been in the Serengeti or back in the Miyi. My father would reminisce about Eritrea, Aden, and the camel bells he played with as a child in the Somali desert. I would sullenly wait for him to finish; what could I imagine of life as a child soldier or as a street boy in Aden, I was not allowed out to the corner shop alone. With a distant sigh, my old father Time would become quiet again and I would tell him what was on my mind, perhaps a new pair of trainers or a puffa jacket. I wanted to be a ragamuffin, never knowing that my father was the biggest ragamuffin, vagabond, buffalo soldier of them all.
And all around us the other vagabonds still pour in. Underneath lorries, stowed away in boats, falling out of the sky from jumbo jets. Even old grandmothers pack up their bags and start the tahrib. Those fortune men like my father who set their footprints in the sand, fifty, sixty, a hundred years ago, are the prophets who led the Israelites out of the wilderness. Whatever Pharaoh says, they will not be tied down, they will not be made slaves, they will make the whole world Their promised land.
The muezzin’s call startled Jama out of his dream, he pulled himself up to look at the sun rising over the cake-domed mosques and the gingerbread Adeni apartments glowing at their tips with white frosting. The black silhouettes of birds looped high in the inky sky, dancing around the few remaining stars and the full 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-coloured 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 neighbourhood with the stench of carrion. The attentive mother fed rotting morsels to her fragile chicks, her muscular wings unhunched and at rest beside her. Jama’s own mother, Ambaro, stood by the roof edge softly singing 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 out 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 away 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 day break 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 with time. 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’, the rubbish bin. 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 in Aden. They had done as promised but it soon became clear that they expected their country cousin to be their servant; cooking, cleaning and giving their family 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 diseases that could infect her precious children. Her gold bangles had clanked around as she checked for nits, fleas, skin diseases; she shamelessly pulled up his ma’awis to check for worms. Even after Jama had passed her medical exam, she glared at him when he played with her children and whispered to them not to get too 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 existence as possible. Apart from the neatly stacked piles of laundry that Ambaro washed and Jama pegged out to dry, they were rarely seen or heard by the family.
Ambaro left for the coffee factory at dawn and didn’t return until dark, leaving Jama to either 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. Somali men asleep by the roadside began to rouse, their afros full of sand, while Arabs walked hand in hand towards the suq. Jama fell in behind a group of Yemenis wearing large gold-threaded turbans and beautiful, ivory-handled daggers in their belts. Jama ran his hands along the warm flanks of passing camels being led to market, their extravagant eyelashes batted 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. The smell of leather harnesses damp with human sweat, of incense lingering on skin from the night before filled Jama’s nostrils. 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. Abdi and Shidane were two perfect sea urchins who spent their days diving for coins. Jama wanted them to take him out to sea so 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