Read Online Black Mamba Boy by Nadifa Mohamed - Free Book Online

disappeared down the road. Ayan was the daughter of one of the younger wives in the compound and lived in a smaller room away from Jinnow. Jama would stone her every time she approached him, so now she just satisfied herself with staring at him from a distance, crossing and uncrossing her eyes, flapping her upturned eyelids at him. As a girl she was rarely allowedout, and Jama’s bad reputation within the compound and filthy mouth had slowly begun to win her admiration. She hoped to stare him into friendship but he had too long a memory for that and was still planning a revenge for the time she dared call him bastard. Jama slyly observed her daily routine of housework, child-minding, and standing around, one leg scratching the back of the other, and plotted her downfall. Ayan’s mother was a tall, shrewish woman with a missing front tooth, a neglected third wife who beat her children down with words and blows. In front of her mother, Ayan was a well-behaved, hardworking child but in private she was a gang leader and vicious fighter. Her troupe of scraggly infants would gather behind her after lunchtime and prowl around the compound, catching lizards by the tail, spying on older children and going through their belongings. If challenged, the younger children would take flight while Ayan fought the angry object of their snooping. Scratches and cuts formed patterns on her skin like the tattoos on a Maori warrior, her young face knocked into a jagged adult shape by the fists of her mother and cousins. Jama had no possessions to filch or secrets to hide, but to Ayan he presented an enigma, a strange, silent boy who had returned from a foreign land.
    Jama would sometimes see Ayan in the evening as the women gathered around the paraffin lamp to tell stories. Tales about the horrors some women were made to suffer at the hands of men, about the secret lovers some women kept, or about Dhegdheer, who killed young women and ate their breasts. Ayan would regularly be mocked as “dirty” and “loose” by the women and older children for being uncircumcised, she had been feverish with chicken pox when the Midgaan woman had made all the girls halal with her razor, and now her head drooped down in shame. Her stupid mistakes would also be recounted;she had once tried to open a lock with her finger and instead got it stuck.
    “I thought that is how people open locks!” Ayan wailed.
    “Served you right, that was Allah’s reward for your snooping,” rejoiced her mother. Jama’s favorite stories were about his grandmother Ubah, who traveled on her own as far as the Ogaden desert to trade skins, incense, and other luxuries despite having a rich husband. “What a woman. Ubah was a queen and my best friend,” Jinnow would sigh. All the storytellers claimed to have seen shape-shifters, nomads who at night turned into animals and looked for human prey in town, disappearing before daybreak and the first call to prayer. Ayan’s eyes would form frightened wide circles in the orange light, and Jama could see her trying to nestle next to her mother and getting pushed irritably away. Jama hoped that one of these shape-shifters would snatch Ayan away and take her out into the pitch-black night where shadows slipped in and out of alleys in which hyenas stalked alongside packs of wild dogs, hunting lone men together, ripping out the tendons from their fleeing ankles as they tried to run for their lives, their helpless screams piercing the cloistered night.
    Jama’s life was no different from that of the goats tied up in the compound, staring blankly as they chewed on peelings. He was just a lump of dull clay that no one wanted to mold or breathe life into, he was not sent to school, not sent out with the camels, only told “Fetch this” and “Get out!” The wives made a show of exchanging glances and locking their rooms if he was nearby; they were all like Mrs. Islaweyne in their pettiness. The only comfort he found was at night in Jinnow’s