The Magic of Saida (2 page)

A few days after that, Hanif and Karima departed for Canada, leaving him, they said, in my custody: “Martin, he’s in your hands.” Kamal was sitting up on the reclining bed as they embraced him and took their leave. It was a sad moment to watch, but the parent and the kids had had a talk and apparently come to an understanding.

“Don’t you want to return home?” I asked him once we were alone.

We exchanged a look, and he replied, haltingly, in a low voice, “I must find out first. I don’t know … I don’t know what happened … I don’t know if I’ve seen her …”

I did not need to ask who.

Over the weeks that followed I saw him regularly, and he seemed to welcome my attention. He was a lonely man, and not only in this
city, where he knew no one besides me and an old schoolteacher; a lonely man anywhere, who had after three and a half decades come back in search of someone he had loved once. What he discovered was his nightmare. It had left him with a dreadful uncertainty. What exactly had he seen and heard during that bizarre ordeal? How much was true, how much, simply, hallucination? He wanted to talk, I was there to listen. I was his comfort, his sounding board, his nurse—not the first publisher, surely, to find himself in such a role.

Her actual name was Saida, he informed me. He knew her until age eleven, when his mother sent him away to become an Indian. He said this as casually as if it were the most normal thing to do. They were from Kilwa, the coastal region to the south whose recorded history and culture go back a thousand years and more—John Milton’s “Quiloa”—though recent neglect has seen it waste away into the dust of obscurity. They were an African boy and girl: their single mothers were like sisters; her grandfather was the beloved poet Mzee Omari Tamim. Their companionship had been accepted, even encouraged. He thought he would marry her. He could never understand why he had been led on, to follow his fool’s path and love her, only to be sent away to pine for her.

It was to find her that he had returned.

A successful and driven doctor in Canada, he had reached a stage in his life of material abundance, in which however—as he obliquely put it—his personal ties had weakened. And so one day he stepped off the treadmill, allowed an old regret to awaken, and suddenly set off to find the girl he had known as a child, keep his promise to her that he would return. That there was more to his urgency, I could guess. Wearing round his neck a tawiz, a Quranic charm given him by her when they first parted, he took a flight to Dar es Salaam. From here he took a bus to Kilwa. It was burning hot in December, and despite some talk of bandits on the way, this is what he preferred, travelling over land—the sight of each bush, each blade of grass, each tree so loaded with sentiment as to grip the heart of the returning native.

Thus he arrived in Kilwa.

Kilwa was all history, Kamal said. The past haunted from the ruins and graves; it was there in the references to the Germans who had ruled here once, and the slaves who were sold here; he heard it in his mother’s tales and he heard it recited—majestically—by the old poet, Saida’s grandfather.

Kamal was nine years old when Mzee Omari began his final work, his magnum opus, with much fanfare. It was to be called
The Composition of the Coming of the Modern Age
, and it would relate how we came to be what we are on this eastern coast of Africa.

Mzee Omari Tamim returned from the mosque as usual that Friday afternoon. He wore his embroidered kofia and a crisp, pure white kanzu, and this being a special occasion, he wore also a black vest. On his feet were his old leather slippers. The skin of his face despite his age was a smooth dark brown like polished wood, the lines on his forehead feather-light. He was a man of medium height, with a slim and compact body. There were people standing on the porch whom he greeted as he passed. He paused at the entrance; the corridor was also filled with well-wishers, who hushed upon seeing him. His granddaughter Saida came and took his hand, guided him through the crowd to his room. Mzee Omari entered and sat down on his haunches upon the mat, which was spread close to the back wall. On the coarse whitewashed wall in front of him hung a couple of ancient photographs inside their unfinished wooden frames, approximately aligned; a side wall carried a framed certificate in the strange letters of the German language; otherwise the walls were bare. In a corner was his rolled-up bundle of sleeping mat and thin mattress, and beside it his precious portable writing desk.

From where he sat the old man looked towards the open door and commanded his wife, who stood in the corridor with others, “Mwana Juma, bring me my table for writing”; Mwana Juma went and picked up the small portable desk and handed it to him. “My son, Shomari, hand me the fine paper from Syria”; a young man in his twenties came in through the doorway with a sheaf of notepaper, which was actually bought from a local Indian store. In olden times, it was said, the poets always preferred the fine white paper from Syria, which was excellent for calligraphy. “And my little granddaughter,” continued Mzee Omari, “you, Saida, bring me my pen from Europe and the ink from India—and the boy, Hamida’s son, Kamalu, can come with you.” Kamal followed the girl as she gave her grandfather the ink bottle, and he handed the old man the long pen. Mzee Omari waved both hands in the air to dismiss them all and they, having indulged him in his beginning of his grand project, a poetic history, retreated.

Mzee Omari then looked up in front of him and called upon his djinn. “Idris, my friend and servant, fly me to days past, so that, looking down upon this land, I can see again what transpired and complete my verses about the coming of the modern age, when the European met the African, and how people followed their leaders and like the wind fighting the ocean took up arms against the Germans, and each time fell to the
pe-pe-pe!
reports of the machine guns.”

In Arabic letters, in the Swahili language, Mzee Omari began to write.

Outside the room were heard cries of “Subhanallah! God give him a long life. A safe journey.” There was some clapping. Then the people departed.

But Mzee Omari was near blind. How could he see clearly the dots and curves of his script? Distinguish
te
from
nun
, or
be
from
ye
? Didn’t his lines run into one another? It was widely believed, it was said with awe that his djinn held his elbow and guided his hand steadily as he wrote. And so those four-line verses, those utenzi, had power, they had truth.

Having been treated to a mandazi and a shot of kahawa by the poet’s friends sitting outside on the front porch, and taking one
steaming roll of mandazi for his mama wrapped in a newspaper scrap, as he rounded the house on his way home Kamal decided to take a peek through the old man’s little window. Perched with both legs on a stone lying next to the wall, hanging on by the single window bar, he peered inside and stared at Mzee Omari scribbling slowly and intently on the paper with nib and holder. No djinn there. Suddenly Kamal felt a stinging slap on the side of his face and went flying to the ground. He stood up, eyes teary, and picked up the mandazi and dusted it with his hand. There was no one around, but he knew it to be Idris the djinn who had so violently slapped him.

Kamal never peeked through that dark little window again. But he would listen to the old man recite his verses to listeners outside on the porch, or at the square on the beachfront, seated on his favourite tree trunk; and once the Tanganyika Broadcasting Corporation came and recorded him, and the following Sunday his voice was heard on the radio to great acclaim throughout the town.

He had returned. But the Kilwa that Kamal saw, as he stepped off the bus at the busy crossroad and looked around, wrung his heart. It was to see a beloved again, now aged; a mother, a lover. Every eye was upon him, it seemed, as he abruptly sighted then took the few steps to the old German monument around which he had played as a child. It stood now forlorn amidst a dump and parking space, a tall white stone memorializing two foreign gentlemen, Herr Krieger and Herr Hessel, who had died in 1888, both in their thirties. They had meant nothing to him. That they were beheaded in Kilwa, during a brief insurrection against its colonization, he discovered much later. He turned around and walked across the road to the tea shop, sat down and ordered chai rangi—black tea—and mandazi and steeled himself. Calmer, he strolled to the end of the road, turned at the boma, the great fortress and administrative headquarters of former times, now, he saw, a hideous ruin of exposed brick punctured with gaping holes. He came to stand at the edge of the town square overlooking the sea.

Try to be cold, objective, he admonished himself, things change, you’ve changed; but he couldn’t stop the images flitting through his mind, couldn’t suppress the outrage. This plaza would fill with people come to relax and catch the breeze on an evening or a Sunday afternoon. Vendors went around selling goodies to eat. In the morning, the sun just peeping out from the horizon, the town’s Indian men came in their singlets to do their exercises. Some evenings Mzee Omari would sit on a tree trunk (Kamal couldn’t see it now) and recite to an audience of rapt admirers in the dark, a solitary lamp beside him. This sanctified ground, now brutalized by encroachment:
a cow pen, a bar, a government shed built centre stage at water’s edge so as to steal the sea view … five minutes from what had been his home, a short walk along the creek from the lagoon where he would meet her, where he last saw her. What hope could it give him, this memory’s violation? We leave so many things behind, why not this one, why not her? Why relive the guilt? Did he want to take this road, wherever it led to—disappointment, heartache? But he was already on it, he had waited a long time.

The town had long possessed him, he mused; always known as a home to spirits, it let loose a spirit to come and haunt him. As he stood looking out at the ocean, the Island, Kisiwani, loomed distantly to his right, its ancient ruins a dim blur. On a school trip to the Island once, they had been met by a short, bearded white man, Mr. Archaeologist, who had shown them around the ruins and attempted to narrate the Island’s history to them. Once upon a time there was a great city on the Island, known all over the world, he began, and gave up right there, wistfully watched the oblivious boys racing away screaming in all directions. What did they care about the past.

Now it was he who had come from abroad to search for a past. Kilwa had called and bid, and now he was here at the “
pays
of my haunting, to feed my obsession.” He had left half a lifetime ago, more; he had made a life elsewhere, planted roots there; and still Kilwa haunted. He had headed out, he said, when there was the world to see; he had seen it. When there were triumphs to achieve, he’d had his modest ones. “I’m a rich man,” he said to me in a tone I could not quite place. He was not boasting; I wished he were, then I could have judged him. I did feel a twinge of envy. It occurred to me that there were many here in this city, in this country, who would have killed to be in his shoes. In Edmonton.

A haze drifted over the shimmering sea, lending to the far distance a myopic vagueness, an impression that a mere lens would suffice to sharpen the horizon; closer at hand half a dozen small dhows were beached, their sails down, waiting for the tide to rise. A covered cart loaded with salt, perhaps, creaked its way across the wet sand to meet them. The clean, regular beat of a hammer on the woodwork
stitching its way to the land. Come evening the dhows would rise and sail, for Zanzibar and Pemba and Mafia. Kamal looked around desperately. This is my place, my little town where I grew up, how can I reclaim it. Where are you, Saida, who called me? I’m here, come find me. And we’ll sit here and watch the sea return, and stroll by the creek, we’ll sit down at the edge of our secret lagoon, hidden by a curtain of fronds … and you will recite?

When God expelled Adam from Paradise, writes Milton, the angel Michael took him up the tallest hill and showed him the world of his dominion, which included “Mombaz, Melindi and Quiloa.” Paradise lost, paradise regained?

Literature was Kamal’s favourite subject, and history; how could that not be, growing up in this ancient town, under a poet’s shadow? In high school he had produced plays and written stories. You will be wasted in medicine, said Mr. Fernandes, the English and history teacher. And Kamal had replied with a schoolboy’s passion, “How can you be wasted as a doctor, attending the sick, sir? When we have fewer than fifty doctors for a population of ten million in our country?” Easy, as he was to discover; by going abroad, and attending to the rich.

He turned around and slowly walked back to the tea shack, where he had left his luggage.

“This region has a bright future, sir.”

It took Kamal a moment to realize that this hope, expressed in English, had been articulated outside of his musing. He turned his head towards the genial face at the next table, belonging to a rather large man, who was wearing the traditional white kanzu and kofia.