What of her father? When did she first set eyes on him, where, and with whom? She hadn’t seen her father until he was brought to them. He had seemed devastated, very frail, his eyes bloodshot, as though he had been crying. He had bumps on his forehead, probably from being hit. What did Faahiye say when they met? He wept and wept, sniffing and unable to say much, and he looked helpless. But he was less weepy on the second visit. Raasta had the impression that he had been brought to them blindfolded, because hanging loose around his neck was a mouth mask like the kind Uncle Bile used when attending to very sick patients.
At some point when Shanta was out of the room, probably in the bathroom having a good weep, Jeebleh asked if Raasta could tell them more about the woman upstairs. Raasta was puzzled, she didn’t understand the question. So Jeebleh asked if she knew why her father had remained in the house. She assumed that he wasn’t allowed to join them, but she couldn’t say more.
When her mother came back, Raasta took her by the hand and, bidding everyone good night, led her as a parent might lead a child, saying, “Let’s go to bed. No more worries, all will be well. You’ll see!” It was Raasta who decided that she and her mother would sleep in Bile’s room.
Before saying good night, Seamus told Jeebleh to let him know anything that might be decided on the matter at hand, adding, “Let’s brain the lot of them for doing what they’ve done to our Raasta!”
JEEBLEH NOW TOLD BILE THE STORY OF HOW DAJAAL HAD TAKEN IT UPON himself to give Qasiir the task of tailing him since their visit to his mother’s grave, and how Kaahin had organized a battlewagon and crew. He wasn’t sure whether Kaahin had changed sides on a permanent basis, but he understood from Dajaal that Kaahin was available to help in getting rid of the riffraff who ran Caloosha and Af-Laawe’s cartel.
Not that Jeebleh and Bile agreed or disagreed on what to do about Caloosha and Af-Laawe, yet their conversation pointed to their incompatibility of purpose, neither able to articulate their differences, and both afraid of confronting the uglier aspects of themselves that this reflected. Jeebleh was wound up, living a minute at a time, as he had after the youth was killed in his hotel room. Bile admitted to not knowing how to right a wrong that had brought misery to their lives; killing X or Y wouldn’t help in a significant way, or solve the country’s problems.
When Jeebleh asked whether he had heard from the lab technician, Bile would say only that Jeebleh should have tests done when he got back to the United States. Pressed further, he became evasive, and got up, ready to bid a hasty good night. Then he said, “Leave it all to me. I know what to do now.”
Jeebleh wasn’t certain about Bile’s meaning: Was he alluding to the lab tests, or to Caloosha, Af-Laawe, and the cartel?
An hour or so later, while Jeebleh was still awake and trying to figure out what was what, or who would do what, Raasta came into the living room. At first, he thought she was sleepwalking, because she rubbed her eyes and mumbled something about wanting to tell him her story. He offered her hot chocolate, then made it for her. She sat in a corner, and after he had brought his double espresso over, she made as if to talk, but she did not. Soon after, Bile, also in sleepwalking stupor, joined them, and Raasta got up and took her hot chocolate with her out of the room without saying anything.
ALONE, BILE AND JEEBLEH TALKED IN LOW VOICES, NOT WANTING TO DISTURB the others in the apartment.
Bile was surprisingly garrulous — maybe because of the hour, or because he felt he owed Jeebleh an apology for Raasta’s unexplained departure. “Until the end of my days,” he said. “I will continue to remember the day Raasta was born best!”
“Why is that?”
“I knew right away that she was one of a kind,” Bile said, “and I sensed her uniqueness in myself whenever I touched her, and in the others whenever they looked at her. There is something special about the sweetness of memory as I revisit the scene. I think of ants forming a line and having to share a few grains of sugar.”
Bile explained that for some time after Raasta’s birth, he made a point of gathering as much information as he could from other countries, and learned of other “special” children, born to societies torn apart by internal conflicts. Described in newspapers, magazines, and radio commentaries as “miracles,” these children revealed themselves in measured intervals, and in different areas where internecine wars were the order of the day. They were born to unsuspecting parents in Senegal, Kashmir, Tanzania, Somalia, Bosnia, Colombia, Peru, Palestine, and in the mountainous Kwanziris of Uganda, near that country’s border with Rwanda and Congo.
Bile looked like a proud parent praising his offspring. Jeebleh listened attentively as Bile described Raasta’s uniqueness and pointed out that, unlike the others, his niece had “secular” beginnings, and nothing to do with the religious fervor.
Jeebleh asked his friend to name another “miracle” child.
Bile narrowed his eyes to the size of ants and said, “I can name one such child, sure. A Tanzanian boy, Sherifu, said to have come out of his mother’s womb chanting, ‘There is no other god but Allah.’”
“Kind of a new messiah?”
“He’s been described by some Islamic scholars as an angel, and been welcomed with the pomp and ceremony given to a dignitary in a number of African countries, most notably in Senegal, where crowds have gathered to hear him chant the Koran. Three African heads of state have received him, including Gadhafi in Libya, Kabila in Congo, Idriss Deby in Chad. He’s also met the American Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan. He’s carried around in a gold-leafed throne by crowds in a frenzy, chanting the names of Allah, and he recites the Koran. Women swoon and collapse, and men fight one another to get nearer to him.”
“Now, why do we need a Sherifu or a Raasta?”
“Because people are lost,” Bile said, “and they hope to find their way back to Allah or to peace of mind through an intermediary. In fact, Sherifu has been described as a divine instrument, because he could recite the Koran at the tender age of three. Raasta is seen as a symbol of peace because of what she represents for people down here. Moreover, the fact that Sherifu is proficient in a number of languages, even though he has never been to school — he speaks Arabic, French, and a handful of African languages spoken in countries where he has never been — is seen as miraculous.”
“What about Raasta?”
“Like Sherifu,” said Bile, “Raasta is exceptionally versatile and picks up languages very fast. What’s more, she gives shapes to the links between words and their meanings, and then fits them into chains of her own choosing.”
“Tell me more,” Jeebleh said.
“I recall the day Seamus asked her how she was doing, and she replied that she felt as frightened as a leaf on a tree, drawing itself in, afraid that someone passing by might cut it off. Another day, after one of her parents’ quarrels, she compared herself to a tooth rotting at the root, with no gum to hold it.”
Bile told of another occasion, when Raasta, not yet three, explained why she had chosen him as her surrogate parent. She did so, she said, because “Uncle and I are bound together with the clear thread of a spider’s web, visible only with the rays of sunlight in the background.”