The Magic of Saida (37 page)

Saida should have come to see him in Kilwa, knowing he had come a long way to look for her. Had he aroused her animus so much, by his betrayal, by her being sent away by his uncle, that she simply would rather not see him? That was not the Saida he knew. But what of Saida now, what had she become as a woman, what had life done to her? Thirty-five years is a long time. She would be about fifty-five; still young where he came from; just past the life expectancy here. You might say that Mama sent him away to give him twenty more years of life. Averagely speaking.

How he had ached for her. Were those twenty extra years of life—averagely speaking—worth it? He probably had half-brothers or sisters somewhere.

He heard someone say “Minazi Minne” and he looked up. The conductor and the driver were discussing him, the driver looking at him in the mirror. Soon after, the conductor came down the aisle with a plate of candies, and Kamal asked him if he knew Minazi Minne well. No, he replied, he did not know it. The television overhead came on with a Bugs Bunny comic and a chuckle went around. In spite of the mock airline service, this was very much a local transport. People got on and off, and in between pickups and drops the bus raced like the devil were after it, always coming abruptly, lurchingly
to a stop, the conductor hanging out the door, calling out for passengers and rattling off rates. Inside, the atmosphere became progressively more stuffy, the country folk obviously not bothered with perfumes.

Finally, on a quiet patch on the road, halfway up a hill, the bus stopped. “Minazi Minne,” the driver said, as casually as though in the midst of a conversation.

“Is this it?” Kamal asked, getting up. “Ndio hapo?” Outside the windows there was forest on both sides.

The conductor came over, grinning.

“Yes, here.” Ndiyo hapo hapo. Nowhere else.

Kamal struggled out into the aisle. “Where is it? I can see nothing outside.” He peered out on both sides.

“It is here only, baba,” a woman said reassuringly, putting a forefinger on his arm. “At the top of the hill—a road goes inside.”

“Why don’t you drop me there, then—at the top of the hill?” he asked the driver.

“Just here,” the driver replied tonelessly, not bothering even to look up.

The woman who had touched him looked at him anxiously.

Kamal stepped off the bus and eyed the hill before him wearily.

“Do you know anyone in the village?” the conductor asked, leaning out from the steps as the bus began to inch forward.

“I know someone.”

“All right, then. And in the town—you have people in Kilwa? Wait, you!” he shouted to the driver. The bus stopped.

Kamal gave Lateef’s name, and Dr. Engineer’s.

“All right then. The doctor will come pick you up.”

“Or I will take a bus.”

The conductor banged on the side of his conveyance a couple of times and it roared away. A few people inside waved to Kamal, and he waved back.

He was aware that he looked hopelessly foreign. His shoes, though dusty from walking on unpaved streets, could not hide their expensive lustre. The flak jacket was only for the comfort of not losing
things—the cell phone, a pen and notebook, his passport. His shoulder bag seemed ludicrous here, but at least it carried his water and the presents and a change of clothes. The sun was hot, and even though he had kept himself fit, he found the walk uphill arduous. No traffic passed him. Panting, dripping with sweat and blistered on his feet, he arrived at the hilltop, much to his relief to see a track winding into a settlement visible from the road. As he walked in, he saw it consisted of a handful of mud houses, one of them the village store. He took a peep inside. There was no one, and it was threadbare: a few cans of food scattered on warped shelves, a closed sack of some produce, a pile of dried cassava on the ground. What do they do here? There was no farm patch in sight. But he saw a few papaya and banana trees, a single coconut tree in the distance. The cell phones don’t reach here, he observed, there’s no telephone line, no electricity.

He stood in the middle of a clearing, the highway behind him, and took in the scene before him. A child of about two, naked from the waist down, trotted out with a chuckle from a house to his left. A young woman followed. She was dressed in a faded khanga around her waist and a blouse and her head was close-cropped. She eyed him as if he were a ghost. “Jambo,” he greeted her. “Sijambo,” she replied.

“Is there a teacher here?” he asked.

It was a stupid query. But a teacher implied a school and a thriving habitation, perhaps that was in his mind, besides an attempt at familiarity.

“Teacher?” she asked, squinting from the glare.

“Yes, schoolteacher.” Mwalimu wa shule.

“No.”

“No school?”

“Is there something you are looking for?” she asked.

“I was told I can find a woman called Saida here,” he said.

“There is no one called Saida here,” she replied and abruptly ran off after the child.

“Is this Minazi Minne?” he called out.

“It is inside there, by the river.” She lifted a quick hand to indicate.

He walked to the house next door; it consisted of a single room and was empty. In the third house an old man, almost naked, sat on
a mat, shoving a twig into his ear, oblivious to the world. He did not respond to the intrusion. Kamal came outside and sat down on a tree trunk, and brought out a bottle of water.

What a beginning. The girl returned with the child at her waist, and an older woman emerged from the first house, the two pinning him with their stares.

“Minazi Minne is down there,” the girl said, sounding more friendly than before and pointing firmly to the area behind the settlement. “But you will find no one called Saida,” she added with a softer voice and a look of the slightest amusement. “Only some old people.”

“Then they must know Saida,” he replied.

She said nothing.

“How do I get there?”

“You go through the bushes. There is a path. Come with me, I’ll take you.”

As she put down the little girl, he realized that the child was wheezing, and her nose was running. He bent down to listen to her chest, then asked her mother to pick her up, and he put his hand on her chest and forehead.

“You are a doctor?”

He nodded. “Take her to the Kilwa hospital,” he said. “There is another doctor there, an Indian. Tell him I sent you. I am called Kamalu.”

She nodded and went into her house, appearing in a moment with an empty can.

They walked together into the bushes behind the huts.

Her name was Zara. People in her village, which was called Kilimani, she said in answer to his question, went to Kilwa and places as far as Dar es Salaam to find work; some worked their plots behind the huts. Those who went far stayed away for months. She bounded lightly on the bush track a step ahead of him, humming snatches of a tune, beaming when she turned to speak, like a free spirit of the forest, devoid of any care. She wasn’t quite sure where her husband was. He wondered if there was one. Her daughter’s name was Salima.

“Eti, you have come from far?” she asked.

“Dar es Salaam,” he replied.

“Not from overseas?” She eyed him slyly.

No innocent, this one, he mused to himself and did not reply. She would be about the same age he’d been when he had last come to see Saida; perhaps as old as Saida had been then. It was a strange feeling: this girl and her easy manner, these huts, this vegetation had not altered in all the years he had been away. Then they were a part of his life. Now they raised a question, Why no progress, not even electricity?

“You won’t find any Saida in Minazi Minne,” she said, intruding into his thoughts. “Who is this Saida?”

He hesitated. “A friend from long ago. I used to live in Kilwa then.” He smiled at her.

“You will find no one who is called Saida here.”

“Whom will I find?”

“Palé,” she said, coming to a stop. There. She pointed.

Some hundred yards ahead, in a clearing, stood a cluster of huts. There could not have been more than six or seven, but there was about them a sense of coherence, unlike the roadstop he had just left. There was a mango tree in their midst and a baobab farther up, on the way to a shimmer that he realized was a stream. His heart lifted. This looked like a destination.

“So who lives here?” he repeated to Zara as they hurried along.

“Some people.” She chuckled.

He saw no one about. She took him past a few of the huts to the farthest one, its entrance facing away towards the stream, and stopped. Saida, he whispered to himself. She is here.

“Suddenly, for a moment, I became afraid,” he said to me. “Icy fingers gripped me. A gust of air, perhaps. That tingle at the back. What you feel in that second before your first high dive … or, more appropriately, when you say, What the heck, and walk past a baobab tree at dusk, knowing that spirits live there. What was I headed for? I should have heeded the signs. In that moment they all came back to me. Saida’s—or was it Fatuma’s?—injunction not to go; the strange
silence of the waiter at the hotel; the amused look on the conductor’s face when I told him my destination, and his later show of concern; and the giveaway—the bus driver refusing to stop at the top of the hill, where the path led inside.”

“Now you were there, you couldn’t escape.”

“This is what I had come for. But it was not how I could ever have imagined it.”

“I have brought you a guest,” Zara said outside the hut, peeping in through the entrance, though her Swahili expression could have implied
your
guest.

“Let him come,” croaked an ancient voice from the black hole, the interior of the hut. Zara scampered away.

He had to lower his head at the doorway to enter. As he did so, he saw a spectre standing before him, the trace of a shadow looking up at him, its eyes like glinting jewels in the dark. There was a small window somewhere at the back letting in a little light, and moments later he discerned the full, small figure of the woman. She was bent at the waist, wearing a khanga wraparound from the chest down. Her skin at the neck and arms was wrinkled and loose, her face was bony, the hair a powder-thin patch of white.

“What do you seek?”

“I was sent here by Bi Fatuma of Kilwa.”

“You’re deceiving me,” she said in a flat undertone, with that immovable authority of the aged. “What have you come for?”

“I was told I would find Saida here.”

“What is she to you?”

“I knew her.”

She didn’t ask him who Saida was, he would recall later, and he didn’t even notice. Zara had brought him here, and his mind assumed he was in the right place. He was not frightened anymore. He answered firmly to her challenge, implying by his tone that he would say no more about that. In the moment that followed, she didn’t ask him to sit, there didn’t seem to be a chair around. He went and sat on the edge of her cot, which was halfway towards the back of the room and had no bedding upon it. There was a pot on the ground; across from him at the back wall were some
more pots and a couple of ladles. The roof was thatched, an unlit oil lamp hung low from a crossbeam. There was an odour of wet earth in the room, and ugali, he thought. She must have had a meal recently.

“What is that you are wearing around your neck?”

Even in the dark, she had seen it at the opening in his shirt. “It is a tawiz,” he replied, holding it.

“Give it to me.”

“I cannot give it. It contains a prayer.”

“I want that thing.”

She was toying with him.

“It belongs to this girl, Saida, whom I’m looking for.”

She said nothing for a while, just stood there. Then she went to her pots and soon brought him a cup. “Drink this uji,” she told him.

He took the cup, looked at the dark porridge, then handed it back. “I can’t. My stomach is unsteady.”

“If you want to find this Saida, you will have to drink it. It has sugar.”

“If you boil it first, I will drink it,” he said. “Truly, I’ve been sick recently.”

She hastened out of the hut, faster than he would have thought possible. As he waited, all kinds of thoughts passed through his head. Should he call someone on his cell phone? He took it out of his pocket, but of course there was no reception. Who was this woman? If you want to find this Saida … Where was Saida? Why all the mystery? Just to find a person. The depressing thought occurred to him then that Saida was most likely dead. Then why didn’t Fatuma say so? Why was he sent here?

Who was the old woman and what could she do for him?

It did not occur to him that he should leave. He waited patiently for her to return.

The old woman came back and gave him the cup. “Drink. I have heated it.”

It was lukewarm and bitter to the taste. Even as he knew something was wrong, he drank it.

“Wait here,” she said, and left the hut again.

He put the cup down on the ground.

He lost consciousness.

He was awake, surrounded by cloying darkness, sitting on the cot. The small porthole a dim, distant gleam of light in a corner of the mind. And she was there sitting on a stool at a slight angle from him. His mind was clear, yet he was weak, and sweating. Sweat pouring from his brows, from his armpits, down his legs.

She looked the same as he had last seen her, many years ago, and he said, “Saida, they said you were dead.”

“Who said? I am here, come back to you.”

“You haven’t changed at all.”

“And you have, Kamalu,” she said. “I waited for you and you changed.”

“I would have come for you, my angel, malaika, my darling.”

She disappeared in the haze for a moment, and then reappeared.

“Lies only. You went away making promises, after I opened myself to you, and you married an Indian girl. Jé, Kamalu, did she give you much happiness? And how many children did she give you? Did you use her as you used me by the shore, and—”

“Don’t torture me, Saida. I have returned. And?” he asked anxiously. “And what?”

“And left me heavy with child.” She looked down at her feet.

“No, Saida … It can’t be …”