Desertion

by Abdulrazak Gurnah

  There were some advantages to Rashid in this otherwise unhappy arrangement. If there was any scolding to be done, for some silliness in the streets, for loitering at a busy crossroads within striking distance of hurtling hand-carts or careering cyclists, or for throwing rotten fruit at each other or for arguing too loudly, the busybody who would take on the task of correction would address his righteousness at Amin, and even blame him for being negligent of his younger brother. At home Amin bore the brunt of any reproaches for their joint misdemeanours, and on these occasions Rashid made sure to stand safely out of harm’s way, grinning and making woe-begone faces at his suffering brother, and throwing in a tiny snuffle if anyone looked his way. Such scenes ended in one of three ways. One: Amin took his berating quietly, eyes lowered in shame and contrition, and everything ended well, concluding with agonised pleas from the parent not to allow whatever it was to happen again. A coin might even change hands at the end of such a scene, to make up for the hard words. Two: Amin would be unable to prevent himself from grinning back at Rashid’s antics, in which case the parent concerned would be enraged at his levity under torture, and would conclude with cuffs and slaps and acrid abuse. Three: if Farida was around during the scene she would betray Rashid instantly, and stern parent would turn around and catch Rashid’s facial contortions. In which case the cuffs and slaps would land on him while he yelled and screamed extravagantly. But on the whole, if there was any hardship to be borne, it was Amin who was required to volunteer. If there was an errand to be run, it was almost certain to be run by Amin. If there was only one juicy morsel of something left, then it was he who was expected to be self-denying and leave it for his little brother. These rules did not apply to Farida who was a sister, and therefore had other rules to follow, and in any case, she knew how to protect her own.

  The scolding and cuffing and slapping only lasted while they were young, of course, but the pattern remained. Everyone treated Amin as if he was nearly grown-up, expecting him to be calm and responsible, and treated Rashid as if he was a bit of a child, impulsive, dreamy. The brothers knew this about themselves, about how everyone thought of them and treated them, and they benefited in a variety of mildly self-gratifying ways. They never discussed this treatment openly, but they worked out strategies that took account of the assumptions of their natures, and then smiled when they were able to have their own way. It was important to them that they were brothers. They were in it together. They were used to each other’s ways. So they found themselves cast involuntarily, and later more willingly, in these roles of responsible elder brother and impetuous younger brother, but as they grew older it became clear that there was a truth in it. It was an apt and pleasing coincidence, an alignment of contingencies. Either that or socialisation worked more profoundly in their case than it does in the wishful thinking of the rearing of other children. Amin the trustworthy: Rashid the dreamer.

  As the children grew older, so their parents’ opinions of them became more set. They saw Amin and Rashid largely as above, making their way in the world as they were equipped to. Farida, on the other hand, was a real worry, especially to their mother. She was easy-going (lazy) and always smiling (silly). All she seemed to want to do was play with her friends or visit the neighbours in their crumbling old house. Getting her to sit down to schoolwork was a torture, which their mother appointed herself to endure. She threatened, and when that did not work she cajoled, and when that only partially worked, she sat down and more or less did the homework for her. ‘This world is not kind to women who don’t look after themselves,’ she told Farida, who looked tragic because she knew this was what was expected of her when her mother talked about how the world treated women. When her confinement was over, she was full of smiles and ready to go round to the neighbours or sit and chat with anybody who was willing. She loved chatting, and when there was no one around to speak to, she chatted with a cushion or an umbrella or the empty chair. She was even happy to help with the house-work, and sometimes managed a conversation with the objects she was cleaning or washing. She only did this when she was on her own, or when she thought she was on her own. Her mother eased off as time passed. She herself had had to struggle hard to become a teacher, and could not conceal her disappointment in Farida’s lack of interest in school.

  The time came when Farida finished school, or rather school finished with her. She was thirteen years old. She failed the examination to the state secondary school for girls. There was only one in the town, in the whole island, in the entire country, which consisted of several islands and a population of half a million people. Every year, hundreds and thousands of girls sat for the examination, and thirty of them were admitted into the school. For most of them, it was their first and last public examination. The names of the successful children were read out on the national radio, to disseminate the news as quickly as possible to all the far reaches of the tiny country, but also to mark the magnitude of their achievement. They sat in a tense silence around the radio while the announcer read out the names in the solemn voice used to announce the death of someone eminent. Farida was one of the thousands whose names were not read out.

  Although Farida had never seemed especially urgent about competing for the scarce chance of being one of the chosen, when she was excluded, she was full of grievance and anger. She burst into tears and fell gratefully into her mother’s embrace. She had been expelled, she said, denied any chance of making something of herself. There was no future for her now, nothing at all. There was a co-educational convent school run by nuns and attached to the cathedral, but that was for Christians. No sane parents would send their children there, especially not girls, to be corrupted and degraded and bent into unbelievers. Then there was the Aga Khan School, for Ismaili children. Non-Ismailis were required to pay fees and to achieve a high pass in the examinations. Farida’s passes were not high enough for the school. There was nothing for her now.

  Her mother contemplated giving up teaching to be at home with her, to teach her herself and look after her, but everyone told her what an absurd sacrifice that would be, after all. Her husband argued against it, her sisters, her brother, even Farida herself.

  Their father Feisal said to their mother, ‘You have worked so hard, and now your reward is to do what is useful to others and what brings respect to you. People like you are an example to others, a challenge to the bullying ways we have to learn to change. People can look at what you’ve done and say, Alhamdulillah, things can’t be all bad if you can learn to be what has been denied you, if you can manage to bring some satisfaction to yourself and to be useful at the same time. How can you even think of giving it up? We’ll find a way.’

  Their mother’s sister Halima said: ‘Let her come to me until you decide. I need the help. There’s no reason for you to give up your work, not after all the trouble you’ve put everyone to over this job of yours. Lo Mwana, calm down. She’s no worse off than thousands of others.’

  ‘That’s what everyone said to me when I was her age,’ their mother said. ‘And if I’d listened I would have been staying at home cooking and looking after children for the rest of my life.’

  ‘Like me,’ Halima said, chuckling and snapping her fingers at the same time, to show how unmoved she was by her sister’s belittling comparison. ‘But then you’d have had time to enjoy looking after your children and cooking for your husband, and even spend some time going out to see people, instead of rushing around like someone with a madness risen in them.’

  ‘I look after my children,’ their mother said, as always stung by this irritating accusation. ‘And I look after my husband. Ask them, see if they have any complaints. Ask them.’

  ‘I don’t need to ask them,’ Halima said, sighing at having arrived at the familiar impasse. ‘Of course they don’t have any complaints. How can they? Don’t make such a fuss, that’s what I’m saying. Send her to me until you decide what to do.’

  So Farida was sent to her mother’s elder sister, Bi Halima. Bi Halima
had a large family but she refused to have a servant, for reasons she could not be forced to explain. She did not like to have a servant around her, she said. She did the washing, cleaned the seredanis, swept the house, did the cooking, the ironing, all herself. She bought what she needed every day from the shop nearby, and her husband Ali brought what was needed from the market on his way home from work. What would a servant do? Farida was sent to help her out during the morning and learn to do the domestic chores which it was necessary for every woman to know. Her parents were distraught at falling back to these old incarcerating ways, but there was no school to send her to. To leave her at home on her own all morning was, of course, unthinkable, not at that age, when girls did not know how beautiful they were, and how much yearning and turmoil they aroused in men if they seemed within reach, and how defenceless they were against those who could arouse their vanity. At about lunch-time, Farida returned home to help her mother prepare the food.

  They had been young radicals in their day, their parents. Not political radicals, marching in the streets and delivering speeches, and making fists in the air, not that kind of raucous radical. There was no space for that kind of thing then. The British would not have stood for it. They were very sensitive about marches and speeches, always on the lookout for what they called sedition. The Omanis would not have allowed it because they trembled at disorder, although they did not always mind raised voices and whirling canes among men. The sheikhs of religion would have prohibited it, because they prohibited any contention or challenge to authority, unless it was one of their interminable feuds among themselves. Their parents were radicals because they both defied their parents to study at the new government teachers’ college. Their father was forbidden to go to the college because his father was suspicious of colonial education: ‘They’ll make you despise your people and make you eat with a metal spoon and turn you into a monkey who speaks through his nose,’ he said. Their father’s father threatened and ranted in the way only a father of that generation could. ‘They will turn you into a kafir, and we will have failed in our duty to God. You might as well escort us personally to the gates of Hell. You will not have my blessing, I will disown you. Stop this nonsense at once, you stupid child of sin.’

  Their mother, on her part, was forbidden by her parents too. Her parents were different in many ways from his, part of a larger and more dispersed family, but they were the same as his in this respect. She was already a young woman, her parents told her, and to allow her to roam abroad unattended was to invite the world’s predators to visit disaster and dishonour upon her and her family.

  Defiance is a sin for people who are required by God to Submit, first to Him and then to their Fathers and their Mothers. But both their parents were defiant. They insisted on continuing with their studies, together, already known to each other, already in love. They bickered and cajoled and begged with their parents, who themselves were also acting in their best lights. They recruited relatives and neighbours to their side, and gradually wore their parent down with the seriousness of their desire and the goodwill of so many among them. It is hard to resist the massed opinion of relatives and neighbours in such matters.

  Then they defied their parents again by refusing to marry, when everyone suspected they were lovers, until they were both qualified as teachers and about to start work. In the end they exhausted their parents, who agreed to a betrothal and some discretion. Sometimes, when she was in the mood, their mother told the story of their fights with their parents, often when their father was also around. Perhaps it was to relive with him the memory of their happiness that she told the stories, and to admit their children into it, to recruit them into their content. Then, in the telling, they shared smiles at certain moments, or their father would frown and remonstrate with their mother for making the telling too melodramatic, too heroic.

  ‘You’re over-salting the dish again,’ he would say, then as always preferring restraint and calm.

  ‘I’m over-salting nothing,’ their mother would say. ‘That’s exactly how it was. You’re getting old. You’ve forgotten, that’s all.’

  To parents like them, for whom school education had been a personal quest, an undertaking into which other unspoken ambitions had been displaced, the route to a new and enlightened world, their daughter’s exclusion felt like a small tragedy. That they had no choice but to accept Aunt Halima’s offer to keep her at home and out of harm’s way felt even worse, like a kind of treachery to the dreams of their own youth. So when parents of a few of the girls who had failed the examination paid a teacher to start a class for their daughters, they were eager for the scheme, especially as Farida was happy to join them. The teacher, who offered private classes at her home in the afternoon, worked in the state secondary school in the morning, the same one that had refused thousands of girls along with Farida. They may not let the girls into the school, but the teacher was the same and the books were the same, the parents said to each other. Farida spent the morning at he aunt’s house, doing her assignments and helping out when she was required, and then went to classes in the afternoon. It was better than school, she said, as the routine was more friendly and the work more manageable. It was embarrassing to walk to classes when ordinary school was over, marked out as one of the failures going to a private school, without a uniform and where anybody with the fees could attend. But there were so many other failures that, after a while, she felt reconciled to be part of this stubborn experiment, to be one of those who had refused to sit in the corner allotted to them.

  ‘I don’t want to stay at home doing nothing,’ she told her Aunt Halima. ‘That’s what women are expected to do. Well, I’m going to do something for myself.’ It made her aunt smile, the thought that she stayed at home doing nothing, when so much of her day from first light to midnight seemed an accumulation of chores, worry and exhausting labour. That was Mwana’s talk, quarrelling and bustling for what she wanted, as if the whole world was desperate to prevent it.

  The classes lasted for a few months and then both teacher and students gave up in mutual recriminations. The teacher said the students did not take the work seriously, and probably were not up to it. There were moments when she sat in aghast silence, which was slightly exaggerated for pedagogic effect, at the students’ failure to grasp elementary ideas in algebra or chemistry. The students said the teacher did not know the subjects she was supposed to teach them, as her subjects at the school were domestic science and Kiswahili. They said she spoke to them as if they did not know anything, when the truth was that she did not know how to teach the difficult subjects. It was a waste of money, they told their parents, who themselves probably thought the same, for how could one teacher in her own home offer as much as a whole school with its troop of teachers, its books and its laboratories. They may also have thought, but certainly would not have said, that they too wanted those luminous European teachers that the girls at the state school had, and not this one like themselves, who could not suppress grateful smiles when she met the parents in the streets.

  So Farida was back to the old routine. She went to her Aunt Halima in the morning, helped her with the sweeping, washing clothes, chopping vegetables or whatever, chatting and laughing with a contentment that was more revealing than she realised. For a while she still took her books with her, as if she still had assignments to complete, but she never touched them. There was never time. When lunch-time approached, she went home, collected what Bi Aziza, their neighbour in the big house, had sent for them from the market, and started the cooking. By the time her mother came home, everything was under way, so Mwana had time for a cool glass of water and perhaps a brief sit-down before taking charge. Food was ready in good time, and its consumption became less frantic and less haphazard. Her father smiled at this new arrangement, though his smile was at times troubled. Her brothers were able to satisfy their enormous appetites before being chased off to Koran school, and Mwana had time for a slow grateful wash before going to lie down for a res
t. Everyone felt the benefit.

  Farida’s arrangements grew more assured as months passed in this way. She took the family washing with her when she went to Aunt Halima and did it there, and then brought it back when she came home the following day. She did shopping errands for her mother, and sometimes went to the market for a particular ingredient that her mother had forgotten to mention to Bi Aziza. She was already wearing the buibui by then, the black robes which all women wore, all except those hardened by foreign ways or by perversity. She went to the market if she wanted, or to the shops, or to call on friends, and came home in time to begin lunch. In the afternoon she cleaned the dishes, swept the house, perhaps did a bit of her own ironing (she left the rest for her mother), and then washed and went out again to call on friends. She went about these uninspiring chores with a smile and a kind of excitement. It worried her mother.

  ‘What’s wrong with her? She shouldn’t be content with this,’ she said to Feisal. ‘She’s fourteen years old. She should be wanting things. She should mind all this drudgery. We haven’t taught her to be like this.’

  ‘She seems happy,’ Feisal said carefully, reluctant to inflame her worries when he could not think of a way of diminishing them. They were lying in bed in mid-afternoon, the quietest time for them, their best time in all the years of their married life. Nobody called at that time of day, and the children were either at Koran school or were old enough to know that this was a time to leave them to themselves.

  ‘You don’t suppose she’s mixed up with someone, do you?’ she asked.

  ‘Nuru, why do you say that? Don’t even think such a thought.’ He was the only person who called her by her real name.

  ‘We can’t let her turn herself into a servant like this,’ Nuru said. ‘It’s not as if it’s necessary. I was managing perfectly happily before. I’ll have to find a way of stopping her from doing these things.’