Ayaana’s voice had crackled. “Ma-e, I, too, I have a father?”
Munira was silent.
Ayaana asked, “Ma-e, mababu wetu walienda wapi?”—Where are our people?
Munira tilted her head.
Ayaana whispered, “Ma-e, what is the name of us…our family?”
Munira shut her eyes and heard, again, her own father’s heartbroken curse: “You, you have lost the right to our name.” She had honored his grief and judgment, had accepted her amputation from a deep and wide genealogy that had for centuries opened for their family access to secret spaces and places of the world. Broken off. Munira and Ayaana had been consigned to nowhere.
Ayaana gestured, pointing through the door, toward the world: “Them…they never want me.”
“Who?” Munira already knew, but she asked anyway.
“Big peoples.”
“How?”
Within the child, a montage of interruptions: Skipping, stop. Tadpole hunting, leave. Marble playing, get out. Shell gathering, go home. Earthworm digging, disappear. Mangrove hide-and-seek…Big people had never reached her among her sheltering mangroves. Turning to her mother, Ayaana then dared to ask the thing she most feared. “Is Ayaana bad?” Scrunching her face, refusing to cry. Tears squeezed through anyway. The child continued, as if reciting a crime: “Bi Amina, Ma-e…Bi Amina…She is saying, Ayaana! Kidonda, Ayaana! Kidonda.”
Munira flinched.
Kidonda: wound. That epithet. An idea oft repeated becoming real. Those familiar tentacles had now turned to hunt down her daughter as well. Witnessing the light being squelched from her child’s eyes, Munira felt her entrails roiling. In that moment, she would have surrendered her soul to the first gray-feathered djinn who could teach her how to spare her daughter the turmoil of inherited anguish. Munira gulped down her rising rage. Unclenching her fists, she raised her chin. Defiance. She had the power of words: she would call forth another name, an impossible and immense name. Munira’s voice was hard. “We have a name.” She paused. “The moon”—she hesitated—“gave it to us.” Now she whispered. “A sky name. We do not say it out loud, except at night, lest they”—she gestured to the outside world with her chin—“seize it from us.”
Ayaana’s eyes widened, as clarity dawned and refreshed their light. A sparkle. “A sky name?” she whispered. “What it is? What it is?”
Munira struggled with the ball of salt lodged in her throat, a curse she wanted to spit at the world. She spoke the lie into her daughter’s eyes. “Wa Jauza.” She repeated the phrase, now planting it in Ayaana’s soul through her right ear. “Wa Jauza.” Jauza. Orion. An entire constellation. “That is our name, our secret,” Munira murmured.
Ayaana had pressed her palms together, contemplating the grandness of this. The feeling grew and grew, till it heated up her heart and tilted her face upward. She would never stop looking skyward after that evening.
Munira had then gripped Ayaana’s right hand, pulling her to her feet, while announcing in a faux-cheery voice, “Come, lulu. Let us hunt roses, lulu.”
Ayaana had exhaled on a shudder.
* * *
—
Seeking roses, borrowing roses, scents that bled tenderness. Munira’s heart-gaze sought beauty as a desiccated soul craves water. Yearning for loveliness, she built on color until the greens became the green they were created to be. She trusted scent; it was for her an unfiltered presence, and therefore truth. She tended flowers and herbs, tugging and caressing at excesses until the plants revealed their essential core in perfect aromas that evoked a particular way of seeing. This was also one of Ayaana’s many pastimes, which included counting ripples on ponds and the sea, anticipating swells, watching rocks in the sea turn to shadow just before sunset, and befriending pointy-eared island cats with their large prescient eyes. The cats’ inclination to disappear with the onset of new-moon tides forced Ayaana into a cycle of affection and heartbreak and affection again.
Munira and Ayaana plucked small petals from the wild-rose bush draped over the ancient tombs. Its flowering was irregular—sometimes light for sweetness, other times dark for atonement. They gathered petals and dreamed of rose water. Rose water purged shame, filled sorrow’s crevices, and rinsed out guilt. Rose water tempered fears and longings. Munira and Ayaana hurried back to their cool, coral-stone home with their floral bounty. Munira rinsed a saucepan so she could boil water for half the roses. She glanced three times at Ayaana, her child of abandonment, child of loss, fruit of lying dreams. The water bubbled. Ayaana’s eyes rounded. Now that she was lost in creating, delight displaced grief. She lifted her head to catch her mother’s eyes. Munira lowered her face, connecting with Ayaana’s forehead. They were eye to eye, eyelashes entangling just like their softly-softly touching spirits. The water was cooling. Munira sighed, “Lulu, drop half the petals into the bowl. One at a time.”
Ayaana did, folding petals in, stirring the water. Seeing that her mother was distracted, her gaze fixed beyond the sea, Ayaana sneaked the largest petal into her mouth, scalding her fingers. She glanced over at her mother, then returned to watch the petals settle in the water and scooped another clutch to eat. In another bowl, the untouched rose petals waited. Later, they would bleed their essence into heated, pure coconut oil, to be distilled into a costly elixir to serve Munira’s work, which was to cover women with beauty, even those who called her a fragrant whore.
[ 8 ]
On a Sunday afternoon, Muhidin sauntered from the waterfront, whistling and swinging four just-purchased spring-tide fish. He saw Ayaana squatting beneath the old, bent ylang-ylang tree. There was a shallow hole in the dust in front of her. Her fingers were trained on a chipped bluish marble. He smiled, and would have continued if he had not heard her sniffing and comforting herself, “No! Ayaana, no matter, don’t cry.”
Surrounded by the resonant cheer of the distant playing children, which bounced all over the land, Muhidin carefully laid aside his fish before getting to his knees. Pretending to ignore Ayaana, he looked about, saw an oval black pebble, and dug it out of the earth.
Her gaze.
Lucid. Unblinking.
At last, Ayaana very slowly retrieved a shiny red marble from her pocket and gave it to him. She took the black pebble from his hand and pocketed it. She wiped her face with dusty fingers, staining it with streaks of mud. Muhidin primed his finger, narrowed his eyes, teeth biting his tongue, and let go. The marble missed its target by a meter. Ayaana’s smile was slow in coming. Then it emerged. Misery evaporated. They played marbles for over an hour, giggling over everything and nothing. Through oblique questioning, Muhidin would find out that some children had exiled her from their playgroup. Dura had said that there were far too many for the game and someone had to leave. Maimouna had volunteered Ayaana. Fatuma had protested that that was not fair, and they could all take turns waiting out the game. Suleiman had shoved Ayaana to the ground. She fell, her legs in the air. The children had laughed at the sight of her torn underwear. It was the humiliation that hurt her. Ayaana had picked up her three marbles and run away.
* * *
A persistent tong, tong, tong drilled into Muhidin’s past-midnight dreaming. It took him another six minutes to understand that the banging came from a door that was not within his dreams. His eyes snapped open. Tong, tong, tong. Tong, tong, tong. Groggy, livid, grumbling, he wrapped a kikoi around his waist and proceeded down the stairs, stumbling against the staircase and stubbing his big toe. “Makende!” he yelped. By the time he had dragged aside the lock, caught the skin of his thumb in between the clasps, howled again, and wrenched open the door, he was ready to commit murder.
There she was again. A little girl, shifting from left foot to right with bright-eyed urgency, in a still night under a waning gibbous moon. “Kuja uone”—Come see. She tugged at his arms, trying to drag him out.
His bewildered “What?” But h
e followed her.
“Hurry,” she demanded.
An emergency? He raced after her. She was steps ahead of him and kept looking back. Hurry, her arms beckoned. Something has happened to her mother. He wondered if he should have carried bandages.
* * *
—
They arrived at a promontory. Below them, a tide swirled. A cool breeze provided a bass note for soughing night creatures—an invisible reptile interspersed the melodies with a monotone croak. Night jasmine infused the air, and the sky above tossed lights across eternity, splashing white, blue, yellow, and red sparks in the sky, which was reflected in the black mirror of the water. The child tugging at Muhidin’s arm attempted a whisper as she pointed skyward at the moon. “Who has break the moon?” Her voice contained a compressed worry. She turned to peer into his face as if he must know, as if she suspected he could do something about the lunar vandalism. Muhidin had scanned the earth. He saw the night sky as if for the first time. “Who done it?” Ayaana pleaded. She was holding his face as if his was the most important answer in the world.
So Muhidin lied, because he did not want to seem ordinary in light of the hunger to know in her large eyes. He lied because he did not believe. Muhidin said, “The Infinite Poet.” “Almighty,” he added, as if he and the Moon Breaker were intimates, “who deconstructs in order to renew.” He repeated the word “Almighty” to watch the “ooooh”s take over her face. He hoarded her wonder for himself.
They watched the sky, saw stray night clouds, a fraction of the moon, and traveling stars. “Read,” she then said, both her hands gesturing skyward. He waited. “Read more,” she commanded. But he had forgotten how. Used to wandering down random trails as he was, he had lost his way. So they watched the sky. Ayaana tilted her head back, squeezing her eyes shut, then opening them. She asked, “And the ocean, she is saying what?”
Muhidin listened. “ ‘Who are you?’ ” he interpreted for her. “ ‘Who are you?’ ”
“I am Ayaana!” she screamed to the water below, leaning over the edge. “Now you.”
“I am Muhidin,” he muttered.
She exclaimed, “Loud!”
“I am Muhidin!” he bellowed to the wind and waves.
They giggled. They watched the sky. They heard the sea ask, Who are you? And the broken moon watched them. She turned and held his face again, the better to speak. But she forgot what she wanted to say as she studied Muhidin’s face. “A small-of-star-insided-your-eyes!” She stretched out a finger and said, “Can-I-touch?” She did not wait for his yes or no. She touched tears, the star fragments she had glimpsed. And they sat on the edge of a promontory, an aging man and a little girl, spying on stars and witnessing the passage of waves. As she pointed, he saw countries between the stars and heard silences between the ebb and flow of the tide. They sat on the edge and listened to the wind, the man and the girl, and the flow of life caused a tree’s tiny branch to mark time with an intermittent tang. In the ocean’s far horizons, a massive ship made its way, a light-spotted giant shadow.
Ayaana whispered, “Where it is going?”
Unconscious that he had done so, Muhidin squeezed her to his side. “Home,” he replied.
“Where it is home?” she murmured.
“Mahali fulani”—Somewhere—Muhidin answered.
* * *
—
The child drifted to sleep curled up against his body, cupping her own face. He listened to her breathing and watched stars and listened to the ocean, while a bird whistled at him. He listened to the sea for a long time before it dawned on Muhidin that Ayaana ought to be sleeping in her bed. Hesitant, fearful that she and her dreams might crumble in his hands, he stooped extra low to lift her up. He carried her, walking with slow steps. When he reached her front door, he stood and frowned. If he knocked, she would get into trouble. So he whispered, “Mwanangu”—my child. Unbidden thought. He blanked it out. “Abeerah,” Muhidin called.
She stirred. She yawned and saw him. When she became aware of their surroundings, she said, “You carry Ayaana? You bringed Ayaana?”
“Yes, Abeerah.”
She held his face again. “Now I go,” she said. “Don’t be scared.” He lowered her to the ground. “You wait,” she commanded, “till I gone inside.”
Muhidin watched as she skipped five meters away from the door. Leg up, she stood on one window ledge and lifted her other leg to stretch across what looked like a string-thick ledge onto another window. A midair leap, and she was clinging to a water pipe, on which she shinnied up to a high window. She squeezed through this. Soon a tiny hand appeared to flutter a bye-bye before disappearing. Somewhere in the distance, a cockerel crowed. Apart from Muhidin’s soft, stunned breathing and the sound of the ceaseless waves, everything became calm again.
[ 9 ]
It was as long as her middle finger, and as thin as her mother’s largest sewing needle. There was yellow-gold and red on its head, and red inside its eyes. Its small chest was olive and brown, and she could see the table through fine wings made of pale-orange light. Muhidin told Ayaana to repeat its name, kereng’ende, in four other languages: “Matapiojos. Libélula. Naaldekoker. Dragonfly.”
Ayaana intoned, “Matapiojos-libélula-naaldekoker-dragonfly.” She clasped her hands, squeezing them. “Why?” she asked.
Muhidin whispered, “To savor its essence. To do that, you must taste at least three languages on your tongue.” Muhidin looked stern.
Ayaana’s facial expression mirrored his.
* * *
—
Lying flat on her belly near the mangroves, Ayaana had waited most of the afternoon for the right dragonfly to show up. Today she did not go to the makeshift jetty to watch for home-comers. When the dragonfly landed on a twig, she crawled, stalked, and captured it. It had curled over to bite at her fingers, but she managed to stick it into one of her mother’s small covered bowls. Taking slow steps, clutching the bowl, Ayaana brought it to Muhidin. He was reading one of his books when she appeared at his door just an hour before dusk and called, “Shikamoo, Babu.”
“Marahaba,” he had replied, his soul uneasy. She was strolling into his life unsought, unwanted, bearing a fragile heart in her big eyes, and offering all this to him unasked for.
“I finded it,” she said, “for you.” Darts of stifled delight crackled in her eyes.
He laid aside the book. “Oh?” And sighed.
“See?”
With reluctance, Muhidin took the bowl. He opened it and found a comatose dragonfly inside. It was still stunned when he stretched it out on the flat surface of a low table and knelt to look more closely at it. Ayaana, clinging to Muhidin’s shoulders, leaned over. Her right foot, in patched red Bata slippers, stood on his left foot. “You like him?” she asked.
“This luminous presence? I do. Thank you.”
Ayaana swung to and fro. “Me, I found him, only me alone.” They watched the creature. She watched Muhidin. She remembered something else. “Him bited me here.” She showed her finger.
Muhidin touched the finger. He pursed his lips. “She was afraid.”
“Why?”
“She is so, so small, and Abeerah is so, so big. See?”
Ayaana’s eyes watered at once. She whispered, “Only wanted to give you a pretty.” Pause. “Ayaana is not bad. Never wanted ’im to be afraid.” She shook her head.
A soft, warm spasm spread across Muhidin’s chest. Abeerah. Unsettled, not knowing what to do. He then told her to repeat its name, kereng’ende, in four languages. After she had, Ayaana had another secret to tell Muhidin. She sighed. She bit her mouth. She clutched her stomach. She sighed again. Big people never wanted to hear what she said. They clicked their tongues. They said, “Debe shinda haliachi kusukasuka”—A half-empty tin does not stop shaking.
Muhidin watched moods shift on Ayaana’s little
face, saw her shoulders rise as if she was elated, and then collapse, leaving an unuttered question dangling on her lips. She swallowed it and rested her face on the table, eyes almost level with the slowly stirring dragonfly. She turned large eyes on Muhidin. Don’t speak, Muhidin suddenly wanted to beg. Go away. Yet another inside voice cried, What, Abeerah?
Ayaana held out for another fifteen seconds. Then the child got up abruptly, body stiffening with her decision. She looked at Muhidin. Her voice was firm: “You are now my father.” Then she exploded into tears, her body shivering from the shock of hearing the words of her longing spoken out loud.
“Oof!” Muhidin huffed as if punched in the stomach. What words. He jerked back, then stood motionless. Now his ears were buzzing. Now his thoughts were lurching. He had traveled long and alone, holding on to nothing. He was used to leaving. He had never been claimed before. She was crying, her shoulders heaving. He stooped over to learn the essence of this, of the nature of words that could tear into a grown man’s heart. This. Child. Her dragonfly. Those words. She sobbed, bereft, as if she had lost everything. So Muhidin reached over to clasp Ayaana’s tiny hand as warning bells pinged all over his body. This child. Her dragonfly. Entwined hands. His hands were oversized and wizened. Rough, hairy, knotted, and hard-etched with the memory of profane and obscene things they had sought and touched. He dragged them away from her. This child. Her tears. His hands touched a crying child’s head. “Haya basi, haya, Abeerah,” Muhidin muttered.
Ayaana hiccupped her tears to a stop. She gulped down breath. She looked at Muhidin.
He tilted his head.
She threw her whole self onto him, clinging to his neck, her hands to his face.
Within Muhidin, the waiting and wondering.
She was chatting about something, giggling, her breath warm against his neck.
The Dragonfly Sea Page 5
