They went through my bags, my papers.
—What is this paper, paper! Show us your hidden gold!
I had carried a 20-rial note as a souvenir of that pre-revolutionary Iran, before Iran fell into the hands of goons.
Once a chance meeting with Ayatollah Beheshti at seven in the morning at Tehran’s Interior Ministry. He was huge; totally unprotected. He turned around like a lumbering elephant and gave me a sharp look as if memorising the features of a future assassin. The Left bombed him out of existence soon.
Rashda Masri came to the Ben Gurion Airport, Tel Aviv to greet me. Pink dress, pink scarf on head, not a day older than fifty.
‘If you’re a Communist we can’t keep you’!
—I’m not a Communist!
‘If you’re a homosexual, ditto!’
—I’m not a homosexual.
My perjury had begun.
Palestine rose out of the bottom of the prehistoric sea, Tethys. It has hillocks and valleys, deserts and sudden rivulets forming valleys (or wadis i.e. water gullies). The Jordan flows into the Dead Sea. There are water wars between nations in the area now. The Mediterranean is hugged by the Gaza coast. These are Cretans (sea peoples of Ramses’ inscription) who settled here. The Phoenicians were seafaring and known for the purple dye made from molluscs. Mt Lebanon’s slopes were covered by cedars out of which the Temple was fashioned. The chalky sub-soil over laterite limestone allows the olive to spread its roots in shallow soil and grow hundreds of years. Grapes, oranges, figs and almonds are native to Palestine. Find two almonds in a shell they say and you’ll find love. Palestinians live on mountain tops and work the fertile valleys. Now Israel builds on peaks to shoot into a restive town below. At the narrowest Israel is only 17 km wide. This is the corridor between Gaza and the West Bank. Choke this chicken neck and you bifurcate north Israel from the south. In Dimona (Negev) Cochin Jews laboured in cotton.
The driver lost his way to Nablus. We arrived by moonlight to a hulking dark hillock. ‘Nablus!’ said Rashda.
‘You’re Blake! You can hear angels singing in trees!’
—Indeed, I did!
The next morning on my way to campus a boy caught up with me. Could it be a new love? No! He was looking for recruits for the PFLP. Rashda hated them. The hatred was mutual.
Rashda’s uncle had started the school with his gay friend, the late poet Ibrahim Touqan—Fadwa’s brother—who still lived downhill at one of the first bends in the road where I too was put up.
Nablus
is a woman
weeping for a lover
She treads stones
on bare feet
At the purple sun-set hour
she weeps …
‘Such a sad poem!’ Rashda said. ‘I hope everyone will say you teach well!’
‘You must love’ said Rumi. ‘If you’re married, love your family. If not, love a friend!’
This was maliciously reported to Rashda as my espousing gay causes. I was merely peeking out of the closet!
A fellow teacher of Shakespeare once herded his uncle’s sheep on the hill pasture of Palestine. He had no shoes on his feet. Now he’d returned from Oxford with a thesis on Cleopatra! He espoused the Palestinian cause. Everyone espoused the Palestinian cause. As long as it benefited them. Politics and oil money.
Another invited me to Salfit. I declined. I did not wish to cause a commotion in a Palestinian village. I thought him to be a bisexual. He was a Casanova. Indeed, in a year’s time he lost his job (as I did) for soliciting students.
Strikes, sit-downs at school. Against the Israelis. Rashda too would strike. Against the striking students. For not knowing their conjugations. I sat at sit-ins with the PFLP students, George Habash’s party. The Democrats of Nayef Hawatmeh tried to woo me, unsuccessfully. I had lost my heart to Nabil of the PFLP. He was second-in-command. Their leader was a thick fellah.
Nabil’s hair shone in the sun. It fell in curls. His head was well-oiled. With olive oil. Olive oil was the liquid gold of Palestine. When the young revolutionaries smoked too much their choked, blackened lungs were relieved of phlegm by drinking a glass of olive oil, neat! Then back to a six-pack day. I called Nabil, ‘Lancelot.’ That he was to become: A ladies’ man. That was what the revolution taught our boys, the Moslems would grumble. Guards in Jewish jails probably solicited Nabil. He probably knew gay sex but I saw him as virginal.
He took me home to his mother. ‘He slept with me thirteen years when his father was away in the coal-mines of Ruhr!’
‘Welcome! Ahlen-Wasalen!’ was all the father muttered, over and over. No language!
‘I love you most, after my mother!’ Nabil said to me.
He took me to the village cemetery. A small plot on a wind-swept slope.
Bury me here!
—‘No, go home to your people!’ said Nabil.
A martyrs’ cemetery. Martyrs of love.
I was so touched by the simplicity, the poverty, the sincerity. I gave away my first salary to the PFLP.
—You’re mad! said Rashda.
She was right. They drank, smoked, womanised, plotted revolution, eight long years of Occupation. ‘The Israelis will come to India too’, said Nabil. Indeed they did, to Sri Lanka. ‘Our fathers too fought. In the 1930s. They were defeated. Kicked by the hooves of British Officers’ horses in Mandate Palestine,’ the Poet informed me.
I called him the Fat Poet. With a bandaged head, from a stone-throwing demonstration, he looked like Apollinaire, trepanned. He wore a Moroccan cape for dramatic effect. I tried on the cape. I waddled in it. But he was a bad poet. And dishonest, too.
—‘Why fat? Just Poet, would do!’ he’d admonish me.
He took me to Jenin. His brother, prize-student of Jenin High School (now the University of Palestine, Jenin) knew immediately I was gay and wished me to give him some experience. I do not attack my hosts’ children. That night, during a power cut (the patriotic village had disconnected itself from the Israel power grid and Israel wouldn’t allow a link-up with Jordan) they all huddled under the magic Moroccan cape. They all huddled, cuddled and giggled. I saw the family’s genius with his sister. They bundled and giggled. The girl giggled, the boy giggled, the father too giggled. A peasant attitude to the body. I sat sourly next to the sweaty Fat Poet who stank.
Power cuts can be fun. They can be tragic too. The newspapers reported a mother lacing her bride-to-be daughter’s school sandwich in the dark at dawn with ratpoison, thinking it to be black pepper. The high school girl merrily ate it: her last sandwich as a carefree lass. She was brought home from school, dead. A scene of rejoicing became a scene of mourning. Palestinians are used to that.
Someone picked up a stone to throw across the picket of burning tyres. The Israeli ace-shooter shot him in the arse. Hip bone shattered. Heroism mattered. In hospital the hero shrieked for his mom! She ran to his bedside. I was there: with rabbit and ‘mlukhiya’ (chard) cooked by my revolutionaries at home. One more hero was disappointed. Wailing like a child in pain. I caused a sensation at the hospital in my white kurta-pyjama. Florence Nightingale from India with a soup tureen held in outstretched arms! The nurses came to look. Everyone wanted to know my exact relations with the hero.
At another rally a seventeen-year-old picked me up and took me to his mother and elder brother, twenty-six, a high school math teacher. The mother, a busty woman in Western attire, a widow, looked like an Arab Shelley Winters. The elder son, a Communist, almost brainwashed his mother into becoming an atheist. She was repenting when we met. The Party would not let the young believe in God or love. They took the youth away from the struggle. An elaborate rigmarole involving a lit match was used to prove that like the heat and light of an extinguished matchstick neither God nor love existed! I’d say you feel the heat but not see it: God and love are just like that. But who’s listening to me, in Palestine! At night they separated me from the boy and asked me to sleep with the elder brother. I held out all night but couldn’t resist him by dawn. He feign
ed sleep, opened an eye at orgasm and promptly went back under his blanket. The next night I was given the couch in the hall. I left the home in rain; the garden hung with pomelos as big as lanterns. I remembered Heine’s ‘Home-Coming’: the eternally wandering Jew hoping to come home some day.
‘My son is not beautiful, your eyes are beautiful,’ a cobbler had said to me in Iran when I praised his son’s beauty. Nablus has its share of cobblers. I fell in love with the son of one. ‘Take him! Take him!’ the father said. They always said that. Ten children to a family: to change the demography of Israel. A political act. Every mother a revolutionary birthing future revolutionaries. (Hence the Naga cannibals in India’s north-east once ate enemy women: They birth future enemies!) Too many mouths to feed! Yes, hands for labour too. But not enough labour in the cities. Unemployment, listlessness. Take him! He tried to rape me in the maze of alleys in the Old City.
Stolen
Stolen fruits are always sweeter
Stolen kisses much completer
Stolen looks are good in chapels
Stolen, stolen be your apples.
—Anon. (Old English Rhyme)
On winter days boys and girls would saunter up and down the college quadrangle: boys with boys, girls with girls. But the boys would go in one direction, the girls in the other. It was like Dante’s Florence after Sunday churchgoing. Same-sex love flourished. A male music teacher took my hand to walk against his girl’s direction. I pummelled his palm for good measure. She sent word he was not to be seen with me. We hid in the Music Room. He would play an instrument; I, write. Teachers, mostly men, peered in at the shut window. He would play a plaintive flute melody till tears welled in my eyes. He’d feel powerful; I, helpless. I’d quarrel with him then. ‘O, Dawood,’ he’d say helplessly. I’d feel some triumph then. ‘Dawood’ is Arabic for David, the type for male friendship in youth and prophecy in age. We ended up in bed. We made love thrice in one night. I had to banish him to the living room where other guests, students, slept. They reported us to the Party. The party parted us. I showed up at school beardless. It was a scandal. When I visited his home in the neighbouring town he played loudly a tape of Koranic verses (to cast out the devil) and ordered me out of his life. We never talked again. After four years of ogling his sweetheart and amassing a bride-price (‘mehr’), they married. When I left town after a year, we chanced upon each other on the high street. He kissed me goodbye.
Bassem would be another boy who’d accost me at sunningtime in the piazza. He’d brush his body against mine and get a thrill. I visited his student room but he was always at prayer. When he visited me, flushed hot with anticipation, I gave him a chaste kiss and sent him away. Bassem remembered me as the chaste Yusuf. When they denounced me in the mosque, Bassem stood up for me. His wife later wickedly said that it was I who was keen on Bassem, that Bassem was never keen on me. It was not that the bird was keen on Prometheus but that Prometheus was keen on the bird. Bassem, forty now, appears on BBC to defend Palestinian Human Rights. I remember the full-lipped boy with slim waist and an ample endowment with a pang.
When Israel invaded Lebanon, school shut down. Everyone got tired chasing everyone else. They stayed home plotting Revolution. I strayed into the PFLP den. The head honcho, an Israel-prison graduate, hence older, was getting his body massaged by his younger minions. I volunteered to massage him. We were not alone and he had to keep up his image among his protégés, so he wouldn’t succumb to my wiles. I was soon banned. Called an Israeli spy. When I protested I did not understand their language they said even a deaf mute outsider couldn’t attend their party proceedings. ‘What party do you belong to?’ the Lahore jail inmates asked the poet Faiz’s friends proceeding to his cell with a birthday cake.
—‘The birthday party!’ they exclaimed.
I hated Head Honcho and even rejoiced when the Israelis put him behind bars in preventive detention without a trial for eighteen days. But when my boy, Nabil, went to jail I pretended to be a Palestinian, wore an Arafat ‘Kefiyeh’, wept, spent sleepless nights, publicly declaimed my poems declaring love for the Leftist martyrs and become the laughing stock of the Islamists.
Everyone wrote poetry. Everyone publicly declaimed. A woman teacher, divorced, leftish, spoke passionately about Palestine. She could see I was a fox in the chicken coop. Our hatred was mutual. To her I was always ‘the foreigner’. The Islamists wickedly put it out that her family beat her up at home for talking freedom abroad.
‘Revolution is not a tea-party’—Mao.
The Arab market (souq): Men with men drinking tea (chai), playing backgammon, fidgeting with worry-beads (tasbiha), calling out to each other with sweet endearments, ‘ya habibi’ (my darling) being very commonly used. Workless, worthless people awaiting to push Israel into the sea. Breakfast was in the souq : Chickpeas (hummus) or bean soup (fool) with flatbread (khobs). Meat and potatoes were staples at lunch. Feasts consisted of roasted lamb in rice (mansaf ) eaten communally from one vast platter. Ramadan fasts in the heat caused kidney failure. Gluttony led to fat, indolence. I thought the society to be homoerotic. I was wrong. The Arabs are homosocial, men with men until night, which was reserved for wives. They went at dawn to the mosque like newly washed lambs. As far the directionless young, they went into the mouth of Israeli fire, lambs to slaughter. If angered they’d say: ‘Talhas teesi’ (lick my ass).
I tired of the Revolution. I longed for the sea. ‘Donkey-Dick’, for that’s what everyone called him because of his big dong visible under his trousers, drove six Arabs in a ‘service’ taxi to the Israeli sea at Netanya. It seemed for the moment that Israel had pushed Arabs into the sea instead of the other way round as the PLO slogan then claimed.
At leisure at the taxi-stand in the Nablus market ‘DonkeyDick’ would be polishing his car with master strokes; stroking his dick for future clientel. He’d solicit me but I’d avoid him. Pay my fare by dropping the shekels into his wide open palm and leave for the beach. I soon ended up on the gay, nude beach.
I stumbled upon Priscilla of the Desert. S/he hadn’t been reincarnated yet on Hollywood celluloid. But here was the living type. If only I knew! Thinking him to be an Adonis I was soon tossed up into his hot embraces, enjoying his kisses. But this was Venus with a penis. S/he turned and slept on her stomach. I slipped manfully into her manhole. Coming took some doing for lack of friction. I persisted a full half hour under the desert sun only to have my performance applauded by a group of gay voyeurs on a sand-bluff above us!
I’d hide my belongings under a rock and go swimming: no watches, wallets, rings and things on the beach. The beachcomber was a thief: the Russian immigrant as scavenger. I was left clothesless. Clad in swimming trunks I asked the Israeli fairies for help. They quizzed me. About my politics. Hot, hungry and literally naked I stuck to my guns. Jews were OK Zionists were not. Wasn’t every Jew a Zionist in Zion? Walk naked to Nablus, they commanded! Donkey-Dick came to my rescue. He literally gave me the shirt off his back and a free ride. I still wouldn’t relent. Ingrate that I was, I brought out from my almirah my last shekels on reaching home and dropped them into his ample, expectant palms. But Donkey-Dick had redeemed himself. Not so the mosque.
On my next foray to the beach I was followed by a spy: a thin, big-dicked Arab with dirty teeth and a huge erection. Feeling shy, my spy hung his underwear on his peg as if it were a coat hanger. I laughed then. But he reported everything to the mosque. And I had as good as lost my job.
But sympathy swung my way soon. Another foray, another misadventure. At the Israeli checkpoints they pulled the Arab workers out of the bus, I along with them. They were kicked, punched, humiliated. I thought I was safe until they chanced upon my newly bought copy of Arafat published in London, sold only in Israel, not in the Occupied Territories. ‘Motherfucker!’ said the young soldier to me landing a stinging slap on my left ear. I smarted from the pain and the humiliation. ‘What the fuck!’ I involuntarily protested. He kicked my left shin, dragged me out of the
drill line and took me to his sergeant lounging with a beer under tamarisk trees. ‘Forgive my men. They are hot and harassed. His blood boiled seeing enemy Arafat’s photo on your book jacket … You don’t have a residence permit. (Israel never gave one to foreigners working on the West Bank.) You’ll have to come to the police station!’
Next day was Shabbat. ‘Policeman says you’ll have to stay in the lock-up overnight and be produced in court on Sunday morning,’ said the woman officer, jiggling her breasts in my face to mock the fairy that she had apprehended me to be. She was definitely her officer’s moll.
‘Can I go to prison with the women?’ I pleaded fearing gay rape.
—‘The women will rape you the minute you enter,’ laughed the officer.
My guardian angels spoke to me:
—‘Lie! Lie all you can, Hoshang, and get out of here.’
‘Excuse me!’ I started. ‘I know the Governor of the West Bank, an Arabic Professor at Hebrew University. My college president and I had ‘kunafeh’ (a sticky Arab sweet) with him when he visited Nablus. It was on TV!’
Officer: ‘You were on TV!’
—‘No, I wasn’t but my college president was. I must’ve been somewhere in the background!’
—LET HIM GO!
I was a hero to the PLO. The mosque, as usual, mocked. I read up on Islam and the Arabs. But I could not read up on Arafat. It was a forbidden book in the forbidden territory; forbidden to all, that is, except the Zionists. Greater Israel! Arabs had to be sacrificed to it.
Jordan was no better. If anyone spoke against the King he was simply pushed off a cliff into the wilderness beneath. A mad Arab killed ‘mad’ King Abdullah at Friday prayers at Al-Aqsa. The bullet grazed the boy Hussein’s medal on his chest. Hussain, soon to be King had become a hero already. ‘It was all a CIA plot,’ said my Arab students.
Truth shifts like a mirage in the desert. Depends on who is telling the story. The vanquished never write history, the victors do. Israel was lost the day they conquered the West Bank (1976). The Kibbutzim dream vanished with cheap Arab labour. Israel turned capitalist and later colonialist. All the pass laws of the British occupiers were kept intact on the West Bank.
The Man Who Would Be Queen Page 8
