They had no word from Ilyas but that was nothing to worry about, Khalifa said. ‘Dar es Salaam is a long way away. We should not expect to hear for a while. We’ll get news when someone comes from Dar es Salaam or perhaps he’ll send us a note. Sooner or later we’ll hear from him.’
In the early days when she went to live with Bimkubwa and Baba Khalifa, Afiya slept on a thin kapok mattress on the floor in the same room as they did. There was a room in the backyard that was used as a store. The basket of charcoal was kept in there, and some old pots and sticks of furniture, which were bound to come in useful one day. Khalifa said he would clean it up and prepare it for her. It would need a coat of limewash to kill off the bugs but should be a comfortable room after that. There was another store room at the front of the house with its own door. ‘We can move the junk in there,’ Khalifa said. ‘There’s no hurry. First let her get used to us here. She is only a little girl. Let her get over her fears.’
‘She is not a baby,’ Bi Asha said, but did not insist.
Afiya was still feverish and her hand pained her, although a little less each day. Bi Asha took her to a bone-setter who massaged the hand and then put it in a cast made from herbs and flour and eggs. ‘It will help the bones to heal,’ he said. He took it off after a few days and taught her exercises to improve the hand’s movement. He told Bi Asha, ‘I don’t know if she will get full use of it back. It may be there is permanent damage to the fibres in the hand.’
Bi Asha prayed for her and taught her to read the Koran. If we read together then you will not be thinking so much about your pain and God will bless you and reward you, she said. It took several weeks of daily effort for Afiya to advance enough in her learning to manage the small suras, but when she did, Bi Asha sent her to one of the neighbours, Bi Habiba, who gave lessons in her home to four other girls every morning. Bi Asha thought the company of other children would make Afiya learn better. To Khalifa she confided that she had doubts that Bi Habiba was much of a teacher. The little girls knew how to exploit her lenient ways and avoid their lessons by tricking her into telling them stories.
‘What stories?’ Khalifa asked. He liked stories.
‘I don’t know,’ Bi Asha said tetchily, knowing that he had missed the point. ‘I expect they are stories about the Prophet and his companions, but they should be practising reading. That’s what I am paying her for.’
‘Oh, good stories,’ Khalifa said, exasperating Bi Asha who thought she heard something slighting in his tone. She was often irritated by his deliberate show of indifference to matters of piety.
‘Yes, I hope good stories,’ she said. ‘Do you think I am paying for her to go and listen to gossip?’
‘You’re probably not paying enough for gossip,’ he said, pleased with his own wit.
As the weeks passed, Afiya read more fluently and her hand healed enough for her to help with chores in the house after the class, which was for two hours or so first thing in the morning. When she came back from Bi Habiba’s she gave an account of what she read that morning and sometimes had to give a demonstration to Bimkubwa. After that Afiya accompanied her to the market to buy vegetables and fruit, and perhaps meat on meat-eating days. Bi Asha taught her the cost of produce and how to pay for it, how to handle the money. When you are old enough, you’ll go shopping for me, she said. Sometimes they passed the house of the merchant Nassor Biashara and saw Khalifa sitting at his desk in the office, facing the open door. The office was a downstairs room in the merchant’s house. He and his family lived upstairs. Later in the morning every day, after their return from the market, a man came around from house to house selling fresh fish out of a basket. He bought from the fishermen on the beach to save his customers from having to go there and haggle among the scales and fish guts. Afiya learned how to prepare the fish: to crush the garlic and the ginger and the chillies on the grinding stone and rub the paste over and inside the flesh. She could grind the paste with one hand while steadying the stone with the other, even though she could not grip properly with her left hand. In this as in many other ways she learned to cope with her injury.
She went to see the family with whom she used to lodge when she lived with Ilyas, the sisters Jamila and Saada and their mother. They were pleased to see her and welcomed her as kindly as they had done before. They noticed her awkwardness with the hand and asked about it. She told them that her uncle beat her because she had learned to write and the mother said such ignorance was a sin. The elder of the sisters, Jamila, was betrothed by now but her father said she was too young to marry and must wait until she was eighteen, otherwise her life would be ruined by child-bearing when she had not even had her youth. Jamila said she was happy at home and did not mind waiting, nor did her fiancé. He lived in Zanzibar and they had only met once, so did not know each other well enough for Jamila to miss him. They asked about Ilyas and Afiya said she had no news. May God keep him safe, the mother said. Whenever I go past your old room downstairs I think of you two living there.
Khalifa came home for lunch every day, which was served immediately after Bi Asha said the midday prayers. Afiya was required to accompany her in prayer but Khalifa usually managed to arrive just after they finished. At first Bi Asha said the ritual words aloud so that Afiya could hear and repeat them. In prayer, she explained to her, a person is speaking directly to God and cannot break off to address someone else or do something else. So she could not stop to explain and instruct during the prayer and Afiya would have to learn by example and repetition. After lunch Khalifa pottered around their bedroom in his shirt and kikoi, and then stretched himself out on a mat for an afternoon nap. Bi Asha did the same in the bed and Afiya was left to amuse herself. She liked these quiet hours in the middle of the day when the streets themselves seemed to fall silent in the heat. She washed up the pots, cleaned the braziers and swept the backyard. Then she sat in a corner of the yard with her slate or scraps of paper and practised writing or else read from the Koran Bi Asha bought her. Everyone should have her own copy, she said, not even glancing at Khalifa who had long ago mislaid his.
The muadhin’s call to the afternoon prayer was the signal for the adults to get up, Khalifa to have a quick wash and return to work for two hours or so, and Bi Asha to do a few chores in the house and then go out to call on neighbours or receive them. One day Khalifa asked Afiya if she wanted to come to the office with him or if she preferred visiting with the neighbours, so she went with him. There were three desks in the office, the large room open to the road that Bi Asha and she passed on their way to market. The desk in the middle, facing the door, was Baba Khalifa’s. The one to the right of the door was the merchant Nassor Biashara’s whom Afiya was meeting for the first time today although she had heard him spoken of a great deal as the greedy scoundrel or, more sarcastically, as our rich merchant. She expected to see someone very much older than he was, with mean and miserly features.
She was installed at the desk to the left of the door with a pencil and some scrap paper that Baba Khalifa found for her. Sometimes men came in to talk or do business, but mostly to catch up with the latest news and gossip. For most people it was the only way of keeping track of what was going on in the world. The visitors often said something about her. I see you have a new clerk, or I see someone in this office who looks as if she knows what she is doing. She listened to their talk of politics and government crises while she pretended to be busy with her scratchings. Their talk was often about the coming war and the ferocity of the schutztruppe, of whom they spoke with a mixture of repugnance and admiration. They are animals, those askari, she heard them say. She asked Khalifa if they were the same askari Ilyas went to fight with or if they were different.
‘They are the same but also different,’ Khalifa said. ‘Not all of them are the fierce brutes the men were talking about. Some of them are policemen or clerks or medical orderlies, some even play music in a band. I think Ilyas will be one of those others. We are sure to have word from him soon. He must have finished his training by now and he will come home for a few days then, no doubt. We can ask him when we see him.’
The merchant did not usually say much to her. He was often busy with his ledgers and his letters or with his visitors, and in any case was not much of a talker. When there was talking going on, he was usually the listener while his visitors and Baba held forth. He wore wire-framed glasses when he wrote and Afiya had not seen anyone wearing these before. Unaware of what she was doing, she once stood staring at him as he worked. She wondered if it hurt to wear them, the way the handles curled behind his ears. Nassor Biashara eventually looked up and pushed the glasses to the top of his head. He rubbed his eyes for a few seconds then sat back and gazed at her.
‘What are you staring at?’ he asked.
She pointed to his glasses and Khalifa said sharply, ‘Don’t point at someone’s face like that.’
The merchant spoke just as sharply. ‘Leave her alone,’ he said, and then she understood that he disliked Baba Khalifa just as much as Baba disliked him.
She had a fit of coughing in the office one day, and Nassor Biashara looked towards her with a frown of concern. Come with me, he said when her coughing did not stop. The door to their residence upstairs was just next to the office and he stood at the bottom of the stairs and called up, ‘Khalida, Afiya is coming up for some water.’ That was how she met the merchant’s wife, and after that whenever she went to the office with Baba Khalifa, which was not every day, she went upstairs for a drink of water and sometimes a slice of rice cake. Khalida had a young baby and did not go out much, so she often had visitors, her friends and neighbours, wives and relatives of other merchants and the people who worked for them. They sat with her in their perfumed kangas and rustling chiffon dresses and talked about weddings and births and bequeathings. Afiya listened open-mouthed as they mocked people with vicious delight: men who swaggered with conceit, women who gave themselves airs, dignitaries whom rumour exposed as hypocrites, some living and some already passed on. They spared their own husbands and their relatives, but were merciless with anyone else they brought into their conversations. She did not bother to pretend that she was not listening. They laughed at her avid attention and warned each other, with winks and raised eyebrows and some coded words, not to say too much in front of the little girl. She knew when they were talking about something they did not want her to know – some people in this room have big ears – because they hummed and coughed and spoke in a roundabout way and used hand signals, laughing among themselves as they played these games. She generally worked out what they were trying to hide from her although she pretended not to. It was a long time before she realised that not everything they said about other people was true.
In this way Afiya filled her time: the class with Bi Habiba, which was in the hallway of her tiny house, the stories she told them of miraculous events befalling the Prophets of God, from Nabi Musa to Nabi Ibrahim to Nabi Issa, and above all to the Messenger of God, salallahuwaale. She visited Jamila and Saada and their mother, sat in the merchant’s office while the men talked and she wrote and drew on her scraps of paper, and then went upstairs to see the merchant’s wife Khalida and her friends and eat rice cake as she listened to their slanders. She did not think it at the time but later she knew that it was a period of contentment for her, those first months when she came to live with Bimkubwa and Baba Khalifa.
*
The junk in the room in the backyard was finally removed to the store at the front of the house. Afterwards the walls were limewashed and the floor was swept and washed with soapy water and the window frame was varnished and the bars were painted.
‘In the time before, my father used to keep trade goods in that store at the front of the house,’ Bi Asha said. ‘Our tajiri Nassor has asked to keep his rubbish in there but I said no. He would want to lock it and keep the key. That would be the beginning – first the store then the yard and then the whole house – and after that we would be out on the street. Nothing is beyond that scoundrel. What trade goods did my father keep in there? Whatever turned up. Everyone traded with whatever came their way: sacks of rice going cheap, which can be sold on, maize or millet after a good harvest to be shipped on, metal trays, rosewater, dates. Some of the goods were from here and some from across the sea. One year he bought dozens of clay water-pots from India, no one knew why. They remained in the store for years, and I don’t know what happened to them in the end. My father was not a very good trader and somehow always managed to make wrong decisions, buy or sell at the wrong time, or at the wrong price. Anyway, he did not make any money, my poor father, and then he let Uncle Amur steal this house from him.’
A new bed with a mosquito-net frame was delivered from Nassor Biashara’s workshop as a gift to Afiya from the merchant. The mattress-maker came and unstitched the worn-out mattress she slept on on the floor and filled it with new kapok. A new net was ordered from the tailor and hung glowing white in its frame. For the first time in her life, at the age of twelve, Afiya had the unexpected luxury of a room of her own. She found it a little frightening at first in her little room in the yard, but she did not say so. She bolted her door and kept one of the window casements slightly ajar as instructed. Then she tucked in the ends of her mosquito net and gradually learned to ignore the sinister rustlings that teemed in the dark.
‘You don’t know how lucky you are,’ Bi Asha told her, but she was smiling, not scolding. ‘I hope we are not spoiling you with all these comforts.’
Khalifa began to talk about how at the same age he was sleeping on a mat under the stairs in his teacher’s house with several other boys and how it was worth it in the end, but Bi Asha cut him off. He is starting with his Indian stories again, she said. Khalifa smiled indulgently and went to lie down after lunch.
One morning, as Afiya was on her way to Bi Habiba’s Koran class, Bi Asha gave her a kanga and showed her how to wear it. You are growing up now. To preserve decency you must cover yourself when you go out, she said.
She knew her nipples ached and were swelling and had noticed that men’s eyes fell to her chest when she walked in the streets. She realised also that Nassor Biashara preferred that she should go upstairs while his male visitors were in the office. She thought it embarrassed him the way they looked at her. She knew what was happening without anyone explaining it to her, and she accepted the kanga gratefully and covered herself as she was told.