So like everyone else I did what could be done and ignored the rest of the wreckage if I could. Houses were falling down in the night in the Old Town, weary and uncared for and out of strength. Once the rendering was cracked, rainwater soaked into the mortar, and sooner or later, however thick the walls, the houses cracked – datta – and collapsed. What could anyone do about any of it? I owned a small share in a market stall where I sometimes found more profitable employment than my office work. I paid for it out of the money my father sent me from Dubai. Other people did that if they could, or found extra work to top up their meagre salary, or if they were lucky enough to be employed in certain government offices and had the knowledge and audacity, they squeezed what they could out of the needy. It was not only government clerks who did this either. Teachers did not always turn up at school because they had another job that paid them better, or that paid them something, and children sometimes had unsupervised periods that they spent joyfully shouting and bickering and tormenting each other as if all day was an extended recess. In better-organised schools, children filled in the empty periods by spending several hours a week cleaning their classrooms, or the school toilets, or even the street outside the school.
*
I lived on my own in the house where I was born and which I had shared with my parents and my sisters, and under whose roof I had spent every single night of my life until then. I had never slept in that house for even a single night on my own. I thought I would be unnerved by its emptiness and silence, and would not be able to resist the night-time fears we all know since childhood. At first I was stunned by the silence in the house, and by the way outside noises came to me so differently, muted and close, and at times sinister. The sound of someone walking in the lane and clearing his throat made me tense, and I waited to hear the slap of sandals receding before I could breathe out. But once I bolted the windows and doors, tucked in the mosquito net and covered myself with a sheet, I felt safe and released, secure from all danger.
The house was rented but since it was now illegal to be a landlord, the owner was too frightened to ask for rent. Officially the house belonged to the government, but with so many houses confiscated in this way, the government office that dealt with gazetted property – that was the coy phrase for the plunder – was still catching up with the administration and had not yet got round to billing sitting tenants. If the house had been a mansion by the sea it would have been a different story, and one of the swaggerers would have had it without delay, but since it was only a two-roomed hut down a dark lane, it had to wait its turn for official recognition. It was an arrangement that suited the government office well enough as it provided opportunities for earning a little more money by selling favours and expediting processes.
In the meantime, I decided to clean the house. I had never lifted a finger to clean anything while my mother and sisters were there, even though at times I had winced at the greasy walls and the mouldy bathroom and the smell of unclean bedding. Now that I lived in the house on my own, I found its filth unbearable. I stripped the beds in the big bedroom where my mother and my sisters used to sleep, washed the sheets and the mosquito nets and aired the mattresses. I washed a few items every day when I came home in the afternoon and hung them on the line in the backyard. They were usually dry by the time it got dark. I collected the books my father had left behind and whatever clothes my mother had not given away and all the little ornaments I did not like and packed everything in a trunk. I did not know what to do with that. Although I would have liked it to disappear without a fuss, I pushed it against the wall for the moment and threw a cloth over it. I folded all the clean sheets and bedding and put them away in the wardrobe. I knotted the jewellery my mother had given me for safe-keeping and hid it under the bedding. When I finished with the big bedroom I closed the door on it and started on the small room where I slept.
After that I cleaned everything in the large entrance hallway: the cupboard with the pots and pans, the braziers, the primus, the mat, and with some of the money my father had sent with the tickets, I paid a house-painter to whitewash the walls and ceiling. The whitewash only turned the walls grey, but I was sure there was a thinning of the smells of grease and sweat and condensed breath. When all this was done, I was ready to start my new life. The house was streamlined and sleek, free from clutter and a lot less grimy.
My neighbours Mahsen and Bi Maryam watched this frenzy with friendly amusement and mocking sarcasm but I took no notice. I loved the freedom of my solitariness. Sometimes the sound of cockerels crowing at dawn made me smile in my sleep, as if I had never heard cockerels at dawn before. Some evenings I went to the cinema, and despite the censors’ watchfulness, found enough of the film there to make it worth the outing. I did not know living alone would be like that. I went out to be with friends when I felt like it, or now that I could, I stayed in and read.
It was difficult to find new books at the time but so many people who departed left theirs behind that second-hand bookshops were overflowing. I visited one run by a young Indian man in Mkunazini whose name was Jaffer. I had been in secondary school with Jaffer’s younger brother some years before and had briefly been friends with him before he was sent off to a private school in Nairobi. His family were ambitious for him and relatives in Nairobi took him in to help him, and maybe the family were the kind who were always hedging their bets and sending one son here and one son there in case things went wrong in one place or the other. The family owned a clothes and sewing supplies business, a haberdashery, but its entire stock was looted during the revolution, and in the uncertainty and anxiety that followed, the remainder of Jaffer’s family took flight for Nairobi after the son who had preceded them, leaving Jaffer behind to stand guard over the house and furniture until he could dispose of them.
In the meantime, he transformed the family haberdashery into a second-hand bookshop, and surrounded himself with piles of books that he arranged on the shelves where bolts of cloth used to lie and placed some of them spine-up on the old shop counters. Jaffer suggested that if I would like to make up a boxful, he would let me have it at a discount. So the two of us walked up and down the counters, and even went into the back-store, while Jaffer, who loved his bookshop and had always wanted to have one, offered advice and opinions. He talked as if he had sampled much of his stock personally or perhaps he could not resist slipping into his trader patter and pretending that he had. I made up an arbitrary library of detective novels, a four-volume collection of Sir Walter Scott (because I had seen the film of Ivanhoe), Westerns, mysteries, an abridged A Thousand and One Nights, an old children’s encyclopaedia (Jaffer threw that in as a gift) and a Collins edition of The Complete Works of William Shakespeare. The letters in the Shakespeare were tiny and the paper wafer-thin, but the book was still fat and heavy, at least two inches across the spine.
I had never read a Shakespeare play before, so when I got home I opened that tome with curiosity, fully expecting to be daunted. I tried the opening scenes of a few of the famous plays – Julius Caesar because we had read Mark Antony’s speech in a class anthology, Macbeth because I had seen an illustrated comic edition and knew there were witches and ghosts in it, The Merchant of Venice because of the shocking idea of the pound of flesh – but I could not manage more than a few pages in each case. Then I started another one and was drawn effortlessly into the text. It was The Two Gentlemen of Verona, and I read the play late into the night. I did not try another for several months, resting on my laurels for the time being and consuming the mysteries and the Westerns, reading and re-reading the ones I liked. That was when I started buying those boxes of books from Jaffer whenever I could afford it. When I was not out in the evening, I ate a cold supper of potatoes and radishes and pickles and, if I had no chores to see to, read for hours on end. I found such unexpected contentment in this lonely and eventless existence.
*
The three months of their permits went by and my mother and sisters did not return. I had re
ceived one letter from my mother soon after their safe arrival, giving me their post-office box number. She told me that my sisters were now in school and were content, as she was, with their new house and neighbours. My father was well and sent his blessing, and asked that I should come and be with them as soon as I felt able to. There were so many people they knew there, you’d be surprised, so you would be among friends and in safety. The letter was written by my younger sister Halima (whose name meant calm and forbearing, my father had told me years ago) because my mother could not write. It ended with her sending her love and saying how much she missed me: Your mother Mahfudha. Below that was a P.S.: So do we, signed by Sufia and Halima. I put the letter away in the wardrobe with the jewellery. Once the three months were past, their travel permits lapsed and they were no longer citizens. A new tense calm descended on me. I was now really on my own.
As my days grew calm and my life slipped by quietly, Saida came back more into it and the thought of her began to make me anxious again. Now when I caught sight of her she seemed more stunning than ever, but I could not just keep looking longingly at her. I had to do something, I had to be bold. I had to take fate in hand and make it mine. Luck played its part. I saw her standing in a queue at the Post Office and joined it, and casually fell into conversation with her. That took some doing, the audacity of it. After that I stopped to talk with her whenever I saw her, unless she was in a crowd of school friends. She asked me about my sister Sufia, who had attended the same school, and I said that the only news was that they had arrived safely and were now settled. I asked Saida about school, and she told me about an incident people were talking about when a man went to the school to accuse one of the male teachers of cheating on his wife, who happened to be the other man’s sister.
‘Can you imagine how embarrassing it was? He came right into the classroom,’ Saida said, her jaw dropping as she re-enacted her surprise. ‘The teacher just stood there looking shocked while the poor man ranted about dishonour and shame, and made ugly threats. He made such a fool of himself.’
‘Everyone knows that teacher has a reputation,’ I said.
‘Exactly, his sister should’ve known better,’ Saida said and I nodded, although I imagined that such knowledge always came too late.
One afternoon I saw her walking on her own and I dismounted my bicycle and walked with her for ten minutes until she reached her destination where we stopped to talk and grin at each other, ignoring the knowing looks people gave us as they passed. She could not have failed to see my devotion to her, but I thought I had to wait until she gave me more encouragement, a definite sign. Other people knew about us now and passed word between us. A sister of a friend said something to someone else, who passed it on until it reached me: she thinks you’re really nice, or vice versa that sort of thing. I still did not know if that was enough encouragement.
Saida was beautiful, she was famed for it. People pointed her out in the streets, and youths sometimes walked behind her, smirking their adoration. In those years, the rules of sexual decorum people had lived by for generations were set aside. The new owners of the government and its offices did so contemptuously, pursuing women they desired without fear of causing offence, or perhaps they did so with such indiscretion deliberately to cause offence, in the way that men look to humiliate their defeated rivals by treating their mothers and sisters and wives with disrespect. They boasted of their conquests and pillage among themselves, giving themselves farmyard names and guffawing at their outrageousness. For the women it was sometimes impossible to say no, because of the insistence of the men or because of the threat to their loved ones or the needs of the family, and because they understood their obligations. Some people thought it a curse when their daughters grew up prettier than expected. It was a time when a beautiful daughter was cause for anxiety. But not all the young women were coerced. For some of them, it was as if after turmoil and deprivation, they who had been under surveillance all their lives now relished this unanticipated liberty and participated in it without heed for what might lie ahead. Something went out of our lives in this abandon, some quality of reflection and tenderness and fellow feeling.
Saida would have been a target of predatory approaches both because of her beauty and her age. The approaches would have been gentle and indirect to begin with, and like most young women of her age she would have spurned them for the moment, would have refused the lift in a gleaming government car and ignored the invitation to have a coffee at a hotel. But she was now in the final year of school, preparing to graduate and to look for work or opportunities for further study, something that could be done more easily with the help of an influential father or lover. It was now that the approaches to young women like her became insistent, and cars parked outside at the end of school, waiting to pick up the lucky ones. By this time Saida was very aware of my admiration, and I guessed she preferred my lop-sided smile to anyone else’s but she did not know exactly what to do about it either.
Her school friends decided to have a party to celebrate their graduation. They asked for permission to use the school hall, so that parents would know that it was likely to be supervised in some fashion. Their parents and guardians allowed them to proceed with their plans if brothers and sisters were also invited, and the party was held in the afternoon so that everything took place in broad daylight. All these measures were intended to diminish the possibility of shame and disaster. A record player would be acquired from somewhere and people would bring their own or their parents’ records. They were also allowed to invite a few friends who were not members of the school – that is, boys. The next time she met me, Saida asked me to come as her guest.
‘We’ll just play some records and dance and have some snacks,’ she said.
‘I would love to come,’ I said.
I had never danced in my life. What an idea! Who would I have danced with and what would Maalim Yahya have said? So I had to have a hurried tutorial from my friend Yusuf, who knew about such things and who taught me how to wriggle and wiggle to music played on the radio. Yusuf wept with laughter at my efforts, which made the exercise even less bearable. ‘Never mind, just keep wriggling your body. That’s all you need to do, it’s not going to be the kind of party where you’ll get to hold her in your arms,’ he told me. ‘It’s just a children’s picnic, really.’
When I got to the party I found it was packed with noisy young people of all ages, like the Idd fair, eating, shouting, pushing each other around, with the music scratching feebly in the background. What little room there was for dancing was occupied by a handful of exhibitionists, who thronged the record player while Tom Jones belted out ‘It’s Not Unusual’ and Ray Charles beseeched ‘Unchain My Heart’. Saida and I found a wall to lean against, and somehow our hands touched. It was only furtive hand-holding but it was enough to make everything clear. She took off her wrist-chain and gave it to me as we parted: ‘It’s only tin, painted to look like gold,’ she said. I solemnly accepted it as if it were made of precious metals.
When I saw her again, I secretly passed her a note in which I told her that her beauty outshone the moon and that she was the light of my life. I had read Romeo and Juliet by this time, which was where I got the line about her beauty outshining the moon. That she was the light of my life was my own line. She had one ready for me next time, in which she told me she loved my gentle voice and sometimes heard it in her sleep. Young love is such a beautiful thing. We saw each other almost every day, often only briefly, our encounters hard-won and sweeter for the contriving. Whenever we thought we were unobserved we held hands, and if the place was secluded enough, we kissed! Just a brief touching of parted lips and then fond smiles in retreat but it felt like sweet daring. I wrote her a note about her perfumed breath. I had a whole house to myself, but I dared not invite her to visit me there. I thought she would feel humiliated by my lack of respect and might misunderstand my motive. It never occurred to me that she would agree. At times I imagined that she was in the hou
se with me and it thrilled me to go about my chores in the evening, pretending that she was in bed waiting for me.
One day I went to the house in Kikwajuni, as arranged, so that Bibi could have a look at me. Normally an aunt or someone like that would have dealt with this delicate business but I had no relatives to perform the task so I had to present myself for scrutiny. Bibi had a good look at me and chatted in her good-natured way, in the meanwhile slipping in several detailed questions about me and my family. She knew about my father, of course, the eminent Maalim Yahya, and my mother, but did not remember meeting either of my sisters or maybe she did when they were small. Has God blessed their move to the land of the Arabs? Inshaalah they will prosper and find a rich Arab to marry. Isn’t that what all young women think about? Saida said No, vehemently, they think about getting on with their lives. Bibi chuckled mischievously, puckering her lined and wizened lips. If I was younger I’d be looking for a rich Arab husband myself, she said. After that Saida and I were more or less betrothed. I wrote to my parents requesting their blessing, and after two months received a letter and a sum of money, which had once again been passed from hand to hand. The letter contained my parents’ blessing and an invitation for my wife and I to come and join the rest of the family in Dubai after the wedding. I put the letter with the other one from my mother, and used some of the money my father sent me to increase my share in the market stall.
Gravel Heart Page 21
