“And what might that have been?”
Seamus’s eyes dodged, and his conversation followed. “Mogadiscio seemed to be the ideal place for me.”
“Hiding out with warlords and mercenaries?” Jeebleh countered jokingly.
“And Bile too! But yes, you’re right.
“I was on the run most of the time anyhow,” Seamus said, after a silence, “spending a week on a curry-and-chow-mein tour, Delhi for a weekend, Hong Kong for a day. This wasn’t work, but run, run, and run, a lifestyle with no room for reflection, a life meaninglessly held together by a major absence: love! I’m not speaking of loving a woman or a man, don’t misunderstand me, but of a good, plain, old-fashioned, sixties-style personal commitment to love.”
“And what have you found coming here? Love?”
“Will you forgive a cliché?”
“Go ahead.”
“I’ve run into my self, coming here.”
“Is this good or bad?”
“There’s a purpose to my life now: Raasta!”
Then he was back to when he decided to come to Mogadiscio: how he bought the New York Times Sunday edition at midnight, in San Francisco; how he read about a UN-funded job in Somalia; how he applied; how he was short-listed; and how he was selected. He packed lightly, convinced that he would hate it. But he didn’t. He met Bile—“It was more like running into my self”—and Raasta; he stayed. “Perhaps there’s some truth in the wisdom that there is no happiness sweeter than the happiness built on someone else’s sorrow. And this city has enough sorrow, with much deeper foundations.”
“That’s how Mogadiscio has struck you?”
Seamus replied, “Mogadiscio, because of Raasta, is what a straw dripping with water is to a man dying of thirst. I’m aware of the fact that it’s a death trap, and because of this my heart goes out to those who’re caught up in the fighting, and those who cannot help losing themselves in its politics. I am here to stay, that’s what matters.”
“And the cobwebs?”
“Vamoose!”
Jeebleh wished he could say that about himself. But then, he hadn’t come to sweep clean the corners of his life that had grown dustier from neglect. And while eluding death, he would lay his mother’s troubled soul to rest. He knew this was a tall order, but worth trying.
“Tell me about yourself,” Seamus said. “Why are you in Mogadiscio?”
“I’ve come to ennoble my mother’s memory.”
Seamus knew that there were occasions when it was best not to say anything, not to even bother with condolences, because there are no words with which to express one’s sentiments satisfactorily. He had heard a great deal about the mothers of Jeebleh and Bile, but it was difficult for him to imagine them alive, a lot easier to think of them as dead. He had a vague memory of some controversy to do with Jeebleh’s letters, but Seamus wasn’t sure if Caloosha had been involved, and in what capacity. He seemed to remember it was Shanta who had spilled the beans on this aspect of the controversy.
“How do you plan to achieve that?” Seamus asked.
“I’m working on it.”
“Is there anything I can do to help?”
“Thank you.”
Seamus now had a disheveled expression as he asked, “Have you seen Caloosha, since coming?”
“I’ve seen him. Have you?”
“I haven’t had the desire to meet him ever,” Seamus said. “The things I’ve heard about him haven’t encouraged me to.”
“I met him briefly, that’s all.”
“And Shanta?”
“Not yet, but I plan to.”
Jeebleh looked at his right hand, palm up, and stared at where the heart line veered toward his middle finger. He asked, “Have you met Af-Laawe?”
After some reflection, Seamus said, “Af-Laawe, the Marabou, is sure to discover the whereabouts of the dead, in whatever state they’re in. I would seek him out if I hadn’t any idea in which of the many cemeteries someone was buried. The man’s death instinct contrasts well with Bile’s life instinct.”
“What do you think about him?”
“He gives me the shudders.”
As the conversation paused again, Jeebleh remembered their youthful, energetic days, when to pass the time they took turns completing each other’s unfinished sentences. When they engaged each other in that kind of banter, fellow students who joined them found it difficult to keep up. Often, even the languages changed — from Italian to English, then perhaps to Arabic. Toward the end of their stay in Padua, Seamus had picked up the basics of Somali.
Jeebleh would have to run a fever of nerves before reintroducing the seesawing games of their younger days in Italy. Most likely, it wouldn’t work here, in troubled Somalia. He asked, “Did you come to Mogadiscio before or after the Marines landed?”
“I arrived in Mogadiscio in 1992,” Seamus said. “I was head of an advance team charged with assessing the needs of the United Nations offices. I was to set up the translation units. The UN intervention was estimated to cost more than one hundred million U.S. dollars for that year alone. We put up a guesthouse, which doubled as our office. Because we hadn’t the authority to hire any local staff, New York imported Somalis with American passports. And you had old British colonial officers running the show: former BBC staffers, chummy with the former dictator, who served as consultants to the UN. I remember an Englishman who kept yattering at me about clan warfare, and how the combined efforts of the U.S. and the UN would sort out the mess. Sod it, it was utter rubbish. Left to me. I would’ve committed the lot to a nuttery, the self-serving imbeciles.”
“How did you and Bile meet?”
“I shared a table at the guesthouse with an Italian-American woman who was on an advance mission to open the UNICEF office,” Seamus said. “She mentioned his name in passing. I looked him up. It wasn’t difficult to find him.”
“Was he living alone then?”
“He was spending a lot of time at Shanta’s, with Raasta, even though he was living in shoddy settings. He had the bare minimum when I first visited him. We talked, and he shared some of his visions with me, visions that took a different form every time we met.” As he spoke, Seamus bit at his fingernails, to the flesh, at times making it difficult for Jeebleh to understand what he was saying.
“Did you recognize each other when you met?”
“He didn’t recognize me,” Seamus said.
“Because of the beard?”
“I hadn’t grown one then.” He looked into Jeebleh’s eyes, as if focusing on some distant horizon, and then sipped his coffee.
“You didn’t expect him to recognize you?”
“For one thing, my name would’ve been the furthest thing from his mind,” Seamus said. “Also, the civil war had had a disorienting effect on him — he was concentrating on minimal survival. But he recognized my voice the moment I spoke a full sentence.
“I went to visit him at The Refuge. He was quieting a toddler who was having a convulsive crying fit. The girl fell silent on seeing me come closer, and from the way she stared at me, you might have thought she knew me from somewhere else. She rose to her full height and wobbled away, past me, up to the new playhouse, where Raasta was playing with blocks.”
“And then?”
“A thousand memories were condensed into a giant singular memory, which dwarfed all others, and I recited a verse from Dante’s Inferno, in which enslaved Somalia was a home of grief, a ship with no master that was floundering in a windstorm.”
“Then he recognized you?”
“And I stayed to help at The Refuge.”
“Just like that?”
“Just like that!”