by Abdo Khal
* * *
Stepping through the Palace gates for the very first time, I was hit by a blast of cold air the likes of which I had never before felt. At the sight of the Palace and its gardens, as well as all the yachts, cars and stables, I really thought I had set foot in paradise.
The first money I earned was for performing a foul act that I thought would be over as soon as my panting stopped. But after a succession of repeat performances, vice became the signal marker of my life. A darkness I had never previously known descended on me, and I became desperate to hide from everything and everyone, including myself.
Whenever I felt the need to hide I would bring to mind the rubbish landing on my head that distant Eid. Sometimes that memory alone was enough to dispel my sorrow at having left the old neighbourhood.
When asked about their place of work, many of the staff declared with pride that they were employees of the Palace. I was the only one who kept my reason for being there a secret. I had chosen an immoral line of work, and performing my job had ruined my life and deadened my soul.
Uncle Muhammad liked to say we were abandoned ponds that had been left to breed gnats and grow slime, and whose stagnant contents belied all the life-giving properties of clean water. That is how I came to feel.
I had not felt that way during my early and reckless adolescence. Back then, I felt full of myself and elated by my actions and I paraded before my friends like a puffed-up rooster, vaunting my stuff and flaunting my colours. I would hunt down ‘prey’ to ensure my elevated reputation among my circle of friends, violating my victims not so much to relieve my lust as to show off my virility. In doing so, I was also able to fend off the predators in our neighbourhood who would have made me their victim.
Life yields its secrets too late, after we can no longer turn back and erase or rectify our mistakes. When we are finally ready to pass on the baton, it is rejected because the next generation, the young people, are naïve and believe their lives will be different.
Uncle Muhammad tried his best to explain this to me on my first day at the Palace, but I was too young to listen. How I wish I had stayed in the Firepit! That wish can never be granted because I have fallen to the very bottom of the abyss.
Gravity is an immutable law. Even though we are all governed by it, we have trouble understanding the precise way it affects our lives. The process of falling is gradual; it does not happen all at once, but in stages. The consequences of the fall are apparent only once the process is complete.
I fell gradually, stage by stage, and now I am at the bottom of the fall.
I fell, and from there I fell further.
3
People were lodged into every nook and cranny of our dilapidated neighbourhood like grains of sand blown in by the wind. Whether it was called the ‘Pit’, the ‘Saltmine’, the ‘Depths of Hell’ or simply the ‘Firepit’, all the designations rhymed with suffering and described our miserable lives inside the neighbourhood.
It had not always been so.
Lying against the bloated and belching sea, it was once a place that stirred even before the first rays of the sun could cast their beams on the windows of the houses. The neighbourhood would wake up to the clamour of children wending their way to school down the narrow lanes, to the din of boisterous fishermen returning with their catch from a night at sea, and to songs blaring from radios that were as dewy as the dawn of the day they celebrated. Like the fine mist from a summer rain, the songs refreshed our spirits and pierced our hearts, and our lungs filled deeply with energising breaths.
The early morning commotion would include the clatter of shopkeepers as they pulled on the whining shutters of their shops and the shouts of street pedlars selling sweetmeats and cheap tinny toys to schoolchildren. Others sold street food that caused a sudden rush of diarrhoea in all but those with the constitution of an ox.
Day after day, the cycle was repeated without interruption, with the sun circling in the sky to reach its zenith and the merciless rays beating down to bleach the last trace of colour off people’s faces, off the neighbourhood’s walls and doors and off the washing hung out to dry on rooftops. Everything dried in the blink of an eye.
At the end of every day, its blaze exhausted, the scorching sun undertook its final journey and descended peacefully in the direction of the Palace foundations.
* * *
Life is a filthy journey that starts out pristine, and we are driven on that voyage of discovery by words of encouragement and censure. In reality, it is only by committing sins that we become fully human. Like millions of people everywhere, it was only after I had left that I realised where I was from.
I had emerged from a humble home buried at the end of the neighbourhood, a gathering-point for the Huroob, Jahnaan and Rawaabigh tribes, who considered city life a stain on the purity of their stock. When Jeddah’s city walls burst, so to speak, people from all manner of descent mixed together, making the neighbourhood appear as if it had been deliberately designed for chaos. In this respect, it was no different from many other neighbourhoods that proliferated outside the old city walls.
My maternal grandfather had arrived from Hadhramaut in Yemen, bringing with him his merchandise of Indian textiles and Javanese incense and sarongs. He built a spacious house, which he had planned to fill with human pups. A man of considerable sexual appetites, he set up four women, one in each corner of the large inner courtyard, consorting with them in turn. His pleasure peaked with my grandmother, Saniyya.
She was of Turkish extraction and had a stunningly beautiful face and a body to match. They say his desire for Saniyya burned undiminished and that, to be fair to his other wives, he always started with the other three first. After his passage through the first three doorways, he would bathe, groom himself carefully and come to Saniyya as fresh and energised as if he had not spilled a drop of his sap earlier.
During his morning sessions with his friends, my grandfather would boast of his prowess with the four women, unaided by the prescriptions of Abu Rasheed. The apothecary of Indian descent had a vast knowledge of herbs and claimed to possess a secret elixir that would give any man the strength of a crocodile and the ability to take on ten women without flagging. Indeed, Abu Rasheed was venerated by men whose vital forces were spent and who had become desperate for his remedies to keep their honour in the bedroom upright.
In a bid to grow his business, Abu Rasheed approached my grandfather with a proposal and, for a while, they became partners in marketing traditional remedies. But the project was short-lived, coming to an abrupt end with the invasion of cheap products to treat the same woes.
Years later, my mother convinced my father to dabble in the trade. However, her recollection of the recipes and concoctions was incomplete and my father’s success in the profession was therefore mixed. But she did remember Abu Rasheed’s most secret concoction and my father used it to boost his own prowess.
While my father’s virility was enhanced by the apothecary’s potions, mine flowed directly into my veins from my grandfather without the need for any treatment. I have been governed by ravenous lust all my life, and in the absence of decent outlets for release, I have channelled it in twisted ways.
Sexual prowess was a badge of honour worn by all men and it was doubtless a desire to prove constantly their competence in the bedroom that caused the population explosion in our neighbourhood.
Small markets sprang up across the length of the main road to cater to ever-growing demand; the burgeoning population also brought on a proliferation of telephone, electricity and sewage networks. Once the roads were paved, the neighbourhood attracted all sorts of people from every imaginable race and language group. Secreted into its winding lanes and tired of hatching in crowded and modest homes, this pullulating life spilled over into secondary streets and sinuous byways.
We arrived late in the game. Our fathers, already past their fifties, were still raising the banner of their prowess on the undulating hills of women, outdoing past
sins with more wicked ones. Most of the neighbourhood children were fatherless and clung to mothers worn down by the daily grind of their lives and the battle to keep their frail children alive.
The neighbourhood choked with people and all means of livelihood had dried up. After the fishermen had to give up fishing and the old artisanal trades died out, all that was left for people were jobs that emaciated their bodies and brought in meagre incomes.
Our generation was raised on fantasies and nursed on envy. Our sole inheritance was the jealousy that showed in our eyes as we leered at the mounds of savoury food, designer clothing and luxury cars, at the rivers of cash in shops and at the women who wandered through the souk wedged in between our houses and the winding alleys of the neighbourhood. The dreams nurtured on covetousness came true only in our imaginations. We pictured ourselves sitting in expensive restaurants, ordering endless courses of refined food. We wanted to own this or that fancy store. We fantasised that any woman could be ours for a wild evening. We clothed ourselves in those dreams until they were so soiled that we tossed them in the laundry pile and picked out fresh ones to dirty. That is what is meant by a life of hardship: a life of constantly changing dream clothes that are all, in any case, illusory.
Several of the neighbourhood boys longed to leave this desert of dreams behind and went in search of the reality outside. They scattered to the four winds, like so many paper scraps floating in the air.
Our nights were like a sultry tunnel that we stole through in the incessant pursuit of furtive pleasures. As evening fell, we were overcome with suppressed longing, the flaming embers of our desire stoked by our fantasies, and we throbbed with lust against each other until we crested the wave and climaxed.
Tahani was the only bright spot in a life otherwise cloaked in darkness and gloom. She would wait for me every night like a bright guiding star shining the way for an errant wanderer.
At night her face was even more enchanting, framed by long flowing hair that nestled coyly between her twin domes whose fullness I had ascertained. Seeing her in the alleys of our neighbourhood, clutching her abaya tightly to reveal the ripeness of fruit ready for plucking and weary of waiting, I was stung by jealousy. I could no longer stand the mere exchange of letters and glances.
One day, I fell into step with her, handed her a note and hurried off. The note read: ‘If you don’t let me spend some time with you, you’ll never see me again.’
Tahani relented after I disappeared from view for two weeks, and started to let me into her bedroom at night. She would make sure everyone in her household was asleep before opening the door; it was so late that even the narrow lane deep inside the neighbourhood where we lived was fast asleep.
I would slip in and spend what was left of the night going back and forth tirelessly over the peaks of her two mounds, not daring to approach her virtue but inhaling the scent of her body sprinkled with aromatic oils and the mists of her desire.
One night, I almost reached the point of no return. But Tahani snapped out of the mood and dug her nails into whatever part of my body was within reach. She drew blood and I instinctively pulled away even though I was still wildly desperate for release. Shocked by what she had done, she sat me up to dab the scratch marks dry, licking the drops of blood with her tongue.
She started to cry as a stream of apologies rushed out of her. ‘I love you, Tariq, more than my soul,’ she said. ‘I don’t want your love to die in my heart.’
She looked away for a second.
‘I’ll be yours as long as I live.’ She added after a moment’s silence, ‘Just don’t spoil our love.’
* * *
Once the Palace was completed, it cast its shadow over the entire front of the neighbourhood, blocking the sea breeze. Between houses that were practically joined at the hip, the air hung so thick and heavy that it caused our chests to tighten.
A body submerged in water is full of ease; we, however, ended up feeling like sea monsters for whom dry land was a burial ground. Had we remained immersed any longer, we would have been swallowed whole. After the Palace was built and its massive walls obscured the blue waters, the sea no longer held the appeal it once had and going to the beach became an arduous task.
In the late afternoons, those of us who were swimming enthusiasts used to meet up with Waleed Khanbashi to be driven to the now distant shore. We would drag ourselves away from the waves only when night fell and our fear of lurking sea creatures outweighed our desire to remain in the cool water.
We emerged dripping and shivering, our teeth chattering wildly since we had nothing to dry off with until we returned to Waleed’s car. Being resourceful, he always brought along tatty old sarongs – two or three people having to share one – and charging each user half a riyal for that privilege. By the third person’s turn, the makeshift towel was hopelessly wet and useless.
Before the Palace was built, there were two places where we liked to submerge our bodies in the sea: the Plage, a stretch of shoreline to the south of Jeddah that fell into disuse after its access became unsafe, and Al-Hamra, which the city’s mayor turned into a promenade adorned with sculptures by international artists and kept gleaming by an army of labourers. For many of us from remote neighbourhoods, just being on the promenade was something to boast about and gave us bragging rights over kids from even more remote neighbourhoods. But it also deepened our sense of grievance when we remembered what this length of asphalt did to us.
More than just screening off the azure sea, the concrete walls lining the shore served to split the population, driving a deep wedge between people that was based on inequity and class.
Jeddah woke to hundreds of workers walling off its shoreline. The sea was parcelled off and no one batted an eyelid as city councillors and their retinue of bureaucrats, lawyers, brokers and developers all got their share. Nothing was left for the rest of the population.
The fishermen were the first to suffer from this de facto exclusion from their time-honoured fishing grounds. They never gave voice to their complaints and one after the other collected his fishing tackle and bid a heart-broken farewell to the sea. Their traditional way of life was gone for ever, buried as surely as the surf that once lapped at their feet.
When they first brought in the tonnes of earth from nearby wadis to reclaim the sea, Hamed Abu Gulumbo looked around for his favourite place on the shorefront and found it gone. He was a fisherman with a gift for poetic improvisation and from that moment, he began to hold impromptu poetry sessions with his fishing companions, warning them of the coming drought.
At first his friends mocked his verses and interpreted Hamed’s many references to the impending loss of their way of life as a lament for a deceased lover. His friends were amused by his poetry, all the more since he responded to their ridicule with even more verses. They were not yet overly concerned. Whenever they saw him, they teased, ‘So when are they going to steal the last wave from us?’
They changed their tune the day Uthman Kabashi got up and left, turning his back on all of them.
Uthman had inherited his trade from his shipbuilding father. Like him, Uthman was mild-mannered, tolerant and respectful. He was a man of his word who inspired trust. His trade was confined to selling affordable boats that he brought in from Port Sudan, giving the always cash-strapped fishermen plenty of time to pay for their new vessels. But one fine day without warning, the man whose word was gold reneged on all the contracts. This decision, which so undermined his standing, was made the instant he saw all the heavy earth-moving equipment on the shoreline, preparing to start work on the Palace foundations.
Uthman had close ties to the head fisherman, Sheikh Omar al-Qirsh, who knew his friend’s unimpeachable character in matters of business. Sheikh Omar had had no reservations in awarding Uthman contracts to supply the fishermen with waterproof boats that could withstand many years at sea.
‘What is going on, Sheikh Omar?’ asked Uthman as they took in the swarm of busy machines and labourer
s on the shore.
‘Well, you can see for yourself,’ replied Sheikh Omar. ‘They say the whole seafront will be reclaimed.’
That night, Uthman met the fishermen and told them he was cancelling all contracts. Faced with an eruption of accusations that he was breaking his word and reneging on his commitments, he tried to reason with them that he was only acting in their best interest. Clearly, he argued, business in this particular trade was about to founder and he did not want to see their meagre resources squandered on buying boats that would never set sail.
But his reasoning failed to convince the stubborn fishermen and so Uthman arranged for a private meeting with his friend Sheikh Omar.
‘I’m very sorry,’ he told him as he handed him all the advance money he had received for the new boats. ‘Please tell everyone how sorry I am.’
The fishermen had planned to lure Uthman to another meeting to pelt him with their turbans and force him to go back on his decision. But their plan was foiled when they caught sight of his huddled figure on a dinghy heading out to rendezvous with a freighter sailing to Port Sudan. Their deeply cherished dreams had evaporated and all that was left for them was to shower Uthman with their curses.
Uthman’s fall from grace did not last long, however. The men soon found out for themselves that they were being evicted from their fishing grounds. Long after the land grab, they finally acknowledged the new reality they had to contend with and realised that their beloved fishing spots had as little substance as the bleeding colours of brightly hued turbans floating in the water.
Issa’s father, Youssef Radini – or Abu Issa as he was better known – never forgave Uthman for cancelling the contracts, even though he knew Uthman was not to blame for the fishermen’s predicament. Abu Issa cursed Uthman to the end of his days, likening the man to a wide-eyed owl – a creature that never sees the light and that jinxes the day when it does.