The Magic of Saida (36 page)

It was late afternoon when they reached the pilgrim town of Somnath, where Kamal had made a hotel reservation. Somnath, a few miles up the coast from Verawal, was the site of an ancient temple by the sea; a beautiful new replica had been constructed in its place.

The next morning Kamal proceeded to Verawal, a small, somewhat weather-blown town, though in antiquity an important port. The driver parked the car on a main street and Kamal started strolling around; he stopped at a few places to ask if they knew a Dr. Amin Punja Devraj, or if there was a Devraj family in town. He met with blank stares and shakes of the head. Soon he was looking lost, an object of curiosity. People stepped outside their shops, others looked over balconies to stare at him, the message having gone around of a dark stranger in town from foreign parts, asking questions.

Finally a brainwave struck him. He asked at a shop if there were
any people of the Shamsi community in town. Immediately he was pointed to the provision store right behind him—at which a man, perhaps in his forties and balding in front, stood behind an open serving window, staring at him. He was called Pyarali, and said yes, he was from that community. He ordered two teas from a vendor and answered Kamal’s questions. The Devraj family was no longer in town, he said. The last one who had lived here, Hassanali, had died a few years before. Yes, there had been a Dr. Amin who would come to visit Verawal periodically from somewhere, when Pyarali was a boy, and would see patients. This, said so casually, to a question thrown off hopelessly. The cup in Kamal’s hand shook on its saucer. This man had seen his father and remembered him. “What did he look like?” Kamal asked. “I don’t recall.” Pyarali smiled indulgently. “Was he related to you?” “Yes,” Kamal said. “Ordinary looking,” Pyarali offered. “Always polite. People lined up to consult him. Once I was taken to him for something—I forget. There was a wife, too, and some children.”

A woman came inside the shop from the back and was introduced as Pyarali’s wife. She took a keen interest in Kamal and quizzed him about Africa, and he answered politely. She knew of people with family members in Africa, she informed him. When he had the chance, Kamal asked the couple, “And where is Dr. Amin now?”

Pyarali answered. “Amin died five or so years ago. We had a service for him here.”

There were no Devrajes in town, Pyarali repeated, and his wife told Kamal he should look for them in Rajkot. The doctor’s children might be in Mumbai.

Kamal declined an invitation to stay for lunch.

He checked out of his hotel and told the driver they would return to Ahmedabad, but first he wanted to visit the shrine of Sidi Sayyad, which he understood was nearby.

“It is in the jungle,” the driver told him. “There are only Sidis there—it will take us out of our way.”

“Never mind. I want to see it.”

The Sidis were the African Indians, and Kamal already knew the
story of his great-grandfather Punja’s relationship with the saint Sidi Sayyad.

They set off, taking a small road through a deeply forested area. The map called it the Gir forest. They drove for about an hour and a half, passing the occasional peasant on the road, a group of nomads with cattle, scattered huts, a chai stand. Finally they turned into a narrower road and quite suddenly it had become a different country. A few young men stood idly chatting at the turning, as you would expect to see anywhere, but these were all black. Farther on they passed a rickshaw bus full of people; everyone, including the driver, was also black and looked completely African. He knew he was approaching a Sidi village, but to see the African presence so explicit, to recognize the features as so familiar, unnerved him. He could have been in Kilwa, the young men chatting in Swahili. They parked on a side road leading into a settlement. A festive drum was beating somewhere. As Kamal walked towards the village, a young man in a Muslim cap passed him from the opposite direction and greeted him respectfully, putting his right hand on his chest, and pointed behind him, as though Kamal was expected there. The drum became loud and insistent. Kamal reached a crossroad, where he turned left, from where came the sound of the drum and human commotion. Ahead of him, behind a wall, rose the dome of a green and white building. People were removing their shoes and walking in through a gate into the compound. Kamal did likewise.

He had entered the premises of the shrine to Sidi Sayyad. The compound was packed with people watching a ritual in progress. Two men were beating on drums, one of them blind; leading them, a few people danced to the beat, including an old woman and a lithe young man who leapt around collecting donations in his mouth. Not all the people present were black; the others were from out of town, having made the journey to beg a favour from the famous Sidi saint. As part of the ritual, a black goat garlanded with bright orange marigolds was being pushed towards the mausoleum. The belief was that if the goat went up the steps, the visiting supplicants’ wishes would be fulfilled.

A little later, when the place was relatively quiet, most of the people having left the compound to partake in a feast, Kamal went up
the marble steps of the mausoleum and entered the inner sanctum, which housed the grave. He stood in silence before the grave, which was covered with a mound of coloured cloth and flowers brought by the worshippers, the air heavy with perfume, and imagined his great-grandfather as a young man having come here with his own wish to be fulfilled. One part of my story started here, Kamal thought.

He had lost any sense of time and place, and when he emerged back into the glaring sunlight he felt faint and overcome by the spiritual experience, and by the overburdened air he had just left behind; he sat down on the steps. He was brought to by the sound of a faint shuffle and something brushing his forearm with the touch of a feather. He looked up, startled. A young woman stood before him, holding in her arms a child of perhaps one. Her head was covered by a scarf and her clothes were bedraggled, and she could have been no more than twenty. “Sahib, please,” she beseeched in a soft voice, “help me,” and the Gujarati words startled him, as though he expected to hear Swahili. As she turned to leave, he said, “Here,” and gave her some bills. She bent down and touched his feet, and he felt a deep sense of unease.

They raced back to Ahmedabad, stopping only once for tea, and arrived at his hotel at four in the morning. Soon after he headed to the airport and caught a flight to Delhi, where he joined Shamim and their group for the last leg of their “Glorious India” tour.

That was India. The apparition at the shrine, as he would recall the young beggar woman, had shaken him. But India had held many shocks and surprises. It was much later, when he had resolved to go and find her, that he realized that it was Saida that the young woman at the shrine had reminded him of.

Before he left Canada, Kamal picked up the phone and called his older cousin and former nemesis Yasmin. He had not seen her or spoken to her in over thirty years, even though he was certain she had visited Edmonton, or at least Calgary, and he in turn had passed through Ottawa where she lived. Now when he called her, finally, he greeted her with some warmth, to which she responded in kind, and then he told her what Azim had revealed to him about Saida’s visit to the shop in Dar.

“Do you remember?” he asked. “You were present.”

“Yes, I remember,” she replied quickly.

“Do you remember what happened? What did this girl say—this African girl?”

“She asked for you.”

“And then?”

“And Daddy said you were in Kampala and were getting engaged that same day.”

“That was all?”

“Yes. And she left. Daddy gave her some money.”

“There must have been something more,” he insisted. “Don’t you remember? Why did he send Azim away? Are you hiding something from me, Yasmin?”

“I can’t tell you what more was said, Kamal. By my faith. Daddy made me promise him that I would never tell you what I heard that day. It has been a long time, you should forget about it. And I am happy you called me. You are my brother, Kamal.”

“What did she look like, this girl?”

“Why—like an African … Wait … she was polite. She wore a khanga.”

He smiled as he recalled this. “She must have seemed so alien to them,” he told me. “Yet she was so much a part of me. But I was not offended at my cousin’s refusal to tell me more. I was afraid of what that might be. It was better for me to go and find out.”

Saida’s whereabouts having been revealed to him by Fatuma, Kamal waited a day to gather himself. He lounged on the beach, took a long walk, then a swim. In his mind, scenes of himself with her, tomorrow. He imagined what she would look like, how she would greet him. Curiously, he did not see anyone else with her, no family. He composed in his mind fragments of speech, what he would need to speak to her—his greetings, his explanations, his life’s story. And then warned himself to be prepared to expect anything, too many years had elapsed. You’ll have to give it time, Kamal. In the afternoon he walked to the bus station and bought a ticket for the village—Minazi Minne—and went back and sat on the patio and read. By evening, after dinner, he was ready, he told himself. Let morning come.

It was early, still grey, but the depot was bustling with activity when he arrived. The Masoko–Lindi bus was being loaded up with all manner of luggage: suitcases, crates, baskets, and sacks of produce. One carton proclaimed a computer monitor as its contents; beside it stood a nervous-looking young man. The conductor, a young muscular fellow, stood at the door enthusiastically calling out destinations on the way, shouting friendly invectives to the loaders, greeting passersby as if on a whim they might abandon their day’s plans and join him on his journey. He stopped midsentence as Kamal came up and produced his ticket, then broke into a grin. “Where to?” “Minazi Minne.” “You know somebody there? Welcome, karibu, take a seat, we leave soon.” He swung aside to let Kamal go past him and take his seat. The interior had been washed and smelled of wet dust and a repulsive cleaning spray. Kamal chose a seat in the third row and
sat down, tentatively, by the window, his shoulder bag on his lap. No one followed him in and he realized after a while that there was still time, and went back out, telling the conductor he had left his bag on the third seat by the window. He walked over to the nearby chai shop, sat down, and ordered. The server dropped a newspaper on his table. It was a few days old.

The concerns of the world, bludgeoned into the brain by the hour and minute in the Canada he had left behind, seemed so distant and absurd from this vantage, he could be on the farthest planet; the feeling was enhanced, he realized, by the grey early hour, the woodsmoke in the air, the blue-tinged tube light hanging above him. He watched, over his tea, the Dar bus, also being loaded, and another that had recently arrived, its weary-looking passengers alighting, picking up luggage, and a taxi and a rickshaw heading out, and vitumbua being fried by the roadside, smoke rising, and a line of people walking to work—life contained and proceeding apace, there could be no other world outside. From the newspaper he gleaned bits of the local news. Yanga had won a soccer match; a man had been murdered in a village for allegedly abusing a child; a million-dollar corruption scandal involving a former minister was still being flogged. There seemed no outrage, Kamal reflected, no emotion wasted at the rampant corruption, as though after decades of socialist austerity even corruption needed its due, someone had to get rich quick. After a while he heard a call, “Minazi Minne! Minazi Minne!” and he quickly paid for his tea and ran to the bus. It lurched forward as he stepped inside, but his seat was waiting for him, with his bag.

Markham had returned from Dar the day before with a recommendation to go to Johannesburg for prostate surgery. He was going to think about it, he said petulantly. Meanwhile, Kamal observed, his chest congestion did not bode well for him. Navroz Engineer had come over in the evening for a drink and they had discussed the pros and cons of India versus South Africa as places for medical treatment. The point was to encourage Markham, who had sat down silently to make a threesome, to take his option seriously.

Kamal had asked John if he had heard of a place called Minazi Minne. John hadn’t heard of it. A kitchen hand knew of it but, strangely, said nothing more.

As he sat looking out the window, as the bus raced down the paved road past the small airport and onto the main highway south, Kamal felt numb inside, a sense of resignation. His quest was ending. What exactly did he expect? To see Saida herself, or perhaps someone who could tell him of her? Before he left Canada he had thought about what presents to bring for her. He couldn’t decide what would suit her, what she would like, and so he had settled for a cologne, some handkerchiefs, and a scarf. These were with him now with his change of clothes. He recalled the gold earrings, the dress, and the blue plastic sandals with heels that he had brought for her the last time they met, which she told him she could not very well wear, for how would she explain them to her husband? She had been only a girl, and he a callow young man. Now he was on his way to see her again. What had Fatuma told him? “You’ll find her in Minazi Minne.” The place with the four coconut palms. “But she doesn’t want you to go there.” What did that mean? As if that would keep him away. She must know that.