There was a slight stirring in the air. It set the plastic sheets fluttering against the sticks which tethered them. It was warm wind, blowing in from the plain. Jamila lifted her face to taste it. She looked at the clouds, starting to thicken along the jagged tops of the mountain range. They were light clouds but building. Soon the first of the monsoon rains would come, breaking over the flimsy tents and plastic homes. She put her hand out to the girl and drew her in, ignoring her resistance, pulling her hot body into the crook of her arm so she could shelter her.
Chapter 13
I am nearly fourteen and my whole life is being wasted. I close my eyes and think of home. I imagine walking down each path through the village. Then I go to the orchards where the plum and apple trees bend towards each other like gossiping ladies. Then I open my eyes and see this hateful misery all around me and I want to cry.
The plains are killing us. We are mountain people. Jamila Auntie says so and, for once, she’s telling something right. Allah in His Wisdom did not create us to live in so much of heat. We will surely die here on this endless bare mud, with no scrap of shade, not even a tree or shrub, and sun so intense falling on our heads we might as well have climbed into the oven back home and shut the door.
On account of Jamila Auntie’s scolding and bullying, we now have a small piece of mud as our own. It is a fourth the size of our real compound at home. The Uncles had to scavenge wooden staves and sheets of plastic and they built a fence round us, pretending it is a compound wall. In fact it is only as high as my head so any normal-sized man can peer right over it and see whatever he likes inside, which is most indecent. I say it should be higher but the only person in my family who ever paid me any heed is my dear baba and now no one knows where he is. He went for help, Jamila Auntie says, after the school was burnt down. But I am nearly dying with worry about how we will ever find him again.
The Aunties spend so much of time crouched inside the tent. But it is very hot in there and the air is dry and stuffy besides. Jamila Auntie complains to Hamid Uncle that we girls should also stay inside to preserve our modesty. Hamid Uncle says he has enough sorrows in his life, as Allah is his witness, without forcing me and the other girls to suffocate to death inside a tent if we cry and beg and refuse.
For that first day, we did nothing but labour. Hamid Uncle met a most respectable family, landowners like us who belong to a village lower down the valley. They came to the camp some days earlier and already knowing all the rules. The men helped the Uncles borrow tools and all manner of needful materials and their boys stood in a long queue with my cousins to get family packs of necessities, like rice and salt and soap and suchlike, one pack for every head of household.
I saw them do it. The men at the head of the queue were sitting with a big ledger open on a table and writing everything. If only I were a boy, if that were the will of Allah, that is a job I most would enjoy. To use an ink pen and write down neatly in a ledger whatsoever information I could deduce about each family, of how many members they are comprised and to which village they belong and if there are any illnesses or special problems and what rations they are being allocated and whether these rations are sufficient for their needs and so on and so forth. I am sure I would be very good at a job like that.
Our small piece of mud is a long walk from the entrance to the camp. It was the only land which was not already covered by shelters and that was with good reason for it is a stark and hot piece of mud and a little sunken also.
The tents are flimsy affairs, just plastic sheets stretched tight over sticks and pieces of wood. Mama and Jamila Auntie and I share one with some Aunties and their babies and other cousins too so you can imagine the noxious smell and the noise in the darkness of all the snorting and snoring and whimpering and all manner of other peculiar noises. It’s not just from inside our own tent, although that is deafening, but from all across the camp.
In the day, I go with the other girls to do chores and, what with all the queuing and all, they take hours. We stand first in the queue for the necessary which stinks so much I think I must be sick.
Then there’s the queue for the water pump to fill the pails and then back to the tents to wash ourselves privately and to wash clothes too and the water sloshes everywhere and turns the earth around the pails to soft mud which the young cousins stamp and it gets everywhere. Then it’s time to start queuing for the daily ration of flour and salt so we can make rotis for lunch which we cook on a common fire between bricks. Nothing tastes like the food we had at home, not even our own rotis.
I was squatting there on the second day, slapping dough into a roti between the flat of my hands, when someone called my name. The air is always teeming with shouting and crying and commotion and yet this voice, shouting my name, seemed to fly through it all directly. I shook my head and looked around.
It was him. My own dear baba was stumbling towards me, his arms outstretched, his poor burnt hands reaching through the empty air for me, his face such an arresting mixture of delight and sorrow that I simply stared, the roti limp between my hands, and couldn’t move or breathe.
For a moment, I thought he was a spirit, taking the form of Baba and come to snatch me from amongst the living. Then he was upon me, almost knocking me over as he embraced me and called me his girl, his Layla, landing kisses on my headscarf and the tip of my nose like a madman. I threw open my arms and wrapped them tightly around his neck, not caring who was there to see. I felt his warm arms and smelt his skin and knew it was indeed my baba and he was still alive and had been searching for us all these long days and I cried like a little girl on his shoulder, feeling safe at last and full of relief, thanks be to Allah, that Baba was back with us again, brightening even this bleak place.
Baba’s coming is a great blessing for Mama and I hope he will be a comfort also. Since Hamid Uncle built the tent, Mama has been lying inside it half the day, either crying or sleeping. The Aunties said she was exhausted from the journey. That was true, she isn’t used to walking hour after hour the way we walked and she isn’t strong. But it isn’t only that.
I say her heart is breaking for Marva. Even I find, when I am standing in a noisy queue assaulted by the shouts of the boys or carrying a pail brim-full with water, that I am thinking about Marva and missing her quietness and her calm smile and the way she liked to comb out my hair when it was all in a tangle and soothe me when I was upset and tell me her stories. I worry about her especially at first light and at dusk when the jets scream overhead and I know they are heading with their bombs for our valley. So I can imagine how hard it is for Mama to bear also.
When Baba heard that Marva was left behind, he stood very still and didn’t speak one word. He looked at Mama as if he, who knows so many clever words, couldn’t understand these simple ones. I only knew that he was alive by the way his chest was heaving for breath. He turned away at last and walked out alone into the noise and chaos of the camp, so slow and silent in all that tumult that it was sad to see, and he didn’t come back for some time.
Baba heard about a girls’ school being set up in the camp. Two of the young cousins should go there, he said, and I should take them.
The school was in a sealed area, even further away from the entrance than our tents. It was ringed with a high wall made of panels of woven straw and too high to look over. I put my eye to the straw to see whatsoever I could.
Inside, a circle of women was perched on plastic chairs, gossiping. Their heads were barely covered. I banged with my knuckles on the wood struts and a woman came to open a panel and stare first at me, then at the young cousins fastened to my sides. She shrugged and let us through.
In the corner of the compound, taking up most of the space, a tent had been erected. A proper tent, like the ones the jihadis had erected in front of the mosque, made of thick green canvas and attached with ropes. It was high too. Even a grown man could stand upright in the middle and not bump his head.
Rows of young girls were sitting cross-legged, chanting their lesso
ns. The high-pitched song of their voices, rising and falling, gave me a pang, thinking of our school and my years of lessons there and imagining it burnt now, as Baba said, to nothing but ash.
A girl was leading them, standing at the front with a special pointing stick and guiding them through their letters. There was one blackboard, set on a wooden stand, and covered with a coloured poster with bright pictures, just like the ones we used in school to tell us how to recite the alphabet and how to count.
The girl who was teaching looked over at us, standing there at the entrance to the tent. She gave me a half-smile and the children stared, because children that age are distracted by anything. And all at once a thought exploded in my head like a ripe plum hitting the ground and bursting apart. I squeezed my cousins’ hands so hard they squealed and tried to pull away. I thought, I could do that. Why not? I could teach children, just like that girl’s doing, and share my learning and be useful at last.
And it struck me that an adventure like that would never have been possible back home in the village but maybe here, with everything in such terrible confusion, it might be allowed. I turned to the smaller cousin and rushed her so hard with a hug that she tottered backwards and fell over and we both laughed, collapsed there in a heap against the bulging flap of the tent, until we almost cried and the children laughed too, clapping their hands and completely ignoring the poor young teacher who had herself forgotten, just for that precise moment, which letter came next.
Jamila Auntie and Baba fought about the teaching. I sat beside the tent, listening. My fingernails made half-moon dents in my palms.
‘The girl has too much freedom,’ Jamila Auntie said. ‘She must be more modest or she’ll get a reputation. Remember that business with the peasant boy?’
‘That’s in the past.’ Baba’s voice was weary. No woman spoke to her husband the way Jamila Auntie spoke to Baba. It shamed him. I wanted to grab hold of her silly face and slap it, to shout: hold your tongue, mind your business, you’re not even my mother. I sucked in my bottom lip and bit down on it.
‘Who knows what manner of people she’ll meet over there? It’s dangerous for her, Ibrahim. If her name is tarnished, how will she ever marry?’
I was holding myself down, itching to interrupt. Baba might give in to her, out of sheer exhaustion. I’d seen it happen.
As I strained to hear Baba’s reply, a boy, a thin child of only five or six, came racing to the compound, knocking into the plastic barrier and skidding to a halt in the mud. His face was red with effort. Jamila Auntie opened her mouth to bawl at him but, before she could, he started to speak tumbling words.
‘A man sent me.’ He was panting so hard, he hardly had the breath. ‘For Ibrahim-ji. The gate.’
Baba was already on his feet. ‘What is it?’
The boy’s eyes rolled. His mouth was opening and closing but the only sound was wheezing. The cousins, playing nearby, stared. Aunties poked their heads out of the tents to look.
Baba went rushing out of the compound. Before Jamila could grab hold of me, I ran out after him. Faces turned as we raced past, first the thin schoolteacher, then the young girl behind. Boys heckled us. A few ran alongside, jeering.
A crowd had gathered at the camp gates. Baba and I plunged into the tight knot of men, young and old, who were standing with their arms threaded round each other’s shoulders. I wriggled through, fighting to keep close to Baba, feeling the hot press of men around me. Baba was bending over something. Someone in the dirt. A body. A girl. I saw the legs, thin and brittle as sticks. Baba lifted Marva’s shoulders and turned her towards me. Her face was smeared with dirt. Baba wrapped his arms around her and cradled her head and shoulders in his lap. I couldn’t move. I stared in shock as if he were someone else’s baba and she too a stranger.
A man, standing outside the gates, started shouting. He was jabbing his fist in the air, gesturing at Marva and at his own family. They sat around him in the dirt. A huddle of dirty children and a woman in a filthy burqa.
‘This is the third camp,’ he was yelling. ‘Two days I’ve been walking. My wife and children too. Because of your useless daughter.’
Baba lifted his head and spoke softly to the man. The man’s shouts drowned him out.
‘Money,’ he was raging. ‘You pay me. I only did it because they said they’d kill me.’
The crowd of onlookers shifted, starting to take sides.
Baba tried to lift Marva against his thigh. She was stirring and I saw she was alive but without the strength to support herself. I pushed forwards. Baba took off his glasses and wiped his eyes with his sleeve. The man pulled him by the shoulder. People around them started to shout, some voices egging the man on, urging him to fight for his money. I huddled against Baba’s side, afraid. The camp guards, watching from the gate, took a step closer and fingered their guns.
Inside the camp, a whistle sounded. There were running feet. Camp officials, some foreign, some local, came pushing into the crowd. One knelt next to Baba. Another clapped his hands and shouted at the gathered men, telling them to go.
The angry man turned to the officials. He was still shouting, counting off on his fingers the camps he had visited as he tried to deliver the girl to her family, pointing to his own exhausted wife. The officials ushered the man and his family inside the camp. The children lay on the ground, their heads leaning on their mother’s legs.
A doctor came. He crouched in the dirt beside Baba, his long fingers probing Marva’s neck and wrists in front of everyone. He and Baba spoke in low voices. Baba lifted Marva into his arms to carry her away. Her limbs trailed like a broken doll.
Baba had forgotten me. The crowd had already thinned but the few men still gawping there made low sucking sounds to me as I pushed through them and I pulled my scarf closer round my face.
In the night, I lay with my arms about Mama and tried to quieten her. She was hot with fever and tossing her head from side to side, murmuring and weeping. I patted her cheek and said, ‘Hush, Mama, hush,’ in a low voice so only she could hear it. Finally she fell into sleep. That long night I didn’t let myself think about Saeed at all but only about Marva and what terrible things might have befallen her. Baba hadn’t spoken about it when he came back to the tents and I was too ashamed to ask. I felt this was all my fault, a punishment sent from Allah for my wickedness in wanting to have adventures like a boy and to be a teacher. Now my sister Marva, a kind person who did no harm to anyone and had barely left the gates of our compound in her life, was somehow paying the price.
The next morning, Baba told me to take the young cousins to the girls’ school. Stay and help the teachers, he told me. Jamila Auntie was too far away to hear. I should have been full of joy but instead I was miserable. All I could think about was Marva and why she was here in the camp but kept separate from Mama and me and the rest of the family, handed over to those doctors who were not decent, everyone told so.
Those doctors’ tents were full of evil djinns. The Aunties all whispered that the Westerners tested their drugs on women there, and afterwards the bodies were stitched into cloth before they went for burial because they were too damaged to be seen. We kept far away from them. And now Marva was there and those doctors might be doing any manner of experiments on her and I might never see her alive and whole again. I was sure that Mama, with all her fever and wildness, must be thinking the same.
At twelve o’clock the lessons finally ended and, instead of staying to eat lunch with the other girls, I said that I had a stomach ache and left. I should have gone straight back to the compound and our own tents as Baba had told me but I didn’t. I pulled my scarf to cover my face and walked, my feet dragging like stones, towards the medical tents.
Trucks had just arrived and a crowd of men was jostling, vying to get to the front to help. The officials, shiny in yellow plastic waistcoats, waved their arms and shouted at them to stop fighting, but their voices were going unheard. In the commotion, I ducked under the loose flap of the med
ical tent for ladies.
Inside, the air was cold and smelt of soap and I stood for a moment tasting its strangeness. The mood was hushed. I crouched low and looked around me, feeling the shake in my legs.
The tent was filled with cots and a girl or woman lay in each one. A young woman, a crisp white apron tied over her baggy salwar kameez, was bending over one at the far end, some distance from me. She was fiddling with a sack of liquid on a metal pole. She had her back to me.
I looked up and down the tent. A few cots away from me, the little girl from Jamila Auntie’s family was lying, Syma. I knew her and her sister from school in the village. Syma was quite still under a white sheet, her eyes closed. Her cheeks looked blotchy and hot.
I crept further into the tent, still searching. Finally I saw her. Marva, my own sister, lying on a cot about halfway down. Her thin legs were covered by a blanket, her hair as neatly brushed as if I had done it with my own hand. Her eyes were open and staring dully at the roof of the tent and at the electric fan fixed there which was slowly turning its head from left to right and back again, like a leering old man enjoying the view of all the half-naked ladies beneath.
The nurse had moved to another bed and was adjusting something. I shrank back against the wall of the tent, trying to lose myself in the shadow. When she finally turned her back to me again, I scooted forwards, running with my body low, until I reached Marva’s cot and slid underneath it, my heart pounding and my eyes closed.
I waited, too afraid to look, until my breathing had settled, then I opened my eyes. The underside of the cot was a hand’s width from my face. It was black and scored with diamond shapes where the material had been stretched over a metal frame. There was a wooden strut just near my head and small tendrils of fluff were trapped there, hanging down like the fronds of plants. All was quiet. The squeak of the lady’s shoes told me she was still nearby, moving quietly from bed to bed. I shuffled on my back to the head of the bed where I knew Marva’s face must be and whispered her name. There was silence for a moment.
Far From My Father's House Page 13