A Girl From Zanzibar

walked across the road to Africa House. It was not like I had fallen in love with The English Boy. My interest in him had simply expanded according to my lack of interest in everything else around me. It’s true I imagined romantic events—falling in love, an invitation to England, marriage, eternal happiness—but I recognised even as I imagined them that these fantasies were a product of my situation, not of the man. Sometimes I had worked through similar scenarios with Bent, the youngest of the Danish team, as leading man. And Bent, who ran the milk processing plant, was as empty and obvious as the shiny pipes of his dairy. No, it was a bread-on-the-water sort of thing, a random attempt to stir up my torpid life in the belief that almost any outcome would be an improvement. I felt there was no harm in him. There was reassurance in his awkwardness and tendency to blush. He was no Didier with charming manners, smart clothes and a French car to dazzle me. Still, just entering Africa House was bold. The staff would recognise me and there would be talk.

The inside of the old building was drab, shadowy and untended. It felt abandoned. I walked through the billiard room with its massive wreck of a table and its three high judges’ chairs, fixed in place, thrones for Englishmen. Now their ghosts were looking down on me. There was no noise except for the distant banging of a door, no sign of guests or staff: the quiet after a revolution, though the revolution had been twenty years before.

The dining room was upstairs and by the time I had made my way to the top of the long, bare staircase, drawing closer to the banging door, I was ready to find Geoffrey and a little scared that I might not, so that my greeting had a greater warmth to it than any feelings I had towards him.

“Oh, Geoffrey, you’re here!”

“Did you think I wouldn’t be?”

“No, but I’m glad you are.” He stood up awkwardly, the heavy chair scraping on the wood floor, and I gave him my hand. “And you’re not wearing shorts!”

The long dining room was empty except for us. At the far end the high arched windows had long ago lost their glass. The only disturbances were the creaking of dust-laden ceiling fans and the periodic slamming in the wind of the door leading onto the roof terrace. Oddly, the door’s glass was intact. I sat down across from Geoffrey, a distance greater than was natural since the tables and chairs left behind by the British were built on an unnaturally large scale, perhaps because their owners wanted to believe themselves giants. In my case the furniture made me feel like a child.

“The waiter said he would find something for us.” “It’s all right. I’m not very hungry.”

“So, Marcella, you were born on Zanzibar?”

“Yes.”

“And you’re ... from the Asian community?”

“I’m Goan.”

“Goan. Of course. From Portuguese India. That accounts for your name. Do you speak Portuguese?”

“A few words. English is my first language.”

“What else?”

“What else? Oh, some Konkani, a bit of Arabic, a bit of Gujerati. I can get by in Swahili.”

“I don’t think I’ve heard of Konkani.”

“Why would you have heard of it? It’s our language— the Goans. Only the old people use it much. Geoffrey, you have so many questions! Am I your research project? You’re famous on Zanzibar for your questions, do you know that? People don’t like it, you know.”

He looked down at the stained tablecloth, then pushed his glasses back up his nose. “I’m sorry. I was just interested.” He spent a moment looking crushed before continuing. “Sometimes I ask questions when I’m nervous. Attractive women make me nervous.”

“I make the big international expert nervous? Well, thank you.”

There was a silence. “Shall I go and look for the waiter?” He half rose.

“No, don’t run away. In any case you don’t know what you might find out there. It’s better to wait—Zanzibar time. I don’t really mind questions. I’m used to Europeans.”

“Marcella—is it all right if I call you Marcella?” He made it sound like an anthropological question rather than a matter of my preference.

“Geoffrey, you already have. We natives are really quite friendly. I call you Geoffrey, you call me Marcella. Or would you prefer Dr Sutton, Dr Sutton?”

   “No.”

“By the way, Dr Sutton, is there a Mrs Sutton back home in Blighty? Little Suttons?”

“No, I’m not married.”

“But maybe a girlfriend, a live-in girlfriend. Europeans often don’t marry these days.”

“No, no one special.”

“Someone not very special, then? Someone you just roll in the hay with?”

“No. Actually, no.” I’d made him blush again.

“You see, Geoffrey, you’re not the only one who can ask questions.” I stretched out to give him a friendly kick under the table.

The waiter was a thin old African I had seen leaving the hotel a thousand times without ever wondering what he did. Now he stood motionless next to us, withholding the bowls of soup he held in each hand. I knew what was in his mind: Geoffrey had told him that he was to have a lady visitor and the kitchen staff had made a special effort to scavenge the food for their English guest and his English lady. Now he discovered that the lady visitor was just the naughty Goan girl who had grown up across the street.

“Salama,” I offered.

“Brown Windsor,” he replied and plonked the plates down in front of us.

I gave Geoffrey a smile and he smiled back, broadly this time, not the little embarrassed smile. Nice. He said: “British food. The worst in the world.”

“We’re lucky to have it. The Danes are eating cassava. We Zanzibaris have taught the experts from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation to eat like peasants. They spend all their time begging our farmers for food.”

“Zanzibar’s not so bad.”

I made a face.

   “No, you’ve got your problems but you’ve avoided some big mistakes. You don’t have big inequalities in wealth like some