So Long Been Dreaming Page 9

  She isn’t the daughter of the prophet as her name suggests.

  No, no. “Fatima” was just what her parents named her. Her true name is Sarauniya Jaa, Queen of the Red. She is the dreamer. Simply call her Jaa. Whenever she storms into the cities and towns here in Niger, she’s draped in a long red dress and a red silk burka so sheer that you can see the smile on her face.

  Her sword is thin as paper and strong enough to cut diamond, and it bears the scent of the rain-soaked soil. It’s made of a green clear metal that has no earthly name because it doesn’t come from earth, but from the body of another place called Ginen, where Jaa often travels to when her Sahara queendom is calm. Years ago, she left our town to go there.

  Jaa is always accompanied by her two wild and sword-swinging husbands, Buji and Gambo; ask me for their stories and I will give them to you on another day. Jaa is a tiny woman, small like a worldly child. But size is deceptive. You do not want to be the enemy of her sword.

  Her voice is high-pitched and melodious. Sometimes when she speaks, red flowers fall from the sky. Legend has it that when she was a young woman, she was stolen by a group of New Tuareg nomads called the Lwa. They claimed that the reason for the kidnapping was because she was their queen.

  They were right.

  Soon, the queen in her awakened, and before they knew it, she was laughing loudly and telling men to straighten up their clothes, women to learn to ride camels, and whoever would listen, the stories of her past life as a daydreaming medical student. This was just after the Sahara was no longer the Sahara and the world had changed. Soon Jaa was ruling the new land with her army of devoted nomads. She feared none of the talking sandstorms, flocks of carnivorous hummingbirds, or the nuclear fallout that drifted from countries away. The subsequent return of magic to the world didn’t bother her.

  I tell you, if it were not for this woman, death and blood would have run through the irrigation lakes and soaked the sands. No empire would have thrived. But it is not Jaa’s wish to rule.

  Whenever things grow calm, she has her group of nomads settle in a town. This last time, it was our town, Kwàmfà. I myself was one of those nomads who traveled with her and settled here. When we were comfortable, Jaa and her husbands rode off into the desert. She hasn’t been seen since.

  But Jaa always knows when to return.

  The storyteller usually recited the last line with a knowing look on his wrinkled shiny face. Then he’d glance in the direction of my father’s big house. I always wanted to ask him why, but I never found the right moment. I knew the answer anyway.

  It was during the New Yam Festival. I was twelve years old. It had been thirteen years since she’d left and my father took over. My father liked to have an opening ceremony where he gave a speech and ate the first piece of yam. The festival was set up in the centre of town. There were booths made of thatch where food and jewelry would be sold and performances would take place. As always, the wrestling match would be held next to the giant monkey bread tree. I’d always wanted to go watch, but women could only attend if they wore the full veil. The matches were always in the middle of the day under the hottest sun, so few women ever attended.

  My father made sure that there was a specific spot next to the stage for plenty of journalists. He loved to be seen and talked about. He also wanted to “put Kwàmfà on the map.” They brought their digital cameras, and the footage and photos would be posted on the Naija Net News and talked about on the even more popular net radio stations. My mother said that Jaa would have been disgusted, for she viewed the yam festival as a private Kwàmfà affair.

  A stage was set up in the center of all the booths and festival spaces for my father to give his speech. A high golden top covered it, and around it were several bushes and a palm tree. The stage floor was covered with a thick red cloth – Jaa’s colour – and decorated with red and gold pillows. The air already smelled of palm oil and the pungent aroma of pepper soup, sweat, and cologne. It was going to be a fun day.

  I sat on some of the gold pillows with my half brothers and sisters. Today I wore my yellow veil. It was light, so although I had on a long blue dress underneath (blue was my favourite colour), I wasn’t too hot.

  “Look at this goat girl who thinks she should be here,” Baturiya said to Azumi. She whispered, but she must have known that she was loud enough for me to hear. She screwed up her nose. “I hate smelling her.”

  “I know,” Azumi replied. “Papa’s heart is too soft. I guess he doesn’t mind the smell of goat shit.”

  “I don’t know why she comes.” Baturiya sucked her teeth, looked me in the eye, and said, “She should be ashamed.”

  They could say whatever they wanted; we were still related. My mother sat in the audience, though. Even if she hadn’t divorced him, she still would have refused to sit with the other wives who were all closer to my age than hers.

  My mother was pregnant with me when she decided to divorce my father.

  “Get out then! You mean less than goat shit to me!” my father shouted that day for all the neighbours to hear when he caught my mother trying to sneak out with her bags. “I don’t want you if you can’t support me!” He was shouting so loudly that his voice cracked and his entire body shook. My mother said he had tears in his eyes, that it was the only time she’d ever seen him shed tears.

  She was several months pregnant and still she was trying to carry those bags. It’s hard for me to get that image out of my mind. But so desperate she was to leave him quietly. He grabbed her bags from her and threw them out the door. Then he pushed her out, too.

  “But not hard enough so that I would fall,” she said, looking at me and knowing my thoughts.

  Over the years, my father didn’t visit me. And only during public appearances did he acknowledge me indirectly by sending a messenger to tell me my presence was demanded. The entire town knew I was his daughter and he’d look silly pretending that I was not of his blood. He went on to marry three very young wives. I think he did it to spite my mother. When they were married, he loved her dearly and exclusively and never spoke of marrying any other women. His wives have since blessed him with five sons and four daughters. So what does he need me for, really?

  As I sat there onstage, a light blue scarab beetle climbed up my sandal. I brought out my magnifying glass to look more closely at it. I liked insects, especially these kinds of scarabs, so I always carried the magnifying glass in my pocket. As I looked, I knew to tilt the magnifying glass with great care. One move in the wrong direction and the inspected insect would fry.

  Sometimes these blue scarabs would spontaneously multiply. My mother said that they weren’t native to earth, that they came from that other place. Still, for thousands of years, scarabs have been the sign of rebirth here in Niger. So what does it mean when such a sign multiplies?

  I dropped my magnifying glass when I felt the rhythm vibrate through the stage, like a heartbeat.

  “In the new year,” my father was saying. He was draped in the red cape that he always wore for speeches. “As chief of Kwàmfà, I will make sure elections run smoothly, and that every man running has his say. In the name of our nurturing queen, Sarauniya Jaa, I will. . . .”

  “You dare speak my name?!” said a voice high-pitched like the sound of a bamboo flute. “You dare say your words are in the name of Jaa?!”

  A whisper flew through the audience and the sound of camel feet on sand grew closer. With my peripheral vision, I saw my half-siblings all running in different directions. But I stayed where I was, too terrified to move. I looked at my father. His eyes were wide and his upper lip quivered as he stared at his fleeing audience. From somewhere in the crowd came the sound of galloping camels.

  “Kwàmfà is mine now,” I heard my father say, his voice sounding as if he were being strangled. “You won’t take it, you witch!”

  There were shouts of surprise as people jumped and threw themselves aside. Behind us, gutsy journalists continued taping and snapping pictures. My
mother remained where she was, her eyes wide. Only my father and I now stood onstage. Even his wives had run off!

  I have seen many camels. People ride them and use them to carry burdens. They smell like desert wind and have long eyelashes, rough fur, soft lips, and knobby knees. They roar with protest when mounted and many of them can speak in human languages, usually to complain. But I have never seen camels of this size. I don’t know how such a small woman was able to climb onto such a great beast, let alone ride it. Her two husbands were not much taller, their camels equally as huge.

  The camels wore no gold or silver and had no saddle or reins. And their eyes were wild. But they traipsed through the crowd with swift agile care. Not one person was trampled. I could see her face clearly through her sheer red burka as she approached. Jaa was very very dark, her skin almost blue – like mine. She had a smile on her round face, just like in the stories.

  Once everyone was out of the way, she picked up speed and unsheathed her sword as she barked something to her husbands. They say she speaks ten languages. Hausa, Igbo, Yoruba, English, Efik, Arabic, all those I know. This language she spoke was foreign to me. Her husbands stopped their camels, but she continued, with her sword held high.

  A guttural grunt came from my father’s throat that was probably meant to be a scream. He swayed slightly, paralyzed by indecisiveness, awe, and fear. Jaa’s camel leapt onstage and ran past my father. I could hear the thumps of its hooves on the stage floor.

  At the same moment, the scarab beetle landed right on my shoulder. It made a soft popping sound as it multiplied into two, the second beetle appearing on my other shoulder. I didn’t brush them off. I was barely even aware of them because of what happened next.

  Shhhhoooomp. With a swipe, she took his head right off.

  I opened my eyes and mouth wide, all the blood rushing to my head, but no scream came. Later I would see that several small veins had burst around my eyes and on my chest.

  The camera flashes made the scene even more gruesome, lighting up the shade and highlighting the blood and bone. I smelled urine as my father’s head fell onto the red cloth, leaving a redder trail, and rolled off the stage and onto the sand. His eyes were still open as his head rolled and sand must have gotten in them. It stopped underneath a bush. I felt sick.

  I didn’t want to look at the rest of my father’s body, which was still standing, swaying, bleeding, dribbling, and would fall at any moment. I knew my father had done bad things, but that didn’t change the horror of what I witnessed. Someone screamed, but I was focused only on Jaa. Her camel had leapt off the other side of the stage. Now it had climbed back onstage and was approaching me!

  I still didn’t move, though at this time I was shaking. I heard a crunch. Her camel had stepped on my magnifying glass. She reached down and pulled off my veil. I felt naked in my blue dress.

  “Are you his daughter?” she asked me in Igbo.

  A red flower fell from the sky, bounced on my head, and fell to my feet.

  “Y-y-yes,” I said.

  “What is your name?”

  “Ejii Ugabe,” I said.

  She chuckled. “Chief Ugabe, indeed,” she said. “I hope you are nothing like him.”

  I stood there looking at the smear of blood on her sword and the strange blue eyes of her camel.

  “Where is your mother?” she asked.

  I looked around. People were running and screaming. A few were staring. Her husbands, Gambo and Buji, shouted for everyone to calm down. Some stopped, but few were listening. My mother was still standing there. I pointed and Jaa looked toward her. She looked at her for a long time. For a moment I was afraid she’d raise her sword and behead my mother too.

  “It’s time that you, Gambo, and Buji have come back, Sarauniya Jaa,” my mother said with a bow. When she looked up, her face was sad and she wiped a tear from her cheek. But that was all.

  Jaa laughed as if my mother were an old friend; no longer did she look like a crazed warrior. I stood there trying to figure out her age, not wanting to look beside me at my father’s body. She appeared both ancient and the age of my mother.

  “You will handle this town when I’m next gone,” Jaa said.

  My mother nodded.

  And that is how my mother became Kwàmfà’s Councilwoman who answers only to Sarauniya Jaa. I think it was also the moment I made my decision.

  We never found my father’s head. The bush it rolled under was one of the new type, the carnivorous ones. It was several minutes before anyone thought to search for it, enough time for one of these bushes to devour flesh and bone. So my father was buried without his lovely head. I still have the flower that fell when Jaa spoke to me. I planted it and over the years it has grown into a tree next to my window. I also still have nightmares about that moment. Sometimes I hear the sound of her camel’s hooves, other times I see my father’s head roll. Other times I see my father and he’s winking at me. He never winked at me when he was alive. But I don’t cry as much anymore.

  I don’t want to be a councilwoman like my mother, though I respect her job. There’s something I need to learn. I keep thinking about how the scarab beetle, the sign of rebirth, landed on me moments before my father’s life was taken. And how it multiplied. What does that mean? It must mean something. Something always comes out of horror, my mother says. She also says that nothing is ever a coincidence.

  I hate Jaa because, though my father did what he did, I loved him. Without him, I would not exist. One is only born with one father. And she killed him. Right in front of me. But I love her because she too gave me a life. If she hadn’t returned, I wouldn’t have been able to go to school and learn and read and think. Still, I want to know why Jaa couldn’t have found another way. Why did she have to kill him?

  It’s been five years since the day Jaa returned to our town and killed my father. For five years, she’s been mentoring my mother and the group of men and women she appointed to work with my mother in the town’s government. Things are running smoothly now, so she is leaving tomorrow. And I’m going to follow her.

  Vandana Singh was born and raised in India, which is on the planet known as the Third World. She currently lives in the United States with her family, where she teaches college physics, writes, and wears her green skin and antennae with pride. Her interests include women’s movements, Indian classical music, and the environment. Her stories and poems have appeared in Strange Horizons and the anthologies Polyphony and Trampoline. Younguncle Comes to Town, her first book for children, has just been published in India by Zubaan Press.

  Delhi

  Vandana Singh

  Tonight he is intensely aware of the city: its ancient stones, the flat-roofed brick houses, threads of clotheslines, wet, bright colours waving like pennants, neem-tree lined roads choked with traffic. There’s a bus going over the bridge under which he has chosen to sleep. The night smells of jasmine and stale urine, and the dust of the cricket field on the other side of the road. A man is lighting a bidi near him: face lean, half in shadow, and he thinks he sees himself. He goes over to the man, who looks like another layabout. “My name is Aseem,” he says.

  The man, reeking of tobacco, glares at him, coughs, and spits, “Kya chahiye?”

  Aseem steps back in a hurry. No, that man is not Aseem’s older self; anyway, Aseem can’t imagine he would take up smoking bidis at any point in his life. He leaves the dubious shelter of the bridge, the quiet lane that runs under it, and makes his way through the litter and anemic street lamps to the neon-bright highway. The new city is less confusing, he thinks; the colours are more solid, the lights dazzling, so he can’t see the apparitions as clearly. But once he saw a milkman going past him on Shahjahan road, complete with humped white cow and tinkling bell. Under the stately, ancient trees that partly shaded the street lamps, the milkman stopped to speak to his cow and faded into the dimness of twilight.

  When he was younger, he thought the apparitions he saw were ghosts of the dead, but now he knows
that is not true. Now he has a theory that his visions are tricks of time, tangles produced when one part of the time-stream rubs up against another and the two cross for a moment. He has decided (after years of struggle) that he is not insane after all; his brain is wired differently from others, enabling him to discern these temporal coincidences. He knows he is not the only one with this ability, because some of the people he sees also see him, and shrink back in terror. The thought that he is a ghost to people long dead or still to come in this world both amuses and terrifies him.

  He’s seen more apparitions in the older parts of the city than anywhere else, and he’s not sure why. There is plenty of history in Delhi, no doubt about that – the city’s past goes back into myth, when the Pandava brothers of the epic Mahabharata first founded their fabled capital, Indraprastha, some 3,000 years ago. In medieval times alone there were seven cities of Delhi, he remembers, from a well-thumbed history textbook – and the eighth city was established by the British during the days of the Raj. The city of the present day, the ninth, is the largest. Only for Aseem are the old cities of Delhi still alive, glimpsed like mysterious islands from a passing ship, but real nevertheless. He wishes he could discuss his temporal visions with someone who would take him seriously and help him understand the nature and limits of his peculiar malady, but ironically, the only sympathetic person he’s met who shares his condition happened to live in 1100 AD or thereabouts, the time of Prithviraj Chauhan, the last Hindu ruler of Delhi.

  He was walking past the faded white colonnades of some building in Connaught Place when he saw her: an old woman in a long skirt and shawl, making her way sedately across the car park, her body rising above the road and falling below its surface parallel to some invisible topography. She came face to face with Aseem – and saw him. They both stopped. Clinging to her like grey ribbons were glimpses of her environs – he saw mist, the darkness of trees behind her. Suddenly, in the middle of summer, he could smell fresh rain. She put a wondering arm out toward him but didn’t touch him. She said: “What age are you from?” in an unfamiliar dialect of Hindi. He did not know how to answer the question, or how to contain within him that sharp shock of joy. She, too, had looked across the barriers of time and glimpsed other people, other ages. She named Prithviraj Chauhan as her king. Aseem told her he lived some 900 years after Chauhan. They exchanged stories of other visions – she had seen armies, spears flashing, and pale men with yellow beards, and a woman in a metal carriage, crying. He was able to interpret some of this for her before she began to fade away. He started toward her as though to step into her world, and ran right into a pillar. As he picked himself off the ground he heard derisive laughter. Under the arches a shoeshine boy and a man chewing betel leaf were staring at him, enjoying the show.