The Other Language (34 page)

“We’ll see about that, Lionel. We’ll see,” Mrs. D’Costa said jokingly. “I am not going to inflict my presence on a daily basis, I wouldn’t want you to get sick of me too soon.”

“That’s an order, Anne! I won’t compromise!” Lionel said, adding a generous splash of vodka to her glass.

Prudence poked him lightly with her elbow.

“Lionel, please let poor Anne be. She’ll do as she pleases. You’ll
scare her away if you insist.” She shook her head and poured herself another drink.

“Don’t pay attention to him, Anne. He has become such a bully, this husband of mine.”

Prudence had put on quite a lot of weight since her days at the Little Theatre, but her roundness seemed to lend her a more youthful air. Men used to fall in love with her all the time, Mrs. D’Costa remembered. She had a lovely figure and a quirky taste in clothes back in the Mombasa days. Gamine, charming: that’s how people described her whenever Prudence came up in conversation. And quite rightly; she had been a lovely girl indeed.

Now Prudence wore Bata plastic slippers and large caftans that helped conceal her frame. She had cut her thick hair short and let it go white. She had spent too many years in the sun, and her face was a web of wrinkles. It didn’t matter, Mrs. D’Costa thought with relief: they had all aged in the sun and at the same pace so why should any of them mind the way they’d changed? They had known one another for so long, shouldn’t they be like family by now? And besides, as far as she was concerned, she believed she looked better now than when she’d just met the Wiltons. She had been a flat-chested, mousy girl with thick glasses, just twenty-one years old. An alien, really, who had just landed in the heat of Mombasa from the Scottish fog.

When Anne and her husband, Victor, met in college at Edinburgh, it was almost love at first sight. Victor D’Costa was a handsome, quiet young man. His family was originally from Goa, but in the thirties his grandfather had migrated to Kenya to work for the railroad company.

In those days in Edinburgh it was rare to see a student with brown skin on a university campus. Anne felt a bit of an outsider herself; she didn’t have many friends either, coming as she did
from a poor, uneducated family in Glasgow. She noticed how the rest of the students either ignored Victor or plain avoided him, and was drawn to him exactly for this reason. As she got to know Victor, she grew more in awe of his impeccable manners, his kindness and wit. Actually she found him far more sophisticated than most of the students who snubbed him.

In 1952, right after their wedding (a small affair, neither had money to spend on the ceremony), the couple had sailed off to Mombasa to stay with his family. She’d immediately agreed to follow him there; she wasn’t leaving much behind anyway: a stuffy rented room that smelled of cabbage, her father’s drinking and her mother’s dreariness. There was also a surly brother she never got on with.

She wasn’t ready for so much brightness.

The East African light was blinding as their ship approached the coast; even at eight in the morning the air was redolent of cloves and sweet flowers. She could smell water in that heat. The clothes clung to her skin.

“It feels like sitting in a warm bath,” she said, leaning into her husband, minutes after touching land at Mombasa port. They had been at sea for seven days.

“Is it too much, dear?”

“Oh, no. This is lovely. Lovely,” she said with a mirthful laugh. “I feel like taking my shoes off and running barefoot on the road!”

He clutched her hand and his eyes welled up slightly. He had been so worried that she might find the climate too harsh.

Her in-laws and her husband had decided it was better to take some time “to adjust” before getting a place of their own, so for a few months they’d lived with his family in the old town, in a big house full of relatives and children. Mixed marriages were a rare thing then, but the D’Costas immediately took her in as one of their own. It did help that they were Catholic Goans and they could all go together to church on Sunday, but in all respects
Anne felt truly welcomed from the very first day. Now she saw where Victor’s kindness came from.

Her new family was right, she did need time to get used to her life in Africa. Her head was spinning with fear and delight every time she walked out the door of her new home. Not only had she gained a whole new family, but there was a new language to learn, new smells, colors, noises and very different rules to get used to.

She asked Prudence whether she still liked to play mah-jongg.

“Mah-jongg? Oh dear, I haven’t for ages, actually. But guess what? I must have that same old set we had in the Bamburi house somewhere, remember? Shall I retrieve it from wherever it’s buried? We sure could play again on Sunday nights, like the old days. That would be so jolly.”

Prudence’s enthusiasm reassured her. It had been a good decision, to reunite with the Wiltons. They were such warm and lovely people.

Mrs. D’Costa and Prudence had met before Independence, in 1961. They’d been hired as typists in a British trading company’s office on Kilindini Road, which was then called Prince Charles Street. But after only two months Prudence had left her desk to join the Little Theatre company, where, thanks to her charm and her looks, she’d been offered a much more exciting career—as well as a more rewarding payroll. Soon after, Lionel—a dashing architect from London who had designed several hotels on the south coast—had spotted her onstage playing Vera in
Ten Little Indians
and had immediately fallen for her.

That first night at the Wiltons’ Mrs. D’Costa walked back home escorted by their night
askari
, Saleem. He flashed his feeble flashlight along a small path that cut through Prudence and Lionel’s garden, skirted one of the crumbling houses standing in
the plot right next to theirs and cut through the back of Mrs. D’Costa’s compound.

The night was scented with frangipani and the full moon peeked through the rustling palm fronds, leaving a silver trail on the dark surface of the ocean. It reminded Mrs. D’Costa of an advertisment from the forties for cruises in the tropics. She wished good night to old Saleem and sat on her veranda with a nightcap before retiring to bed. She was certain she’d sleep soundly on her first night at the cottage, and she did, lulled by the sound of the surf breaking on the reef in the distance.

Only two weeks after Mrs. D’Costa had moved into the cottage, Prudence and Lionel’s ancient Land Rover was hit by a truck as they were heading to Nairobi to visit their daughter, and they died on the spot.

It was a terrible shock, and for days Mrs. D’Costa avoided taking in the enormity of what had just happened by keeping herself busy. When the Wiltons’ five children congregated in the airy house from different parts of the world with spouses and children, it was she who took charge of the situation. Without even asking permission to do so, Mrs. D’Costa supervised meals, went shopping for supplies and took care of logistics with military precision, as one does whenever a tragedy strikes and everyone else is walking around in a daze.

Now, with Prudence and Lionel gone, she had been battling her loneliness in various ways. She’d started working daily in the garden—she had landscaped most of the garden at Mtwapa herself—and now with Hamisi’s help she dug a small pond that they filled with papyrus, water lilies and tiny fish. She attempted to teach English to some of the children living in the bush behind her property and had gone to great lengths to organize a Sunday class in her house. Only a couple of them showed up, brought by their mothers, who squatted outside on the floor of the veranda
while Mrs. D’Costa sat at the table with the children. She gave them notebooks and pens and started her first lesson conjugating the verb
to be
. The children—who had never sat at a table before and had never seen a house like hers—looked terrified. They were unable to follow what she was saying (despite the years she had spent in the country, her Swahili was still poor and too heavily accented), and as soon as one of them started crying, the other followed suit. The mothers apologized. The children were not used to
wazungus
. They were shy and they “had fear” of her.

That same year, during the monsoon, Anne spent endless afternoons under the pounding of the rain against the tin roof. She played solitaire over and over, reread cover to cover most of the yellowing paperbacks on the shelf—old thrillers, a couple of Daphne du Maurier novels,
The Field Guide to Birds in East Africa
. In between the daily power cuts she’d listen avidly to the BBC World or talk to her dogs, and one afternoon she finally resolved to teach Hamisi gin rummy so that they could play it together after dinner. He wasn’t as engaged by the game as she’d expected he would be, so she let him win most of the time in the hope of luring him into playing another hand and then another. It was essential that she keep spirits high and not indulge in dark thoughts. It was too late to turn back. And besides, even if she’d wanted, there was no other place waiting for her to turn back to.

Margaret Dobson—Margie to her friends—back in the days of old Mombasa had been a celebrated beauty, with the perfect marriage and the perfect children. A slender blonde with light blue eyes, she bought her wardrobe in England and always had a string of cultured pearls dangling around her neck. For Mrs. D’Costa she’d been just an acquaintance—they didn’t belong to the same Mombasa circles—but Anne had always admired her style from afar. Thus it was with extreme pleasure and surprise that two years after the terrible accident she learned that Margie
and her husband, Keith, were looking to leave Mombasa to retire on the south coast and were coming to look at the Wiltons’ plot of land. News of their visit had reached her via Saleem, the old
askari
who still lived on the premises, looking after the empty house. He came almost every evening to drink a cup of masala
chai
with her cook, Hamisi, to shake off the loneliness. The two men sat on the
baraza
outside the kitchen talking in Digo. Mrs. D’Costa enjoyed the sound of their soft cackles that seeped from the backyard into the house while she read a book with Pickle and Chutney snoring at her feet.