The Magic of Saida (24 page)

We were visiting Zanzibar, the two of us, in the vague hope of finding there some trace left by his ancestor Punja. We found none. It was Kamal’s first trip to the island, and we sat in the lounge of the plush Serena Hotel, where he wished to drink coffee of a quality closer to what he was used to. He could afford it, I mused, as I
watched the wealthiest of tourists relaxed in their various outfits, some in almost none, and he described the most traumatic and pivotal moment in his life. Pivotal, yes, because he was forced brutally to shed the life he knew, moult and step away from one existence entirely into another.

“Mama, don’t let me go! Usiniache! I don’t want to go. Mama don’t throw me out, usinifukuze!—I will be good, Mama … What did I do to offend you?”

“You have to go, my son. Your father has arranged it.”

“And you? And you …” In his bed in Markham’s hotel he found himself clutching at his fever-wasted sheets.

What do you do when your world suddenly comes to an end, when those tender insecurities, those delicious fragile times of temporary want and despair, those moments of pure laughter, those minutes of mysterious poetry, those timeless delights in your mother’s bosom are all of a sudden torn away from you? You stare ahead at a frightening wasteland without love.

Mama, don’t let me go. Usiniache. How could she, his mother, simply tell him, Go, there is no choice.

He never forgave her.

Even if maybe she had no choice?

He shook his head, slowly, tenderized by his reborn grief.

She did not even prepare him.

On a Sunday morning, she woke him up, told him to pack the trunk, he was going on safari. What safari? Did they have money for a safari? School was not out yet.

“Stop harassing me now,” she said. “Pack.”

They packed the trunk with his things, but not hers.

“Are you not coming?” he joked.

“No,” she said. “I am sending you away to become an Indian, to your father’s family. And you must be good. Remember, I have taught you adabu, and religion, and respect for elders. You are going to the world to become a big man.”

His eyes widened with disbelief, with panic, for she was not joking.

“What kind of big man? I don’t want to go.”

“You are going to your relatives’ home in Dar es Salaam. They are
Indians and they are now ready to receive you and prepare you for the world. I cannot give you anything. I have nothing, but these are the socks I have bought for you, and these the handkerchiefs, and this shirt—”

And Kamal was staring at Mama as she coolly counted out these things.

A man came in through the door, one of the Indian men who had come a few days before to see her, a short, stocky man, who said, “Is the boy ready? The bus leaves in a short time.”

And that was when a huge wave of realization crashed upon him, and Kamal cried, “I don’t want to go, Mama, don’t let me go, please!”

On his sickbed in Kilwa he was weeping as Lateef’s voice came at him, “Daktari, you must drink this soup.”

And Markham was gruffly saying, “A spoonful of whisky will revive him.”

And Shamim put in her bit,
You never told me this, all these years of marriage and you never said how you came to Dar
. And he replied,
What could I say, that my mother abandoned me and broke my world?

A porter carried his trunk and the Indian man walked beside Kamal, his mother watching from the doorway, murmuring, “Kwa heri, mwanangu …” Goodbye my son, we’ll meet again, God willing. And suddenly Kamal made a dash for it, as fast as he could, the fastest boy in his school, and a voice shouted, “Kamata mtoto!” Catch the boy! and feet came thumping after him but could not catch him, the onlookers watching, some encouraging him, “Raise the dust, boy!” He fled down the street and across the main road, raced past the German memorial and towards Saida’s house, saw no one there, and he turned around, raced past his two pursuers and the monument again and back into his street towards—of all places, but understandable, surely—his own house and into his mother’s arms—which handed him over to the Indian. His name was Samji, and holding Kamal firmly by the wrist he took him to the waiting bus, sat him by a window, and planted himself next to him.

“You, Kamalu, now don’t give me trouble,” Samji said as the bus
filled up and then groaned away onto the highway. “I am taking you to your father’s family. They are watajiri, people of means, and they will give you a good life and a future.”

The world of his familiarity, the parallel streets leading carelessly in from the main road, the white memorial stone, the boma, and the town plaza at the harbour, the chai shop at the crossroads … there a sheikh in white kanzu and cap strolling, there a woman in black bui-bui, there the orange seller and the fish vendor … all pulling away behind him, never to be seen the same way. People watching him, knowing his plight. Kamalu is being sent away. Kwa heri, Kamalu! And then he looked behind one last time and saw her, standing by the memorial, her small figure dwarfed by it and getting smaller and smaller, gazing in his direction. Kwa heri, Saida. He clutched at the tawiz she had given him.

It was a long journey north. They passed the land of the Matumbi, his African ancestors, and the Ndengereko and the Zaramo. The bus had originated in Mtwara to the south and had people with all sorts of features. There were two Masai with spears and gourds and a distinctive odour; there were several men and women with tattooed faces, the women with black buttons stuck to their upper lips, making them look grotesque. They were from the Makonde people. The Makonde make good watchmen, explained Samji, but watch out for the Zaramo with the kumi-na-moja sign of eleven on the sides of their heads. They are thieves, every one of them, and will have their hand inside your pocket in no time. When the bus stopped at a place called Handeni, Samji came down with him, and they peed by the side of the road in the bushes. The Indian bought him maize from a road vendor and from an Indian shop a Coca-Cola, which Kamal had tasted only once before. Mama had bought a bottle once as a treat for them both, and they had made it last two days.

As the bus left the village, it ran into a patch of deep mud and tilted alarmingly to one side while attempting to run through, until finally having dug in deeper it gave up and stopped. They all got out again.

Kamal could have run off into the jungle or hidden behind bushes or climbed a tree, and taken a bus back home afterwards. In the months ahead he would regret many times not making the attempt.
Years later he would ponder over his reluctance. Partly, he thought, it was the sheer shock that his mama had let him go, and the awareness that he always obeyed her, that made him accept his fate, whatever she had decreed. She was sending him into the world. He had to be good.

That world began with Dar es Salaam, the European city as beautiful as Berlin, according to Mzee Omari’s account. He was curious about his father. Why had he gone away? He asked Samji, “I will see my father in Dar es Salaam?” “No,” Samji said. “Where is he, then? Is he dead?” “I don’t know. You will stay with your uncle, his name is Jaffu Punja. He has a shop. Everybody knows him.” Why had his mother not been asked to go too? He would tell his uncle, Jaffu, it was all right, he did not have to worry about him. He, Kamal, could manage with his mother. He did not need help. He would help Mama, he would grow up and find work and get her a small shop of her own.

That had always been his dream, to get his mother beautiful clothes, to get her a shop of her own.

Dar es Salaam, as they entered early the next morning, was disappointing in its familiarity. Not the London he had seen in the books, and he was certain it was not like the Berlin of Mzee Omari. It looked like Kilwa, only much bigger and busier; there were people already on the streets, the shops were opening, and the number of vehicles dazzled him. But the familiarity also comforted him. So this was Dar es Salaam. The bus stopped at a noisy, crowded station, and as he and Samji waited for his trunk to be handed down by the man on the roof rack, he was told to watch out for pickpockets. With his flashlight Samji peered at all the luggage that landed on the ground. When Kamal’s small trunk finally appeared, they got into a taxi and were driven on a long and busy street to a small cross street near a big yellow building with a clock tower. There, outside one of the shops, they got off and entered. An Indian man sat motionless on a chair in the middle of the shop, looking out, his open shirt revealing a heaving, hairy chest over a bulging stomach. Kamal went up and in a nervous low voice greeted him respectfully.

“Shikamoo, Bwana Jaffu.”

“So you have arrived. Welcome.”

His uncle had a stiff manner. He rarely showed emotion, as Kamal was to discover, and his throaty voice rarely altered its pitch. He was not a big man, and he had a scar over his left eye. His right leg twitched constantly as he sat.

“Your relative has arrived,” Samji announced. “And don’t think he came willingly. We had to chase him through the alleys of Kilwa.” He broke off into Kihindi, the Indian language, which Kamal of course did not understand.

Jaffu Ali Punja grunted and eyed his nephew with interest. He said, “Your mother has no need for you now. She will get married and go to live with her husband in Lindi.”

In Lindi.

“You are now a Mhindi, an Indian, and will live like a Mhindi. You will go to a good school and you will learn. Your father wanted that. Forget about the past. It is over.” Yamekwisha.

The boy started to cry and was taken upstairs to the family flat.

“Why did she abandon me?” he pleaded in his North American inflections to the red, hairy face of Markham looming over him.

Markham had him lifted by the head and poured a shot of whisky down his throat.

“Bwana Markham,” came Lateef’s reproachful voice, “you are giving forbidden substance to this sick believer! Haram! Shame on you!”

“A little Scotch never harmed anyone,” came the gruff reply.

“Sir,” pleaded Lateef to Kamal, “please let me give you a bath.”

“No,” Kamal said. “I will do it myself. Though I’d appreciate clean sheets.” He turned to Markham.

“Clean mattress, Mr. Markham!” demanded Lateef. “This man is paying you dollars!”

Later Kamal went out to sit on the patio outside the lounge. The sun, the salty breeze, the booming crash of the waves; here they were again. He’d been out two days, it seemed an eternity. Those nightmares. He had not for a long time recalled his childhood trauma so
vividly, so precisely. Over time his mind had blotted out the details, so that what he ever recalled were abstractions, bloodless events in the resumé of his life. His dreams about that parting became fantastic allegories. Now in his recovery he had all his pain back again.

He looked around at the three men who had tended to him, John and Markham standing at the doorway, Lateef hovering beside him.

“It’s the water I drank at that Fatuma’s shop,” he explained sheepishly, “that surely did me in.”

The warm water with the greasy aftertaste. The thought made him shudder. “Perhaps they put a spell in it—to give me nightmares.” He attempted a laugh.

“You said it, bwana, you’ve hit the nail,” Lateef said.

“But I was only joking.”

“Ah no, bwana. They wanted to look into your heart. They wanted to see that innermost self that resides there.”

“Who? You mean that Fatuma?”

“They put a medicine into the water.”

They put a potion into a doctor’s drinking water. Some truth drug. Some doctor.

“And now they’ve seen into my heart?”

“Enh-heh. With the help of a mganga.”

“What mganga?”

What nonsense, he thought, but he couldn’t help feeling a certain trepidation. He turned gratefully to the tray of tea and toast that John brought for him. “I want to thank you all for looking after me,” he said. “Really, I am touched.” “It was nothing,” Markham growled and disappeared inside.

The rest of the day Kamal spent outside on the patio and later on the beach. There was hardly anyone around; a few tourists set off for the Island in a motorboat; a fish vendor came by with a late catch; a group of youths strolling. He napped on the beach chair, too afraid for now to go and abandon himself back to his bed. He read from his anthology, though fitfully. There was in him that pleasant feeling, as he lay exposed to the elements of his childhood, that awareness of a gently throbbing but not unbearable wound. He had been transformed somehow, born again by his experience. By reliving the angst of his childhood, he had arrived in Kilwa shorn of foreignness.
He had made his confession. Was this pure fantasy? Had he come under a spell? Did he believe in spells?

No. Not anymore.

But he was back in Kilwa. And in the Kilwa he knew there was always magic. That thought was perturbing.

Sometimes we African sophisticates of a certain age, well travelled in the world, at ease even at a Stockholm reception on a winter’s night, having raised ourselves from the primitivism in which we were born—and I don’t mean this negatively—find ourselves pushed back onto our heels by the occasional eruptions of barbarism on our home ground. It is as if an uncouth elder, dishevelled, incoherent, unclean, shuffles in from the inner room where you would rather keep him to the cocktail party in progress in your drawing room. Incidences of magic are such. Simple magic is understandable—it is of the order of superstition. Even American presidents, we are told, consult the stars. But what of cannibalism: making stews out of murdered humans expressly quartered for the purpose, and using them as tonic to bring on strength and vitality? I have in mind the recent murders and mutilations of our albinos for purposes of witchcraft. In a macabre twist, the police recently exhibited in Dar es Salaam an albino human skin to discourage such atrocities. That they felt the general public needed discouragement is a backhanded admission, surely: more people than would care to admit believe in the efficacy of magic. If a potion works, why bother where it comes from? Still, call me an apologist—and those convinced of my provenance on a tree will sneer—I am firmly of the belief that not much separates humans from each other, wherever they come from, nor humans from the bestial. History shows amply that it is not only Africans who are capable of grotesqueries.