The Magic of Saida (6 page)

But there were others who went around saying, We will possess the Indian shops and send them back to Bombay, we will move into the European houses in Dar es Salaam. We will marry Indian girls.

“Mama, will I be chased out of the country because I am an Indian?”

“Not at all! Who told you that? You are an African.”

“But you call me an Indian every time. Everybody calls me an Indian! Except the Indians themselves.”

“That is because you are an Indian who is more African than all these Africans walking about. And a better Indian than all those Banyani shopkeepers. Remember that.”

“Are you telling me a riddle now, Mama?”

“Enh-heh. You find out the answer when you grow up, not before.”

The riddle of his life, that’s what she had casually thrown at him. It meant nothing at the time.

The old men would gather for poetry, sometimes on an afternoon outside somebody’s porch, or under a tree, consuming kahawa, a boy vendor going around with his charcoal warmer and decanter, serving the arabica in delicate little cups; and sometimes in the evening, almost in secret, in a corner of the town square facing the harbour, breeze blowing, the hiss of waves breaking upon the shore, the distant echoes of mundane life. All would sit on the ground facing north. The proceedings would begin, someone would come forward to recite a verse from the Quran. Following this, a few amateurs stood up one by one to be indulged, and rendered the occasional poem they happened to have written—on the occasion of Eid; or giving thanks to the Prophet for bringing God’s message to Arabia, from whence it came down to the coast of Africa; and once, to much approbation for the vulgarity of the subject, praising the skills of the footballer Salum Ali. But Mzee Omari was
the
poet, he was the one awaited. He would stand up from the first row, assisted by his son Shomari, if he was there, or someone else, and step forward. He would go and sit on the tree trunk. With his barely seeing eyes he would look up, and then, the audience hushed, begin. His high, trembling voice would rise and fall, but never to extremes; it was the same shairi tune that came over the radio, that others used too, but in his voice, as it was said, a steel wire ran through. In spite of his age, it had a toughness, a flexibility, the cool glisten.

He always began with a minor preamble, as though to provide a transition from the amateur displays that preceded. In one preamble, he advised “our young brother” Julius Nyerere from up there
in Uzanaki, near Lake Victoria, to engage against the British with care, for we your fathers already saw how useless the struggle can be against the wazungu, the white men, when our own fathers failed against the Germans with their machine guns that spilled out pellets of death like rain; another sent blessings to our Kikuyu brother Jomo Kenyatta in a British jail—palé Kenya, there in Kenya, as the refrain went. Then he would continue where he had left off previously, reciting his utenzi, the long poem that told the stories of zamani za kalé, the history of our Kilwa and of our precious Swahili coast. It was the one he had begun some time ago with fanfare, invoking the djinn Idris, and was called
The Composition of the Coming of the Modern Age
. It would contain a thousand verses when finished. These old men sitting before him mesmerized were the witnesses to its birth.

—Go on, Mzee Omari. Recite.

—Recite what? (A purely rhetorical retort.)

—Where did Idris your servant take you? What did that djinn show you of the past?

—Sing, Mzee Omari. Tell us about the war.

—That I will, but can you bear the truth?

—Who can’t bear the truth?

—Sometimes I can’t.

—Ah, Mzee Omari! Stop playing with us! Go on, tell us. Tell us, we are all ears. Tell us about our mababus, the grandfathers; tell us about how they lived. Tell us about their bravery. Our ears burn to hear praises of our people; our eyes are ready to shed tears when we hear from you of their forbearance in the days of kalé.

Silence. And it would seem that Allah’s entire Creation waited, under the swaying branches and the stars and the moving clouds, for that voice to cut its sonorous way through the frivolous night breeze and silence the crickets and configure from the vacuity of the retiring night the events of the hazy past, lend them coherence and bring them to life.

When Mzee Omari recited, he became a different man, as if in a trance, standing upright but not rigid, his near-blind eyes staring in front, the words emerging steadily from his mouth as if some spirit inside him were sending them forth into the world where
they became real and permanent. When a verse was recited, it had received birth. It was a bead to join a rosary of beads, its four lines artfully constructed in that unforgettable rhyme,
aaab
, to please the ear and the mind, and also to instruct.

Hidden among the night shadows, Kamal sat a few paces behind the attentive men, when a pebble hit him sharply, from somewhere in the dark. He winced, tried to pay attention, when another pebble hit him, from the opposite direction. Then a sharp pain in the back, where a bigger one landed, and he stood up to go. He didn’t have to think who it was harassing him from all sides. But then Mzee Omari came to his rescue, stopping his recital abruptly to sternly chide his djinn, “You Idris stop harassing the daktari’s boy and sit down!”

He waited for the audience to settle down again. When silence fell, the poet opened his mouth; but instead of resuming, he said, “That boy who sits quietly there listening, know that his grandfather Punja has sent him here to listen. Yes, this Punja was a lion. His tale too belongs to this composition, and I will get to it! I will get to it, and then you will see; to everything its time.”

“Yes, Mzee, without doubt. The Indian’s time will come. Pray, go on. Continue.”

Mzee Omari continued. But Kamal heard nothing now, the rich voice only the background, in his mind the words repeating, “Punja was a lion … Punja was a lion …”

A lion of a man. Mzee Omari knew about him. Kamal wished he could sit with the old man and ask questions. Yet how could a boy ask questions of a venerable mzee, a man of such skill and wisdom that he could compose a thousand verses and recite them without looking at a paper? And who had his own personal djinn?

The evening would end suddenly. Mzee Omari would pause and say, “Here I end my recitation today. Now to praise the Maker, Ashahadun la ilaha illallah …” They would all repeat the prayer with him in a chorus, then get up to go, the more knowledgeable among them ready to discuss the fine points of prosody: the subtlety of a rhyme, how the Arabic pronunciation lengthened a vowel, how a German word had saved the integrity of a line, and so on. The men would disperse into the darkness, head for their houses in Kilwa’s dark streets. Mzee Omari would walk slowly home in the company of his son Shomari.

Some nights another strange being would be haunting these gatherings, lurking among the shadows. He was Salemani Mkono, the one-armed beggar. At the end of the night’s proceedings he would slink off into the shadows, observed only by one person, Kamal.

“Don’t go to the seashore at night,” Mama warned, when she found out about Kamal’s nocturnal jaunts. All the time she had thought he was out at play down the street.

“Why?”

“Don’t go when those old men gather there. I am telling you.”

“I’ll go.”

“Thubutu! Don’t you dare!”

“But why? I like to listen, Mama. I like the stories—they are like cinema!”

The only film he had seen was a Laurel and Hardy clip on a screen set up in the backyard of the Shamsi jamatini, the large prayer hall. He and a few other boys had gathered in the alley outside and
climbed up on stones and boxes and craned their necks over the wall to watch, but created such a noise that they were allowed in and told to sit quietly at the back. After that the Shamsis showed their films inside their jamatini. But Kamal knew about movies from the notices in the papers, and from listening to Indian boys talk about them in school, having seen them during holidays in Lindi and Dar. And so he knew about Raj Kapoor and
Shane
. His dearest desire was to see a Tarzan film. But Mzee Omari’s stories were exciting too. His heroes were Africans like al-Bushiri and Makunganya and Kinjikitilé of Ngarambe. And Punja the Lion.

“Don’t go, I tell you,” Mama said. “There are djinns there, by the sea, in the trees. That Mzee Omari, he attracts them. He has no fear of anything, that old man. Don’t go there, did you hear? Some shetani-djinn will get inside you.”

“Thubutu! That Idris tried to chase me away one night, and what a chiding Mzee gave him! In front of all.”

“I told you!”

He couldn’t keep away. One way or another he would find out when a recitation was scheduled, and he would sneak off and find his place behind the rows of sitting elders. One evening Kamal sat mesmerized, listening to the poet, when Saida slid down beside him, silent, panting. She smelled of pee.

“Mama, she does not wear knickers. I can see her uchi sometimes.”

This happened when they were sitting on the floor, studying. His mother looked strangely at him, then looked away.

But Saida got her knickers, she showed them to him proudly when she came for her lessons, in one quick flick of her dress, when Mama was not looking. Red and yellow checks, the kunguru design, coming up to her belly button. Mama had stitched them. Kamal was pleased with himself too. He had got his first Y-front from the Indian store. The problem was when it was in the wash. “I’m saving,” Mama said, “I’m saving for the next one. Meanwhile, keep your thing discreet. Don’t let the bwana peep out or flip-flop about.”

They had a long laugh together.

•  •  •

“Mama …”

“Mmm. Nini, sasa.” Stitching buttonholes for the Indian store. She wore glasses now. “What’s it,” she said.

“Mama, sikiza!” Listen!

“Now what, my son?”

“Mzee Omari’s ancestors were Arab.”

He sat down beside her, on the broken-down sofa.

“Who told you that?”

“Even he said that—they came from Baghdad!”

“What are you saying?”

With that tone there always came a glare. He didn’t like to make Mama angry. It was so much nicer when they were friends and she looked after him, when they laughed together. Seeing her mood suddenly scorch unsettled him. But he couldn’t help it. He had discovered a point of argument.

“Mama—can anyone be more African than he? And yet his ancestor came from Baghdad.”

“Don’t trouble me.” Then she reached out and drew him up close. She laughed, and his heart relaxed with joy. There were only the two of them then, the third one mere memory, an imprint on their existence, slowly fading.

He had heard about India in his school, and he had read about Baghdad in a storybook. In his class, which contained all Indians except for him, a teacher came to instruct the boys about their culture. Every time he came he would tell a story. Kamal would be asked to sit in the last row during this lesson, but he paid attention, and that’s how he learned about his father’s country. In India there was a king called Rama who had a wife called Sita. The teacher held up pictures of this couple; they were similar to those in the calendars in the Indian shops. Rama and Sita were white people and had four hands. Rama held a bow. Their friend was a monkey who stood tall on two feet, looking very serious. This monkey was a fundi, an engineer. Was his own father, the doctor who had gone away, white? Did some Indians look like monkeys? If so, then he begged Allah that they did not include his ancestors. Among the Indians in town there were one or two men who would definitely fit that description, he thought. And in Baghdad there was a powerful sultan called Harun
Rashid. There was Aladdin who had a lamp with a djinn inside it. No surprise that Mzee Omari, whose ancestor came from that city, had his own djinn too. Did Mzee Omari keep the dreadful Idris in a bottle? Did he come out of it like a blue puff of wind as in the storybook?

During the month of Ramadan, early in the evening, when the day’s fast had been solemnly broken in each Muslim home, Kamal would emerge into the streets with a sinia, a round tray that he would balance carefully on one shoulder, holding it against his neck, heaped with diamond-shaped kashatas, pink and orange coconut brittles, sweet. Barefoot, the imported, England-made Y-front his only, though hidden, privilege. “Kashaataaaa! Five cents a piece!” he would call out proudly in a high pitch as if calling the azan—there was no shame in doing business. “Weh kashata!” would come a cry, calling him over, for in the parlance he was identified with the product itself, and he would go and ask the customer, “How many?” and collect his money. From such origins to medical school. From there to Edmonton.

With his laden tray he would first meander towards the monument on the main road and linger, until her high, thin voice rose and she appeared from the opposite side, calling out, “Ee-eeh taaambi!” Fried vermicelli. They would sally forth on the street of the Indian shops, separating to compete for customers, then on to the street of the large Indian stone houses, which had a few shops too and the large prayer house, outside which the kids played. They were the best customers. The two vendors would rendezvous for a break to give their throats a rest. At one of the shops they would get a drink of water. “How much did you make, Kamalu?” “Fifty.” “Me, sixty-five!” “Go on, eti!”