Nadifa Mohamed - Black Mamba Boy

Isir carried on weeping while the compound women danced around her, clapping their support and flushing out their own grief.

Isir became a small ally against the compound women; she slept in the same room as Jinnow and Jama and joined in on their late-night conversations.

“I used to sleep right there next to Ambaro, where you are now, Jama, plaiting our hair, tickling each other.”

“That’s right, that’s right,” encouraged Jinnow.

“Jinnow would throw a slipper at us to quieten our laughter.”

“They had no sense of time.”

“Do you remember, aunty, how she would read our palms? Telling us all kinds of things, how many men we would marry, how many children we’d have. She scared the other girls with that talk.”

Jama sat up on his elbows and listened attentively to the women.

“It’s because she had the inner eye and she didn’t soften or hide what she saw. I saw it in her from an early age, I watched her read the future in shells when she was not yet five, grown men would come and ask her to tell them their fate. Did she tell you all this, Jama?” Jinnow asked.

Jama scanned his memory. “She only told me that I had been born with the protection of all the saints and that a black mamba had blessed me while I was in her stomach.”

“That is all true, you had a very auspicious birth, every kaahin and astrologer envied your signs, even Venus appeared the night you were born.”

Jama rested his head on his arm and sighed loudly. If only he could meet his father, he would believe all of their fanciful words.

Jama went to the abattoir every morning, and his eagerness and industriousness meant he was always picked out, creating enemies for him among the other hungry children, but only a few resentful slaps or gobs of spit landed on him. Jama saw the sweaty, smelly work as a kind of test that, if passed, would entitle him to see his father, a trial of his worth as a son and as a man. He wrapped all of his abattoir money in a cloth and hid it inside a tin can in Jinnow’s room. The bundle of coins grew and grew in its hiding place, and he could feel the reunion with his father approaching, whether his father came to him or he went to his father, Jama knew it was fated to be. He read it in the clouds, in the entrails of the carcasses he delivered, in the grains of coffee at the bottom of his cup.

After work, he often wandered around town, sometimes as far as the Yibro village that nestled against the thorny desert on the outskirts of Hargeisa. He walked through the pariah neighborhood looking for signs of the magic that Yibros were said to possess, he wanted some of their powerful poison to use against Ayan, to watch her hair and nails drop off. Jama peered into small dark huts, an outcast among outcasts, hot dark eyes following his progress. But there was no magic to be seen, the Yibros had yet to find spells that would turn dust into bread, potions to make their dying children live, or curses that would keep their persecutors at bay. An Aji boy in their midst could easily bring trouble. If a hair on his head was hurt, a pack of howling wolves would descend on the village, ripping and tearing at everyone and everything, so they watched him and hoped that his curiosity would quickly be satisfied. The village had only recently stopped mourning for a young man killed by Ajis, his body cut up and the flesh put in a basket outside his family’s hut. His mother collapsed when she brought in the basket and realized where the plentiful meat had come from. His head was at the bottom, broken and gray. No blood money could be demanded by them because they were not strong enough to threaten vengeance, his father went to work the next day as he did every day, smiling to hide his fury, bowing down to men who had dismembered his child. Jama saw that the village was full of women; Yibro men were usually laboring elsewhere, hammering metal or working leather or in the town cleaning out latrines. The children sat outside, picking their noses, their stomachs stretched to bursting point, destitution the way of life. The clan handouts that kept other Somalis afloat were absent here, as the Yibros were so few and so poor. Ancient superstitions meant that Aji Somalis ostracized Yibros and Midgaans and other undesirables without any thought; Yibros were just Jews, eaters of forbidden foods, sorcerers. Jama was only dimly aware that these people received a payment from families like his whenever a male child was born and that a curse or spell from a Yibir was more powerful and destructive than from anyone else. Jama could see why they were feared, their clothes were even more raggedy than his, their shacks open to the cruelties of the August heat and the October freeze, their intimacy with misery deeper than that of anyone else.

On a stagnant day, Jama returned home from work to find Ayan in Jinnow’s room, standing on tiptoe, her eyes ringed with stolen kohl, her raccoon eyes widening as she saw him staring at her while she snooped through Jinnow’s things. The beautiful silver kohl bottle rolling on the floor separately from its ornate lid.

“Thief! Thief!” shouted Jama, filled with horror that she might have found the hidden money. “What are you doing? You thief!” he said as he lunged at her.

Surprise had frozen a ridiculous expression on Ayan’s face, her eyebrows arching like the spines of frightened cats and her gap-toothed mouth hanging open. Jama pulled her arms behind her back, lifting her thin, dusty feet off the ground.

“Let me go!” she cried.

“What do you want in here? What are you looking for? Has someone sent you?”

“No, no, please, Jama, I was just looking, wallaahi, let me go!” she begged. Jama in confusion held on to her. Ayan was strong and supple for a girl but she was no match for a feral street boy. He was too embarrassed to check her body for the money, so seeing the imposing dark wood wardrobe with the key in the lock, he opened the door and shoved Ayan in. He quickly turned the key and stood back, shaking, with sweat beads trickling down his forehead. He stared at the wardrobe door as Ayan kicked and shouted to be let out.

“Jama! Jama! Jama! Let me out ! I can’t breathe!” said her muffled voice.

Jama gathered himself, and with a jabbing finger said, “You are staying in there, you dirty thief, until Jinnow comes back and checks you.”

Ayan screamed long and loud, her erratic breathing and convulsive tears clearly audible in the room. Jama wiped the sweat off his brow and walked out of the room as Ayan continued to wail and weep. “It’s dark! It’s too hot. I’m going to die. Murderer! Murderer! Jama the Bastard Murderer!”

Jama waited and waited outside Jinnow’s room while inside the cupboard Ayan gulped down the warm old air and emitted a low, strange whine. Her jail was lined with nuptial gowns and undergarments given as part of ancient dowries, the relics of dead loves and youthful dreams of glamour and romance. The velvety blackness around her shifted and made room for its young visitor. She felt like she was at the bottom of a deep, deep well, too deep in the earth to ever be found, and panic washed over her in rapid waves. The noon prayer came and went as did the afternoon prayer, and it was not until it was nearly time for the sunset prayer that Jama could hear Jinnow’s voice rising up from a commotion in the courtyard. Jinnow walked down the hallway followed by a loud troupe of compound women, with a beleaguered look on her wrinkled face.

“Have you seen Ayan? Her mother can’t find her,” Jinnow asked.

Jama looked up, and it was only then that it occurred to him how long he had spent on that doorstep and how long Ayan had spent in her makeshift prison. Jama got up creakily on weak legs. With slippery fingers before a roomful of expectant females, Jama turned the key on the wardrobe lock. Immediately a stink of urine swelled out of the hot, stuffy cell. There lay Ayan, barely conscious, her head flung back, her too-red tongue lolling. A collective gasp surged from the audience and Jinnow shoved Jama violently out of the way to get to Ayan, she shook Ayan and kissed her face until the girl’s eyes snapped open and a long scream coiled out from her. Ayan’s mother grabbed her child and hugged her suffocatingly against her bosom. “May God break your back, you devil,” she said over Ayan’s shoulder, her eyes ringed with antimony shooting daggers of hate deep into him.