“I found him,” the young girl said.
“Give it here,” Duniya requested.
“It’s a boy,” Nasiiba said as she handed over the baby.
Duniya toiled with her breathing as she took the baby in her arms and sat down with the deliberate slowness of one troubled. Did this baby in any way resemble the one of her dream? Nasiiba was eager to tell her something, but she displayed no interest.
As she sat, a flexing of muscles reminded Duniya of the pain of labour, more than seventeen years ago. She also remembered that of late she had been hostess to several mysterious calls from birds and other beings. She made up her mind not to be the proverbial bad swimmer who, drowning, seeks support from the foam on the surface of the water which is killing her. No, she wasn’t going to ask Nasiiba any questions, was uninterested in establishing the foundling’s identity or where it had been found. The time would arrive soon enough when everything would begin to make sense.
She half-listened to Nasiiba’s pedestrian explanations as to where she had come upon the baby and in what state of filth, but couldn’t help remembering Harun and Musa’s story published in the newspaper, a story in which Elijah’s alter ego, the Prophet Khadr in Islamic mythology, had metamorphosed himself into a cow, perhaps to test their endurance. Had Khadr now chosen to enter her house in the guise of a baby abandoned near a rubbish-bin?
No sooner had her cursory examination confirmed that the foundling had an anus than they heard a man’s voice shouting the Somali greeting formula. The new caller was Bosaaso, and so Duniya said, “Please come on in.”
Nasiiba sat up in nervous tension as if the man had come to lay claim to the foundling and take him away. As far as Duniya was concerned, too many fresh thoughts were making demands on her; she had to deal with one at a time. She wished she knew if every isolated event was part of the same chain of incidents fettered to a common fate, hers and Bosaaso’s.
Bosaaso presently stood in the doorway. He looked from Nasiiba, who had risen to her feet, to Duniya, to the baby. His hesitant frame gained confidence the moment he decided the baby belonged to neither Duniya nor her daughter. It must be connected with Duniya’s work, but he couldn’t determine how. He had been to the hospital and Dr Mire had guessed that the reason his senior nurse hadn’t reported for duty today must be that she couldn’t find transport.
Nasiiba said to Bosaaso, “We found him.”
“Did you?” he said as casually as if he had known about it all along. He nodded at Nasiiba, and she nodded back, acknowledging each other’s presence. It was hard to believe that they had not met before and that Bosaaso had never set foot in this room. Presently he paid close attention to the baby at whose tightly closed fist he stared, and he asked Duniya, “Where did you find him?”
“Nasiiba did,” she said, with the formality of someone presenting one in-law to another. Bosaaso and Nasiiba smiled at each other.
“Where?” Bosaaso asked, crossing to sit in the armchair beyond the brick-barrier, and facing Nasiiba.
She told him where.
Silent, he held his head inclined. He looked about the room with the sensuous approval of somebody who knew it well. He was at home there, his body totally relaxed.
It was into this quietness that Mataan wheeled his bicycle with its wobbly tyre, his face pinched with the surprise of discovering his twin-sister and his mother in the company of a man he had never met before. Then he saw the baby. In the brief time he had to think he decided that the man and the baby belonged together.
He mumbled an “I’m sorry,” turned and was about to push his bicycle with the buckled wheel away when his mother called him back, explained about the foundling, then introduced him to Bosaaso.
Someone named the foundling Magaclaawe, meaning “The Nameless One.” Nasiiba and Mataan did not agree as to who had given it the name although they concurred on the time of day it had been bestowed: early afternoon, after Duniya had said, to Nasiiba and Bosaaso’s delight and Mataan’s surprise, that they would keep him. Nasiiba put no pressure on her mother to make this decision; she knew better, for it would have been counter-productive. Mataan would admit later that he hadn’t considered the question at all, whereas Bosaaso, who had mulled it over, felt that he hadn’t been close enough to Duniya for his counsel to be heeded. But everyone was clearly excited. When Nasiiba brought out a cot for Magaclaawe, Bosaaso was tempted to offer them all the baby things that had once belonged to his now dead son, but didn’t for fear that Duniya might resent it.
The foundling’s feeding noises, touching as a famished animal’s, put Duniya in mind of the Somali notion “ilmo jinni,” the offspring of jinns. This brought with it a motley of memories, including of Zubair’s first wife, who had been suspected of having an affair with a jinn. Although Duniya tried to disregard them, these thoughts came to her every so often. For instance how was it that Nasiiba had forgotten to settle the family’s debt? And why had she donated blood? Duniya decided to wait for the appropriate time, not confident of getting a satisfactory answer out of Nasiiba.
There was something else. Had she not always looked forward to the day when her children had grown up so that she could do what she desired with her own time and freedom? And had she not boasted to Bosaaso, on the day he gave her a lift in a taxi, that she had plenty of time? The foundling was now a reality. It remained to be seen if Duniya would now have more time to herself, more physical space and liberty.
Bosaaso cleared his anxious throat.. “I suppose we have to start worrying about the bureaucratic part of the foundling’s affairs. I suggest we register his existence with the authorities.”
Duniya noted he included himself in the “we.” She was pleased.
“But do we know enough about him, enough even to fill a single sheet?” Mataan asked.
“That’s one of the major points,” said Bosaaso. (It amazed Duniya how familiar all this was sounding: Mataan conversing with an adult male-friend of his mother’s.) “We report that we have no information about its ancestry, no inkling who his parents are.”
Duniya nodded her agreement.
“Somebody must know,” Mataan said. “Know a little more than we,” he added as an afterthought. Duniya looked from her son to her daughter and her face tightened; she prepared for a quarrel between the twins. In a sense she looked forward to it, wondering how Bosaaso would handle it.
She busied herself by feeling the foundling’s cheeks, then undoing the knots of the towel that served as a nappy. They all watched her. Now she felt the baby’s small feet, one at a time, now its knuckles; she did all this with the professional touch of a nurse, as if she meant to enter the details in a ledger. The midwife in Duniya ran far ahead of the mother and woman.
The air was so anxiety-ridden that Bosaaso couldn’t inhale any more. He said, “Perhaps Mataan and I should go to the local police station and report the foundling’s presence here.” He got up.
Duniya smiled and waited.
Mataan then said respectfully to Bosaaso, “Before going I suggest Nasiiba tells us how and where she found the baby.”
Duniya looked from Mataan to Bosaaso, her eyes avoiding Nasiiba’s altogether. The clouds on her mind’s horizon were dark with the gathering of a storm about to break.
Mataan, who tended to be cautious, addressed Bosaaso, “At least she’ll give us a clearer picture than we have so far, and that will surely make our task easier.” He sounded very reasonable.
Nasiiba said, “There was this small crowd of women surrounding the baby when I got there, and he was in a basket. I tell you I’ve never seen such frightened faces — the women’s, I mean. They wouldn’t go near the Nameless One and wouldn’t let anyone else either.”