A BLACK COCK STORY

by Steve R E Pereira

Dar es salaam. 1967.

‘You have to find a cock, a big, black cock. It has to be black. A very big, black cock. Unaelewa?[understand?]’ Mai looked fierce as she wagged her finger vigorously in Annie’s face.

‘Naelewa[I understand]’ Annie said, trying, not successfully, to hide a smirk as she wrapped her kitenge around her house-dress. She knew this little drama was being played out for Jonathan’s benefit. After fifteen years as Mrs. Alfonse’s maid, she was well used to her calculating theatricality. Jonathan pictured a big, black cock. Its one-eyed glare seemed angry. It wouldn’t like him. He could tell.

‘Why does it have to be big?’ he asked.

A small, black cock wouldn’t be so bad. He could handle small. He was relatively small. He was only nine years old.

‘Nenda.[Go]’ Jonathan’s grandmother sent Annie on her errand with her usual imperial flourish of one hand, while using the other to pinch Jonathan’s ear — hard.

‘Big, big, very big.’

Jonathan was up on his toes, grasping his grandmother’s wrist, trying to ease the burning pressure on his ear. There was that malicious glint in her fierce glare. Just like Jonathan imagined the cock would look.

‘For you, it not only has to be a big cock, but it has to be a giant cock,’ she said, “a giant, black cock. Then maybe we will chase that devil out of you.”

She released his ear, and as Jonathan rubbed the pain away, he wondered what lesson a big, black cock could teach him. His imagination failed him. That it would be painful, he had no doubt. Most things having to do with his grandmother involved pain. She liked inflicting it and certainly enjoyed watching it unfold. Later, when Jonathan learned of schadenfreude, he immediately thought of his grandmother, and the little smirk of satisfaction that twitched at the corners of her mouth anytime something went wrong — for somebody else.

For Jonathan, there was an extricable link between that — that enjoyment of pain — and the fact that she was, they were, Catholics of a particularly fervid kind. The kind that didn’t believe in being kind. No, they were the fire and brimstone kind, the spare-the-rod-spoil-the-child kind. In Jonathan’s world, dire punishment always hovered above his head from a legion of guardian angels, devils, patron saints, and God himself, ready to strike, weep, or be crucified at the slightest infraction. As far as Jonathan was concerned, they were wasting their time with him. His grandmother had the job well in hand.

Adolph had overheard the instructions about the cock, from the dining room where he was brylcreaming his cowlick and moustache. He poked his head in. ‘Arrey, Ma, what are you saying?’ He, knowing the background of this little drama, couldn’t decide whether to be shocked or amused.

Adolph was Jonathan’s uncle, his father’s younger brother. In his early 20’s, Adolph was a slight, dapper man with an affectation of sardonic languor popular among the hip set in Bombay where he had been sent to study law. He was back on a family visit. His family, in this backwater of a town in Tanzania, were far too provincial to merit anything other than a disdainful dismissal. But Adolph was his mother’s favourite, and he found much in her that was amusing, for the same reason Jonathan couldn’t fathom then but understood later, his father found her unsettling and embarrassing.

‘Arrey, you shut up-your-face.’ Mai slapped Adolph hard — she didn’t do anything by halves — on his head, as she bustled to the stove. ‘Mind-in-the gutter always. Nobody wants your opinion.’

Adolph rubbed his head. Seeing Jonathan try to hide a snigger, he stuck his tongue out at him.

‘If my mind is in the gutter always, it is because you put it there,’ Adolph said to the back of Mai’s head as he sauntered out the door. She didn’t bother turning around.

‘Have some respect, you. If you are so smart, how come pass class is all you are getting?’

He was out the door by that point, but she shouted after him. ‘Who will give you a job with pass? Huh, Mr. Smarty farty pants?’

‘Hai, Ma,’ Jonathan couldn’t help himself; he needed to get his own back, ‘Daddy told you one million times not to say fart. It’s rude.’ Mai just let out a loud, long, malodourous fart. Jonathan scuttled out of the kitchen in a hurry.

‘Go to your room. No reading. Writing only. Finish your punishment. The whole thing.’ And then even more emphatically, she called after him: ‘You have to finish it before tonight, otherwise, double you will be getting.’

Jonathan wanted to go out to the back garden and find Salimu, but he couldn’t. He was forbidden to see Salimu, and he couldn’t anyway because Salimu was gone.

‘You have to get rid of that bloody bugger.’ Jonathan had overheard his father, Freddie, tell grandmother, the day after the-thing-that-happened. ‘He is lazy, how many times I have been telling you that? I can’t even count.’

Mai shot his father a look. ‘Tell me,’ she said, trying to sound reasonable, but her usual impatience seeping through, ‘how this is Salimu’s fault? He is Muslim. What does he know about what is allowed and not allowed in the Church? Tell me that. If Jonathan said, “Give me that,” and it is a piece of chapati, not an axe, remember that, is he in a position to say no?’

Freddie tried to respond, but she stopped him with a premonitory hand.

‘But you are right,’ she said, ‘he should go.’

There was a pause while Freddie looked at her warily. And sure enough, she had more to say. ‘Yes, I’ll get rid of him. He is too good looking for his own good. Even Annie is getting palpitations, him in those tight shorts. Palpitations are no good for her; she doesn’t know what to do with palpitations. God knows what that husband of hers is good for. Complete bebdo he is.’

Freddie was in equal parts confused and appalled, which, to be fair, pretty well summed up his relationship with his mother.

‘What? What rubbish are you talking now?’ he said in a sputter of exasperation. ‘Is that any way to talk? His shorts? What? What are you saying? And YOU! You are the one who brought Salimu here from Dr. Remedios. Suddenly you decided you need a garden boy. You only. And THIS one only. I told you. Alzira told you. Doctor’s wife is complaining we stole him. Even people are talking at the club. I told you. Alzira doesn’t want to show her face there.’

Mai sucked her teeth and waved him off as she would a fly, but Freddie was on a roll and wouldn’t be stopped. His volume escalated to a shout, ‘Send him back then. Sometimes you are too much. You. This is because of you with this kind of talk and see what happens? You should have some decency, no? This is why that child is like he is. You. You spoil him. Next year, boarding school for him. That will teach him how to behave.’

From his vantage point, where he was lurking, Jonathan could see his grandmother widen her eyes, wag her head and purse her lips in mockery at her son, which pretty well summed up her relationship with him.

‘OK, then,’ she said, with a smirk, ‘I will send Salimu back. If that Mrs. Remedios doesn’t want him, Flora Almeida will. Her garden needs looking after, and she could use some palpitations. Mouth like a lemon that woman has with an attitude to match.’

Freddy threw the Readers Digest he was attempting to read, across the room, sending a statue of St Jude, Patron Saint of Lost Causes, flying off the side table. ‘What are you talking like a madwoman?’ he bellowed at his mother.

Mai’s eyes gleamed. She did so enjoy getting a rise out of her elder son.

‘I don’t know how,’ she had said to him when he was seventeen, after discovering he had turned down a sneak-off to the beach for a boozing session with the hockey team “you have turned out such a little prissy, priggy, prig, prig” (those convent school taunts could come in useful!). And her opinion hadn’t changed much over the years.

‘Ah boarding school, yes.’ She caught Jonathan in her gimlet gaze. ‘That will certainly teach him something. Maybe teach him too much.’ She winked at Jonathan and let out cackles of laughter as she waltzed (literally) into the kitchen calling out, ‘Ahh Salimu, Wewe mvivu[You lazy] bugger. Umeficha wapi?[where are you?]?’

Jonathan fled to his room.

Freddie gritted his teeth. He picked up the fallen statue and set it back on the table with an apologetic kiss to its head. He missed the leavening influence of his father, who hadn’t dared keep his wife’s rambunctious spirit in check but nonetheless provided a calming counterpoint. His death twelve years earlier had left Freddie in charge, but his mother was indefatigable.

Freddie’s wife, Alzira, Jonathan’s mother, made a token attempt to assert herself in the running of the house after the wedding. But after three months and several tearful, whispered consultations with her husband, who had fully anticipated problems but dared not do anything to sort them out, she fled back to work as a secretary at what until recently used to be Barclays Bank but under nationalisation was now the National Bank of Commerce. The running of the house was left to her mother-in-law, which worked out better for everybody.

So, when Salimu didn’t show up for work, nobody said anything about his absence, and Jonathon knew well enough not to ask. At any rate, Jonathan couldn’t go out into the garden. He had been restricted to the house where his grandmother could keep a steely eye on him. And eye him, she did.

Jonathan went into the dining room to do his next favourite thing, which was to observe Adolph.

He was fascinated by but didn’t particularly like Adolph who was not only competition for his grandmother’s affection but who treated him with a puzzling and unfamiliar wariness. But he liked watching Adolph who, as far as Jonathan could tell, spent all of his time prissing and preening in front of a mirror.

A year earlier, at a swank party at Malabar Hills in Bombay, an air hostess with Air India had told Adolph that he looked like Clark Gable when she really meant Sammy Davis Jr but wasn’t sure how Adolph would take that. In the sixties in India, air hostesses had a supermodel-like status and their access to international travel made them impossibly cosmopolitan. As a result, Adolph spent hours cultivating just the perfect cowlick and just the perfect pencil moustache, which truth be told, didn’t look bad on his nut-brown, angular, lantern-jawed face. Paired with a sartorially conscious uniform of tan Chelsey boots, slim tailored pants with wild check patterns, and despite the Indian heat, turtlenecks usually adorned with a bead necklace or two, Adolph cut a diminutive but dashing figure, and he knew it.

Jonathan found him endlessly curious. Adolph, for his part, found the boy’s attention unsettling. ‘PSB: Precocious, Spoilt, Brat,’ was how he described Jonathan to his friends. (‘Yaar aik dum bitch you are,’ his best friend Sunita had said with an approving smirk, and since then, he threw in the descriptor as often as he could.) Now, he narrowed his eyes at Jonathan’s reflection in the mirror and waggled his head to indicate scornfulness.

‘What are you doing, looking, looking all the time? You are not in enough trouble already?’

Jonathan looked away. He got that sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach. He couldn’t understand what the fuss was all about. Was it really such a big deal? It was only a bite of a chapati.

He walked to his room, feeling sorry for himself. He slammed the door shut, earning him another yell from his grandmother. Throwing himself on the bed, he desultorily played with a collection of toy tin soldiers his father had caved in and bought for him as a First Communion present and was now threatening to take back. Take them, then, Jonathan had thought but did not, of course, say. He had asked for the soldiers because they were the closest thing to dolls he would be allowed. But the miniature, crudely painted tin pieces were a cold substitute, so Jonathan didn’t really care either way even though it was sort of fun to make them do the cha cha cha.

Tiring of the soldiers, he looked at the stack of books by his bed but knew that reading might get him into more trouble. They all complained that he spent too much time reading. That Jonathan was not a sporty, outdoorsy boy was a cause of general concern. His vociferous and precocious (yes, Adolf was right) and not yet discriminating reading habit was held to blame for this, with some reason. At nine, he was reading Enid Blyton, Nancy Drew, The Hardy Boys, alongside Agatha Christie, Nick Carter, and James Hardly Chase, anything he could find in the homes of relatives and family friends. He didn’t necessarily understand it all, but he was capable of understanding more about the world around him than the adults thought he should, and that made him troubling.

He opened his notebook and contemplated the passage from the ‘Gospel According to John’. He had been told to rewrite it ten times to teach him a lesson, though again he wasn’t sure what the lesson was he was meant to learn.

I tell you most solemnly, if you do not eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink His blood, you will not have life in you. Anyone who does eat my flesh and drink my blood has eternal life, and I shall raise him up on the last day. For my flesh is real food and my blood is real drink.

He knew from experience that the shiver-inducing references to eating flesh and drinking blood were something to be surreptitiously wondered at. He had already gotten into trouble in catechism class for speculating aloud as to why the cannibal tribes in other parts of Africa who ate those martyred priests were so bad. Surely eating a priest should be a good thing if eating Jesus was?

With a deep sigh, Jonathan set about copying the passage, yet again, even as his mind wandered over to Salimu and the conniptions he had caused the previous weekend.

Sunday had been the day of Jonathan’s First Holy Communion. What Jonathan didn’t quite understand then was that the religious significance paled in comparison to the social significance of the event. It was a vitally important event for all the extended family, and friends. There was a lot riding on it, particularly because this was Jonathan’s third go at his First Holy Communion.

Jonathan had tonsillitis the first time he was supposed to receive communion with his batch. The next year he got the mumps. So, he was doing it two years later than expected, which was fine as far as staying in God’s graces and entry to heaven was concerned but tethering dangerously on the edge of social impropriety. Missing his communion once was unfortunate but understandable, twice was alarming, but had he missed it a third time that would have been calamitous. Three times would have suggested satanic interference; there would be mutterings of a curse of Greek tragedy proportions and a cloud of suspicion would forever hover over the family.

‘What will people say?’ Alzira stormed at Freddie in a flood of tears, when it became apparent that Jonathan was going to strike out three times.

‘What people will say, men?’ Freddie pleaded with Adolph, having a suspicion that Adolph, a noted gossipy raconteur on the party circuit, wouldn’t be able to resist exploiting the situation for his own social capital.

‘People will say.’ Mai said definitively with sour satisfaction to Annie. ‘They already think that boy is too…’ She paused, unable to complete the sentence.

Annie was shrewd enough to hedge her bets. ‘Smart.’ Annie said, ‘Too smart.’

Mai shot her a look, and the two continued to clean the endless trays of rice, in silence.

On that Sunday, it was about eight in the morning, the service wasn’t until ten, but Jonathan had been roused out of bed at seven and freshly scrubbed. His head was a smooth helmet of slicked-down hair and he was dressed in white shoes, white socks, white pants, white shirt, and white tie. While the others got ready, he had been deposited in the front parlour on the grand plastic-covered sofa, with strict instruction to do absolutely nothing else but contemplate the glory of God and his own relative insignificance. Jonathan got quickly bored. He had fought off the urge to stick his finger into the chalice-shaped white iced cake, bearing the legend: ‘Happy First Holy Communion’. He was now contemplating lighting the white candle decorated with white crepe paper and ribbon, that he was to carry ceremoniously. It was going to be lit anyway, otherwise what was the point of it being a candle? But knowing that it would lead to trouble, he was debating the possible consequences and whether he cared about them, when he was interrupted by a sudden eruption of shouted conversation.

Alzira, her anxiety levels in overdrive, called out yet again. ‘Jonathan, I hope you are behaving yourself. Freddie, can you check on him?’

Freddie played at plaintiveness. ‘What now? I’m shaving. Even that I can’t do in peace?’

Mai announced impatiently, asserting the primacy of her position in the household: ‘It’s ok. I told him to sit in the sitting room quietly and think about his communion.’

Alzira could be sublimely passive-aggressive. ‘Mischief only he is thinking of. Chee! How Annie ironed this dress? How am I supposed to wear this now?’

It was Mai’s household; thank you very much, and as Alzira well knew, Mai didn’t take to criticisms of her staff very well.

Mai called out to Alzira, ‘Didn’t you promise Fr. Lynch that you were going to bring your (her deliberate emphasis on the ‘your’ raised some question about ownership) roses for the side altar? And Freddie, I hope you kept the good whiskey for that Lynch? When he went to see Mrs. Gomes, Sylvie was saying he made such a face when they gave him the local stuff.’

‘When have I had time to do anything?’ Alzira appealed to Freddie for help. ‘Freddie!’

Freddie responded to his mother: ‘Ma, I know, I keep that bottle of imported stuff for him. He only drank half of it the last time he was here. Did you tell Salimu to come today to help? Tell him for the roses.’

Jonathan listening in, saw his opportunity. He shouted, ‘I’ll go.’ He practically sprinted out the back door.

Alzira, Freddie, and Mai said simultaneously. ‘No, sit where you are. Do what you are told.’

But it was too late, Jonathan was out the door and into the garden.

He made his way down the overgrown path towards the back, calling out, ‘Salimu, Salimu.’ As he turned the corner by the dusty and dank shed, Salimu appeared silently out of the thick undergrowth. Startled, Jonathan stopped in a rush and stood there for a moment, his mouth open, staring at Salimu, which should be noted, was his usual reaction to Salimu.

Salimu was stare-worthy. For one thing, he had the cultivated muscular bulk of a wrestler. That is what he was, a semi-professional wrestler when he wasn’t jobbing as a garden-boy in various houses in the Indian community. He had become a favourite with housebound housewives and a couple of husbands who developed a sudden interest in gardening. Salimu well knew the value of display and wore his t-shirts and shorts tight to best show off his impressive musculature. He did stand out where standing out or attracting attention was largely seen as an indication of unseemly hubris which would lead to a much-deserved comeuppance. But being African, he was allowed some laxity, and more so because he was good looking, even though his very dark, ebony skin was seen as an affliction.

‘You know,’ they said to each other, ‘That boy would be so good looking if he wasn’t so black.’ Mai got a kick out of describing him as Shashi Kapoor, the swoon-worthy Bollywood star, but adding ‘in negative’ meaning a photo negative. That was always good for a chuckle or two.

Jonathan couldn’t identify yet why he found Salimu fascinating, but he was incapable of hiding it. He was wary of the sly knowing amusement with which Salimu dealt with him but didn’t know how to respond to it. They had rarely talked; Jonathan just followed him around like the proverbial puppy and Salimu would throw him the occasional lifted eyebrow and half-smile.

Now in the garden, Jonathan looked at Salimu, forgetting entirely why he was looking for him. Salimu, cocking an eyebrow at Jonathon, took a big bite of the chapati and jam roll Annie had just given him. He chewed slowly.

‘What you want, bwana?’ Salimu asked.

Jonathan tried to remember what the errand had been. Salimu took another deliberate bite of the chapati. He narrowed his eyes at the gaping Jonathan, Salimu’s half-smile slipping into something more cynical.

‘You want?’ he finally said, indicating to Jonathan the chapati roll. ‘You want a bite?’

Salimu held out the chapati roll and, Jonathan instinctively took it.

Less than a minute later, Alzira tottered up the path in her too-high heels, calling out for Jonathan and Salimu, ‘Jonathan, what are you doing? Salimu! Uko wapi?[where are you?]’ She turned the corner and saw them standing there, Jonathan’s back to her.

He turned to face Alzira. She frowned at him. There was something wrong with this picture. Then she twigged on and let out a shriek. ‘Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, what have you done?’

Jonathan was still holding the chapati roll an inch away from his mouth. There was a smear of red jam on the corner of his mouth, and he was in mid-chew. Alzira grabbed the chapati roll and pinched him hard on the cheek. ‘What have you done? Father told you. You know you are not supposed to eat before your Communion. Fasting, he said, from midnight, he said. How many times have you been told? You can’t take communion now. Your Holy Communion now, what is going to happen? God help us, Jesus, Mary and Joseph, what devil got into you now?’

Freddie, Mai, and Adolf arrived on the scene. Mai immediately went to, ‘Arrey baba; what have you done now?’

Alzira waggled the chapati roll vigorously at Freddie, sending a spray of red jam droplets over the front of his pristine white shirt. Then she threw the chapati roll into a bush.

‘See your son. This is what he does. How is he going to receive communion now, tell me that? Three times!’

She looked at Jonathan with a very real fear. ‘How could you do this? What possessed you?’

Freddie went into conciliation mode. ‘Ok, don’t panic now. It was a mistake. He made a mistake. He only had one bite.’

He looked closely at Jonathan. ‘And not even that. See, he didn’t swallow. He still has it in his mouth.’

At which point, Jonathan instinctively swallowed the piece in his mouth.

There was a pause while all the adults stared at him aghast but not sure how to respond.

Alzira took a deep breath and turned to Freddie: ‘There are sixty-five people coming for lunch today. You only decide what to do.’

She shot a look at Mai to include her in the decision making (and thus implicitly blame her as well), and she stormed back to the house. Mai pursed her lips and wagged her head at Freddie. She pointed to the jam stains on his shirt. ‘Look at the mess you made. Go change your shirt,’

Freddie saw the stains on his shirt and shook his fists at the sky.

‘What?! We are going to have to cancel this whole bloody thing, men. What else to do?’ He shouted at his mother’s receding back.

‘You are such a stupid.’ she stopped and yelled back at him. ‘What’s the time now?’

Freddie looked at his watch. ‘Nine o’clock. But the time is irrelevant. He is supposed to be fasting from midnight.’

‘Not necessarily. One hour only and now it is nine o’clock. Service doesn’t begin until ten, and then Father’s sermon is one hour in itself; he won’t be getting communion until at least 11 o’clock.’

Freddie knew he shouldn’t have trusted Mai for any useful advice. ‘What are you saying? Father said, fasting from midnight. I was there.’

Jonathan knew that to be correct but thought wisely to abstain from the conversation.

Mai switched to her condescending mode, which she also knew irritated Freddie no end. ‘Arrey, Father said that, but it is not the church policy. It used to be from midnight, but now it is one hour. Vatican II all those changes the church made. I know for a fact. One hour only. Father, you know hates all those changes that is why he is saying midnight, but the church regulations are one hour. You can go there and check with him if you want.’

That is not what Freddie wanted. ‘Are you mad? If I tell him what do you think is going to happen? Nobody is going to tell him.’ He stared hard at Mai. ‘You are sure of this?’

Mai held her palms up to him: ‘As God is my witness. My question is, why do you not know this, and I do? That, I think, is the real question.’

The question was deliberately rhetorical. Mai knew very well that Freddie chose not to know. He didn’t deal well with change, and change aplenty was afoot. It was troubling enough for him that the certainty of his accounting practice and the benign collegiality of the club were threatened by the sweeping changes that came with independence. He couldn’t deal with Vatican II as well.

‘Nenda[Go],’ Freddie said to Salimu, ‘fanya kazi yako. [Do your work]’ Salimu disappeared into the undergrowth and out of Jonathan’s life.

‘You come with me.’ Freddie marched Jonathan, stumbling past Mai, down the path to the house.

The rest of the day was a blur to Jonathan, but the upshot was that he did receive his First Holy Communion that Sunday. Nothing was to be said to anybody.

Alzira fully expected, and Freddie half-expected lightning to strike when it was Jonathan’s turn to receive communion, but nothing untoward happened. Making him brush his teeth twice and rinse his mouth out with soapy water, threatening him with an enema, and the three Hail Marys the entire family said in front of the family altar before leaving for church, must have done the trick. Even the lunch went off relatively incident-free though people did comment on how strained Alzira looked. But that they attributed to Mai. ‘Is it any wonder… How she copes, I don’t know,’ they said of Alzira to each other snidely when they were sure Mai was out of earshot.

So, back to the black cock. That afternoon Jonathan realised that it wasn’t the whole cock that was required, just a feather. When Annie tickled his nose with the long black feather she had brought back from her errand, Jonathan understood. They were going to do a dist on him, cast out the evil spirit inhabiting his body. That wasn’t so bad. He had had it done to him before. It was not unpleasant, and he rather did enjoy the ritual and solemnity of it and, of course, being the centre of attention. This time though, he was in deep trouble, and there was going to be no coddling.

He watched his grandmother place the feather alongside a lump of rock salt, some dried red chilies, and a handful of raw rice on a silver tray. Annie deposited the tray on a lace doily covered table which Adolph then placed in front of the big altar in the front parlour that was the daily site for never-ending rosaries, novenas, and family prayers.

Jonathan loved the altar and so was not allowed to touch it without adult supervision. The built-in cupboard with its carved wooden doors and ornate brass handles swung open to reveal a shelved alcove bearing flickering votive candles, a dozen or so framed pictures and statues of various incarnations of the Virgin Mother, the Holy Family, the painfully, crucified Christ and several saints. The gods and saints were rendered in vivid technicolour in an assortment of stages of undress and degrees of martyrdom, all writhing in religious ecstasy. For Jonathan, the cupboard with its concealed treasure of exposed flesh, explicit passion and ecstatic pain aroused an inchoate desire for something he couldn’t quite identify yet. The desire to see, feel and touch more was the only way he could articulate it for himself and only to himself. He knew enough that this was not something he could share with anyone else. Not yet. So, every time the cabinet was opened now, he held his hands in prayer, put on his most sombre and respectful face, and recited the prayers by rote while his mind raced.

In the evening, before dinner, Adolph and Annie were dispatched down the street to fetch Aunty Pinto, who was sufficiently old and appropriately blind enough to have credibility as a dispeller of evil spirits.

The family, including Annie, assembled before the altar. After the novena — they were on day four of the nine successive days of prayer for Jonathan’s soul — they started the dist. Jonathan, hands held piously in prayer position, gaze directed suitably to the floor, was placed in front of the wizened Aunty Pinto. Annie stood next to her with the tray in hand, and the rest of the family in a half-circle around them. At Freddie’s instigation, they all crossed themselves, muttering, ‘In the name of the Father, and the Son and the Holy Ghost,’ and ending with a kiss to their forefingers.

That was Aunty Pinto’s cue to begin. In a quaver, she intoned the Nicene Creed in Konkani, “Sotman’tam Devak, Sorpodvedar Bapak, Sorga ani prithumechea Rochnnarak, Ani Jezu Kristak, Tachea ekleach Putak amchea Somiak…” As she recited, Annie handed her each one of the items off the tray: feather, a lump of rock salt, a handful of dried red chilies and a handful of raw rice which Aunty Pinto passed over Jonathan’s head and torso before handing them back to Annie to place back on the tray.

The ceremony was short and ended a little too prosaically for Jonathan’s liking. Just a communal sign of the cross and then a slap across the head for Jonathan from Freddie with instructions to thank Aunty Pinto.

‘Thank you, Aunty Pinto,’ said Jonathan dutifully.

‘You should behave yourself, baba, what trouble you are giving your parents.’ Aunty Pinto said sorrowfully.

‘And what about his grandmother? No trouble he is giving me?’ Mai interrupted.

Aunty Pinto, who in her day had had her own experiences of Mai, said nothing as she indicated to Alzira to lead the way to the dining room. She had earned her dinner and was going to have it now. Mai tailing behind the others blew her a silent raspberry.

After dinner, when Aunty Pinto had been safely escorted home, Adolph and Freddie took the feather and the rest of the dist materials, wrapped them in a newspaper, and then burned them in the outdoor coal stove. There was a superstition that said if you looked at the rock of salt as it burnt, you could see the face of the person (and there usually was one to blame) who had cast the evil spell, but Alzira was convinced that the Devil had a direct hand in Jonathan’s affliction, Freddie really didn’t want to know and as Mai said, ‘So you know, now what you are going to do?’

So they left the ashes to be thrown into the chicken coop where Jonathan watched the hens and rooster (not black) peck at the scraps and wondered idly if the chickens were ingesting bits of the devil, which would then make its way into the chicken curry.

He felt no different after the ceremony. Maybe a little emptier, but he wasn’t sure that it wasn’t because he was sorry about what happened to Salimu.

After that evening, there was no direct reference made about the incident at all.

A year later, Jonathan was packed off to a boarding school in India, trusted into the care of Christian brothers.

At the airport where Adolph was accompanying him to Bombay, Mai made sure she was the last to wish him goodbye. She gave Jonathan a tight hug, and he felt her slip something into his blazer pocket. ‘Don’t worry, baba.’ She whispered in his ear, ‘We will take care of all those devils you will find.’ Later, midway over the Indian Ocean, when he remembered, he checked his pocket and found a large black cock feather.

THE END