He lay there, on his clay plinth, which seemed a hundred years old as well. A low, thick-thatched sun shelter stood over him, but otherwise he lay in the open, in the shroud of his red robe, as though in yet another trance. I stopped several feet from the pavilion, reluctant to go any farther. Involuntarily, I brooded on the contrast between the straitened circumstances of the Mata of the Menai and the grandeur of the Nanga of the Sontik.
If I had come the day I arrived, I would have met him alive.
A clean-shaven man with an unruly flare of grey hair walked toward the pavilion. He wore an expensive black jacket, but his sweat was plebeian enough. His eyes were intense and piercing, fixing on me from a long way off. Then he approached and offered me a handshake.
‘I’m Professor David Balsam.’
Something clicked from an earlier conversation I’d overheard at Ma’Calico’s, something about a harmless black British professor of history who carried around pictures of a bronze head. The locals called him Questionnaire—because he would ask silly questions until he was shooed away. I glanced across at Amana, and she glared vindictively as she slipped away. It was too late for me.
‘Zanda.’
He nodded. ‘You’re not from these parts.’ Coming from him, it sounded like an accusation.
‘Neither are you,’ I countered. My mood soured further; I was spoiling for a fight. I was back in Kreektown Primary, where, for six years, a staple playground debate was the identity of Zanda’s real father.
‘Exactly.’ He smiled nervously. ‘You wouldn’t know who’s organising this, would you? The old man is not to be buried here.’
Before I could respond, he spotted a more likely face and moved away, but my mood was already ruined. It had been a mistake to come. In the presence of Mata Nimito’s corpse, my remorse flared. I turned to go, but Amana had reappeared. Her mood had swung around, and she beamed excitedly. I wondered what there was to be excited about, at a burial.
‘I’m going to pay my respects. Coming?’
‘You didn’t even know him.’
‘It’s not as if I didn’t try. I came here a couple of times on my job, but he never spoke to me. He didn’t speak English or Sontik, and I don’t speak Menai. Come.’
She grabbed my hand, and I followed her through the crowd. There was an air of the carnival. Although Nigerians lived in awe of death, they saw nothing tragic about the death of an old man. Many had come with cans of beer. A grave had been sunk twelve metres from the Mata’s house. The gravediggers sat on the lip of the readied hole, smoking, joking, and passing a bottle of kai-kai around as they waited for the coffin, which had been donated by the Bus Conductor’s Club. I saw how, unless it was relatives who sank the grave, a burial was more waste disposal than funeral. The cheap coffin appeared, precariously balanced on a wheelbarrow. The gravediggers were anxious to be done, but the auxiliary nurse was, for once, out of his depth. They had to wait for a real doctor from the Ubesia council to sign a death certificate and write a burial licence. A bedraggled choir unloaded drums and cymbals from a minibus. The makings of a slapdash funeral were coming together as I stepped onto the elevation.
This was no way to sing a dead mata’s calamity.
Two youths emerged from the Mata’s submerged home dragging his mananga. My stomach heaved. That act of desecration swamped the distance I had built and nurtured since my emigration, ‘Hai!’ I shouted, advancing. They looked up and fled, leaving the ancient xylophone on its side.
Amana looked at me without comprehension. ‘They’re just having fun. The old man is dead; it’s just going to rot there.’
I kept mute. She was not to know that a mata could not be buried without his mananga.
As we watched, David Balsam ducked into the house. I turned away.
I glanced beyond her at Mata Nimito and stiffened. I took two steps closer. Deep breath. Slow exhale. Deep breath . . . I looked around.
She eyed me curiously. ‘What’s the matter?’
‘Look at him!’ I whispered.
She did so and recoiled. ‘My God! He must have been at least two hundred years old!’
I exhaled slowly. It was another hallucination, then. I walked slowly up to Mata Nimito, philosopher-guide of Menai, and tried to see what I ought to see. He was so old, so frail, and the muscles of the thin limbs that projected out of the red robe were locked and stiff.
Miyaka sia Menai! Jonszer wasn’t addled after all. He had recognised me all along. His last words for me were a disgusted ‘See what’s left of the Menai!’
I wondered what Jonszer would have done.
I knew.
It was a breach of the distance I had built, but it was only a small, anonymous breach. No Menai would ever know. I went to the mananga. The arms were missing from their sockets. 3:2:1:2, that was the base rhythm. I had attended too many calamities ever to forget it. I had never wanted to hear that tattoo again, but for Mata Nimito, for Jonszer, I would play it one more time. I turned to the Mata’s home. The exterior of it was a stretched canvas for a mad illustrator: stick figures and savannahs, cattle and pyramids, tableaus painted in indelible red and black and ochre.
Inside was a large open-plan home, made small by the glut of old, inexpensive things of profound value. Questionnaire was bent over a rack of figurines, circumcisionheads, and carvings by the old man’s bed; he did not hear me enter. A rage flared, but I clamped down on it. Distance. I ignored him. On the wall, I found the mananga’s arms, the hooked mallets that gave voice to the instrument. They were dusty, had clearly not been touched in months. I ducked through the low doorway and stepped outside.
The air was noisy with the chatter of a hundred souls. The clouds were low and swift. I wondered what the Mata would have cast from such a sky.
‘Zanda?’
I turned. Amana was watching me curiously.
I addressed the mananga. It was a monster of a xylophone: three dozen uniquely sized, weighted, and tuned wooden panes, built in an arc around the player. It measured five feet from end to end. I wheeled it up to a rattan bench and sat, my back to the Mata, facing the bulk of the sightseers, most of whom now watched me. Anuesi gubu anueso gudabe: the day’s for the dead, but the dance is for the living. The tanda ma. It was the basic beat every Menai had to learn. It was the frame to which Menai history was set. Slowed down, it was also the frame on which the calamity, Menai’s dirge, was hung. It surged in my heart, but I clamped my teeth on it. I would not speak or sing Menai. From the corner of my eyes, I saw her, the very arch of her body, a question; I shut my mind and my eyes and let my fingers and ears rediscover the tanda ma. The voice of the xylophone drew down a silence on the pavilion. I felt curious eyes on me.
‘Amie Menai anduogu . . .’
Memory flooded me.
‘It is of Menai stock I speak,’ I began to play.
Near the peak of Arrawadi
is the plain of our Kantai . . .
I had not played a minute when I felt the whoosh of air. My hands faltered and I opened my eyes; for a disoriented moment I was back by my primary school locker, letting out the snake. Then I came back to the present: around me surged a stomping mob struggling to escape. Inside me, a floe of fear coalesced. A woman the size and weight of Asia plunged wordlessly past me, crushing my foot under one