Her English mum smiled, her face all complicated with knowledge about grown-ups that couldn’t be explained. “Still the Mystery Man, I’m afraid.” That was how she often referred to Dhikilo’s original father: the Mystery Man. Nobody seemed to know what had become of him after he’d tossed Dhikilo through the air into the arms of a nurse.
By contrast, Dhikilo’s English dad was not a Mystery Man at all. He was in the next room reading a book about a retired politician, with a mug of tea balanced on the arm of the sofa, and his name was Malcolm—Malcolm Bentley. Which made his adopted daughter Dhikilo Bentley. Or sometimes, if she was in the mood to write a nice long line at the top of her school jotter, Dhikilo Saxardiid Samawada Bentley.
What Words Meant
For a while after getting the news about her mother, Dhikilo tried to learn more about her. At first it seemed that Malcolm and Ruth didn’t know anything, and then after a while it seemed there might be some official stuff that Dhikilo could find out, maybe, but not until she was eighteen.
“Why eighteen?” she asked.
“Because that’s how the law works,” said Malcolm gently. “They’ve thought very carefully about these sorts of situations.”
“Who’s ‘they’?” asked Dhikilo.
“The people whose job it is to figure out the best and kindest way to help children with...questions,” said Malcolm. “And they decided there are things that are easier for a child like you to understand if you’re a little bit older.”
“But when I’m eighteen I won’t be a child any more,” said Dhikilo.
“Yes, exactly,” said Malcolm, as if she was seeing his point instead of disagreeing.
* * *
Next, Dhikilo had tried to learn more about the country of Somaliland, in case it helped her understand anything about her parents. Her Geography teacher was no use, and there was nothing in the school library. She got the impression that no matter how hard you looked, there wasn’t much to be found, especially if you were a young girl in Cawber-on-Sands who spoke only English (and a little French).
There was a bookshop on the High Street, which had thousands of books but none specifically about Somaliland. On their Travel shelf they had one guidebook for tourists who fancied going to lesser-known places in Africa that were beautiful, uncomfortable and maybe dangerous, and in the middle of that book there was a chapter about Somaliland. Dhikilo read it in the shop. It didn’t take long.
Somaliland was big—almost as big as Britain—but had far fewer people living in it. It wasn’t exactly desert, but it was desert-ish. It had a lot of cute goats and black-faced sheep who sometimes died of hunger when there wasn’t enough rain to let crops grow. It had bats and pythons and squirrels and giant guinea-piggy things called hyraxes. The skies in the photos were very blue and empty. The women wore head-scarves. There weren’t many shops and you were supposed to buy stuff with a special kind of money that only existed in Somaliland and wasn’t worth anything anywhere else. The rest of the world still hadn’t decided whether to accept Somaliland as a real country or not. It might happen one day maybe, but not soon.
Somalilanders were very keen for tourists to come, but this wasn’t as simple as just going there in a tour bus and walking around eating ice cream. The war that had made Dhikilo’s father do what he did was officially over, but every now and then people started fighting again regardless. You weren’t supposed to venture outside the main cities of Hargeisa and Berbera. If you wanted to go to Laascaanood, the government insisted that you be accompanied by special soldiers who would make sure nothing bad happened to you. You were also supposed to buy a few bundles of chat leaf to give to guards at checkpoints so that they would let you through. Dhikilo turned the page hoping there would be a helpful picture of a chat leaf, but the next page was already a different country. She put the book back on the shelf.
At home, Dhikilo tried researching Somaliland on the internet. The internet had a million pages on just about every subject in the universe, but amazingly little from Dhikilo’s country of origin. There was a website where Somalilanders argued with each other, in a mixture of their own language and English, about stuff you could only understand if you were in their gang, and another one where they discussed football.
The most interesting websites were the ones explaining what words meant. They couldn’t agree on the spellings, or whether the words were Somali or just generally Arabic, but there were some beautiful meanings. “Saxansaxo,” for example, meant the smell and the coolness carried on the wind from a place where it’s raining to a place where it isn’t. How could one little word mean something so marvellous? It made you realize that language wasn’t just a code to communicate with: it was magic.
Anyway, the word “magacaa” sounded like it should mean “magic” but it actually meant “what’s your name?” The word for “dog” was “eey” and the word for “eye” was “isha,” although it seemed you needed a completely different word if you had two eyes instead of just one. Dhikilo got the impression that learning Somali would be quite hard unless you had parents to teach it to you when you were a baby. However, there were some easy words like “bataato wedjis” and “furuut,” which meant “potato wedges” and “fruit.”
People’s names had meanings, too, although there was disagreement about what the meanings were, or maybe there were just lots of meanings. One person wrote that whenever his family had to move someplace else, his father would load all their possessions onto the back of a camel, taking care to balance the weight evenly. There must be an equal number of dhikilos hanging off each side of the camel, he said. Sadly there wasn’t a picture, so Dhikilo could only guess what a dhikilo might be. She liked the idea of hanging off the side of a camel, though, especially if there was another one of her hanging off the other side.
There were loads of different words for camel, none of which sounded anything like “camel,” and “Khamiis” meant Thursday.
The word for father was “aabo.” Mother was “hooyo.”
The word for “daughter” was harder to figure out. At first she thought it was “inanta,” which sounded rather grand. But then other websites said that “inanta” was just the word for “girl” and that “daughter” was actually “gabadh.” But then other websites said that “gabadh” meant “slave-girl.” Or “chestnut.” Finally, the most trustworthy-seeming people she could find said that when a father in Somaliland speaks to his daughter, he calls her “aabo,” the same name as himself. That was a bit strange. But sometimes strange things are true.
Just in case she would ever need them, Dhikilo wrote “aabo” and “hooyo” on the back cover of her school jotter, the one for History.