Read Online The Magic of Saida by M. G. Vassanji - Free Book Online

said, that image in his mind, the memory of that primal revelation had the power to chill the heart. There was something about what they saw, where they saw it. Some days after that incident, he would hear of a violent ruckus in the Indian community, involving a girl and a boy, and that the girl had been sent away.
    We were sitting, Kamal and I, on a bench at Dar’s Oyster Bay; before us, on the beach, young men playing football, a couple of hawkers vending coconuts, and young teens in uniforms, fresh out of school. Behind us a steady traffic. This area in colonial times was for Europeansonly. Our previous governments, against advice from bankers, kept it free of development and tourists, so that now we can come and enjoy the beach unimpeded. Until the developers, someday, win.
    He had rented a furnished flat in the Asian area, in one of those new eight-storey affairs built on two-storey former foundations and a prayer (his word). He enjoyed the crowded ambience of the neighbourhood, though not the cars parked thick on the sidewalks so you couldn’t enter the building easily. To keep fit he jogged, early in the morning. And he gave free medical advice, while he bided his time.
    A ship appeared in the far distance and he gazed at it intently—an understandable obsession if you’ve lived by the sea. Soon the ferry from Zanzibar came speeding along, headed towards the channel into the harbour, and Kamal turned to me with a grin.
    For decades he’d had this story to tell, and now he was telling it.
    “It just happened,” he said. “We would meet at the shore and hold hands and walk by the creek.”
    Impulsively he would wander off by the creek and wait; it would be after the noon hour, and she would be there or soon appear. There was an illicit feel to their trysts, they both knew that, without knowing quite why. Perhaps it was the secrecy that made them so. They would stare out at the dhows, watch them being loaded, painted. They would imagine spirits haunting the tall, mysterious deep-green forest of mangrove that sheltered the harbour. They would race to the German graves and play there. Near the bushes where they had discovered the Indian couple, they had found a shallow lagoon protected by overgrowth, with a narrow sandy clearing around it that was like a beach. She would remove her dress, enter the water and splash about in it. He would do the same in his shorts. It was here that she once immersed herself in the water and did not emerge for what seemed a very long time; he could see her clearly, looking flat and ghostly, and he got worried and called at her. When finally she emerged, she said, “I am Kinjikitilé.” The magician of Ngarambe, who went by that name, had also immersed himself in water, before emerging to inspire men and women to make war against the Germans.
    One day from the mud near the bushes she picked up a piece of white rock. “It looks just like you!” she said and giggled nervously, holding it forward. Not a rock, but part of a skull. He picked up something else to beat her with for the insult, and she ran off, throwing down the skull. Then he saw that what he was holding was a bone. A broken tibia. He dropped it.
    She came back. They concluded that these bones were the work of sorcerers, those of the evil sort who sometimes killed people and dismembered them. Ate the parts in order to gain strength. Used the brain to make medicine. So much for wandering off by themselves. Their sin, unarticulated, instinctive, against the modesty required of them had received an admonition. They stopped their outings together.
    But it was their secret place, this lagoon, its compact beach; for one day she would arrive there again to meet him. But that was later.
    When he told Mama about the bones on the beach, and his explanation, she cut him short. “What do you know? Witches go to the forest, not to the sea, out there in the swamp!” He was shocked by her unexpected sharpness and turned to go, but then