He was a dark-skinned African, shorter than my five- foot-two, with a foolish little belly pressing out against his loose shirt. His face was dotted with a thousand pockmarks, as if his mother had taken one look at her baby and battered him with a hairbrush. In fairness, his smile was rather sweet. A good Moslem, I’d say, a family man, a small man in a small job. Not a bad man.
Perhaps I was a little arrogant, but the morbid stillness frightened me, who wanted movement, and my confidence was new and thin. I was still impressed with myself for having made a life in Dar, with money to spend and European friends. Now that I was back home I hugged this slight cosmopolitan identity to myself. For my first visit to the passport office I wore blue Levis, a pale silk blouse, earrings, a coral clip in my hair and the headphones of a Sony Walkman around my neck. I think I owned the only Walkman on the island.
I handed over my identity papers and filled in the forms, finding a space for myself on Mr Khatib’s desk between the high columns of decaying manila files. He watched from the other side, protected in his fort. I was speedy, brisk and European; he folded his hands over his stomach and maintained a Moslem calm.
“So, Marcella,”—he looked at the form—“you want to leave us? Not for too long, I hope.”
“Just a holiday.” I wanted to be lying.
“Good. We’d miss you, one of Zanzibar’s flowers. You know about the currency restrictions, of course.”
“The government won’t let me have my money, Yes. How long will it take to get my passport? I need to travel soon.”
“It depends. It has to go through Dar-es-Salaam.”
“But in Dar they told me I had to come here! I live in Dar-es-Salaam. They said that since I was born in Zanzibar, I had to apply here. That Zanzibar was separate from the
mainland in passport offices.”
“They were correct. Everything they told you was quite accurate. We are separate in passport offices, but not separate in issuing passports. It’s all Tanzania. That is the nature of the Tanzanian Union. Our papers must go to the mainland.”
“Will it be more than a week? I need to look after my business in Dar.”
“It might be more.”
“Then I should go back until it’s ready.”
“Unfortunately, that would be a problem. I have to send your papers to the mainland, so you will be unable to travel out of Zanzibar. But we are happy to have you back, I am sure your family must be happy too. Your mother is alone these days, I think.”
I checked myself and looked at him. Did I know him? Zanzibar was small. I asked, “Could it be much longer than a week? A month?”
Omar Khatib gave his sweet smile and indicated with his hands that it was for someone higher, maybe his boss or Allah, to dispose. “Shall I send in your application?” He offered it back to me.
“Is there another way?”
“I fear not. No other way.”
The weeks dragged by, sloughing away my thin-skinned confidence with them. After my first meeting with Omar, I visited him every Thursday morning. He insisted that I call him Omar. While all over east Africa the Asians were being vilified, hounded and even deported as economic parasites, he took a careful pleasure in paying me compliments and celebrating my continued presence. “There’s a silver lining, Marcella,” he told me, after the customary tea and contrition. “The world’s loss is my gain.”
The rest of my time I spent in my childhood bedroom, hiding from busybody eyes, playing disco and staring at the wall of once-precious magazine pictures of film stars, that were now faded to pinks and pale blues. My older sister, Maria, had gone to the mainland after very properly marrying a very boring Goan accountant. The schoolmates with any spirit had all left and the ones remaining were complacent wives. My Arab boyfriend from schooldays, Ali, my first lover, had gone to be a businessman in Oman and now existed only as the occasional clumsy note, which he always signed, Your fiance, Ali. A joke, I assumed. I lay sweating high up in my fourth floor bedroom, headphones on, hoping that something would move, even if it was just a breeze to molest the curtains that kept out the sun. Maybe Ali was serious. So far I’d only claimed him as a fiance when I needed to put off unattractive men. Now I daydreamed that I might marry him next time he returned, then escape to Oman. While I dreamed and brooded, Mummy was often somewhere in the house, a pretty woman no longer noticed by men to be pretty. We met only for meals and then we hardly talked. She lived in a happy, dotty world of her own, where everything was decided by my father’s sister, Auntie Stella, alias Mrs Fernandez, known to everyone—including me —as Mrs F.
I tried to blame my French boyfriend, Didier, for my predicament, but could not quite make anger work. Though the passport was supposed to be for joining him in France, I could not entirely keep from myself the idea that Didier was just an excuse. When we met he was employed by Peugeot in Dar, and I had just bought two battered Peugeot 304 taxis. We fell
