The Magic of Saida (32 page)

“No, Saida. I like studying. And only by going to the university can I be something important—a doctor.”

“Hm.” She sounded amused. And he had picked up her hand.

He told her all about his life in Dar es Salaam. She wanted to know how the Asians lived. What they ate. How they sounded. Was it true that they ate a lot of daal? Yes, he told her, which was why they were weaker than Africans! But he had refused to eat daal. He
liked chapati and bhajia. No, not all of them worshipped cows. His family ate cow meat, and they called themselves Muslims, though they were different. He mouthed a sampling of Kihindi for her and she broke into a peal of laughter, and he shushed her. “Do you want someone to find us?”

She was leaning into him. He felt the warmth of her body against his chest and he held her briefly.

“A many and a pany,” he murmured. “Do you remember, Saida? Kinjikitilé? Did you really miss me when I left?”

“I cried for a few days. They said you would return.”

He drew her close to him with one hand, tightly, and she released herself and picked up her presents. “I must run and hide these.”

“Hide them? Why? They are for you to wear!”

“My old man will beat me if he discovers them.”

They fell silent. Did it really matter if she was married? She could unmarry …

“Tell him some relation brought them for you.”

“You have forgotten our ways, Kamalu.”

She was right. What plausible reason could she have to wear a new dress, gold earrings, new shoes not given to her by her husband?

“Kesho,” he said, he pleaded, as she got up. Tomorrow.

“Kesho,” she replied simply and released her hand gently from his.

The next time there was no inhibition.

He had thought of nothing but her the last two days, recalling all her wonderful expressions, the new ones and those that were familiar, reminding him of the way he had known her before. He loved her thin voice and her brown complexion, her skip as she walked away when her time was up … a mellower Saida of softened edges but Saida all the same, there was a continuity between them, a closeness that had survived from old and become naturally this adult intimacy, this passion.

In their lovemaking was the sweet ache of the illicit, and fear of the sinful; the joy and relief of coming home to each other; the pure passion of possession and love; it was not the casualness of fucking and becoming lovers, language common where he would eventually
depart to, depicting the biological and instinctual, the needful with all the brutality of the mechanical. He smothered her with kisses on her cheeks, on her body, but he could not kiss her on the lips, because she hated it. She gave herself with abandon, as did he himself, completely, so that when she said give me all you’ve got, he became hers in every spurt and trickle he could muster, and she became his, feeling him in the very core of her being and body.

She had married two years before, at sixteen. When he left, she had been used by her family to earn a living by practising as a mganga of the Book. Did she believe in her powers, did she believe her prescriptions worked? She said they did, for she used the Book, didn’t she? And didn’t he himself come to her once to ask for advice? That he did. Later she worked as an assistant to Mzee Abdalla, a powerful mganga, who married her. He was her husband. And he beat her? he asked. When she did wrong, she replied. He was very powerful. He could read your heart … what was in it …

Suddenly they heard sounds above them, and in terror they huddled closer together in their hideout, silent until the disturbance had gone away. He pushed her down and lay beside her, stroked her face.

“I will take you away. Would you like that? I will return from university and take you away.”

“You can do that, eti? And I can trust you?”

“You are mine, Saida, and I am yours now. We have decided that, you and I. Haven’t we? Tell me!”

“Yes.”

“Then I will come for you.”

She stepped aside to take a pee; he did likewise; he helped her straighten her clothes and himself felt pleasantly dishevelled.

One day they recalled Mzee Omari. His memory, too, had bound them together. Kamal told her that whenever he would hear a shairi recited on the radio in Dar, and whenever he read the shairi columns in the Swahili newspaper
Ngurumo
, he would hear Mzee Omari’s voice in his head. He could not forget how the old man died.

“My grandpa liked you.”

“Yes. And he knew I liked you. Once I heard him say, ‘Anampenda.’ ”

She blushed, ducking her head a little.

“Sing a shairi for me, Saida. You used to.”

“I have forgotten.”

“How can you forget?”

“A wife forgets many things. She forgets her childhood.”

“Well, I am your childhood and I am back …”

Mzee Omari was a troubled soul, she said. He talked in his sleep. Once the family was woken up by the old man shouting at his djinn Idris, telling him he was useless and to go away. He was sick with fever at the time. Mzee was growing more blind and Idris could no longer guide his hand. But Mwana Juma said it was his past memory that was eating him from inside. She knew all about him, all his troubles. She knew about his brother Abdelkarim, and she knew about Salemani Mkono.

“That devil!”

“The same one.”

The night before Mzee died, Salemani Mkono came to see him and they sat on the porch talking. And when Salemani left, Mwana Juma gave him some money.

Watching her soft face, the nervous look she gave him, he felt a surge of tenderness towards her. He wanted to take her away, now. He would be her teacher again and teach her about the world. But he would have to wait. He was still young, he had to complete his education.

“What are you thinking?” she asked.

He recalled how helplessly she had clutched his hand and dropped her head against his shoulder at the sight of her grandfather lying dead on the ground, the telltale strangulation wound like a red ring round his neck.

“I was thinking of that day when Mzee Omari died,” he said.

“Idris killed him and disappeared.”

“Idris went away after that?”

“He went away. He was not seen or heard again. He went into the air where the djinns live.”

“And Salemani—what happened to him?”

“He was crossing the road one day and was run over by a bus.”

“Saida,” he said, “I have to go back—to Dar es Salaam—”

“I know you have to go.”

“But I will come back again. I will come back and take you with me.” She took his hand and put it on her breast, drawing him to her.

His hosts had become worried by his daily disappearances and his distraction. He was polite but quiet. They could not understand why he had come. He had dutifully gone to the prayer house with them, and accepted invitations at several households. Two young women had been shown to him, discreetly, but he had shown no interest. A telephone call came from Jaffu Uncle finally, reminding him that there were matters to attend to before his departure for Kampala: forms to sign at the Ministry of Education; his passport; his certificate from school. He should come home.

The night before he left he asked Bandali about the mganga Abdalla Hamisi.

“He’s a powerful one,” Bandali told him. “What shida do you have? Some girl you want to snare?”

Kamal acknowledged his wink with a smile.

“And we’ve been showing you all the beauties of Kilwa!” the man said. “My friend, it seems that some other girl has put the witchcraft into you! Tell us if you want something done about it, and we will help you.”

Early the next morning as his bus drew away from the crossroads, he caught a glimpse of Saida standing at the monument, still and staring, just as she had done seven years before when he left. Clutched in her hands was something she had presumably gone to buy as an excuse to come out. The thought came to his mind, a refrain from a currently popular song: My angel, I love you; I will return and take you away. He turned around to the clamour of excited passengers settling down, the groan of the engine.

To go from humble Dar es Salaam to the fabled City of the Seven Hills, Kampala, was thrilling; to study at one of Africa’s foremost temples of higher learning was to be privileged beyond measure. Kamal Punja was one of a new generation sent out into the world to get the goods and serve the nation. Throughout the country, from scattered towns and villages, this chosen tiny number were setting off for university to become bureaucrats, doctors, engineers, and teachers.

The family came to drop him off at the Dar bus depot, and Uncle for once let his guard down and gave Kamal a brief hug. Zera Auntie was in tears and thrust more bills into his hands. Of his three cousins, Azim and Shenaz embraced him, the latter crying copiously, and his antagonist over the years, Yasmin, shook his hand.

He was with five other boys and two girls on the overnight bus bound for Nairobi. There he stayed with one of them at the university dorm, and only hours after their arrival they were all out watching the latest James Bond thriller, which had been banned in socialist Tanzania. The next day they went shopping on Government Road for their smarter requirements, such as blazers, and then two of them took off for Kampala and Makerere University. His co-traveller was a girl called Shamim and their fate together was sealed on that journey. He was, as expected of him under the circumstances, her protector on the bus and at the stations, sitting beside her, watching her luggage for her, so she could sleep without worry; and she smiled her feminine gratitude and ensured he ate well from the supplies she had brought.

She was sweet, she was chatty, she was a neighbour whom he had seen in the streets in Dar but never spoken to before. During those lonely Uganda late evenings after completing their assignments or on Sundays when they missed home desperately, finding the Kampala-ites too snooty or alien, they sought each other out. They remembered Dar, the likes of which surely there was no other place, and their friends and all the neighbourhood characters, even the crazies who roamed the streets. She had a wonderful way of beginning her conversations with “I say,” in her high voice, and she was outspoken, but with a sense of humour, and had a subtle way of evoking a protective gesture from him. But he had told her he was committed to someone else.

“Someone I know?”

“No. No, she’s in Kilwa, where I spent my younger days.”

“And she was in Kilwa while you were in Dar? Is there a high school in Kilwa? I recall there is one in Lindi.”

He didn’t respond, but discretion was not one of her qualities.

“Don’t tell me she didn’t finish high school! What’s her name?”

He hesitated, while she waited.

“Saida,” he said. “Saida binti Ali.”

“You mean … she’s an African?”

“Yes, she’s an African. Like I am, as you see.”

“No, you are an Indian.”

Just like that, no argument. And in the future too, she would state this belief just as flatly, regardless of what he said, how he attempted to qualify it.

And Saida—Kinjikitilé? Whom he had told to wait for him, he would take her away? His angel. He still believed he would go and rescue her, even as he continued to go out with Shamim.
Date
was not a word in use. He wished he could use Bandali’s address in Kilwa to write to Saida and reassure her; but why would that shopkeeper agree to be party to something as immoral as an affair, or to cross the powerful magician Abdalla Hamisi? Kamal knew in any case that she could not write to him—even if she somehow managed the English script—without her husband finding out.

Were his thoughts about her immoral? Yes, and their passionate consummation in Kilwa had been immoral and sinful. But it had
seemed natural and right. They were made for each other, were linked forever, as he had discovered. He had been removed from her, and she had been forcefully married off to an old man. Wasn’t
that
immoral?

But at this remove, the promise he had made to her seemed more and more fantastic, braggadocio. A lie. Where could they run to with their sin, after all? Where would he take her to—a foreign place, far away? Saida was not made for foreign places.

His life was a tangle of impulses. There was the thrill of freedom, of discovering a new place, taking carefree excursions into the city or to the parks to view elephants and hippos, or north to watch the source of the River Nile—with Shamim. There was the pride of studying under great medical teachers and doctors, who came from Nigeria and Ghana, Britain and America. Makerere was a beautiful campus on a hill, away from the city centre. To walk along its paths and corridors clutching books and papers, to sit on its impeccable green lawns to read—or think by yourself, to hear a lecture by some visiting eminence—all this was to be vested with a sense of importance and privilege. A bright future beckoned. One of the eminences who visited the campus was the novelist Ben Assamoah, who had come to his school in Dar; Kamal went and introduced himself to the author, reminding him of their meeting. “You advised me studying medicine would be better, and I am doing just that,” he said. “I told you that?” came the reply. “Literature wouldn’t have been so bad!” They laughed.

And then there was the nagging guilt of betrayal, of knowing somehow that Saida had known too that he would not be able to keep his word.

Clever Shamim could read his dark moods.

“I say—still thinking of your African girlfriend? Your uncle and aunt won’t let you marry her, you know. And she might get married while you are here in Kampala. They are very conservative, these Muslims.”

She displayed not a qualm about inviting him to go somewhere, do something together. Nor he, about accepting. Loneliness was the strong incentive; so was the companionship of a pretty girl. In the local Shamsi community their names became linked. You didn’t go
out with a girl on a regular basis without commitment. Commitment was assumed, then imposed upon you. They did not return to Dar during Christmas, going on a med school excursion instead, to visit an area in the north where a severe outbreak of sleeping sickness had occurred. But they did return for a few weeks at the end of their first year—and discovered that the news about them had already spread. At home there was teasing by his cousins, remarks were made about “you two.” Zera Auntie visited a few goldsmiths in anticipation and Uncle’s reserve had acquired a hint of warmth. At the shop of Hassam Walji, Shamim’s father, Kamal was received with as much fanfare as discretion allowed, in an atmosphere replete with plans and dates that were not mentioned. Kamal was seen to have made a catch, for he was still dark after all. On the other hand, what other qualities of a desirable young man didn’t he possess?