The Magic of Saida Read Online Free PDF Page B

he buried? She didn’t know. “I wasn’t born then! Why do you have to ask me of days long gone?” “
You
began it,
you
told me about my ancestor!” They quarrelled.
    One day Punja’s grandson, a well-mannered, quiet, and dignified man called Dr. Amin, arrived in Kilwa to look at the place where Punja had died, and to say a prayer, a Fatiha, for his ancestor. The doctor liked the town and stayed on and opened a clinic. He married, or kept as common-law wife, a woman named Hamida, whomhe trained as his nurse and dispenser. But one day, when the boy was four, the doc upped and left.
    There was that picture, the telltale snapshot that he left behind, evidence of his fall from Indian respectability—having gone local, fathered a half-breed, an outcaste whom he could never call his own back in Gujarat. He appeared very fair in that photo, sitting stiffly on a chair, and he was short, with his hair parted in the middle. He wore a Western-style double-breasted suit and tie. Beside him stood Mama, solemnly staring straight out at the camera, in a khanga dress with a headpiece. Between them—he could sense her pushing him towards his father—stood the boy, wearing awkward, extra-large shorts. Looking rather lost—or did he project himself as he looked at his own photo?
    He didn’t recall posing for it.
    “What about
your
family, Mama?” he asked her.
    “Hamna kitu,” she’d say impatiently. Nothing to speak of. What did she hide?
    Kamal begged her for her story, perversely as he later thought, for he had guessed somewhere deep in his mind the reason for her reticence. She was from slaves. But the Devrajes, his father’s folks, yes, she would tell him about them. They were his people. The sultans. The ambassadors. From India.
    “But I’m an African,” he protested with vehemence. Ni Mwafrika! “I don’t speak Indian, I don’t eat Indian! They eat daal and they smell!”
    “Mhindi, tu.” An Indian. That’s what she wanted for him. But why? So he too could be a sultan. Once when he pestered her for details of that phantom figure Punja Devraj, his great-grandfather, she told him, “Ask Mzee Omari, he knew him.”
    He knew him! But how to ask that fearsome poet, with that lout of a djinn hovering about him?
    When he asked her about Punja’s grandson, the daktari, his father, she said he was a steady man. “Did he love you, Mama?” She smiled to tease. One day he brought up his father when Bi Kulthum happened to be visiting. And Bi Kulthum voiced boisterously, “Your father! The doctor! He was a generous man! A lovable man!”
    Later, Mama said to Kamal, “Don’t mention your father in BiKulthum’s presence.” There was mischief in that admonition. “Eti, she fancied she would take him away from me!”
    There lay a story, the precise nature of which remained a mystery.
    Kamal could never get the African out of him, even when he washed himself with bleach to get his muddy brown out. That was in the future, when Mama sent him away to claim his father’s heritage, become an Indian.
    “Listen to this,” Kamal said to me. He read out:
    “ ‘In November 1776, French ship owner Captain Morice arrived at Kilwa and signed a treaty with Sultan Hasan bin Shirazi by which every year he would take away a thousand blacks, for twenty piastres each, men or women; he was granted exclusive rights, and the treaty was valid for a hundred years.’ ”
    A hundred years later, in 1878, an Englishman, Capt. J. Frederic Elton, departed from Zanzibar on Her Majesty’s service to inspect the towns along the east coast of Africa for slaves owned by the Queen’s Indian subjects. All along the coast in the trading towns he freed the Indians’ slaves, the majority of whom opted to stay with their former masters for wages. The Kilwa–Dar es Salaam route was busy with slave traffic. Elton described an encounter: “One gang of lads and women, chained together with iron neck-rings, was in a horrible state, their lower