Munira said, “Mombasa is too small for us, lulu.” A pause. “Today I wash your body. Singo. You like that, my heart?”
Ayaana’s eyes glimmered. She gasped. A bride’s treat! Jasmine, turmeric, ylang-ylang, cloves, sandalwood, and rose petals in rose water on her body. The fragrance that lingered also offered a soft and gentle sleep. “Who is the groom?”
Munira did not laugh. She said, “Then I show you how to make and apply…secrets…so no man will ever leave you.” Munira’s words faltered. “Ah well,” she muttered.
Ayaana turned to her mother and became aware of something murky hovering in the room around them. “Ma-e?” Uneasy. “Why are you crying?”
Munira rubbed her eyes. “Chili on my fingers! Silly me. Rubbed my eyes with it.” She laughed. Her eyes were red as she worked on her daughter’s body. She painted Ayaana’s toes with red polish after giving her a clove pedicure. She covered Ayaana’s arms and back with henna whorls. Skin, contact, touch, intimacy, mother, daughter, two women. Timeless space. What with the sky that day—an overcast dark blue—and the tang of lemon, mint, and cinnamon, and the low moan of a wind that caused the sea to churn with churlish intensity, Ayaana thought they might remain forever like this. Blurred beingness infused with fine scents and sumptuous meals. Ayaana forgot to miss Muhidin. Munira, reveling in the moment, forgot its aim and she started to sing:
“Ewe ua la peponi
Waridi lisilo miba…”
Ayaana turned to her mother, and her mother was luminous and other, and hers, and there was nothing in existence that she could love more. Ayaana reached out to move a hair strand that was hovering over Munira’s eyes. Munira rubbed her own forehead as if scrubbing away a stain. The heart is elastic, she told herself. It could learn to love anything. This she hoped. She herself had once craved the fire, and it had taken years, but it came through Ziriyab, and she had known, for a season, that desire existed to be fulfilled. She had devoured every drop of pleasure. Now, even though haunted by temporality, she wanted more. “Love is a two-faced beast,” she told Ayaana. She was about to say that desire and suffering were of the same substance, but then she clammed up and focused on making sure her daughter’s skin would glow.
* * *
Cock-crowing relay on a bright Thursday morning.
Munira called, “Ayaana?”
Ayaana emerged from under her bedsheet. A geography textbook she had been reading the previous evening slipped from the end of the bed and fell to the ground with a thud. Munira flinched. Then she said, “Rest today. Sleep. I’ll return in the afternoon.”
At midday, Munira walked into Ayaana’s room and unwrapped something that caused Ayaana to jump off her bed and whirl her mother about. Ayaana stared at the frothy pale fabric, tight-fitting floatiness.
She looked at her mother, eyes bright and wide. “For me?”
“Visitors.” Munira said. She tightened her lips. “Wake up. They’re coming to see you.”
“Me? Why? Who?” Ayaana’s mind whirred. “You told them about school?”
Munira rubbed a spot on the door. “I’ll dress you up. Make up your face. They will explain.”
“Make up my face? Ma-e, what do they want?”
Munira wiped another nonspot off the wall. “To discuss your future.”
Munira coughed.
“Ma-e! Shall I bring my test papers? They will see my results are good.”
Munira was silent.
“Ma?”
“If you want.”
Ayaana skipped into the bathroom, shouting: “You have my school reports? I must pin my calligraphy to the wall. When they see, they will ask, Who did that? You must say, It is Ayaana.”
Munira remained silent, rubbing the part of her chest where her heart beat, burned, and broke.
[ 27 ]
Salmon-colored chiffon cloth scraps. The dress Ayaana had worn lay shredded in the corner. Two streaked faces, one convulsing body. Cooling water on the floor—unwashable stain on cement, unwashable stain in partly desecrated flesh. The hot, sticky sugar water soaked a meal that had been spread on the table. It seeped into and eroded Ayaana’s former childhood and became a mirror of origins she knew nothing about.
* * *
—
Munira, who had been led out of the house by the smooth assistant, and directed toward a corner of her garden where transplanted wild roses grew, strode with her head held unnaturally high. Lavender and rosemary scented the air as bees buzzed. A quick glance at nearby tombs, a trance-smashing question from the suddenly pensive matchmaker: “Rot and perfume in a single crucible,” the man said as he saw a cream rose petal fall. “Decomposing beauty. Still desirable.” He looked around him, inhaling the air, before turning to Munira, who was plucking at her veil. “Did you know that the word ‘desire’ is taken from the Latin, ‘desiderare,’ which means, ‘to await what the stars will bring’?”
Jauza, Munira remembered, a name in the stars she had summoned for two souls.
They walked. Sweat beaded her forehead. He sniffed the air again. “A whiff of desire blended with blood, smoke, shadows and—what is that?”—his voice was strangely ragged—“grief?”
A strangled sound from the direction of the house. It was cut off. Munira spun to look and then turned back to him. Cold curiosity was etched across his face. “Desire! Dreams!” he leaned over to whisper at her. And then Munira cried out, pivoted and tore back to her house. She burst through the door, hair disarranged, shrieking, “Ah! Maskini!,” in time to witness thick gold-ringed fingers on her daughter’s body, twisting it this way and that, as the man breathed heavily in an attempt to mount Ayaana, a thick hand blocking a low-grunting scream that emerged from her daughter’s mouth. The creature had already torn up the frothy dress that the child had delighted in.
Munira’s hand went to the stove to seize a sufuria full of sugar water that she had left simmering on the stove. The caramel would have been used to peel hairs off Munira’s clients’ bodies. Now barehanded and scalded, but unfeeling, automated, Munira poured the almost caramel liquid on the fat man’s body, the back of his head, his back, and he had the grace to groan, to stiffen, to recognize what she had done to him, to see that she was waiting for him to refuse to move so that she could crush his head with the saucepan. Some of the syrup had also spattered on her daughter’s thigh. She would forever carry burn marks, together with bite marks from an ugly rich man’s mouth.
* * *
—
The bulky Wa Mashriq, after the first grunt of surprise and hurt, slithered out without uttering another sound. Even as his body burned, he did not flinch. Munira watched. She had scored him. He had proved to her that he was not the same kind of human as she was. The man studied Ayaana, her fallen, crumpled self rolled in the ball of her torn frothing dress, long thin limbs curved in, bare-breasted—her breasts had emerged at last—her makeup running, hair disheveled, more fragile than he had first believed.
Shattered.
He had grinned at Munira.
She read the message in his face as if he had spoken it: I may have yielded the endgame, but you have lost your only child. Your loss is the more terrible one. The man dropped a bundle of notes on his way out.
“American,” he murmured.
He abandoned Munira and Ayaana to their silence in caramel-scented steam. Outside, restless winds lashed at waves, and the waves laved the shore.
* * *
“Get up,” Munira told Ayaana, rather than I’m sorry. “I’ll burn the dress,” she said, rather than I’m sorry. She said, “You can’t afford tears,” rather than I’m sorry. “Go and clean yourself. I’ll wipe this room. Have some milk. There’s more on the stove.” She said all this rather than I’m sorry.
Ayaana said, “Yes.”
Obedient, sad, older, and wiser now.
* * *
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They would both pretend that there had been no Thursday evening. Even though the shadow of the caramel-water stain on the floor marked the site as a gravestone does. Purgative options, a way through anguish: seven tablespoons of clove oil, three teaspoons of lemongrass stirred into a bucket of steaming bathwater. A promontory and the sea below it: the temptation to jump.
And.
Strangling sounds inside the solidity of nights. If the mute and nauseated Ayaana had cared to look, she might have seen her mother lying sleepless in bed, terrified of what she had almost been willing to sacrifice in order to snatch at a buried dream.
Munira stood up to listen to her daughter sob inside her room. She counted the shuddering pauses between Ayaana’s breathing, her head resting against the closed door. She reached for the handle. Fingers curved over the metal. Would have pushed it open if she had been sure she would not fall into the chasm of her own making. Munira pivoted from Ayaana’s door.
* * *
—
Ayaana watched the skies. Dark moon. No moon. A promontory and the sea below it: the temptation to jump. Munira watched out for her distant shape from the doorway of their house, her heart riven.
* * *
—
Seven days later, under the cover of an early-morning storm and a violet-blue sky, a shrouded, stooping Ayaana stepped out of a home stained by the cold shadows of a scarred conscience. She walked through a landscape now streaked with her humiliation. Sprinkles of water drenched her. Fresh, clean water. She paused to watch massive waves submerge fishermen’s boats, listened to the tumult, the howling wind, a rumble of thunder disheveling frantic people. She made her way blindly over stones, past creaking shrubs, toward Fundi Mehdi’s boat-repair cove, relying on smell and mood to sense a way. Hearing him carving away at something, she stopped under a grand coconut tree within which a giant cobweb hovered, with its resident victims and a single midsized brown predator. She watched the trap for a while before swiping it to nothing with her bare fists. When she appeared in front of Mehdi, she stooped, waiting for him to condemn her. He glanced at her. She saw the seven new “war on terror” wounds crisscrossing his face. He glanced at her, said nothing, and resumed his work.
So Ayaana took catlike steps toward the old stranded dau. She climbed into it. There she sat, cradled by namelessness, not crying out as she needed to, not examining the weals and violet bruises on her limbs as she wanted to, emptying herself to let in the sense of the sea and its splendid voice. With her head back, and without intending to, her eyes followed the flight of a brown raptor playing amid storm-carrying air currents. Ayaana’s ghosts receded. In the background, a radio meteorologist’s voice lamented the state of the tides.
Elsewhere.
Munira.
She glanced at the morning star at dawn and saw blood. She went to pluck the pale roses, pricked her thumb, and saw blood. Munira saw blood on the water when the dim orange sun set over the storm-purged ocean. When she soaked her wood shavings in pungent oils and purgative spices to make oudhi, even so, she smelled only blood.
* * *
Today. Making rose oil so that the light-etched perfume will exorcise the stench from the desecrated body, heart, soul, and blood. You intended the aromas to digest sorrow and then restore your child to you in this season of unquenchable loneliness. You wandered toward the fringes of your island at a desolate dawn, and crouched where threshold wild roses grow, to pick petals before the morning dew dried up. You gathered these in a woven reed basket and ignored the blood from the places on your hand pierced by thorns. You used your fingers to press tears back into your eyes. You then hurried through your land, ignoring, once again, the double glances sent your way by your people, who were now confirmed in their belief of your cursedness. You accepted it now. In your kitchen, you washed the rose petals in soft water and wept unutterable prayers. Your rose oil was famed for its truthfulness. Few knew how you first stroked the aura of the heart of rose to beg forgiveness for needing to shred its life. You offered the petals the tenderness you would offer your daughter if you could. Soon you would blend your oils—olive, coconut, grape seed—in the proportions that deepened their being. You had to bruise the rose petals. You did so with regret as you dropped them into the blended oils in dark-brown jars, which you carried to your rooftop wrapped in heated cloth. These would sit in clay pots that you would replenish with hot water. You would place these along shelves on your decaying rooftop, next to the pile of oudhi-making wood parings, where jasmine, lemongrass, and orange blossoms also bled in distilled water beneath the Pate sun, under the Pate moon, fringed by the Pate sea. Today you would stand in stillness to watch the hours of the day cook your rose oil. At night you would retrieve the rose-hip-oil-scented water you had prepared for your daughter. Yes, your marashi mawaradi was renowned, and your rose attar, the halwaridi, sold out before any could be stored. Now you took the rose water. You sprinkled it around your house while night birds stuttered. The scent infused your private hearse of pain as you heard your daughter moan in her room. In your memory, the curse “ki-don-da” resounded. Later, you would hear from the usual gossips that you and your child should be aware that the powerful-in-heat were never thwarted, that they had paid hungry stonemasons to reap for them what they could not harvest. You raced from island nook to island cranny, mapping spaces where your daughter could not hide.
[ 28 ]
Time flowed through Ayaana and proposed forgetfulness. She felt she was no longer visible to herself. She had lost the sense of a future to lean upon, lost the old sense of the safety of “mother.” She had learned new eyes to use to look upon Munira.
Munira spoke to Ayaana. She said, “We must be careful.” She said, “They want revenge.” Ayaana stared at her mother, numb and dumb. Munira said, “They did not get all they wanted.” Her head was bowed. Paid for, she remembered. She shivered.
If Muhidin…Ayaana began the thought before extracting it and rubbing it out. It lurked anyway inside her heart.
* * *
—
Days re-emerged with less and less of Ayaana as presence, as person. When her name came up again, it was now as a prospective bride for thirteen others, ranging in age from thirty to eighty, and cultures from Somali to Indian. There was a convert from Gujarat who wanted a fourth bride from the East African coast in order to consolidate his Indian Ocean connection. Names, names, names offered by emissaries. Her suitability as spouse was underlined by four ideas: she was young, female, and tainted with just enough scandal to be interesting and only slightly spoiled. Names, names, names that proposed forgetting and forgetfulness. Names that were a temptation because they were a way into something other, away from herself.
* * *
—
Almost two months later, Ayaana came face-to-face with Suleiman again. She had been avoiding people after the Thursday incident. She was heading toward the mangrove swamp ignoring looks that were also lewd questions. The keys to Muhidin’s house clanked in her pockets. She intended to later sit in the Bombay cupboard. Ayaana stopped. Four bright green suitcases blocked the path. Mama Suleiman was ending a phone conversation with someone. Her other arm was locked around her trimmed, clean, blue-suited son. “You’re leaving?” Ayaana exclaimed without thinking.
Without turning to Ayaana, Mama Suleiman said, “Go away. You’re cluttering our view. Suleiman, stop brooding; you’re not a bird. Ayaana, there are jobs for maids in Saudi Arabia. They pay well, my girl.” She smiled. “You’ll need neither to solicit favors from strangers nor to sell your intimate treasures to the lowest bidder. Move, girl.” She glared.
An exchange of furies in one glance. Ayaana clenched her fists, angry and hopeless. Mama Suleiman smirked. Suleiman guffawed.
Ayaana shriveled. By her will alone, no tears fell. Suleiman’s braying pummeled Ayaana’s heart.
He winked at her. “Hey, hey…Ayaana, do you still se
e the ghost of your ugly cat?” He pretended to rub tears from his eyes.
Right there, Ayaana learned unalloyed hatred. The sound that squeezed through her lips caused Suleiman to duck under his mother’s arm. Bi Amina stepped forward: “Esh, girl! Don’t you have tricks to learn? Go away. We are busy people…Suleiman, head up! Back straight. Are you malformed?” To Ayaana, “What? You bold thing. What? You are still here?”
Ayaana ran.
She reached the cove she did not yet know was also her mother’s hiding place.
She tumbled on the sand.
Grieving, again, a dirty-gray kitten.
Time flowed through Ayaana. A seaweed, a rock shimmered from the fragments of so many dying hopes. There are lonelinesses that enter into a being in order to separate body from marrow.
* * *
—
Later, she knelt before her sea to bargain. Take me away. She glanced over her shoulder at the troublesome existences rushing at her. She turned to the sea. Take me away. A hungry plea. Straining toward the waters, needing to fall in. Yet she did not tumble. She breathed. She shrouded her body, a black-draped shadow with a quick, soft walk. Afterward, in the salt-drenched darkness that obscured her form and identity, she crept along the path that led to Muhidin’s house. There she listened at the door, hoping to hear life stir within. She then unlocked the door and entered, and coughed at the cloying dust of absence. Heart. Pounding. Sudden flurry. Ayaana whirled. She swept the books off the shelves. She retrieved a kitchen knife with which to slash at fabrics and upholstery. She pierced the broken promises of men. She broke Muhidin’s crockery. She then took the stairs, two at a time, to enter into Muhidin’s bedroom. She aimed for and leapt on the bed, jumping up and down in her shoes, as if it were a tarpaulin, dirtying the covers, kicking down pillows. As she jumped, she felt her trajectory constrained by a hard object beneath. She jumped down and looked under the bed.
The Dragonfly Sea Page 16
