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 of her flip-flops. Suddenly the carnival was gone, leaving the enclosure like a many-limbed creature, breaking bottles, chairs, and saplings. The cheap coffin was splintered and crushed, the drums were punctured, clothes and shoes littered the Mata’s enclosure, but a tinny voice nearly deafened me, and it came from right behind me. I put away the mananga’s arms in their sockets.
I turned, light-headed. His voice was a note higher than I remembered. He had barely stirred, but he was coming fully out of the trance. It was no hallucination, then. I abandoned the mananga and scrambled up the embankment on my hands and feet. From the Mata’s house, a thunderstruck Questionnaire emerged, bearing two singate heads like holy relics. I looked at the Mata. It seemed evil to call a man this old back from the grave. His eyes were milky, almost undifferentiated between pupil and whites. I searched the drawn face for a familiar expression. Then he spoke, and it was Mata Nimito of the Great Calm. It was not evil, then, it was right, to live.
‘Worie.’
‘Dobemu,’ I replied.
He fell silent at my voice. Then he asked, ‘Ama Zanda mu chei?’
‘Zanda mu chei.’
His eyes closed, and he was breathing regularly again. I bowed, condemned by the silence. When I left, he’d had a Menai nation to care for him. I had not meant for this to happen, that the Mata would face his death alone, among strangers so impatient for him to go.
‘My apologies,’ said Questionnaire. ‘You’re certainly not a stranger to the old man.’
‘Yes,’ I said, not looking at him. ‘And where you were grave-robbing before, now you are a common thief.’
‘You misunderstand me completely. Listen, this is extremely important.’ He was climbing up to us. ‘I’d like to talk to the old man about these. Can you interpret for me?’ He took my shoulder to turn me around. I resisted, protecting my tears from sight, but he was strong, and I turned with him, pushing him away, sending him tumbling down the pavilion, bronzes flying. I wiped my cheeks and bent over the old man.
‘Jons miena qua?’
‘Jonszer amie gonzi.’ There was no point in hiding anything from the Mata. ‘Minsa qua na Agui.’
He turned towards the tidal creek, which sat lower in its bed than I had remembered. He looked at me. His eyes were so milky, I wasn’t sure, now, how much he could see. ‘Amazi manasi ungheu.’
I felt the shame but no surprise at his perfect recollections, for he carried millennia of Menai history in his head. I was away for six and a half years and he picked up as if I had just returned from the stream. His eyebrows lifted, and I followed his eyes to the huddle of wine gourds assembled for the burial. He could see well enough, then.
I filled two brown glasses and brought them over. He stared. I remembered and scrambled for water. Water was primal, water was first. I gave him a gourd, which he took with a hand that trembled. ‘Amis andgus.’
‘Andgus ashen,’ I replied and drank from the same gourd. I drank deep, quenching a sudden thirst not for water but for custom. It was true, then: all the healing in the world was in the gourd of water.
‘This is old water,’ I said in the Menai equivalent of small talk, dodging the weighty things that had to be said.
‘The sky pissed it when the world was young,’ he agreed.
An age passed. The sun was going down, so I pivoted the sun shelter until he was looking into clear skies. His hand—leathery, insubstantial—fell on my head, and a shroud of gooseflesh wrapped itself around me, stubbling my skin. I began to remember. Flakes of memory began to coalesce around the water in my guts. I served his wine and joined his eyes in the skies.
There was no ‘ordinary’ sky. Each one was unique. Every hour’s pattern was a perfect, never-to-be-repeated arrangement of shades, wisps, and auguries. For a cloudcaster like Nimito, a sky—day or night—was not just a densely scripted tome to be studied, deciphered, and decoded but a backdrop on which to project and encode a mata’s legendary memories of the past and deductions of the future. For me it was just a ceiling for life, but in his presence it acquired a grandeur that it normally lacked.
I found myself stealing glances at his riveted face, trying to glean something of the psychosis that had kept this man so long and consistently in this groove. His eyebrows were the most animated part of him, the one organ that seemingly refused to atrophy, gaining, instead, a second sight that stymied the first. The muscles of the brows were still as limber as a tongue. I watched the emotions course through them. A flash of sly. A pucker of small surprise. And then—thirty-five minutes after our ritual drink of water—an electrifying dilation that swamped the orbs and spread, through stiffening, corded muscles, through his wasted body.
His face fell slowly from the skies until his eyes held my gaze. There was a look of ineffable sadness in them. I knew it was time to mourn Jonszer. Yet by killing himself he had fallen foul of the great taboo. The Mata could not sing the tanda ma of his man Friday.
I went to the mananga, wondering whether I dared.
Jonszer’s last words came back to me, his disgust amplified by the pathos of his suicide, by the passion of an excellent swimmer who dived into a creek with a cord and roped himself to a mangrove root under the surface.
A nervous hand hovered on my shoulder, and when I turned, Amana was standing there.
