The Dragonfly Sea

by Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor

  * * *

  —

  In the mabaraza, after their evisceration of politicians who, they agreed, went to Nairobi garlanded in dreams and promises and returned to them as shape-shifting djinns—devious, untruthful, and ravenous—the chattering men would often target an island resident to broil, roast, and chew over. To Muhidin’s suddenly increasing dismay, he observed how often Munira, the little girl’s mother, was fodder. Kidonda entwined with major human follies, with a focus on lust, mannerlessness, sloth, and vanity. Kambare mzuri kwa mwili, ndani machafu. She had outer beauty but inside dirt, proclaimed a middle-aged merchant with a penchant for watermelons and lewd insights: “Have you seen how that one spins her head?”

  “How?” Muhidin barked, irritated by his irritation. Not my business, he scolded himself.

  The merchant’s eyes roamed as he said, “Nose high up. Scandalous daughter of fire, she even speaks with her hands.” He lowered his voice. “You’ve seen the gap between her front teeth? She ensnares men with potions.” His head moved in an arc that pointed northward.

  Munira had been seen wandering in the direction of the arc, where Fundi Almazi Mehdi lived. He was the almost mute shipbuilder and long-ago wind-whistler—one of the few who could summon sea winds by intent and melody—whose grandfather had moved to Siyu from Kiwayuu. Mehdi repaired broken sea vessels. His wife, sons, and daughters had lives elsewhere, in the Middle East, where Mehdi had also been before returning to Pate alone. He was sometimes heard to whistle to the memory of sea winds. His radio knob was permanently set to the meteorological channel, with which he kept abreast of the state of tides.

  “Fundi Mehdi?” Muhidin restrained his amusement.

  “God protect us,” the merchant sighed.

  Muhidin let go a belly chortle. “Dear man, you sound thwarted. Were you hoping to be ‘ensnared’?” The others laughed at the man. Muhidin added, “Du! Yet that woman’s garden is alluring. The soil loves her hand. What flowers! What herbs! What spices!”

  The island’s mobile-phone services provider protested. “But have you asked yourself what sort of person cultivates plants near a grave, eh? I swear she employs djinns, eh?”

  Djinns? Muhidin said, “Decayed flesh is also manure, brother!”

  The man sniffed.

  A week later, Muhidin felt his body edging away from these night conversations. He had been about to jump into the conclusion of a debate about Arsenal versus Manchester United, in praise of the Chelsea Football Club, when he realized he was on the outside looking in. The same thing happened three nights later. As the island’s oldest tailor was boasting and calling his wife “a flower of flowers,” Muhidin had stretched his arms. Faking casualness, he pursed his lips to whistle. He wandered off, looking about him as if for a pee bush. But as soon as he was out of sight of his companions, he dashed all the way back to his house.

  * * *

  —

  Muhidin felt his way up the stairs and into his bedroom. There he showered before falling into bed, where an odd electric sensation seized him. What am I doing? He tossed about in dampening sheets. “Where is your wife?” those men had once asked him. He had lied. He had looked roguish when he said he had made full use of misyar, the traveler’s marriage—a legal temporary arrangement between a consenting man and woman. “Countless Nikah mutʿah,” he announced. The men gaped at him in wonder. He had compounded the lie to extract sympathy: “The one I most loved…she got sick. To spare me grief, she left me”—he dropped his head and choked—“to die.”

  The men made sympathetic sounds.

  One observed, “It is good you are here now; our women are beautiful.”

  Now, lying in his bed, Muhidin evoked the women who had been actual intimates in his life. After his first wife, he had temporarily married three others—lush beings. He had disappeared on them. One was in Pondicherry, another in Mocha, and another in…was it Beira? Far too many gaps, he grunted. He had lost the threads of the lies he told to gain access to soft, scented, sultry bodies, and the lies he wove to extricate himself. With a piercing pang, he wondered about his children—those he knew about, the ones he had abandoned. A shuddering in his heart: condensation of unspoken fears. He murmured into that night: “Am I, then, to die alone?” He had lived hard and unfettered. He had sought this way—preferring it to the possessive disorders of erratic jealousies, overwrought demands that passed for love and its suffering. He had never been able to give himself over to stifling domesticity. He read it as insanity. Fortunately for him, fresh horizons always beckoned. He was a man most himself when roaming the contours of life’s riddles. But time had turned on him. Time had handed him over to the shapes of his ghosts. They were of the texture of his unchosen life.

  Now—“What am I waiting for?” An opposing proposal—“Who am I waiting for?” Muhidin turned over in his bed, leaning away from the encroachment of memory, but not succeeding.

  Raziya, his first wife: he had divorced her when he was nineteen and she eighteen. Raziya was a sweet, trusting, overprotected island girl, vulnerable to the potent flattery—mndani, and mpenzi wangu—that Muhidin ladled. They had eloped and gone to Malindi, then returned to the island married. Seven months later, she gave birth to twin boys, Tawfiq and Ziriyab.

  Three days later, Kenya, the restarted country, lowered the Union Jack and raised a red, green, black, and white standard. Raziya’s father, Haroun, an erudite man striving for tolerance, who had almost studied at Oxford University, had tried to embrace his rough-hewn fisherman son-in-law. He turned over one of his houses to his daughter, hoping the cultured environment would have both a cleansing and an enlightening effect on the man, to whom he insisted on speaking in English. The house had indoor ablutions. “Dowry,” the father-in-law had told Muhidin.

  The house’s elegant lines and spaces, rows of bookshelves, and old, delicate Chinese plates had scared Muhidin, who stumbled into and broke a two-hundred-year-old Persian vase on his foray across the threshold. He took to spending days and nights at sea to avoid being near the house. He darted hither and thither to avoid the father-in-law, who was always seeking to improve him. “We are now Kenya,” Father-in-Law once said of the new flag fluttering on the pole of the repainted administrative shed.

  “So?” Muhidin had replied in Kibajuni. “Will it improve the supply of fish?” He was not being rude; he had simply wanted to understand what “Kenya” meant.

  Father-in-Law had tried for two more years before giving up and arranging a more suitable affiliation for his daughter, with a widower, a respectable merchant cousin from Yemen. Father-in-Law then contrived a dawn fishing trip with Muhidin. He had camped next to Muhidin’s boat from midnight, waiting for him. “Let’s go,” he told Muhidin. Mid-sea, Haroun had produced an envelope with eight thousand shillings and an introduction to a ship captain in Mombasa. In exchange, he pleaded with Muhidin to divorce his daughter—“Be merciful in God’s name; you are surely most unworthy of my child and her children”—and effect a permanent disappearance from the vicinity of the territories of the East African coast forever. Muhidin had sputtered before squelching a plea to Haroun, to explain that he had been poring over a dictionary of English words, that he listened to the BBC on shortwave radio even at sea. Instead, Muhidin had exhaled, deflated. None of his efforts would ever be good enough for them. Muhidin told Haroun that he was bored with the island anyway, that he was tired of everybody’s improvement schemes for him. He grabbed the money and left, cursing the island and its people. He told the scrawny boatman with whom he rowed to Lamu that he would become a beached octopus before he returned to Pate.

  Yet, years later, Muhidin had drifted back to Pate, and it looked smaller, shabbier, more derelict, isolated, and even more preoccupied with trivialities. The nation of Kenya’s half-century of neglect had consumed the soul out of the land, just as ocean-bed trawlers of many nations sucked up migrating yellowfin tuna and marlin
unchecked, leaving the fishermen with scraps and the stocks of fish depleted. Most conversations now were about departures—intended, hoped for, planned, or executed. What still thrived were Pate’s teeming ghosts, who jockeyed with residents for the right of abode. What still flourished were those in-between-space realms, their history, memory, and stories—it is to these that most who stumbled back to Pate returned.

  What lingered was Muhidin’s restlessness.

  But that night in his bed, inside the gloom of the decayed glory of a coral house he had once shunned, he mulled over an unforeseen reality: in all his fleeing, seeking, tricking, escaping, negotiating, working, whoring, wondering, reading, lying, learning, wrestling, questioning, seeing, tasting, hearing, and journeying, nothing had suggested a vision of “home” or “belonging” until that light-spattered dawn when he glimpsed a little creature dancing with the sparkling Pate sea.

  [ 6 ]

  Weeks later, within those cryptic violet-orange moments before sunrise, Muhidin was startled into wakefulness by a grating voice hurling “Ayaaana?” It was Abasi, the other muezzin.

  Abasi was a one-man morality police who modeled himself on a Saudi mutawwa—policing morals—and might have given himself over to bearded Wahhabism were it not for his heart and gut’s helpless devotion to his island’s saints. Today, it seemed, Abasi had glimpsed the ocean’s dawn companion. Muhidin threw on an old gray kikoi and stumbled down uneven stairs as outside, Abasi bayed, “Eiii! Mtoooto wa nyoka ni…ni nyokaaa!”—The child of a snake is a snake! Words as blows. Muhidin reached for his carved door. Abasi was cawing like a starved raven, “Nazi mbovu haribu ya nzima, weeee mwanaharamu!” Hearing light footsteps on the pavement outside, Muhidin flung open his door. There she was. Little, thin, doe-eyed, intense, shivering, dripping water from a tiny pink T-shirt, wearing faded blue leggings. Her damp bangs covered half her face. Upturned nose. Her eyes were red with sea salt, and fear mingled with mischief inside them. The child opened and closed her mouth like a stranded fish.

  “Mwanaharamuuu!” Approaching footsteps. The child hunched over.

  Muhidin beckoned her into the house as he stepped backward. He pointed to a cavernous engraved hardwood cupboard—made in Bombay before Bombay became Mumbai. It had come via Oman. Its main purpose was to aid concealment. There was a deep shelf inside where Muhidin stored his best books, his attar and blossoms; spice-incense experiments lined up several drawers. Four hidden compartments kept his other secrets. Inside, a two-person red velvet bench snapped into place to create a temporary yet comfortable hideaway. Ayaana scrambled and disappeared inside the cupboard. Muhidin closed his door. He stepped into the room to lock the cupboard, pulled out its long key, and lifted his barghashia to place the key in the middle of his head. He restored the barghashia. Muhidin heard the grumbling outside—“Today I’ve caught you!”—followed by a shuffle and an impatient knock. Muhidin took his time releasing the latch, ignoring the flutter in the pit of his stomach. There he was: squat, squint-eyed, big-toothed Abasi, chirping, “She was here,” as he pecked at the ground with a twisted stick. Leaning over to look, Muhidin saw tiny, fading footsteps in sand and water leading across the porch and into his shop-home.

  “Ma’alim Abasi! Salaam aleikum, mzee! A day of sunshine! Who was here?” Muhidin asked, but, moving sideways with a surreptitious gesture, he swept a hand over a shelf weighted down with maps, magazines, and books. These fell with a bang to create a small hill that cluttered the entrance. Muhidin huffed, “A thousand possessed books!” He bent to pick up a book, clutching his back with a grimace. “Oh, my back! Good you are here. Please. Help me capture my many, many vagabonds as we talk…”

  Abasi lifted up clean hands. He also tried to peer over Muhidin’s shoulder to scan the room. “I wondered…em…I saw…Did you see? Babu, forgive me, I’d like to help you…Did you see a curs-ed child, this high?” He estimated Ayaana’s height with his hand. “What? The books? Understand…were it not…Yes…You know Farouk, the agro-supplies man…not good. The tumor has spread to his forehead. Not good…” He was on surer ground now. “I must go.”

  Muhidin blew the dust from the jacket of another book into Abasi’s face. His voice wheedled: “Just a little?”

  Abasi sneezed, rubbed his eyes, and took four steps back. “Understand…” He was very firm. He hurried off, down the coiling street.

  The morning returned to its former stillness.

  There was the smell of the sea—a whiff of the illuminated things of life. A bird with a low-pitched voice lifted the morning with a punctuation mark—tong, tong, phee! Muhidin unlocked the Bombay cupboard’s door. “You may emerge, Abeerah,” Muhidin said. “A lazy camel has vaporized at the thought of labor.”

  After four ticking minutes of nothing, a small creature flung the cupboard door aside, leapt out, and ran smack into Muhidin. It knelt and wrapped its arms around his knees. “I am Ayaana,” it breathed.

  “I know, Abeerah.”

  Five ticking seconds.

  “Nitakupenda.”—I shall love you—the small being shrieked, before it sailed over mounds of books on its way out, dashing into a narrow alleyway where it merged with lean shadows.

  [ 7 ]

  She stuffed small pink petals into her mouth, chewing damask roses, while her mother, Munira, was distracted by the buzzing of secret thoughts. The girl studied her mother’s faraway look as she tasted the rose hip, its thorniness. Sucking rose water from her fingers, treating scent as taste, and remembering how her mother sometimes dropped twelve perfect globules into their tea, their milk, and, always, the halua she made. Sliver of a shadow as the girl’s thoughts skipped. Many nights, her mother, struggling in a net of fear of unknown things, would call her child over to her bed. There Munira would unseal a tiny long-necked blue metal mrashi, stored under her pillow, and sprinkle its rose water over the both of them as a prayer shroud.

  Before the girl found a way to this moment of roses, she had been weeping. She had wanted to fix the terribleness of her existence. That day had collapsed over her. In the morning, during the madrassa session, the recitation had all of a sudden pierced her very core. Lost in the feeling, she had been unaware of a gradual silence enfolding the room. She had not seen the usually immobile and monotone Mwalimu Idris stir and then rise like a fire-fed phoenix. Neither had she heard his pained “Subhan Allah!”

  Ayaana had not expected that the tip of her teacher’s stick would beat a tattoo on her head to snap her out of her trance.

  Mwalimu Idris had then lowered his head, the better to scrutinize her. He adjusted the lenses of round glasses that made his eyes huge and asked Ayaana, “Are you a djinn?”

  Ayaana froze, not understanding. The teacher’s stick poked her forehead. “Only the unholy dead yowl as you did; only the damned would sully these, the sweetest of words, with such a caterwauling.” He had enunciated his judgment: “You will leave my class. You will not return until such time as I decree that I have recovered from this assault.”

  Ayaana had fled the room amid the titters. She sobbed, then determined that she would not cry.

  Big people!

  Later that day, she had worked extra hard to do everything she could to be the “same as” the others: striding like Khadija, rolling words in her mouth before spitting them out like Atiya, raising the corner of her upper lip before smiling like Maimouna, and hunting for crabs in the mangroves and then donating the choicest findings to boys like Suleiman. But that afternoon, Atiya’s up-country father had returned to the island and found the children playing in the nearby field. While Farah, Mwanajuma, Rehema, and Ruquiya counted seeds, Ayaana skipped rope. The rope belonged to Atiya, who had started to grumble, impatient for her turn. The father had hissed at Ayaana as if she were a stray dog, and yelled, “Wee! Mwana kidonda!”—Child of the wound! He had proceeded to break a twig from the nearby shrub with which to threaten her.

  At first, A
yaana’s playmates had giggled. But when two of the girls burst into tears, unsure of what Bad Thing had happened, Ayaana had run away, tearing down ancient roadways. She had hurled herself through the half-open door of her house, trembling at the unseen horror she carried that offended others, which she could not fix.

  * * *

  —

  In the early evening, Munira, her mother, returned home, carrying two fish, a new set of lesos, and an aromatic plant. She crossed the threshold calling, “Ayaana!”

  No reply.

  Munira clucked. She was crossing the living room to reach her bedroom when she saw the deformed shape of her daughter, huddled on a faded blue chair. Munira dropped her goodies and approached the form. Her daughter’s head was pressed against a shabby green-gold photo album; she bit hard on her lips, and from time to time scrubbed the wetness off her face. Munira’s gaze focused on the album, remembering, with the usual pang, the people in there, frozen by light, who were absent from their present, and maybe their future. She had not told her daughter who these were. Later, much later, Munira would again conceal the album in a dark, dank corner of her cupboard, still unable to throw it away, still praying that time or termites would dissolve it for her. Now Munira knelt before Ayaana, tugging at the album until it left her daughter’s hands. Ayaana lifted her head and sought her mother’s gaze. Munira stopped a howl at the sight of her child’s hollowed eyes, the profound grief that pinched her face—the miasma of ancestral sorrows, the inheritance of wounds, of absences. She had choked a little, struggling for the right word.