When She Was Queen Read Online Free PDF Page A

from the beginning.
    The beginning was when her father died and her mother remarried. Her parents had lived upcountry in the town of Dodoma in central Tanzania. Her mother went to live with her new husband in Uganda, and later in Congo. The kids were parcelled off first separately to two relatives on her mother’s side, and shortly thereafter reunited in the home of their father’s younger brother. They were treated well, perhaps too well. Anaar was nine. Their aunt and uncle had a son, their only child, a year after Anaar and her brother were adopted.
    Anaar never forgot her parents’ home, Dodoma, the gulley—or alley—in which they lived, the tinsmiths knocking pots and pans into shape, the sweetmeat shop, the open drain, the quarrels among the women, the local crazy shuffling along followed by a train of boys. She spoke about that home to hurt her uncle and aunt when she wanted to taunt them, when she needed something so badly she didn’t care about anybody else: she was an orphan, sort of, was her defence of last resort.
    But she helped to raise their child, Azim, who always called her his sister; and she cooked in the house, especially when both her aunt and uncle were needed in the shop during month-end rush.

    By my teenage years I lived with my family in Upanga, an Indian suburb closer to the schools and the beach, away from the bustle of Kariakoo and Uhuru Street where Indian shops serviced African needs. I think I saw Anaar for the first time after school one Saturday (which was a half day) when I came walking along her street accompanying a friend to his home. She came gliding up on the opposite side of the street, erect on her bike seat, quite modest in her green box-pleat skirt and white blouse—the school uniform—her hair done up in a long pigtail. I remember stopping and turning around to watch as she went by. She alighted swiftly outside a corner store, stood the bike, which a boy, her brother, then took and pedalled away. He went past us, taking his hands off the handlebars, stretching them out sideways in an act of bravado.
    That vision of a slim, fair, thin-faced girl approaching on her bicycle is, in the constellation of memories of my hometown, a bright star, something that draws a wistful smile. We looked down our noses at Kariakoo, those of us from Upanga. Contrasted with Kariakoo’s dusty hustle and bustle, its homes huddled behind shopfronts or stacked closely above the stores in apartments, we had what we would now call townhouses, with ample gardens, and friendly alleys and playing fields. But Kariakoo from that day onward also had this genie, the only girl I had seen in Dar on a bicycle; the place was now home to a certain mystery, an enigma.
    She had, as I recall further from that day, a certain sternness in demeanour, an intensity in the eyes as she concentrated on the road in front of her; and the tight pigtail gave a prominence to her cheekbones and forehead.She is not as thin-faced now, but it is hard not to superpose that face from long ago upon the one before me and see a match. And it is as hard not to feel the force of an enigma, even now. Her voice is soft and I’ve not seen her laugh, but she smiles warmly and searchingly as she looks into your eyes.

    Her Amir Uncle, Anaar’s girlfriend Guli would say, was more like a brother or cousin; he was a bachelor and liked to play games—“You should see him at the picnics”—and flirted with the women. He was not as old as the other uncles either.
    Anaar too began to call him Amir Uncle. And to her too he was more like an elder brother who said silly things sometimes and made jokes and was protective. As a person from Upanga, who worked as a comptroller at the European firm of Twentsche Overseas Motors, he had a status; at work he wore white shorts, shirt, and stockings, with black shoes, as the Europeans did. Before, she had hardly been aware of him, but now that she knew him, he seemed to be everywhere, known to everyone. One