Recently, in my queen-sized Vermont bed, I dreamed of Mrs F I dreamed of her portly body exactly superimposed on the map of Zanzibar, floating like a fat foetus in the Indian Ocean. She was peaceful, and smiling gently, though in life she rarely smiled, and never gently. When she did force a smile it was usually for the rare white man who found his way to her Elephant Bar, and the result was oddly upside-down, the ends lower than the middle. While everyone else has become smaller with the passage of time, Mrs Fernandez has grown larger.
I can see us now, three Asian women on their nightly stroll, unconsciously displaying all the cultural irresolution of the Goans, our little group of Lusitanised Catholics from India. Mrs F leads of course, stately in a sari, her belly carried out in front like armour. To her right and always a step or two behind is Mummy, absent-minded in one of those simple cotton dresses that British missionaries introduced everywhere. And to the left, also a little behind, comes me in T-shirt and jeans, the headphones of the Walkman—for which I no longer have working batteries—around my neck. I am hanging back in a tiny assertion of my reluctance. Mummy is hanging back just out of the habit of following.
A decade and a half later, I can still walk it in my mind, this ritual evening stroll in the last of the day’s heat, downhill through the city’s jagged alleys to the bald little park by the harbour, that had been the garden of the Sultan’s palace before the revolution. Everyone would be there; it was the day’s only event and I hated it for that. Our route to the sea passed close to the Goan Cathedral, St Joseph’s, far too big and grand for us, and this was excuse enough for Mrs F to spike her monologue with routine complaints about my failure to attend church. “You have responsibilities,” she insisted, “Goa is the Rome of the Orient,” as if I hadn’t heard that before. I let my eyes reply for me, boring resentment into her back while she glided over pocked paths and gracefully skirted the corners of dilapidated buildings.
Inside St Joe’s, which I remember as being the same sugary pink and blue as my faded bedroom pin-ups, there was stored a relic of St Francis Xavier, the patron saint of Goans. Walking past I thought how creepy it was to chop off his finger and send it all the way from India for the comfort of a couple of hundred emigrant Catholics on Mohammedan Zanzibar, and how odd it was that I had not thought this before. There must have been a time when the Portuguese in their Rome of the Orient, thought Zanzibar a prize and that the Goans might win it for them. That was before Goa, Zanzibar, and even Portugal, had ceased to count for anything. Then I wondered whether I was mistaken, and had only imagined the finger.
While I followed my own thoughts, Mrs F talked, trailing words over her shoulder for us to catch as best we could. She used the evening strolls down to Jamituri Gardens to review the condition and morale of her Goans. There were infractions of behaviour—frequently involving drink and my favourite uncle, Uncle John—and loose elements who needed to be bonded into usefulness through marriage or employment. There was consideration of the enemy too: the necessary accommodation of the governments of Zanzibar and Tanzania, the drift of the political wind, what the Hindu and Moslem Indians were saying about us, whether the African Moslems would step up their fundamentalist demands and their hypocritical objections to alcohol, who should be guarded against or pandered to, the possibilities for revival of business on the island and the danger of new violence. Interspersed with equal weight, and likewise requiring no response, there was the subject of me, my jeans, my hair, my immodest ways, the absurdity of French or Arab boyfriends, my ridiculous fantasies of escape, a fretting refrain that this time turned out to be preparation for the necessary, but unpleasant, task of offering me a compliment.
“Marcella!” she said loudly, jerking me out of my reverie, but not turning to look at me. “You’re a bright enough girl when you choose to be and I think you’re a natural businesswoman. Some people have it and some don’t, "Your mother doesn’t and your sister doesn’t, but I think you do. You might as well do something useful while you’re here.”
I glanced across at my mother, at her station on the other side of Mrs F. She was lost in her own thoughts, untouched by the slight. A girlishness had reappeared in her gait in the years since Maria and I left home. She had given up on cares, leased them out to Mrs F for the duration. Her face, though, had aged of its own accord, the cheeks flatter than I remembered, her complexion duller.
Into my silence Mrs F added, “So, do you have any ideas?”
“I haven’t given it a moment’s thought. I’m not planning to stay. I’m going back to Dar, then to Europe.”
“And have they given you a passport yet?” She did not turn when she talked to me; she just left the words behind her for me to collect.
“Not yet.”
“And your French boy, have you heard from him?”
“Yes.”
Strictly speaking this was true. There had been one lonely postcard rattling in my PO Box, complaining of hard work back in France and remembering the
