“No wealth at all.”
“The streets aren’t full of a mixture of Mercedes Benzes and beggars.”
“We don’t allow either.”
“No traffic jams. No pollution. "You don’t have advertisements everywhere making people want things they don’t need and can’t afford.”
“Geoffrey, there’s nothing to buy.”
“That’s not Zanzibar’s fault. That’s the West punishing you for being socialist.”
I opened my mouth to argue but found no words. Seeing this, Geoffrey continued. “And it’s quiet here, peaceful. The beaches are empty and unspoiled. Europeans dream of beaches like yours.”
“We dream of Europeans.”
“Maybe, but you could be worse off. Food is a problem of course. And corruption—but that’s everywhere. And you have the essentials. I’ve seen blocks of flats and a big hospital...”
“Without medicine or doctors.”
“Even a funfair.”
“It’s locked up.”
“Then there’s all that history. "You have one of the most exciting histories in the world. Zanzibar ruled half of Africa. Everyone came here. I look at the people in Jami- turi Gardens—all those different ethnic groups mixing together, the traditional dresses, the local food for sale. Not the ice-cream of course, that looks completely out of place.”
“But they all hate each other. And, by the way, the ice-cream’s mine.”
He was not listening. “Look at your own group, the Goans—how long since the Portuguese arrived in Goa?”
“A long time. I don’t know.”
“Almost five hundred years, I think. Vasco da Gama stopped in Zanzibar in fourteen ninety-nine, then went on to India. The Portuguese overthrew the King of Goa a few years later. But of course you were trading between India and Africa for a long time before the Europeans arrived. When did your family come?”
“We never talk about it much. It’s complicated, you know. I think people used to go back and forth. A few generations, I suppose.”
This man knew more about my history than I did. I was embarrassed. The conversation lapsed and in the silence I realized I had been animated, interested. Geoffrey’s rosy view of Zanzibar seemed crazy, yet I couldn’t convincingly dispute it. I had nothing to compare it with, while he had been everywhere. It was a topsy-turvy world like the ones I used to invent as a child, where people walked on ceilings and things fell upwards. In Geoffrey’s world, having nothing was good, the fact that no one wanted to visit was an advantage and the proximity of murderers to their victims was a cause for celebration. It was infuriating but exciting; it made it seem that I could, if I chose, walk out of my Zanzibar state of mind and simply choose another. I felt less imprisoned and I wanted more of this. We spooned the cold Brown Windsor and caught our breath.
ONE DAY, WHEN I WAS ABOUT SEVEN, I LED MY SISTER
downhill past Africa House to the city beach where the fishermen mended their nets, only slightly beyond the strict boundaries of our lives. The innocence of childhood in Zanzibar was carefully contained by the sense that the world outside our little community was serious and unsafe. It was there in the faces of aunties and uncles with their watchful eyes, and knowing this, we pushed against the borders of our world in measured ways, cramping the full opening of our angelic wings. But on this occasion I insisted that Maria follow me, using her older sister’s sense of responsibility against her. Maria was shy, with a taste for order, leaving open the naughty role for me. At the beach a grinning old African gestured an invitation to his boat, which was little more than a canoe, and while Maria hung back, I jumped in. I wriggled my way down into the narrow hull between the crossbars of the outriggers so that she could neither prize me out nor leave me behind and was forced to come along.
To find myself among the waves was as much of a surprise as if I had learned to fly. They seemed so much higher now that we were bobbing on them. I screamed in delight as we slid down hills of water, while Maria gripped the sides of the boat in terror. The bony old fisherman, a dirty crimson fez planted on his head, just smiled a wordless gap-toothed smile down at the two of us from where he balanced on the boat’s high stern.
From a trough between waves I looked up to find that Zanzibar had entirely vanished. Instead, there was a new horizon of solid water, a substance I had previously regarded as transparent. Everything I had ever known was momentarily gone—all those massive buildings that made up the little city that was my world, all the harbour and its boats, all the bustling people, all that had ever concerned me—-and I was made silent, greatly impressed by this immense magician’s trick. At this moment Maria began to cry, but I remember only being quieted and excited by the revelation.
Probably, we were only a few hundred yards from shore. The fisherman’s grin turned to a look of concern at Maria’s bawling and we were quickly returned to the beach where two uncles waited to scold us and upbraid the fisherman in as full a way as their Swahili would allow. I tried to go to the old man to thank him, but at seven I was too small to make such independence stick. Our uncles ushered us home to my mother’s indulgent punishment.
Mummy had told me that she was sure I would travel one day. There was a look in me, she said. I looked like a bird set to fly, by which I took her to mean my beaky nose, my attention lost to distant dreams, my legs tensed under me, always ready to spring from my doorstep perch. She told me this, I now think, to say that I was not like her, who was weak and stayed at home, less like her than I imagined. Yet we were of a type, both
