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Stranger in Paradise

For a few hours I tried to put my disappointment behind me, to make what I could of the place I was so eager to call home. Foreigners, so easily seduced by the island’s outward charms, had long grown disenchanted with life in Zanzibar. In the 19th century, the British consul Christopher Rigby, just months after rhapsodizing about a place that was “the very perfection of rich tropical scenery,” scribbled words like “muggy,” “unwholesome” and “detestable” in his journal. The explorer Burton, mindful of the island’s pestilential climate and murderous intrigues, wrote that “every merchant hopes and expects to leave Zanzibar forever.” Livingstone passed this simple judgment: “No one can truly enjoy good health here.”

But what was “good health,” really? What was I after? In the haste to settle in after countless months on the road, to find a place where I could restore my emotional equilibrium, could stop worrying about getting on the right bus, finding the right room, keeping an eye on the guy who’s keeping an eye on my bags at the train station—in all my eagerness to take a break from the rigors of traveling, I hadn’t asked myself if I could really be happy here.

I was still half a dozen time zones away from the only place I’d ever known in my heart as home: the brick bungalows and johnny pumps, the streets lined with ailanthus trees, the pug-nosed butchers pushing buckets of soapy water across the pavement with their brooms. Home was a father who dozed off in front of ball games on ESPN, it was the familiar smells from the kitchen, the neighbors who knew me since I was a boy. It was a world that had watched me grow. But here, surrounded by a scene of riotous commerce at the market, the ground slick with vegetable carcasses and fish guts and nameless somethings piped from the underbelly of the Third World, I had to wonder if Zanzibar could ever find a place like that in my heart.

Beaten, harried, jostled by spice-sellers, I took panicked flight behind the market. I turned corners, disappeared down blind alleys, found marvelous Swahili doors carved with all the faithful craftsmanship of a Spanish cathedral. Old barefoot men reclined on the stone barazas, moon-eyed, grinning, their faces coarse as peach pits. Women in headscarves fanned themselves in the doorways, henna’d hands fluttering like butterflies. Everywhere I turned I was greeted with smiles, with warm welcomes and salaamas, I was peppered with questions about my family, my home. There were kids shouting and pedaling too-big bicycles with wild abandon. Life, in all its precious delirium, whirled by.

Behind a majestic old mosque I found myself in a courtyard flooded with sunlight. The madrassas were out, the boys in white caftans and the girls in black bui-bui robes scooting across the yard like little chess pieces. Their shouts, their shrill voices, caromed off the walls and shot into the sky like a flight of swallows. And it was at that very moment that I remembered what it was like to fall in love.

Later, at my hotel, the owner introduced me to a friend who was renting an apartment nearby. It was a cavernous one-bedroom with a modern kitchen and a canopy bed and a gaudy living room decked out with gold tulle curtains and silk floral arrangements. It was, in its own scruffy way, absolutely perfect. He named a price: 300 U.S. bucks a month. I asked when I could move in.

The next day I busied myself with the business of making a home of my new home. I bought a woven-palm basket at the market, I filled it with rice and produce, with spices and condiments, with utensils and plastic containers and rolls of toilet paper, with bottles of cooking oil and sacks of sugar. I took pride in arranging and rearranging these things around the house. I plopped down on the living room sofa—my sofa!—and turned on the TV and padded through the kitchen with naked proprietorship. I bought a carton of milk and put it in the fridge and looked at it. It was a marvelous sight.

That night I slept the sleep of a sultan. In the morning the muezzins were calling, the faithful were up early and I could hear them shuffling through the streets. I could hear the fruit-sellers, the women scrubbing last night’s pots, the clanging of a bicycle’s bell, the cries of children, the crows beating their heavy wings and lifting from their nest outside my window. Love can be a simple thing. On the street a boy pushed a wagon full of coconuts, singing softly, his feet scuffing the pavement, the joints of the wagon creaking, the wheels turning over the pebbles and the dust. Sunlight lit the rooftops, the shutters flung open like a lover’s arms, it warmed my hands.

I had a home in Africa and I knew some happiness there. I drank white wine on the balcony and watched the commotion on the street, growing used to the days’ rhythms until they became as familiar as the beating of my own heart. Mothers woke the street with the throaty calls of their domestic tyranny. Solemn men came home at dusk, heavy-shouldered after the day’s labors. In the dwindling daylight, little girls in frayed dresses scampered through the rubble of abandoned houses. They picked the hibiscus flowers growing through the rocks, bending the branches until the blossoms kissed their faces.

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Photos Courtesy:  REUTERS  |  iStockPhoto  |  flickr  

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