Останься, дочь / Stay, Daughter

Here, a neighbor’s goat wandered over to chew on sprigs of jak leaves brought from the countryside, and a neighbor’s ducks waddled in to splash in mud puddles left behind by monsoon rains. The smells from adjoining kitchens mingled and wafted in the breeze and into this mix was added, every day, another odor, when the bucket man from the municipality opened a latched door at the back, and emptied into his handcart the brimming pails that he pulled out from the latrines.

My mother’s uncle, Zain Magdon insisted that the first Muslim allowed to live inside this citadel was one of our own ancestors.

Nearly two centuries ago, his great-great grandmother, Raheema Umma, a widow with seven daughters (all of them very beautiful, Zain Marma also insisted), had lived in Magalle, a small town a few miles south of the Fort. Some hooligans who knew about the pretty girls began to harass the family, and one night, the notorious bandit Kitchel, who worked with the fearsome robber Gurubaldi (so Zain Marma’s story went), broke into the house to abduct them. Though the cries of the women brought out the neighbors and the widow and her daughters were saved, the next morning, the terrified mother appealed to the colonial authorities to give her a safe place to live.

At the time, there was a Dutch law that restricted Muslims – whom the colonizers called Moors – to their own enclaves in the country, but in 1774, Raheema Umma was allowed to move to the safety of the Fort with its army barracks and impregnable walls.

Not everyone in the Fort was willing to accept that it was someone in Uncle Zain’s family who had been the first to move there – such distinctions were only grudgingly conceded. But when challenged, Uncle Zain whipped out the evidence: Dutch Governor Willem Jacob Van der Graff’s census of 1789 did have an entry for a Moor widow with seven daughters living in the Fort; and the name of the widow was recorded as Raheema Umma.

When this great-grandmother, several times removed, first settled into a house on Church Cross Street, she lived, a lone Muslim, among Christian Burghers – the middle-class traders from Holland whom the Dutch had encouraged to migrate to their Asian colonies. After the British repealed, in 1832, the law that restricted the rights of the Moors to live where they wanted, more of them migrated into the Galle Fort.