He turned around and shouted across the square. Another boy came running up, shaking yellow packets of dehydrated soup: Just try one; see how you’ll like it … Zindi sat unmoved, staring ahead of her. One of the boys leant over and tweaked her plastic bag open. Zindi, suddenly alert, snatched her bag away. She rose with a howl and sent the boy staggering with a blow of her open hand: Get away from me, you son of a bitch, ibn kelb.
She walked across the square flailing her bag and rolling her eyes: Yalla, yalla, out of my way, sons of bitches, can’t sit a minute anywhere any longer, crowd around your feet like shit on a beach.
Crossing the road, she stood on the pavement, panting and wiping her forehead. Then something in one of the cavernous shops that ringed the square caught her eye and she went inside. She pointed it out to the shopkeeper, nestling between piles of aluminium pots and plastic buckets. It was a baby’s comforter. Holding it like a talisman before her, she went across the square to her bus-stop, deaf to the suppressed excitement that was now rippling through the whole square.
She had a long way to walk after she got off her bus. By the time she was struggling up the side of a long, high embankment, every layer of her black dress was soaked in sweat. Once she had scrambled up to the road which ran along the embankment she stopped to catch her breath, shielding her face from the sun with her bag. On the far side, a finger of land, invisible from the other side of the embankment, jutted out into the sea, bordered on one flank by a narrow inlet. Far away, at the end of the inlet, was the old harbour, crowded with sambuqs and motor-boats. That narrow spit was known as the Ras al-Maqtu‘, the Severed Head, a sandbar garotted by the road on the embankment.
The Ras shimmered and blurred in the heat of the afternoon as Zindi looked confusedly about — at a group of neat whitewashed houses in a corner by the sea, at the jostling, crowded walls of wooden planks and broken crates which covered the rest of the spit, all but a narrow strip of beach. She looked over the roofs of corrugated iron and halved oil-drums, with their crazily angled wooden platforms and tracery of pumpkin vines, and at last, led by a strip where the dense patchwork was cut through by charred, blackened frames of shacks, her eyes found her own house, solid and thick-walled, its brick-and-cement permanence setting it apart from the others, a reef in a shifting tide.
She stopped when she reached the house, for she sensed something amiss. She looked down the narrow lane, at the blackened stubs of wooden planks and collapsed, soot-covered sheets of corrugated iron which lay all around the house. Then she pushed against the heavy wooden door of her house and almost fell in, for, to her surprise, the door was open. The door opened into a short, dark corridor, which ended in an open courtyard. There was a room on either side of the corridor and more around the courtyard.
Zindi stood in the corridor and shouted: Karthamma … Abu Fahl … The only sound that answered her was the cooing of pigeons in the courtyard. Frowning, she went into the room to her right and hung her plastic bag on a nail in the wall. The room’s complement of mats stood rolled in a corner as she had left them. A kerosene-stove lay beside them. She picked it up, held it to her ear and shook it. She knew by the sound that it had not been used since she left. She looked into a biscuit-tin and saw that none of the tea inside it had been used, either.
She hurried out into the courtyard and shouted again: Professor … Kulfi … Alu … Once again there was no answer. Turning, she threw open the door of the room opposite her own. It was the door to the room in which the men of the house lived. Mattresses were spread neatly on the floor. Trousers, lungis and jallabeyyas hung from pegs on the wall and wet clothes dripped on a line which ran from one barred window to another. The windows were shut as they always were during the day: that was one of Zindi’s rules.
Suddenly uneasy, she dug into her petticoats, pulled out a bunch of keys and hurriedly opened a steel cupboard which stood in one corner of the room. The cupboard was tidy, as it always was; Rakesh’s pile of shirts and printed T-shirts lay stacked in a neat pile, beside Professor Samuel’s bulging wallet; cassette recorders and transistors stood in a row on the bottom shelf, undisturbed. Sighing with relief, Zindi locked the cupboard.
Back in her own room Zindi unlocked her wooden provisions chest and went through it carefully. The sacks of wheat, rice and sugar and the packets of tea lay untouched. Breathing hard, she went down the corridor, into the courtyard, shading her eyes from the sudden brightness of the sun.
A storm of cackles greeted her. Several plump chickens flapped out of her way, and in a wired pen in a corner a long-necked gander hissed and spread its wings protectively across its flock of geese. The sides of the roof above were lined with grey pigeons looking down into the courtyard, their heads cocked. Zindi saw that the birds had not been fed and she fetched corn and wheat and half a cabbage for two rabbits in a wire-covered wooden crate.
Then she crossed the courtyard and unlocked the door to the women’s room. The room was divided into cubicles by lengths of cloth nailed into the walls and ceiling. She went around the room, pulling the makeshift curtains apart. The room was undisturbed and empty. Experimentally, she tried the heavy brass lock on the door of the next room. It was firmly locked, and that was the one lock in the house to which she had no key.
Zindi went back to her room, the heavy folds of her face knotted into a scowl, her jowls dripping sweat. She spread a mat on the floor and sat down to wait.
It was sundown when she heard the knocks she had been waiting for. She switched on the naked bulb in the corridor and stood there for a moment, her hands on her hips, shaking with anger. The rapping grew louder, and she flung the door open. Karthamma, Professor Samuel and Rakesh stood outside. Rakesh held Boss, the baby, cradled in his arms. Behind them, dimly outlined in the darkness was a man in a jallabeyya, stocky, dark and powerfully built, the texture of his face that of supple leather. He had only one eye; the other was an even grey, glowing dully beneath a half-closed lid.
Zindi’s eyes fastened on him. When the first wave of her roar broke it sent them all staggering backwards into the shadows: So it’s you, Abu Fahl, you bastard, you son of a bitch. It’s you who’s been behind everything all along? So this is your plan, is it? Lure the others out of the house like cattle, in the middle of the day, and leave it open for half the world to come in and take what it likes? You know what we’ve been through and now you plan this? This is the way you’re setting about it? Wallahi, wallahi, you don’t have to wait any longer. As God is my witness, you can have all your things and wander off for ever to eat out of a ditch. That’s where you were born, that’s where you’ll end. Wait.
Zindi ran into her room. An instant later a tin case flew out of the door and crashed on the wall opposite with such force that its hinges fell apart, spilling clothes, money, cassettes. Then she heaved one of the two mattresses in her room to the door and threw it out. There, she shouted, that comes to an end now, and I’m happy at last.
Abu Fahl pushed Professor Samuel aside, jumped over the mattress and leapt at Zindi. Wrenching her arms behind her, he pushed her down on to the mattress. He knelt beside her and put a hand, as large and horny as a goat’s head, on her heaving shoulder. Zindi, he said softly. Zindi, calm yourself. Calm yourself. Haven’t you heard?
Zindi rolled her eyes at Karthamma and Rakesh. I’ve heard enough, she growled deep in her throat. I’ll give you something to hear about.
Abu Fahl looked up at the others and rubbed his wrist on his blind eye. She doesn’t know, he said. God the Living, she doesn’t know.