The Magic of Saida (10 page)

“Say, Doc, how about giving me a checkup for a day’s rent? You give me a clean bill of health, I write off a day from your bill.”

Beneath the crude humour Kamal discerned a lurking fear. But he declined Markham’s offer.

“I’ve stopped practising, Ed. And I am not licensed here.”

Yes, he’ll have coffee with his breakfast, he said to the waiter, who left with the order, and Markham continued,

“This is Africa, Doc. Two days’ room and board?

“Aah,” he waved away Kamal’s demurral, and confided, “I think my prostate’s killing me.”

The red face, the yellow teeth, the hard breathing, the silver stubble. The acrid odour. Kamal was not about to physically check the man’s prostate, and gave him a look to say exactly that. “You could get a blood test, Ed,” he suggested. “The local medic will have the equipment.”

But Markham too was medically equipped. He hobbled off and brought back a cardboard box.

“I’m not licensed,” Kamal repeated, his attention drawn by blister packs of antibiotics and other medicines in the company of a fat paperback handbook. He noticed the blood pressure kit and instinctively pulled it out, and began taking Markham’s pressure. Then he took the pulse.

“Just as I suspected, Ed. Not good.”

Markham put on a rueful face. “Your advice.”

“Less fat, less salt,” Kamal recited the mantra. “And exercise. Or one day soon you’ll drop dead, like that. Or you’ll suffer a stroke,
and John will not be your nurse for long. And the prostate—get it checked in Dar. Soon.”

By this time there was a queue of five people, all the kitchen hands and John the barman, waiting for the doc, grinning sheepishly, sleeves rolled up.

Sulking, Markham was at the bar helping himself to a whisky.

Having checked the blood pressures—all excellent, Kamal reassured his five patients—he made to attend to his breakfast. Just then Lateef arrived, and stumbled on a chair as he dramatically raised a desisting hand.

“You are not to eat that!”

Kamal was halfway into getting to his mouth a morsel of sausage, cut from one of the two on his plate that the waiter had enticed him with, having arrived on the morning’s flight from Dar.

He looked up at his friend, dressed today in a kanzu and cap. He must have been to prayer.

“Why not?” Kamal asked, knowing full well that it was not the cholesterol value that had drawn the objection.

“Daktari, it is pork.” Nguruwe. Haram.

“Perhaps.”

“It is not good, sir. Daktari, you have fallen from your ways. How can I help you this way?”

“I don’t know, Lateef.”

He was not the man he was, yes. He couldn’t be. Then what was he doing here? Did he have a right to return and interfere with lives with which he had lost connection? What would Saida expect from him? She had called him, a part of him believed that; she must have called him over the years. These thoughts and their many elaborations would torment him later, tortures designed for his particular insecurities, but for now they fleetingly made themselves felt as he surrendered the two sausages, putting them on a separate plate that Lateef delivered hastily to the kitchen, where presumably the staff ate them.

Lateef returned, puffed up with satisfaction. “Good, sir. You are a good man.”

The waiter soon brought a tray for him, and Kamal felt the odd wave of pleasure watching him fall to it.

Lateef had come especially to condole with him regarding the previous day’s disappointment. He already had a solution. Ali’s father’s sister, Mzee Omari’s daughter, lived with him behind the medical shop. It was to her that Kamal should talk. He would go himself and arrange a meeting with her. That would be just wonderful, Kamal told him. All he required was one piece of information.

The rest of that day Kamal spent by himself. To begin with, after breakfast he chose to sit at the beach with a book, under an umbrella. The sky was perfectly clear, the breeze delightful. But he was not used to such idleness. The life he had left behind had been hectic and crowded. He had patients at three clinics, he managed to visit two of them every day. Now, sitting here and waiting, he felt listless. Everything proceeded slowly in these parts, he reminded himself; he would have to be patient. Bado kidogo, wasn’t that what they said?—not yet, there is still time. A fisherman came by, holding in both hands a large fish for sale, and one of the kitchen hands hurried out to negotiate the price and buy it for dinner. The sun was gradually rising over the ocean, glistening over the wavetips; a few dhows were out. Kamal dipped into his book, an anthology of Swahili verse he had brought with him, in which however Mzee Omari bin Tamim was represented by only one entry. He had heard the poetry of his mother tongue all his young life, but it was only much later, as an adult and when he had gone away, that he had taken the pains to learn all about it: its history and tradition, its rules of prosody, its noted practitioners. How different, the dignified and elitist concerns of that poetry, and how naive, compared to the mischievous rap—the Bongo Flava—that the youth delighted in now. Every instinct, fed by such observations, told him he was on a quixotic, hopeless quest—every instinct but one: that Saida had called, Saida to whom in a passionate moment he had promised that he would return for her.

In the afternoon, after a simple lunch in Masoko, at a restaurant recommended by Lateef, he strolled over to the harbour. The prospectors’ ship, a small, squat steel vessel with a square bow, was busy receiving attentions from its crew; one of the Filipino crew waved at
him. Kamal had had a chat with the two Dutchmen and learned that their work was done and they would be flying off to Mombasa, the ship to follow at some lowly speed. An idle motorboat was ready to take Kamal to the Island to see the ruins. As soon as he had bargained the fare and sat down inside, the boat filled up with passengers who had been waiting under a tree for a dhow to take them across. Now subsidized by his fare they would pay nothing, or only a token. He didn’t mind. The sea was choppy and the ride took ten minutes.

He had not been to the Island, Kisiwani, ever since that day he had come on a school trip, when they had met the bearded archaeologist. The ruins of the ancient sultanates were now a UN Heritage Site, as a sign proclaimed. There was nobody else visiting, and Kamal meandered through the site by himself, noticing that the newly posted descriptions—of the Big House, the mosques, the graves—seemed to have been taken directly from a book he had in his possession. It was impossible to imagine, he mused, a different form of life here, with luxurious houses of stone, containing baths and recreation rooms, and mosques with multiple domes and columns, when there was leisure and wealth to create beauty. He wondered where the slaves—the ones the French captain Morice took annually—were kept: here on the island, or on the mainland? In later times, when the Island kingdom was long extinct, it was to Kilwa the slaves were taken and sold.

A gang of small boys followed him at a distance, and when he paused for them and greeted them, they walked with him, past an immense baobab tree to a small settlement where he sat down and asked for tea. The houses were of mud and thatch, and there was no electricity, and no employment that he could see.

On the way back to the shore he came across a solid brick building, above the entrance of which was a sign indicating a madrassa. He stepped in, and was met by a polite man in kanzu and cap, who was the teacher. There were sixty-three students, the teacher said, when Kamal inquired. They were all boys and came from all across the southern region of the country. All were on scholarship and boarded here. He showed Kamal the weekly schedule of classes, written on a blackboard. The instruction available was Islamic and in Arabic, but there was some English and math too.

Kamal phoned the boatman on his cell and was picked up. Back on the other side, the water having risen, he had to take his shoes off to wade to the shore. It was no longer easy, he discovered, to walk barefoot on the pebbles.

He sat at a table at the hotel’s small patio overlooking the sea, musing to himself, waiting for the chef to sound the dinner gong, which he always did with much gusto, bringing sudden life and cheer to the place. It was dusk, the hour of mysterious portents. Where he sat, the beach was empty, though from somewhere came the disembodied voices of two men out on a stroll. Earlier, on his way back from his Island tour, he had splurged on several newspapers at a vendor’s stand in Masoko. The stand had appeared like a miracle on the roadside; he had not seen it before. Nobody read newspapers in these parts, as far as he could tell, or anything else. In Kilwa he had looked foolish merely asking where he could buy one. He thought about the sign he had noticed behind the vendor—painted in crude caps on a board nailed to an electric pole, advertising the services of a mganga, a traditional doctor, for problems of love, sickness, business, virility. A mobile number was provided. Perhaps that might be his last resort? How far was he willing to go in his search for Saida?

The dull drone of an outboard motor, a thread of sound in the pitch-darkness of the sea, drew him away from his consciousness, until Lateef had arrived and rescued him.

“Sir—you think much,” Lateef said, sounding cheerfully solicitous beside him. “It must be about this woman, Saida. Tell me about her. Eti, she was a good woman?”

“She was my friend when we were children. We played together. I taught her English and math, and she taught me Arabic writing. Our mothers were like sisters. Then we got separated, and now I want to find her.”

“You came from Canada to find her.”

“Yes.”

“Enh.”

He had been asked a half question to which he gave a half answer, and received a grunt of approval. He had come all the way just to see this local girl with whom he had played. Lateef was impressed.

“Sir—tell me about Canada. Does it have the sea, eti?”

“Yes, it does. You have seen the map of America? And it has the sea on both sides?”

Lateef agreed.

“Well, Canada is just to the north of it, you see. It too has the sea on both sides—Atlantic Ocean and Pacific Ocean.” And it has a sea on top, but he didn’t say that.

“It’s big then.”

“Yes, it’s big—like from here to Nigeria,” Kamal said, taking a wild guess.

“The marvels of Allah never cease.” Ya Mungu ni mengi.

Lateef became thoughtful; he looked around and glanced behind him into the bar. There was only John there, standing idly at his post. Finally, in a somewhat muted tone, Lateef said,

“They have agreed, sir. Saida’s family have agreed. Ali’s younger mother, Fatuma, will talk to you. I explained that you are one of us and a daktari, and she was impressed. Here we worship doctors. We will go and see her tomorrow.”

“Thank you, Lateef. God bless you.”

“You are welcome, bwana.”

“You came all the way here—you could have phoned me, Lateef.”

“I was in the area, bwana. I thought I would come and see how you were doing.”

He had a soft drink and left.

Watching him go out past the bar and through the dining hall, returning greetings, Kamal had the distinct feeling that he was still under observation; the door had only been partially opened to him. But what could there possibly be to hide or hold back? Why had his simple search become such a runaround? He knew this for certain: if he had not put aside the two pork sausages that morning, he would never have had a second chance with the family.

The gong had already sounded, and he went into the dining lounge.

That evening, sitting in the lounge, Kamal put himself to duty writing letters. Markham was alone at the bar, chatting with two customers, the reverberation of his drawl like the rumble of very
distant thunder. Candle lamps flickered on a few random tables and the dry, acrid smoke from a mosquito coil swirled up from the floor somewhere, thinly tainting the evening air. Music played as usual in the background, and from somewhere came the sound of a soccer commentary. He felt strangely calm and contented. This was his escape, this lonely tropical night, the insistently quick guitar twang in the background only serving to sound its emptiness. It could have been terribly romantic, with the right companion. A good wine, the medium-bodied Chianti he liked, sinful lamb or rabbit, espresso and cognac; slow adult sex. But with the right companion, there would be no limbo, there would always be that preordained ending. The return ticket. As it was, this loneliness should be relished. There was no war in Iraq or Afghanistan, the Dow Jones did not exist. The media did not snipe at you with shock and awe, breaking news every minute; hucksters didn’t pop up all the time, with promises of better life, endless life, more money, more erection and more sperm; the phone rarely rang. Of course he was connected, but that other world was a long way away, on another planet, its signal dim.

He wrote to his son, Hanif, and to his daughter, Karima. Platitudes. What else but suggest bounds you expected them to transgress, provide a superego or an elastic band of safety. In his childhood there were no bounds, just obligations and love. His one fear in life was that he’d lose his mother, the dearest thing to him. He lost her. But to his Canadian kids and their cohorts such fears were entirely alien. What they knew was want, that fuel of the consumer index.

He decided he would not mail the letters after all. What was a letter but a strong signal? He did not need to send one of those now. He did not want a reply. He would remain silent as an unknown planet, going about his business somewhere. The kids were taken care of, wherever they were.

Across the channel, the Island lay like a shadow, two dim pinpoints of light visible upon it. The twenty-first century, and still no electricity there. Where I come from, on that planet we leave lights on casually, cities light up the sky, and we contrive to feel cold in the summer. The sea was calm, black and receding. The lounge had emptied, the few other guests retired. At the bar, without turning to look, Kamal sensed Markham’s presence. Another escapee from
out there, come to eke out the remaining years of his life. There was perhaps fifteen minutes of probing silence between them, before Markham shuffled over with two drinks and sat down. Kamal said thanks.