"More tribes, more tribes. I wake up, go to the window, and there – MORE TRIBES. Every time I look – ANOTHER TRIBE. Everybody saying, ‘Oh, no visas anymore, they are getting very strict, it so hard,’ and in the meantime everybody who apply, EVERYBODY is getting a visa. Why they do this to me? That American Embassy in Dar – WHY??!! Nobody would give that Dooli a visa. Nobody. One look and you would say OK, something wrong here – but they give it to him!"
Saeed cooked cow peas and kingfish from the Price Chopper to cheer himself up, and plantains in sugar and coconut milk. This goo mixture smelling of hope so ripe he slathered on French bread and offered to the others.
The sweetest fruit in all of Stone Town grew in the graveyard, and the finest bananas grew from the grandfather’s grave of that same wayward Dooli whom the American Embassy in Dar es Salaam had so severely misjudged as to give him a visa – so Saeed was telling them when he glanced out of the window -
And in a second he was under the counter.
"Oh myeeee God!" Whispering. "Tribes, man, it’s the tribes. Please God. Tell them I don’t work here. How they get this address! My mother! I told her, ‘No more!’ Please! Omar, Go! Go! Go tell them to leave."
Outside the bakery stood a group of men, looking weary as if they’d been traveling several lifetimes, scratching their heads and staring at the Queen of Tarts.
"Why do you help?" asked Omar. "I stopped helping and now they all know I won’t help and nobody comes to me."
"This is not the time to give a lecture."
Omar went out. "Who? Saaeed? No, no. What name? Soyad? No, no one of that name. Just me, Kavafya, and Biju."
"But he work here. His mother tell us."
"No. No. You all get moving. Nobody here who you want to see and if you make trouble WE get into trouble so now I ask you nicely, GO."
"Very good," said Saeed, "thank you. They have gone?"
"No."
"What are they doing?"
"They are still standing and looking," said Biju feeling brave and excited by someone else’s misfortune. He was almost hopping.
The men were shaking their heads unwilling to believe what they’d heard.
Biju went out and came back in. "They say they will try your home address now." He felt a measure of pride in delivering this vital news. Realized he missed playing this sort of role that was common in India. One’s involvement in other peoples’ lives gave one numerous small opportunities for importance.
"They will come back. I know them. They will try many more times, or one will stay and the others will go. Close the door, close the window…"
"We can’t close the shop. Too hot, can’t close the window."
"Close it!"
"No. What if Mr. Bocher visit us?" He was the owner who dropped by at odd moments hoping to surprise them doing something against the rules.
"No sweati, bossi," Saeed would tell him. "We do everything you tell us just like you tell us…"
But now…
"It’s my life we’re talking about, man, not little hot here and little hot there, boss or no boss…"
They closed the window and the door, and from the floor he telephoned his apartment. "Hey Ahmed, don’t answer the phone, man, that Dooli and all them boys have come from the airport! Lock up, stay down, don’t stand, and don’t go near the window."
"Hah! Why they give them a visa? How they buy the ticket!" They could hear the voice at the other end. Then it vanished into Swahili in a potent dungform, a rich, steaming animal evacuation.
The phone rang in the bakery.
"Don’t answer," he said to Biju who was reaching for it.
When the answering machine came on, it went off.
"The tribes! They always scared of the answering machine!"
It rang again and then again. Tring tring tring tring. Answering machine. Phone down.
Again: tring tring.
"Saeed, you have to talk to them." Biju’s heart was suddenly pulsing with the anguish of the ringing. It could be the boss, it could be India on the line, his father his father -
Dead? Dying? Diseased?
Kavafya picked it up and a voice projected into the room raw and insistent with panic. "Emergency! Emergency! We are coming from airport. Emergency! Emergency! Saaeed S-aa-eed?"
He put it down and unplugged it.
Saeed: "Those boys, let them in, they will never leave. They are desperate. Desperate. Once you let them in, once you hear their story, you can’t say no, you know their aunty, you know their cousin, you have to help the whole family, and once they begin, they will take everything. You can’t say this is my food, like Americans, and only I will eat it. Ask Thea" – she was the latest pooky pooky interest in the bakery – "where she live with three friends, everyone go shopping separately, separately they cook their dinner, together they eat their separate food. The fridge they divide up, and into their own place – their own place! – they put what is left in a separate box. One of the roommates, she put her name on the box so it say who it belong to!" His finger went up in uncharacteristic sternness. "In Zanzibar what one person have he have to share with everyone, that is good, that is the right way -
"But then everyone have nothing, man! That is why I leave Zanzibar."
Silence.
Biju’s sympathy for Saeed leaked into sympathy for himself, then Saeed’s shame into his own shame that he would never help all those people praying for his help, waiting daily, hourly, for his response. He, too, had arrived at the airport with a few dollar bills bought on the Kath-mandu black market in his pocket and an address for his father’s friend, Nandu, who lived with twenty-two taxi drivers in Queens. Nandu had also not answered the phone and had tried to hide when Biju arrived on his doorstep, and then when he thought Biju had left, had opened the door and to his distress found Biju still standing there two hours later.
"No jobs here anymore," he said. "If I were a young man I would go back to India, more opportunities there now, too late for me to make a change, but you should listen to what I’m saying. Everyone says you have to stay, this is where you’ll make a good life, but much better for you to go back."
Nandu met someone at his work who told him of the basement in Harlem and ever since he had deposited Biju there, Biju had never seen him again.
He had been abandoned among foreigners: Jacinto the superintendent, the homeless man, a stiff bow-legged coke runner, who walked as if his balls were too big for normal walking, with his stiff yellow bow-legged dog, who also walked as if his balls were too big for normal walking. In the summer, families moved out of cramped quarters and sat on the sidewalk with boom boxes; women of great weight and heft appeared in shorts with shaven legs, stippled with tiny black dots, and groups of deflated men sat at cards on boards balanced atop garbage cans, swigged their beer from bottles held in brown paper bags. They nodded kindly at him, sometimes they even offered him a beer, but Biju did not know what to say to them, even his tiny brief "Hello" came out wrong: too softly, so they did not hear, or just as they had turned away.