Silent Minaret

by Shukri, Ishtiyaq

  Click click click.

  Just so.

  “Alhamdullilah!”

  A gust of wind lifts his hair and drops the loosely draped blanket to the ground. She sees his eyes fill with all the resentment and rage she had first seen in them a few months back.

  And all for what? For this? All over again?

  “Issa! Wait! Where are you going?”

  He doesn’t turn around. Just says, as he crouches through the open window:

  To stop them.

  “I sat up to wait. In the morning, I woke to the normal sounds of the buses in the terminus. For a while I didn’t know where I was; I never sleep in my armchair. The TV was still on. It was just before six. I got up to turn on the kettle. And then, slowly, it all started coming back... But what had become of him? Was he back? Perhaps he’d knocked. Perhaps I’d slept through. And then.

  “When I came back in here, there it was, all over the TV, the mosque, the police in riot gear, the motorcycles, the helicopters.

  I turned up the volume. They had shut down the whole area, more than a hundred, hundred and fifty of them. From up here I had no idea all that was taking place down there. And for what? A toy gun and a couple of gas canisters? More enemies made than caught, if you ask me.

  “But whether they had sealed off the area before or after Issa got down there – ” She shrugs her shoulders. “Several men were arrested. All foreigners. At the time I thought he might have been one of them; the rage he was in when he left here, there was no telling what he might do.”

  sifir wahed athnaan

  NEXT SHE LEARNS THE NUMBERS, Arabic numerals, starting with the number they invented, zero, sifr:

  “The sum total of Arab contribution to modern culture,” a fellow diner at a dinner party had quipped, raising his thumb and forefinger into a circle: “Zero.”

  When the laughter subsided, she turned to the man. “You might want to get it right,” she said. “In Arabic, zero is indicated by a dot, not a circle and, just off the top of my head, I can think of at least two more things,” she said.

  The man dropped his hand and looked indignantly at her.

  “Plato and Aristotle.”

  “My dear,” he said with an air of vindication. “They were Greek.”

  “So they were,” she conceded. “But I would have expected one who has clearly had the benefit of an expensive education to also know that, when Europeans deemed it best to burn the pagan thoughts of their Greek forebears, their ideas would have been lost for eternity, had their survival not been ensured by the translations of Arab scholars kept safe in the libraries of Baghdad.

  “With such glaring gaps,” she said, filling her glass, “I suppose you also believe that the Renaissance was an entirely Italian affair. More wine?”

  She decides to make a list, in Arabic, of all the names and telephone numbers stored in her telephone. In future, as an ongoing exercise, she will consult this list when she wants to make a call rather than select and dial the number automatically from her phone. In her list, names, where possible, take their Arab equivalents: Peter becomes Boutros, John Yahya, Mary Miriam, Paul Boulos. And because Arabic has no p or v sounds, Paul becomes Baul and Vivian, Fifian. She loved the way Karim said please, ‘Blease,’ as if spelt with a b. When it is finished, the list, at first sight still little more than a collection of elegant unintelligible strokes and loops, undecipherable to everybody on it, becomes to her access to her life.

  And when she goes about the city, she pays special attention to its many Arabic signs, reading them slowly, letter by letter, until the vowel-less string clicks into meaning:

  She particularly enjoys deciphering the registration plates on luxury cars from the Middle East that glide through affluent parts of the city. It thrills her that she is able to pierce the ‘exotic’ surface of the image and identify the real country, the very city beyond:

  One day, a Jeep darts by flashing a registration plate, which she is certain read as ‘mSr’. But this makes no sense to her and Maseru is all she can come up with. But with an Arabic registration plate? Surely not. So she looks up the entry in her dictionary:

  A veil is being lifted and slowly, a whole world – its symbols, its rules, its logic – is beginning to reveal itself to her, right here, in London. Where once she was blind, she can now do so much more than see. She can read.

  III

  The Café

  ‘when the Reagan Administration began its war with Nicarargua, I recognised a deeper affinity with that small country in a continent upon which I had never set foot. I grew daily more interested in its affairs, because, after all, I was myself the child of a successful revolt against a great power, my consciousness the product of the triumph of the Indian Revolution. It was perhaps also true that those of us who did not have our origins in the countries of the mighty West, or North, have some things in common – not, certainly, anything simplistic as a unified “Third World” outlook – but at least some knowledge of what weakness was like, some awareness of the view from underneath, and of how it felt to be there, at the bottom, looking up at the descending heel.’

  Salman Rushdie

  Jaguar Smile

  1987

  Vasinthe’s Letter

  IN JOHANNESBURG, VASINTHE HAS BEEN agonising over it for days. Not about whether to write it – she does not dispute his right to know, or, for that matter, hers to tell him – but about how and what to write. That was what bothered her. She hasn’t heard from him since that near-fatal morning when he stormed out of the house, leaving her –

  She shuts out the memory.

  He must know of the son that was born minutes later. She’d given him the name they’d agreed upon, the name he had wanted. She had written to him at his parents’ to tell him.

  Faced with a silence of more than 30 years, she could not decide on what to say, what to leave unsaid.

  Not even on how to begin.

  But now it is written. Short, she decided, was best. She reads the letter one last time:

  Johannesburg

  30th August 2003

  Muhsin

  I regret that I have been unable to make direct contact with you at this time. I would have preferred to speak with you in person. I wasn’t aware that you no longer live in South Africa – though where, your sister would not say. But she assured me that, if I wrote, she would see to it that my letter reached you. She may in fact already have told you my news; I am pleased that they seem to have reconciled with you.

  I feel it incumbent on me to let you know that Issa has disappeared from London where he was studying. I have always been certain that, whatever our past, yours and mine, I would inform you if anything happened to your son. And now it has.

  My first instinct was that he might have gone in search of you. I cling to the possibility that this is the case – although, as the weeks and months pass, it seems less likely. It has been four months now. But I trust that you will let me know if he does turn up on your doorstep. I assume he is not already with you; whatever has happened between us, I think you would at least have let me know?

  You’ve never seen Issa, so I am enclosing the most recent photograph we have of him, taken by a friend of his in London a few months before he went missing. I think you’ll agree that I may as well have sent you a picture of yourself at that age.

  Vasinthe

  She joins the queue at the small campus post office. While she waits, she retrieves the photograph discreetly from the unsealed envelope. It is a bright picture, taken in Katinka’s sunny flat; one of the pictures they left with Margaret. Issa is leaning against a doorframe, smiling, as he does, has always done, only slightly, head at an angle, arms folded casually across his chest. His thick black hair is swept back from the high forehead and falls in sleek waves on his shoulders. Muhsin, she thinks again: running a trembling finger down the strong nose and along the jaw, wiping the deep eyes gently with a tender thumb. The resemblance only struck her recently.

  She has
been unable to recall her son’s face; is kept awake at night by faceless memories of him. She can conjure countless images of him as a child: following the trauma of his birth, the relief, when Gloria handed him to her, of holding him, bloody and blue, in her arms for the first time; the way he’d sit, legs crossed on the floor in front of the television, engrossed by the adventures of Lawrence, crossing the Empty Quarter with him, tensing himself, rocking anxiously backwards and forwards, when Daud falls into the quicksand, sitting up on his knees as the struggle to save him grows more and more desperate, rewinding his favourite scenes over and over again until he could recite whole stretches of dialogue.

  She can still hear him now: “What is it, Major Lawrence, that attracts you to the desert?” / “It’s clean.” The confused expression on his face when, chasing Kagiso at a picnic, he stepped onto something concealed in the long grass. The terror when he sat down, lifted his bare foot and saw a broken bottle neck stabbed into his sole. Kagiso’s question, asked sheepishly on the backseat during the rush to hospital: “Does it hurt?” Issa’s response, recited in a swoon: The trick, William Potter, is not minding that it hurts. The giant teardrop that welled up in his right eye, like Pharaoh in Tadema’s ‘Death of the first born’ she always thought – suspended in that throat-clenching moment of utter devastation, the teardrop welling up slowly, first in one eye, later in the other, before breaking free of the lid, then rolling down to where it dangled, for just a moment, from the tip of one of the long lashes before its gathering pear-shaped weight sent it falling, down and down till it landed, plop, on the official advice of his Matric results.

  Vasinthe can recall all this detail over and over again, but she has almost no recollection of the young man he’d turned into in Cape Town, the man in London. She now keeps a copy of this photograph in a silver frame – a gift from Katinka – by her bedside and one on her desk, the first personal memento to encroach on her professional domain. The queue inches forward. She becomes aware of the cold. She has come out without her jacket.

  She recalls an incident some years earlier when a colleague lost his son in a motorcar accident. A few weeks after the funeral, he came into her office:

  “They’ve found a cornea for Mrs – ”

  “At last!”

  “But can you do it?”

  “What do you mean? We’ve been preparing this one for months. And you’re the ophthalmologist. This is your case. I don’t understand?”

  He stepped forward, “Please?” She could smell that he’d been drinking.

  “Bloody hell, Peter! How much have you had? We can’t postpone. How long will it take to – ”

  “Too much. Too long. Look, we’ve worked on this one together. This was your referral.”

  “I know I can, but that’s not the point, Peter,” Vasinthe shouted. “I haven’t had time to -”

  Peter interrupted her. “I’ve got the file here. We have time. Let’s sit down with it. And then we can go to inform her.”

  “Of what? That her surgeon can’t operate because he’s bloody drunk.”

  “Vasinthe, she knows you. She was your patient too.”

  “You sneaky shit! You knew that all along, didn’t you? That the team would cover for you. That’s why you went and got yourself bladdered.”

  “Look! I know I’m out of order – ”

  “But remember that old adage, Peter, the one about strong chains and weak links.”

  He looked pleadingly at her. “Vasinthe, this isn’t helping.”

  She exhaled deeply.

  He watched her for a response.

  “Okay,” she sighed. “I don’t have much of a choice, do I? But we’ll have to inform the super. It’s very late to be swapping the lead surgeons.”

  “But you’re the Head of – ”

  “Yes, and I’ll deal with you in that capacity on Monday. For the moment, talk me through the latest progress. Where’s that file? Who’s assisting?”

  He flopped into her armchair, despondent relief hanging over him.

  “I’m sorry Peter, I don’t mean to be harsh, but we’ll have to play this one by the book. You know what’s at stake here.”

  He dropped his head.

  “Look, is there anything I can do?”

  He looked up at her, his red eyes welling with tears. “It was only when I went to identify his body, when I saw him lying there, lifeless on a tray in front of me, that I realised...”

  Her expression softened.

  “That I realised what a beautiful son I had. Even with all those fatal injuries. He looked like a god, fallen in battle.” He swivelled the chair round to face the window. “Too busy making medical history here to even have noticed.”

  In the queue, Vasinthe shudders. She’d registered the words as he spoke them and made private little pledges to herself, but her progression to a JME appointment, the celebrated success of the difficult transplant, the flurry of invitations to overseas lecture-tours, Peter’s disappearance into an obscure early retirement on his remote ancestral farm somewhere in the Eastern Cape – it was easy to forget about his regrets when work was so rewarding. She’d forgotten about the pledge until asked by Margaret in London during their preliminary telephone conversation for a description of Issa. She fumbled. Margaret suggested they finalise the description when she came to the office the following day.

  “Can I – ” She started hesitantly. “Can I bring along his friend? She knew him very well.”

  “Of course you can,” Margaret said, reassuringly. “Our role is to support family and friends alike.”

  “After you, Professor.”

  Vasinthe looks up, startled by the familiar voice. She hadn’t noticed her student ahead of her in the queue. She quickly slips the picture back into the envelope.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes, please. You go first.”

  Vasinthe smiles thanks. She steps forward and places the sealed envelope on the scales. “Special delivery, please.”

  “Where to?” the cashier asked.

  “Durban, please.”

  Walking back to her office, she tries to recall the picture. She remembers that it is bright. She can recall folded arms, a leaning posture, a slight smile – but that is all. She becomes agitated. Muhsin, she thinks, as she tries to reconstruct the son through memories of the father. But all she gets are crazed blood-shot eyes, flaring nostrils, clenched fists, a kick in –

  When she reaches the department, she increases her pace into a doctor’s determined stride: “See their white coats flapping, Sinth. See their stethoscopes.” If you stop me now, someone will die. She can’t remember where she’d heard the comment, but she cringed in recognition.

  Normally she makes a conscious effort to be less hurried around the office. This is a different space, and though busy, it doesn’t demand the urgency that accompanies her life-or-death role in the hospital up the road. Here, she is Professor Kumar, the teacher, the researcher, the scholar. She makes herself amenable, approachable. She smiles and, from time to time, stops in the corridors to exchange pleasantries with colleagues and students.

  But not now.

  She does not enter her office as she usually does, via that of her assistant, but slips in through the private, back entrance. At her desk, she reaches for the framed photograph of Issa hidden beside her monitor and slides it into the centre of the desk in front of her. She doesn’t hear the students streaming out of the adjoining lecture theatre and into the sunny quad behind her. She runs her forefinger slowly around the edges of the frame, then rocks it gently from corner to corner.

  Like a cradle.

  She picks up the receiver:

  “Yes, Professor?”

  “Susan, can you get Professor Godfrey on the line for me.”

  Susan hesitates. “Professor Peter Godfrey, Professor?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Certainly, Professor.”

  “And Susan – ”

  “Yes, Professor?”

&nb
sp; “Hold my calls.”

  “Yes, Professor.”

  Another Brick in Another Wall

  KATINKA AND KARIM WOULD LIE in a knot and talk through the night, of London and of home. Not sleeping, sinking into each other’s stories like water into sun-cracked earth, like salve into raw wounds.

  One night, he tells her about the wall that is being built across his family’s property. It will separate their house from their decimated olive-grove, their last remaining trickle of income. The wall surrounds their town on three sides. Most of the businesses in the town have shut down. “It is eight metres high. We never see the sun. Our house is always in its shadow. When I look through my bedroom window that is all I can see. The Wall. It does what it was designed to do; make us feel small.”

  Another night, he tells her about Wafa Idris. “It’s not what I would do, but I understand why she did it. Here, in the free world, even the prime minister’s wife was not free enough to say that, but I can. You know: ‘When this life makes you mad enough to kill / When you want something bad enough to steal.”’ They laugh at his imitation of the rap.