The Dragonfly Sea

by Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor

  * * *

  Two weeks later, Ayaana traveled to Nairobi by road. She glimpsed the progression of a Chinese-built standard-gauge railroad snaking across the landscape with moral messages emblazoned on massive signs: “Today low skills, tomorrow chief engineer.” Ayaana’s name was in the book for her early-morning appointment at the Embassy of the People’s Republic of China in the Republic of Kenya. Banners at the gate announced a “Seminar on Deepening China-Africa Cooperation.” The red-paper-wrapped package she was carrying in her big violet handbag was also scanned. A man ushered her into the office of the adviser on culture and education. Two minutes later, Shu Ruolan clickety-clacked in, in pointy patent leather shoes. Ayaana shot up.

  She held out her package with both hands. In it was a green-and-white leso set woven with the aphorism “Elimu ni kama bahari, haina kuta wala dari.” “Xie xie nin,” added Ayaana—Thank you.

  Shu Ruolan studied Ayaana. “Bu ke qi.” She hesitated before accepting the offering.

  Ayaana stretched out her right hand. Shu Ruolan took it. They held hands for a moment.

  “Xie xie nin,” Ayaana repeated.

  She bent her head before leaving the room.

  Teacher Ruolan watched Ayaana make her way through the embassy’s gates. Her hands idly unwrapped the gift. She studied the colors on the cloth and patterns. She read and translated the aphorism to herself, “Knowledge is an ocean, it has neither walls nor a roof.” A student should honor her teacher.

  Usiku mwaka.

  The night is a year.

  [ 96 ]

  Fates. The children, the next generation of islanders, had run down the hill to Mehdi’s workshop to seek out Ayaana, who was welding in greasy overalls. “Bi Ayaana!” they shouted in unison. She turned off the metal cutter and lifted up her rusted helmet, to listen to what the children had to say.

  * * *

  —

  Ayaana tore out of the shed full-tilt, the children at her heels. She saw him, the giant. Attenuated by time, still and sedate, a huge green canvas-wrapped object positioned next to him. He carried a simple black leather bag.

  “Nioreg!” Ayaana screamed, forgetting herself. As if she had not already caused sufficient scandal on the island, she leapt into his arms. Nioreg lifted her up, his face wreathed in so many lines, his hair now white. “What’re you doing here?” Ayaana cried. “Where’s Delaksha?” Ayaana looked around for her friend.

  “She is here,” said Nioreg.

  The porter carrying his bag handed it over to him. Nioreg slipped him a few euros.

  “Where?” asked Ayaana, scanning the road behind.

  Nioreg pulled out an engraved wooden box. Inside the dark blue felt, a painted urn. He did not need to speak. It is in stillness that stark truths emerge. It is in moments when pasts, and what is unspoken between them and the present whisper, but not in words. There is a way of knowing that bypasses mundane words. Then Ayaana knew, but she denied truth entry.

  She looked into Nioreg’s eyes, her voice breaking. “What’s that?”

  Nioreg lifted his eyes to survey the island. He looked up at the sky, its endlessness, and how it met the sea. The in-betweens. He smelled the age sweating off the skin of the coral land, scattered by winds with strange and lyrical names. He looked at the slight young woman looking at him with all her life inside her gaze. He wanted to say, This is what the passage of life is, here its culmination. Unlike your tides, we do not always hear it coming. Sorrow is our fate, but we sometimes live enough to recognize it as the finger of a friend. Everything gives way, at some point of its being. Even hauntedness gives way. One truth remains: I was loved. And I loved. How I loved. A soft smile suffused Nioreg’s face. “Ayaana-petite,” he says, “I’ve brought Delaksha home. I trust that a discreet person exists who will help us commend her to your earth?”

  Two tear streams lined Ayaana’s face. She bowed her head. At last she said, “Yes. Follow me.” They walked in the direction of Sheikh Shamum’s house. The sheikh’s application of the faith was broad, creative, and greatly accommodating of human vicissitudes. “What happened?” Ayaana hiccupped.

  Nioreg glanced at her. “This beautiful girl…she fell.”

  “Fell?” repeated Ayaana.

  “Hard.”

  Quiet.

  They walked. Their feet crunched the sand.

  * * *

  —

  Something had split, and metals had groaned, as the MV Qingrui’s gangway jerked left and launched Delaksha forward. She had tumbled to the ground. Her head had connected with a jutting metal object. The crack that broke her neck was audible. Bags tumbling around him, Nioreg had reached her side in a single leap and heard her mutter “Fuck!” before she had gurgled, “So sorry, my dear big love.” There was nothing he could do for her. Because he did not know yet how to cry out loud, he had shuddered from the inside out.

  “Don’t leave me,” Delaksha had lisped. “Pray.”

  “How…”

  “ ‘Now I lay me down…’ ”

  “Delaksha…”

  “Love me…”

  “Delaksha…”

  In that atmosphere of quiet catastrophe, baffled watchers saw wrinkles and shadows wreath the face of a black colossus, a muscular foreigner who clamped down his lips, and who, bit by bit, turned sallow as a bleeding woman twitched in his arms. A medical team raced in with a stretcher between them and went into action. Watching over Delaksha in the speeding ambulance, the passing lights on their faces, Nioreg understood that there was no theory or philosophy for what hospital emergency doctors would confirm to him: Delaksha is dead.

  * * *

  Two weeks after she died, a lead coffin was loaded into a China Eastern plane heading to Rome. An unspeaking man accompanying the corpse had sat in Business Class, studying a document written out in Mandarin and attached to a brutal English translation, and an even more horrible French one. His eyes had focused on the section of the document that noted, “Delaksha Tarangini Sudhamsu Ngobila, wife of Nioreg Marie Ngobila.” Death did not disturb the plans they had made. He implemented their travel itinerary in full. A few adjustments: A hearse was now on standby in Rome. He drove it. He had also included a destination he had earlier disputed—the Church of the Sacred Heart of the Suffrage, where there was a Piccolo Museo del Purgatorio. He spoke to Delaksha there. Months later, his constant conversations with her had transformed the timbre of his voice into a soft hauntedness that those who heard leaned toward to hear intimately. His security-service life ended. Those whose job it was to find out what happened when one of their own went AWOL reported that some of the demons they were familiar with had caught up with their brother Nioreg.

  * * *

  —

  Nioreg told Ayaana, “They prayed for her at the museo.” A pause. “A liturgy for her soul.” Remembering with a soft smile. “Couldn’t leave her. Couldn’t leave her in Kerala, either. Her mother’s mind is not…whole. She would not know what to do with her. We’ve traveled a long way, Delaksha and I. We have cried. We’ve waited in many places. Couldn’t leave her. Bought her a place in a cemetery in Spain with a view of the sea. Cremated her there. When they gave me the urn, I couldn’t leave her. She needs to be with those who love her, you understand? One day I had a dream. We were all here.” He looked about him. “I was not certain you would be here. But it is destined.” Ayaana wiped her eyes. Nioreg added, “She’ll be content here.”

  Ayaana nodded. She lifted her hand to knock on the sheikh’s door, but it was already opening for them.

  * * *

  —

  They buried Delaksha before sunset. They burned incense for her and consoled themselves with the mystery of its scent. Her resting place was shaded by a tall pawpaw tree, beneath which lay the small bones of a long-dead kitten. Delaksha was interred with an additional name: Ra’abia. The name secured Delaksha’s
belonging to Pate and its people. After a simple ceremony, Nioreg decided to walk the length of the beach. He had lost his voice. He stumbled into a fisherman’s shed that had last been used by a seeker in exile who had now joined the long list of Pate’s “disappeared.” It was a good place to sit and not know what to do for a while.

  * * *

  Ayaana phoned Munira that night.

  “We buried a friend today.”

  “Who?”

  “Delaksha. We met on the ship.” Ayaana’s thoughts skittered.

  “She was good to you?”

  She was a lighthouse.

  “Yes.”

  Munira’s voice sounded thin. “This thing, death.”

  Stillness.

  Later, Munira added, “Soon, Ayaana, soon, I too must return to Pate.”

  * * *

  —

  Almost a month later, Nioreg re-emerged. He came to Ayaana to say his goodbyes. Ayaana was silent as she walked him to the jetty. Nioreg left Pate, promising to return. He left on a fast boat to Lamu, where he caught a short flight to Mombasa. Weeks later, Ayaana would read a small news item in the Coastweek newspaper. A long-established coastal magnate, a man of European origin whose vivacious wife had disappeared a few years ago and was now presumed drowned, was driving home from his private club at night when a jalopy appeared from a side road and crashed into his Mercedes. He leapt out to berate the offender—the magnate’s temper was renowned. The offender was described as a large African male, who delivered such a beating to the businessman that he was left on the roadside with a fractured spine, broken ribs, teeth, jaw, and nose. The magnate would recover, but, unfortunately, would never walk straight again, nor would he be able to eat without dribbling. The male offender had disappeared into the night. It turned out that the jalopy was unregistered. There were no fingerprints on the steering wheel—a strange thing indeed. But such was the character of life in these uncertain times. Ayaana read the article several times over. When she lowered it, she knew East Africa would not see Nioreg again.

  [ 97 ]

  Harbingers. A cloud appeared over Pate. At its core was a rainbow. The temperatures on the land plummeted briefly. Some islanders glanced upward and waited for the winds to show up and deliver the message.

  Thirty-one days later.

  The disembarking three-year-old had her father’s popping-out eyes. Her name was Abeerah. A strong-willed soul, she preceded her mother off the boat, acting as if she knew what to do. She tumbled into the water. Emerging from her immersion, stoic, she attempted to wipe her soaking-wet dress. Her presence on the island was as surprising as that of her mother.

  * * *

  —

  Munira, noticeable in the fuchsia sweater she had thrown on against the cold breeze, was greeted as a grieving and honored sea widow. She was treated as if her past had not happened. She was welcomed as a mother of the island.

  When she had stepped off the boat, she turned around to stare at the sea.

  “My rival, my wicked co-wife, this sea; must it always seize my men?” Tears in rivulets ran down her face. “How did I ever offend this witch?” She clung to the hands of the little girl.

  A fisherman asked, “Who is our guest?”

  “She is not a guest; she is his daughter.”

  “Muhidin has a daughter?”

  “He named her Abeerah.”

  And those clustered around the child cooed and oohed and praised Abeerah, who peered at the crowd from behind her mother’s back.

  * * *

  —

  News reached Ayaana that Munira, whom she had been expecting, had at last arrived. Three days late, but she was now here. Ayaana ran all the way to the jetty. She started screaming from a distance the moment she glimpsed her mother. She reached her and grabbed her. They clung to each other. Crying, laughing. Talking. Crying. Laughing.

  Ayaana turned to help with the luggage, and then she saw the child. At first she thought the girl belonged to some other passenger, but when she caught sight of something of Muhidin’s being in the creature, Ayaana dropped the bags, and time scattered. A metallic bad taste in her mouth, her palms wet, and her eyes narrowing, she pivoted to face Munira. “Who is this?”

  Munira leaned over, half smiling, and touched Ayaana’s face. “Your sister, Abeerah.”

  “Abeerah?”

  A complex silence followed before Ayaana’s drawn voice asked, “Your…daughter?”

  “Yes.” Munira’s stretched out her hands to Ayaana. “We wanted to…”

  Ayaana’s tone was chilly. “I see. We had better get to the house; you must be tired.”

  She lifted the bags on her shoulders and set off ahead of her mother and sister, marching toward their house. Her face was flushed, and her stomach roiled: I. Will. Not. Cry. Unreal reality. Falling apart within. A sister? No one had told her anything. Their daughter. Abeerah. Jealousy in procession: her father, her name, her mother. Melancholy. It tasted like loneliness and the horror that she was not necessary to anything. Abeerah. She had even been robbed of her name. When Ayaana reached the house, she dumped the luggage, went into her small room, and shut the door. She crashed. She did not know how to stop the breaking of a patched-up heart.

  * * *

  The family again endured curious and commiserating crowds. Food appeared. It was served. Ayaana emerged from her room. She listened to many voices in silence. She avoided her new sister’s watchful gaze. She did not need to know how she was supposed to be.

  Long past midnight, when the house was quiet again, Ayaana stood at her mother’s door as she watched her soothe Abeerah, who was fussy. Munira saw her there. “How tall you are. How well you look. How were your studies, child?” she asked.

  “Good.”

  “What did they give you?”

  “A bachelor of science, nautical studies.”

  Munira’s eyes shone.

  Then—uneasy silence.

  “We were waiting to tell you together…before…before…” Munira gestured as she cradled Abeerah. Shadows on her face, she sighed, “What’s so wrong with this, lulu?”

  Ayaana snapped, “Others know”—she pointed at the child—“before me? A whole baby?”

  Munira laid the child on the bed. She walked to Ayaana. She opened her arms. “Lulu…”

  Ayaana turned away from her.

  Munira’s hands fluttered. “She surprised us.” Ayaana rolled her eyes. “So unexpected. Didn’t know I could carry her to term. Everything…Allah’s hand…this child, a gift. A woman my age…and Muhidin…This…He was so happy. He said we must tell you together. He named her for you, the first one who had truly loved him—that is what he called you.”

  Munira’s voice faded.

  Muhidin was missing.

  Munira’s mouth trembled.

  Both women then touched the wounds of far too many absences, the losses and silences, all the things they could no longer talk about.

  Numbness.

  Pushing herself away from the whirlpool of strange emotions, Ayaana glanced in the direction of the child. Cold-voiced, she said, “Mother, we are related by blood, the child and I, but that is all. She is nothing to me.” Ayaana spun on her heel and went back to her room. She closed the door.

  * * *

  Whenever Abeerah tried to enter Ayaana’s room, Ayaana screamed, “Toka!”—Get out! Ayaana would not carry Abeerah, or help feed her, or dress her, or soothe her when she cried. Ayaana would rush to work at Mehdi’s workshop when it was still dark in the morning, and return late in the evening. She took her food in her room, with her door shut. Soon, when Abeerah saw Ayaana approach, she would freeze and wait for her to pass.

  The island gossiped: “Du! Ayaana is possessed. Chinese djinns!”

  “Ayaana!” Munira once shrieked.

  “La kuvunja halina ubani”—I
ncense cannot disguise something rotten—Ayaana retorted. And she walked out of the house, despising herself for escalating things, unwilling to do anything about it.

  * * *

  —

  Confused and trying to shrug off some shame, some guilt, Munira threw herself into the repair of their houses, chasing after repairmen and moving supplies from Nairobi and Mombasa to the island. She and Muhidin also had a boat in the high seas, heading out to Aden, carrying passengers and goods. She monitored its progress by phone. She was immersed in work, paralyzed by sorrow and denying the broken link with her elder child. She had difficulty reading Ayaana and the impassive face she wore. Her daughter’s eyes were all too often turned inward, as if debating some unknown fate. Munira fretted. What was this cloud over their lives? Munira felt the island had returned to whispering “kidonda” behind her back. She started tending her garden to calm herself. She muttered her fears to the plants and the earth. When she went to the mosque to pray, she caught sight of Mama Suleiman there. They nodded at each other. Ache in the soul as she thought of Ayaana, grief when she remembered Muhidin, and then deep gratitude for her child Abeerah.