“A pity that my biggest fan is in no position to hire me for an acting role,” Cambara would remark tongue in cheek to her mother and friends. Arda was so enthusiastic about her daughter’s potential that she would delight in speaking gloatingly and praising her to high heaven; she would describe her, preeminently, as an actor who would one day surprise the world, given the chance. When relatives or family friends pointed out that Cambara was getting on in years and hadn’t as yet made a breakthrough, married, and provided her with a grandchild, Arda, in her riposte, would speak of the primacy of her profession, which she would place above marriage or childbearing. She would add that Cambara would turn her mind to matrimonial matters only after she had secured an acting contract worth the wait. In the meantime, Cambara worked as a makeup artist for an outfit called The Studio and was very popular among theater folk and among Somalis, who sought her out so she would prepare the bride on the eve of her wedding.
In fairness, Cambara was more realistic than her mother made her out to be. At times, it embarrassed her to hear her mother’s over-the-top bragging, her mother who awoke nearly daily animated with the energy derived from the belief that Cambara would one day make it big, and that she would bring a smile to everyone’s lips and pride to her own eyes and heart. Arda dreamed of precipitating a profitable scheme that would lead to her daughter’s ultimate success. Ever since her parents’ relocation to Canada several years preceding the fighting in Mogadiscio, which wrenched power from the dictator’s iron grip, Cambara assumed a central role in their lives. She rang them often and called on them whenever she could. When her father took ill, it fell to Cambara to drive to his house and spend her weekends or holidays. And when the old man became bedridden and there was need for round-the-clock care and her mother relied on an elderly Filipino woman for this purpose, Cambara helped out the best she could. Her father’s death brought them much closer. How the two women enjoyed their long conversations, complimenting each other, the one a fan, the other, in her self-restraint, refusing to lap it all up like a famished kitten consuming the milk in a saucer. However, seldom did either allow her talk to veer toward the very personaclass="underline" marriage or babies. Discreet, Arda would reiterate that, in matters of the heart, she had faith that Cambara eventually would make the right choice.
One day, half a year after her father’s death, Arda invited her on the pretext that she might have discovered an elixir for her professional problems. Cambara went to Ottawa to humor her mother, assuming that her mother’s summons had something to do, most likely, with the strife raging in Mogadiscio and the rest of the land, no more than that. If anything, she supposed that a relative was in some trouble and needing a leg up, or maybe the Canadian government was setting up a commission to help its policy makers come to grips with the Somali crisis, and it was possible that through someone’s intercession, Cambara was being asked to join the assembled pundits. Whatever it was, and even though she would not elaborate on it at all, her mother had sounded chuffed. She doubted if the visit would have any bearing on her professional ambitions or would result in her mother’s discovery of a panacea, but since, in her experience, Arda’s records of intervention were invariably marked by success, Cambara said to herself, “What do I lose?” and drove to Ottawa to hear her mother out.
They got down to the business of talking after a hot bath and a delicious meal prepared and served with loving maternal care. All was good at the initial ground-clearing phase, in which Arda spent a long time on the preliminaries and Cambara listened with due patience and filial deference as her mother untangled the wool gathered from the mesh of her speculative fibers. However, when Cambara finally got the drift of her mother’s plan and paid more attention to the nuances being employed, Cambara found out that she could not fight the feeling of nausea gradually coming upon her in waves and eventually overwhelming her with a sense of despondent torpor. The short of it was that Arda was proposing a course of action that would prejudicially undermine Cambara’s sense of privacy and encroach upon it drastically.
Cambara was disturbed. Not only was the plan, as her mother conceived it, unworkable, from her own point of view, it broke with a long-held understanding between them, reached during the young woman’s teens, that at no time and under any circumstances would either of her parents ever make a decision that might affect her without first talking it over and clearing it with her. In her zealous attempt to remain her own person, Cambara stood guard over her own privacy, allowing no one to intrude upon it and permitting nobody, family or nonfamily, to step past its threshold unless she approved of it. What upset her no end was that she and her mother spoke and met often, especially after her father’s death, and she was appalled that the old woman could entertain such a preposterous idea without taking Cambara’s feelings into account, in this way entering sensitive territories beyond which she knew she was not to venture ever. Whatever had made Arda barge in without her time-honored thoughtfulness! Yet this was precisely what Arda had done. Cambara could see no sense in her mother’s behavior, which was so unlike her. To put it another way, what her mother was now proposing did not tally at all with what she had alluded to when she invited her a couple of days ago to come and talk about the panacea to her daughter’s professional success.
The languor that at the moment rippled through her whole body made her want to sit on the first available bench in the park where they were walking. From the expression on her face, you might have thought that someone had held a bottle full of ether to her nose — she was so breathless, and she was becoming drenched with cold sweat. It rankled Cambara that she, who always took exceptional pride in declaiming that she could read her mother’s mind as easily as a fortune-teller reads a desperate client’s particular needs, was being proven wrong. It was obvious one of them did not make the grade this time, and both would have to revise their views, which she was finding equally disturbing. And when, a little later, Arda seated herself at a small distance from her, Cambara’s chest produced something between a chuckle and a snivel.
Emboldened, Arda took this as a sign she could resume speaking. She said, “The long and short of it is that I would like my nephew Zaak to join us here in Canada, legally.”
Cambara was sufficiently vigilant to spot the catch, instantly feeling the sting in the tail of the key word “legally.”
As irony would have it, planeloads of Somalis were arriving illegally at major ports or airports everywhere in the world, including Toronto, nearly all of them declaring themselves as stateless, and no one was turning any one of them back, not from Canada, anyhow. But Arda did not want her nephew to board an aircraft from Nairobi, where he ended up after fleeing the fighting in Mogadiscio, like tens of thousands of other Somalis, as a refugee. Being Arda, she intended to spread a carpet of welcome for him all the way from Nairobi, which he would leave, if at all, on a flight bound for Toronto, not as a refugee but legally as a spouse. She felt protective toward him, solicitously making sure that he was not vulnerable to harassment at the hands of the Kenyan immigration authorities, who were given to extracting exorbitant corruption money from Somalis relocating to Europe or North America. She did not want him to be apprehended at a midway location between Africa and Canada and returned to Nairobi. Making an already terrible situation worse, Arda, plodding, repeated everything from the beginning for the third or fourth time, as though she, Cambara, were a bit thick: that she would fly out to Kenya on a work-related visit to that country, link up with Zaak, who was waiting for a sponsorship to a third country, and bring him along as her spouse.