Nadifa Mohamed - Black Mamba Boy

Life carried on bearably like this until, after a long, exhausting day of collecting gum for her perfumes, Ambaro unstrapped her daughter from her back and found her limp and lifeless in the cloth sling. Ambaro screamed for Guure and he took the child from her arms and ran to Jinnow, who tried to rouse the baby with drops of ZamZam water and prayers and slaps.

Ambaro’s soul emptied after her baby’s death, she wept in sunshine and moonlight, she refused to get up, to feed herself or Jama. She blamed Guure for making her carry a young baby while she bartered from settlement to settlement in the heat and dust. Ambaro had feared for Jama, as a baby she had constantly put her ear against his heart to check it was still beating, but he had thrived with her. Now she felt that she had failed Kahawaris, had been a bad mother to the beautiful child, had become arrogant and careless. Guure struggled hopelessly to look after them. He fed and bathed Jama but he could not trade and barter like Ambaro, so they often went hungry or begged. He did not know the value of anything: Was a perfume vial worth two blankets or just one? How much grain should he ask for if he gave a woman a basket full of tamarind? The wily women cheated him and sent him away with curses. Guure’s father had died before he was born, so he had no idea what a father did or didn’t do, he just floundered along guiltily, frightened that Jama would also die. Finally, when a drought devastated the clan’s camels, sheep, and goats, people began to disappear: some to find work in Hargeisa, some to live with relatives in Aden. Families dissolved as people sought survival down every dirt track.

Guure cupped Ambaro’s face in his hands and said, “Look, either I go and make a living for us or you do. What will it be?” Ambaro took his hands away and kept silent.

That very same day, Guure set off on a mapless, penniless journey to Sudan. That was the last they saw of him, though they sometimes heard tales of his wanderings: clansmen told Ambaro that he was in Djibouti singing, in Eritrea fighting, in Sudan driving. She did not tell Jama these stories, not wanting to raise his hopes with mere rumors; only news of deaths and births could be trusted along these slippery streams of walking men. Ambaro waited and waited for Guure, not knowing if he had died, gone mad, met someone else. Her family demanded that she divorce him, the wadaads told her that she had been abandoned and was free, but still she waited. She went to Aden and its factories, hoping to earn enough to track him down. She cursed her admirers and sent them away in the hope that one day Guure would appear over the horizon with his lute strapped to his back.

Returning to the Islaweynes’ house was too bitter a fruit for Jama to stomach; the bloated, pompous pig of a woman treated Jama and his mother like flies hovering around her heaped dinner plate. He had grown tired of making his small body even smaller so that false queen could feel like the air in the room was her sole preserve. Even his mother did nothing but give him a headache with her cursing, shouting, and smacking, and he stayed away longer than he intended because he was afraid of the beating he would eventually receive. Living on the streets intermittently from the age of six had furnished him with a wolfish instinct for self-preservation; he could sense danger through the small hairs on his lower back and taste it in the thick, dusty air. He thought from the primitive, knotted tangle of nerves at the base of his spine — like Adam, his needs were primal, to find food, find shelter, and avoid predators. Sleeping on roofs and streets had changed his sleep from the contented slumber of an infant, safe within his mother-sentried realm, to a jerky, half-awake unconsciousness, aware of mysterious voices and startling footsteps. Weeks came and went but Jama rarely knew where he would be eating or sleeping on any given night, there was no order to his life. Jama could easily imagine growing old and weak on these cruel streets, eventually being found one day, like other market boys he had seen, cold and stiff on the curb, a donkey cart carrying him away to an unmarked pauper’s grave outside town before stray dogs made a meal of him.

His favorite place to sleep was an earth-smelling nook on the roof of a teetering apartment block. It was formed by a mud wall that curled over to make a three-sided tomb, and in it Jama felt as safe as the dead, in this world but not of it, floating high in the sky. At dawn he would wake up and watch the little insects as they carried on with their busy lives, scurrying across the wall with so much self-importance, crawling over his fingers and face as if he were just a boulder in their way. He felt as small in the world as them but more vulnerable, more alone than the ants with their armies or the cockroaches with their tough shells and hidden wings.

This night he would return to the new apartment block he had been sleeping in with Shidane and Abdi for a few weeks. Letting himself quietly into the building, he found the kind old caretaker who allowed them the use of the roof, and wished the sleepy-eyed Haji goodnight. Jama went up to the roof, feeling a hollowness in his chest from wanting to be with a mother whose company he found too difficult to bear. On reaching the roof, he saw his inner emptiness matched by complete silence. Abdi and Shidane were not there, perhaps were sleeping somewhere else. The loneliness Jama felt carved even deeper into his soul; he needed Abdi’s small warm body to huddle up with tonight, his wet nose tucked in Jama’s neck. Jama stepped onto the ledge and looked up at the stars and the indifferent moon.

He hung there, enjoying the vast drop inches away from his feet, and at the top of his lungs called out, “Guure Mohamed Naaleyeh, where are you? Come find your son!”

His voice echoed against the buildings and drifted out to sea.

Shidane led his gang through the streets of Ma’alla, the Arab section, filling in his uncle and Jama on the local goings-on, passing the information he had gleaned from his errand work. Men and women moved behind curtains like jerky Indian puppets, their lives framed by windows and backlit by lamps as the boys watched them from the twilight street.

“The woman in that house is really a eunuch, I have seen him take off his sharshuf and underneath he has a gigantic club sticking out, hair all over his arms and feet, oof! He looked like a wrestler, wallaahi, I swear.”

Jama looked incredulously at Shidane and pushed him away. Extravagantly red roses the size of Jama’s face flopped over the exterior walls of the houses, filling the air with their molasses-sweet scent. Jama picked one off its stem, stroking the petals that felt like down on a butterfly’s wing, then waved it in a circle in the dusk breeze, trailing a ballet of insects that urgently followed the arcing fragrance.

“And that man, see him up there? In the turban? He is always in and out of jail, all of his teeth are gold, he’s a diamond smuggler, he can take out his teeth and hide diamonds inside, I’ve seen him do it at night through the window.”

Abdi with a rapt expression exclaimed, “Inshallah, I will be a diamond smuggler when I’m older, that’s even better than being a pearl smuggler. I would buy sparkling black pointy shoes like rich men wear and buy my hooyo a house and more gold than she could ever wear.” Silently the three boys looked at their naked feet shod only in sand and dirt.

“Do you know what I would buy?” asked Jama.

“A car?” replied Shidane.

“No, I would buy an airplane, so I could fly through the clouds and come down to earth whenever I wanted to see a new place, Mecca, China, I would travel even farther, to Damascus and Ardiwaliya, and just come and go as I wanted.”

“Allah! They are the work of the Shayddaan! You wouldn’t get me in one of those things,” Shidane harrumphed. “My mother says they’re haram, it’s only angels, insects, and birds that God intended to fly, it’s no surprise that they burst into flames. Then when you die your body is turned into ash so you can’t even have a proper burial and you go straight to hell. Serves the Ferengis right, though.”