“Have you seen Mustafa?”
“Have you seen the man of the tondoba tree?”
“He has gone to the realm of the jinn women of Wad Yahya, my child. Come back to your senses, and to your family.”
“Perhaps his mind returned to him at last, and he went back to his people.”
“The tondoba has dried up, and the dune has become flat since Mustafa left.”
“Look somewhere else.”
This was Nahla’s twentieth visit, perhaps more, to this village. These were some of the questions she asked its people, and these were among their gentlest answers. Two full years had passed since the man she had named Mustafa disappeared from her life and from the village in a single breath. Still, she returned, following the compass of her heart, certain that she would meet him here as she had met him the first time, in this village stretched between plains and palm trees.
He had disappeared in a single moment. She searched everywhere and found no trace of him. She had never believed in stories of jinn and demons, although those very stories had led her to him. She was not searching only for Mustafa, or for the man of the tondoba tree as the villagers knew him, but for the feeling that had entered her life with him: the strange feeling that grief had not taken everything, that somewhere beneath the ash of her days, a small coal was still alive.
With a stubbornness that would not soften, she believed he would return to this place, to the tondoba that had become his roof, his witness, his rumor, and his country.
She did not know, when her friend Buthaina invited her to travel with her to visit her family in this village, that the journey would divide her life into before and after. Buthaina had meant kindness. She wanted to draw Nahla out of the long, airless rooms of mourning left by the death of her parents and her only sister in a terrible accident. Before that loss, Nahla had belonged to a house full of voices. After it, she moved from room to room as though living underwater. Doors opened. Curtains stirred. No one answered.
She agreed to the journey only after Buthaina promised her, laughing, that it would be a trip she would never forget. Despite the hardship of the road, Nahla found comfort in watching the landscape change its face. Whenever the bus stopped, the driver sounded the horn not as a warning, but like a reed flute, as though announcing to every village that its absent ones had returned. Children ran beside the bus. Men lifted their hands. Women shaded their eyes and smiled. Dust rose and settled. At last, the bus entered Buthaina’s village.
The two friends were preparing to get off when the air split with the screams of women, girls, and children. The crowd scattered as if an unseen fire had passed through it.
“The man of the tondoba tree! The man of the tondoba tree!”
Against the retreating bodies, a man came forward in filthy, ragged clothes. His beard and mustache merged like a loose veil hanging down to the top of his chest, hiding everything except a large nose and two wide eyes filled with a calm, watchful light. He looked less like a beggar than like someone the desert had claimed, shaped, and then left unfinished.
Nahla’s eyes held him until he noticed her. He came nearer. His eyes moved, almost smiling, and he raised his hand in greeting. In her bag, she had biscuits and sweets. She held them out to him through the bus window. He took them, nodded his thanks, then placed them in the basket of an old woman who was pulling a small child by the hand. She alone did not seem to fear him.
Nahla kept watching.
“Who is that man?” she asked Buthaina. “And why did everyone run?”
Buthaina smiled with the pleasure of someone about to offer a marvelous story.
“He is married to a jinn. He has lived with her for years.”
“That is nonsense.”
“You can find out for yourself.”
“Then we will visit him.”
Buthaina’s answer came at once.
“You will visit him alone. No one here goes to the tondoba.”
Two days later, Nahla asked Buthaina to take her on a walk through the village. They went out with girls from the neighborhood and wandered through the palm trees. The village smelled of palm flowers, crushed leaves, smoke, and animal dung and breath. There, as casually as she could, Nahla asked where the man of the tondoba tree lived.
The girls stared at her as if she had asked for the road to her own burial. They exchanged glances and small bursts of laughter. When she repeated the question, one of them pointed beyond the towering palms.
“Do you want to see him? I can take you there.”
Nahla followed her. Behind them, Buthaina called warnings that the wind swallowed one by one. The girl walked with quick, graceful steps, while Nahla struggled each time the sand closed over her feet.
“Why are you taking me there?” Nahla called. “Aren’t you afraid of his jinn woman?”
“The man of the tondoba tree was my uncle’s close friend,” the girl said without turning around. “But he does not know me. He does not know anyone in the village except my father and my uncle, and both of them have gone.”
As they walked, the girl poured out the village’s inheritance of fear: his marriage to a jinn; his children who gathered the dates dropped by the wind; the palm trees that fruited every year without pollination, though no hand dared gather their dates.
“Have you seen them?” Nahla asked.
“No,” the girl said. “But they say his wife is one of the jinn women of Wad Yahya. And many children say they have played with her children.”
Then the girl stopped and pointed to a high mound where a tree stood without a visible trunk, more shadow than wood, more claw than branch.
“There.”
She apologized and hurried back before sunset could overtake her.
Nahla stood alone. She recited every verse of the Qur’an her memory could summon, then climbed the mound. Near the tree, she found him sitting against a palm trunk, rubbing fibers between his hands and twisting them into uneven ropes. When he saw her, he rose hesitantly, stepped forward, and offered his hand. She placed her trembling fingers in his.
His hand was strong and rough. His body was tall and thin. Up close, he frightened her more, not because he seemed monstrous, but because he seemed unbearably human beneath the mask the village had given him.
“Have you lost your way?” he asked. His voice was deep, touched by a hoarseness like water drawn from an old well.
He gestured toward the village.
“Come. I will take you back.”
“I have not lost my way,” she said, rubbing her hands together. “I came to see you.”
He passed a hand over his beard.
“Why?”
She searched for an answer that would not betray her.
“Curiosity, perhaps. Or boredom.”
“Boredom brings people to dangerous places.”
“And fear keeps them from knowing whether the danger is real.”
Something shifted in his eyes. He returned to his ropes.
“What are you making?”
“Ropes.”
“For whom?”
“For the village. It buys from the madman what it refuses to take from the man.”
“Are you mad?”
“Aren’t you afraid I might be one of the jinn?”
“If you were, would you need to sell ropes?”
For a heartbeat, he stared at her. Then a laugh escaped him, low and reluctant. He disappeared into a strange opening between the tondoba’s branches and the side of the mound. When he returned, he carried a cup of water, a wooden stool woven with rope, and a book without a cover. The book was Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North.
He handed her the water and the book, then set the stool before her as if receiving a guest in a house whose walls only he could see.
She turned the pages and smiled.
“Are you Mustafa Sa’eed, then? Did you not drown?”
He laughed again, more freely this time, and went back to twisting rope.
After a while, he said:
“Perhaps.”
Dusk thickened. The palms became black script against the sky. He stood and pointed to the road.
“It is better for you to go back.”
He walked ahead of her in silence, taking long steps, until he brought her to Buthaina’s house. She thanked him for his company and for the book and promised to visit him the next day.
He stepped back as if her promise had burned him.
“Don’t.”
Then he fled into the dark with the speed of someone escaping not from her, but from hope.
Inside the house, Buthaina and her family reproached her until their fear exhausted itself. Women gathered to ask whether Nahla had returned unharmed, in body and mind. Their eyes searched her face for traces of possession, disappointment almost clear when they found only dust. Later, Nahla sat beside Buthaina’s grandmother and asked about the man.
The old woman shook her gray head.
“He came as a stranger and lived as a stranger. As for Wad Yahya’s daughters, the jinn women of the tondoba, no one here denies them. But whether he married one and had children by her, I neither deny nor confirm.”
That night, beneath a small kerosene lamp, Nahla read the novel he had given her, though she knew its events by heart. She read as if the drowned Mustafa Sa’eed might rise between the lines and explain the man beneath the tondoba.
The next afternoon, when the house surrendered to the mercy of the midday nap, Nahla slipped out. She did not know the man’s name, so she gave him one. Mustafa.
She wore a black abaya and wrapped her scarf over her nose and mouth, so no one would recognize her. When she reached the mound, the place was empty and silent. She approached the opening between the thorny branches and the sand. Small round fruits hung there, pink and translucent, like drops of sunset caught in thorns. She took one and bit it. Sweetness burst over her tongue, followed by a sting sharp as pepper.
“That is not how it is eaten.”
She turned in fright, then breathed when she saw him. He took one of the fruits and squeezed it between thumb and finger until the sticky pulp slipped free and the peel remained in his hand. He ate the inside and threw the skin away.
“It’s called Hunbak,” he said. “No one has discovered it yet.”
“You have.”
“I live where others refuse to look.”
He touched the tree.
“The tandab trees grow in desert and semi-desert lands. It is thorny, stubborn, unwanted. But it holds the sand back. Without it, the dune walks.”
He raised his eyes toward the mound.
“Look how much desert this old tree has held back.”
Nahla looked from the tree to him. There was a strange resemblance between them: his face hidden in hair, the tree hidden in its own thorns, both half-buried and still standing.
“Maybe that is why you stayed,” she said. “You and the tree do the same work.”
“What work?”
“Holding back the desert.”
His smile faded, not with anger, but with recognition.
“And what desert are you holding back?”
The question entered her before she could defend herself.
“The one that entered my house after everyone died.”
He looked at her then, fully, and for the first time since the accident she felt that someone had not only heard her words, but touched the silence beneath them.
“I am sorry,” he said.
No one had said it like that. Not as comfort, not as duty, but as if he knew that some houses remain standing long after they have become graves.
To save herself from tears, she pointed to the opening.
“Even this looks like your mouth covered with hair.”
He laughed until he bent forward. When he straightened, his gaze had softened.
“Where did you come from?” he asked. “For years, I have not spoken like this. For years, I have not laughed from my heart.”
“Then let me see where you live.”
He lowered his eyes. She took his silence as permission.
The thorns scratched her arms and fingertips and caught in her clothes as she entered. Inside, the place was the embrace of a tree: shade, yellow sand, and a narrow hollow crowded with a few stubborn possessions. A traditional wooden bed woven with rope, its legs sunk into sand. Small handmade stools. An old kerosene stove. A blackened cooking pot. A clay water jar planted in the earth. Cups. A tea kettle dark with use. An iron table carrying books and old magazines. An iron trunk like the one her grandmother used to carry her belongings in when she came from the village to Khartoum. Nothing else. No woman’s scarf. No child’s shoe. No second cup waiting beside the first.
He stood behind her.
“No stranger has entered my tondoba before.”
“So, this is where Mustafa Sa’eed lives.”
“If you have read the novel,” he said, passing a hand over his beard, “you know I do not resemble him. The narrator said he had no beard, and that his mustache was smaller than the mustaches of the men in the village.”
“A beard grows,” she said. “So does a mustache.”
Then, more quietly:
“Who were you before they made you into this?”
He glanced toward the iron trunk, then away.
“A son. A student. A coward. Perhaps all three.”
“Perhaps that is already a story.”
He did not answer. Instead, he went out. She followed, ashamed of having asked too directly. At the opening, he lifted the branches so the thorns would not tear her clothes.
“Go before the village sees you and makes another tale.”
“Will you tell me yours?”
“Maybe one day.”
“I leave the day after tomorrow.”
“I said maybe one day. That is enough.”
Then, shyly, almost pleading, he added:
“Do not come again.”
She returned to Buthaina’s house with something inside her, leaning toward him. She asked the grandmother for his real name, but the old woman said he must have had one, though memory had let it fall. For more than twenty years, people had called him only the man of the tondoba tree. So, Nahla gave him a rumor of her own. Since the village had buried his name, let him have another. Mustafa. By nightfall, the girls and women were saying that the man of the tondoba tree was named Mustafa.
Nahla did not sleep. Tenderness moved in her like water finding a crack in stone. It did not erase her grief; nothing erased it. But for the first time, grief had a window.
On the morning of her departure, she searched for him among the faces but did not see him. She sat beside the bus window, saying goodbye without knowing to whom. The horn sounded its sweet, foolish song, and the bus moved slowly, followed by children singing:
The white one has moved, oh peace,
leaving the world in darkness, oh peace.
Beloved of his people, oh peace,
they told me he has gone, oh peace.
She was waving when a man appeared in a white jalabiya, running alongside the bus. His face was handsome and bare enough to be seen, with only a light beard and mustache. Yet his eyes held the same calm, watchful light. For a moment, Nahla did not understand. Then her heart struck her ribs as if trying to escape. He reached for her outstretched hand. Breathless, he pressed a letter into it. On the envelope, in beautiful handwriting, were the words: To Nahla.
She tried to call his name, the name she had given him, the name he had not yet heard from her mouth, but the bus gathered speed. He fell behind. The children’s voices thinned into dust.
Her hands shook as she opened the envelope. Inside was a clean sheet bearing two lines, and other old pages stained with oil, as though rescued from a life that had been buried in haste. On the back of the last page, she found recent lines written in red ink. She read the first sheet:
“To the stranger like me, who colored my life, even if only for a few hours…
Here is my story. Read it. Am I Mustafa Sa’eed? Perhaps I may be him, or may not be.”
Then she began reading the old pages:
“I often heard stories of jinn, devils, and demons, but I did not believe in them. There were many things I did not believe in, so people called me a heretic, beginning with my father, the sheikh of the zawiya. Once, I traveled to attend the funeral of a friend’s father in a village in northern Sudan. I came from a city in the center of the country, and everything here was different from my father’s strict house. At night, young men gathered on sandy hills, playing the Tambur, drinking, singing, and telling stories of love, jinn, and cannibals. They wrapped white shawls around their faces, so I saw nothing of them but their eyes.
They spoke of Koko’s house and of Wad Yahya’s daughters, the jinn women of the tondoba. I called them liars. I said what they saw was only alcohol and superstition.
One night, they asked about my adventures with girls from the capital. When I told them I had none, they laughed until I felt smaller than my own shadow. They said Koko could make me a complete man.
I did not sleep. I was neither a righteous son who pleased his father nor a man who knew the things men boasted of. By afternoon, my friend Amer and his cousin Salim were taking me to her on a donkey.
On the way, Salim said I had to drink some alcohol first. He spoke of Sittuna’s homemade alcohol, how good it was because she never adulterated it. Then he told me that the police had taken Sittuna because she refused to sell to the officer at the post after he had flogged and imprisoned her neighbor, Abdel Latif, who had been cursing the government in the Wednesday market and speaking about the injustice done to villages and farmers. Secretly, I admired Sittuna and Abdel Latif for their bravery. Amer bought me a small bottle of foul-smelling, badly colored alcohol, then we went toward Koko’s house, near the acacia forest. Behind it appeared the dune of the tondoba. At sunset, the tondoba was frightening: no clear trunk, no clear branches, only thorns and openings at the base of a dune.
Inside Koko’s house, lanterns lit the veranda with a sickly glow. Masked men sat with a full-figured woman whose perfume mingled with homemade alcohol and talk of war, gasoline, government, and desire. I wondered how politics could sit beside the desire without shame. In a brothel, no one is punished for speech, and no one remembers it in the morning.
When Koko asked me to follow her, I trembled so badly that she took the bottle from my hand and asked if this was my first time. I nodded. She told me to wait until she returned with some food.
I waited. Then a little girl came to say Koko could not receive me that night because a police officer had arrived and would remain until dawn. She opened a back window and returned the bottle. Outside, Amer and Salim were gone. I called for them in fear, then cursed the officer who had ruined my night, and drank everything in the bottle. I walked toward the tondoba. I climbed the mound, lay at the top, and rolled down like a child or a corpse. Sand filled my mouth and nose. Then a hand lifted me and brushed the dust from my face.
She was beautiful, dressed in deep black, carrying a scent like Koko’s. She took me to the foot of the mound and stayed until late at night. She told me she was the youngest of the jinn women of Wad Yahya and asked me to meet her every night beneath the tondoba.
At dawn, I woke naked under the tree. I returned to the Amer’s house and told him. He laughed and said it was the alcohol. But I insisted it was true. He patted my shoulder sadly and said, “Then you slept with a jinn instead of Koko, my friend.” The news spread faster than mercy. They said I had gone mad. I returned every night to the tondoba and came back each morning naked as the day my mother bore me. My father took me to sheikhs, and all declared me possessed. Then he saw me one morning beneath the tree and abandoned me.
The villagers rejected me. My friends left me. The tondoba became my home. On many nights, I saw fires burning near the mound and heard singing and laughter. Whenever I approached, the fires moved farther away. My belongings disappeared, sugar, tea, and flour, and when I called out for them to be returned, I would find them later in places I had already searched.
With them, I found a peace I had never found among human beings. The village fled from me, cursed me when it saw me. Only Tariq Niran, the lorry driver, sat with me without fear. He sold the ropes I made and brought me books, magazines, and supplies. Once, he told me his grandmother was the daughter of the king of the jinn. I pretended to believe him. He longed to know the truth behind the stories people wove about me. Poor people. If only they knew the truth.”
There, the blue ink ended. At the bottom of the page, in faded red ink, Nahla read, “My secret and the jinn will remain buried here. Perhaps one day I will entrust you with it. I do not know why I am telling you my story, or why I do not reveal everything. But I found comfort in writing to you. I thought often about what you said: that I resemble the dune of the tondoba. I am no longer that. For one afternoon, I remembered that I had a face beneath the hair, a voice beneath the rumor, and a name waiting somewhere, even if it was one you gave me.
Thank you for appearing in my life. If you ever wish to write to me, my address is simple. Write on the envelope: To Mustafa, the Man of the Tondoba Tree.”
Nahla folded the pages. Something heavy settled in her chest, but beneath it another thing beat wildly: fear, hope, anger, tenderness, all tangled together like roots underground. “So his new name reached him,” she whispered. “He accepted it. He made it his address.”
At the next station, the bus stopped in a cloud of dust. Nahla stood before she knew she had risen. Buthaina cried out and caught her sleeve, but Nahla pulled free. Her bag remained on the seat. Her scarf slipped from her hair. She stepped down as if stepping out of one life and into another.
Behind her, the bus groaned, swallowed its passengers, and went on without her. She returned to the address written at the end of the letter. But Mustafa was gone. The tondoba had changed. Its thorns were brittle. The small opening through which she had entered had collapsed into sand. The fruits had shriveled on their stems, pink no longer but brown as old blood. The dune itself seemed lower, as if whatever he had held back had begun, grain by grain, to advance. No one had seen him leave. No one had seen him die. No one had seen a female jinn take him by the hand. And here she is, for the twentieth time and more over two full years, sitting where she first saw him twisting ropes beside the palm trunk. She finds nothing of him but his letter, and nothing in the village but the same answers.
She reads. Then she writes to him of her longing, though longing is poor ink and never says what it means. She addresses her letters: To My Mustafa… the Man of the Tondoba Tree.
Then she leaves the papers to the wind. They fly for a little while, white and helpless over the sand, before catching in the claws of the old tree. And the tondoba, which could not keep the desert back forever, keeps the letters. And waits.
A note: The tondob tree is a desert tree, scientifically known as Capparis decidua. I have kept the local name “\ طُندُبةtondoba” because of its cultural and symbolic importance in the story.
Nafisa Z. Sharfi is a PhD student in Curriculum Studies at DePaul University, an Arabic language educator, and a published author. She focuses on Arabic language, literature, literacy, and story-based teaching. She has published two novels, Ancient Drawing and Sweat of the Fingernails, along with a short story collection, The Elegant Sins. She has also been a guest speaker in Arabic literature classes, where students read and discussed one of her short stories.