Authors: N. S. Köenings
Agatha, supportive of her allies when it mattered, applauded from her seat. When she said, “Yes, you must do it again!” Sarie
felt betrayed. But she decided to join in. They’d been through this together, after all. “That’s right,” she said. “Do it
for your friend!” she said. “And for me. For your Mrs. Turner!” Her voice rang oddly in the air. She could not say his name.
Agatha continued to ignore her. Tahir, concentrating, didn’t answer. Sugra’s smile was kind, but at that moment Sarie feared
her. She felt distinctly separate from everyone, even from her child. As if confronted by a family, a threesome: Tahir, Agatha,
and the-green-dressed-woman-with-the-smile, the
lady of the house
. And on the settee, like an extra limb, huddled in the corner, all alone, Mrs. Gilbert Turner. Sarie felt demoted.
We love her
, she heard Maria say again.
She’s so beautiful. Bwana’s favorite lady
. Her throat hurt. Her bowels shifted, continents adrift; the soles of her feet burned.
Without meaning to, she winced. Sugra saw her from the corner of an eye. She patted Tahir’s arm and sent him to his room.
Not everyone was as interested as she—
though they should be
, Sugra thought—in little Tahir’s legs. “Take your friend along, will you?” she said. “Show her how you put your crutches
by the bed so you can reach them by yourself” The children slipped away, Tahir struggling bravely and Agatha excited, giving
praises as they went. The women were alone.
Sitting in the chair Majid Ghulam had taken that first day, just
beneath the clock, Sugra looked benevolently at Sarie and said, of all things, “I’m so glad you have come.” What perverted
twist was this? Sarie had no idea what to do, what could be expected of her. Or, indeed, what she could expect. Majid’s
lady
. Could her lover have deceived her? She thought about the Kuria cattleman and about Angélique. Had that thief been faithful?
Had Angélique gone, too, to where her lover lived, and found he had a mistress or some wives; that he did, in the end, love
cattle more than he loved her? Her eyes roamed over the coffee table and the floor, her legs, as if looking for a clue. She
felt Sugra waiting, watching her. Did not know where to look. She scratched her wrists, wound her ankles round and round.
At least I
, she thought,
told him of my husband. I told him about Gilbert. I told him nearly all
.
Sugra knew of Mrs. Turner’s visits, how since the accident on India Street she’d come almost every day with her little girl
in tow. She’d heard about it from the aunts and from people in the storefronts whose wandering eyes were keen. She’d also
heard it from the boy. She respected her for it. Was grateful. So rare, these days, for strangers to be gentle more than once!
In Tahir’s version, Sarie’s energetic daughter sat beside him on the bed feeding him bananas or reading from a book while
her mother sat with Majid, demure in the front room. Sugra, who thought that, like her cousin, Mrs. Turner was a widow, who
had heard no mention of a husband, had, actually, hoped that they did do more than talk. She had thought (since no one in
their family would have him) that Majid might find pleasure there. Weren’t British women known for starting up affairs? And
hadn’t Ghuji seemed much braver recently than he had in a long time? Smelled a little sweeter? She could see that Mrs. Turner
was unhappy. She said, “You expected to see Majid, eh? You came
to see my cousin?” Sarie didn’t speak, was watching, waiting, thinking, trying to stay calm. Sugra attempted to encourage
her. “I have heard about your visiting, you see.”
Sarie focused on this last. It was not the best thing to have said. Now Sarie imagined Majid telling all to someone else,
to someone he loved better. Laughing. A jealous woman would be easier, she thought. But the more Sarie looked at Sugra, the
more she felt that Sugra had nothing to fear. Only a woman who is perfectly secure can treat a rival kindly, after all. Sarie
felt confused, said nothing. Something in the woman’s face was tender. Sugra seemed
concerned
.
Sugra, for her part, was beginning to feel certain: the British woman came for more than tea. She cocked her head and gently
said, “He’s gone out. I am as surprised as you.” Sarie paused, sniffed. Rethought things a little.
Could a rival be so calm?
Sugra looked at Sarie sideways across the coffee table and touched her hand again, inviting her to join her in soft talk
about Majid. “All of us have worried so for him, you know.” She lowered her voice. “Since the children’s mother died. May
she be in peace. It altered him completely. He’s been lost. Has Majid told you this? It’s good he has a friend.”
All of us
. Sarie felt as she had the first day, the first time she’d entered Tahir’s room after the accident and had thought about
the aunts. The women who made visits, came with cakes, and with no feelings of trespass watched the sick boy sleep. She felt
again that she did not belong, that she stood uncertain on the margins of an unfamiliar world where she might make mistakes.
As Gilbert had done far more than imply. She tried to slow her heart.
Wait a little
. She bit down on her lip and nodded slowly. “You are Majid’s
cousin?
” She could not meet Sugra’s gaze. Her fingers fluttered at the hem of her white dress.
Yes, Sugra knew a sweetheart’s longing when she heard it. She almost laughed out loud. After so much widowed love and sorrow,
how
natural
, how wonderful, that Ghuji would be subject in the end again to
really masculine
desires. She could also tell when a woman thought that someone else had slipped into a bed.
How silly!
The parrot cried out from the kitchen. Sugra clapped her hands down on her thighs, let out a pretty giggle. “Yes!” she said.
“My
husband
lets me visit Ghuji now and then, you know, because we were children here together. Ghuji is my cousin, like a brother. I
look in on the children when I can. It’s hard once you are married!”
It took Sarie a moment to understand that Sugra’s “Ghuji” was her very own Majid. This woman—not a
lady
, after all, perhaps; perhaps a relative who had a husband of her own—knew her Majid by a nickname. As children do, as people
who are raised together.
A brother
, Sarie thought, embarrassed. Oh, that terrible Maria! Had she been playing games? From the wild mix of emotions that were
twisting in her belly and sending heat into her face, a tear had escaped. She squeezed it from her eye with a deep frown,
as though something else—dust, an unknown thing, an insect—had caused it to appear. She batted at her face. Relief? Yes, oh,
yes, relief. Her Majid, her poetic lover-man, could not have a lady.
Only me
, she thought. Finally, she looked across at Sugra. She did not care if her voice shook. “Will he be back today?”
Sugra shrugged and smiled. “Well, now,
that
no one can say. Today Majid has surprised us. Who knows when he will come? But, look. Why don’t we have tea? I will call
down for Maria.”
That she was on the verge of reenacting with his cousin what she had done with Majid Jeevanjee on that first day gave Sarie
a chill. And thinking of Maria made her angry—
elle m’a joué un tour!
she thought. No, she did not want to stay. And was furthermore
surprised by what she
did
want: to be safe at home again. With Agatha in bed and Gilbert reading in the parlor. With the things she understood, and
no strangers to see her. She could not have tea with Sugra, wished she’d never come. “No. No, thank you. Please,” she said.
“I can’t.” Sarie got up roughly, feeling as she pushed the table back that a skin was falling from her. She called loudly
out for Agatha and, without waiting for her, hurried down the stairs.
Around the corner, deeply satisfied, Maria turned the taps and slapped at soaking things. Sugra leaned out of the window,
looking sweetly down: “It was good to meet you, Mrs. Turner! Welcome, welcome. When will you come back?”
For Majid, the day Sarie met Sugra was the day he fell out of the past, through the unexpected now (which had never been as
still for him as it had been for his lover), and into something that, while not quite yet a future, was absolutely new. It
was the day, he would later recall, that he’d come back to life. That morning, Majid had woken early, bathed, and, for the
first time in many years, since not long after Tahir’s birth, which was also Hayaam’s death, said prayers at a mosque. He
did not choose the grandiose masjid he had frequented in the past, the towered place beyond Mbuyu Mmoja Park, where he could
count on seeing people he’d once known and been close to, people who had grown up with Hayaam or loved her. That, he was not
certain he could bear. Majid had started small. He walked out to the mosque that gave the name to Mosque Street, the high,
white, crenellated thing around the corner from his house, the mosque whose prayer call had taught the parrot almost all the
words it knew.
Majid understood the value of small signs, the first slow, tender steps.
It doesn’t matter where I go
, he thought.
It’s the going-out at all
.
Any mosque, any mosque, would do—and better, really, not to go to the old place, the
real
place, right away. Wouldn’t it be easier, if this was really a fresh start, to go first to a little world where he was not
well known? He entered the gates bravely, gave each mendicant a coin.
At the white-tiled water tanks just inside the walls, Majid washed his hands and feet with other city men, exchanging simple
greetings, acknowledging their presence, nodding as he should. Majid didn’t know it, but the first to say hello was the very
coffee salesman whose coals had toppled when the
Al-Fadhil
-bearing bus had borne down on his son. The coffee salesman, to whom most men of Majid’s age and pedigree looked very much
alike, didn’t know it, either, though something in Majid made the man feel kind. They asked after each other’s families and
smiled afterwards, sincerely. Whatever happened outside of the gates, however split up and on-what-side-of-what-fence, it
was good to be together.
In the cool, high, vaulted space, Majid prayed with thirty sleepy men, standing, bowing, touching his bare forehead to the
floor mat, where, with a little wave of pleasure, he noted the bare toes of the men ahead of him. How soft and silly men’s
feet were when seen from underneath. How every man’s were different! Knobby, slender, stunted, bruised, fine, long, or very
small. But also, yes, how very much the same. Just toes on sleepy feet. The synchronic standing, bowing, rising, the way he
felt alone and not alone, all of that joint motion and joint stillness, soothed him.
Amin, amin
. His own worship ended, Majid walked out slowly to the steps. Before he left, he turned towards the mirhab. Other men were
still arriving. Some sat down and stretched their legs along the thick layers of palm mats, opened books and read. Still others
curled up in the corners, thinking they might sleep. Majid, who had stayed inside the rooms of Kudra House for so many private
years, felt shy. At
last, he found his shoes among the dozens at the door. Pausing at the steps, he straightened up his cap as men continued milling,
washing, entering and going on their way. Of course such things went on! But how he had forgotten.
Afterwards, he was glad that no one knew him. That no one there was close enough to what he had once been to say, to themselves
or to another, “Look, it’s Majid Ghulam Jeevanjee, crazy Mad Majid, who couldn’t grieve his wife and go on with his life.
A-laa? I thought he was dead.” Because just then Majid felt anything but dead, and not entirely crazy. As he’d walked out
into the morning, the air had seemed particularly fresh. He’d looked up Mosque Street and then down, and thought:
I know each end of this. To Libya. And beyond that to the park. On the other side, the sea
. A litter woman passed him and he smiled, not at her, exactly—in fact, she didn’t see him, bent over as she was, seeking
husks and crumpled bits of tin—but at the thought of her. At the thought of people who rose before the dawn and
did
things. He’d once risen early, too, each day; had had a sense of duty, worked at things. Looking at Kikanga, Majid felt ashamed
and proud at the same time. Ashamed at how hard other people worked, and proud, proud that he had come. The feeling made him
think about the Bata shoe that Tahir had never gotten back, the shoe whose loss he’d felt so keenly, and the doctor who had
said, “What’s a shoe,
yakhe
, in the face of life and death?” He wondered where it was, but this wondering did not, he found, upset him as it had. Perhaps
the doctor had a point. What if life
was
bigger?
Those doctors
, Majid thought.
Maybe they work hard
.
He’d been about to turn up Mosque Street, heading home because he didn’t know what else to do, when something oddly reminiscent
of Hayaam made him stop and stand still at the corner. Not a vision, not Hayaam herself nor the woman-like-and-not-like-her
who had sat beside him in the bedroom and looked at
those old clothes on that painful, painful day. Nothing so outlined or so firm, but a soft sensation in the corner of his
eyes, at the edges of his skin. Out of reach, but
there
. As if in this great world he was not really alone. The impression that he was accompanied by something other than himself
brought into relief, and altered, how the shuffling of feet and sandals sounded on the street, a bit of how the light looked.
Just behind his shoulder, he thought that he heard Hayaam laugh—that good laugh, the one he had remembered right—and the laughter
in his ears commingled with a shiver at his skin, a freshness in his sight. He saw a pinkness in the air and in the sky, a
gildedness to things; felt buoyed by the shapes that moved around him. Blessed. And so, shy and new, loose and fine from his
ankles to his elbows, from his neck to the skin of his wide brow, Majid turned away from home and headed towards the sea.