The Wild Wind

by Sheena Kalayil

  I shut the door, crept back to my bed with my heart full of something: relief, gratitude, sadness. I closed my eyes, and replicated her sleeping position so that I could feel even closer to her. I fell asleep again quickly, I must have felt reassured, but I woke with the wind – it seemed only a short time later – to the unfamiliar sweeping sounds. Like a storm that came and went, came and went, but faster, much too fast to be a storm. Juddery thuds, a noise that was too loud, intrusive, it did not belong in the dawn. Early morning light filtered into my room and I closed and opened my eyes again to make sure that I had indeed woken up. I realised my mother was calling me, and then she appeared at my door in her nightdress, and pulled me out of the bed, back into her bedroom, where Danny lay, still asleep, but out of his cot, in the middle of the bed. Her grip was strong and her expression terrified.

  ‘What is it, Mama? What’s happening?’

  Her eyes were wide, and she did not speak, only made a little sound, held me tighter. ‘Sissy!’

  But I pushed her arm away, ran to the window and pushed aside the curtain.

  The helicopters hovered – five, six of them, angled in the sky – but not so high, not so far: in the space between the land and the heavens. Their bodies not moving, but their giant blades cutting through the silence, churning time and churning up dust from the ground, with that groan that I would remember decades on. And one helicopter, its gleaming metallic body cold and hard in the light of dawn, hovered in front of us, so close I was sure that if I opened the window I could stroke it, feel its hot metal heart. At its opening, a man, a boy really, with blond hair showing beneath his helmet, his body encased in a khaki uniform, a diagonal strap across his chest, tools of some kind in his hands. He was watching the scene below him unfold, but then he turned to see me as I looked up.

  ‘Sissy, no!’

  But I stood transfixed, framed in the window, the gusts of wind swirling around outside, exchanging a gaze with this stranger above me. And he, too, seemed disturbed by the sight of me, pushing the machine gun that extended from his hands to his calves to between his ankles, as if to reassure me that he would not raise it, take aim. His eyes were open and troubled, as were mine, while all around us, growing clearer, like the swell of the sea – but not, it couldn’t be, we were as far from the coast as we could be – a gathering chorus: the screams.

  I had by now pushed the curtains wide open and we watched the girls run, their hair in curlers or hairnets or in disarray, some not fully clothed. They were pouring out of their dormitories, their voices being carried in all directions by the wildness of the wind. One girl tripped, was flung headlong, and shouted out as her friends thundered past her, until another slowed, with one hand caught her friend’s, lifted her, so she could join the others, their legs a blur. They screamed and ran – past the houses, through the backyards, and into the bush beyond.

  Part Four

  14

  THE past jumped out again at me, coming on the back of the publication of my book, The Wild Wind: Translating the Poetry of James Joyce in Post-war Italy, six years after I had finished my doctorate, and not quite two years after my sojourn in Delhi. It was published by a small press in Maryland, was stocked in several university libraries including, to my great pride, the university in Rome where I had spent my halcyon year as an undergraduate. A pleasing side-effect of my publication was the modest collateral publicity that the novels I had previously translated received. And it was possibly for this reason that, hearing I was in town, my supervisor from my doctoral studies insisted I come to a drinks and nibbles party at her apartment. The writer from Brooklyn, my first writer, was also invited and had expressed a wish to see me.

  He was separated from his partner and a weekend dad to his four-year-old son, who accompanied him to the party. Parenthood had made him even more attractive. He was less groomed, but this new scruffiness only added to his appeal, as did the obvious love and tenderness he had for his son. A touching addition to his armoury and I could see why some people toted children as accessories. They made a fetching duo; when he proffered a sandwich to his son, the child munched on it obediently before silently giving the half-eaten triangle back to his father, who gobbled it whole.

  I’ve heard about your book, he said. I must order a copy.

  My supervisor joined us. I never told you, but Sissy here was so intimidated by you she wanted to talk herself out of the job.

  I blushed – never a good look on a facial burns survivor – but the writer laughed: I might have been intimidated by you, in fact.

  I don’t believe that, I managed to say, as, her work done, my supervisor drifted away.

  Well, I always wanted to study, he said. I dropped out of college. I’m not saying that I’ve suffered for it, but I confess I’m envious of anyone who managed to stick it out. And you were on your way to getting a PhD, for Christ’s sake.

  I shook my head, laughing: well, you could have been nicer about it.

  I stand corrected. He grinned back. His son tugged at his trouser leg and he picked him up: meet Doctor Sissy, buddy.

  I spent most of the time with him at the gathering, and his son eventually warmed to me when I revealed my secret superpower – a skill at making paper aeroplanes, something that had kept Danny occupied for hours on end at the same age. I left the apartment having talked and talked, having soaked up a warmth from the writer that was a very welcome contrast to our first encounter, feeling prouder of my achievements than ever before.

  Although the irony of it all was that I had long left academia, long stopped translating literary texts and long left New York. I had not managed to sustain a livelihood through my endeavours. I had clung on for years, and to no avail, to the hope of getting tenure or even more than just one, unpredictable class at NYU or Brooklyn College, or any of the institutions I had diligently turned up to, cap almost in hand, to teach the subject that no one else wanted to, at the most inhospitable hour, with the lowest remuneration, with the heaviest marking load. Not long after my strange week in Delhi, I had shelved my romantic ideals, and had moved completely into commercial translation.

  For nearly two years I had been working for a firm of engineers, based in Boston, and subcontracted by an Italian oil company. Their funds seemed endless, the financial ambience in which they operated contrasted with my frugal existence of the previous years. I could charge for subsistence and overheads if I worked from home. I was paid overtime if I needed to meet a deadline. They flew me out to Houston and New Orleans and Montreal, paying for flights, expenses and hotel rooms for a one-hour meeting. And then, a few weeks after that party in my supervisor’s apartment, to Douala, Cameroon, for a four-day workshop, a trip onto which I tagged an extra three days of unpaid leave. For I intended to use this visit to the continent to make a pilgrimage to Zambia.

  As always with these work jaunts of late, the logistics were taken care of with seamless precision by the well-oiled cogs of the firm, and before I could fully process the fact that I had had a yellow-fever jab and a tetanus vaccination – just in case – I was on the plane, and soon after in a hotel room in the Akwa area of the city, preparing for my first meeting the following day at the offices nearby. Unlike my memories of Lusaka – of its quietness and staidness – Douala was brutish, its pleasures more visceral. It was a large sprawl, its streets crowded with vendors, who annexed the pavements outside air-conditioned, guarded shops and cafés. It had a busy port that obscured the beauty of the sea, and large sections of the city were replicas of themselves: a long busy road with tower blocks on either side, the repetitiveness only broken by the occasional green space or market. What it lacked in aesthetics, it made up for with energy. The city pulsated as if it were a living organism, fuelled by the needs of the oil industry, and these visitors, such as the clients I was visiting, viewed the city with a mixture of awe and contempt. I was taken for dinner to a restaurant on the estuary of the River Wouri, during which my Cameroonian colleague switched from French to English to Ital
ian with panache.

  But I had once again misjudged – as on my return to India – and I soon discovered that it was not so easy to just book a flight and go to Zambia. They were on the same continent but travelling between the two countries proved as complex, and as expensive, as flying across the Atlantic. There were only four flights per week, the timings of which ate into the three days I had at my disposal. In order to return to Douala in time for my return flight to Boston, which could not be altered, I would have to arrive in Lusaka in the morning and catch the same aeroplane back later, leaving me with only the day to spend there.

  On the phone to my fiancé I bemoaned my lack of planning, the cost.

  The fare is astronomical, I said, and it feels so extravagant to spend it for a few hours’ sake.

  I think you should go ahead and do it, he replied. You don’t know when you’ll next be that way. He was being tactful; he could have said, you’ll never go that way again.

  I hummed with hesitation.

  Sissy, charge it to my card, he said impatiently. What’s the point of having a sugar daddy if you don’t spend his money?

  I had, of course, fallen in love with an older man. Not old enough to be my father, not quite – fourteen and a half years older – he would be forty-six next month. Not even what one could call rich, not the best of sugar daddies. He was an engineer, and we had met at the firm that employed me. He was recently divorced, and I would have two teenage stepchildren, a girl of fifteen and a boy of thirteen, whom my fiancé adored with a guilty terrified love, and who regarded me with caution. I was still being tested. We had met after his separation from his wife, but even so, he had fallen back into a relationship within a few months of the divorce being finalised. And he had chosen a younger woman, such a cliché. The only point in his favour was that, although his ex-wife was gorgeous, always immaculately presented, his wife-to-be was disfigured.

  I murmured my agreement and thanks on the phone. I’ll make it up to you, I said.

  He had replied: you can begin by telling me what you’re wearing, down to the very last detail.

  And I had laughed out loud, gripping the handset. Wishing he were with me, but knowing that I was too immersed in thoughts of my return to miss him after I had hung up. Knowing that I needed to make this personal journey alone.

  From Douala I contacted a travel agency and arranged for one of their guides to meet me at the airport and ferry me around Lusaka. No, I was not interested in a tour to Victoria Falls or the game reserves, I would only be in Lusaka for a few hours. Roma? Yes, of course they could take me there, although it was certainly one of their more unusual tour requests. I had, before leaving Boston, contacted a professor at the university in Lusaka. Some years earlier, I had read his analysis of the last stages of the Rhodesian bush war, which included his first-hand account of what became known as the Green Leader Raid, one of a series of incursions made to avenge the shooting down of the plane. The professor, in his youth, had been part of the same Rhodesian SAS regiment who had made the daring sortie across the border, to attack the camp on the outskirts of Lusaka, and on learning this I imagined that he must be the young fair-haired man who had tried to reassure me from his lofty heights: not you, we’re not looking for you. He had since interviewed several members of the Patriotic Front who admitted to their involvement in the catalyst of the events: the downing of the plane and subsequent civilian fatalities.

  In the late seventies, the event had thrown the talks-inprogress regarding a future new government in Rhodesia, to be renamed Zimbabwe, into disarray. The missile that had brought the aircraft down had been indisputably launched from the Zambian side, by Nkomo’s men, but from there on, details became vague. The men interviewed declared that they had had intelligence that the aircraft would be carrying ammunition; it was therefore considered a legitimate wartime target. Who would have provided such faulty information? The list of potential sources was long – the Soviets, the Renamo rebels in Mozambique, the South Africans, the Americans? There had been many actors on Africa’s stage during that time. The men’s assertion was either false, and the assault was simply a spiteful, vindictive act on holidaymakers returning from Victoria Falls, or there was a more Machiavellian strategy at play, one that orchestrated Nkomo’s removal from his favoured position. For why would Nkomo sanction such an act when he appeared on the brink of winning favour over his rival Mugabe? Why would he jeopardise his future ambitions? But most chilling were unsubstantiated rumours that some of the survivors, having crawled out of the wreckage, were then shot and killed. The men refused to talk of this.

  In his book, the professor had explored his own ambivalence: of the injustices that were atoned with more injustices; of how, on gaining its hard-fought independence, the country’s liberators had turned on each other. Soon after a new flag was raised, thousands of Ndebele, followers of Nkomo, disappeared, presumed killed – a secret genocide orchestrated by his nemesis Robert Mugabe. The Gukhurundi operation, he wrote, documents the violence with which Mugabe has been willing to conduct his politics. While the Rhodesians, and I include myself as a young man, cannot be condoned for engaging in warfare to uphold a political system that was committed to a disproportionate role for the white minority and racist policies over the black majority, a war which would cost the lives of an estimated 25,000 civilians, including civilians in Mozambique and Zambia, history now looks less favourably on the actions of the Zimbabwean liberators. Mugabe has shown his ruthlessness, not just against hated colonialists, but his very own people.

  His very own people. While I was fascinated by his book, these words jarred. He was, here, building a dramatic tension that was unfair, I felt. Pitting brother against brother, Cain against Abel. But were they not, ultimately, just men, written into the same country by a map drawn at some point in history? While the professor’s frank admission of his own involvement in historical events and his detailing of how he had latterly agonised over his youthful convictions moved me, I longed also to correct him on this point. I needed to impart to him the words that I had not forgotten: you see, Sissy, we are tribes, not countries in Africa. I was grateful for the professor’s willingness to meet, and although it was I who had initiated our acquaintance, he was now the more interested party. He wished to interview me and record my memories of the events. I could see that I would, with my child’s perspective, provide a different texture to the story that read like the pages of an international espionage thriller but which was a real event and which had touched real people’s lives, some now scattered all over the world.

  But by the time I attended the last meeting and workshop in Douala, my mind was already elsewhere; my interest in his project faded, my desire to explain the politics of the past evaporated. I could only think of my own return, to where I had spent so much of my childhood, to where I had had my rebirth. I avoided looking at myself in the mirror. With this pilgrimage imminent, I did not see my scars as friends. It seemed the decision to go back to the space where I had been whole and unblemished was reigniting a bitterness that I had suppressed. I was alive, I reminded myself; I hadn’t died. And yes, I was now marred, but it could have been so much worse. My fiancé often told me I was beautiful – not an adjective I would ever have chosen for myself. Already, in Douala, I had had my share of attention, equal parts pity and revulsion. I imagined this would be magnified when the land recognised the child who had lived there before, and it was only my innate conscientiousness – a need to see a project through – that made me board the plane early in the morning. And in fact, when I landed, despite my fears, nobody paid me any attention. Save for a brief spark in the immigration officer’s eye, I could discern no reaction to my appearance.

  When I approached the travel agent, who was holding up a card with my name, I saw her eyes falter only for a second and then she was extending her hand: I’m Veronica. Veronica Sibanda.

  She was slim and elegant, her hair straightened into a sleek, chin-length bob, and she wore a silk shirt tuck
ed into smart trousers. What did she make of my request? I felt embarrassed about the lengths I had taken to revisit my past. Her cousins had attended Roma, she informed me, straight off the bat, but she had gone to the American International School.

  Yes, I knew some kids who went there as well, I said, and she nodded without saying anything as she unlocked the doors of her car, as if she expected nothing less from a foreigner such as myself.

  But then she turned around and smiled at me. Well, welcome back.

  As we drove through the city and then on the long straight road leading outwards, memories started slotting back as if finding their favoured position. The trees looked familiar, and it was likely they were the same, for twenty years was a whisper in a tree’s life. But the settlement, the cluster of tin-roofed homes a mile or so outside the campus, was gone and in its place I saw white and pink villas, arranged around a swimming pool, so that the tension I had bottled inside me over re-viewing that particular location seeped out. Before I knew it – the distance covered with little effort in a modern car – the entrance to the campus loomed in front of us, now boasting a wider road, a glass-fronted cabin in which sat an attendant, who waved us through after a few words from Veronica.

  I phoned ahead, she said. The Mother Superior has been here now ten years, but she did not know your family.

  We drove up the steep hill, and I remembered, my heart in my throat, as if it were yesterday, how Jonah had stood up on the pedals of his bicycle, and then we were on the narrow road, freshly tarmacadamed, the netball courts still visible down the steps on our left, and the row of bungalows to our right.

  It’s school holidays, Veronica continued, so no classes, no girls, which is why we could come just like this. She stopped the car and we got out. There’s no staff housing on site any more, it’s no longer a boarding school. Day pupils only. She pointed to the bungalows: they’re offices and suchlike now. Then she said gently: I’ll wait for you here. Take as long as you like.