The Dragonfly Sea Read online

  Allahu Akbar…

  The Adhan here was still borne in the voice of a man, two men—Omar Abdulrauf and Abasi Rashid—to be precise. Rivals, each bore a rock-hard conviction of his particular vocal giftedness while offering faint praise for the other’s efforts. The island still resisted the taped, exact, and washed-out coats of sound offerings made in dour Saudi Arabia that elsewhere had replaced that timbre of truth that a living voice offered.

  “Ash-hadu an-la ilaha illa llah…”

  Muhidin climbed down broad steps, ears buzzing from Omar Abdulrauf’s bayed summons: “As-salatu Khayrun Minan-nawm…”

  Muhidin wondered about offering a honey-clove-ginger gel to the crier, whose baleful countertenor suggested the mating of whales. Muhidin hastened across the inner courtyard and shaded his eyes from the light pouring in.

  He waited.

  Three minutes.

  There it was.

  Patter of footsteps behind the north-facing house. After a few minutes, a child’s voice chanted: “Kereng’ende…mavuvu na kereng’ende…”

  Kereng’ende? Muhidin scratched his beard. Dragonfly season. He glanced skyward. The short rains were coming. The air was thick with humidity, the clouds sat high in the sky, and large shoals of fish were showing up from spawning grounds. There were new currents and undercurrents. Muhidin turned to the sea.

  Splash!

  A child gurgled, piling on laughter. Muhidin listened for a while before rubbing his whiskers as he wandered into his lower-floor kitchen, and switched on the kettle. He laid out a chunk of honey halua and mahamri ya mbaazi on a rusting round tray that had once featured pictures of kittens. He poured hot milk into a large mug, added a spoonful of masala, and imagined that the evening dhow from Lamu would come bearing some mkate wa mofa, which he needed to get. Somewhere in the water, the child laughed again. Her glee crinkled Muhidin’s eyes. Secret laughter for Muhidin meant that a secret could be transferred with a glance across a gallery’s turquoise balcony. A secret could be born when a man witnessed a dance that the rest of the world would never see. A secret could be felt or held in a minuscule smile that was no more than a tic on an aging man’s upper lip, or a glimmer of starlight in a bastard child’s eyes. Before the child had seen him, she used to twirl in the ocean’s shallows and sing a loud song of children at ease:

  “Ukuti, Ukuti

  Wa mnazi, wa mnazi

  Ukipata Upepo

  Watete…watete…watetemeka…”

  Unseen, he would listen. Other times, he saw her just combing the beach. She hauled in driftwood, dead eels, dead birds, dead starfish, a sealed bag of pasta, a hockey stick, a baby doll’s head, and a blue plastic turtle. Then she had discovered he was at the balcony at dawn. So she sang in softer tones, but the morning breeze still brought her tune to him.

  “Sisimizi mwaenda wapi?

  Twaenda msibani

  Aliyekufa ni nani?…”

  * * *

  —

  He had seen her long before her dawn adventures entered his life. It was over an oil-exuding, large, lobed, scaly fat creature, the size of a short man, with four leglike lower fins that one Yusuf Juma, fisherman, had hauled in and dumped on the jetty. People had gathered to stare, and some fishermen remembered that a similar beast had been found before. The little girl had appeared. She had crawled under the assembled adults’ arms, and was kneeling close to the thing, arms looped across her knees, when Muhidin, who was on his evening walk, the tap-tap of brogues with steel heel and toe caps announcing his approach, had pronounced, “Ni kisukuku. Alieishi tangu enzi za dinasaria.” He repeated a message from a poster he had seen about the coelacanth. He added, “Netted one once when I was at sea. Can’t eat it. Return it to the water. The sharks will rejoice.” As he glanced over, he briefly noted the intense wide-eyed, openmouthed gawking of the girl in oversized rags. His eyes had glazed over, preoccupied as he was with completing his evening stroll.

  As the kettle now hissed and spat water at Muhidin, he heard her voice:

  “Sisimizi mwaenda wapi?

  Twaenda msibani…”

  * * *

  —

  He knocked the kettle’s head as if it were a disobedient pet, and poured the dark, bitter coffee into the mug. Chewing on coffee grounds mixed with cardamom, cloves, and cinnamon, he carried his tray upstairs to his room. He looked over the balcony to scan the sea, scrutinizing the red-edged clouds and uneven blue waters. Storm tonight over water, he predicted. The girl was playing in white-froth waters. She dived under the surface. The current, he worried. Muhidin counted the beats of his heart, looking for telltale dark, rippled signals of an undertow. Then the child popped up. She had surpassed her previous two-minute underwater feat by seventeen seconds. Muhidin wiped his nose on his sleeve. Wasn’t as if it should matter to him. Not his business. Mouth twitch. Two minutes seventeen seconds!

  * * *

  —

  An early-morning creaking and shuffling had disturbed Muhidin’s sleep one night more than a year ago. It had been dark when he reached for a watch he had put together from the remains of past watches. It chirped, cricketlike, and pinged once every three hours. Restless for the usual unremembered reasons, he had retired to his balcony to wait for the sunrise. He had noticed the glimmer of light in the magenta slashing across the sky. In that luster, he had glimpsed a being leaping in the ocean, cavorting like a baby pomboo, a dolphin. It had dived under water and emerged several meters away. It was not that Muhidin believed in the existence of djinns, but, as an explanation for the specter in the water at that hour, the shadow of the idea crossed the wall of his mind. He hurried downstairs, crossed an inner courtyard, cut through the reception space he used as his shop and dispensing booth, walked past the foyer and out through the porch. On the street, he trotted down to a corner that would lead to the beach. Then he recognized the waif.

  His disappointment had surprised him. Desperate for ghosts, Muhidin? he chided himself. Kweli avumaye baharini papa kumbe wengi wapo—many kinds of fish in the sea. He had scowled as an inner debate curdled his thoughts. Should he haul the child out? There were unstated rules about who could and could not swim in the sea. A child: not without supervision. A girl: hardly ever. But. He also knew how the sea was with certain people, how it needed them, and they it. It was like that for him. But it had been expected of him. His late father, and his father before him, had been sea keepers—they had read the water in all its seasons, and had kept its rites and rituals. Even though they had died before he could learn from them, he had retained an instinct for the calling. In his youth, he had been one of only seven who could dive in the middle of the night to find fish, oysters, and crabs from the deep with only lanterns on boats to light their way. He had been stung by jellyfish and electric eels, and lived. He could name swells, tides, and currents by look or sensation. When a riptide had swept him into deep seas, he had not been afraid, merely curious. Ever since he had returned to Pate, three times he had snapped awake, only to find himself in the water at night, without knowing how he had left his bed and house to reach the tides.

  [ 3 ]

  The dirty-white kitten wrapped itself around the little girl’s tiny shoulders as she watched passenger boats dock. She was waiting for her father. She had never seen her father, nor did she know what he looked like. Everything she believed he was had arisen from her imagination, where she had demanded that he reveal himself in a tangible form today.

  Just as she had expected that he would yesterday.

  And the day before.

  Whooshing winds, the murmur of the tide.

  Today, her father was not among the disembarking home-comers of the morning, or among those who tumbled out of the evening dhow. He did not disembark from either of the two matatus that traversed Pate Island. Ayaana had waited till she heard the night crickets chirp, until there was sudden stillness, as if t
he world were waiting for her to speak. She whispered to her kitten that she would give her father only one more chance. Tomorrow was his very last chance to find her. The cat faux-scratched the girl’s head and purred.

  [ 4 ]

  Time-dissolving floating. Solitude and wordlessness, and everything traveled toward an unknown beckoning. Even she did. But underwater she did not need to worry about labeling things in order to contain them. Feeling, sensing, experiencing—that was enough for knowledge. The sea had many eyes, and, now hers were another pair. A passing fish stared. A human looked back. She drifted with the currents, with the things of the current. She drifted until it was necessary to surface for air.

  Laughter echoed.

  Muhidin leaned over the balcony to listen to the child with the sea, the child in the sea. Would she learn that the ocean, like the world, was unpredictable? But. Not his business. He had returned to his house that first morning. Still, he looked out for the child every dawn. On some mornings, she did not show. On others, she shimmered into view before cockcrow, tiptoeing into the water, bouncing through the shallows if the sea was in ebb, and jumping into waves when the sea flowed. Months later, as she scurried back to her house, she had tilted her head up at him as if she knew he would be there. He withdrew from the balcony. A month later, she slowed down as she crossed the area below his balcony, walking with her head low. Days later, she stopped and breathed. She caught his look. She then pulled her ears down, crossed her eyes, and stuck out her tongue. And then she was gone, making tiny holes in the sand, as if a duiker were crossing.

  When she reappeared the following week, Muhidin returned her salutation in full. As he did, her eyes grew bigger, and then she clutched her stomach and screeched, before covering her mouth. Her mirth made her execute three cartwheels and then collapse on the beach, overwhelmed by the too-much-ness. Her merriment inside dawn’s protective shadows had infected Muhidin, who started to guffaw as he clung to his balcony railings. Then she was gone. Paff! Tiny steps on dark brown sand.

  Ayaana.

  The child’s name was not common to Pate. Ayaana—“God’s gift.” Of course, Muhidin knew her story. Everybody did. The child had come to the island one high tide seven years ago. She arrived in the arms of her then skeletal, mostly vanquished, on-the-tail-end-of-a-scandal mother, Munira, daughter of prestige—pale-skinned, narrow-eyed, as slender as a bird’s foot, and just as delicate. Her previous haughty, loudmouthed, angular, and feral beauty had been sheared off and dimmed by whatever it was she had tangled with in two and a half years of life away from the island. She had drifted back home, a broken, rusting anchor. Ayaana was Munira’s only explanation for the raw-skinned thing she carried. It bawled at a wild, fire-streaked dusk as its mother disembarked from the leaky fisherman’s ngarawa she had chartered from Lamu in exchange for her last two gold bangles. When Munira landed on Pate Island, “Ayaana” was a plea for mercy on her lips. Those who witnessed their arrival, as they would an approaching cortege, did not renounce “God’s gift,” the babbling evidence of one woman’s washed-away dreams.

  “Who is the father?”

  “…”

  “The father, Munira?”

  “The wind,” she cried out, harrowed, hollow. “He is a shadow of wind.”

  And the answer, throbbing with the hint of horror, incited the family to organize schemes that would cause the situation to vanish. They promptly identified a groom for Munira: an austere scholar with a thin beard that touched his concave stomach, whose numerous attempts at serial marriages had failed—each bride fled and was never seen again. His first and only wife had also willed herself into muteness. The man was determined to merge with Munira’s patrician family and enter into its ancient, intricate, and extended business tentacles, which touched most port cities of the world. He was already starting the process of changing his name to theirs—a part of the deal.

  In response, Munira had rushed to the promontory, clutching Ayaana to her body. She prepared to jump. Her suicide threat compounded the scandal, entrenching the certainty of her incorrigible madness, her cursedness. Many, many years later, in one of their lucent moments, Munira would tell Muhidin the smaller details from that time: how she had handed her heart over to nothing—“I don’t believe in man”; how at every moon tide she would vomit out hope; how she rated some days’ quality by the quantity of insults received—the fewer the kinder. “But you can’t outrun your shadow,” she would say to Muhidin. He would reply, “You can ignore it.” She would scoff, “Stop it. We know the truth. Even as we lie.” She would say, “We will speak of death before we dare to speak of our loneliness. Dua la kuku halimpati mwewe. But I’m alive. Isn’t that good?” She would laugh at herself.

  After Munira threatened suicide, her cherished father, to save face, declared her maharimu—anathema. He had also preceded her name with the word mahua—the deceased—saying, “You, my firstborn, you trampled on my holiest dreams, you, to whom I gave everything. You have squandered your right to our name.” His eyes had been red with grief. Munira’s father, to the resentful regret of the archipelago—he had been a significant job-creator—had at once moved his harborage business and household five hundred kilometers away, to Zanzibar. Munira’s spurned suitor and his family went with them. “Please, die,” her stepmother suggested to her on their way out, “but do it after we’ve gone.”

  They abandoned Munira in Pate with her child.

  Munira mourned them. She would live, but her name became a byword for faults, a caution used to threaten bold or rebellious girls, a reason to remember why there were fewer jobs available on the archipelago. She was kidonda—a walking wound.

  In spite of his anguish, Munira’s father had, supposedly in error, left behind the keys to one of the family’s smaller houses. Munira had cautiously moved in and waited to be evicted. That did not happen. She retreated into its shelter with her daughter. She emerged in the early light with the child wrapped on her back and cleaned houses, cooked, washed and braided hair for pitiful shillings, with which she fed herself. She then started a garden of flowers, spices, and herbs, which she tended one plant at a time, burying her hand into the difficult loam and churning it with manure until it became fruitful again. Her beauty-therapeutics work sprang gently from this.

  Munira was marooned on her island. But twice a month, and only at night, she wandered over to a cove or sought out one of four large sea-facing rocks from which to look out at dark horizons into which she could implant secret dreams, safe from the jagged, gnashing teeth of an unappeasable world. There, within the shelter of night, Muhidin had thrice glimpsed Munira. Two years into his return to Pate, Muhidin, wandering in the darkness, had sighted a fluid shadow under the silver-light moon. The vision had frosted his soul. Then, to his breath-restoring relief, a human body glided after it, an unveiled moonstone woman. In another month of another year, in an equally dense hour, Muhidin’s and Munira’s sea-sprayed shadows crisscrossed, merged, and separated again: two isolations tiptoeing on an ocean’s boundaries, ears tilted inward, straining toward unknown phantoms and old promises that tempted them into an interiority where they could rest. Muhidin again spotted Munira crouched within an onyx-shaded hollow close to the sea. Not once did either of them acknowledge the presence of the other. At the previous New Year’s, while trying to strip himself of the ocean’s hold on his soul—he had, again, woken up to find himself in the water—Muhidin had run toward Munira’s house for no reason. He had leaned his head against the pillars of her door. Ever since then, he had tried to avoid even the thought of her.

  [ 5 ]

  On some Pate Island nights, conversations among men converged on the island square. In the absence of a reliable television service, these mabaraza were Muhidin’s news roundups. The men, mostly retired civil servants with rolled-up two-day-old newspapers whose every word they pored over, merchants, nondescript workers and scholars talked. Children played, and women m
urmured and tittered, and voices gentled by the day’s end debated Kenya’s contorted politics, its brothel-opened approach to everything, and English Premier League scores. There were three main groups unfairly distributed in support of Arsenal, Manchester United, and Chelsea. A few clung to a much-mocked nostalgia for Liverpool. They spoke often of Kenya as if they mattered to it, as if it had not at once lost its memory of their existence.

  Muhidin gobbled sweetmeats with these men, sipped hot, bitter coffee, played dominoes, mocked nearby Lamu Island’s self-importance—Pate had once dominated these seas, had been a maritime hub, making and selling warships to the nations of the ocean. The men outdid one another’s monster-and-mermaid tales, and dissected visitors, such as the old man from China who had taken over a fishing hut and was planting a vegetable garden. They clucked about scavenging watu wa bara, mainlanders, and the native-born nyang’au who were Kenyan politicians. They whispered about secret oil and gas and gold finds on the island. They traversed the memories of their broken island; picked up shards of fragmented, shattered, potent yesterdays. They exchanged tales of happenings in ports and sniffed the aromas of white flowers—lady of the night, orange blossom, lilies, jasmine—under the trillion eavesdropping stars. These Pate nights had reduced the volume of the thousand and one moans plaguing Muhidin from hidden places of his soul. The men would often rib Muhidin about his flirtations with heresy and his wild-tempered avoidance of public prayers and sacred events. “The Apostate,” they had nicknamed him. Yet Muhidin was also treated with cautionary wonder. Not only was he an augur who soothed secretly proffered fears with mysterious elixirs, but also, with one Pate eye perpetually cast on imagined worlds beyond the sea, the men saw in Muhidin one who had lived their every unmet dream.