“He spoke of the gigantic minaret of the Great Mosque at Samara, for centuries the world’s largest, with its staircase that winds around the outside. He brought me up a picture of that one a few days later. Huge, it was. I’d never seen anything like it.
“The highest minaret in Casablanca. That was impressive too. It has a laser at the top that beams across the Sahara in the direction of Mecca. I often sit here at night and try to imagine what that must look like – a green laser beaming across a clear desert sky.
“And my favourite, the Issa Minaret, like his name, in Damascus, where the faithful expect the Messiah to appear on the Day of Judgement.”
The church-like mosque used to be the Roman temple of Jupiter, then the Basilica of St John. It’s where the head of John the Baptist is buried, a holy place for both Muslims and Christians.
“I’ve thought about that one often since. I’d never heard of it. I wouldn’t have minded seeing it. Such a link.” A real cathemosdraquel, she thinks.
“The oldest minaret in the world is in Tunisia, and the oldest mosque in Britain is in Woking, would you believe,” she says, rising from her seat to join him at the wall. “And the largest mosque in north London is in Finsbury Park. Look at it! I’m certain it used to be lit up before. You can’t see the building itself from up here, but it’s all boarded up now. Shut down, like a shipyard, because of the threat it poses.” She shakes her head. “Shameful. Just shameful, while all the time we are the ones fighting our second war.”
Remembering Hide and Seek
TONIGHT, SLEEP DOES NOT BESTOW herself freely. From the mattress, he looks across to where the shiny knob of the desk drawer plays with light from the street. He crawls two paces on his knees across the floor, takes the yellowing childhood photograph from the drawer and returns to the mattress to study it. Lying awake, his eyes have adjusted to the darkness and there is no need to turn on the light.
When they were little boys there was sometimes the novelty of playing hide and seek indoors, with their mothers. With each game, their hiding places grew more and more elaborate: in Ma Vasinthe’s secret bathroom behind the built-in wardrobes in her bedroom; behind the geyser in the roof. Once Ma Gloria even took them to hide in the neighbour’s kitchen, where they ate cakes and biscuits while they waited for Ma Vasinthe to find them. Ma Gloria had thrown them over the back wall, before jumping over the wall herself and spraining her ankle.
Wherever they hid, Ma Vasinthe would always find them. As she approached their hiding place she would say, “Fee fie foe fum, I smell the blood of three South Africuns!” And then she would open the door and they would cling, squealing and laughing, to Gloria’s skirt, while their mothers nodded reassuringly at each other.
The game would start with a knock at the door. Ma Vasinthe would look at Gloria who would rush the boys into hiding, while Ma Vasinthe counted slowly and went to answer the door. But the charade soon turned sinister. Once, when they didn’t have enough time to find a good hiding place, they scrambled under Ma Vasinthe’s bed and waited. That was an eerie round and they didn’t enjoy it very much. It frightened them and, even though Ma Vasinthe said that they were imagining things, they knew that from under the bed they had seen the boots of the dreaded Black Jacks come to drag Kagiso and Ma Gloria away. After that, they enjoyed the game less and less.
Purple Rain
SEPTEMBER 2ND 1989 WAS A SATURDAY. When he wakes, still holding their childhood photograph in his hands, that is the day he remembers. Then, as now, his waking thoughts were of Issa, Issa with boyhood lips eternally poised for p. P is for paneer, p is for purple... They hadn’t seen each other for months, not since his birthday in July, in fact, when Sophie, drunk, tripped Issa up and broke his leg. During their years at university, he at the ‘Ivory Tower’ on the slopes of the mountain, Issa at ‘Bush College’ out on the Cape Flats, they had grown apart. But when he opened his eyes on that Saturday morning, he knew Issa well enough to know he would be involved.
The whole country knew about it. He did too. For weeks, the activists in Jan Smuts House had spent their days falling over one another and their nights in long meetings behind closed doors, followed by dinners of hushed whispers, and Tracy Chapman ‘Talkin’ Bout A Revolution’ in the common room, now reserved by unspoken agreement for their exclusive late-night use:
Don’t you know
They’re talkin’ about a revolution
It sounds like a whisper
Don’t you know
They’re talkin’ about a revolution
Their efforts paid off, as thousands took to the streets of Cape Town on that spring day to take part in the biggest demonstration in South African history.
But he wasn’t there, having opted instead for a matinee screening of Dangerous Liaisons in Rosebank with Sophie, Richard and the other bright young things from Upper Campus. Richard Mc Kenna, he thinks. Sophie Scott-Harris. What became of them all?
After the film, they went back to Jan Smuts House; it would be quiet, it wasn’t far and it had started to rain, and town would surely still be a mess.
They had the place and its panoramic vistas to themselves, a welcome change after the weeks of frantic covert planning it had witnessed. They’d stopped for pizza and some wine on the way - Constantia, as Richard rarely drank anything else – and Sophia had brought some hash that they smoked secretly in Kagiso’s room under clouds of incense. The boys agreed that Michelle Pheiffer was gorgeous; the girls did too. Then the girls agreed that John Malkovich was gorgeous, and the boys did too. Everybody agreed that the American accents were distracting. None of them had read the novel and all of them were oblivious to the chaos that had erupted on the other side of the mountain...
The Defence Force, armed with water cannons, had sprayed purple dye on the peaceful protestors as a means of marking participants, and then set about arresting everybody who bore the stains for their involvement in an illegal gathering.
Kagiso and his friends knew nothing of their plight; of the defiant hairdressers who did their bit for the struggle by giving refuge to fleeing demonstrators in their salons, draped them in towels and gave them un-purple rinses; nothing of the desperate crowd who, in vain, sought refuge on holy ground – the police, armed and dressed in full riot gear, raided St George’s Cathedral, in the interest of national security. They knew nothing of the 500 demonstrators who had been rounded up by the end of the day and trucked to police stations around the city.
And then, at around ten thirty, just after they’d heard the punch line to Richard’s joke, the activists – wet, bedraggled and purple – walked under the archway and into a courtyard that was about to explode with gales of drunken laughter. It was not until the tears of hilarity had been wiped away and Kagiso had caught his breath that he recognised Issa, stained purple, staring at him, from among his purple comrades.
jim, ayn, káf, mim, há,
IN HER SUNNY KITCHEN, she closes her reference book and turns away from Karim’s alphabet on the wall. On a clean page, she starts to write down the alphabet from memory – all 29 letters, from alif to hamza, saying each letter out loud as she writes – sound and symbol, sound and symbol. Some letters – bá’ and nún , jim and kha’ – still throw her; like b and d, g andj, they confuse the novice. She has to think carefully whether to place the dot above or below the otherwise identical shapes. Fluency and instant recognition will come with time and practice, she reassures herself.
Her favourite letter is m: mini – – with its loop and tail, a little like a p. She likes the word moemkin – it contains two mims and her other favourite letter, k: kaf – . She likes its look and its sound: m oe m kin. She sometimes talks to herself, making whole sentences with just this word: “Moemkin moemkin moemkin moemkin moemkin!”
Now she writes the word moemkin, remembering that the letter changes its shape to when it appears at the beginning or in the middle of a word and the letter is written when it appears in the middle of a word: . It means possible.
She smiles. She can read and write her two favourite words. She touches the tip of her forefinger to her lips and then, gently, to the words she has written on the paper, Karim, possible: .
She opens her eyes, takes a deep breath and moves on to the next phase, memorising the mutations of those letters that change their shape depending on whether they appear at the beginning, middle or end of a word: jim, ayn, kaf, mim, has’ .
“I just don’t give a – ”
“THE ANGER,” FRANCES REMEMBERS through narrowed eyes, “came later. First, there was the despair. On that Sunday night, 26 days later, as we watched the bombs start to fall, he fell silent. But I didn’t notice it at first – was too absorbed in what was happening on the screen:
As you all know from the announcement by President Bush, military action against targets inside Afghanistan has begun. I can confirm that UK forces are engaged in this action. I want to pay tribute at the outset to Britain’s armed forces. There is no greater strength for a British prime minister and the British nation at a time like this than to know that the forces we are calling upon are amongst the best in the world.
“The world had lost its moment,” Frances sighs, “and Britain was again at war. Never thought I’d see the day. Of course there was the Falklands, but that was Thatcher’s doing. Wicked woman. This chap on the other hand. I won’t be voting for him again,” she declares, grimacing with distaste and slapping her hand on her armrest with the finality of a judge passing sentence. “And so it wasn’t until I saw his shoulders shake that I realised he had started to cry. I turned -”
Kagiso leans forward. “Frances?”
She shows him her palm. “I’ve just remembered something.”
“that? ”
She starts slowly, like a medium, eyes unmoving, reporting events from another world. “It was a few weeks before he went home for his mother’s inaugural lecture, late August, early September, before the world went mad. He’d started reading a novel earlier in the summer, quite a thick one it was. He read snatches of it to me from time to time.” She shakes her head, annoyed with herself. “What was it called? Never mind,” she says, waving dismissively. “It will come to me later.”
“Anyway,” she continues, “he wanted to finish it before he went home, so he brought it up to the roof the day before he left for Johannesburg. He sat himself down in the driver’s seat while I made some fresh lemonade. When it was ready, I took it out to him and then I let him be.
“Mind you,” she confesses, “I kept peeping out from time to time to see how he was doing. It felt so reassuring to have him out there, his nose in a book. All I could see from here were his big feet stretched out on the crate in front of him.
“When I was sure he’d finished, I peeped out again. This time I saw him hunched over his knees, the book cradled in his lap. I went out to see if he was okay. As I got nearer, I heard sobs.
“‘Issa,’ I whispered. ‘Are you alright?’
“He looked up at me, his eyes red and puffy.”
“Fine thanks”, he said.
“‘What’s the matter?’ I asked.
“The book, he said. It’s the saddest thing I’ve read. And then he started crying all over again.
“We laughed about it afterwards, but even when he left for the airport the next day, I could tell that the story was still with him, there, in his eyes, when he turned around to wave goodbye one last time before going down into the station.
“What was it called?” she asks again, staring hardinto the middle distance, a bent finger tapping at her lips. “I can still see the cover. It had a picture of a little girl balancing on a stick... Never mind.”
She turns to Kagiso with renewed focus. “But the night the bombs started to fall, that night was a different sort of crying. I turned to him but he seemed not to notice me. I strained to hear the words he kept muttering to himself, over and over again.”
There’s nothing there to bomb. There’s nothing left to bomb.
“That was when he started listening almost constantly to the World Service. Its muffled, crackly transmission reminded me of the dark days of the Blitz when we would gather around to listen to the news on a long wave Bakelite wireless that took five minutes to warm up.”
“Welcome to Talking Point on the World Service of the BBC. US forces continue to pound the military installations of Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda network and its Taliban protectors inside Afghanistan.
“The US has declared the military operations a great success, but President George W Bush has also warned that the campaign is only the start of a war against terrorism that could last for years.
“Violent protests against the US-led air strikes on Afghanistan have taken place in Pakistan, which threaten to further destabilise the region.
“What is your reaction to the US-led attacks in Afghanistan? Are the strikes justified? What are they likely to achieve? And what could be the repercussions for the people of the region and the rest of the world?
“The lines are now open. Let’s take our first caller, Raymond in Singapore. Hello, Raymond.”
“Yes, I think it unlikely that Osama bin Laden is going to sit and wait for the US forces to capture him in Afghanistan. I assume that if it becomes necessary, he will go underground in some friendly community. Will the US then start bombing other suspects, presumably Islamic countries?”
“And he hardly ever watched the news on TV anymore. He’d still come up here most evenings – more, I think, out of habit and to keep me company – but he always brought a mangled newspaper with him, which he flicked through while I watched the set, or a little transistor radio which he’d take out onto the roof”
“This week in Talking Point: the worst fighting may be over in Afghanistan but aid agencies warn that the refugee crisis will not be solved for years to come.
“There were at least two million refugees in Pakistan alone before the start of the American bombing in October, more than 200 000 are thought to have crossed the border since then.
“Many of these refugees are desperate to return home, but the UNHCR has been urging them not to return immediately, since Afghanistan is not ready to receive them.
“The primary obstacle to large-scale repatriation now is security, as tribal warlords continue to fight over the spoils of war.
“Jobs and food are both in short supply in a country where six to seven million people are reported to remain on the brink of starvation.
“Does the West need to do more to help the Afghan refugees? What should the new government do to help the Afghan people repatriate?
“We’ll go immediately to our first caller, Paul in England.”
“Here we go, another huge flood of welfare claimers and council house takers heading our way. Isn’t it time we told people to go back into their own countries rather than coming in and sucking ours dry – which is the inevitable conclusion if we don’t tell these people to go back to their homes?
“I wouldn’t mind aiding people if they were willing to help themselves – but people are too ready to cry and whinge. When I saw people dancing in the streets and enjoying themselves in their country, it showed me that it can’t all be that bad, and now they’re out from being oppressed they have a golden opportunity to make something great of themselves. They’d have the backing of everyone if they didn’t send their people over here to claim our money from our welfare system and send it home.”
“No. It wasn’t till several months later, not until the summer, following that dreadful incident in Lye, that the anger started to set in.” Frances slips away again, a pensiveness coming over her. “I can still see him sitting in that very armchair you’re in now, circling words in the newspaper article: riot gear, metal battering ram, mosque – children, refuge, deportation. He turned to me, pleading to know...
What sort of society can make sentences out of such disparate words, Frances – casual, matter-of-fact sente
nces out of such disparate words?
“‘Well,’ I stumbled for an answer, ‘the same sort that only two generations ago displayed signs like: no blacks, no Irish, no dogs. Things have come a long way since then.’”
Yes, Frances, they have – a very long way. Bigoted signs have become battering rams, detention camps and bombs. A very long way, backwards.
“What did happen at Lye?” Kagiso asks.
“Wait a minute,” she says. “I still have the article right here. He dropped it into my lap before he stormed out and disappeared for days. You can read it for yourself.” She retrieves a white envelope filled with prayer cards and parish leaflets from a folder on the smoking table next to her chair. On the envelope, in her careful, old-fashioned hand, is neatly written, Issa’s article, and the date, 25th July 2002. Kagiso opens the envelope:
Mosque raid causes anger
Police yesterday raided the Ghasia Jamia Mosque in Lye in the West Midlands in order to remove an Afghan family that had sought refuge there after the Home Office ruled that they had no right to remain in Britain. The raid caused anger and has been widely condemned by Muslim and human rights organisations.
Police officers dressed in riot gear used a metal battering ram to break down the door of the mosque. The Afghan parents and their two young children have been taken into custody pending their deportation from Britain.
The raid has caused anger and outrage in Britain’s Muslim community. A community spokesperson outside the mosque said that they were angered and disgusted by the way in which the police and the Home Office handled the situation. “Seeing a destitute family hounded and traumatised and our place of worship violated has left us feeling angry and humiliated.”
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