01.3 A Broken Wing

I mentioned about this spy to my Addu friends. Nobody heard of a woman spy. It was like the Maldivia Gardens in Saint Helena. Ten near perishing souls on a boat picked from the open sea in 1735 by British Captain Pelly were taken to St Helena off the coast of Africa. Five men, a boy and a woman survived. They were asked to craft a garden. St Helena – the island Napoleon Bonaparte was exiled in 1815 and died in 1821. Even Napoleon had been to the Maldivia Gardens and the Maldivia House. No one in the Maldives heard of it or lost a soul, kept a record or knew they ever returned. It showed in record, seven left Saint Helena to go back home – the Maldive Islands.

So be it, when one of the scholars from the UK showed photographs taken of a grave marked in Divehi, somewhere in Freeport in the Bahamas, my jaw dropped. Engraved on a gold plate on the headstone in thāna – ‘ދީނި’ – the Divehi script to read ‘deeni’ and rest in English letters; ‘Mariam Mala, 29^th March 1930 – 26^th July 1979’.

1989 – a group of Oxford University scholars left on a ship to the Bahamas on a study tour involving oceanography. Among them was a Maldivian student, Thafseel Isaq, who happened to enter a grave because one of the siblings of a key handle died and a date coincided to this burial. He was thunderstruck to read ‘deeni’ – meaning ‘bird’ – a name often called in endearment like ‘dove’ – written in Divehi and obviously beside a Divehi-Arabic name. He did not have time to ask around who it was buried there. All he could do was to take some photographs.

In the new millennium, I read on websites of two separate finds of mass graves uncovered on Gan in Addu Atoll that belonged to young boys. In one of the graves, they found three carcases and in the other, seven dead bodies. There were no further investigations, no DNA or samples collected for forensics, no referring to any records saved in the archives.

I happened to know Habib when I was young. He rode a scooter. He was a sergeant of the national guards. With nine daughters and a striking nine-storey house, he won’t talk. A tall useless guy. I haven’t seen him recently.

I looked for Waheed, Mala’s son, and it happened to be someone I knew. Between ’84 and ’87, we worked together at Civil Aviation Authority. I didn’t know he was from Huludu but I knew he was from Addu. He was sixty-four and retired to home in 2015. Second time I called, he said I shouldn’t be calling. Waheed was very reluctant to talk about his mother.

He couldn’t remember his mother. She left when he was three years old. This whole episode of a spy role took place on a separate reef. Waheed or members of Mala’s family in Huludu never encountered much with her as she served as Nurse Deeni. Never heard from her ever since. Not even a postcard.

It was a stroke of luck that I came to know Retired Colonel Savari Shakir in 2003. I was living on rents collected from small apartments. A family from the Suvadives came to stay. A beautiful lady who was very frank with strangers. She met Shakir at the hospital and became friends. Then he began to call at my place. He knew more about me than I knew of him.

I was raised by a single mother but I did have a father. He was a cop extremely involved in the Suvadiva Uprisings and during the RAF withdrawal from Gan. Retired Colonel Savari Shakir knew him well.

Outside my room, in a dim little corner, he sits with this lady with plenteous talcum on her face in a little nightdress glammed for the occasion. Sometimes we sit with them to pass time, her husband as well. Colonel Shakir was vastly cultivated, a generous man, sixty-seven years old, standing erect, clean-shaved, well-dressed and bold.

I mentioned this woman spy and showed him a photograph of the gravestone to his surprise. I told him that I was going to write about it. Colonel Savari Abdel Shakir painted the picture of this mysterious spy codenamed ‘Dhekunu Mala’.

Mariam Mala was flown in a crate box on a Royal Air Force Cargo to North Borneo and taken to a camp – a concentration camp. Her condition worsened. She was unceasingly interrogated. Finally, the Brits came to resolve since there was nothing new to learn. Fights took place at the time – war among the tribes of Malaya and Indonesia – the British involved. During this time, a doctor who treated Mala wished to support her and took her to Britain via Singapore. Apparently, they retired to the Bahamas. Unfortunately, Mariam Mala passed away at the age of forty-nine.

Colonel Savari Shakir told me, “This file of ‘Dhekunu Mala’ remained in the archives for some time with all those photographs and tapes. Those photographs taken by the Doctor and during the little episode. I destroyed them all. Colonel Gold ordered me to destroy the SS Files.”

Mala as a given name is pronounced as “malaa” meaning ‘flower’ and as a codename it’s pronounced as “mala” meaning ‘vista’.

I mentioned Huzeir-bé to the colonel and he uttered, “He’s a loophole!”

Remember, he said; ‘It was something I said’. It was he frequented to casual relationships. Shakir’s former wife was a beefy woman and Huzeir-bé goes crazy for the type. He sits at home, when Shakir is gone, nictitating and doing the yellow talk. Women get flattered to have a guy around. He got caught in flagrante delicto. And that’s all I have to say about it.