The Dragonfly Sea

by Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor

  Hudhaifa’s eyes glittered.

  What a delicious turn. As much as he relished the triumph of underdogs, he preferred the titillation of twisted bloody endings. Such a spectacle! He giggled. Moreover, when Mama Suleiman was unhappy, she bought reams and reams of cloth. He had better stock up.

  [ 31 ]

  That evening, Munira stood close to Ayaana, wanting to tug at her cheek. Poor child, so thin. What was that she was wearing? Munira’s faded, patched maroon A-line dress. Munira said, “Bahati haina hodi. This is your luck. In China you will become anything you want to be.” Munira’s tone was wistful. She touched Ayaana’s hand—its rough palms, uneven nails. “Let’s go to Mombasa,” Munira suddenly said. “Let’s buy a new dress for you.”

  Ayaana’s head jerked back.

  Only then did Munira remember the pungent smoke from the last new dress Ayaana had had. She backed away.

  * * *

  Later that night, Munira, her heart roiling with the forces of everything that had happened to their family, the strange, strange twists of fate, rose from her bed and relit a lantern to venture into Ayaana’s room. There she was, her little girl. Munira stared at Ayaana. The flickering light shed a warm orange upon Ayaana’s face. Mother-tenderness flowed for the splayed, sleeping young woman, whose right leg dangled off the end of the bed. Munira gathered bedclothes to cover Ayaana. She bent over her and inhaled orange blossom and jasmine suggestiveness, bergamot, patchouli bitterness, ylang-ylang dreams, and the seductive venom of oleander—the fragrances of expectation. She kissed her daughter’s forehead, lips to skin. Poor child. Munira remembered another woman whom she had banished from her thoughts.

  A flurry of images from the past: a restless, ridiculous, giddy creature who was cosseted by grown-ups and sure of her belovedness and belonging, who waltzed through the world gilded by her father’s influence, money, and indulgence, his confidence in her, as if she were immortal. The young woman had once spurned this mangrove-fringed island to risk everything for the savor of more. Imbibing life, its banquets, pouring faith into the world’s glittering promises, and that of the best-looking man she and her hooky-playing girlfriends had ever met.

  They had all been in a bridging-year computer college, and would dodge their network of busybody guardians. She was the beautiful one, the best dressed of them all. She was the outrageous, jeweled one, the boldest, bravest, and most intelligent. On a dare by her friends, she had gone up to greet the tall, sleek, black-haired man, with his square jawline, wide forehead, and high cheekbones, dressed in a beige linen suit.

  Head tilted, her breathy “Salaam, sir, what time is it?”

  He had turned. Eyes crinkling at the corners, gleaming, finding hers. “I saw you,” he had answered. Gentle-spoken. She had to lean toward him to hear his words. “Please, share a cup of tea with me; I have been lonely for beauty.”

  She followed him. She sat next to him, in awe of this splendid being with his tender voice and sad eyes, flattered but not surprised that he had noticed her.

  He talked. Said he had moved to Mombasa two years ago. He worked in the mining sector, linked to a firm on the South Coast.

  “The time,” he said.

  “What?”

  “You’d asked about the time?”

  She lowered her head, covered her mouth, laughing.

  “I did.”

  He moved next to her so that they could read his watch together.

  “Four thirty-eight p.m.,” he whispered into her ear.

  Just as she had seen the females do in the films she loved, and even though she felt she was melting, she looked into his eyes; acting, she asked, “Really?” Feeling very grown-up.

  They met every day after that. He blessed her every thought, her beauty, which she knew about, but not in the way he described it, how it colored his dreams, how he could not think without invoking her as an angel for his moments.

  He asked her to walk and twirl for him. She was a gazelle. Had she ever thought of modeling?

  Her father would never agree, she had explained.

  He had nodded. “We must honor fathers. We must obey their love.” Then he remembered that he needed to go and pray.

  Later, he told her about Paris, London, Dakar, New York, Kuala Lumpur, Ankara, and Beirut. The next day, he showed her the label on his suit, Hugo Boss. The following day, he bought her a silk scarf and perfume, Opium.

  His sentiments. She would show the scarf off to her friends. He said he needed to know her better. He said he could not sleep because she possessed his thoughts. He had blushed as if embarrassed by his own words. He had apologized with a stutter. She basked in his glow. Another day, he lit a cigarette and shared it with her. When the Nadi Ikhwan Safaa taarab music group came from Zanzibar, he escorted her to a private performance at a wealthy trader-friend’s house.

  “Be careful,” one of her friends warned her.

  Jealousy, she thought. She began to avoid her college friends, impatient with their provincialism, their contentment with small things. She was irritated by their lack of curiosity, their unwillingness to hear her bore them with the virtues of her catch.

  The man introduced her to his business partners: loud, sharp-suited men who called him “Chief” and conceded to his arguments, which seemed to leave them all tongue-tied.

  She was proud of him. His partners envied him her company. “Such a beautiful thing; where did you find her?” He liked it that other men envied him. He wanted her to think in broader terms about her education. He was willing, he said, to go to her father and convince him to let her study in Singapore. He also said he had something even more important to talk to her father about.

  She went coy. He must mean marriage. She had wanted more time to experience the world, but such was destiny. Their children would be beautiful. He said he would always protect her, said life in Singapore or Malaysia was very different from anything she had imagined—richer, better, faster, fuller.

  One night, returning late from a film followed by a party, he suggested that she crash in his apartment rather than drive across the town to her small room.

  She did.

  It was so simple.

  He had only one bed—his own.

  That is where she slept. It was not as if she had a choice, she had informed her heart.

  A chaste rest.

  After that, it became easier and easier to sleep in his arms, his safe and securing arms. He always talked about prayer and lulled her into sleep.

  It wasn’t rape.

  She could never argue that he had forced his body into hers and made her bleed without her consent. But neither could he claim her consent when she woke up suffocating, to find that he had pinned her arms above her head, and had dragged her nightdress up to her neck, so that she did not fight back, or scream, or scratch, or kick, or punch him, or mark him with her manicured, painted nails.

  After he had finished, with an extended grunt mingled with expletives and prayer words, he had rolled off her body and asked a logical question to her silent sobs: “If you didn’t want this, what were you doing in my bed?”

  Not like this, she had thought, cleaning up her body, collecting her clothes. Eyes dry.

  “Stay,” he said. “We’re married by deed now. Come, the second time is better.”

  Six weeks later, when she told him she was pregnant, he had held her face between his hands and said, “As God wills.”

  Subject to his whim, thought, intent, her life depended entirely on his choice. He knew it. She prayed for goodness. He used her desperation by turning her into his maid: Do this, do that, go here, there, everywhere. So she started to dream of walking through the doors of women who vacuumed out unwanted presences. The word they had whispered behind scandalized hands at school: “flushing.” Flushed. Gone. And she would make her way back home, purged, cleansed, and forgetting.


  Yet.

  Perhaps the unseen thing inside her body did lurch at her thoughts. Perhaps she really did feel a small warm hand cup her face. Perhaps she imagined it, just as she was imagining everything else.

  She waited for the man’s next move. Two months later, he said. “We’ll fix things. I finish with my employer in three weeks, four at most. I get the money. We see your family. We marry, on Pate?”

  “No,” she had answered, so deeply relieved her voice was shaking, “here, Mombasa.”

  “Done.”

  She had then fallen on her knees. “Don’t leave me here.”

  Hands in his pockets, he had looked at her. “You look foolish like that. Why don’t you trust me?”

  “I’m afraid.” She had wept.

  He had said, “When you are sniveling, you’re a bore. A boring black prostitute.”

  She had heard him. She had wiped her voice. She rose from her knees and shut up.

  He left.

  Three months later, he had still not returned. The Bohra landlord came to collect his rent. She said, “He’s been delayed. We’re getting married soon.”

  “Good for you,” the landlord answered. “Six months I wait. Six months I’m patient. Six months no rent.”

  The things she did not know.

  Six months’ rent-free living.

  Munira had collapsed to the floor, retching and yet paralyzed.

  * * *

  —

  Later, she waddled to their room and dug through her handbag to retrieve all the money she had. Her handbag lay on a glossy black table on which a large, shining television presided. It took an hour. She returned to the waiting landlord with an inventory of household goods on a sheet of paper with a forged signature, and her own as witness: leather couch, washing machine, thirty-two-inch television, entertainment unit, dishwasher, stainless-steel pots and pans, bedroom ensembles, and two business suits that he could hold as collateral, or sell for the outstanding rent. That afternoon, she took the ferry to the South Coast and journeyed the distance to the new mining territories to look for the man.

  “Oh, him,” the company people said. “Was he the geology consultant who was here with us a year ago? Absconded from duty, even though he had been paid in full. Pity! Had come well recommended. Where’s he now?”

  The things she did not know.

  Despair.

  On the road, on the ferry, on the road again, she wanted the journey never to stop; she did not want to have to reach a destination and make a decision.

  But she did.

  In the apartment, she called her father, her cherished father. She said she needed more money to finish an extra finance course. He teased her, said he would send a relative to fetch her—was she plotting to take over his businesses?

  No! She pretended to laugh. She said she wanted to learn how money worked.

  “You’re my pride,” her father said, “my smile.”

  “I miss you,” she said. Quiet tears.

  “Come home soon,” her father urged.

  He wired her the money, and extra, at once, and she dropped out of college. She filled a bag with things from the apartment—not a big bag, just things she would need in rented one-room servant’s quarters with a shower/toilet in Ganjoni. Her new landlady was an upcountry woman who operated a clandestine bar/brothel/beauty parlor in her spacious compound, who wanted her rent on time, and tenants who minded their own business. Munira returned for more soft things from the apartment—sheets, towels, and perfumes—and then she disappeared from herself, friends, and family.

  The baby grew, and when Munira wasn’t vomiting, she was inundated by cravings for fresh juice and vegetables and fried fish. Her emotions seesawing, she struggled with knowing what to do. She spent some money on a burka, through which she could stare at the world. She went out in the late evenings, traversing nights, hoping to be attacked by night trolls who would offer her an excuse that would lift from her the burden of responsibility.

  Not my fault.

  Nothing happened to her; nobody approached her. Sometimes she went to the apartment to see if any light had come back on. It never, ever did. Most of the day, she sat on her mattress, retching into a blue bucket, knotted up inside, surviving on spiced tea, listening to radio chatter, taarab music, her thoughts suspended, and she cried because she needed her mother. But her mother would tell her father, and her father’s heart would die, and that she could not live with.

  * * *

  —

  Taarab music from the dingy bar six doors away.

  A woman sang in the voice of wounded longing:

  “Ewe ua la peponi

  Waridi lisilo miba

  Kwenu kakutoa nani kwenye maskani yako…”

  * * *

  —

  The melody halted Munira’s progress. She listened until the song was done. When it was done, it let her go.

  * * *

  —

  Nightmares.

  * * *

  —

  One cold morning, she woke up soaked in sweat and dread. The terror stayed with her all day long, so that in despair, in the evening, she bought herbicides and rat poison. She would evacuate the thing inside her. Instead, she almost died, she drifted into another nothing, suspended on the edge of a cord that she was tangled in. There she saw images of her family and her father, and how her dying would eat him up. She vomited everything out. Two weeks later, tired of being afraid of everything, she drank down a jar of anti-malaria tablets. This precipitated labor pains. At last, she thought.

  She had prepared for the horror. Water, basins, scissors, towels, bandages, plastic garbage bags. She moved with the waves, shoving the thing from her body, clamping down her lips, not making a sound.

  The mess—blood, sweat, shit, and chaos. The twenty-eight-hour travail. At 2:00 a.m., as students in a far nation were unveiling the Goddess of Democracy statue on Tiananmen Square, a shriveled thing resembling a clod of pale beige clay popped out of Munira’s body. It lay unmoving. Panting, Munira seized scissors to hack off the flesh cord that still bound them to each other. To do that, she had to touch the still-warm, bloodied creature, and when she felt it, something feeble fluttered, and the fluttering turned into a stabbing explosive light inside her soul, and she became as big as the cosmos, so that in pure awareness she was breathing into the child, sucking out the mucus, purring and chirping until her child could breathe on its own, until her baby coughed and opened her large eyes, and then lifted tiny hands toward her.

  Munira had sobbed. “Oh, you! It is you? Ayaana,” she had cried “Oh, Ayaana.” And she clutched the child to her body.

  Minutes later, as the baby suckled, Munira stared, transfixed, thoughts dropping like small bricks. It did not matter, then, what anybody would think about her. Anything could happen to her now. She did not care. She loved. That was all. She could endure anything—go anywhere, do whatever she needed to do—to live for Ayaana.

  For Ayaana, Munira risked the contempt of her landlady.

  She went to beg to learn how to plait hair, do facials, manicures, pedicures, and massages. Munira started by sweeping the cut-off, rubbed-off, flaking-off human pieces from the floor—hair, nails, skin. She learned touch, acquired its language. She washed hair. She was allowed to do pedicures, then manicures, then henna, and then everything else. She worked on commission. She learned how to ward off the leering attention of the men who came to get their hair cut and, to her shock, their nails done. They learned to ask for her. She learned to offer a soft touch, a sideways look, a small laugh that preserved fragile egos and camouflaged her aversion.

  Munira used the money she earned to buy baby formula and secure some postnatal services. Inside a buibui, her dress was shabby. A steel will denied her the indulgence of dreaming of Pate’s sea and her home.

 
; Munira worked five more months, until an unbearable pressure in her skull, the inability to wait anymore, made her wrap up her daughter and walk out of her single room. She left the door wide open. She walked all the way to the Old Harbor, where she found a fisherman willing to sail to Pate Island if she would help out with the cooking on board. For Ayaana she would do anything.

  And she did.

  * * *

  —

  Here she was. Ayaana. Now almost twenty-one years old, gangly and deep in sleep. Munira watched her. Doubts turned into certainty. The things a mother had to do. No one ever spoke about the bittersweetness of this beyond-feeling pain, of realms beyond limits, of having to pull away from the most beloved thing. Women never spoke of such things, of secrets etched into desolate absences. Giving birth was an unending journey, and sometimes the character of its harrowing only deepened with time. The choices a mother had to make.

  Munira left the room.

  She left to seek the sea.

  The vanquished do sing.

  One song. A tribute. Munira breathed from a fathomless corner of yearning. She sang for daughters. She, too, had been someone’s daughter. She sang for her father, her long-dead mother. She sang most for Ziriyab and Muhidin. And then she sang for Ayaana.

  “Ewe ua la peponi

  Waridi lisilo miba…

  Mabanati wa peponi hao ndio fani yako…”

  Munira stopped.

  The booming of waves. Hissing stars. Muted night sounds. Was this not life, to allow for anything? Munira covered her head and stepped into the shadows snaking along the shoreline.