The Magic of Saida (4 page)

A troupe of beautiful women in colourful attire arrived in the company of two men. As the music turned louder, the men and two of the women paired up to dance. One of the prospectors briefly took the floor. Kamal declined, as Lateef readily took on a partner. One hand behind her in a slow dance, he was suddenly clutching one
plump and willing buttock, Kamal observed of the strange Muslim teetotaller and descendant of imams, who continued to dance in this manner as if it were the most natural thing.

“You don’t dance?” Lateef asked, back at the table.

“I can’t.” How he’d tried, in senior year of high school; it was a way to get close to the girls, in a once-every-blue-moon party. He’d had to give up. And got teased: What kind of African are you if you can’t dance? An Asian African. A chotara.

“I am looking for a woman,” Kamal said at length. Lateef’s face lit up and he opened his mouth, but Kamal hastened to explain. “Not like that. I am looking for a particular woman. I knew her as a child. She was my friend. Here, in Kilwa. She would be the same age as me. Her name is Saida, and her mother was called Bi Kulthum. Her grandfather was Mzee Omari bin Tamim, a famous poet.”

“Ah, Mzee Omari.”

“You know about him?”

“Famous poet of Kilwa—everybody knows about him. But sir, shairi is not popular these days. People prefer Bongo Flava—have you heard it? Hip hop, Swahili style.” He paused, went on. “Mzee Omari’s family, they have a shop in Kilwa. But I have never heard of this girl, this woman called Saida. You must tell me more about her. Then I will help you find her, wherever she is.”

He nodded, his eyes fixed on Kamal’s, ready to do the big favour.

What to tell him? Just that, there was nothing more. But of course there was more. There was a whole lot more.

Lateef told him he would inquire about Saida, then left. Kamal stayed in the lounge a long time, long after everyone else had gone, wary of being alone in his room. He had brought reading material, but the lights here were dim; he might have to use his flashlight. It might be a good idea to start his day early so he could end it early, that’s how it was done here. Evenings emptied the streets, all life disappeared, only the spirits were about. He glanced towards the Island. He listened to the waves and the wind, the odd voice in the dark; revived his memories of his life as a boy here, as he drank the tea the waiter had brought him in a very English service, only for him.

Kinjikitilé, the jingle of a dancer.

One morning while their mothers organized how he could help her with her lessons, he showed her his mother’s anklets. Mama did not dance, they were her mementoes from another life. What was he thinking? He took the anklets from their place on the shelf and jingled them in his hands, and grinned at her; showing off. The girl took them from him, started rhythmically to stamp her feet, chanting
o-o-o-o
like a traditional ngoma dancer, but softly so as not to provoke the mothers. Jhun-jhun … Kinjin-kinjin is how he would recall that moment. Kinjin-kinjin, she took up his challenge. The innocence. The mischief. The provocation. Without a word spoken, or even the thought articulated, he was hooked on her. He was hooked on that look, that manner, that moment in their lives. It was to see that face again, howsoever ravaged by age, that he would travel thousands of miles, abandon his practice.

“I want this Saida to be a madamu, a teacher,” Bi Kulthum, her mother, was telling Mama.

Mama and Bi Kulthum were as close as two sisters, and unlike as any two women could be in Kilwa. Both were without their husbands, Mama’s, an Indian doctor who had absconded, Bi Kulthum’s, a trader who had died of fever. Bi Kulthum shared a house with her parents, Mzee Omari and Mwana Juma. Like most Swahili women she came out in a black diaphanous bui-bui, full length over her dress, only her long face exposed; Mama wore a dress always and used a colourful khanga to cover her shoulders and head when necessary. She was the modern one. But now both had their heads uncovered,
as they sat in the front portion of the room that was the entire house, Mama on the broken-down sofa, Bi Kulthum on the chair opposite. The barred window in the front was wide open, looking out upon the tree.

“Mwalimu, eh!” Mama exclaimed approvingly. A teacher! Well indeed! “And she will stand up straight and command with a ruler.” She laughed gaily at the thought, gave a clap of the hands. “Weh, Saida!—do you listen? That would be very good. Then, my sister, my son Kamal will be very happy to help her.”

This was the request Bi Kulthum had come with. Saida should be a teacher, with Kamal’s help, and God willing. Saida’s schooling thus far had been sporadic; she had attended when she or her mother had felt like it. Now Bi Kulthum had been struck by this whim, this ambition for her daughter. She said to Mama, “Your son is a gift to you from Allah the Merciful, even though he does not have a father.”

“Truly,” replied Mama and made a brief gesture of spitting on the floor. Bi Kulthum followed suit. It wouldn’t do to invite ill luck.

He enjoyed watching them this way, so much at ease with each other; it gave him pleasure, and a sense of comfort. The world was a glad place. Mama husky-voiced, and strong; fleshy in a nice sort of way; darker. Bi Kulthum angular in face, like her daughter. Her eyes fascinated him, more flashing purple than black. Her speech was more formal: she would say
Allah
to Mama’s
Mungu
.

After three decades, these scenes came vividly to him.

He was a lonely child, I observed to him.

Yes, he admitted, though he did have companions to play with. But essentially lonely and very attached to his mother. They were a unit—Hamida and her son Kamalu. He had often wondered, what did people say about Mama and him behind their backs? The abandoned twosome. When will Hamida forget her Indian doctor and accept one of her admirers? A woman needs a man, whatever she says.

And then came Kinjin-Saida into his life. Before, they had hardly spoken to each other; now she came to see him, with respect, to learn from him.

She came on Sundays, around eleven, having completed chores for her mother; she would be washed and dressed up, her hair combed
neatly into braids. But barefoot. They would sit down on the floor, the linoleum from his father’s time with its pattern of overlapping squares long having lost its gleam, and he would try to teach her English and arithmetic. He found it hard going; she was easily distracted by the sounds on the street outside, or by his mother working in the other end of the room. Often they got stuck on some simple problem whose concept would simply not penetrate her head.

“Why should I do it like that?”

“Because that is the way to do it.”

“Let’s play. Tucheze,” she would say in a small pleading voice, having already given up in her mind. The gleam of hope in her eyes, the puckered lips ready to smile. The little sorceress.

“To play? What? Tucheze nini? Sit down and do the sum!”

Mm-mm. No, with a shrug, the Swahili way. Mm-mm. Aa-aa. She’d push the notebook away, he’d raise a hand to threaten her, and she’d pull the book back to her. He was not a good teacher, he couldn’t have been at his age.

“Mama, do I have to teach that girl?”

“Saida? No, you don’t have to. She doesn’t have the brain for it, does she? I’ll tell Bi Kulthum.”

“No, I’ll teach her.”

She threw an amused eye at him. “You like her?”

“She’s only a girl,” he replied scornfully.

She quickly looked away, but not before he caught the edge of her little smile.

Mama liked to tease him. He was her little husband. He watched her as she finished hemming the cloth in her lap, cut the thread with her teeth, squeezed the needle into the reel and placed it on her little table of sewing things that stood by the window. She turned to look at him and he could sense her eye caress his face. Then the anxiety overcame her, like a shadow. There were only the two of them, and they had long stopped waiting for his father to return. Dr. Amin Punja had abandoned them.

As you’ve done your children
.

That persistent, wifely voice in his head, relentless, all the way here, even after the separation.

They’re adults, for God’s sake!

You are going back to the witch and you’ll never return
.

For a few weeks, he had told her. He would go away for a few weeks. But then single-mindedly prepared to go away not knowing when he would return. Or if.

And his own father, what did
he
say before he left his wife and child and never returned? What destiny called
him
?

As an adult, did he ever try to find his father?

Yes, he said, and left it at that.

And his mother? Where was she now?

He didn’t know.

“Your father came from seafaring merchants,” Mama said proudly. Masultani, mabalozi, waarabu! They were sultans, ambassadors, and nobility, and he did not have the heart to call her exaggeration. Perhaps it was her eyes that betrayed her, that quick glance that shot away. The meagre story that he gleaned from her over their years together was that long ago in the previous century one Punja Devraj, a Gujarati from India, came as a trader to Zanzibar. He became known for his business acumen and honesty, and one day the sultan sent him to Kilwa on a mission. In those days Kilwa was an important place. Caravans arrived all the way from Zimbabwe in the south; from Bagamoyo and Zanzibar in the north; and from as far away as Congo in the west. Ships took away slaves and ivory, gum from the ground, and grain, and even wild animals, for in Europe they liked to look at our animals. Here the story became weak. She couldn’t say what Punja’s mission was, and she couldn’t say for certain whether his family accompanied him to Kilwa. Sometimes yes, sometimes no. If yes, what happened to them? They left after he died. Then he died in Kilwa? How did he die? Where is he buried? She didn’t know. “I wasn’t born then! Why do you have to ask me of days long gone?” “
You
began it,
you
told me about my ancestor!” They quarrelled.

One day Punja’s grandson, a well-mannered, quiet, and dignified man called Dr. Amin, arrived in Kilwa to look at the place where Punja had died, and to say a prayer, a Fatiha, for his ancestor. The doctor liked the town and stayed on and opened a clinic. He married, or kept as common-law wife, a woman named Hamida, whom
he trained as his nurse and dispenser. But one day, when the boy was four, the doc upped and left.

There was that picture, the telltale snapshot that he left behind, evidence of his fall from Indian respectability—having gone local, fathered a half-breed, an outcaste whom he could never call his own back in Gujarat. He appeared very fair in that photo, sitting stiffly on a chair, and he was short, with his hair parted in the middle. He wore a Western-style double-breasted suit and tie. Beside him stood Mama, solemnly staring straight out at the camera, in a khanga dress with a headpiece. Between them—he could sense her pushing him towards his father—stood the boy, wearing awkward, extra-large shorts. Looking rather lost—or did he project himself as he looked at his own photo?

He didn’t recall posing for it.

“What about
your
family, Mama?” he asked her.

“Hamna kitu,” she’d say impatiently. Nothing to speak of. What did she hide?

Kamal begged her for her story, perversely as he later thought, for he had guessed somewhere deep in his mind the reason for her reticence. She was from slaves. But the Devrajes, his father’s folks, yes, she would tell him about them. They were his people. The sultans. The ambassadors. From India.

“But I’m an African,” he protested with vehemence. Ni Mwafrika! “I don’t speak Indian, I don’t eat Indian! They eat daal and they smell!”

“Mhindi, tu.” An Indian. That’s what she wanted for him. But why? So he too could be a sultan. Once when he pestered her for details of that phantom figure Punja Devraj, his great-grandfather, she told him, “Ask Mzee Omari, he knew him.”

He knew him! But how to ask that fearsome poet, with that lout of a djinn hovering about him?

When he asked her about Punja’s grandson, the daktari, his father, she said he was a steady man. “Did he love you, Mama?” She smiled to tease. One day he brought up his father when Bi Kulthum happened to be visiting. And Bi Kulthum voiced boisterously, “Your father! The doctor! He was a generous man! A lovable man!”

Later, Mama said to Kamal, “Don’t mention your father in Bi
Kulthum’s presence.” There was mischief in that admonition. “Eti, she fancied she would take him away from me!”

There lay a story, the precise nature of which remained a mystery.

Kamal could never get the African out of him, even when he washed himself with bleach to get his muddy brown out. That was in the future, when Mama sent him away to claim his father’s heritage, become an Indian.

“Listen to this,” Kamal said to me. He read out:

“ ‘In November 1776, French ship owner Captain Morice arrived at Kilwa and signed a treaty with Sultan Hasan bin Shirazi by which every year he would take away a thousand blacks, for twenty piastres each, men or women; he was granted exclusive rights, and the treaty was valid for a hundred years.’ ”

A hundred years later, in 1878, an Englishman, Capt. J. Frederic Elton, departed from Zanzibar on Her Majesty’s service to inspect the towns along the east coast of Africa for slaves owned by the Queen’s Indian subjects. All along the coast in the trading towns he freed the Indians’ slaves, the majority of whom opted to stay with their former masters for wages. The Kilwa–Dar es Salaam route was busy with slave traffic. Elton described an encounter: “One gang of lads and women, chained together with iron neck-rings, was in a horrible state, their lower extremities coated with dry mud and their own excrement and torn with thorns, their bodies mere frameworks, and their skeleton limbs slightly stretched over with wrinkled parchment-like skin. One wretched woman had been flung against a tree for slipping her rope, and came screaming up to us for protection, with one eye half out and the side of her face and bosom streaming with blood.”