The Magic of Saida (27 page)

Of course none of them sitting at the beach knew how much Kamal had been bought for.

•  •  •

“Surely I’m not completely off track, am I”—he said to me—“in seeing a certain circularity here, history, albeit on a small scale, repeating itself? My grandmother, or her mother, was sold as a slave to some Indian; and I was also sold, to an Indian. I know, I know: I went on to become a successful doctor.”

“You have a house in Canada,” Markham said, and it was as if he were breaking the news to Kamal. Perhaps he was not asking but admonishing, reminding his guest of his responsibilities.

“Edmonton,” Kamal replied. “Yes, I have a house there.”

A big one too, designed to specs; private bathrooms, a game room, a prayer room; my study. A man comes to garden, and in the winter a team comes to clear the snow from the long, sloping driveway.

“And a medical practice?”

“Yes, I have three clinics. Doing well.”

“Must be nice.”

They were just the two of them in the lounge late this evening, seated at a table, John washing up at the bar to the sound of a lively music turned down very low. A cool breeze blew, leading the tide in towards the shore. The silence between them was weighted with a question. Kamal gave it time, then answered it.

“I heard a call inside me, from someone who was very close to me in the past. I had to come and find her …”

“An old girlfriend.”

“Well, we were young then.”

“Come to chase a shadow, then.”

“She was real enough when I knew her.”

Very casually Kamal moved his hand and touched the tawiz at his neck, to reassure himself, a secret believer before an avowed agnostic.

“Here’s good luck to you, then,” Markham said.

“Thanks.”

It was Kamal’s turn next.

“Tell me, Ed—have you left anything behind? Family? Property?”

“I’ve a son in England. We don’t keep in touch. This hotel is all the property I possess in the world—I believe I owe you two days’ rent.”

That’s what Markham had offered in return for a physical checkup. Now the checkup was done, whatever was possible under the circumstances, and the prognosis looked serious, even without blood results. The sample had been sent to the Kilwa hospital.

“You paid in advance, Ed. You nursed me during my illness.”

“That was John.”

“All right. But I’m serious, you should get a full checkup done in Dar.”

“And that will help me?”

“It will.”

“Seriously, tell me—how many months would you give me, Doc?”

It was a question he had asked before.

“I don’t give months or years, Ed. But treatment could help you.”

Nicely ducked.

The next morning Kamal arrived in Kilwa early and anxious. From the monument, where he was dropped off, he first took a brisk walk to the harbour, spent some moments looking out to the sea. The breeze was cooling, the tide was out. A few vessels were beached and receiving attention. At a kidau being loaded, he discerned the large figure of Lateef supervising the job. He had discovered that Lateef exported timber, which was cut and processed at a mill in the forest. The wood was headed for Zanzibar, and from there north to the Middle East. Kamal turned around and walked away, not wishing to be hailed.

The town was only partly awake. Outside their homes people washing their faces; two girls in uniforms, heads wrapped in scarves, striding off to school, looking rather cheerful; a woman at a porch frying vitumbua. The technology had changed from the days of Bi Kulthum: instead of a few individual small woks on the stove frying the sweet bread, there were eight smaller ones joined together in two rows of four. A bus was readying to leave for Dar as Kamal turned into the chai shop. It was busy but a table was cleared for him.

After his tea and mandazi he left to go and see Fatuma. He had resolved that he would see her alone, without the agency of Lateef; she must deal with him, and he with her. If she refused to help him, it must be straight to his face. The shop was closed. He entered the side alley and arrived at the porch in the compound behind the shop, where he saw Amina at a gas stove. “Karibu,” she greeted, as though expecting him, and he responded with thanks, and before he could inquire further she indicated the room in the corner. “Mother’s inside.”

He went towards the room. “Hodi,” he called out softly at the door, then louder.

“Karibu,” came a strained reply and he walked in.

The room was small and cluttered, torn linoleum on the floor. There was a broken sofa facing the doorway, and a television on a stand against a side wall. A window, its half curtain drawn, lit up the room with sunlight. Bi Fatuma was lying on her side on the floor under the TV, wearing a khanga wrapped up to her chest. Her head was raised, supported on one hand. The wrap looked old and faded, and was likely her nightdress. He went and sat on the sofa, and they stared at each other for some moments, the look on her face an indulgent curiosity, perhaps a sour humour at his expense.

“You’re still here. You like our town.”

“I was born here.”

Outside, Amina was talking, perhaps to her husband, Ali, saying Fatuma had a visitor. A gust wafted in a smell of cooking. His mouth watered. Barazi, he said to himself, pigeon peas cooked in coconut.

“Now this woman you’re looking for …,” Fatuma said.

“Saida. Yes, she’s your niece, didn’t you tell me?”

“Enh, Saida. Now why are you looking for her?”

Patiently, he explained once again, “We were children together. We were friends. Our mothers were friends. Did you know my mother? She was called Hamida.”

“So that is why you are looking for her. Because you played together.”

He must seem stupid to her. Or a deceptive male, perhaps. She eyed him, the look implying, There is obviously more than childhood games involved here.

“You have any business with her?” Fatuma asked.

“It’s been a long time since I saw her. I want to meet her.”

“And perhaps you want to give her some money?”

“That’s possible—a gift … Does she need it?”

“I don’t know,” she said flatly, putting a hand to her side.

He did not move, sat and looked at her, then around the room. There was a photo hanging next to the entrance, showing Fatuma flanked by Ali and Amina. Fatuma wore a bui-bui. He wondered what other pictures she had. She was watching him.

He turned back to her with a final plea: “Tell me what you know. I saw her last in 1970 …” When he had returned to Kilwa briefly, before setting off for university. And never saw her again.

She watched him reflect on his memory, then relented: “And wasn’t that the time I myself got married and went to live in Lindi?”

Not a question, simply framed as such. He knew the tone.

“I hope you had a good life in Lindi, Fatuma. My mother was in Lindi. Hamida—did you know her?”

“I knew her. But they went on to Songea or Tabora.”

“And Saida? What happened to her?”

“She had a child …”

Whose child?
he wanted to scream out in English. “Boy or girl?” he asked. “Where is that child now?”

She looked away.

He sighed. “Let me know if you find out anything.”

“Look at my back,” she said. “It hurts me.”

He went over to her and lowered himself down on his knees to examine her. “Turn the other way,” he instructed and pressed her back and side, saw her wince. She was wearing nothing underneath. Women used to do that. The tenderness in her side alarmed him. Is everybody whom I see dying? He stood up and told her she must visit the hospital as soon as possible and gave her the name of an analgesic to take. She turned around, gave him a wry look of gratitude.

“If you are a doctor who was born here, why are you abroad treating foreigners?” she asked petulantly.

He had no reply, and simply smiled.

He departed, his expectations half fulfilled. He was being toyed with, of course. But he had also discovered a trail, a short one, a footstep; he had to keep pursuing. But for how long?

•  •  •

The town hospital was a short walk from the site of the hangman’s tree, which some years ago had given up the ghost and been cut down; in its place stood a plain, whitewashed monument. There was some irony in its makeshift crudeness, compared to the century-old German memorial down the road by the taxi stand, its brass plaque intact, the names and dates exact. The inscription on this one had been hand-painted unevenly in large black letters, the awkward line breaks clearly the work of an illiterate or a lazy painter. It was an embarrassment, installed by the fiat of bureaucracy, perhaps with foreign money. No care, no loving hand had attended it. Kamal walked over to the hospital.

The walk-in clinic was a room in the middle of the corridor facing the road; an overflow of patients sat outside on the floor; inside was packed, the air filled with the raw odour of unadorned humanity. At the far end, in a cubicle set off by a curtain, Dr. Engineer had his consulting space. Just outside it, behind a table, sat the nurse, who also registered the patients. Name? she would ask; postbox number? Do you have a cell phone? Sign here or put your thumbprint.

The doctor was a short, somewhat heavy-set man of about forty, wearing a stethoscope around his neck. “Ah, Dr. Kamal.” He shook hands and led Kamal into his cubicle, walking briskly with a limp. He sat down behind an old wooden table, on which was a ledger book for recording cases; Kamal took the chair opposite him. A small shelf behind the doctor held some medicines.

“Most cases are routine,” Dr. Engineer explained, after the niceties, “and the remedy is a simple painkiller. Once in a while, an antibiotic is called for, or an antimalarial. I have samples, which I distribute—and hope for the best, that they’ll take them on time. Anything serious and I’m stumped—they can’t afford to go to Dar. Cancer, and what do you do? Aspirin for the pain. Ditto for malaria, unless I have received a free shipment.”

As he spoke, he glanced up at the curtain, and Kamal knew he was using up valuable time.

“I must apologize for the patients who drop in on me,” he said. “I try to discourage them and refer them to you.”

“Not at all, my friend. You are welcome to them. In fact, if you wish, I can get you authorization to practise. The DC is a friend. But you are not here for long, obviously …” He made a wry face. “I will send Ed Markham’s blood sample to Dar. It will take time to get the results, you know.”

“A formality. He has everything wrong with him. The heart condition looks severe. He had asthma as a child, and I’m positive he has diabetes. And if any of those don’t kill him, there’s the prostate. I’ve recommended immediate admission to a hospital in Dar for a checkup. Could you arrange that for me?”

Dr. Engineer eyed him thoughtfully. “I’ll do that on your say-so. But if we are talking surgery, it could mean Bangalore or Johannesburg.”

They said no more, and as Kamal left, his eyes briefly lingered over the waiting room, the silent, patient faces, even of the children. Life expectancy, he reminded himself, was in the fifties, if that. He recalled assisting senior doctors on their duties when he was in medical school in Kampala. The same crowded rooms then as now, the same fate-afflicted faces.

“Let’s meet for a drink,” Dr. Engineer said cheerfully to his back, and Kamal turned to reply, but the man was already behind his curtain.

Waiting for his taxi, Kamal couldn’t get the clinic out of his mind. The crowded room, that warped shelf of inadequate medicines in the doctor’s cubicle. He thought of his own clinics in Edmonton. The waiting numbers there were large too, but the expectations were different. He had returned from a pampered world, where a remedy was offered for every ailment, real and imagined. A glut of medicines and treatments. Death was an affront. But someone like Fatuma would be looked after. She would get her X-rays taken and a host of tests made and not pay a dime. Her medicine would come subsidized. Her taxi fare would be subsidized.

Curiously, he could not recall Mama ever having been sick. Tired, yes; at times sad; and angry. A whole palette of moods. But never sick in bed shivering helplessly with homa, the dreaded fever. She
blamed his illnesses on his weak Indian blood; until someone else in the neighbourhood fell sick, and he would say, “See?” Children did fall sick, there were deaths, but it was all perceived as bad luck. God’s indiscriminate angel Azrael out to collect souls. No question, why should children die of simple homa. There was only Allah to assist you; and the waganga, the witch doctors or traditionalists who gave roots or powders or performed more nefarious rites to keep away that angel. He himself had survived malaria on a liquor of root extracts boiled by his mother and with the prayers of Mzee Omari culled from the Quran. It had seemed the most natural thing in the world. Alternative medicine. How far would she have gone to save him? Even a human sacrifice? And then she gave him away.

The making of Golo into an Indian of the Shamsi community meant that he had to learn their language and worship their gods, sing weird hymns to them. The khano was a wonderland—an alien spaceship, as he would think of it later—brilliantly lit with chandeliers; on every wall and pillar hung their imam’s photos, staring at you from every angle. After the prayers a few hundred people mingled about, food offerings were auctioned in a loud, festive ambience, kids ran around screaming and playing. Khano was prayer and party combined.

Most people went every evening, some also early morning for meditation. The building itself was an imposing two-storey yellow structure topped with a tile-roofed clock tower. Late afternoon Kamal would take his bath, and wearing clean clothes stroll over to the khano. The best part of khano for boys was before and after the ceremonies, playing games and getting into mischief. Across the yard from the khano was an empty plot where they shot marbles, gambling at the ad hoc casino of marble games set up in a row: you won a marble if you hit it from a distance, and lost yours if you missed. There were sharpshooters who never missed and left with bulging pockets, and dodgy operators with false trails on the ground to waylay your piece. Just before prayer time, the session having peaked, the religious monitors would sweep in and the boys would collect their stuff, scamper off to the taps to wash their feet, and go inside.