Gravel Heart(53)

The flight was exhilarating, and as the plane flew over Zanzibar in the dawn I searched the landscape for familiar signs in the brief moments before landing. I recognised the air with my first breath, even though it was not something I had thought about and would not have had the words to describe. I knew this smell, and would have known it if I had been shaken awake in the middle of the night and asked to name it. Someone behind me on the steps of the plane nudged into me. The flight was packed with British tourists. They must have been eager to get to their holiday pleasures while I wished to linger and relish my return.

I saw Munira across the barrier as I was going through Customs. She was standing on the pavement outside the Arrivals gate, her left hand on the metal railings that fenced off the passengers from the outside. I recognised her from the photograph she had attached in her last email, but I would have known her anyway. She looked so like Mama, but perhaps taller. I waved to her and she waved back, and even from that distance I saw that her smile was calm and patient, as if she was in no rush for what was to come, as if she was just meeting her brother who had been away for a few days, really just like Mama. We embraced and kissed, and then she stood back and examined me with a confident gaze. Still handsome, she said, and then led me to the car. She drove herself. It would have been unusual for a woman to drive in the time before I left, but I expected things like that to have changed. She talked as if she had known me all her life when in reality she was three years old the last time I saw her.

‘By the way,’ she said in between our excited exchanges and my distracted attempts to take in familiar sights and listen to her at the same time. I was familiar with By the way, spoken in a casual way like that. It was usually a preamble to something that was anything but casual, and I gave my sister my full attention.

‘By the way,’ she said, unable to suppress a smile, ‘I’ve cancelled your hotel booking. You’re staying with me.’

‘But why did you do that? I’ve already paid,’ I said.

‘No, you haven’t,’ she said firmly. ‘I checked with the hotel. There’s no point protesting or being stubborn. I can’t have my brother staying somewhere else when we have our own flat. What will everybody say? Can you imagine?’

I protested again but nothing I said disturbed her composed smile. ‘See if you like the flat first,’ she said. ‘You can stay there as long as you like. I have to go back to Dar for four nights next week to take the last of my finals, but after that I’ll be here and we can catch up with everything that’s happened. You’ll see, it will be better than shutting yourself up in a hotel.’

I wondered once again how she had got to be so brisk and confident. Mama had never been anything like that, or if she had it must have been before my time, so I guessed that it was a quality Munira inherited from her other parent. The flat was in Kiponda, and she parked her car in the yard in front of the Ismaili Jamatkhana. The huge main door looked new and Munira said it had recently been renovated. The Aga Khan Trust was spending a lot of money repairing old Ismaili buildings and re-laying the pavements all over the old town. You wait until you see Forodhani, she told me.

‘It’s not my car,’ Munira explained, ‘it’s my sister’s but I can borrow it whenever I want. She is away studying in Boston, so you just have to say if you want me to drive you anywhere. I’ll be taking it back later in the afternoon and you can come and meet the rest of the family if you want. Daddy is in the Ministry of Defence now but he is nearly retired and only works part of the day. We could go and greet him when I return the car.’

I did not reply for a moment. ‘I’ll go and greet Baba this afternoon,’ I said, regretting that I had not been able to stick to my plan to stay in the hotel. It was to avoid this tangle of obligations and courtesies that could not be refused without guilt that I had wanted to do so. I could not have my father finding out that the first person I went to visit on my return was not him but the destroyer of souls. ‘Maybe later,’ I said.

I did not go directly to Khamis’s shop but took my time walking through the streets. I met people who recognised me and jumped to their feet to greet me. How could they still remember me after all these years? And how did they all manage to look the same when I felt so transformed? When I reached the shop, I saw Khamis sitting on a bench under an awning, older and heavier but still the same, while a young man was serving customers behind an aluminium-clad counter. Khamis knew me immediately and got to his feet, chuckling with pleasure and extending his hand. After our greetings he said, ‘Go in there, he is sleeping probably. Give him a shout.’

Baba was not sleeping. He was sitting at the table reading, just as he used to several years ago, only now he was wearing glasses. He took the spectacles off and continued sitting for another minute or so after I appeared in the open doorway, contemplating me, and then he stood up and extended a hand to me. I ignored the hand and embraced him, and felt how slight and thin his body was. His hair was white and receding and cut very short. I gave him the bag of presents I had brought for him, a couple of shirts and books and confectionery, and Baba accepted the bag with gracious words and then put it aside without looking into it. After a few more minutes of greetings and questions he said, ‘Let me get changed and then we can go for a walk.’

At first we did not speak as we walked. I saw that I was now taller than my father and I could not remember that being so obvious before I left. We walked slowly and I thought he faltered at times, as if he was struggling to keep his balance. I had felt his frailness when I embraced him and as we walked I could see it in his step and in his smile. He touched my arm now and then and said something affectionate or admiring … how well you look … with an openness so unlike the way he used to be. We stopped at a café and ordered tea. I could not relax because the café was noisy with shouted orders and raucous banter between the customers and the staff, and everything was greasy – the cups, the tables, the buns that came with our tea. It was not always grease that was visible to the eye, it was ingrained in the café’s atmosphere and decor. I won’t get used to this, I thought, but I did because it was Baba’s favourite café. There were cleaner ones elsewhere, but this was where he came at least twice a day for a cup of tea and for his supper because he knew the owner from school days.