We Are All Birds of Uganda

by Hafsa Zayyan

  ‘Why not?’ he asks, unable to stop himself.

  She sighs. ‘I’m old, Sameer. Past marriageable age.’

  ‘What does that mean?’ He had always assumed she was the same age as him.

  ‘I’m thirty-six, very soon to be thirty-seven.’

  ‘OK. So?’

  ‘I wasn’t interested in marriage when I was younger. And now I’m older, guys aren’t interested any more. So, yeah.’

  Sameer opens his mouth to say something – but all the things he is thinking of saying sound stupid even inside his head and he’s not sure they are the right thing to say anyway. Women can be funny about their age. So instead, he says: ‘Thank you for everything – for being my friend out here.’

  She fidgets with the edge of her sleeve. ‘You’re welcome,’ she says automatically. ‘I’ve enjoyed it.’

  It is a strange goodbye; he has that feeling, when you leave the house for the airport, or when you’re halfway there, that you have forgotten something. There is an awkward moment where he thinks they might embrace, but she raises a hand and waves, smiling, as she backs away into the house and disappears.

  That night, Sameer struggles to sleep. Maryam’s words ring in his head: God conscious. He cannot stop thinking about the fact that God saved his friend’s life. That God brought him to Uganda – to Maryam – just like God brought his grandfather back to his true home to die.

  At 3 a.m., he wakes from a half-dream, the memory of it evading him, and wonders if he is in love with her. The thought seems silly, childish even; he barely knows her, he has only spent time with her on a handful of occasions, he has barely touched her, let alone kissed her (can you fall in love with someone you have never even kissed?) – and yet. He leans over the bed, retrieves his iPad from where it is charging and types skyscannner.com into the Safari app. Before he really knows what he is doing, he has bought a single from Entebbe to England in two weeks’ time. The ticket was stupidly expensive, but he doesn’t care: a weight has been lifted from his shoulders. For a moment, he sits there on the bed, unable to stop grinning. Then, quite quickly, he wonders if he has gone crazy. He will check into a hotel of course; he does not want to be a burden on the Shahs.

  He reaches for his phone, surprised to see a notification: WhatsApp, Maryam. He opens the message, heart pounding.

  Maryam (01.51): I enjoyed spending time with you

  Maryam (01.51): Hope you come back soon

  His eyes, dry from the lack of sleep, stare at the message. She wants to see him again. She actually wants to see him again. This thought rises like a bubble of confidence: he wasn’t an idiot for extending his trip, the decision was justified. Now, he knows she likes him; now, he is sure of it.

  Sameer (03.08): I might have extended my trip by a couple of weeks … When are you next free?

  There is something new about the morning when Sameer wakes up; it is somehow different from the others. For the first time that he can remember, he feels a strange yearning to learn more about the shadowy edges of the religion that he was born into, which he has half practised, half-heartedly, his whole life.

  The national mosque is not really walking distance from the Shahs’ house, but the day is bright and clear and Sameer enjoys the hour-long stroll through the suburbs of Kololo, into Nakasero and down towards Old Kampala. On the way, he comes across a small Islamic bookstore and he spends some time rifling through the available material, eventually selecting a rather large but beautifully patterned hardback translation of the Quran.

  He arrives at the mosque just as the call to the early-afternoon prayer rings out. The group of men (all locals) gathered together to pray is small, less than ten, but they welcome the Muslim muzungu with huge smiles. It is this feeling of being accepted by strangers because they are bound together by their common belief, because they share a secret which makes them part of an exclusive club, that Sameer craves. He lines up with the men and they pray together, shoulders touching.

  After the prayer is over, Sameer takes a seat on the carpeted floor, leaning against a wall close to the breezy archway doors. He opens his translation. The introduction explains that he should eschew any preconceptions; that the Quran is unlike any book he has ever read; that he cannot expect to read it in a linear format, front to back, but rather it is more easily accessible by identifying a theme and finding passages relevant to that theme. He flips through the volume and stops at a random page. Surah 30: The Romans. Sameer’s eyes are drawn down the page to the words at verse 21:

  And of His Signs is that He created for you mates from your own kind that you may find peace in them and He has put love and mercy between you; surely in this there are Signs for those who reflect.

  Why did his fingers land on this of all pages?

  He reads on to verse 22:

  And of His Signs is the creation of the heavens and the earth, and the diversity of your languages and your colours; indeed there are Signs in this for those who are wise.

  Sameer studies the words, reading them over and over again. He has always been able to recite the flowering Arabic, but until now, he had never bothered to learn what it meant.

  That evening, the Shahs take Sameer out to dinner at an expensive restaurant in Kololo. ‘I’ve barely seen you the past few days,’ Aliyah complains, pouting at Sameer across the table, ‘and now you’re already leaving!’

  ‘Actually, about that,’ he takes sip of water. ‘I’m staying another two weeks.’ He catches Mr and Mrs Shah looking at each other across the table and quickly adds: ‘I’ve booked myself into a hotel – you’ve been so generous, but I’ve imposed enough.’

  ‘Well, that’s wonderful,’ Mrs Shah smiles. ‘What prompted you to stay?’

  ‘Because you’ve decided to pack in the legal career and start working with us?’ Mr Shah suggests hopefully.

  ‘Because he obviously wasn’t ready to say goodbye to me,’ Aliyah says, batting her eyelashes flirtatiously at Sameer.

  ‘Um …’ Sameer laughs nervously and takes another sip of water. ‘I just want to travel a bit, you know – see the rest of Uganda.’

  ‘Ooh, where do you want to go?’ Aliyah asks, leaning forward, green eyes wide, head resting in her palm.

  ‘Not sure, haven’t made a real plan yet,’ Sameer says vaguely.

  ‘Well, let me know if you want any help. I could definitely give you some tips.’

  ‘You’d better not be a stranger,’ Mr Shah adds. ‘I expect to see you stopping by the office and the house.’

  ‘Of course,’ Sameer says. The Shahs have been nothing but generous to him and when the bill comes, he insists on paying for it.

  It is slightly strange going from the Shahs’ house to a hotel; he’d got used to the house and its endless number of rooms, to Ama and Paul, to the sunshine-filled tennis court. He’d got used to going to work in the mornings with Mr Shah. But when he arrives at the hotel the following morning, lounging by the poolside until he is able to check in, he finds that it’s also a bit of a relief to be alone.

  He’s aware that he needs to tell his parents, who are expecting him back tomorrow, that he has decided to stay, but he is not quite ready to do it yet. He will tell them at the last moment, when he has to – as he always does – and his mother will be sad and disappointed – as she always is. His father is not speaking to him anyway, and Zara will not care. He opens WhatsApp and rereads the message he received from Maryam earlier that morning.

  Maryam (08.23): Imran is going to Mbarara tomorrow to pick up some things for the store. I can try to swap one of my shifts if you want to go with him to see Mburo National Park?

  A flutter of excitement moves through him. He immediately flips open his iPad to look for a lodge they could stay in.

  Imran and Maryam collect him from the hotel on the day of the trip. Sameer is glad of this, guiltily wanting to avoid seeing Musa and Ibrahim, wondering what they would think of his extended trip, what kind of obligations they might believe he was assuming by deciding
to stay. Even the thought of seeing Imran makes him a little nervous. But Imran barely seems to notice that his trip has been extended from its original length, and when he sees Maryam for the first time since he said goodbye, any worry about what her family might think disappears. The sight of her, when he had come so close to never seeing her again, makes him realise that he would have moved mountains just to see her again.

  ‘So what have you learned about Ugandans in the weeks you’ve been here?’ Imran asks Sameer as the journey begins. Imran is driving, Maryam in the passenger seat. Sameer sits patiently in the back, surprised to find himself missing his partner in crime, Ruqaya, and wondering why she had not come.

  ‘What have I learned? Well, you’re always smiling. Oh, and you have your own version of English. Sometimes I have no idea what you’re saying.’

  ‘Ah. U-glish.’

  ‘It’s taken some getting used to. I was so confused the first time I asked for directions. Slope that way, branch here, shall I give you a push?’

  The three of them laugh. ‘I’m guessing you got lost with those directions,’ Imran says.

  ‘But you can’t tell anyone that of course,’ Maryam says, ‘because being lost means something completely different in U-glish.’

  ‘What does it mean?’

  ‘Lost is like, it’s been too long since I’ve seen you,’ she says softly, looking over her shoulder momentarily to catch Sameer’s eye.

  ‘What you need to realise about Ugandans is that directions are not important anyway,’ Imran says. ‘No Ugandan is ever on time for anything!’

  ‘Well, that’s one thing we have in common,’ Sameer says, laughing.

  Mburo is perfect, and for a long time he will look back on the trip as the highlight of his time in Uganda. Imran drops them off at the lodge and excuses himself to go into the nearby town of Mbarara; Sameer and Maryam, left alone, check into their respective rooms and take a long, lazy lunch as they look out over the savannah and at the small klipspringers standing on the rocky outcrop around them. Sitting with her over lunch and watching her animated face as she chatters away happily, he knows that she has a hold over him in a way no person has ever had before: he would do anything within his power to make her happy. Proving the point, after lunch, Maryam suggests the horseback safari, and although Sameer has never ridden a horse before, he agrees because she wants to do it (and regrets it later when the horse, which he finds himself completely unable to control, canters across the grass, smashing his balls spectacularly hard against the stiff leather saddle). They are led by a guide across the grassy plains, getting within touching distance of zebras and buffalo; the guide asks if they would like him to take a picture of them together and they laugh in the realisation that neither of them has brought a phone. This is it with her: the rest of world becomes irrelevant.

  In the early evening, Imran returns from Mbarara and the three of them have dinner together, watching as the lodge’s staff coax the shyest, cutest bushbabies out from the trees for their guests’ entertainment. The evening is brought in with a chill; slapping mosquitos from their arms and ankles, they sit close to the fireplace and play two games of Scrabble after dinner. Sameer, as the only Englishman, is slightly embarrassed to lose a game to each of Maryam and Imran – he insists that he had terrible letters and asks for a final game, but Imran, laughing, says that he is going to bed.

  ‘There’s no moon tonight,’ Maryam says, once Imran is gone. ‘Let’s step outside to look at the stars.’

  He follows her as she walks out from under the lodge’s large wooden awning, led by torchlight past the still, black swimming pool and onto the rocks overlooking the lake. Maryam surveys the rocks with the torch and sits down, patting the area next to her for him to sit, and he obeys. ‘Lie back,’ she whispers, stretching out her own body onto the rock. He copies, making sure that the length of their bodies are touching.

  Spread out nakedly above them in the black velvet of the cloudless night, there are stars as Sameer has never seem them before. There are millions – or billions – spraying the sky; these are the stars of the galaxy that he has seen in pictures, twinkling whites streaked along the hazy smudge of the Milky Way. The careful flourish of an artist’s hand against a blank canvas. He stares at the blackness and brilliance and depth of it all, and is stunned into silence. Suddenly he feels very small.

  ‘Subhanallah,’ Maryam breathes next to him. Taking him completely by surprise, she takes a hold of his hand. Her fingers are cold and he rubs the crevices of her joints.

  ‘What does that mean?’ he asks, unable to tear his eyes away from the sky. ‘By the grace of God?’

  ‘It means God is perfect,’ she replies.

  Under the canopy of the star-washed night sky, holding Maryam’s small hand in his own, Sameer thinks about his relationship with God. He has a long way to go, but Maryam has awakened something inside him, a hunger for knowledge. He did not know before he met her, that beyond a partner in mind and body, he was looking for a partner in spirit; but now that he is lying next to her it seems so obvious that anything else would leave him incomplete. I think I’m in love with you, he wants to tell her. He recognises that her body is dilating towards him, that she is opening like a flower. But he does not do anything or say anything. She is thirty-six years old, looking after a sick father and living in Uganda; he is moving to Singapore in a few short weeks to start building his career in earnest. After these weeks are over, they will never see each other again. So, instead, they lie there in comfortable silence, hands still interlinked, until their backs start to hurt, signalling that it is time to go.

  The next two weeks pass in a blur. Sameer spends his days looking further into how he might run a business from Kampala, or in the mosque, reading the Quran. He has stopped by Mr Shah’s office several times, Mr Shah answering his questions about starting a business, but politely declines offers to have dinner at the house. Instead, he spends his evenings at Maryam’s house, talking to Ibrahim and Musa (who barely registered surprise at his appearance), letting Ruqaya and the other children play with his hair. Sometimes, he will meet Maryam for breakfast in the morning before she goes to work; once, he met her outside the hospital straight after a shift and they went for an evening walk. They never speak of his grandfather’s letters any more, but he asks her to tell him about Uganda’s colonial legacy from the Ugandan perspective, and she tells him that in the Asian expulsion perhaps a dozen Asians were murdered but hundreds of thousands of Ugandans were killed. Her knowledge thrills him and makes him want to learn more, to better himself. He spends hours on his iPad, reading about Uganda’s history, and walks through the ring-road-fenced enclaves of Nakasero and Kololo with fresh eyes, seeing for the first time the Asian buffer between this Kampala and the rest of Kampala. He reads about colonial favouritism towards to the Buganda people, and imagines the British evaporating from Kampala on independence, leaving the Asians – facilitators and beneficiaries of British colonial policies – caught between the elite and the masses. Maryam warns him that a tension remains, although its parameters differ; it has morphed to take shape against the newest threat, the Chinese, tolerated as a result of the Ugandan debt burden, unable in this day and age to be expelled by crude policies.

  As his trip once again draws to a close, Sameer starts to feel a familiar and horrible sense of desperation. And there it is, like the fleeting passing of any period of happiness in life: his last evening in Kampala. They are back at the same steakhouse, and the only thought running through his mind is that he cannot believe that he never even had the chance to kiss her.

  The dinner is over before he knows it, and they walk back to her car in silence, slowly. Maryam rummages for her keys in her handbag for several minutes, muttering that she cannot find them; she eventually retrieves them and unlocks the car. They both stand in front of the car, not moving.

  ‘Sameer –’ she begins, at exactly the same time as he begins to say her name, and they laugh awkwardly, too loudly and for
too long, as if this might prolong their time.

  ‘You first,’ Sameer says when the laughter has died to nothing and there is only the close night air, thick with the sound of crickets.

  ‘I wasn’t going to say anything, really, just, you know, that it’s been fun.’

  ‘Oh. Yes – for me too.’

  ‘Well, have an amazing time in Singapore,’ she garbles, avoiding his gaze and reaching for the car door, ‘make sure to keep in touch –’

  ‘Maryam.’

  He puts his hand on her arm and gently removes it from the car door: there is no resistance. He takes hold of both her arms and pulls her towards him; pulls her closer until their foreheads are almost touching.

  ‘The thing is,’ he says softly, knowing that he is about to say what is in his heart, ‘I’m in love with you.’

  She tilts her chin up so that her full lips graze the surface of his. It is barely a kiss but is enough to send his body into overdrive. He can feel her heart pounding through her slender frame.

  ‘You barely know me,’ she whispers uncertainly. ‘People can seem very nice and you think at a particular time that you get along. Then, well, they turn out to be crazy. Only time can tell.’

  He wonders what experience she has been through that has made her say this, and he burns as he imagines her feeling something for someone else, for anyone else. Her eyes search his face, and when he doesn’t respond immediately, she tiptoes to kiss him again, harder this time, so he can feel blood rising to his mouth in response. He has never been more certain about anything; instinct tells him that with her by his side, things will always be all right.

  ‘I’ll take that risk,’ he says when she pulls away. ‘Will you?’

  Part III

  * * *

  21

  Sameer is simultaneously exhilarated and nauseous, as if he is about to go onto a stage to make a speech; loud thumping in his chest, uncontrollable and wild; mouth dry, hands twisting nervously in his lap. He has never felt like this before, not ever – not even with Raha (which now seems so juvenile, so silly – he thinks of his parents’ attempts to interfere as harmless, even with fondness: they only did it out of love). There is colour and beauty in everything; a sad story in the news brings a tear to his eyes, a happy story does the same. His mind drifts to Maryam constantly; she is in his days and in his dreams. He pictures the way she looks when she smiles, the dimples which create that impression of mischief and innocence at the same time; the interminable black of her eyes; the fullness of the pink, wet lips that she brushed against his own only twice before he left Uganda. He sees them lying on the grass outside the Baha’i Temple, her head on his stomach, while she tells him about her favourite childhood memory, while he traces the lines on her palms with a finger.