Black Cake
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Winner of the The London Magazine Short Story Prize 2025.
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They came in and shot up Mr. Ali. At the time, when they shot him up, my husband and I had moved back to Dundee. We built a house in Mahaicony when we got married, but then we broke it down and built it back in Dundee. We chose Dundee because people told us it was a nice place. I knew a man and his wife who lived there. I thought we could all become friends.
We left Mr. Ali and moved back to Dundee just in time. We first heard the news from that man and his wife, who were big gossips. We stayed with Mr. Ali because he had a gun and we didn’t. I don’t know how he got a gun but his uncle was a night watchman, so maybe he got the gun through his uncle’s work. My husband, before we were married, was a watchman, too, at the Gonzales Gas Station. I met my husband when I was going to school. He was a hard worker and every day off from school, he was always there at the Gonzales Gas Station, a grocery store in the centre of Mahaicony. The Gonzales Gas Station had a drinks shop and they sometimes let my husband help sell the drinks. They never gave him a gun, though.
I was fourteen and my husband was nineteen when we married. Then he stopped working at the Gonzales Gas Station and became a fisherman. Tide sailing, drift sailing. Tide sailing catches gilbaka, big fish. Every day was fishing day, but not every day was catching day. Most days he didn’t catch anything and then he was overcome with the sulks. When he caught fish, he took them to Stabroek Market to sell, and if he caught only one or two, he brought them home for me to gut and fry. I was happy when, at the end of the day, I saw him walking up to our house, lugging the icebox behind him, because I knew he would be in a good mood. We couldn’t afford to buy presents for one another – we didn’t have time to cut cake on birthdays or anniversaries – but he brought me fish.
Sitting across the ornate coffee table from my husband, I felt as if I was seeing him for the first time.
I grew tomatoes and sweet peppers on Zaleena Sankar’s estate. Zaleena Sankar was a white woman who had a house in Georgetown and a house in Mahaicony. She lived mostly in the city with her husband and two pickney, but when she was around, she did nice things for us village girls. She bought my wedding dress and showed me how to style my hair. At night, she said, just do your best. I asked her what she meant. Us village girls are kept so naïve. She didn’t come to the wedding, but I saved her a slice of black cake, wrapped in foil with a little Thank You note saying I loved her like I loved no one else. I left it on the counter of her enormous kitchen for her to find. Black cake is something that gets better the longer it stays out, and it can stay out for years. The day my husband and I left for Dundee, she said the black cake was the best she’d ever tasted. My mother had baked the cake and did the royal icing and everything. A month after we moved, that man and his wife told me Zaleena Sankar and her husband were divorced, but not to worry because she was still rich. She still had the house in Georgetown and the house in Mahaicony.
We moved in with Mr. Ali because we were scared. We were recently married, and all around us bad things were happening to newlyweds. Bad things happened to everyone, black and brown, but especially to newlyweds. Like the bad men could tell how naïve we were, or they just couldn’t stand the thought of us, happy and in love, moving about in our little houses. Or maybe it only seemed this way because we were scared. So we ended up at Mr. Ali’s. We heard he had a gun and one day we packed a suitcase and walked over to where he lived outside of Dundee village. We told him about the riots and he knew about them already because others had come to him for help. It was as easy as that.
Mr. Ali forbade us from going outside. Things have turned bad, he said. You can’t trust anyone anymore. For the first time in his life, my husband had no work to do. He could see the creek running behind Mr. Ali’s house, could see the haimara jumping out and taunting him, and that drove him wild, I know. But what could he do? He couldn’t argue with a man like Mr. Ali, who was smarter than us combined. And we’d packed the suitcase and spent half our savings to get here. He accepted his fate. He laid on the sofa and didn’t talk to me. If I happened to walk into the living room when his supine body wasn’t there, because he had gone to the bathroom or the snack cabinet, the room looked so unfurnished that I would suddenly become dizzy and unsure of where I was.
He and I spent all our time in the living room while Mr. Ali and his wife went about their days, minding the animals, keeping house, Mr. Ali venturing outside for Very Important business. Mr. Ali’s wife was beautiful but fat. Maybe she was beautiful because of her fatness. She had a little garden in the back with sweet peppers and seeing the sweet peppers made me think of Mahaicony and Zaleena Sankar and how badly I wanted to be in the dirt again. I told her I knew how to plant. She would be doing me a favour if she let me plant. I had to accept my fate, too. Mrs. Ali was a woman who didn’t need anyone’s help with anything. We couldn’t even clear our own plates. She did everything and found time to be sweet-smelling and bright-eyed when Mr. Ali returned home in the evening.
The curtains were always closed and this made that whole period seem like a dream. I can’t say if we stayed for one month or one year.
Sitting across the ornate coffee table from my husband, I felt as if I was seeing him for the first time. I told him so, somewhat jokingly, but mainly to crush the silence that had overtaken us, and was about to add, At least we can finally catch our breath, eh? but then I was overcome by the feeling of telling a lie, so I kept the rest to myself.
The curtains were always closed and this made that whole period seem like a dream. I can’t say if we stayed for one month or one year. The only differentiation to the days existed after dinner, when all of us came together for a group activity. We watched an old movie or played cards. I’d won some art competitions in school and when Mr. Ali learned this, he allowed me to spend the evenings painting portraits of him and his wife dining, descending the grand staircase, dancing. I had never met people who danced like they did. They could dance without music. Eventually I got the sense that my husband begrudged me my small liberty and wanted me beside him again, so one night I declared that my painting career was over and that was that.
My only communication with the outside world was a letter from my younger brother. We were close. He was my only brother. At the time, he lived with our mother in Mahaicony, raising sheep. Mother worry about you, he wrote. She cry every night. The situation outside hadn’t changed, just like Mr. Ali said.
My mum planted and cut rice for a living. She had urged my five sisters and I to get married fast. I couldn’t imagine her calloused hands wiping her eyes. I couldn’t imagine what the cottage must look like now and that made me want to cry. My dad was a watchman at the Gonzales Gas Station. Dad worked the night shift, while my husband had worked the days. My dad met my husband before I did. He’d liked him. My dad wasn’t anywhere in the letter, but that was the way he stayed.
On our last morning, we were gathered in the kitchen for tea as usual. All of us had to have our tea. When the kettle went off, someone knocked on the door and we didn’t think anything of it, but then they kept knocking, like they wanted to bust the door down. Mr. Ali left to get his gun from the china cabinet, and I headed to the blue guest room to begin packing. Before anyone told me, I knew who it was. I don’t know how I knew. I looked out the second-floor window and standing outside the house was a newlywed couple, clutching one another, telling Mr. Ali about the riots and gesturing to their suitcase.
Back in Dundee, we heard about what happened to Mr. Ali from that man and his wife. Then we heard it from everyone else. A week must have passed since our departure. I remember when my brother came to check on me, I didn’t answer the door right away because I was in the middle of folding my husband’s clothes. My brother told me later that those five minutes of silence gave him such a fright.
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Renesha Dhanraj is an Indo-Guyanese writer and graduate of the MFA Fiction Program at Brooklyn College. Her stories have been published in EPOCH, The Minnesota Review, Pithead Chapel, The North Meridian Review, performed at Liars’ League London and awarded Pushcart nominations. She has stories forthcoming in Prairie Schooner and with the Observatory Caribbean Migrants Project (OBMICA). She is currently living in NYC and working on a novel about Guyanese immigrants.
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