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prefer—salt or sugar?”
    “Salt.”
    “Then bring me some salt.”
    Ji Bai went inside and brought a heap of salt on a plate. The mchawi took it from her, turned away and whispered prayers over it, finishing by blowing three circles over it.
    “Take it. Every night take a handful and sprinkle it outside. If you need more, call me.”
    Someone was to make a pile of sticks outside the town on the road to Guu Refu’s farm, with a rock of salt in the centre, and check every morning that it had not been disturbed. Having given these instructions, Bwana Khalfaan strode out, followed by his acolyte. He looked on the ground as he walked, and people moved out of his way. It was not advisable to cross his path.
    Every morning the pile of sticks and branches would be found in disarray, the rock of salt missing, white flour sprinkled on the ground, and Ji Bai would reassemble the pile over a new piece of salt.
    Huseni did not come. Early one morning the captain of a dhow delivered with much ceremony a letter for Dhanji Govindji from Zanzibar.
    “A man answering your description has been sighted. Come soon before he begins to suspect.”
    Dhanji Govindji packed a trunk and set off with the dhow on its return leg. Thus began the first of Ji Bai’s viraha, the long anxious waiting of a woman for her journeyman beloved: every morning she peeps out of the door to see if he’s coming, all day long her eyes fix with hope on a returning traveller, every night she looks out wearily one last time before finally closing the last panel of the door, pulling the stopper shut, fastening the bar, hanging noisy metal objects behind it to keep out intruders in the night.
    And what did the gentle Gulam think of his wife’s silent though somewhat unusual vigil? The gentle Gulam was appreciative of Ji Bai’s solicitousness after his father’s welfare. Father and son never exchanged an angry word. Neither did mother and son. The haughty Fatima simply said, “Let him go to Jhannam with his slave’s son!” Ji Bai and Fatima had never quarrelled either. During Ji Bai’s early days in Matamu, while she and her mother-in-law would enter pregnancy together, wondering who would make it to the end, Fatima would confide to her. “Tell me, what is my sin, that I should inherit this slave’s son with my marriage … this junglee who stands out like a wart in this family, a bad influence on my children, ruining their good name …” And young Moti outside making a racket with pots and pans, pretending not to hear, speaking loudly as she came in, to give ample warning … Fatima came from a family of slave owners. “See,” she would say, “Arab blood runs through my veins, I have Shirazi ancestors, look at my skin, see how different it is from yours …”
    Dhanji Govindji returned one month later, empty-handed. “A waste of time,” he told Ji Bai. “The man’s name was Abdulla Bombay, short and thin, selling ices at the harbour … simply because he has brown skin, with some Arab blood, or Indian blood, or some weird mixture, the mukhi thinks it’s Huseni! A proper swindler, a thief, just after the money. Did he look at the description I wrote him? ‘Big and strong,’ I said. ‘Muscular,’ I wrote in clear handwriting. ‘Strong as Bhima!’ ” Here his voice rose and he thumped his chest. “And this man, this seller of ices to tourists? Short and thin, an Adam’s apple large as a khungu, a squeaky voice like an old woman’s … ah! a shoga, a fag, wagging his bottom as he walks. I thought perhaps if he had seen our Huseni … so I asked him. And where does he take me, this shoga? … Ah, my dear, you should go to sleep.”
    Dhanji Govindji, sitting at the store threshold at night, a panel open, feeling the cool salty air from the ocean, hearingthe occasional voice or shuffle of feet on the road, the roar of the ocean in the background. Sometimes he shelled peanuts as he talked, sometimes he soaked his feet in water.