“I enjoyed reading your ‘Story of a Cow,’” she said.
He searched for words with the clumsiness of a man with very fat fingers trying to undo a subtle knot. He did not manage to speak a full sentence she could follow. His eyes narrowed to a slit.
Duniya was sure he was asleep, and she let him. She remembered the number of times he had come home, devastated. Or when she had returned from work to find him all over the floor and beds in the shapeless position drowsiness had called on him and her three children. She would take them to their respective places of sleep.
Now Duniya was certain she heard vague noises. Because she had her back to the door, she turned to see who it was that had come and decided to leave. Not meaning to, she kicked Taariq awake, and, startled, he cried something that sounded like “Who?”
The voice of an equally worried woman answered, “It is I.”
“Please come back,” said Duniya, recognizing the old woman’s voice.
In the meantime, Taariq sat up, eyes bloodshot, rubbing them sore and redder. She apologized for waking him; he, for napping.
And Duniya got up to welcome Maryam, Marilyn’s grandmother, with the words, “The children have all gone with Bosaaso and they have left me in charge today.” Then she introduced Taariq.
It was weird, but the old woman would not look at Taariq, who had risen to shake hands with her. Looking intently at Duniya, she said, “I am sorry to drop in on you like this, but I was actually looking for Marilyn, hoping I would find her here.”
“No, I am afraid she is not here.”
“Did she go out with your children?”
“I doubt it.”
She turned round and said to Duniya, “I must be on my way then.”
At which point, Taariq said to her back, “Have we not met, you and I?”
A smile dirtied the old woman’s clean features. “Have we?” she asked.
“You gave me a blanket one early morning, and kept vigil so that my drunken figure would not be pestered by stray dogs, hungry cats and midnight thieves, for which I’ve never thanked you.”
Marilyn’s grandmother shook her head, “I don’t recall any of that.”
“I have kept the blanket as a souvenir of your kindness.”
“It must be someone else you are confusing me with,” insisted the old woman.
“I meant to return the blanket, but didn’t for a number of complicated reasons, and therefore kept the episode as a private memory of an old woman’s kindness.”
“In that case,” the old woman said, “why devalue the significance of the act by mentioning it in public? Why must you speak of it?”
Taariq reflected on what the old woman said.
“She has a point,” Duniya agreed.
The old woman, her voice now confident and her eyes prepared to meet Taariq’s, said: “Is anything the matter with the baby? Why is he so quiet?”
No sooner had Duniya thought of what to say than the outside door opened, admitting the pot-bellied, perspiring figure of Qaasim. Like Shiriye, Qaasim had the eyes of a man who wanted to be somewhere else. He was very fat, like Shiriye, his body round like the lower part of a baobab tree, with stubby, short-nailed fingers. Qaasim’s eyes were small, his teeth tobacco-stained. His belly, it occurred to Duniya, had the shape of a cement-mixer. Qaasim, unlike Shiriye, spoke little. He let his money speak for him. Like an emperor with a full coffer to distribute, Qaasim gave and gave and gave. He left before people, praising or blessing him, got to the “Amen” of their prayers.
“Where is the little devil?” he said, in haste.
“What little devil?” asked Duniya.
“The little jinn that has created all this discord?”
The old woman looked as if she wished she had gone away earlier.
Duniya said, “When you come to someone’s home, you greet them first, you take a seat, you remain polite.”
“I said where is he?”
“Where are your manners?”
“Manners, listen to her talk of manners to me?” he addressed the old woman. “Where are your manners, Duniya? I’d like to know where your manners have gone, deciding to sever all relations with us, at a stroke. Don’t talk to me of manners.”
As the old woman prepared to leave, Qaasim said to her, “Do you know where the little devil is?”
“Of course, he is no devil — an angel maybe.”
“Where is he?”
“You know there are only two rooms here, since you own the place,” said the old woman angrily “Find him yourself.”
He gave heed to her advice and went to the Women’s Room. When eventually he re-emerged, he was not saying a word and was in no haste either. He took a seat, mournfully A blanket of sadness covered every inch of his large body, including his pot-belly, which appeared to have shrunk like a burst balloon.
Without being told so, Duniya knew the foundling had died.
As though he were a waterhole and all the others thirsty animals that had come to drink from it, everybody sat round Qaasim. Only Nasiiba and Duniya did not and they knew why Yarey, in her restless mood, sitting astraddle his knees, kept asking, “But why?” Yarey looked from Nasiiba, who had been the first to find him living, to Uncle Qaasim, who was the first to see him dead. Duniya, in a sad instant, did not put it past Qaasim to have strangled “the little devil who has created so much discord.”
The foundling’s death shook Duniya profoundly She could remember nothing that had ever touched her so deeply as his death. Nor could she be as philosophical about it as Taariq who had quoted the Somali proverb in which it is said that death saddens you less if it strikes a homestead far away from your own, or a camel herdsman whom you do not know. She asked herself what would become of Bosaaso and her myth-construct?
Bosaaso was the first to move away from those sitting round Qaasim’s waterhole. Agitated, his memory replayed a couple of sequences from two other deaths, his late wife and son. He stood still, rocking on his heels. He said, “Now we have to think of his burial and the bureaucratic rituals surrounding it.”
For a moment, Duniya hated him. How could a man so sensitive be so down-to-earth at the same time? She wondered if anyone had told him about the quit-order notice she had served on herself. And what was he likely to say when he had the opportunity to speak?
Taariq, on the other hand, had tear-stained cheeks and kept looking clumsily for a clean handkerchief, only discovering a crumpled tissue, dry with the holes of previous uses and mucuses, whenever he put his hand in his trouser pockets.
“I suppose we will have to submit the baby’s body to the mortuary for a post-mortem,” continued Bosaaso, “to find out why he died, and then submit six copies of the death certificate to the district police station where we registered him in the first placed.”
The old woman was the only person who went into the Women’s Room where the corpse was, keeping vigil, saying a few Koranic verses. She closed the window overlooking the road and covered the dead body with a sheet from Duniya’s cupboard.
Duniya wondered what would become of Bosaaso and her? Would something irrational like the foundling’s death demolish the symmetries they had constructed together?
At the foundling’s wake, anecdotes about death and creation myths were told. Present were a number of friends, including Mire, and all of Duniya’s immediate family. Mire told the first anecdote.
“A child dies in his sixth year and finds himself allotted to a lower berth than that occupied by a much older man who had died at sixty. The young boy says to God, ‘Why is it, Lord, that I have been offered a lower berth in heaven’s hierarchy than the grey old man here above me, when I haven’t lived long enough even to sin?’ And God responds: ‘Because this old man not only reached and lived beyond the age of reason, but he withstood all temptation without committing a single sin. That is why he has been rewarded well’ Unconvinced, the child then says, ‘I beg Your divine patience to tell me why I had to die young and wasn’t given the opportunity either to prove myself worthy of your rewards or that of sinning to deserve this punishment?’ God replies, ‘Because We knew you to be a sinner, and We spared you, for you would surely have earned Our disfavour if We had allowed you to live a moment longer. God is All-knowing, and Merciful.’ And so the child prostrates himself before the Almighty, Whose pardon he seeks, repeating the litany: God gives, He is All-knowing and Merciful.”