from his erection. ‘Naila’s education—’

  ‘Naila is four, Bella. And must we be million-billionaires to have another child?’

  ‘All you think about is money.’ Isa blew at the hair that had fallen over her eyes. ‘You sit in your shop all day counting out your money and then you come home and fill our daughter’s head with this “kwacha, ngweeee!” nonsense. Do you think you’re teaching her business? Do you think this is business too?’ She wrapped a hand cruelly around his member. ‘You cannot put a price on everything!’

  ‘Can’t I?’ He smiled grimly and placed his hand on her breast.

  They glared at one another, each gripping the other’s pound of flesh. Then their anger burst, releasing an energy that swirled quickly into desire. As always, much sighing and capitulation followed. Isa simply couldn’t help the way her lust bloomed like a lotus flower on the surface of some internal swamp. At least this time she managed to get a condom on him first – or so she thought.

  * * *

  A few days later, Daddiji was sitting at the head of the dining table when he felt a tickle under his palm. He lifted his hand and found a white card taped to the arm of his chair. Chair K50,000, it said. He glanced at Naila, who shrugged. Daddiji decided to ignore it and reached for his Coca-Cola. As he sipped, he caught a flash of white at the bottom of the glass. He went cross-eyed trying to make it out through the bubbles. He swallowed and raised the glass to read the tag taped to its base. Tumbler K1,000. Daddiji lowered his glass and looked around. They were everywhere. Little Naila watched as he walked around the dining room, collecting the diaspora of labels, detaching them from lamps and curtains and books until he had a heap of price tags – or were they receipts? He sat down as Isa came in.

  ‘We are making a point?’ he asked her wryly.

  Is
a said nothing as she took her seat but her lips twitched smileward. Sibilla, oblivious, came in with a steaming bowl of pasta and set it on top of the tags like they were a new sort of trivet.

  The next day, more tags appeared around the house: on utensils and decorations and pillows, attached with string or Sellotape or a staple. Daddiji had to admit, his wife had a good business sense – the prices were the right value. He would know, having purchased these things, after all. He thought he understood Isa’s message: ‘Life costs too much to bring another child into it!’ To convey his response – ‘Love is free. Your efforts to block it are what is expensive!’ – he taped a tag of his own on the packet of condoms in the drawer of her bedside table, capping the price with an exclamation mark.

  It was a nice piece of rhetoric but Daddiji’s victory didn’t last long. Isa had two advantages over him: time on her hands and the need to be right, a need so intense that it often surpassed the original argument. Soon there was an infestation of numbers, everything in the house labelled with a price. The family lived like this for a time, as if the home were an extension of Daddiji’s shop. They ate supper with labelled forks off labelled plates, swilled their drinks from labelled glasses. They brushed their teeth with tagged toothbrushes, laid their heads on priced pillows. The price tags flapped and flickered in the windy nights of dry season.

  One night, Daddiji dreamt that they were chasing him, diving at his head, flocking onto his hands, biting his palms – a lifetime of papercuts in one fell swoop – then flying off, leaving him to stare at his bloodied stumps…He woke with a start and stared at his alarm clock for a good three minutes before he realised the numbers there were not the unbudging time, but another price tag.