The Old Drift

by Namwali Serpell

  ‘Naila?’ Mother called out.

  Naila waited a beat before she stepped inside the dining room. ‘Yes, Mother?’

  ‘Come,’ Mother said coldly. ‘It’s time to put price tags on these packets. Your nonna can watch the girls. Tell the maid to bring her some tea. She needs something to calm her nerves.’

  * * *

  Sibilla sat in the sitting room with her granddaughters, obediently awaiting her tea. Contessa was performing a wobbly dance for Gabriella and Lilliana. These three had landed in the family as if all at once, a bundle of limbs and affection and need. Only Naila stood apart. Perhaps it was because she had come earlier than the others but her mother had also cultivated that separateness. Isabella seemed to resent her eldest, for being Daddiji’s favourite or for being less subject to her will. Once, coming across that ridiculous morning charade in the corridor – Isabella marching before her daughters like a matronly Mussolini, demanding ‘What are you made of?’ – Sibilla had caught Naila rolling her eyes and making shudder quotes with her fingers when she answered, ‘Hair.’

  Chanda came in with a tea tray. Sibilla smiled at her. She hadn’t planned to bring all of her old servants with her to the Kamwala house like a lady with maids-in-waiting. But when Simon, the old gardener, had succumbed to TB, Sibilla had felt that she should take care of his daughter. Chanda had grown into a sweet, square-shouldered woman, who provided without complaint for both her fatherless son and her twin siblings. She knelt now before Sibilla and poured tea into a cup. She was wearing the uniform Isabella insisted on, a pink and white affair that made her look clownish under her magnificent headdress of long plaits – like a kudu in pantaloons.

  ‘Myook, Ba Madam?’ asked Chanda, holding the creamer aloft.

  Sibilla nodded and turned back to her granddaughters. Lilliana was dancing now, like a robot it seemed – arms at right angles, neck stiff with concentration. If only they knew how much like robots they were, machines in their parents’ hair factory! Sibilla wondered, not for the first time, whether she was to blame for this. She had vowed to stay out of the war between Isa and Daddiji. But she hadn’t been able to help herself when it came to the Battle of the Price Tags. She knew she shouldn’t have tied that blank tag to Naila’s toe after the girls’ parents had sold everything in the house.

  ‘Chooga?’ asked Chanda.

  Sibilla nodded and held up three fingers, then four. They both laughed. Chanda’s teeth glowed white. Her plaits danced as she handed the mug over. Sibilla sipped her tea. At the time, she’d thought it would be the ultimate rejoinder to Isa and Daddiji both: You cannot put a price on a human being. She’d reasoned that one of them would find it and blame it on the other and feel ashamed. Chastened. She had never considered the possibility that instead they would join forces and become allies, that they would end up collaborating on an operation that revolved entirely around putting prices on their children’s heads.

  ‘Contessa wins!’ Gabriella yelled. She had apparently been designated judge of the dance competition. Lilliana began to whimper. Chanda turned to look, and Sibilla noticed that the wig braided into her hair was bronze, not black, and less shiny than her granddaughters’ hair. So! The servants had boycotted Lovely Luxe Locks Ltd! Before Chanda could rush off to attend to the children, Sibilla reached out and grasped a bouquet of her plaits.

  ‘Oops!’ Chanda giggled and swerved back to accommodate the pull to her head.

  ‘Where did you get this?’

  ‘Sorry, Ba Sibilla.’ Chanda looked down, thinking she was being chastised for disloyalty.

  ‘No, it’s fine,’ Sibilla smiled and released her grip. She raised her voice over her granddaughters wailing in the corner. ‘I just want to know. Who did this beautiful thing to your hair?’

  ‘Ba Madam, it is just this ka woman pa market. She is a relative to Ba Enela.’

  ‘Is she? And what is her name?’

  ‘Ah? But I think they are calling her Loveness.’

  * * *

  When Sibilla hunched into the stall of the Northmead market where Chanda had directed her, she was surprised to find a glow coming from above. She looked up and saw that the ceiling was a sloping raft of plastic bottles. It kept out the rain but let in the light. She was charmed by this resourcefulness – she remembered well using what you have to make what you need. There were two women on the floor inside, their shoulders pressed comfortably together, chatting and drinking beer. They were dressed well for market women – one wore a velour tracksuit with gold and pink roses, the other a tight lycra dress with what looked like deliberate wrinkles stitched in.

  ‘Loveness?’ asked Sibilla.

  ‘What’s up?’ The darker-skinned woman looked up from her Mosi.

  ‘I have a proposal for you,’ said Sibilla, and removed her face scarf.

  The women’s eyes widened but they did not flinch. Local Zambians had always accommodated Sibilla’s condition easily – they were so used to foreigners being strange, they had no expectations or judgments about the nature of that strangeness. Sibilla explained that she had come to offer her services – her resources. She wished to donate the long white hair that still spilled daily, endlessly from her scalp, so that they could package it and sell it as wig.

  ‘So you are what?’ Loveness laughed up at her. ‘An NGO for hair?’

  The other woman stood up and circled Sibilla, ran her fingers expertly over the product on offer. ‘No, but it is good hair,’ she said to Loveness with a shrug. ‘We can use it.’

  Loveness narrowed her eyes and requested funds as well, in the Zambian way – not asking directly but wondering aloud if there was any to be had. Sibilla reached into her purse and handed over what she had saved from teaching Italian. It would be just enough to build a salon, to fit it with a wall-length mirror, and paint it with a sign and a mural perhaps, to advertise their services.

  * * *

  The Balaji girls were placed in the back seat of the blue Mazda. Drinks were placed in their hands, drinks that would be drunk too fast, held in too long, expelled among tall grasses on the side of the road. A climate pattern of bubbly colourful rain: gulped in through sticky lips, splashed out between sticky legs. In the spaces between, the journey. Sounds and insects and hot dusty air drifted in through the open windows, riding the spines of uneven breezes. A funk steadily grew: bodies sitting still in the midst of movement. They were off to Lake Malawi.

  Daddiji was at the wheel, master of the Mazda and the road. Mother was in the passenger seat beside him. On either side of Great East Road, breeze blocks rose and fell, half-built and quarter-built houses, like Lego projects abandoned by baby giants. The car passed through a village every once in a while, the road filling with bodies and bicycles. Daddiji would honk and the pedestrians would scamper gingerly out of the way as if scalded, then stare at the passing car and catch the girls’ eyes – a brief connection, severed by speed.

  Potholes riddled the road, sometimes crowding into a sinkhole so cavernous its shadowed depths were as dark as fresh tarmac. Sometimes Daddiji would swerve too late and thumpety-thump they’d go. Slow down, Mother would mutter. SLOW DOWN!!! the four girls would echo-yell from the back, making Mother smile and Daddiji actually slow down. Sometimes there were too many potholes to avoid, and then a new sound joined the soundtrack of the drive: the clackety-clunk of a giant typewriter writing their journey eastward.

  When the morning sun grew strong enough to scorch the breeze, they rolled up the windows and turned on the air conditioning, which smelled of frosted dust. The girls row, row, rowed their boat. They were animal, vegetable or mineral. They spied with their little eyes something beginning with…Naila’s back pressed into her seat as the road through the front windscreen began stretching upwards like a cobra. The car climbed swiftly, swallowing it, until it came up behind a putt-putting minibus, blue on the bottom, white on the top. It was bursting at the seams with people,
their elbows jutting from the open windows. The car drew close enough to see the name of the bus painted in red on the window – CHE GUAVA – and the messages scrawled in the dust coating it: JESUS LOVES ME, I LOVE MARY, MARY LOVES KASONDE.

  Daddiji honked and indicated, then sped up to overtake the bus. As they drove by, they heard the humming swarm – it was a song, each note swelling to capacity before it tipped into the next. Daddiji told the girls that the people on the bus were singing a hymn to ward off danger and mourn the dead. He pointed at the valley below, at the metal frames burnt black or rusted red there – a graveyard, a warning. Naila stared at the glinting guardrail, at the bends and gaps in it, until it slunk back into the ground.

  Once they were past the minibus, Daddiji had to slow again behind a lorry struggling up the hill. Its bed was a barn: a cage of wooden planks brimming with sacks and crates and a chicken coop. A how-now-brown cow was pressed against the back slats, moaning loudly as the lorry climbed. Daddiji pointed and laughed. The girls laughed because he was laughing. Mother tutted. Daddiji accompanied the cow’s moans with an excitable ‘whoaah…whoaah…’ The girls joined in – ‘whoaah…whoaah…’

  It happened all at once. The slats of the lorry splintered, then broke. The cow tumbled out of the truck, landing awkwardly on its front legs. Even with the closed windows, it was a horrible sound – nearly human. The girls shrieked as Daddiji swerved sharply off the road. The tyres tumbled off the tarmac onto pebbles and dirt. The Mazda skwerched to a halt, its front bumper nuzzling a bush. As always, emergency bred hierarchy: everyone fell into place.

  ‘Wait!’ Daddiji barked. ‘Don’t open the windows.’

  Mother turned a stern face to the girls to reinforce his message. Naila squeezed Gabriella’s hand. Lilliana stroked Contessa’s hair. Behind their catching breath, they could hear the groaning beast and the heedless lorry chugging up the hill. Dust spun, surrounding them in cinnamon light, then drifted left, giving the illusion that the car was sheering right. Two men emerged from the haze. They were stumbling, dragging the unconscious cow between them. Framed by the windscreen, it was like a cartoon. One man’s t-shirt was bullseyed with sweat. The other man, holding the thrashing tail end, paused to wipe sweat from his face. They vanished into the bushes and re-emerged on the other side, an awkwardly hobbling mass.

  ‘Looky-look!’ Daddiji roared with laughter. ‘That was quick. At least someone got a supper out of it!’

  Mother glared at him. He kissed her forehead, then manoeuvred the car back onto the road. To cheer his girls up, Daddiji launched into a story about the men and the cow, about their ‘tribe’, which he said lived at the bottom of the hill and caught all the things that rolled down it. The girls moaned.

  ‘No! Daddiji, snot possible.’

  ‘That doesn’t even make sense,’ Naila muttered.

  ‘Okay-okay,’ his head see-sawed in the rearview mirror. ‘You don’t believe Daddiji.’

  ‘Ugh, Daddiji.’

  ‘Just tell it, Daddiji.’

  ‘Rightee-o. Once upon a time…’

  In Daddiji’s story, the tribe was called the Hilly Bottoms and one day, a lorry had stalled halfway up it and the driver had gone for help. As soon as he left, the Hilly Bottoms gathered at the base of the hill and deliberated. Then a breeze blew and the doors of the lorry swung open, just like arms opening for a hug. Twelve soft-drink bottles fell out. Some of them burst, making a sticky sharp carpet, but others went rolling unharmed down to the Hilly Bottoms, who cupped their hands with their knuckles to the ground to catch them.

  The next time a lorry stalled, the Hilly Bottoms were blessed with bales of wheat. Then Bata shoes. Popcorn – blue, yellow and pink like at the Agricultural Show. Bunches of bananas. Ears of chimanga. Dartboards rolled down the hill, then rocked onto their split faces. Shoe polish. Mattresses. Daddiji never got around to the moral of the story – about opportunity? Ingenuity? Things coming to those who wait? Instead, he fell into a rhythm of naming the things that tumbled down from the lorries that paused on the slope of the Hilly Bottoms. Buckets. Marmite. Watches. Chickens. The girls sang along, adding to his list.

  They drove east, away from the orange sun. It rotted behind them, leaving pulpy stains in its place. They reached Chipata just as night fell. By the time they had got through customs and immigration, the littler girls in the back seat were stacked against one car door like tumbled dominoes. Naila alone drowsed against the other door, her breath fogging a pulsing halo over the window.

  ‘Do you remember when we went to Livingstone?’ Daddiji asked Mother.

  ‘Our honeymoon?’ Mother murmured, turning her head to the back to check on the girls. Naila closed her eyes and feigned sleep.

  ‘And the accident?’ Daddiji asked. Naila could see the thick edge of his glasses. ‘The drunk man. On the bicycle. Sometimes, I’m thinking-thinking. And just now. With the cow—’

  ‘Yes,’ Mother said sombrely. ‘I thought of it, too.’

  ‘What do you think happened to him?’

  After a moment, Mother replied: ‘It was just a broken leg. I’m sure he—’

  ‘But do you remember his face? There was a hole in his face, Bella. In his cheek—’

  ‘Shhhh.’ Mother turned back again. Naila let her eyes slide shut. After a moment, she heard her mother say, ever so softly:

  ‘We left that little boy with him. And money. Plenty of money.’

  Behind her closed eyes, Naila saw the hole in the man’s cheek, releasing red bubbles one by one. She saw kwacha floating up out of her father’s pocket and her mother’s purse, fluttering down over a group of villagers clapping with gratitude, clapping to catch the cash.

  * * *

  Sibilla had decided to take matters into her own hands. Sitting in the taxi on the way to Kalingalinga, she looked over at her granddaughter. Naila, in her Namununga school uniform, was in three-quarter profile, her head turned to look out of the window as Lusaka scudded by. The girl was twelve, still bone thin, her temples shadowed with soft fur. Her beige skin was darker than usual – the family had just come back from their annual holiday at Lake Malawi.

  The girls were always excitable upon their return, bubbling with stories for their nonna: how the waves in the lake were big enough for surfing, how they saw the treetops waving in the game park – a herd of elephants silently passing through. This time, they were all agog about an accident with a cow. A cow? Yes, a cow that fell from a lorry and then two men stole it for the Hilly Bottoms! Oh, and they found a moth sleeping on the hood of the car – the size of Daddiji’s hand! It was all very sweet and charming.

  But later that evening, when the younger girls and their parents had gone to bed and Sibilla and Naila had stayed up watching Idols South Africa together, Naila had told another story. About a drunk man and an accident and money falling like rain over the villagers and Daddiji driving away. And wasn’t it funny, the bicycle? And wasn’t it strange, the hole in the man’s face? Sibilla had hidden her shock from the girl as she pieced it all together. They had left that man there. Not just Isabella, but Balaji, too. And in front of their children. This was what trading bodies for money yields, she’d thought: creature comforts, a life of family holidays and unworried purchase, and a man left to die on the side of the road.

  Sibilla looked out of the taxi window. She had never got used to the flatness of Lusaka, so unsettling after the mountains of Alba. Here, it felt like there was too much sky pressing down on the levelheaded trees. She sat back and closed her eyes, relaxing into the peace of grandmotherly love, a love without need or resentment. Naila. Here was someone she could sway, someone she could teach. You do not have to succumb to inhumanity, Sibilla practised in her head. It’s not a question of power. It’s a question of generosity, what is freely given, tossed from a window to help others. Do you know the story of Petrosinella? It would be a small intervention, but…

  ‘You
are sick, Madam?’ the taxi driver interrupted her thoughts. She opened her eyes. He was looking at her in the rearview mirror with a frown.

  ‘Sick? No, I’m not sick,’ said Sibilla, puzzled.

  ‘Sick,’ he persisted. ‘Like mwenyes, how they wear their hair…’

  ‘Oh!’ Sibilla clapped her hands, the hairs on them shivering like tassels. ‘You mean Sikh. No, I’m not Sikh. But my son-in-law, he is from India.’

  ‘Oh-oh?’ he said. Black Zambians always pretended to be shocked that people intermarried.

  ‘Yes, this is my granddaughter.’

  Naila waved at him and grinned. He waved back. Sibilla was about to ask how many Sikhs he knew personally when he slowed and turned into the compound. He inched into its busy inner recesses until there was simply no more road to traverse. Sibilla paid his exorbitant price as Naila stepped out, eyes wide. Sibilla joined her, breathing in the familiar smells of the compound. She felt comfortable here, among the poor. She understood the constant complaining that surrounded them like the droning of insects. They were right: it was all just luck, just circumstance.

  She herself had grown up a servant in a tiny cabin in Italy only to end up a bwana in a big house in Zambia. Naila had grown up here in ‘the Third World’, but in a sheltered part of it. When she wasn’t at school, she was at home with her sisters, helping their mother sell the dross of their bodies. It made sense that the girl would be skittish in Kalingalinga, her eyes darting and her shoes stumbling on rickety boards and broken concrete as they picked their way towards its centre.

  Boys and girls dressed in faded school uniforms and salaula strolled by. Old women sat in the shade, shouting to each other as they adjusted their chitenges under spatulate breasts. Young women walked with babies on their backs and buckets on their heads, the water tower in the distance carrying its oblong crown with equal grace.