The Dragonfly Sea

by Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor

  Muhidin shrugged. “Enough.”

  “Yes?”

  “Mhh.”

  Munira said, “I’ll pay, of course.”

  Muhidin snapped, “Just stop it!”

  Munira’s hands fluttered. “Please bear with me. I don’t know…don’t know what to do with all this.”

  “This what?” growled Muhidin.

  “You…this situation.”

  Muhidin went silent.

  Munira asked, “You pray?”

  “No.”

  “No?”

  A shrug. “Maybe an occasional salute to the Creator of Storms.”

  “God?”

  “Who knows?”

  “You don’t?”

  “Do you?”

  Munira bent to stare at her hennaed feet. Wistful. “They say you’re an apostate.”

  “They do.”

  Munira reached over to touch Muhidin’s right knee, eyes welling. “She believes. I can’t give her all I want her to have, but I can offer her the dream of limitless goodness. Do you understand?”

  Muhidin bowed his head, the essence of night jasmine hovering between them. He gave a tight nod.

  “Thank you.” Munira settled back into her seat.

  A clock ticked. Ayaana drew. Munira stared at the room, the books. Muhidin watched Munira. She said, “I hear you’ve traveled the world.”

  “Most of it.”

  “When I was a girl, I intended to travel. I wanted to live in every country for a week.” Her face was flushed. “How is it?” She leaned forward.

  “People are people,” Muhidin answered, struck by the strangeness of the night, by the brightness of curiosity in a cursed woman’s eyes.

  Munira looked away. Her hands adjusted her head covering. “It’s late. I’m sorry. But I just couldn’t endure another night of her grieving…”

  Muhidin suppressed a grin. Good.

  An uncertain smile softened Munira’s features. “Since my one child is possessed by a desire to treat you as the light in a holy man’s camel’s eye, and you’ve tied your fate to ours”—Munira raised a brow—“shouldn’t we clean up this fortress of dust of yours?”

  Muhidin looked around him with a fresh sense of possessiveness. It was his dust. He focused a cold gaze on Munira. Her zeal subsided at once. There were boundaries. Her daughter’s asthma would have to cope. Let him deal with that.

  [ 13 ]

  Yet, within twelve days, these boundaries were breached by a gut-wrenching howl at dawn, a wretched being in elemental agony. Island doors were flung open. Footsteps rushed toward the source and faltered. A mother in a flowing cream robe, her hair disheveled, feet bare, flew to the site of the crime and fell over her thin little daughter, who was cradling a ragged corpse with a crushed skull and wet tail—a dirty-white kitten. The girl was baying, her face mucus-streaked, bloody, and muddy. The mother, hand to head, was sobbing. “Why hurt this useless thing? Who did it offend?” And men and women watched, or turned away. Some sniggered. Others, those who knew, or had seen which of their children had been involved, crept away. Though they would pinch those children’s ears, nothing else would be done.

  Muhidin appeared. He absorbed the scene. He saw a crushing sorrow too old and too adult for a child to bear. So he seized the child, trying to absorb the anguish. He enclosed her and her dead cat in his arms. Both were still, cold, and frozen.

  “Why?” whimpered Ayaana. She expected Muhidin to know. “He done nothing bad. So why?”

  Muhidin squeezed her. He glanced at Munira’s tear-streaked face as Ayaana said, “You fix him.” She told Muhidin, “Tell him, ‘Move.’ ” Her eyes were clear in her certainty of his power over life and death.

  Muhidin swung his body to face the thinning audience. “Someone saw something.” His hands were fists. No one answered. He roared, “Who is responsible for this? Speak!” No one looked at him.

  Within a minute, everyone had slithered away and abandoned the trio and their small corpse.

  * * *

  —

  That evening, after Muhidin and Munira had cleaned up the kitten, they wrapped it up with strips of pink silk and inserted it in a large perfume box. They carried this to Munira’s gardens, near the tombs. Muhidin dug a hole next to the light-colored roses. Ayaana’s eyes were fixed on Muhidin as he then turned the pages of the Hafiz poetry book he had carried, hiding his helplessness behind others’ words. “Abeerah,” he suggested, stopping on a page, “read this.”

  Ayaana closed her eyes.

  Muhidin said, “Kitten needs to hear your voice as he jumps to the…er…stars.”

  “No!” yelled Ayaana.

  Muhidin crouched next to her. “Why no?”

  She pointed. “Him, he’s not moving. See?”

  Muhidin glared at the hollow earth. He lied. He said that the kitten was already a wave, a star, and one of the beats of Ayaana’s heart, and that to be these things the kitten had put aside his body. He said now the kitten could even grow into a tree. He added that whether the tree would yield one or many more kittens would be up to the tides and winds.

  Ayaana whispered into his right ear, “Even me, I can be a tree also?”

  Muhidin almost wept. “Not yet, Abeerah.” His arms were on her shoulders.

  Solemn-eyed, Ayaana stood inside all her unanswerable questions. Muhidin frowned at the tombstones and waited. Finally, Ayaana asked, “Is this ‘dead’?”

  The strain for the correct answer distorted Muhidin’s face. The “yes” was wrenched out of him. That was the closest he came to howling.

  Ayaana asked, “ ‘Dead’ is not moving?”

  Muhidin cleared his throat. “Yes.”

  A ghost of worn human sadnesses imbued with newborn dread-loneliness inched into Ayaana and found a space where it could gaze out at the world from within her eyes. The look would never leave her. She lowered her head. They waited.

  “You read,” Ayaana at last whispered.

  So Muhidin read Hafiz over a small hole in the ground, which would later become a mound, and did something he had never imagined he would ever do—he mourned a kitten.

  “Greet Yourself

  In your thousand other forms

  As you mount the hidden tide and travel

  Back home…”

  He could not continue. Little fingers: Ayaana’s hand inside his. They stood silently and waited for nothing. Munira, watching from the sidelines, struggled with jumbled sensations: the oddness of experiencing one battle she did not have to carry alone; the sight of her daughter’s fears enclosed and offered solace. Munira bowed her head, still expecting an inevitable blow. Preoccupied, the trio missed another watcher, a stranger who often came to the ancient graves in the evenings to sit close to and address their contents. He turned to focus on the child, whose slanted eyes were shaped exactly as his own.

  * * *

  —

  Muhidin returned in the middle of the night to cover the grave and also plant a pawpaw seedling. Ayaana, up at dawn to visit the grave, was startled to see that her kitten had re-emerged as a small green plant overnight. She hugged the discovery to her heart while, from the inside of her existence, a dreary thing that had overrun her heart the day before eased away.

  * * *

  —

  A rented morning boat. A man, a child. Muhidin had turned to the sea for help. Now, from the water, the island dissolved into forms and shapes Ayaana could rename, and sear into memory: mangrove train, Muhidin’s head, the dancing bird, Munira’s foot. Ayaana the latest witness to the old habits of water and winds as these approached her island; giddy right-turning leaps, stealth approach, ambush, groaning tumble. Ayaana absorbed everything. She saw how life moved. They returned with the early-evening high tide. Ayaana drowsed as Muhidin rowed, and the tears that had been r
acking her spirit dried up.

  * * *

  —

  A few weeks later, Muhidin went to Lamu to collect a parcel, leaving Ayaana in his house, and his keys with Munira. He returned a day later, with a carton of fresh supplies and new textbooks, to find that color had invaded his domain: pinks, oranges, purples, reds, yellows, and lemon greens. Fresh-smelling soft things: cotton, silk, satin, lace. Strings of gold and glass beads dangled off doorways, and his chair seats had been cleaned and mended. His clothes were gleaming and smelled of frankincense. Munira had created flatness where, before, things had been puffed.

  Muhidin bumped into Munira on her way out of his house. Her gaze averted, she was going to walk past him when his hand stopped her, and wrapped itself around her left arm. “Thank you,” he said.

  She shook her head at him, tearful. “No. Thank you.”

  He dropped his hand.

  She walked away.

  * * *

  —

  Under a fresh spirit of order, Muhidin continued the cleaning process. He started alphabetizing his books, as he had always hoped to. Munira returned two days later to help. Muhidin stiffened. She understood why when she swept down a pile of paperbacks from a shelf and found at least thirty empty and not-so-empty translucent dark and light green, colorless, and amber mini- and half-sized bottles of assorted booze stored amid a jumble of papers and maps. She did not ask. Muhidin did not explain.

  * * *

  Pate Island, itself a mutable thing, got bored of its rumor mongering—Munira, the whore, was beguiling Muhidin, the apostate—and resigned itself to the arrangement. But, days later, an anonymous message-sender left Munira a purple-on-white leso. She found it outside her door on Thursday morning. The design on the cloth, a cashew-nut motif, was precise. The woven-in aphorism, the message to Munira, was mean: “Huyo kibuzi mwarika mtizame anavyojitingisha”—There she is, the stupid goat; watch how she sways. Munira carried the cloth to Muhidin. “Still want to be entangled with us?”

  Muhidin read it. “If I were a woman”—he exaggerated a swirl of hips—“I would parade my scorching reply.”

  Munira’s already narrow eyes narrowed even more. She raced toward the door and went straight to Hudhaifa the Shirazi. They scanned his shelves for specific lesos. When she found them, she bought two sets. An extravagance. Hudhaifa, thrilled that he had inserted himself into a story line, gave Munira a 50 percent discount. He was interested in outcomes.

  Munira needed three days to cut and sew. On the fourth day, the island and some of its gossips watched her swing in elegant flow in the direction of Siyu, adorned in vibrant blue and white, which, as her body swayed, revealed its message: “Fitina yako faida yangu”—Your ill will; my favor. The following day, she sauntered over to the vegetable stalls in a brown-and-white ensemble. Embedded within its cashew-nut whorl design, an aphorism in white text: “Mie langu jicho”—Mind your own business. Her favorite.

  * * *

  Muhidin now accessorized his evening walk with a shiny ebony bakora, whose handle, when unscrewed, revealed a dagger. He wandered the island waterfront arm in arm with Ayaana. Flaunting her acquired father, Ayaana looked out for old nemeses from school, especially the boys. In her deepest heart, she also searched the land for the absent father, the one who just might appear from nowhere, but whose view she had blocked with Muhidin’s formidable presence.

  “Ayaana!” She turned. It was Suleiman, bully-in-chief. She ignored him and told Muhidin the sorry history of his moving her end of the school bench just when she was about to sit, so she fell on the floor. Muhidin paused in order to show her what to do next time. He demonstrated a low kick, a follow-up punch to the nose. Twa! Twa! Break the bone. He pointed the ebony stick at Suleiman, accompanying the gesture with a glare. Suleiman slunk away.

  Resuming their wandering, they reached the smaller jetty to watch the return of the fishing fleet. They listened to the call and response of men contented with the catch of the day. They watched the water together, and Ayaana, watching Muhidin watch the sea, asked, “What is good about water?”

  “Storms.”

  Ayaana hesitated, unsure. “What is bad about water?”

  “Storms.”

  Silence.

  They walked on.

  Along the way, they ran into the Chinese visitor, who was fiddling with a small net, a thin cigarette in his mouth, his face in profile to them. The sun and humidity had basted him dirt-brown. “Mchina Nihao” was his first nickname in Pate. His smile, when he met anyone, was broad, his gestures fluttery: “Ni hao,” he did not neglect to say—hello. But when he had taken up jogging in the early mornings, Hudhaifa the vendor started to call him Mzee Kitwana Kipifit. The name stuck; the visitor now answered to it.

  Muhidin and Ayaana proceeded onto a twisted road that would lead to the black sand of Mtangawana, from where they would watch the arrival of dhows and other boats. The golden dusk glittered on the water so that it was like orange glass. Engulfed by light, Muhidin turned to contemplate Ayaana. “Belonging” required a map, he thought. Nothing about it could be predicted. He wanted to call her “daughter.” But he said, “Abeerah” instead.

  “Y-e-s-s-s-s,” she sang.

  Luxuriating in the salt air, he watched the rise of the red basket-shaped moon and its mirror image on the water.

  “What is his name?” Ayaana asked.

  “Whose?”

  “Moon on water?”

  Muhidin racked his brain. Moon on water. Moon on water. He had forgotten the sense of that. “Mahtabi,” he proposed. “Perhaps Akmar.”

  “Mahtabi. Akmar,” Ayaana mimicked.

  But this was also a portent, this red moon on the water. Unseen by Muhidin, Mzee Kitwana was nearby with his nets. He had wanted to see the moon on the water, but had been distracted by the sight of Ayaana, who was now standing on her tiptoes, demanding that Muhidin command the winds to lift them both up. The child’s presence reminded him of a life he would rather forget, and when she turned her head, or gestured, or settled into stillness before the presence of the sea, she evoked for him something of a child of another China.

  Penye shwari na pepo upo.

  Where there is calm, there is also a storm.

  [ 14 ]

  Harbingers—the birds borne on the matlai wind, sun-tinted dragonflies, moon-dancing swordfish, sand-nibbling parrot fish—spoke of the changing seasons of earth, of its dying stars, and of melting time. Sometimes the debris of people, things, destiny, tragedies, and tales collected around a monsoon. Sometimes these seasons showed up with strangers and left them behind on Pate’s black sand shores. Harbingers, like the moon-timed festivals Maulidi and Idd-ul-Fitr, brought souls from the fringes of the seas across island thresholds into communion with one another. Invariably, at least three of those who had entered the island’s cult of hospitality did not leave. There were those who, unknown even to themselves, belonged to the island and were covenanted to stay. There were those who tried to leave but never could. And there were far more than expected who left, only to show up again years later. Some entered the portals of the land, sometimes naked, sometimes alone, sometimes naked and alone and even dead. The island renamed these. Some tendered false names; Pate did not mind. Names are mere place markers. Their manners alone established their character, and this determined if they should stay or leave. Other persons crossed into Pate to override its timeless codes. These, the would-be reformers, came, saw, scowled, sulked, scolded, and stipulated that the island transform itself for them. Invariably, the right winds swooped in to sweep these away.

  * * *

  —

  And then there were the men—always men—who wore the beleaguered faces of hurriedly abandoned pasts. They entered Pate Island to disappear. The island hospitality apparatus took over; under the shelter of a roof, they would be cajoled into revelations over shared meals. They were observed as
they laughed at well-placed jokes; laughter was a test. A disarmed man showed his soul, and the soul, being naked, revealed essence. And essence was truth. Such men might then be taken over by the guiding spiritual undercurrent of the family and the space. Transcendent expectations were synchronized, and the guest would find another ready to guide him into Pate Island’s tenets of belonging. At some point in his Pate life, this person, now linked to a family and treated as such, would make a public pronouncement of Shahada: Ash hadu anlla ilaha ilallah…Afterward, the new islander, giving his life over to the place, would, after taking a purifying bath to shed the skin of the past, adorn himself in a clean white garment and re-emerge, finally, at home. An island bride might be offered to him then. If the betrothal flowered, the visitor would take up a trade to sustain his home, and find himself written into the palimpsest that was Pate.

  * * *

  —

  Toward the end of 1995, a visitor landed—a fastidious, pale, unsmiling man who said he was from the Comoros, although he did not speak like a man from the Comoros. He had sat in the boat praying throughout the journey. His lips had locked into a stern moue from the second he saw red strings dangling off the boat’s mast. As his boat companions hurried through their prayers, he clucked, disapproving of such casualness. His voice was polite when, in Arabic, he asked the three women in the boat to cover themselves. They were beautiful, he said, and such beauty was the preserve of God and their husbands.

  Three faces turned to him at once. A woman hissed: “Huendapo waishipo vyura huishi kama vyura waishivyo”—When you visit frogs, you live as the frogs do. The others tittered.