Dottie

by Abdulrazak Gurnah

  One night, after many secret struggles, he succumbed to his wanderlust and set off once more on his journeys. He was so filled with guilt that he did not say goodbye to his benefactors. He travelled south to Punjab and Sind and eventually took ship down the Arabian Gulf to the land of the Mahara. At the outbreak of the 1914 war he found himself working as a sailor on a Royal Navy ship, the Argent, in the Shatt el Arab by Basra. One day the Turkish forces sent fireships drifting down the Euphrates. It was like a scene from the Trojan War, wooden barges laden with naphtha that blazed remorselessly despite all attempts to extinguish the flames. Several British crafts were damaged, and many of the sailors were burnt or overcome with smoke. Taimur Khan fought so bravely and with such resourcefulness that the captain of his ship noticed and commended him. The captain declared that by his courage Taimur Khan had acquired the right to call himself an Englishman. It was less than Taimur Khan had expected. When he had seen how delighted the captain was with his endeavours, he had begun to hope for a small purse of rupees or a handful of guineas.

  But waste not, want not. When the time came to pay off the ship’s crew, Taimur Khan held the captain to his word and insisted on being repatriated to England. The captain laughed delightedly and endorsed Taimur Khan’s request. He arrived in London in April 1919, and took a train to Cardiff with a Malayan whom he had met on the journey. The Malayan had also been a sailor, but had been working for the American Army in France during the last months of the war, digging trenches and laying pipes. He told Taimur that in Cardiff there were many black and brown people, some of whom had been living there for decades and generations. Many of them were Somalis and were Muslims, the Malay told him, so he would not lack hospitality. There were also some Malayan and Javanese families, but the ignorant people of Cardiff called all of them Arabs.

  By this time Taimur Khan had learned to bear life’s burdens without too much grumbling, and the months of his journey from Basra to Europe had opened his eyes to many things. In Cardiff he went about his business with as much dignity as he could manage, suffering the petty persecutions his hosts inflicted on him with smiling tolerance. They were foreigners and nasrani as well, and could not summon the discrimination to tell a Somali from a Malay, so one could not expect too much from them. In any case, where had he been where strangers were not treated with high-handed mockery? He found work in the docks, and lived near by, where all the black and brown people in the city also lived. The house belonged to a pious Somali, who had seven other tenants. Taimur had tried to find a less crowded house, where the call to prayer did not take precedence over all else and where the praises of the prophet did not run into scores of verses, but he had failed. He did not try to find a room in another area because he had been warned that the white people did not take foreign lodgers, so he had no choice except to squeeze in where he could and attend to his immortal soul with what grace he could muster.

  Despite these small discomforts, he relished his new life. Some evenings he attended classes to improve his knowledge. They were free and were a respite from the interminable prayers at the house. The classes were held in a local school, and Taimur had learned about them from an exasperated fellow worker at the docks who had completely lost patience with his poor English. They were run by a young lawyer who was always talking about justice and equality, noble words that Taimur revered. The lawyer called him Ali Baba and sometimes cited him as an example of something he was explaining – we can ask our good friend Ali Baba what the Eastern point of view on justice is – but Taimur Khan did not mind. It was a chance to improve his knowledge. He knew that the people in the city were angry with foreigners, although he was not sure why. Perhaps there were hardships in the community – that would not be such a surprising thing. Children shouted at him in the streets, telling him to go away, but he smiled to himself and ignored them. The worst thing you can do with such rude children is take any notice of them.

  The lawyer had hinted at an explanation now and then, but he talked in riddles which made the other people smile but which were too complicated for Taimur Khan’s grasp of the language. He used words like utopia, feudal, occidental. Taimur felt the power of these beautiful words but did not have an inkling of their meanings. Even though he did not understand the lawyer’s explanation, he knew it was something to do with him, because of the way they looked to see how he was taking it all.

  What the lawyer sometimes said, and which Taimur Khan could not understand, was this: The mind of the Muslim man is unable to function rationally. It is obsessed with visions of sensual utopias and arcadias. Its idea of Paradise has no spiritual dimension, and consists only of thousands of houris ministering to basic physical needs. His processes of thought cannot resist atomising experience, so each event is concrete in itself and does not contribute to a larger whole. It is a feudal view of the world, which the occidental world advanced from during the glorious years of the Renaissance. The inability to function rationally, or recognise the general utility of individual action, therefore, has its explanation in the way the Muslim imagination takes experience to be discrete and atomised. That is why, the lawyer summarised, your run-of-the-mill Muslim cannot arrive at an intelligent generalisation of experience.

  Taimur also knew that the people of the town were angry with foreigners because of the women. Their faces became tragic when they said our women. To be truthful, their women seemed a shameless crowd to him, brazen and half-undressed in the unaccustomed heat of that year. He himself was already courting the daughter of a Lebanese shopkeeper who lived two streets from him, and he could understand the people’s irritation with the uncouth sailors who were always being disrespectful to women. Perhaps it would be better if the women did not always seem to be flaunting their bodies. The woman he was courting was called Hawa, and he had received enough encouragement from her hazel eyes to know that his endeavours would not be in vain. He had decided that Cardiff suited him, and had all but given up the idea of moving on to Argentina or the United States. He knew that he had done nothing to deserve the good luck that had attended his miserable existence, and he thanked God for having preserved him through the carelessness of his youth. He was ready now to accept the stroke of fortune that had landed him in this foreign city. If Hawa would have him, if she would honour him, he would give up his roaming life and stay with her.

  He was tempted to tell the lawyer about her. Taimur had a habit of hanging around after classes, paying homage to his teacher and delaying the moment when he would be forced to return to the crowded house. At the end of the evening during which the lawyer had discoursed on the Muslim mind, Taimur was shyly loitering in the class-room when his teacher asked him how soon he would be going to sea again. ‘Once a sailor always a sailor,’ he said. ‘When will you be off again? Although you’d be lucky to get a berth the way things are.’ The temptation to speak about Hawa was almost irresistible, but a sense of the ridiculousness of his language made him reticent. He shook his head, saying that his language was bad. The lawyer at once resolved that Taimur Khan should talk to the class, recount something of his travels and experiences. So the following evening he told them about the fireships down the Euphrates, and how they lit up the sky with enormous tongues of smoke-fringed flames that shot glittering sparks over the water. He spoke so badly that when he told them what the captain had said about him being an Englishman, they laughed at his broken English until tears streamed down their faces.

  The anger that the people of Cardiff felt against the foreigners could not be contained for ever, and in the end they ran riot and tried to hurt or kill as many of the black and brown people who lived among them as they could find. For two hot days in June the fighting raged. The Somali hotel in Millicent Street was attacked by soldiers and citizens, and was then set on fire. Lives were lost. Taimur Khan himself was chased through the streets by crowds of people carrying sticks and shouting abuse. He ran towards the docks and threw himself in the water. Hundreds of people stood on the water-front, at times thou
sands, rising and falling in the red-dimmed tide of his vision. They waved their fists and threw stones at him. He knew he was in terrible danger because he was not a good swimmer, so he could do little to escape the well-aimed stone. He had already gone as far out as he dared. In his terror, he shouted back at them, thrashing in the water and only attracting further attention to himself. Some yards away was a Somali man who must have already been in the sea when Taimur jumped in, and he angrily advised Taimur to calm down before he had both of them killed. The crowd saw him too, and began sharing out the missiles between the two men in the water.

  Suddenly a stone hit the Somali on his forehead, making him roll back and twist in the sea. Taimur saw the crowd turn their whole attention on the wounded man, and hurl rock after rock at him. Every time he rolled under, a roar of joy went up from them. Taimur made one attempt to reach him, but he lost his footing and attracted a hail of stones in his direction as he struggled to recover his balance. He waved a defiant fist, thinking his time would soon come too. But the police arrived before either man was seriously injured, and persuaded the crowd to leave. They laughed as they dragged the two men out of the water, slapping them on the back and telling them to send prayers of thanksgiving to their Almighty Wog-Wallah for their deliverance. Taimur and the Somali, whose name was Salla, were taken to the police station, to join the other people already under arrest. They were told it was the black and brown people who had caused all the trouble, and a few of them were put in prison. ‘East is East and West is West,’ the trial judge said, ‘and never the twain shall meet.’ Many white people were arrested as well, some arraigned for murder and assault, but everyone knew how sorely provoked they had been. It would have been adding insult to injury to punish them too severely. Most of the foreign people who were arrested were sent away, first to Plymouth and then to their own countries. Taimur Khan was allowed to stay because the lawyer helped him and spoke for him.

  6

  That was the story that Bilkisu used to hear when she was very young and was still allowed to sit in her father’s lap while he traded stories of his travels with the other people among whom they lived. Her mother Hawa never said anything but later she would tease him for exaggerating the hardships. Times are harder now, she used to say. Bilkisu’s father used to call Hawa his Devil, because of her black hair and red lips. In Hawa’s hearing, he told Bilkisu the story of how he came across her on a mountain path, abandoned and crying, surrounded by tumbled rocks. In her hair were thorns and poison berries, and her beautiful hazel eyes streamed with tears. He stopped to speak to her, and offer what help he could. He soon discovered that he could not leave for the rest of his life, and so he stayed with her and Bilkisu. In Bilkisu’s hearing, Hawa called him an iblis for telling such stories, and if she was near enough slapped him hard on the back for his fierce jokes.

  The trouble between Bilkisu and her father started when boys began to look at her. At first he only scolded her and asked her to remember that these were the children of the same people who had chased him through the streets, and would have killed him if he had not run faster than them. Then he had threatened to take her out of school, had forbidden her to go out after dark, and had started to talk of marriage. Bilkisu could barely bring herself to say anything affectionate to him any more, and he constantly found fault with her. In the end he became obsessed with the thought of finding her a husband. He was so disappointed in her that he was sure she would bring home a man who would exploit and ruin her. Hawa begged him to leave her alone but he could not, unable to hide from his wife the pain Bilkisu’s rejection caused him, unable to stop thinking of the shame her behaviour could bring them.

  Two things happening at once persuaded Bilkisu to flee. When she was seventeen she slept with a boy for the first time, and for a few days of terror at the end of the month she thought she was pregnant. At the same time her father began talking about a sailor from Karachi who was interested in her. He was a tall, fleshy man with a carefully trimmed moustache and a soft-looking pot-belly. When they met he smiled at her through a mouthful of the tobacco he was chewing, and the next morning she was gone. She could not bear the thought of that man’s mouth on her. In any case, she was terrified of her father’s wrath when he discovered that she was pregnant with a white boy.

  She called herself Sharon, the name of her one true friend in Cardiff. She passed herself off as a Christian, contemptuously tossing aside the loyalties that her father had pressed on her. She took the name Balfour as a deliberate act of defiance. Her father had ranted about him, describing the British Foreign Secretary as the perfidious agent of anti-Islam for giving the holy lands of Palestine to the Jews, and for dispossessing the Palestinian people of their homes. Even in his prayers Taimur Khan remembered to ask that God’s curses should fall on Balfour for his treachery to the Palestinians. When he saw the Minister’s name in the newspaper, his face would grimace with scorn. Balfour! Laanatu-llah alaika! he would cry, in a voice filled with rage. Bilkisu gave up her father’s name for a name he loathed more than any other, rejecting Taimur Khan and the life he had tried to force on her.

  She never went back to Cardiff, afraid that he would kill her if ever he caught sight of her. Instead she roamed the cities of England and Wales, attracting men with her dusky looks and her red lips, and fulfilling for them their prurient fantasies of A Thousand and One Orgies. When she was lucky, she had a regular man for a while, sometimes for months. Hudson’s father was a man like that. She was his woman for two months before he went away to France and then she never saw him again. She had already had Dottie and Sophie by the time she met him in Carlisle. She was then twenty-four and beginning to put on weight.

  For three years before moving to Carlisle, she lived in Leeds, but she had to escape hurriedly from there too, taking the train without thought or care of where it went. She ran because of a man called Jamil. His name meant beautiful and to Bilkisu he seemed like a prince. He had been seeing her for several months, and had just started to talk about being a father to her children. He told her things she had never heard of, and made her feel things she had forgotten about. One night he told her the story of Princess Badoura of China and the Ajemi Prince Qamar Zaman, who met each other in their sleep, brought together for one night while rival spirits quarrelled over which of the two of them was more beautiful. One of the spirits, Maimuna binti Damarat, favoured Prince Qamar Zaman while the other spirit, who was called Dahnash, preferred Princess Badoura.

  The Prince is like a burst of sunlight in a dark forest, Maimuna wept, streaming down the trunks and pouring off the leafy canopy like liquid fire. The moisture in his mouth is like the finest honey.

  In his turn Dahnash exulted: Badoura’s hair is like the nights of emigration and separation, and her face is like the days of union. She spread three locks of her hair one night and I saw four nights together. And she turned her face to the moon in heaven and I saw two moons.

  Maimuna hovered over the sleeping prince, her fingers almost touching his face. His lips are like carnelia. Words fail to describe his other charms, she murmured. His beauty is that of God.

  Dahnash glowered but kept his irritation in check. Instead he knelt beside Princess Badoura and cried softly: No one compares with her.

  In short, they could not agree. In the end they summoned the ugly hump-back who lived at the bottom of the well in the courtyard, and asked him to judge. He was sometimes called Cashcash, a name he hated, and Maimuna flattered him when he appeared among them by addressing him with his courtesy name of Dhamana, which meant Responsible. He squatted beside the Prince and Princess and gazed at them. His grotesque body, covered with scales and fuming with putrefaction, shook with amazement at the sight of such beauty, but he could not decide between them either. In desperation, the three spirits, Maimuna, Dahnash and Dhamana, were forced to wake the Prince and Princess one at a time, to see which of the two would show greater amazement at the beauty of the other. When that failed to resolve the matter, the three spi
rits in turn kissed the young people between the eyes and sang odes of praises to their beauty. Then Dahnash returned Princess Badoura to her home in China, and Qamar Zaman was whisked back to Ajemi, and the spirits returned to their crowded world to continue their arguments. The young people were stricken with love, and knew no way to find each other. Jamil told Bilkisu the story of their separation, and how their love overcame all obstacles until they found happiness. She did not tell him, because she did not know how to, that the story filled her with such joy that she felt that life was not impossible after all.

  Jamil was from Jamaica and his father worked as a postman in Leeds. Jamil himself was an electrician on the railways, which was why he was not in the war, his job being considered important enough in other ways. He was only a few months younger than Bilkisu, but his face was still bright with optimism. She wondered, at times, if she was taking advantage of his innocence, if that was how it seemed to others. But she knew she would be good for him!

  His family called themselves Syrians. They were Christians from Tripoli, but had been living in Kingston for three generations. It was Jamil who persuaded her to have the children christened in the church of Our Lady. He thought this would remove one of the objections that he could anticipate from his family. It did not matter, in the end. Jamil’s father sent two men to see her and beat her about, friends of the family. They told her to leave before there was trouble. They were ambitious for their son and did not want him to be ruined by a woman like her. The men did not give her much time, telling her that if she was there the following morning they would give her more of the stuff she liked, and might even give her little daughters a taste of it as well. She waited up all night, thinking Jamil might come to tell her that all was well, that they too would find happiness like Badoura and Qamar Zaman. She would have told him, had he come, that fathers are tyrants. They can’t help being like that. But Jamil did not come, even though she knew he was in town. She waited until it was light, in case he had been afraid to come in the blackout, but still he did not come.