I DID NOT BELIEVE what my mother had said about the dead until I dreamt I saw my father just this way: walking backward, his face to me, his feet headed toward oblivion. There was a wound on his forehead, red and large as a carnation in full bloom. In the dream I wanted to touch this carnation, to carry it off, but my arm, extended outward, could not reach. I cried out and then awoke to find myself in a room not my own, cots configured dormitory-style; crowded, noisy, it was not a place I recognised. It was not a jail – although it may well have been, for there were bars on the windows…At night bats flew in leaving a foetid mess and there were so many mosquitoes I could not sleep for the buzzing at my ears. I had more dreams, nightmares they were…of my mother weeding Papá’s grave on the plateau of Rua de São Tomé and waving to me across the tarmac where I was boarding a TAP flight against my will. A well-dressed man with a briefcase took his seat on the other side of me by the window. He did not recognise me but I instantly recognised him as Senhor Mascarenhas…Of a morning, my eyes felt heavy – worlds turned in the time between closing and opening them – and my nightie was saturated with sweat. I would see women wearing white dhotis reapplying disinfectant to the floors, but the smells that returned only hours after, mine no less than any one else’s, were invariably human. Apparently, I was in quarantine because of fears that, having come from Africa, I might infect someone with a tropical disease. How did I know this? Like most things about this new country, this terra incognita which I hesitate to call home, it came to me only later, after much bewilderment and angst. Other women moved about me: their saris and salwar kameezes rustling, their anklets and bangles tinkling like bells. They gawped and smiled and their presence was at once intimidating and comforting as, assuming I understood, they rapidly fired off conversation in Hindi or Marathi. Out of pity for my incomprehension or my poor appetite or perhaps my being alone, they offered me sweets from their thalis; I took them but they were sickly, saturated with ghee. Eventually I learnt some words – to ask for water, to ask for fruit, to ask what day it was…Time seemed to slow or to have halted. They asked me my name and I lied. Masquerading, I said, My name is Saudade, and, to my surprise, no one unmasked me. I was so lonely yet not at all alone – a paradox I thought of while taking the last of the puris out to feed the birds on the balcony. From here I would watch the huge dusty crows vying for crumbs with the small, undaunted sparrows. A few fair-skinned women were here too; they were hippies, I discerned from their dreadlocks. They kept to themselves and were often to be found asleep in the old, bowed cane chairs or sleepwalking, barefoot, to bum beedis from the wardens. The acrid smoke would drift in with all the other strong smells: frying food, incense and factory emissions – and the alien noises: the call to prayer, a cricket bat thwacking a ball and children running and laughing…Later, when I was let out, I played games of rummy and draughts with a few of these children. They showed me the rules and I observed them closely, like a spy deciphering a code. One girl my age called Mira befriended me; she told me she was coming home from the Gulf where she had been to see her husband. She was so young I did not believe she was already married, but she showed me the proofs by way of her mangalasutra and the intricate but faded designs of the mehndi on her hands. It was only a few days, yet all this came to be routine and those around me almost familiar, when one morning I was summoned to a large administrative outbuilding. My passport, papers and suitcase were summarily given back to me and I was told to get ready: a boat had been booked for me and I would be escorted to the docks by noon…I got dressed, pulling on jeans and a shirt, clothes I had almost forgotten. The streets through the taxi window were thronged with people and slums rose into view at every turn. I arrived at a harbour called Mazagaon, which had once been a fishing village, facing out towards the sea; a sea that, like the last, could disclose so many secrets and so many expectations. Almost as second nature, I knew it was the Arabian Sea and this was Bombay…Near the docks a girl, perhaps half my age, her eyes streaked wildly with kohl, tapped my hand and begged for paise. As I fumbled in my pockets, she had me bow my head and draped a garland of marigolds around my neck…On the ferry everyone said I was going home and that it would only be a short journey. Again I had occasion to ponder the meaning of this word, how home may be destroyed by so much strife; how it might be remade from so many makeshift and indiscriminate, even downright unsuitable, materials. I stayed out on deck until the sun had set and the lights off to the south had faded, then retired like everyone else to my cabin. My sleep was light, fitful; my dreams broken but insistent. Outlandish dreams: of whether Andrea’s piano would fit up the rickety staircase of her grandmother’s flat in the Alfama, whether Miguel’s letters to me would come in my absence; whether Caetano would come home…It would be many months before I would learn he had not gone back to Mozambique but died fighting in the civil war…Certain images and words came back to me with a novelistic clarity, but it also seemed like it may all have happened years earlier or to someone else. School closing and coming home to find my mother sitting on the edge of the sofa in her dressing gown, the one with the batik bird of paradise on it, whispering about Caetano’s disappearance, the rumours that he had been arrested…Papá also returning early; my mother wringing her hands. For days afterward, his brooding and terrifying presence in the house. The curfew, the blackouts, the rumours of soldiers returning, decamping from their bivouacs on the outskirts of the city…Haze and smoke in the air, the smell of sisal fields burning in the distance. Looking through the window at the empty streets and the neighbourhood curtains drawn. Watching on the television as, overnight, in Largo da República, the Portuguese flag was lowered by the Governor, and another, Angolan, raised by Neto…Papá stalking the corridors, asking not to be disturbed, retiring to his study and, after my mother and I had both gone to bed, the gun shot ringing out, the huge carnation forming…Beads of perspiration glistened on my mother’s forehead as she asked me to run and tell the neighbour. Too late, the arrival of the ambulance. In the days afterward, sending me into the newly independent streets with the money for the deposit for the gravestone; the arrangements for the funeral; frenetic telexes to the Carmelite convent in Goa and urgent visits to the tourist office to book my ticket and have my passport prepared. Looking at my father’s face in the coffin, I realised it was a face I had not been able to look at for so long without being afraid but I did not feel anything other than pity to see it now. My mother could not look at it and, in the days after his burial, stared at the garden, meditating on her rotten lot…On the eve of my departure, I sat on the edge of my bed for the last time, thumbing through the pages: the photograph with my hair newly cropped; the date – August 15, 1958 – and place – Benguela – of my birth; Papá’s name and my mother’s maiden name…With the permission it granted me, I was leaving Angola, leaving the continent of Africa perhaps forever. My passport told a story of where I had come from, but nothing could tell me where I was going; my destiny was unwritten, a tabula rasa all over again. I suppose the beginning always seems beautiful; we are born unscarred by history’s vicissitudes…My mother came to the doorway. I said to her I would soon be an orphan like Caetano. She said no, it would only be a short time and we would be together again. In the meantime, she told me, I would make my home in a village close to the sea with my grandmother, my father’s mother…My mother had apparently seen to everything. Someone from the village was waiting at the docks at Navegação to collect me. He put the luggage in the back of his Ambassador and, as we got into the car, finger-kissed the picture of São Sebastian that hung from the mirror. We passed the Summer Palace of Adil Shah; the Church of Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception, whitewashed, in the baroque style, and the Park of Garcia De Orta. The Indian flag fluttered and children again played cricket in the playgrounds, impervious to the archaeologies which surrounded them. We moved along Mahatma Gandhi Road and then turned down longer, more winding roads that led into the villages. Temples rose irrepressibly, to Shiva, to Mahalakshmi and to Shantadurga. I remarked on the red, red earth and the quaint colonial houses and laterite roofs made of this same earth. The vegetation was alien but it was also beautiful – rows of tall coconut and betel groves and undulating paddy fields a lush green I had never seen. Now and again I would sight bougainvillea and moringa, the last my mother’s favourite…It was not her house I was going to; rumours had it that it was lying abandoned in another village, the subject of her uncles’ ongoing feuds. No, it was my father’s house, abandoned also and now, bittersweet legacy, destined to be my mother’s as a result of his death. Soon the car turned off a coastal road into a grove of coconuts. Light streamed through the canopy and a dog barked sharply as the car came to a stop. I got out to find myself in another garden – there were large black-and-white butterflies alighting on red hibiscus. The air was humid and the waves of the Arabian Sea crashed in the distance. Perhaps it was where Lord Parashurama had, according to a legend I would be told, created the land, but as I walked forward it was as though I was entering an abyss, and the ground itself was like quicksand. A woman came down from the balcony, redoing the pins in her hair bun. She embraced me and I followed her up into the house. I was told to wash, told to come to table where the old servant, Santana, was laying out lunch. Another stranger, an old man, sat in a wheelchair at the table, gurgling like a baby. I was told he was my grandfather. I now remembered how, in a rare and tender moment, my father had told me that when he was a child he would get into trouble for eating, like Santana, with his hands. He told me he would like nothing other than to get up early in the morning and wait in the kitchen as she heated the leftover kulchi codi so he could mop it up with the freshly baked pão. I began to eat then, with a hunger I had not known, and in just the same manner.