She had been in this town for barely two hours, and here she was already being suffocated in the heat of this beautiful man’s gaze. She sucked at the straw, sometimes drawing cold tamarind juice into her mouth and sometimes just to have something other than his eyes and face to look at. He sat next to her on an identical high stool. He had no juice to pretend to drink, so he just looked at her. Ali Kiba’s Dodo was playing from the speaker on the ceiling above them, but it felt like a different song when on such low volume. She had stopped speaking. She wondered how long it would be before she caved and started rambling again just to do something to interrupt the way he looked at her. He spoke before she did.

“Why do you leave your city and home so often, if you love it so much?”

She looked at him, looked away and sipped again.

“Sometimes it feels like I’ve never left it. That city never loved me back and the shadows of all the terrible things that have happened there follow me, no matter how far I go.”

Another sip and this one picked up the sourest of the tamarind bits. 

“What kinds of terrible things?”

“The kind that would make you not talk to me, if you knew.”

“I doubt it.”

Another quick look at him and another sip. 

She was starting to feel afraid. It was moments like these, people like him, that had started all the terrible things. It was people who spoke like him who had convinced her that when someone had done the things her brother had done, he deserved what came to him. She still only half believed it, but as long as she kept moving, kept leaving each city and each town for the next, she could keep the worst of her thoughts just neatly tucked under the surface. 

It was time to leave. Her glass of juice stood empty, save for the tamarind residue she knew she could not suck up without noise. She stood up, lifted her cloth tote to her shoulder and turned around. She paid the girl at the cashier’s desk. Just before stepping out into the narrow Stone Town street, her eyes met his and she smiled at him. She did not wait to see if he smiled back. 

As she got farther down the street, she knew she would never again speak to the owner of the juice bar. Something about that felt sad but it also felt freeing. She had fought and won, even if only this time. Or perhaps this was the first of all the times she would keep winning at this, at avoiding the people who threatened to untuck her scary thoughts. The only thing left of that encounter was the picture on her phone, the one where her grinning face and careless body was framed by the bright mural on the juice bar’s wall. He was not in the photograph. He had asked, gently, but she had refused to let him join her in the tight space next to the wall. He had agreed, despite her rejection, to take one of her using her phone’s camera so she could have something other than a selfie.  She pretended not to notice the look he gave her when he was taking the picture. When he pulled out his own phone to take another picture of her, she moved away quickly and mumbled ‘no’.

That’s when she had sat to her glass of juice and he had taken the stool next to hers to launch into one of those conversations that instantly refuse to remain at the level of small talk. 

Outside, in the sun, it was hard to imagine that the peace of water and waves and the vast white beaches of Zanzibar were just a few meters away. Instead, there was an urgency to the heat, the humidity and the sweat-drenched humanity as she made her way through the skinny pathways between shops and homes and everything else that made up a small tight coastal town, ignoring the clucks and stares at her short shorts. It was amazing how these coastal people retained just the right level of scorn for women who did not cover up in the heat that the moral judges themselves sat melting in, and had known all their lives. She slid her sunglasses further up her nose and walked on, thinking about the lift of each foot so that her clammy feet did not slide right out of their sandals.

Only once did she think about him and their conversation as she walked. He had told her that he had once been a model and singer. The juice bar was a childhood dream of his that he had finally opened on his thirtieth birthday, just a few months before.  She had once been a singer too, gaining prominence as a backing vocalist in Nairobi before she gave it up and put everything into her day job and the succession of terrible troubles. She had just turned thirty two. The last of her innocence had left in her twenty ninth year. The day job was the only thing left and the reason she could travel like this. She smiled at the memory of the look the juice bar owner had given her, when she said she did not sing anymore because she was afraid of that part of herself. Her sudden smile invited catcalls from a group of youngish boys wedged in a shop’s narrow entrance ahead of her and brought her mind back to walking and the street. 

Unlike her only brother, if she could still claim him as that, she was doing everything to get off the path that those before them had set, doing everything not to let her life rot. That was one of the things these solo trips gave her – the inimitable sense of vibrancy that is impossible to find in routine and familiarity, especially a familiarity steeped in dark memories. Each experience when she traveled was amplified, and it allowed her to feel, intensely, the things she kept fearing she had lost. Watching a new place fall in love with her for a few minutes felt good. A contaminated kind of good. Even the ridiculousness of catcalls by strangers in a strange town gave her a rush; a heady mix from her entire being preparing for fight-or-flight. An exquisitely painful reminder that this, anything, was better than numbness. 

She rushed past the boys, turning sideways to stop her body brushing against them as she made her way through. Finally, a few meters on, the narrow streets opened onto the market square. Beyond it, she could finally see and hear and feel the ocean and its breezes. 

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