Black Mamba Boy

ADEN, YEMEN, OCTOBER 1935

The muezzin’s call startled Jama out of his dream, and he pulled himself up to look at the sun rising over the cake-domed mosques, the gingerbread Adeni apartments glowing at their tips with white frosting. The black silhouettes of birds looped high in the inky sky, circling around the few remaining stars and the pregnant moon. The black planets of Jama’s eyes roamed over Aden — the busy, industrial Steamer Point; Crater, the sandstone old town, its curvaceous dun-colored buildings merging into the Shum Shum volcanoes; the Ma’alla and Sheikh Usman districts, white and modern, between the hills and sea. Wood smoke and infants’ cries drifted up as women took a break from preparing breakfast to perform their dawn prayers, not needing the exhortations of the old muezzin. A vulture’s nest encircled the ancient minaret, the broken branches festooned with rubbish, the nest corrupting the neighborhood with the stench of carrion; the attentive mother fed rotting morsels to her chirruping chicks, her muscular wings unhunched and at rest beside her. Jama’s own mother, Ambaro, stood by the roof edge, softly singing a song in her deep and melodious voice. She sang before and after work, not because she was happy but because the songs escaped from her mouth, her young soul roaming outside her body to take the air before it was pulled back into drudgery.

Ambaro shook the ghosts from her hair and began her morning soliloquy. “Some people don’t know how much work goes into feeding their ungrateful guts, think they are some kind of suldaan who can idle about without a care in the world, head full of trash, only good for running around with trash. Well, over my dead body, I don’t grind my backbone to dust to sit and watch filthy-bottomed boys roll around on their backs.”

These poems of contempt, these gabays of dissatisfaction greeted Jama every morning. Incredible meandering streams of abuse flowed from his mother’s mouth, sweeping the mukhadim at the factory, her son, long-lost relatives, enemies, men, women, Somalis, Arabs, Indians into a pit of damnation.

“Get up, stupid boy, you think this is your father’s house? Get up, you fool! I need to get to work.”

Jama continued to loll around on his back, playing with his belly button. “Stop it, you dirty boy, you’ll make a hole in it.” Ambaro slipped off one of her broken leather sandals, and marched over to him.

Jama tried to flee but his mother dived and attacked him with stinging blows. “Get up! I have to walk two miles to work and you make a fuss over waking up, is that it?” she raged. “Go then, get lost, you good-for-nothing.”

Jama blamed Aden for making his mother so angry. He wanted to return to Hargeisa, where his father could calm her down with love songs. It was always at daybreak that Jama craved his father, all his memories were sharper in the clean morning light, his father’s laughter and songs around the campfire, the soft, long-fingered hands enveloping his own. Jama couldn’t be sure if these were real memories or just dreams seeping into his waking life, but he cherished these fragile images, hoping that they would not disappear from him like his father had. Jama remembered traversing the desert on strong shoulders, peering down on the world like a prince, but already his father’s face was lost to him, hidden behind stubborn clouds.

Along the dark spiral steps came the smell of anjeero; the Islaweynes were having breakfast. ZamZam, a plain teenaged girl, used to bring Jama the mealtime scraps. He had accepted them for a while until he heard the boys in the family call him “Haashishki,” Trash Can. The Islaweynes were distant relatives, members of his mother’s clan, who had been asked by Ambaro’s half brother to take her in when she arrived alone in Aden. They had done as promised but it soon became clear that they expected their bedu cousin to be a servant: cooking, cleaning, and giving them the appearance of gentility. Within a week Ambaro had found work in a coffee factory, depriving the Islaweynes of their new status symbol and unleashing the resentment of the family. Ambaro was made to sleep on the roof, she was not allowed to eat with them unless Mr. Islaweyne and his wife had guests around; then they were all smiles and familial generosity, “Oh, Ambaro, what do you mean ‘Can I?’ What’s ours is yours, sister!”

When Ambaro had saved enough to bring her six-year-old son to Aden, Mrs. Islaweyne had fumed at the inconvenience and made a show of checking him for things that could infest or infect her children. Her gold bangles had clanked around as she looked for nits, fleas, skin diseases; she shamelessly pulled up his ma’awis to look for worms. Even after Jama had passed her medical exam, she glared at him when he played with her children and whispered to them to not get familiar with this boy from nowhere. Five years later, Ambaro and Jama still lived like phantoms on the roof, leaving as few traces of their presence as possible. The neatly stacked piles of laundry that Ambaro washed and Jama pegged out to dry were the only banners of their existence to the family.

Ambaro left for the coffee factory at dawn and didn’t return until dark, leaving Jama to float around the Islaweyne home feeling unwelcome, or to stay out in the streets with the market boys. Outside the sky had brightened to a watery turquoise blue, and Somali men asleep by the roadside began to rouse, their afros full of sand, while Arabs walked hand in hand toward the suq. Jama fell in behind a group of Yemenis wearing large gold-threaded turbans and beautiful, ivory-handled daggers in their belts. He ran his hands along the warm flanks of passing camels being led to market, their extravagant eyelashes batting in appreciation at his gentle stroke, and when they overtook him their swishing tails waved goodbye. Men and boys shuffled past ferrying vegetables, fruits, breads, meats, in bags, in their hands, on their heads, to and from the market, crusty flatbread tucked under their arms like newspapers hot off the press. Butterflies danced, enjoying their morning flutter before the day turned unbearably hot and they slept it off inside sticky blossoms. Incense lingered on the skin and robes of the hammals as they pushed their wheelbarrows through the narrow, potholed alley, each man cocooned in the perfume of his home. Leaning against the warm wall, Jama closed his eyes and imagined curling up in his mother’s lap and feeling the reverberations of her songs as they bubbled up from deep within her body. He sensed someone standing over him, a small hand rubbed the top of his head, and he opened his eyes to see Abdi and Shidane grinning down at him. Abdi was the nine-year-old, gappy-toothed uncle of eleven-year-old gangster Shidane. Abdi held out a chunk of bread and Jama swallowed it down.

The black lava of the Shum Shum volcanoes loomed over them when they reached the beach. Market boys of all different hues, creeds, and languages gathered at the beach to play, bathe, and fight. They were a roll call of infectious diseases, mangled limbs, and deformities. Jama called “Shalom!” to Abraham, a shrunken Jewish boy who used to sell flowers door-to-door with him. Abraham waved and took a running leap into the water. Shidane’s malnutrition-blond hair looked transparent in the sunlight and Abdi’s head jiggled from side to side, too big for his paltry body, as he ran into the surf. These two perfect sea urchins spent their days diving for coins. Jama wanted them to take him out to sea, so he collected wooden planks washed up on the shore, and called the gali gali boys to attention.

“Go and find twine so we can go out to sea,” he ordered.

Jama sat on the seaweed-strewn sand while Abdi and Shidane tied the planks into a makeshift raft. Together they pushed the rickety contraption out into the undulating sea. “Bismillah,” he whispered, holding on desperately while Abdi and Shidane propelled him forward, kicking up masses of foam and spray. When the boys tired, they clambered on, panting beside him, their faces upturned to the rising sun. Jama turned on his back and smiled a contented smile, they floated gently on the young waves and linked arms, water droplets scattered over their skin like diamonds.

“Why don’t you learn to swim, Jama?” Abdi asked. “Then you can come pearl fishing with us. It’s beautiful down there, all kinds of fish and coral, shipwrecks, you could find a pearl worth a fortune.”

Shidane shifted position and the raft spun around with him. “There aren’t any pearls down there, Abdi, we’ve looked everywhere, they’re all gone, taken by the Arabs. Look at those stupid Yemenis, they don’t deserve a boat like that,” he sneered. “If we had a gun we could take everything those fools have.”

Jama lifted his head up, saw a sambuk hurrying back to port with crates piled up on its deck. “Get a gun, then,” he dared.

“Ya salam! You think I can’t? I can make one, boy.”

Jama pulled himself up onto his elbows. “What?”

“You heard me, I can make one, I’ve been watching the soldiers. Some people are always active, always thinking. It’s simple for someone like me to make these Ferengi things, you get a piece of hardwood, make a hole all the way through, get gunpowder, stuff it into the hole, then fill one end with pebbles and in the other put a lit string, then blow fools like those into the sea.”

“More likely you would blow your burnt futo into the sea.”

“Laugh all you like, you big-toothed Eidegalle donkey, I will be the mukhadim, if you are lucky you can be my coolie.”

“Yes! We could be shiftas of the sea, covered in gold. Wallaahi, everyone will shake when they see our ship,” Abdi said, firing imaginary bullets at the sun.

Jama felt water against his skin. “Yallah, yallah, back to the beach! The twine is loosening,” he cried as the planks fell apart.

Abdi and Shidane sprang into action, grabbing his arms and bearing him aloft like two well-trained dolphins.

Walking out into the dust and scorching heat, Jama instinctively headed for the warehouse district. He kicked a can down the streets of Crater, a town in the heart of a volcano. Sunlight reflected against the tin roofs of the warehouses, blinding him momentarily. The smell of tea, coffee, frankincense, myrrh swept up the hill and swathed him in a nauseating, heady mix. As Jama reached the first warehouse, bare-chested coolies chanted while they pushed heavy wooden crates onto the backs of lorries. After standing outside Al-Madina Coffee Stores for a moment, Jama walked through the stone entrance and peered into the darkness. Sunlight splintered through the roof, illuminating the dust rising from the coffee beans as they were tossed to loosen the husks. A field of underpaid women in bright, flowery Somali robes were bent over baskets full of beans, spreading them on a cloth and removing stunted ones before the coffee was exported. Jama weaved around them, looking for a woman with smallpox scars, copper eyes, canines dipped in gold, and inky black hair. He found her in a corner, working on her own with a sky-blue scarf holding her hair back. She brought his head down to kiss his cheek, her soft, freckly skin brushing against his.

Ambaro whispered in his ear, “What are you doing here, Goode? This isn’t a playground, what do you want?”

Jama stood in front of her, legs entangled like a flamingo’s. “I dunno, I was bored… do you have any change?” He hadn’t been thinking of money but now he was too embarrassed to say he just wanted to see her.

“Keleb! You come to my place of work to hassle me for money? You think of no one but yourself and may Allah curse you for it, get out now before the mukhadim sees you!”

Jama turned on his heels and ran out the door. He hid behind the warehouse but Ambaro found him, her rough dry hands pulled him against her. Her dress smelled of incense and coffee. He let his tears soak through to her skin.

“Goode, Goode, please, you’re a big boy, what have I done to you? Tell me? Tell me? Look at the life I’m living, can’t you take pity on me?” Ambaro asked softly. She pulled his arms up and dragged him to a low wall facing the sea. “Do you know why I call you Goode?”

“No,” lied Jama, hungry to hear of the time when he had a real family.

“When I was pregnant with you I grew incredibly large, my stomach stuck out like you wouldn’t believe, people warned me that a young girl of seventeen would die giving birth to such a child, that you would tear my insides out, but I was happy, at peace, I knew I was expecting someone special. Following camels around is terrible work and I got slower and slower. I was often separated from my father’s large caravan and would hobble with my swollen ankles until I caught up with the family. But maybe in the eighth month, I was so exhausted I had to stop even though I had lost sight of the last camel. There was an ancient acacia in a savanna called Gumburaha Banka, and I sat under the old tree to rest in the little shade it provided. I sat and listened to my heavy breath fall and rise, rise and fall. I was wearing a nomad’s guntiino and the side of my stomach was exposed to the sun and breeze. Then suddenly I felt a smooth hand caress my back and move toward my belly button, I looked down in shock, and hoogayey! There was not a hand but a huge mamba curling around my belly. I was scared its heavy body would crush you, so I didn’t move even one inch, but it stopped and laid its devilishly wise face against you and listened to your thumping heartbeat. All three of us were joined like that for what seemed like a lifetime until, having decided something, the snake flexed its sinews and slipped down my body, and with a flick of its tail it disappeared into the sand. I wanted to name you Goode, meaning Black Mamba, but your father just laughed at me; he liked Jama because it was his best friend’s name. But when you slithered out with your beautiful dark skin and your smell of earth, I knew what your name was meant to be. I kept it as my special name for you.”

Jama melted in the warmth of his mother’s words and he felt the liquid gold of love in his veins. He was silent, not wanting to break the spell between them, and she carried on.

“I know I’m tough on you, sometimes too tough, but do you know why I ask things of you? Things that you don’t understand are good for you? It’s because I have such high hopes, you are my good luck baby, you were born to be somebody, Goode. Do you know the year you were born became known as the year of the worm? Fat worms poked their noses out of the earth during the rainy season and came out to consume the grass, the trees, even our straw houses, until, finished, they suddenly disappeared. Everyone thought it was a sign of the end but the elders said they had seen it before and it was barako, as the rains would be plentiful afterward and our camels would breed fantastically. One old woman, Kissimee, told me that as my child would be born in the thick of that plague he would have the most beautiful luck, as if he had been born with the protection of all the saints, and he would see the four corners of the world. I believed her because no one knew that woman to ever make a false prophecy.”

Despite the beauty of her words, Jama felt his mother threading pearl after pearl of expectation into a noose that would sit loosely around his neck, ready for her to hang him one day. He pulled in close to her for an embrace and she wrapped her golden brown arms around his mahogany back, rubbing her fingers along his sharp spine.

“Let’s go back home to Hargeisa, hooyo.”

“One day, when we have enough to go back with,” she said with a kiss on his head. Untying a knot at the bottom of her dress, she pulled out a paisa coin and gave it to Jama. “See you back on the roof.”

“Yes, hooyo,” Jama replied and stood up to go.

Grabbing his hand, his mother looked up at him. “God protect you, Goode.”

Mrs. Islaweyne had a problem with her unwanted houseguest, and she didn’t inconvenience herself by concealing it; rather, in the mother’s long absences she went for the cub. When she realized in her lengthy sickly sweet interrogations that Jama would never speak badly of Ambaro or let slip embarrassing secrets, she volunteered her own criticisms. “What kind of woman leaves her child alone to roam the streets every day?” and “I’m not surprised Somalis have a bad reputation, the way some of these newcomers dress, all naked arms, with their udders hanging out the sides.” The resentment was mutual, and Ambaro and Jama mocked her behind her back. When Ambaro saw Mrs. Islaweyne wrapping her nikaab around her face, she would raise an eyebrow and sing in a bittersweet voice, “Dhegdheer, Dhegdheero, yaa ku daawaan? Witch, oh witch, who will admire you?”

Dhegdheer was a strange, vain woman, with short plump limbs always oiled from head to toe, her eyebrows drawn on thickly with kohl, a fat, hairy mole on her cheek blending into a luxurious mustache, small, swollen feet squeezed into shoes that Ambaro could never afford. Sometimes Dhegdheer would appear on their roof, glaring at them for no particular reason, marking her territory, and when she returned downstairs, Jama would copy her signature waddle and squint to perfection. “Go eat yourself, witch!” he shouted when she was safely out of earshot.

“The one thing that woman is good at is breeding, she must have a highway between her legs, she gives birth to litters of two and three as if she were a stray bitch,” Ambaro would say, and she was right, Jama had counted eight children but behind every door there seemed to be more sleeping or crying. The older Islaweyne boys went to school and chattered away in Arabic, even at home. Jama had learned a rough street Arabic which they mocked, mimicking his bad grammar and slang in slow, imbecilic voices. Although ZamZam was not the most alluring of girls, Dhegdheer had her eye on one of the wealthy Somali men who imported livestock from Berbera and wanted her daughter to appear a delicate flower, cultivated in the most refined setting. Jama heard Dhegdheer complaining to her husband that Ambaro and her guttersnipe son lowered the honor of their family. “How can we be first class when we have people like that in our own home?”

Mr. Islaweyne grunted and waved her away, but it was clear to Jama that his place in the home was precarious. As Jama spent more time on the streets to avoid Dhegdheer and her sons, the more their complaints about him increased.

“Kinsi said she saw him stealing from the suq.”

“Khadar, next door, said that he hangs around the Camel mukhbazar joking with hashish smokers.”

Jama joked with the hashish smokers because he knew his powerlessness and did not want to argue or make enemies. He did not have brothers, cousins, or a father to protect him like the other children. He had recently befriended Shidane and Abdi, who were kind and generous, but friendships between boys of different clans tended to form and collapse as quickly as nomad’s tents, never lasting.

In the apartment, the cold war between the women was thawing and simmering in the summer heat. Ambaro, tired and frustrated after work, became more combative. She used the kitchen at the same time as Dhegdheer, helped herself to more flour and ghee, picked out whichever glass was clean instead of the ones set aside for them, and left the laundry waiting for days at a time. Even with Jama she was like a kettle whistling to the boil: one day she wanted him to work, another day to attend school, another day to stay on the roof and keep away from those market boys, and yet another day she didn’t want to see him ever again. Jama at first tried to soothe her, massaging away all the knots in her body with his keen, sprightly fingers, but soon even his touch irritated her and he left her, to spend the nights with Shidane and Abdi. He returned every few days to wash, eat a little, and check on his mother, until one evening he came in to find Ambaro and Dhegdheer in the kitchen, bosoms nearly touching, nails and teeth bared, ready to pounce on each other. From what he could tell through the shouts of “Slut born of sluts!” and “Hussy!” Dhegdheer was ordering his mother out of the kitchen, and she was cursing and standing her ground, looking ready to spit in Dhegdheer’s face. Jama grabbed his mother’s arm and tried to pull her away. Dhegdheer’s sons, older and stronger than Jama, slunk into the kitchen, unable to ignore the shouting women any longer. Ambaro and Dhegdheer were now grappling with each other, pushing and shoving among the steaming pots, and Jama hustled the pans off the fire and put them out of harm’s way. Ambaro was younger, stronger, and a better fighter than the housebound Dhegdheer, and she pushed the older woman into a corner.

“Soobah, soobah, come on,” jeered Ambaro.

Dhegdheer’s oldest son grabbed hold of Ambaro and jostled her onto the floor.

“Stop that shameful behavior,” he squeaked in his breaking voice.

Seeing his mother lying on the floor, Jama without any thought picked up a pan of boiling soup and slung the steaming liquid in the boys’ direction. The soup fell short of their bodies but cascaded over their bare feet. Dhegdheer was beside herself. “Hoogayey waan balanbalay, my precious boys, beerkay! My own livers,” she keened. “May Allah cut you up into pieces, Jama, and throw you to the wild dogs.” Dhegdheer picked up a long butcher’s knife and began sharpening it. While Ambaro tried to wrench it out of her hands, Jama darted beneath their legs and escaped from the apartment.

Shidane and Abdi slapped Jama on the back when he told them he was never going back to the Islaweyne house. Aden was a huge, dangerous playground for market boys and Shidane knew all of the secret nooks, crevices, holes, and storerooms that made up its unseen map. Together they could avoid older boys who would rob or beat them. Each morning they ambushed donkey carts to steal bread and woven baskets of honey, Jama and Shidane wrestling the young Arab drivers down while Abdi carried away what they needed. It was only when they became a gang that Jama realized Abdi was nearly deaf, he would put his ear right up to your mouth to compensate and hold your hands while he listened.

As they sat on their rooftop, watching the setting sun turn the pools of water in the ancient tanks into infant stars, Jama and Abdi snuggled under an old sheet. Shidane laughed at their canoodling and they laughed at his big ears.

“No wonder your poor uncle is so deaf! You have taken enough ears for both of you,” said Jama, grabbing hold of Shidane’s flapping ears.

“You can talk!” exclaimed Shidane in response, pointing at Jama’s big white teeth. “Look at those tusks in your mouth! You could pull down a tree with them.”

“You wish you had teeth like mine, rabbit ears. With a lucky gap like this in my teeth, you wait and see how rich I become. You would die for my teeth, admit it.” Jama displayed his teeth for them to envy.

Ambaro had spent days holding her breath when Jama had disappeared, while Dhegdheer took quiet satisfaction from her pain. Mr. Islaweyne had allowed Ambaro to move into a tiny room in the apartment until he found another clansman or woman to take her in; he did not want to earn a bad name by throwing her out on the streets. Ambaro searched for Jama in dark, filthy alleys late at night, long after her twelve-hour shift had finished she was still looking, she went to his old haunts, asked around with the other market boys but they kept the stony silence of secret police when adults penetrated their world. She had no friends among the coffee women, and unlike the other Somali women she met at the water faucet or bought pastries from in the street, their troubles gushing forth at every opportunity, her anguish stayed locked up within her chest without release. Her pride would not allow her to broadcast her woes, her life would not become honey for gossips, who “Allah-ed” and bit their lips in front of her and laughed behind her back. She continued her late-night search on her own; Jama disappeared regularly but Ambaro had a panicky feeling that this time he would not come back. Her daughter, Kahawaris, began appearing in her dreams, and she hated dreaming of the dead.

Unlike the Somali hawkers, coffee cleaners, beggars, or dancers who often abandoned four- and five-year-old boys on the street when their fathers absconded, she had guarded Jama as best as she could, and thought day and night, How can I keep my baby safe? They had come to Aden expecting an El Dorado where even the beggars wore gold but instead it was a dirty and dangerous place, heaving with strangers and their vices.

Jama was the only family she had or wanted; she had not seen the rest since leaving for Aden. Ambaro had grown up in the care of her aunt after her mother, Ubah, died of smallpox. Izra’il, the angel of death, had barged through Ubah’s door fourteen times to spirit away her legion of children with diarrhea, petty accidents, coughs that had wracked tiny rib cages. Ubah had left one live child, a heartbroken, sickly little girl who haunted her grave, waiting for the Day of Judgment to arrive and restore her mother to her. Smallpox had laid its hand on Ambaro’s body but she had survived, wearing her scars as proof of her mother’s ghostly protection. As she grew older, Ambaro became a lean, silent young woman, beyond the jurisdiction of her father’s other wives; she wandered far away with the family goats and sheep. Grief for her mother and lost brothers and sisters kept her detached from the other members of the family, who feared her and worried that misfortune might lead her to perform some evil witchcraft on them. Ambaro’s eyes were too deep, too full of misery to be trustworthy. It was only Jinnow, the levelheaded matriarch of the family, who showed her any affection. Jinnow had delivered Ambaro into the world as a baby, whispering the call to prayer in the small shell of her ear. Jinnow had held the baby up to her mother, rubbed the blood off the child and revealed the brown birthmark on her cheek that earned her the old-fashioned name Ambaro.

Guure the orphan grew up in the adjacent aqal with another elderly aunt, but while Ambaro was called “cursed” and “miserable,” he was petted and fawned over. He pulled Ambaro’s plaits and nicknamed her “Ameer,” heifer. One dry season, Guure went away with the camels an irritating, dry-kneed wastrel and came back a lissome poet with long eyelashes. She watched him for a long time before he noticed her, but then he began sneaking up behind her as she trekked to the well or collected firewood. She had always felt as thorny and barren as the desert that surrounded her, with snakes and cacti in her heart, but Guure brought rains that made the cacti flower.

When Guure’s proposal of marriage was refused by Ambaro’s father, she pleaded with Jinnow to send word to Guure to meet her, and Jinnow, unable to deprive her of any happiness, acquiesced. Ambaro wrapped herself in her newest shawl, broke through the back of the thorn fence, and escaped into the night. Guure stood waiting under the great acacia as she planned, lithe and smiling, his skin shining in the moonlight. His brown afro formed a halo around his head and with his luminous white robes she felt she was running away with the archangel Jibreel. He had brought with him a cloth bundle. He kneeled down to open it and brought out a pomegranate, and a gold bangle stolen from his aunt; he passed these to Ambaro, kissing her hands as she took them. Then he removed a lute and pulled her down to sit next to him, the cloth underneath her. He plucked the strings sparsely, delicately, watching the shy smile on her face grow mischievously; he then played more confidently, easing out a soft melody. It sounded like spring, the twang of a blossom as it bursts out if its bud. They sat entwined until the moon and stars were hidden by clouds, leaving them with the freedom of the night.

They were married the next day by a desolate saint’s tomb near the road to Burao, in a wedding witnessed by strangers and conducted by a rebellious sheikh who laughingly placed two goats in the role of the bride’s male guardians. They returned nervously to the family encampment, its girding of thorn branches torn in places by jackals, bloodstains and wool stretching away into the desert. The elders were furious, both for their disobedience in getting married and for damaging the fence, so they refused to give anything to the young couple, who were forced to build a ramshackle aqal of their own. Ambaro quickly learned that her husband was a hardened dreamer, always stuck in his head; he was the boy everyone loved but would not trust with their camels. Guure could not accept that his carefree youth was over; he still wanted to wander off with his friends, while all Ambaro wanted was a family of her own. Guure played the lute with all of his passion and attention but was listless and incompetent with the practical details of life. They had no livestock and lived on plain jowari grain, boiled and tasteless. Jinnow smuggled them small offerings of meat and ghee when possible but she could not stop tut-tutting at the predicament Ambaro had got herself into; she had wanted Guure and Ambaro to get married but not in this slapdash, hurried way. Jinnow’s disappointment was cutting to Ambaro, and in the blink of an eye, she became Guure’s judge, his overseer, his jailer; she followed him everywhere and dragged him home when necessary.

When Jama arrived a year later in Ambaro’s eighteenth year, she hoped it would force Guure to start providing but instead he carried on endlessly combing his hair and playing his lute, singing his favorite song to Ambaro, “Ha I gabin oo I gooyn. Don’t forsake me or cut me off.” He occasionally dangled the baby from his thin fingers before Ambaro snatched Jama away. Ambaro carried both a knife and a stick from the magic wagar tree to protect her son from dangers seen and unseen — she was a fierce, militant mother, her sweet mellow core completely melted away. Ambaro tied the baby to her back and learned from Jinnow all the things that women did to survive, how to weave straw baskets, make perfume from frankincense and myrrh, sew blankets from Ethiopian cloth, intending to barter these items in neighboring settlements for food. Whatever Ambaro did, they remained destitute, and she was reduced to foraging in the countryside for plants and roots: dabayood, likeh, tamayulaq. When Guure began to spend his days chewing qat with young men from whom he caught the Motor Madness, Ambaro was ready to tear her hair out. He bored Ambaro with obsessive talk about cars and the clansmen who had gone to Sudan and earned big money driving Ferengis around. It all seemed hopeless to Ambaro, who had never seen a car and could not believe that they were anything more than the childish sorcery of foreigners. Ambaro tried desperately to extinguish this fire that was burning in Guure, but the more she criticized and ridiculed him, the more Guure clung to his dream and convinced himself that he must leave for Sudan. His talk stole the hope from her heart, and she wondered how he could desert his family so easily. He would hold her as she wept, but she knew only heartache lay ahead.

Guure quietened down when a daughter arrived a year after Jama, a smiling golden child with big happy eyes that Ambaro named Kahawaris, after the glow of light before sunrise that heralded her birth. Kahawaris became the light of their lives, a baby whose beauty the other mothers envied and whose giggles rang through the camp. Jama had grown into a talkative little boy, always petting his little sister, accosting the adults with questions while he carried Kahawaris on his back: “Why are your toenails black?” “What made your beard orange?” With his two children pawing at him, complaining and crying with hunger each night, Guure promised that he would take any work he was given, even if it meant carrying carcasses from the slaughterhouse. He began to help Ambaro with the chores, scorning the jeers of his friends to collect water from the well and milk the goats alongside the women.

Life carried on bearably like this until, after a long, exhausting day of collecting gum for her perfumes, Ambaro unstrapped her daughter from her back and found her limp and lifeless in the cloth sling. Ambaro screamed for Guure and he took the child from her arms and ran to Jinnow, who tried to rouse the baby with drops of ZamZam water and prayers and slaps.

Ambaro’s soul emptied after her baby’s death, she wept in sunshine and moonlight, she refused to get up, to feed herself or Jama. She blamed Guure for making her carry a young baby while she bartered from settlement to settlement in the heat and dust. Ambaro had feared for Jama, as a baby she had constantly put her ear against his heart to check it was still beating, but he had thrived with her. Now she felt that she had failed Kahawaris, had been a bad mother to the beautiful child, had become arrogant and careless. Guure struggled hopelessly to look after them. He fed and bathed Jama but he could not trade and barter like Ambaro, so they often went hungry or begged. He did not know the value of anything: Was a perfume vial worth two blankets or just one? How much grain should he ask for if he gave a woman a basket full of tamarind? The wily women cheated him and sent him away with curses. Guure’s father had died before he was born, so he had no idea what a father did or didn’t do, he just floundered along guiltily, frightened that Jama would also die. Finally, when a drought devastated the clan’s camels, sheep, and goats, people began to disappear: some to find work in Hargeisa, some to live with relatives in Aden. Families dissolved as people sought survival down every dirt track.

Guure cupped Ambaro’s face in his hands and said, “Look, either I go and make a living for us or you do. What will it be?” Ambaro took his hands away and kept silent.

That very same day, Guure set off on a mapless, penniless journey to Sudan. That was the last they saw of him, though they sometimes heard tales of his wanderings: clansmen told Ambaro that he was in Djibouti singing, in Eritrea fighting, in Sudan driving. She did not tell Jama these stories, not wanting to raise his hopes with mere rumors; only news of deaths and births could be trusted along these slippery streams of walking men. Ambaro waited and waited for Guure, not knowing if he had died, gone mad, met someone else. Her family demanded that she divorce him, the wadaads told her that she had been abandoned and was free, but still she waited. She went to Aden and its factories, hoping to earn enough to track him down. She cursed her admirers and sent them away in the hope that one day Guure would appear over the horizon with his lute strapped to his back.

Returning to the Islaweynes’ house was too bitter a fruit for Jama to stomach; the bloated, pompous pig of a woman treated Jama and his mother like flies hovering around her heaped dinner plate. He had grown tired of making his small body even smaller so that false queen could feel like the air in the room was her sole preserve. Even his mother did nothing but give him a headache with her cursing, shouting, and smacking, and he stayed away longer than he intended because he was afraid of the beating he would eventually receive. Living on the streets intermittently from the age of six had furnished him with a wolfish instinct for self-preservation; he could sense danger through the small hairs on his lower back and taste it in the thick, dusty air. He thought from the primitive, knotted tangle of nerves at the base of his spine — like Adam, his needs were primal, to find food, find shelter, and avoid predators. Sleeping on roofs and streets had changed his sleep from the contented slumber of an infant, safe within his mother-sentried realm, to a jerky, half-awake unconsciousness, aware of mysterious voices and startling footsteps. Weeks came and went but Jama rarely knew where he would be eating or sleeping on any given night, there was no order to his life. Jama could easily imagine growing old and weak on these cruel streets, eventually being found one day, like other market boys he had seen, cold and stiff on the curb, a donkey cart carrying him away to an unmarked pauper’s grave outside town before stray dogs made a meal of him.

His favorite place to sleep was an earth-smelling nook on the roof of a teetering apartment block. It was formed by a mud wall that curled over to make a three-sided tomb, and in it Jama felt as safe as the dead, in this world but not of it, floating high in the sky. At dawn he would wake up and watch the little insects as they carried on with their busy lives, scurrying across the wall with so much self-importance, crawling over his fingers and face as if he were just a boulder in their way. He felt as small in the world as them but more vulnerable, more alone than the ants with their armies or the cockroaches with their tough shells and hidden wings.

This night he would return to the new apartment block he had been sleeping in with Shidane and Abdi for a few weeks. Letting himself quietly into the building, he found the kind old caretaker who allowed them the use of the roof, and wished the sleepy-eyed Haji goodnight. Jama went up to the roof, feeling a hollowness in his chest from wanting to be with a mother whose company he found too difficult to bear. On reaching the roof, he saw his inner emptiness matched by complete silence. Abdi and Shidane were not there, perhaps were sleeping somewhere else. The loneliness Jama felt carved even deeper into his soul; he needed Abdi’s small warm body to huddle up with tonight, his wet nose tucked in Jama’s neck. Jama stepped onto the ledge and looked up at the stars and the indifferent moon.

He hung there, enjoying the vast drop inches away from his feet, and at the top of his lungs called out, “Guure Mohamed Naaleyeh, where are you? Come find your son!”

His voice echoed against the buildings and drifted out to sea.

Shidane led his gang through the streets of Ma’alla, the Arab section, filling in his uncle and Jama on the local goings-on, passing the information he had gleaned from his errand work. Men and women moved behind curtains like jerky Indian puppets, their lives framed by windows and backlit by lamps as the boys watched them from the twilight street.

“The woman in that house is really a eunuch, I have seen him take off his sharshuf and underneath he has a gigantic club sticking out, hair all over his arms and feet, oof! He looked like a wrestler, wallaahi, I swear.”

Jama looked incredulously at Shidane and pushed him away. Extravagantly red roses the size of Jama’s face flopped over the exterior walls of the houses, filling the air with their molasses-sweet scent. Jama picked one off its stem, stroking the petals that felt like down on a butterfly’s wing, then waved it in a circle in the dusk breeze, trailing a ballet of insects that urgently followed the arcing fragrance.

“And that man, see him up there? In the turban? He is always in and out of jail, all of his teeth are gold, he’s a diamond smuggler, he can take out his teeth and hide diamonds inside, I’ve seen him do it at night through the window.”

Abdi with a rapt expression exclaimed, “Inshallah, I will be a diamond smuggler when I’m older, that’s even better than being a pearl smuggler. I would buy sparkling black pointy shoes like rich men wear and buy my hooyo a house and more gold than she could ever wear.” Silently the three boys looked at their naked feet shod only in sand and dirt.

“Do you know what I would buy?” asked Jama.

“A car?” replied Shidane.

“No, I would buy an airplane, so I could fly through the clouds and come down to earth whenever I wanted to see a new place, Mecca, China, I would travel even farther, to Damascus and Ardiwaliya, and just come and go as I wanted.”

“Allah! They are the work of the Shayddaan! You wouldn’t get me in one of those things,” Shidane harrumphed. “My mother says they’re haram, it’s only angels, insects, and birds that God intended to fly, it’s no surprise that they burst into flames. Then when you die your body is turned into ash so you can’t even have a proper burial and you go straight to hell. Serves the Ferengis right, though.”

The rose torn from its bush wilted in the stifling heat and Jama tore it apart petal by petal. “Hey, do you remember that flower merchant we worked for last Ramadan?”

“That shithead, how could we forget him? We are still waiting for our pay. We can’t all flutter our eyelashes at the women like you, Jama. ‘Good evening, aunty, any flowers for you, aunty?’” mimicked Shidane. “Sickening!”

Jama held his finger to his mouth. “Be quiet and listen, Shidane. I heard that he is now a seaman and earned enough on one voyage to take two wives and buy a large house in Sana’a.”

“Two wives!” said Shidane with a whistle. “That ugly sinner! I would be surprised if he managed to trick one blind old baboon into marrying him.”

Abdi creased up at his nephew’s cruel tongue. Abdi’s face was usually set in a grave, contemplative expression, but then with a flicker of light in his eyes, a crooked smile would crack it open, revealing teeth that tumbled over one another.

Jama had enjoyed carrying the big baskets laden with jasmine, frangipani, and hibiscus from door to door in the cool quiet twilight, smiling at the pretty wives and daughters of wealthy men in the rich neighborhoods. By nightfall his skin and sarong would be infused with an intoxicating smell of life and beauty. He returned home to decorate his mother’s black hair with the crushed pink, red, and purple flowers at the bottom of the basket that the rich women didn’t want. The bruised petals were the only gifts he had ever brought her; with the flowers he could make her beautiful, run his fingers through her hair and over the soft skin of her neck, his fingers scented with jasmine.

As the three boys padded down the street, a racket broke the silence of the neighborhood. A woman’s screams rose above the general shouts and Jama nervously looked at the others. A small middle-aged woman darted around a corner, running barefoot past them with the front of her gown ripped open revealing an old gray brassiere, her face contorted in unseeing terror.

Behind her chased a group of older men, one of them bearing a knife, another a thick cane. They hollered after her, “Ya sharmuta! Whore! Adulteress! You have brought shame on our street. By God, we will catch you.”

Behind them a ragtag bunch of children came, some crying, some cheering and laughing. This human storm engulfed Jama and then flowed away just as quickly. Jama stood still, bewildered by what he had seen, his head still turned in the direction of the lynch mob.

“Let’s chase them!” shouted Shidane, and they pelted after the crowd. “Which way did they go?” Jama asked, trying to pinpoint where all the commotion had gone.

The screams were piercing when they reached the dirty alley where the woman had been cornered. Her children clung to her, a howling, shaking little girl holding her mother around the waist, and a teenage boy desperately trying to put his slight body between his mother and the man holding the knife. Shidane pushed through the crowd to the woman, the knife frozen in the air above their heads.

“Let go of her!” he screamed. “Let go of her, you son of a bitch.”

Jama saw the man with the cane slap Shidane around the back with it, and the other thug held him back as the old man cursed and lunged at Shidane: “Get away from here! Ya abid, slave,” he raged.

The crowd of excited children shifted around Jama, their eyes wide with terror and joy at what they were seeing. One boy kept climbing Jama’s back for a better look but he threw him to the ground. Abdi was hanging from the arm of the man with the cane. Jama, worried that Abdi would be beaten, grabbed hold of the knife man’s arm and sunk his teeth in. He bit harder and harder until the knife dropped to the ground. Shidane picked it up and dragged Jama and Abdi away, into the night, the dagger tucked into Shidane’s ma’awis.

The next day, the boys stalked the outdoor restaurant of Cowasjee Dinshaw and Sons like a pack of stray dogs. They flanked the seated cosmopolitan diners, who had ordered heaped plates of rice with chicken, spaghetti with minced lamb, maraag with huge hunks of bread. The clinking of full glasses and chatter drifted up into the air along with faint arabesques of cigarette smoke. Jama wiped his salivating mouth and made eye contact with Shidane, who was standing behind the table of a suited Banyali merchant and his elegantly sari’d companion, her juicy flesh peeking out from underneath her fuchsia choli. The boys had barely eaten or drunk anything for days and they had to restrain their desire to knock the waiters down and snatch the steaming plates from their hands. The waiter took the white towel hanging over his forearm and flicked Abdi roughly around the back of his legs with it. “Yallah! Yallah! Leave our customers in peace,” he shouted. The boys pulled back from the restaurant and regrouped at the palm trees lining the road. Abdi gestured toward the Indian couple, who were settling their bill. Jama and Shidane sprinted to the table and in one swift movement tipped two plates of leftover spaghetti into their sarongs, which they had pulled out into makeshift bowls. Abdi collected all the bread and then ran after Jama and Shidane as they scrambled up the road. They stopped the instant they realized they were not being pursued and dropped down by the side of the road with their backs against a wall. They pulled the food to their mouths as if they would never eat again, silently and with a fixed attention to the meager meal in their laps. Abdi tried to pick spaghetti from Jama’s and Shidane’s laps but had to dodge their frenetically moving fingers. They in turn grabbed at the bread in his hands, and it was only after he shouted in despair that they slowed down and allowed him his share of the booty. Jama and Shidane wiped their greasy fingers on the sand beneath them and watched as Abdi lethargically finished off the scattered bread crumbs. Jama’s eyes scanned over the little boy’s protruding ribs and matchstick-thin ankles and wrists. “Abdi, why do you eat like a chicken? You’re always getting left with the crumbs, you have to be fast!”

“Well, I would eat more if you two pigs didn’t swallow everything before I can even sit down,” Abdi replied sullenly.

Abashed, Jama and Shidane giggled but did not meet each other’s eyes.

“I want to go see my hooyo again,” said Abdi sadly. “I think she’s ill.”

“Don’t worry, we’ll go tomorrow. We’ll all be going back to Berbera soon anyway. The dhows are already leaving for Somaliland. I can’t wait for this year’s fair: coffee from Harar, saffron, tusks, feathers from our great Isse Muuse, Garhajis with myrrh, gum, sheep, cattle, and ghee, and the Warsangeli with their bloody frankincense. And all those Arabs and Indians to pickpocket before our morning swim. Are you not going, Jama?” asked Shidane.

“No, I’m staying here, in the big city. I’ve got nothing to go back for,” lied Jama. Shidane stared at him, a smile pulling at his mouth.

“Where is your father, anyway? Why did he run off? Was it you or your mother that got on his nerves?”

“Shut up, Shidane,” Jama replied sternly. Shidane picked on people the way he picked at scabs, trying to get to the red, pulpy stuff underneath. Jama hated Shidane when he was like this. Shidane’s mother was a prostitute in a port brothel, but Jama still never dared insult Shidane back. The boys never took Jama with them when they visited Shidane’s mother but Jama had followed them once, he watched from behind a post as Shidane and Abdi embraced a small woman in a Ferengi shirt, her red hair flying in the breeze. She was surrounded by the hard-living women of the port who drank, chewed tobacco and qat, and attracted sailors by shaking tambourines and dancing. Shidane’s mother looked like a lost bride with her red lips, kohled eyes, and copper jewelry, but behind the makeup was the bloated, yellow face of a drunkard.

Shidane’s father had been killed by a British bomb left behind from their campaign years earlier against the Mad Mullah, and the rage that this had spawned in Shidane sometimes made his temper flare up as brightly as magnesium. He would seek out fights and get pulverized. Jama and Abdi would then huddle silently around him, tentative, as he wheezed and swore at them for being cowardly, stupid, pathetic, his eyes bloodshot with held-back tears. Jama and Abdi loved Shidane, so they tolerated his foul mouth, his unreasonable demands, his cruelty; he was too charming to hold a grudge against. His gigantic eyes could be so sincere and full of compassion that they could not stay angry with him.

Without Shidane and Abdi, Jama’s days would be long, lonely, and almost silent. They had insinuated themselves deep into his heart, and Jama liked to pretend that they were his brothers. The only time they were separated now was when Shidane and Abdi went to Steamer Point to dive for pennies. Cruise ships on the way to India or the Far East stopped off in Aden and idle passengers would throw coins into the water to watch the gali gali boys risk their lives to collect them. Jama occasionally watched them, Shidane dangerously sleek and elegant in the water, Abdi struggling always with a mouthful of saltwater. After hours in the sea they would come ashore with their cheeks full of coins and spit them out at Jama’s feet; it was begging, but they made it look beautiful.

At Shidane’s instigation the gang would sometimes go looking for trouble. Indian kids, Jewish kids, and Yemeni kids all lived with their parents, however poor they might be. It was only the Somali children who ran around feral, sleeping everywhere and anywhere. Many of the Somali boys were the children of single mothers working in the coffee factories, too tired after twelve hours of work to chase around after boisterous, hungry boys. Their fathers came and went regularly, making money and losing it, with the monsoon trade. With no parental beatings to fear, the Somali boys saw the other children as well fed and soft enough to harass safely.

Jama, Shidane, and Abdi liked to prowl around Suq al-Yahud, and the Banyali area as well as old Aden. Today, they penetrated the Jewish quarter, walking under the flapping laundry crisscrossing the alleys, looking for boys their age to fight. The Jewish boys looked so prim and proper in comparison with them, overdressed with little skullcaps balanced on their heads, books tucked under their arms as they returned from yeshiva.

Shidane picked up a stone and lobbed it at one. “Hey, Yahudi, do they teach you this at your school?” he said with the secret envy of the illiterate. Abdi and Jama, although hesitant, picked up smaller stones and threw them as well.

The Jewish schoolboys piled up their books in a heap. “Somali punkah-wallahs, your fathers are dirty Somali punkah-wallahs!” they shouted and started bombarding the Somali boys.

Soon vile insults in Arabic against one another’s mothers were exchanged along with the stones. Jama chipped in with a few Hebrew insults he had learned from Abraham, a boy he used to sell flowers with: “Ben Zona! Ben Kelev! Son of a whore! Son of a dog!”

The Jewish boys had sweat dripping down their temples into their ringlets, and their tunics were damp with it. Jama and Shidane cackled as they avoided the sharp stones, pushing Abdi out of the way whenever one was aimed at him. Hearing the commotion and obscenities, mothers came out onto their balconies to hector the little brats. They went unheard until one no-nonsense woman went indoors and returned with a large basin, tipping half of the dirty water on the Somali intruders and splattering the rest on the Sabbath-disrespecting sons of Israel. All of the boys ran away, Jama, Shidane, and Abdi fleeing together, passing fabric shops as their shutters closed for the holy day.

Abdi pinched a black waistcoat that was hanging from a nail and they ran even faster, their booty held aloft while a burly, bearded man chased them. “It’s the Sabbath, you shouldn’t be running!” shouted Jama over his shoulder, and Shidane and Abdi roared at his wit.

The man huffed and puffed behind them but eventually gave up, cursing them in Hebrew. “You should have had a shit. You’re too heavy to catch us!” shouted Jama in a parting shot, as they bolted from the neighborhood.

The Camel mukhbazar was a small, whitewashed greasy spoon with a few round tables inside and Somali baskets hung from the wall in an attempt at decoration. Most of its customers preferred to stand or sit outside in loud groups, metal plates of overcooked pasta or spiced iskukaris rice balanced in their hands. The Camel had become a meeting place for all the Somalis who washed up on the Yemeni coast looking for work. Merchants, criminals, coolies, boatmen, shoemakers, policemen all went there for their evening meal. Jama often hovered around its entrance, hoping to see his father or at least someone who had word of him. Jama did not know what his father looked like; his mother rarely talked about him. Jama always felt, however, that if he ever had the chance to catch his father’s eye, or watch him move or talk, he would instantly recognize him from among the untidy men with shaved heads and claim him as his own.

One windy day, as Jama’s legs and feet were being buffeted by flying refuse, he joined a group of men gathered around Ismail, the owner of the mukhbazar. The Somalis were flowing out into the road to the consternation of Arab donkey drivers and coolies, who struggled past with their heavy loads. Jama heard them cursing the Somalis under their breath. “Sons of bitches should go back to the land-of-give-me-something,” one hammal said. Jama fought the temptation to tell the men what the Arab had dared say. He eased his way into the crowd until he was at Ismail’s shoulder. Ismail was reading from an Arabic newspaper. “Italy declares war on Abyssinia, Haile Selassie appeals to the League of Nations,” he translated.

“To hell with that devilish imp!” shouted out a bystander.

“Colored Americans raise money in churches but the rest of the world turns its gaze,” Ismail carried on.

“Good! They turned their gaze too when the Abyssinians stole our land in Ogaden, handed over to them by the stinking English. If the Habashis can take our ancestral land then let the Ferengis take theirs,” shouted another.

“Runta! Ain’t that the truth! Look at this small boy.” Ismail suddenly lifted his head from the paper and pointed an angry finger at Jama. “Selassie is no bigger than him yet he has the nerve to call himself a king, an emperor, no less! I knew him in Harar, when he was always running to the moneylenders to pay for some work of the devil he had seen the Ferengis with. I bet he needs his servants to pick him up before he can relieve himself in his new French piss pot.”

Jama inched back, the finger still pointed at him as Ismail returned to reading. “The Italians have amassed an army of more than one million soldiers, and are stockpiling weapons of lethal capability. Somali and Eritrean colonial troops are already massed at the borders.”

Ismail stopped and screwed up his face. “One million? Who needs a million of anything to get a job done? This war sounds like the beginning of something very stupid.” He impatiently scrunched up the newspaper, wiping the ink from his fingers with a handkerchief, and padded back inside his mukhbazar.

Jama was eavesdropping on the men’s war talk; the names of strategic towns, disloyal nobles, Somali clans that had decided to fight with Selassie were thrown about over his head. Ismail leaned out the kitchen window and whistled at Jama. “Come in and make yourself useful, boy!”

Two cooks were working in the kitchen. A bald-headed, yellow-toned Somali man cooked the rice and pasta and another, taller man made vats of the all-purpose sauce of onion, tomato, and garlic.

Ismail fluttered around, moving dirty dishes to the basin on the floor. “Get here, boy, and wash these dishes. Do them well and you’ve got yourself a job.”

Jama’s eyes widened with happiness at the prospect of regular money and he rushed toward the pyramid of dishes. The hot water scalded his arms but he scoured and rinsed the heavy pots and pans without complaint. His nimble, strong hands reached the dirty corners that the adults missed, and he imagined he was scrubbing the roof like he used to for his mother. Ismail stood behind him, scrutinizing his work, but soon left to talk with new customers. Within a few minutes the dirty pyramid had been transformed into a sparkling display of almost-new-looking dishes. Jama turned around with a jubilant look but the two cooks were uninterested in his achievement. Ismail came back into the kitchen and, after casting an eye over his rejuvenated dishes, said, “Come back tomorrow, Jama, you can start at seven in the morning. There’s a plate of rice waiting for you outside.”

Jama skipped past as Ismail slapped the back of his neck. A large white plate of steaming rice and stew was placed on a table, and he stopped to smell the delicious aroma and wonder at all this food that was entirely his own. Eating slowly was a luxury he rarely allowed himself but he chewed the lamb meditatively, removing all the meat from the bone and sucking out the marrow. He licked the plate clean, then sat back as his stomach strained against his knotted sarong. As soon as he felt able, he waddled out toward the beach, eager to boast to Shidane and Abdi about this unexpected good luck at a place they were used to stealing from. Shidane’s idea had been to tie a fresh date to a stick, and use the contraption to pick up paisas left on tables for the waiters. Jama was the best at casually, innocently walking past and stabbing the coin with the stick. When they had finally been caught by a waiter who knew Shidane’s reputation, they had moved on to the Banyali quarter. Shidane would throw a bone into the shops of the vegetarian Hindus and Jama would offer to remove it for a price.

Shidane and Abdi were kicking at the surf. The waistcoat Abdi had stolen looked ridiculous hanging from his bony shoulders, and Jama burst into laughter at the sight of Abdi in a fat Jewish man’s clothing. Jama skipped up and jumped onto Shidane’s shoulders. Shidane shook him off in irritation, and said, “Leave me alone, you donkey.” Abdi looked gloomily at them both, rubbing his red, teary eyes with the back of his hand, silently gathering the waistcoat around his ribs to stop the sea breeze blowing it away. Shidane was in one of his moods. He kept staring at Jama, his nostrils round and flared, his face set in a hostile grimace. “Something has happened to Shidane’s mother,” Abdi tried to explain, but Shidane hushed Abdi with a stern finger against his lips.

“What’s the problem, walaalo? You need money? I’ve just had some good luck.”

“What?” asked Shidane defensively.

“I’ve got a job starting tomorrow at the Camel mukhbazar, Ismail wants me to do the dishwashing from now on.”

“Ya salam! You Eidegalle really know how to look out for each other, don’t you?” interrupted Shidane.

“What do you mean by that?” asked Jama in shock.

“Well, it just seems strange that you’re always getting work and you never think to ask for us as well, all you care about is yourself.”

“Have you gone mad?” exclaimed Jama.

“Don’t raise your voice to me, saqajaan, do you hear me? What do you want from us, anyway?”

“Stop it, stop it,” pleaded Abdi. “Just leave Jama alone.”

“Why are you acting like this, Shidane? You know I’ll look after you, you can come and eat there anytime, now.”

“You think we need your charity? That it? Do you think we need the charity of a saqajaan bastard like you?” spat Shidane.

Jama froze, Abdi froze, the children playing nearby froze, even Shidane froze once these spiteful words had left his mouth. Jama felt his pulse beating hard in his temple, in his throat, in his chest, and he felt a trickle of shame running down his back.

“Take that back now, Shidane,” threatened Jama.

“Make me.”

There was only one way to save face after Shidane’s insult, and Jama threw up his fists and charged. A crowd of boys surged forward, emitting a savage cry for blood. Jama pounded his fists clumsily against Shidane’s soft face and slapped away Abdi’s attempts to tear them apart; unable to watch his friends hurt each other, he preferred to take the blows himself. Jama pinned Shidane down on the sand, between his knees the face he had looked for in crowds, the body he had slept next to for months; it was as if the world had been turned upside down. Jama couldn’t bring himself to look into Shidane’s eyes as they fought; a shadow Jama stood to the side and frowned at the pain he was inflicting on his friend. Abdi, unable to stop this cataclysm, gave up and waded in to defend his nephew, pulling at Jama’s hair and feebly trying to pull him off Shidane. Jama turned around and punched Abdi hard in the mouth. Seeing this, Shidane pulled the trophy dagger from his sarong and plunged it into Jama’s arm. Jama tried to jerk away as Shidane lunged forward for another stab but was knifed again. Blood poured onto the sand and was lapped up by the surf. Jama rose woozily from Shidane and squeezed his bleeding arm. Tears gathered, burning hot behind his eyes, but he kept them hard and unblinkingly focused on Shidane.

“Jealous of me, you’re just jealous of me, because you’re a sea beggar, diving for the pennies that Ferengis throw you, and your hooyo opens her legs for them,” Jama yelled.

Shidane clutched at the howling Abdi with one hand, the bloody dagger in the other. “Don’t ever let me see you again or I will cut your throat.”

The crowd of children, who all knew the combatants, kept a respectful distance and noted this shift in alliances. From now on Jama was on his own, a true loner, a boy without a father, brothers, cousins, or even friends, a wolf among hyenas. Jama slunk away, intending to walk and walk until he found himself at the end of the world or could just disappear into the foaming sea. He wanted to escape like the fake prophet Dhu Nawas, who had ridden his white horse into the waves and crests of the Red Sea, who let the sea bear him away from pain and misery.

Approaching the Camel mukhbazar the next morning, Jama’s eyes were sunken and dark, his back aching, but worst of all, his hand bled every time he tried to use it. He had a strip of his sarong tied around his arm which stopped it bleeding, but he was unable to stanch the flow from his hand. He had walked around the eating house from dawn, watching the white walls become more and more luminous against the dark cloth of the sky. He now saw Ismail walking with that camel-like gait that had named his mukhbazar.

“Nabad, Jama,” hollered Ismail.

“Nabad,” mumbled Jama, wringing his hands behind his back.

“You have a long day ahead of you. Start by sweeping the floor and wiping the tables and, when the first customers have eaten, start on the dishes.”

Jama nodded and followed Ismail into the yellow-painted room. He picked up an old broom propped up in the corner and started attacking the piles of sand that had rushed in during the night through the cracked door. Pretty soon springs of blood popped up from Jama’s hand, rivering down the brown earth of his skin and the broom handle to splash red pools on the white cement floor. Ismail returned to find Jama trying to sweep away the blood but just smearing it over a larger area.

“Hey, hey! What are you doing? Why is there blood all over my floor?” shouted Ismail as he lunged toward Jama. Ismail pulled Jama’s hand up into the air and marched him back outside. “Kid, why is your hand bleeding?”

“Someone cut me yesterday, I was only protecting myself, but now it won’t stop.”

“Wahollah, Jama, how do you expect to work today when there is all this najas on your hand? You’re dealing with people’s food, for God’s sake! Go home, come back when it’s healed,” exclaimed Ismail.

“No, it’s fine, please, let me keep my job.” pleaded Jama, but Ismail was a squeamish man and pulled a disgusted face as the blood dripped down from Jama’s hand onto his.

“Jama, I’m sorry, I will keep you in mind if another vacancy arises. Go and wash this so it doesn’t go bad,” Ismail said, dropping the child’s hand.

Ismail rummaged in the pockets of his thin gray trousers and pulled out a handkerchief and a crumpled note. He handed the money to Jama and wiped his hands with the handkerchief. Ismail threw the bloody cloth away and padded back into his café, shutting the door firmly behind him. Jama stood motionless, looking vacantly at the dirty money in his hand.

Jama wanted to distance himself from any gloating eyes, so he walked away from the market toward the port. The sun was starting to thicken the air into a choking fog, and Jama developed the droopy-eyed, slack-jawed expression of the stray dogs that lived on the city limits. More and more Ferengis appeared in the streets; in the starched white uniforms and peaked caps of the Royal Navy, they ignored the young child and drifted in and out of groups sharing cigarettes and gossip. Jama’s eyes fell on a tall, black-haired sailor who was waving goodbye to a group of men; Jama unconsciously followed him and was drawn deeper and deeper into the busy Steamer Point. Massive steel cranes lifted gigantic crates into the air and into waiting trucks. Camels were suspended in terror as they were unloaded from the ships, their legs stuck rigidly out like the points on a compass. Machines belched dirty, hot fumes into the already claustrophobic atmosphere. Jama let his mind and feet wander in this alien place, a comic, strange, technological land so different to his own antique quarter. Staring at the workers, their loud cranking, whirring machinery, and the goods both animate and inanimate had made Jama lose the shiny, obsidian head of the sailor. He sat on a decayed section of wall and dangled his legs over the edge, balancing himself on his hands, a frightening drop beneath his feet. In the distance, steamer ships chugged toward the port with all the slow grace of turtles. Jama tried to imagine where the ships were coming from and going to, but could not really believe in the icy realms and green forests that people had described to him. The vessels seemed both monstrous and magnificent to Jama. Who could create such colossal objects, were they the work of giants, devils, or of Allah? The torrid black smoke emanating from their stacks frightened him and he shivered at the idea that these ships of fire might at any time erupt into hellish infernos. It was supernatural how they defied the laws of nature — the sea swallowed everything he threw into it, so how did these iron-and-steel cities stay afloat as if they were no more than flower blossoms or dead fish? Jama, thirsty, climbed off the wall and went to search for a drink in one of the busy port cafés, his money stuck to his sweaty, bloody hand like a stamp to an envelope. He waited behind the broad back of a sailor at the counter, while a wiry Arab man scurried about delivering drinks to tables. When it was his turn Jama found the counter was taller than him so he pushed his moneyed hand up and waved it at the man serving. “Shaah now!” The waiter let out a derisive snort of laughter but took the money and put a glass of watery tea on the counter. Jama carefully took it down and walked out with his lips placed against the rim of the sticky glass, jingling his change in his other hand.

Jama was tired of always turning up a beggar at people’s doors, begging for someone’s leftover food, leftover attention, leftover love. “Everyone is too busy with their own lives to think about me,” he muttered to himself as he walked to Al-Madina Coffee. He intended to give the change to Ambaro and buy his way back into her affections. Inside the warehouse, the women had moved positions, and new girls were being trained by the Banyalis. A teenage girl was working in his mother’s spot, and he looked at her disapprovingly. He recognized the large woman next to her. “Where is my mother?” Jama demanded.

“How the hell would I know? Do I look like her keeper?” the woman said, pushing Jama out of her way.

“Did the Banyalis tell her to go?”

The woman put her tray of coffee husks down and decided to give Jama exactly ten seconds of her precious time. “She fell sick a few weeks ago, I haven’t seen her since then. She never spoke to any of us so I don’t know where she’s gone, but I shouldn’t be the one telling you all this, boy, she’s your mother, after all.”

Jama dragged his feet out of the warehouse, his eyebrows knotted in concentration as he ran through the possibilities. His mother was suddenly the only person that mattered to him. Sneaking up the gray worn steps into the dim hallway of the Islaweyne apartment filled Jama with unpleasant memories. It seemed incredible to him that his mother, a woman who had so devotedly tutored him in pride, self-respect, and independence could allow herself to become subject to the petty dictatorship of a fat woman and her overfed family. Jama found the roof empty and snuck back downstairs into the apartment. Ambaro had been moved into a closetlike, air-starved room in which old suitcases lay stacked against a wall, watching her silently. She was stretched out on a grass mat, her thin headscarf slid back over big black waves of hair. The tobe she was wearing had split all the way down the side, revealing a body shrunk to childlike fragility. A strange odor hit him as he got closer to her; he saw a basin brimming with najas; phlegm, blood clots, vomit all curdling together.

Ambaro’s hand was thrown over her mouth. He could hear a terrible gurgling sound with every intake of breath. Jama crept closer to his mother, his eyes darted from her knees to her ankles, swollen with the same fluid that was drowning her lungs. “Where have you been, Goode?” Ambaro gasped.

“I’m sorry, hooyo,” Jama whispered as sorrow, regret, shame seared through him.

“Put me by the window, son.”

Jama threw open the window, picked her up under her arms, and dragged her with all of his strength; he gathered her head in his lap and stroked her cheek. Ambaro’s heartbeat shook her body, every pulse pounding against her ribs as if there were a butterfly inside of her, battling free from a cocoon. A gentle breeze washed over them. Ambaro’s lips were a deep, alarming red but her face was pale yellow. He could never have imagined seeing her so sickly, so ruined. Ambaro’s eyelids were clenched in pain, and Jama looked on jealously as her convulsing lungs took all of her attention. He wanted her back, to shout at him, call him a bastard, get up suddenly and throw a sandal at him. Jama placed his mother’s head gently on the floor and rushed from the room.

“Aunty!” Jama cried. “Aunty, hooyo needs a doctor!”

He ran into each room looking for Dhegdheer, finding her in the kitchen. “Hooyo must see a doctor, please fetch one, I beg you.”

“Jama, how did you get in? What kind of people do you think we are? There is absolutely no money for a doctor, there is nothing anyone can do for your mother now, she is in God’s hands.”

Jama pulled out the remnants of his pay and held it up to her face. “I will pay, take this and I will earn the rest after, wallaahi, I will work forever!”

Dhegdheer pushed his hand away. “You are such a child, Jama.”

She turned her back to him, ladled out soup. “Here, take this through to her and don’t make so much noise. Inshallah, she just needs rest.”

Jama took the soup, his head drooping down to his chest, his heart a lead weight, and went back to his mother. He gathered Ambaro in his arms and tried to put the soup to her lips. Ambaro jerked her head away. “I don’t want anything from that bitch. Put it down, Goode.”

Jama felt a surge of power run through Ambaro. She turned her face to the window and took in a smooth, deep breath.

“Look at those stars, Goode, they have watched over everything.” The sky was as black and luminous as coal, a white-hot crescent moon hung over them like a just-forged scythe, the stars flying like sparks from the welder’s furnace.

“It’s another world above us, each of those stars has a power and a meaning in our lives. That star tells us when to mate the sheep, if that one does not appear we should expect trouble, that little one leads us to the sea.” Ambaro pointed at anonymous specks in the distance.

Jama saw only a sea of solitude, an expanse of nothingness impossible to navigate on his own.

“Those stars are our friends, they have watched over our ancestors, they have seen all kinds of suffering but the light in them never goes out, they will watch over you and will watch over your grandchildren.”

Ambaro felt Jama’s tears falling on her and grabbed hold of his hand. “Listen to me, Goode, I am not leaving you. I will live in your heart, in your blood, you will make something of your life, I promise you that. Forgive me, my baby snake, don’t live the life that I have lived, you deserve better.”

“I wanted to make you happy, hooyo, but now it’s too late.” Jama wept.

“No, it is not, Goode, I will see everything that you do, the good and the bad, nothing will be hidden from me.”

Jama pushed his face against his mother’s cheek, rubbed his moist face against hers, hoping to catch whatever she had, to go with her to the next life. Ambaro pulled her face away from him.

“Stop that, Goode. Shall I tell you what the Kaahin told your father?” she cajoled. “A great Kaahin once told your father when he was a boy that his son, the son of Guure Mohamed Naaleyeh, would see so much money pass through his fingers. Guess what your father said to the Kaahin? He asked him, ‘What’s money?’ Neither of us had seen any before, but now I know money is like water, it will give you life. Take the Kitab amulet from around my neck.”

Jama began to unpick the large knots in the string that hung the amulet over Ambaro’s chest. Folded in a paper heart lay prayer after prayer, and in this heart Ambaro kept her hope, as she did not trust her body anymore. The Arabic script had smudged and faded on the thin exercise paper the wadaad had used. “Inside the amulet is one hundred and fifty-six rupees. I do not want you using it until you absolutely need to; wait until you have grown up and know what you want to do with your life.”

Jama squeezed the amulet in his palm. He had never seen a rupee, never mind hundreds of them, his world was of ardis lost in the street, paisas to pay for stale cakes, occasional annas thrown to Abdi from the passenger ships.

“I have been saving that for you, Goode, promise me you will not waste it. Don’t tell anyone about it either, tie it around your neck and forget about it.”

Ambaro’s swamped lungs protested against her chatter and her face suddenly contorted as she gasped for breath. Jama did not believe a word of the old Kaahin’s prophecy; he knew that no boy born for a special fate would have to see his mother choking on strange liquid that poured out of her mouth and nose. Jama wiped his mother’s face on his ma’awis and held her in his arms. “Shush, hooyo, shush,” he soothed, rocking her gently. His mother fell into a curl with her back turned to him and soon fell asleep. Jama watched the rise and fall of her back and grabbed a handful of her tobe to keep himself connected. The fabric dampened in his nervous grip; she was already slipping from him. He would have preferred his umbilical cord to have never been severed but to extend limitlessly like spider’s silk between them. He belonged to no one else, she belonged to no one else, why couldn’t God leave them together?

Jama’s eyes remained open all night, scanning the dark room for any figures that might materialize to take his mother away. The gloom was alive with shifting densities, lumps of gray light that hovered slowly along the floor, furry black masses that shivered in corners. Jama’s fingers loosened their grip on Ambaro’s tobe and reached out. Ambaro’s arm was relaxed along her side, her fingers resting on her hip. Jama placed his hand on hers, she felt like one of those shells washed up on the beach, cold, hard, smooth, veins making superfluous swirls under her skin. Everything powerful and vibrant about her had gone, only the worn-out machinery of her body remained, and the little life that wondrous machinery had produced was left to grieve over everything she had once been.