determination to do what she pleases. He recalls Dajaal informing him that she started wearing a headscarf and then the veil to minimize her unceasing quarrels with the men averse to seeing women with uncovered hair, or young women in trousers, or in dresses deemed to make men lust after them. Women must hide their bodily assets so that the men inwhom fires of lust are burning may not be tempted into sin. It must be hard on Cambara, trained as a makeup artist and an actor, not to be able to express her womanliness, if that is what she has a mind to do.
No wonder some of the religionists want to run her out of the city where she has found the happiness that eluded her in Toronto.
Conveniently, Dajaal is at the door, ready to drive them back to the apartment.
Cambara stares into Jeebleh’s eyes with great intensity. There is a hint of sorrow—of loneliness with depth, Jeebleh thinks, and he remarks that she runs her tongue repeatedly over her lips and seems to be holding back tears. She does not want them to go, even if she can’t bring herself to say so; she wants the good-bye to last forever. Malik, for his part, thinks that there is nothing like the aloneness of a woman looking after a man she loves, in a city like Mogadiscio.
It is then that she comes out with it. “I wish you were staying here with us, both of you. Only we thought, or rather Bile thought, that Malik would want to have his own place, where he could do his writing and conduct his interviews in peace. Also, we have a young man staying in the annex, Robleh, the younger brother of a close friend of mine, a die-hard supporter of the Courts. He spends all his time in the mosques, politicking. I would love for you to meet him. He is some sort of talent spotter for the radical religionist fringe.”
“I’d very much like to meet him,” says Malik.
“Robleh is into everything the religionists do,” she says. “Who knows, he may know someone who can assist you in finding what has become of the runaway Taxliil. What do you think?”
Dajaal, who has now joined them in the foyer, is pointing at his watch, indicating they are running out of daylight. Like a mother with a baby sleeping in another room, Cambara responds to a movement upstairs: Bile flushing the toilet and shuffling slowly back to bed.
“I must go,” she says, hugging them, and they are off.
Jeebleh isn’t keen on the city tour, but he doesn’t fuss. He sits silently while Dajaal acts as tour guide, answering Malik’s questions. Malik takes copious notes as Dajaal points out buildings, gives the names of streets, and spells the names of the districts through which they happen to be traveling. Dajaal has the sociology of it down pat. Malik writes in his notebook, “The heart sickens.”
Jeebleh finds a generic featurelessness to the city’s destruction, as if the impact of a single bomb, detonating, had brought down the adjacent buildings, or they had collapsed in sympathy. The city is oddly ostentatious in its vulgarity, like a woman who was once a beauty refusing to admit that the years have caught up with her. Dajaal says, “It’s an in-your-face city, whose various parts, hamlets of no mean size, are less than the whole. It extends in many directions, in utter disorder, as if a blind city planner has determined its current shape.”
Women in
niqabs
—veils—and body tents go past, treading with much care, in streets chockablock with minibuses speeding down the dusty roads. One loses one’s bearings in a city with few landmarks, no road markings, and no street names.
Dajaal says, for Malik and Jeebleh’s benefit, “The city has undergone many changes, in the residents it attracts and in the services it renders or doesn’t render anymore.”
Here, a set of dirt alleys leading into a maze of dead ends. There, hummocks of rubble accumulated over the years through neglect and lack of civic maintenance; kiosks, mere shacks, built bang in the center of what was once a main
No wonder some of the religionists want to run her out of the city where she has found the happiness that eluded her in Toronto.
Conveniently, Dajaal is at the door, ready to drive them back to the apartment.
Cambara stares into Jeebleh’s eyes with great intensity. There is a hint of sorrow—of loneliness with depth, Jeebleh thinks, and he remarks that she runs her tongue repeatedly over her lips and seems to be holding back tears. She does not want them to go, even if she can’t bring herself to say so; she wants the good-bye to last forever. Malik, for his part, thinks that there is nothing like the aloneness of a woman looking after a man she loves, in a city like Mogadiscio.
It is then that she comes out with it. “I wish you were staying here with us, both of you. Only we thought, or rather Bile thought, that Malik would want to have his own place, where he could do his writing and conduct his interviews in peace. Also, we have a young man staying in the annex, Robleh, the younger brother of a close friend of mine, a die-hard supporter of the Courts. He spends all his time in the mosques, politicking. I would love for you to meet him. He is some sort of talent spotter for the radical religionist fringe.”
“I’d very much like to meet him,” says Malik.
“Robleh is into everything the religionists do,” she says. “Who knows, he may know someone who can assist you in finding what has become of the runaway Taxliil. What do you think?”
Dajaal, who has now joined them in the foyer, is pointing at his watch, indicating they are running out of daylight. Like a mother with a baby sleeping in another room, Cambara responds to a movement upstairs: Bile flushing the toilet and shuffling slowly back to bed.
“I must go,” she says, hugging them, and they are off.
Jeebleh isn’t keen on the city tour, but he doesn’t fuss. He sits silently while Dajaal acts as tour guide, answering Malik’s questions. Malik takes copious notes as Dajaal points out buildings, gives the names of streets, and spells the names of the districts through which they happen to be traveling. Dajaal has the sociology of it down pat. Malik writes in his notebook, “The heart sickens.”
Jeebleh finds a generic featurelessness to the city’s destruction, as if the impact of a single bomb, detonating, had brought down the adjacent buildings, or they had collapsed in sympathy. The city is oddly ostentatious in its vulgarity, like a woman who was once a beauty refusing to admit that the years have caught up with her. Dajaal says, “It’s an in-your-face city, whose various parts, hamlets of no mean size, are less than the whole. It extends in many directions, in utter disorder, as if a blind city planner has determined its current shape.”
Women in
niqabs
—veils—and body tents go past, treading with much care, in streets chockablock with minibuses speeding down the dusty roads. One loses one’s bearings in a city with few landmarks, no road markings, and no street names.
Dajaal says, for Malik and Jeebleh’s benefit, “The city has undergone many changes, in the residents it attracts and in the services it renders or doesn’t render anymore.”
Here, a set of dirt alleys leading into a maze of dead ends. There, hummocks of rubble accumulated over the years through neglect and lack of civic maintenance; kiosks, mere shacks, built bang in the center of what was once a main
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