“And you won’t give us anything?” Waaberi said. “Not even this last time?”
“Give your mother my best wishes, that’s all.”
Leaving, Waaberi left behind a tension which strangled Duniya and Bosaaso, preventing them from speaking, even after the outside gate had been shut.
Then, after a long silence, he said, “It’s getting late.”
Absent-mindedly, Duniya asked, “Late for what?”
“I must go and collect the keys from the cleaning women, call at my cousin’s commune and arrange that Axmad joins us in his taxi this afternoon to go to the airport.” He paused. He was sure he had forgotten something.
She didn’t say anything.
“Are you coming or staying?”
She thought that he had his tension to keep him company; so she said, “I’ll wait for you here, do the washing-up and all that. But could you call at my place on your way back? Just to find out how things are?”
Kissing her lightly, he said, “Ciao.”
“Ciao!”
Duniya turned a question over and over in her mind, faster and faster, until the words comprising the question ran into each other. Bosaaso had been gone almost half an hour, by which time she had done the dishes. Then the bell in the kitchen rang.
She went to open the door. She was surprised to be greeted by Hibo and Kaahin.
Duniya invited them to come in and walked away, hoping one of them would push the gate shut and then both would follow her. When she didn’t hear their footsteps, Duniya turned. Curiously, they were talking in whispers, arguing about something. Now she might not have invited Kaahin into her house, but this wasn’t hers, and from what she knew of Kaahin’s and Bosaaso’s relationship, he was welcome in his friend’s house. But now she hesitated and was unable to decide what to do. Were Kaahin and Hibo having a very quiet affair and had they come here, assuming to find only Bosaaso who in any case had known of their liaison? She became irritable. “What’s all this? Why won’t you come in?” she said to them.
Hibo’s eyes moved like a scatter of frightened ants. But Kaahin did not display any nervousness, no deference.
Looking from one to the other, she said, “If you people aren’t coming in, I am going inside to make myself a cup of something and sit in the living-room.”
Unsmiling, Hibo said to Kaahin, “I’ll go in with Duniya, but you sit and wait in the car.”
Duniya knew it wasn’t her business to interfere, but said, maybe out of a desire to avoid misunderstanding, “Come inside, Kaahin.”
He looked like a man who had been dispossessed of all he owned. Duniya thought that Kaahin shared a meagre resemblance with Mataan, in that he too appeared to bloom best when treated like a son. She wondered if this had been the way Zawadi had always treated him, like a son, although he wasn’t her junior in years. And his mouth opened just like Mataan’s and wouldn’t shut; his beady eyes had a glint in them, reflective as silver, when the sun shone on them. “I don’t mind if I wait outside in the car, really,” he said.
“Come, let’s all go inside,” Duniya said to Hibo.
“But I’ve come to talk to you.”
“Let’s go inside, all three of us,” insisted Duniya.
She walked away and was relieved to hear the outside gate bang shut and two sets of footsteps following her. If nothing had been going on between them, what were they saying to each other all the time?
When they were in the kitchen, Duniya said, “Bosaaso isn’t here. So what can I offer you? Tea? Coffee?”
Kaahin said, “We met him in town, running errands. It was he who told us you were here. In fact, I was taking Hibo to your place.” He wore a charming smile.
Duniya decided not to mention that Waaberi had come to see Bosaaso on her own and had not received a warm welcome.
“What’s the matter with you? You look like a suttee who’s come to take her leave of the world she loves,” she said to Hibo, sitting in her chair wrapped in rags of sadness.
Hibo didn’t ask who or what a suttee was, but Kaahin did.
Duniya remembered the explanation Nasiiba had given her, which she repeated, looking not at Kaahin whose question she was answering, but at Hibo who chose to remain silent. “Suttee is a Hindu custom in which a widow immolates herself on her husband’s pyre.”
This made Kaahin so unbearably nervous that he got up as if his chair had instantly turned into an electric one. He said, “I really must go, to let the two of you talk. Thank you, Duniya. Good luck, Hibo,” and dashed out of the kitchen door, banging into it. Even this didn’t stop him. For he shook his head in amazement, grinned and went out as fast as his legs would take him. Soon after, all noises ceased. “What’s ailing you?” Duniya asked Hibo.
Emotionless, Hibo said, “I think I’ve killed Gallayr, my husband.”
“You think you’ve killed him?”
“Yes,” said Hibo, her voice empty of sadness.
“Where’s his body?”
“At home.”
Duniya remembered the detective novels she had read and said, “Is he buried under a pile of earth with bushes hiding the mound or is his corpse in the freezer, awaiting a mortician’s arrival, soon to be followed by an inspector with an unlit pipe?”
Hibo didn’t appreciate Duniya’s humour. She said flatly, “When I left him he was on our bed, grovelling with pain, his face pale and swollen, his eyes bloodshot and all the veins visible.”
“Where did you hide the knife?” asked Duniya.
“I didn’t use a knife.”
“And where are your children?”
“They spent the night at a relative’s.”
Duniya drew comfort from the news that she wasn’t the only one who had spent the night out of her usual bed. For all anyone knew, Hibo had spent it in Kaahin’s place, and was carrying her make-up kit in her handbag that she clutched so tightly during her visit.
“So this was premeditated murder, cold and calculated?” said Duniya.
Not a muscle of Hibo’s moved. “Yes,” she said.
“Where did you throw the gun? Or was this what you and Kaahin were arguing about in whispers by the entrance?” Duniya asked.
“I didn’t use a gun.”
“If you didn’t a knife or a gun, what did you use — poison?”
Hibo nodded, and for the first time since they started talking about all this, she winced. But she suppressed her tears. Her husband, Gallayr, had done something for which he had to be punished, and she did just that. There was no need to shed a tear.
“Don’t you want me to tell you why?” asked Hibo.
“He’s given you gonorrhoea and you killed him by poisoning his food,” Duniya said. Hibo had said that she would either kill or commit suicide if her husband gave her gonorrhoea; she had said so on the day an out-patient confessed her own husband had given her the disease. It was a bore to be as predictable as Hibo, Duniya decided.
Hibo then burst into a tiresome explosion of tears and emotions, but there was something shallow, something pretentious, about her weeping. Given a few seconds, Duniya was certain all this crying would peter out like a river ending in a desert.
Hibo was quiet now and asking Duniya, “What would you do if you were in my place?”
Duniya found it difficult to imagine standing in Hibo’s shoes, but she was a very bright woman and so she said, “If I were you, Hibo, I would go home, and give myself a single effective injection of 2.4 or 4.8 mega units of procaine penicillin.”