The Other Language

by Francesca Marciano

  Margaret Dobson—Margie to her friends—back in the days of old Mombasa had been a celebrated beauty, with the perfect marriage and the perfect children. A slender blonde with light blue eyes, she bought her wardrobe in England and always had a string of cultured pearls dangling around her neck. For Mrs. D’Costa she’d been just an acquaintance—they didn’t belong to the same Mombasa circles—but Anne had always admired her style from afar. Thus it was with extreme pleasure and surprise that two years after the terrible accident she learned that Margie and her husband, Keith, were looking to leave Mombasa to retire on the south coast and were coming to look at the Wiltons’ plot of land. News of their visit had reached her via Saleem, the old askari who still lived on the premises, looking after the empty house. He came almost every evening to drink a cup of masala chai with her cook, Hamisi, to shake off the loneliness. The two men sat on the baraza outside the kitchen talking in Digo. Mrs. D’Costa enjoyed the sound of their soft cackles that seeped from the backyard into the house while she read a book with Pickle and Chutney snoring at her feet.

  As soon as she heard that Margie and Keith were coming to pay a second visit to the property, Mrs. D’Costa sent Hamisi over to the house next door with a note asking the Dobsons to stop by for tea. She then instructed him to bring out the nicer cups and to serve tea under the flame tree on the lawn, where they could have a good view of the sea. For the occasion she washed her hair, put it into rollers and wore a dress with a large floral print.

  “It would be lovely if you came to live here,” she said, pouring the tea into the floral porcelain cups. How exciting to have the Dobsons, of all people, sitting on her wicker chairs looking out at the ocean.

  “Yes, it would. Wouldn’t it, Keith?” Margie asked her husband, her face eager and cautious at once; she was clearly afraid to commit herself without his approval. He nodded briefly, seemingly impatient with this impromptu tea party, and looked the other way.

  He was tall and imposing, quite handsome still. As a young man he’d had a classic appeal, dark haired, with a roguish face with thick eyebrows over green eyes. That wild Irish look that aged well. He had maintained his stature and bulk. Time seemed to have only made him more interesting.

  Margie had been the one to keep the conversation alive. After commenting on the tragedy that had ended Lionel’s and Prudence’s lives she noted that it seemed that many of their old friends had followed a similar journey: from their society days at the club, the up-country safaris with the children and ayahs in tow, to retirement on a quiet beach, looking forward to silence and lots to read. Mrs. D’Costa agreed, out of politeness, despite the fact that she’d never been part of the “society days” at the club nor had she been on safaris with ayahs. Clearly Margie had no recollection of how distant their life had been from hers in the days when she and Keith had pink gin at the club every evening. In fact, so many years later, none of her white friends seemed to remember how different things had been before Independence, Mrs. D’Costa thought, but she wasn’t the kind of person who would make a sarcastic remark. She disliked feeling any bitterness.

  The sea glowed like an iridescent sheet of mercury. A heron flew low over its still surface, and one could hear the sound of its wings flapping. Two fishermen came walking from the other end of the beach in their tattered shorts, squatted on their haunches by the edge of the water and started to wash themselves, rubbing white sand on their dark skin, in the bluish light of dusk.

  “Look at that reef, Keith,” Margie said encouragingly in her lilting voice. “It’s just like a gouache, isn’t it?”

  Her husband didn’t answer.

  “You could start painting again,” she added.

  Keith ignored her. He lifted a stale Barvita biscuit from the plastic tray but put it back. He’d never possessed good social skills, that much Mrs. D’Costa remembered about him. He was always brooding, intimidating; the rare times they’d met in the past she’d never dared start a conversation with him. But now that the Dobsons had landed on her turf, she was the one who was supposed to show them the ropes. If they came here they’d have to rely on her, at least in the beginning.

  “It’s very peaceful indeed, this beach,” Keith finally conceded, perhaps with a hint of sarcasm.

  “I hope peace is what you’re looking for,” Mrs. D’Costa said, an eyebrow raised, “because here you’ll find plenty of it.”

  On the first of each month Mrs. D’Costa drove the twenty miles to the small junction that people proudly called town and stopped at the hardware store to pay the rent. The so-called town was a mix of moldy one-story buildings in need of whitewashing clustered around the post office, the hardware store, the gas station and the bank. A line of wooden stalls along the main road sold wrinkled vegetables and dried fish. The butcher’s sign had ribs and loins drawn by a childish hand. Slabs of meat covered in flies hung on hooks against the bright blue wall. Young men shielded by cheap sunglasses and rasta hats were smoking ganja by the bus station, while the eternal Bob Marley song blared from a portable radio from one of the wooden shacks that sold fries, hard-boiled eggs and sweet masala chai.

  Mrs. D’Costa didn’t dislike coming to town, didn’t think of it as charmless or ugly. The memory of European architecture for her had faded, and these days she couldn’t recall much of the geography there and hardly ever thought about it anyway. To her the town was just any African town and she expected nothing more of it other than what it offered.

  She actually had always looked forward to her visits to the hardware store. She enjoyed having a chat with her landlord and she liked the smell of sawdust, the dim light filtering from the skylight, the old teak cabinets filled with antiquated brass locks and hinges. Mr. Khan was a chubby man with thick tortoiseshell glasses who seemed always to be sitting in the large chair in the front of his shop, propped up by several pillows because of his bad back. The Khans were a wealthy Gujarati family who’d come to East Africa looking for opportunities and had been successful shopkeepers for generations. Mr. Khan was no longer the one in charge of the shop; his son Kublai had now taken over the business, but the old man still liked to sit by the cashier under the fan, just to sip tea and greet clients while wrapping a pound of nails in a scrap of old newspaper, give out some change, shout an order to one of the younger guys who sawed wood in the backyard. Though balding at the top, he wore dangling white mustaches and kept the rest of his hair rather long, so that he was beginning to look more like a Chinese sage than an Asian shopkeeper.

  Young Kublai greeted Anne at the door, smelling of incense and Lifebuoy soap.

  “Good morning, Mrs. D’Costa. How are things at the cottage? Did Hamisi manage to fix the faucet or should I send you one of my fundi?”

  “No need to, Kublai, thank you very much. Hamisi and I managed. We have a pretty good toolbox. I’ll let you know if it holds, otherwise we’ll have to replace it, I’m afraid.”

  “No problem. You know that we are always here to assist you.”

  Kublai Khan bore his noble name graciously. Somehow he reminded Mrs. D’Costa of her husband when they’d first met. Kublai too had exquisite manners, a mane of jet-black hair and thick eyebrows. His English was perfect, his words always carefully articulated. He’d been an exceptional student and had spent a few years in England right after high school to study as an engineer but didn’t like it there and had left.

  The weather, he’d said laconically. And I missed my folks.

  So he’d come back to the family’s empire within the small perimeter that circled the gas station, the tire center and the hardware store, where members of his clan had been undisputed kings for three generations. A melancholic young man, one could have said of Kublai Khan, someone who at some point had followed an impulse in the belief that he could’ve become a completely different person than the rest of his kin. But that sense of a calling had never quite come through. That was part of the reason Mrs. D’Costa felt a special empathy toward him. Like her, he too, had a dent.

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nbsp; Right behind the lumberyard one could get a glimpse of the Khan women dashing around in their starched saris, scurrying back and forth from the kitchen of the house. The smell of roasted cumin, mustard seeds, turmeric and cardamom wafted through the dimly lit shop. A pale little girl with skinny legs brought a bowl of food to her father and grandfather. Fresh chapati and shrimp jeera.

  “Would you like to taste some, Mrs. D’Costa?” Kublai asked, placing the bowl on the counter.

  “No thank you, Kublai, Hamisi is waiting for me to take my lunch at home.”

  “Please. My daughter-in-law is a very good cook,” the elder Mr. Khan interjected.

  “I have no doubt about that, Mr. Khan! I can surely tell when a curry powder is homemade and ground with a mortar and pestle.”

  The old man laughed. “Of course, of course you can, Mrs. D’Costa. Did you learn your cooking from your mother-in-law?” he asked gently. He knew of course that her in-laws were Goans and that they’d lived in the old town in Mombasa.

  “Yes, she taught me everything. When I first came over all I knew was meat, boiled carrots and potatoes!” She started laughing too. “And she was very particular, you know. We had to roast each spice separately, and make fresh powder every morning. She just refused to use the leftover curry from the previous day.”

  “That is the way. That is the way,” Mr. Khan said. “In our house it was the same. My late wife also had the same rule.”

  He leaned slightly over the dark wood counter and lowered his voice in a complicit tone.

  “She made sure the daughters-in-law didn’t use the kind you buy at the duka. You know how the younger ladies now prefer to take shortcuts in the kitchen?”

  “Of course. Everything comes in a box, these days. But it surely doesn’t taste the same.”

  Mrs. D’Costa slid the envelope filled with banknotes over the counter.

  “One day I’d like you to taste my Sunday curry, Mr. Khan. I suspect you won’t be disappointed!” she said in an unusually exuberant voice and, as she heard herself, she felt her cheeks blush as she hadn’t in God knows how many years.

  Mr. Khan took the envelope and joined his palms together over his chest.

  “It’s always a pleasure to see you, Mrs. D’Costa. And remember, if you have any problems at home, just give us a call and we’ll send someone to fix it for you.”

  In the car, on her way home, Mrs. D’Costa thought about Mr. Khan. She felt so at ease in his company; he was such a nice, courteous man and she would’ve liked to get to know him better. She wondered whether she had been too forward mentioning Sunday lunch. She knew the rules, of course, when it came to Asian family etiquette. The upper and lower caste issue—although unspoken—still existed to some degree and her strict mother-in-law would have surely disapproved of her asking a shopkeeper to lunch.

  Oh well, we’re all outcasts here, after all. Which means we are all the same in the end, Mrs. D’Costa thought. The idea made her smile.

  She left the paved road and turned left, on the winding dirt track that took her home through the coconut plantation. Every time she made that turn she was greeted by the sudden shift from the blinding light of the main road to the shady coolness of the bush. She loved the way the sun filtered through the branches of the mango trees lining the road, projecting dancing shadows on the red earth.

  Thinking of what she’d said to Keith Dobson only a couple of days earlier, she nodded to herself: she was lucky to have found such a place to live.

  As the Dobsons were finalizing the paperwork for the title deeds up in Mombasa, Anne was announcing to Kublai their imminent arrival, telling him that they’d probably need to do quite a lot of repair around the house, and would most certainly place a large order of materials with him. She was actually savoring the moment when she would take Keith to the store and show him not only how well regarded she was there, but also what lovely people the Khans were. Hopefully that would help to make him like the place more. But when the time came and she offered to make the introduction Keith simply said that he didn’t care to meet any shopkeeper from the village. He had already placed an order for everything he needed in Mombasa and it was due to be delivered any day.

  “I hate that horrid little junction anyway,” he said in his disparaging tone. “The less I’ll have to go there, the happier I will be.”

  Six weeks later, once the walls had been repainted, the bathrooms renovated and the kitchen redesigned, the Dobsons moved into the Wiltons’ old house, breathing new life into rooms that had been empty for more than two years. Mrs. D’Costa brought over a potted bougainvillea as a housewarming present and Margie showed her around the rooms. They were filled with sturdy furniture in blond wood, with bookcases for the large number of books that Keith meant to read, with a grand piano that Margie meant to play, with an astonishing variety of kitchen utensils, pots and pans, garden furniture and the usual array of paintings people collect during a lifetime in East Africa: there were buffaloes staring down from a ridge, Masai warriors on the hunt holding spears and blazing sunsets over the Indian Ocean. There were, of course, dozens of pictures of the Dobsons’ progeny scattered everywhere, either sailing a dhow off the island of Zanzibar, trekking Mount Kenya or driving open cars through the bush in muddy safari clothes with a beer can in hand. They were two incredibly good-looking boys, tanned, blond, healthy, carrying the great mix of their parents’ genes in their youthful bodies.

  Mrs. D’Costa inspected every picture with great care. She was looking forward to meeting the boys when they would come to visit their parents. It would be so refreshing to have some young people around.

  Her own children all lived too far away. For them to fly with wives and children just to see her was too expensive. The oldest was a schoolteacher in Brisbane, the other a chiropractor in a small town in northern England, and her daughter was a full-time mother of three in Durban. They all struggled to make ends meet at the end of the month, and though they always promised a visit, they kept postponing the trip and now it’d been close to three years since she had seen them. They often wrote letters (Mrs. D’Costa had firmly refused to learn how to use a computer and to write e-mails) and they called her once every two or three weeks, but she wished she could see the grandchildren more. These days children grew up so fast, one had a hard time recognizing them after only six months.

  Looking at these festive family photographs she couldn’t help but admit that her own children had had a very different life than that of the Dobsons. Not so much access to adventure. Well, and very different looking, for sure.

  In early December the short rains ended and the weather finally changed. Every morning now the skies were clear, no more rumbling in the distance announcing another downpour. The nights were warmer, the fishermen went out in the evenings in their slim ingalawas, dotting the horizon with flickering lights.

  But it turned out that, unlike Lionel and Prudence, the Dobsons hardly ever invited her over, and Mrs. D’Costa’s gin rummy nights with Hamisi continued. One week shortly after they’d settled in she’d asked the Dobsons over to Sunday lunch and had extended the invitation also to her old friend Ada, an ex-nurse who still lived in Mombasa, whom she’d met through the East African Women’s Society. Ada arrived almost an hour late, so that by the time they heard her battered car sputtering and clanking along the driveway, everyone was starved and jittery. They heard the car door slam, then Pickle’s and Chutney’s furious barking over Ada’s high-pitched voice.

  “So sorry! I had a bloody puncture and nobody stopped to give me a hand! Off you go! Off! You wretched creatures!”

  Ada appeared on the veranda panting and puffing in faded baggy trousers and a strange shirt with a ruffled collar that didn’t make any sense. White roots were showing under a faded hair dye.

  They sat down to lunch at last and Hamisi brought his legendary curry to the table. Even before Ada had arrived, Mrs. D’Costa could tell that Keith found the company dull, as he didn’t make any effort to participa
te in conversation and now ate his food in rapid, greedy gulps, shaking his leg under the table in a nervous tic. Ada began a meandering tale about how she’d just won the yearly contest of the society with her tomato preserves, and how the previous year the first prize had gone, of all people, to Mrs. D’Costa for a multicolored crocheted blanket. Margie half listened while sending quick, concerned glances across the table to her husband, probably gauging his tolerance level, which was clearly dropping by the minute. None of this escaped Mrs. D’Costa, who felt sorry both for Keith, who had to listen to all this nonsense, and for Ada, who was making a fool of herself. She was relieved when Keith suddenly stood up and declared it was time for his nap.

  After this experiment Mrs. D’Costa had enough good sense not to ask them again. She thought it wiser to sit and wait for the Dobsons to return the invitation. It never came. If by chance she’d cross their car on the dirt road, the Dobsons would limit themselves to waving a hand and keep driving on.

  Often in the evening the breeze would carry the sound of Margie playing the piano, or sometimes she’d hear Keith’s voice calling for Justin, the houseboy they’d taken with them from their previous home, or laughing out loud about something. It was like receiving snippets of a parallel life she had no access to.

  “Oh well,” she said out loud to her face in the bathroom mirror. “If they want to keep their privacy, just let them be.” But she knew better.

  As the holidays neared, Margie showed up a couple of times by the cottage on her way to the junction. Sometimes she would just honk at the end of the driveway without even getting out of the car, with the engine running. The last few times Margie apologized for being always in such a hurry—she told Mrs. D’Costa that she was terribly busy getting everything ready for Christmas. Their two sons were coming with their wives and children, and there was so much to do. Where should she get the turkey for Christmas dinner? Was it necessary to book one? Would Anne know a good, reasonably priced fundi for repairing the thatch roof of the garage?