A Girl From Zanzibar

live with him in Ohio. She loved him, she thought, but did not really want to move. He had been her first lover, she said, and I wondered if he had been the only one. I let myself enter her world a little and leave my thoughts behind. There was a future in her mind composed mainly of a disorienting blaze of choice. She was talented in various ways, and there were various places she might live. Being tied down too early did seem wrong if she wanted to travel, but she thought she might love this boy, and she did not want to be one of these rootless single girls, unserious and forever dating, wasting their energy on acquaintances. I realised, at last—not good at this—that she wanted me to tell her to stay, complete her studies at Moore, that love would wait, that I thought highly of her and believed in her future. And so I did, my feelings mixed, caught between affection for the girl and impatience with all this privilege.

*

I cannot remember how I imagined my future as a child, sitting on the doorstep of the house my father built. My world was so tiny. Did I dream of marrying an Arab prince from the House of Wonders? Riches? A European city called London? Hardly a snowy place called Vermont. Maybe the dreams I had then have nothing to do with the life I’ve led and it was all inevitable—in the nature of the world or in the cocktail of my genes—that I would go to London and then move on from there, continuing west. And maybe it was inevitable, once in London, that I would fall in with the people I fell in with, that I would fall for Benji, who seemed so like me, that I’d bank at the BCCI—“the immigrants’ bank”—the Bank of Credit and Commerce International, known more recently to witty Westerners as the Bank of Crooks and Criminals International. Perhaps this path was always set for me, quite possible to predict by those with more knowledge and understanding, and the dreams were of no consequence, my will and industry nothing more than the machinery of fate.

My desk is crowded these days with the details of millennia of human movement: from Africa to Europe to Asia to America to Africa and back again, every connection to everywhere at sometime made. These days I seem to want to connect all parts of the world with each other, all times with the present and all of my life with myself, one huge, expansive web with me held small and safe within it.

I don’t have explanations. But since the market is for certainty, I write academic papers. I’ve just written with a straight face that, “The potential migrant on the threshold of departure balances the cost of giving up his familiar life against the estimated economic benefits of what he knows less well or not at all.” I’ve made the migrant “he” for the sake of convention and for the sake of not being me, and I’ve put him on the shore with a calculator in his hand. In this, there are no devils snapping at the heels, no mad yearnings to be drawn up into the glorious blue, no sticky muck of misery to suck back at the shoes.

THE THURSDAY MORNING BEFORE CHRISTMAS WASimmediately different from the other Thursday mornings. “Miss D’Souza. Please wait one minute.” No “Marcella.” No flirtatious lilt to Omar Khatib’s voice. No eye contact.

He left the room and returned with my file, untied the string around it. “This is your passport. Will you sign here, please?”

I signed. I picked up the passport, gingerly at first, then held it in both hands as if it might transmit messages to me through my palms. “I can keep it?” I asked stupidly.

“Of course.” He was still avoiding my eyes. Something had happened. I thought of the limp figure in his hospital bed, the effort he had made for me.

“Why now?”

He ignored my question. “And this is your application fee, which proved to be unnecessary. Please count it and make sure it is all there.”

It was all there. Omar watched me. I felt him watching me. To think I had considered sleeping with this horrible little man. I hated him. I loved Geoffrey. I wanted to say nothing. A wrong word might change something. I opened the passport. There was my photo. I couldn’t help asking, “There are no restrictions on my leaving Zanzibar?”

“You can travel freely. That is the meaning of a passport.”

“Mr Khatib, why didn’t you tell me this was coming?”

“They sent it over from the mainland by hand. Special delivery.” He paused, then looked me full in the face for the first time. There were tears in his eyes. “You didn’t have to do this. "You think I don’t have a family? You didn’t have to use your VIP friends against me. Why didn’t you tell me you knew such people? I would have gotten you your passport.”

He was on the edge of losing self-control. I slipped the passport into my bag. “Then it’s all worked out. You wanted me to have a passport and now I have one.”

“All worked out. Except I am sacked. I am without a job. I give you your passport and then I go home. What do I tell my wife? That a pretty Goan girl with friends in the government has taken the food out of our children’s mouths because she wants to travel to Europe? Would you like to tell her? You can tell her about how you made me take money and then accused me of taking bribes too.”

“I did no such thing.”

“Haven’t I always treated you nicely? Chatted with you as a friend? Now you get on a jet and I go home to watch my family starve. Maybe you can give my children some of your ice-cream to eat.”

Omar was not the only one to lose his job. There was