“Yes,” replied Lai Jin.
“I’ll see you before you go?”
“Yes,” said Lai Jin, wondering about the voyage ahead, and the name—was it auspicious?—imposed upon his ship. The official shuffled away, frowning at the documents. Lai Jin stared at his renamed ship in dismay.
* * *
—
They would be leaving Mombasa in two weeks. Aboard, Lai Jin paced. His stateroom, as stark as a monk’s cell—with the main color provided by an untitled Zao Wou-Ki print, before which he paused often—remained untouched. He had offered to surrender his captaincy if his cabin was interfered with. Lai Jin expected to be chastised at some point for this act of noncooperation. He wandered over to the cabin renovated for the Descendant, the cabin formerly designated to the chief engineer. He flinched in front of a bureaucrat’s interpretation of contemporary Taoism blended with further China-clichés. If the intent was to depress the cabin’s inhabitant with an excess of China-isms, it would be successful.
There were red dragons on one wall, supplemented by art prints of mountain landscapes—sunrise and magnolias—and everyday life scenes—fishing, pouring tea. A seventeenth-century woodblock print depicting Admiral Zheng He’s treasure ships, and a photograph of a statue of Zheng He himself. Lai Jin informed the image. “Zhe shi wo de chuan,” he said—This is my ship. He adjusted his shirt and strode out. His footsteps echoed on the steel floor. Guolong? He still mused, watching unknown birds soar and dive. Here he was again, asking for a thousand paths, and always being returned to one—waiting. Always waiting. For what? Storm front rushing in. Black-ink skies. Lai Jin waited.
Kupoteya njia ndiyo kujua njia.
By getting lost, you learn the way.
[ 36 ]
Only one passenger had booked a passage on the MV Qingrui/Guolong, not the five Captain Lai Jin had hoped to parade as impediments to a bureaucrat’s schemes. Still, one was better than none. Three others who came on board as registered passengers were all linked to the bureaucrats’ plans. Lai Jin studied the passenger manifest and wondered what destinies had brought them there.
* * *
Shu Ruolan had never boarded a ship in her life. She concealed her trepidation and adorned herself in her new role as chaperone to the Descendant. She was a fragile-looking creature, unusually doe-eyed, with pale skin, and silken black hair styled to allow tendrils to frame a perfectly heart-shaped face. A polyglot, she stumbled over only a few English words, in an accent with a hint of the BBC, a staple of her childhood. Her mother had insisted. While her peers aped Michael Jackson’s songs, she pored over Shakespeare and Austen. After the university, she became a translator, hostess, and English teacher for high-echelon bureaucrats. Everything would have been fine for “Teacher Ruolan” had she not become the object of competitive yearning among four officials, one of whom bought her an engagement ring on impulse; this caused her to be promptly relocated to faraway English-speaking East Africa. Shu had sat before her mother, trembling. “What is Africa?”
She left for Kenya accompanied by what the World Wide Web had suggested to her as necessary Africa travel literature: works by Paul Theroux, Ryszard Kapuściński, and V. S. Naipaul. In these she found the writings of lucid adventuring solitaries who brandished cutting adjectives, who were unfazed by the aggressive overtures of hostile beings whose guttural cries—as conveyed in the books—suggested the intent to cannibalize. When Shu Ruolan’s plane landed at the Jomo Kenyatta International Airport in Nairobi, the first Kenyan customs official she met immediately dismayed her. Not his sable shade, or the brownness of his uneven teeth—that was to be expected. It was his English, handled as if he had grown up frolicking in a gnome-dotted Sussex garden. Immersed as she was in the anthropology of bureaucrats, she recognized a ubiquitous specimen. But eight months later, Shu was on the MV Qingrui/Guolong, heading back to China. A high-ranking official with a Shanghai accent had persecuted the embassy into releasing a female to chaperone a young traveler, known as “the Descendant,” and instruct her on China basics. Shu was the easiest to sacrifice. She was only just getting comfortable walking through a river of dark-hued bodies, in which she was a minority soul.
* * *
Nioreg Marie Ngobila was listed as a passenger. Wide forehead, cleft-chinned, black-marble-toned, with close-cropped hair, a baobab-trunk neck, and a barrel chest, bow-legged, six foot four. This fifty-year-old man, originally from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, carried multiple passports—flags of convenience. He had driven into the port in a large green tropicalized 4x4 with Mozambican license plates, which he abandoned in the parking lot. Few people bothered him: His size. His demeanor. Courteous. Distant. He had been linked to guerrilla squads in Angola; he was now a freelancer loosely attached to a “special services” company. They had assigned him this ship duty, his fourth ocean-based project. Upward glance. The ship was smaller than he had imagined. He hefted a leather barrel bag and a canvas rucksack and headed for the docks, then paused to see, really to take in, the sight of a bird—green, blue, white, and orange—slender, long-beaked, chatting to the world as it scoured for insects. It is the bird that prevented him from running, right then, into the being who would divert the course of his life.
* * *
—
The first thing that people noticed about Delaksha Tarangini Sudhamsu was the broken trapeze-shaped plum-colored wine stain beneath her left ear. Today, they would also see a blood-streaked bandaged hand. This five-foot-five woman, whose fluffy black hair with five gray streaks now hung as limp strands around her face, wore oversized dark brown sunglasses that were two hues darker than her blotchy skin. They covered the blue-red of a healing right-eye-shutting bruise. “Rubenesque” was how she described her figure on her good days. Twice she had turned around, but then returned. As she approached the harbor master’s office, she straightened up, tightened her lips, and burst through the door.
Her clipped English had a lachrymose quality to it that complemented her overly bright, brittle smile. “Good afternoon, my name is Ms. Delaksha Tarangini…” Words failed her. She tried again. “I’m trying not to cry,” she explained to the suddenly nervous man at the desk. “I was reading a book a few days ago, a South American author…Well, he has his character enter a tavern and go up to a tavern keeper and request a solicitud de asilo—lovely word—‘solicitude,’ it evokes protectiveness. So may I bother you and make a request for shelter?” In her mind’s eye, a vision of a simple white-sheeted bed, a breeze blowing through wide windows, voices on the street. She added, “I need to go home to my mother.” She opened a pouch and showed two passports. “Which one? I beg you, which one will take me back to Kerala?”
The man, bombarded by sound, color, and words he had never heard strung together like that, cleared his throat before speaking in the “Be reasonable,” long-suffering manner of old Kenyan bureaucrats. “Now, madame—now, madame—listen, madame, there are procedures we must follow, the rules are…”
She wilted before him and blubbered. Her tears made the kohl run down her face, streaking it black. “Please…please…”
Desperate, the man shuffled papers. Emotion was not his forte. “What can I do? See…madame…Kerala?” Where was Kerala? Seizing straws: “Madame, if you have…do you have fifty-two thousand shillings for a cabin in a cargo ship? China. From China maybe you can…uh…uh…Kerala?”
Delaksha dug into her handbag and drew out all the Kenyan shillings she carried, even the coins. The man counted 74,793 shillings. She said, “If there was more, I’d give it to you. Take it all.”
The stupefied man watched her carefully. She had materialized from nothing. She shifted shape. She leaked. She flowed in multiple directions with unexpected consequences for him. He looked at his tabletop, studying his Bic pen. He would fill in the form for her; it would make her go away quickly. “Your hand, madame,” he muttered, “is bleeding.”
She s
aid, “Yes. I had an epiphany.” It was better for him, the man realized too late, not to speak. Delaksha was frowning at her bandaged hand. “Pontius bit me.” She told the man. “He’s a Doberman-Alsatian.”
The man worked extra carefully on Delaksha’s form.
“The dog pities me,” she told the man.
It was good news, the man understood, that this woman was leaving Kenya. “Kerala?” he asked. “You will be happy there.”
“Thank you for saying that. I could kiss you.”
“Please, no, madame.” He froze, not daring to move lest it encourage her. “Please.” He was firm about that. When Delaksha left, he made himself a cup of hot tea.
* * *
Apart from Captain Lai Jin and the officer of the watch, there was a first mate and nine other crew members: an able-bodied seaman, and an engineering team led by a barrel of a man. A bland chronicler of this voyage who had been dispatched from Shanghai, wielding a computer and camera, whom the captain had breathed terror into, daring him to interfere with the smooth flow of things, was also on board and assigned crew quarters. Another man who may or may not have been South African, endowed with a rugby forward’s protuberant forehead, was second engineer. Two deckhands, and a wizened, tattooed tree-trunk-like Malaysian whose spread of duties included chef and steward, rounded out the souls on board.
Creaking chains, the clunking of solids. Floodlights lit up the hold, and cranes like slender giants presided over the cargo. Much of the ship’s cargo was Kenyan tea, and high-quality coffee whose aroma escaped tight seals and roamed portions of the ship, blending with the smell of sea and giving birth to a temporary pungent headiness. A whole section of rust-colored containers contained scrap metal for export.
* * *
The captain was an imposing sentry in the dawn when Ayaana approached his ship. Daybreak’s light had framed him so that, for a second, he seemed to be half in and half out of existence. Morning crows cawed as Ayaana started across the space that divided her old world from the new. She started to hyperventilate. Inundated by the ship’s otherness, bigness, hard corners, steel, and echoes, dwarfed by machinery, some with chains and rims that were the size of large motorcycles, by the tiers of containers, mostly rust-colored, that dominated the view just before the blue ocean. A world of blue-and-white steel, narrow corridors, and small staircases leading to windowless heights. Fire extinguishers, monster ropes, life buoys, life rafts, mysterious things that hummed, bubbled, beeped, groaned, and grunted. Pipes like giant black millipedes leading to and into holes in the wall. Yellow cranes pointing skyward, funnels, and a rotary device that spun around and around before which paused quick-moving men in beige overalls and matching hard hats—the crew, some of whom wielded extra large tools. The ship spat out foaming water from hidden orifices and strained its anchor, anxious to leave with her, and suddenly she felt in her bowels the sense of her own absence from Pate, from Kenya, and from her old self.
Teacher Ruolan had seized Ayaana’s elbow then, and in a firm yet reverent tone had said, “Chuan zhang.” Then she had shaped Ayaana’s body into the proper posture. Teacher enunciated, “Honorable ship leader, Captain Lai Jin.”
Ayaana had scrutinized the square-shouldered, sad-aura man with faraway eyes on a face that was a convergence of symmetry, scars, angles, and smoothness set off by close-cropped black hair. He stood in a space that could have been the center of the world. “We are friends from long ago.” Soft words collapsing into one another. Ayaana stared. The right side of his face was written out in smoothed welts. Unthinking, she exclaimed, “How did the fire write you?”
Then two strangers’ eyes met. His sense of presence was as an avalanche rushing at her, crowding her. Next, dissonance. Fleeting glimpse of time’s essence. She deeply felt her clumsiness and a mouth filled with out-of-control words. Even with her eyes closed, she was seared by the memory of this man’s no-smile face and his presence, which evoked a desolate, horizonless wasteland. No hills, no crevices, no trees. No end in his look. He seemed exasperated by the proximity of disordered things, which she was. Surfing the silence. Ayaana waited for an interpretation of this, the stillness. The question circled them, and Ayaana’s stomach churned. Her palms were wet.
Lai Jin shut his eyes for half a second, breathing in rose, the citrus in rose, the musk in rose, the rawness of rose and its transmuting presence. What a question, he thought.
Teacher Ruolan blushed crimson after Ayaana’s question. Teacher Ruolan nudged Ayaana, whispering in hard words, “You talk last. Last!” Ayaana bent her head to see her red-painted toes showing at the tips of her new maroon cork-heeled sandals, strapped above the hems of stonewashed jeans, beneath a black buibui. No words. If Teacher had not lifted her head, Ayaana would have continued to watch her toe colors merge into the steel of the ship.
Then, from the gangway, lumbering footsteps, shrill laughter. Other voices. A phalanx of men and women in suits. This was Ayaana’s official send-off party.
The Kenyan and Chinese bureaucrats lined up for endless photographs with Ayaana. Soon they were caught up in a rhapsody of self-congratulation. The senior Kenyan diplomat gave Ayaana a gift to present to the people of China from the people of Kenya—an ocean-rescued bit of Chinese porcelain, a relic from a just-recovered junk. It was wrapped in “Made in China” red felt and contained in a black-and-gold woodlike box of smooth texture crafted in Makueni. The package would be secured in the ship leader’s stateroom.
After the speeches, followed by early-morning ritual libations that went down throats, and caused red spots on some faces, and slurred words on other tongues, Lai Jin retreated. More photographs with Ayaana. Her veil slipped farther and farther away from her face, the better to allow her escorts to capture the slant of “almond-shaped eyes,” the genetic-puzzle single-skin eyelids on dark golden brown skin. A mêlée. More speeches. A mirthful official from the embassy assured Ayaana of the greatness of China. Ayaana thought of six-hundred-year-old dead seamen, who would not have imagined this postscript to the story of their fate.
Another frantic thought. She turned her body toward the gangway. When she might have given in to the impulse to escape, a hand touched her wrist. She gasped.
It was the captain. He shook his head. Then he smiled. Pressure on her wrist; she followed its leading. An alcovelike cranny temporarily separated them from the party. Ayaana clutched the gift with one hand and readjusted her veil with the other. Together they watched the impromptu party fizzle to an end. They waited a minute longer there. Then the man sighed.
“Now,” he said.
Ayaana followed the captain out so that they could stand in final ceremony as the bureaucrats wished them a safe journey. The merrymakers disembarked in undulating descent, careful to support one another, and demonstrating proof of the power of cheap champagne to forge loving connections between two uneven countries.
* * *
—
Teacher Ruolan, who had been conferring with her embassy boss, had lost sight of Ayaana. She was scanning the deck when she saw Ayaana emerge with the captain by her side. She hurried to interpose herself between them. After the bureaucrats had gone, she directed Ayaana up steel steps and down a narrow corridor, their footsteps punctuating the steel. They squeezed past a woman whom Ayaana towered over, whose wind-churned hair matched her “Where am I?” pose. The woman’s flowing white dress was stained; her eyes were hidden behind extra-large sunglasses. A turquoise necklace with its tigereye pendant hung in her décolletage, beneath which large breasts strained. She was patting an indigo-colored bag as if it were a sentient being; a thin white unlit cigarette hung between her teeth, in spite of the “No Smoking” signs.
* * *
Twenty souls left on board MV Qingrui/Guolong as she sailed out of Kilindini Harbor, Mombasa, with the mid-morning’s high tide, despite big waves and a cool wind that breathed into the harbor’s mouth. A harbor pilot escorted th
em away from Kenya’s shores. Other ships sounded farewell horns. The Dragon of the Nation foghorned back. At the horizon, the morning star. In international waters, a deckhand lowered the red, green, black, and white Kenyan flag.
[ 37 ]
On the first evening aboard the creaking, thrumming, vibrating vessel with its smell of diesel and oil, while the other passengers lumbered into an indifferent mess furnished with a melting plastic object that was supposed to represent a lily, Teacher Ruolan escorted Ayaana into the captain’s mess, with its many plaques and pictures of ships. Her emotions darting like a bird unable to perch on anything, Ayaana focused on Teacher Ruolan’s hand on her arm. As they sat down, Ayaana stared at a stain on the table that was raised like a wart. Place settings for a single serving: a cup, a bowl on a dish, chopsticks on a holder, a ceramic spoon.
Ayaana glanced at the food at the center.
No one moved until the captain gestured. “Please,” he said.
Assailed by the cadences of English, tonal variations she had not ever imagined, Ayaana was suddenly uncertain about her grasp of the language. She started to panic about acquiring another language as well. Listening closely, trying not to miss anything, Ayaana also studied Teacher Ruolan from beneath her thick lashes, observing and envying her gracefulness. The woman turned to attend to Ayaana, showing her the thin black sticks with which she would eat from now on. Ayaana slowly picked up hers, and in so doing somehow managed to drop the ceramic soupspoon. It tumbled to the floor.
The Dragonfly Sea Page 21
