by Anita Desai
Then Hamid came out of his study, blinking behind his spectacles, hungry, pitiful, wanting his supper. It could not be hidden from him: Laila was still out, had not returned, and it was dark. Where was she? he would ask.
But no, he came into the kitchen and sat down at the table with a sigh, holding his head in his hands while she ladled out a bowl of soup and set it before him. He needed only her attention, her care. ‘Eat, Hamid,’ she sighed, ‘eat. Then the headache will go. Too much reading. Too many books.’
‘Ech.’ He did not like her to say that. He took up a long-handled spoon, dipped and ate. Her good lentil soup revived him. He tore off a piece of bread and gave her the most fleeting twinkle. ‘And you?’ he said. ‘No books? No reading?’
‘Mine is different,’ she said, sitting down and putting her elbows on the table to watch him eat. Clio leapt onto her lap, digging her claws in through the cloth of her skirt, and made herself comfortable. ‘Student papers. I go through them, like this –’ She made a gesture of her thumb and finger to show how they rippled through her hands. Then she ran her fingers through Clio’s fur, sighing: it was not student papers that weighed on her.
‘Eat,’ he told her, eating himself. ‘Eat, Alma.’
Then she burst into a long wail. ‘How can I – when the child is not home?’
Hamid put down his spoon, and the bread, and stared at her. It was dark, they had forgotten to turn on a light. The dark air was filled with their waiting.
Laila would come sprinting up the stairs at any hour at all. They would hear a commotion on the stairs as she called to the concierge, he yelled back, the children laughed. Laila would fly in, barefoot, her hair wildly tossed about, her bright dress dirty, even torn. She would swoop at the food waiting on the table, and cram it into her mouth with both hands hungrily. But she would not tell them where she had been, what she had done. Such a small child, so headstrong, so independent, it was dangerous, anyone could see that.
‘Laila, you cannot do this. You do not know what bad things can happen on the street. And where do you go? We need to know. You must tell.’
She stared at them with eyes like coal, so black and so brilliant. ‘I don’t know myself,’ she said so gravely that they could not accuse her of flippancy. ‘I go down the street, I turn a corner – I don’t know where I am.’
‘Oh Laila,’ Alma wailed, ‘then tell us what you do.’
The child’s mouth tightened. ‘Do? I do nothing,’ she retorted angrily. ‘I walk, I play, I look. But I do nothing.’ Her voice turned shrill.
‘All right, all right,’ the mother hushed her. ‘Then go and bathe. Time for bed.’
Hamid, standing by the door, listening silently, said, ‘And schoolwork? Has she done that, her schoolwork?’
Both parents – both teachers, both scholars – sighed. The house was filled with their sighing. Laila fled from it.
They could do nothing. He was in his study, making lists of the books that he believed had been in the Serapeum in Alexander’s day; she was in the kitchen where she spread the students’ French exercises on the table where she could look them over while she kneaded dough or shelled peas, now and then stopping to pick up a red pencil to mark them. Both kept their doors open and with one ear listened for the sound of their daughter returning.
As she grew older, she returned later and later. Often it was already night. Then to see her with her bare legs and a rent in her dress and flowers stuck in her hair – daisies, alyssum that she’d snatched up out of the dust – or with sand leaking out of the soles of her sandals, gritty with sea shells, frightened them so badly they wept, and that made her furious. When she was furious her face would contort and she would tear at her hair.
‘You want me to be your prisoner,’ she shouted. ‘That is how I feel here – a prisoner.’
‘Is this house a prison, my child?’ the mother cried, and the father couldn’t speak for sorrow.
‘Yes, yes, it is, it is,’ she shouted passionately, and with her hands she made as if to tear open her bosom. That was not a child’s gesture. It was the gesture of a woman who knows what her breast contains. She had in her some of the rage, and the pride of a goddess. ‘I want – I want – to dance,’ she burst out, pushing at the air as if to clear a space for herself. ‘Not sit here, reading, reading, reading –’ she spat out – ‘but out, dancing! Then I would be free –’ and she made wide, sweeping gestures with her dancer’s arms, swung them around and above her in a way that seemed to them wild and terrifying.
‘Hamid, we cannot permit this,’ Alma declared. ‘This is enough.’
He was at his desk, studying. The ancient Serapeum of Alexander was his obsession. It was painful for him to have intrusions made upon it. But he saw Alma had gone without sleep for nights, she was haggard. He took off his spectacles. ‘Yes, my Alma,’ he said.
‘If we don’t put a stop to this, who knows but she might pursue this mad idea of hers.’
He cringed at that: such things should not be put in words; it brings bad luck. At times his Alma was too blunt, too forthright, perhaps too French and Lyonnais. His own inclination was to the indirect, the circuitous and unspoken.
She was not satisfied. She stood in the doorway, loaded with her bag of books on the way to the girls’ school where she taught French, although she had hardly enough strength to walk to the end of the road, let alone take a class, after a night of waiting up for Laila. She said sharply, ‘That is not enough. Sitting here, waiting for her. More is needed. We must send her away.’
‘Send her away?’ he was amazed. He thought the entire intention was to keep her at home. ‘Where? What will she do?’
‘She must study. We must get her away from the streets. We must find what will interest her.’
Hamid knew that if his daughter had declared herself for dance then it was not books that would hold her. He had seen her take a black pen and slash lines across a page of print, or even rip a page out of a book, crumple it and fling it out of the window in defiance. That was what she thought of books and studies – she, the daughter of teachers, both her parents with university degrees, parents in the academic profession. Little made her so fierce as the idea of scholarship. It acted on her as the idea of home did – she had for it the scorn she felt for her mother’s kitchen, her mother’s terrace garden, the apartment filled with silverware and photographs and china dishes and statuettes. She had smashed some of them in her rage, seeing them as emblems of her imprisonment. She could have been born a gypsy child, a foundling they had adopted.
Alma could read her Hamid like a book. He did not need to say any of this to her: she saw his thoughts go through him as clear as lines of print. She said, ‘I know what you think – this daughter of ours will not study. I know, I know. Listen, we must make it attractive to her. We must make it so she cannot resist. Let us tell her: go to Cairo. Study. If you study well, you might go to Paris.’ Alma looked distraught. She spoke the names – Cairo, Paris – in a kind of despair. ‘She might agree,’ she explained, and unfolded her design: to send Laila to school in Cairo would prove their faith and trust to her; they would be treating her not like a prisoner or a delinquent but as a responsible adult; she would learn to be careful, to look after herself. Then, if she did well, they could send her to Paris, to the Sorbonne where both of them had studied (that was how they had met, Hamid having come to Paris to study). Alma’s sister lived in Paris with her French husband and four French daughters; they would take in Laila, see to her education. If education were coupled with Cairo and Paris, Laila might be tempted.
She proved right: good Alma, good mother. Laila did not agree instantly – rebellion had become her stance, her habit – but she had hesitated. Alma saw that hesitation and moved quickly to take advantage of it. She had seen an ember of curiosity light in Laila’s eye. She was not so stupid as to think the idea of study caused it, but perhaps it was Cairo, surely it was Paris. A part of Alma trembled to think of her daughter in those cities, alon
e. She thought of how Laila had lately taken to dressing in brocade vests, and ribbons and gold slippers, and using kohl to make her eyes larger and more brilliant. She thought of the morning they had found her curled up on the stairs, like a kitten, too tired to walk upstairs. But a drastic remedy was needed, and she took courage in her hands in order to apply it. She was rewarded by that hesitation in Laila’s eyes. After that it was easy.
Laila had visited Cairo previously with her mother. When she was a child, it was the cakes and bonbons she was offered in the homes of her mother’s French friends that made the city so sweetly agreeable; as a young girl, it was the great clamour of traffic, the sight of the Nile, the floating cafés, the lamps lit on them at night, the boulevards and the radio tower pricking the dark sky at night with red stars that made her heart beat faster. Now the tantes whose hats and dresses and cakes had seemed so beguiling when she was little turned out to be, in the eyes of the older girl, not quite as smart or elegant as she remembered them. True, Tante Mathilde had her bedroom all done in pink satin frills and yes, Tante Jeannette did take her to the Automobile Club for lunch and the ladies’ room there was a marvel of mirrors and white fur rugs, but now Laila found her mother’s friends less sophisticated, more matronly and boring than they had once seemed, talking of gall bladder and liver problems, doctors and treatments, the changes in the political atmosphere, the recent riots and demonstrations against the British, the huge strikes that demanded an end to the British Protectorate, the chances of Sa’ad Zaghlul and the Wafd of taking over power that should have come to them with the end of the World War and had not, the uncertainties of the future . . . Then there was the nuisance of being sent off with the children to walk in the Botanic Gardens or play tennis at the club. After she had made the first round of visits, eaten large, heavy lunches served by servants in white, and conveyed messages from her parents, she resolved to keep away from a society that seemed only a new Cairene version of provincialism.
At the American College for Girls in which her parents had decided to enrol her in preference to either a French convent or an Arabic language school, she quickly observed that there were two groups she might join, one of wealthy, Westernised girls in dresses and high-heeled shoes who learnt to play the piano and flickered their eyelashes at the young men who hung around the gates hopefully, and one of demure and serious students from the provinces who were there on scholarships, who took Arabic classes in addition to English and French, and carried their books with them everywhere. Laila could see that while the smart Westernised girls laid themselves open to observation quite candidly and there was no more to them than met the eye, the modest girls who kept their eyes lowered were the ones who had secrets, who had inner lives that might possibly prove to be intriguing.
As it happened, it was one of the latter group that first fell into step with her as they walked to their class, sat down at a table to study with her, and began to talk as if she, too, found the other intriguing. ‘Shall we do our grammar together?’ she suggested, and later, ‘Shall we go and eat now?’ Whenever Laila chose to study or to eat, Fatimah chose to come too, open her book or set down her plate, and assume a friendship that proved hard to deny: it was the first.
Fatimah even caught Laila’s hand in hers, clutched at it fondly or turned it over and patted its soft pink cushions affectionately. ‘You are not Egyptian, are you?’ she asked one day, slyly. Laila did not like to confess her mother’s French origins; in Alexandria she rarely had to, it was so well known, and she had hoped to avoid personal revelations in Cairo. ‘Why do you think so?’ she asked carefully. ‘Oh, you look foreign,’ Fatimah laughed. This made Laila put on a prim expression and say, ‘But here I am, studying French – like you.’ ‘Yes, but you are so good at it – you don’t seem to find it hard as I do.’ ‘Why are you learning French?’ Laila turned the question on her and Fatimah fumbled, dropped her eyes and looked sullen. ‘You know, my parents want me to. They think if I learn French, I will get a good husband. Good husband! They mean a rich man, a smart man,’ she cried indignantly. ‘I will never marry that kind of man. I will marry a good Muslim.’
Laila watched her closely, with a sharpened interest. What was this creature, a good Muslim? It had never ventured into her parents’ agnostic, academic home. Fatimah’s definitions were basic and naive but Laila paid them attention, flattering to the other girl. When Fatimah asked her to come with her to her Koran class, she agreed instantly, not unaware of what her parents would think of that. The two took permission to go out that evening and slipped away to a mosque below the Citadel walls where the mullah held a special class for girl students. The mosque was a clay-coloured ruin except for a few remaining tiles of turquoise and cobalt and indigo glaze in a Tree of Life pattern. In the dusty courtyard, by a gnarled and twisted pomegranate tree, some cotton rugs had been spread out and there the girls sat, each holding a copy of the Koran before her, swaying back and forth rhythmically as she read aloud. The mullah, a small, spare man with a chalky face against which his beard looked dramatically black, led them in a reedy, piping voice. For all her fear of seeming a stranger and out of place, Laila found the scene as intensly moving as the vivid and wonderful blue of the glazed tiles. Here were no giggles, no confusion, no blushes as there were in the French classes where the reading of a poem by Rimbaud or Baudelaire led the students to wink or catch each other’s eyes or even the teacher’s if they could. No one took such liberties with the mullah; the girls kept their eyes to the written page, their voices rose and fell, their bodies swayed and rocked as if fastened to the lines they read, and Laila saw a way of learning that had no opening to debate, discussion, doubt or argument as it had in her parents’ home. Here was a book, a subject, a doctrine that did not allow questioning; that was powerful and authoritative in a strange and inexplicable way: it pleased her even as it puzzled. In any event, she applied herself to learning the verses with a fervour, hoping to catch up quickly with the others and not betray her ignorance.
When Fatimah praised her progress, Laila caught her hand and swung it, happy with the compliment. ‘You should come to our meetings perhaps,’ Fatimah ventured, looking oddly secretive.
Laila was confused: meetings other than those in the mosque?
‘Oh yes, a students’ meeting, started by students. I go there and we discuss different things – Egypt, the future. We talk of freedom.’
‘Freedom?’
‘From the British!’ exclaimed Fatimah, astonished by her ignorance. ‘Don’t you believe we should be free?’
Laila hurried to assure her she did. Having invented a visiting uncle and aunt for the authorities in charge of their movements, she wrapped around her head the brown kerchief Fatimah lent her and followed her into the streets behind the Al Azhar University. There, at the end of a dusty lane where chickens and ducks squawked in their cages while a butcher sharpened his knife, and women sat stitching bright squares of cloth into rugs and hangings for sale, they entered a coffee shop where men were sitting on benches, bubbling at their shishas. Laila was taken aback at being taken to a male enclave by Fatimah, but Fatimah hurried her through it to a smoke-blackened room at the back. Here Laila pushed aside the kerchief from her face and saw to her surprise that the young men who sat around a wooden table greeted Fatimah as if she were a close friend. It made her look at Fatimah with a new curiosity but Fatimah pushed her towards a pair of chairs in a corner, and there they sat and listened to the young men read aloud from a news sheet they were planning to print. The words Laila heard them speak were utterly unfamiliar to her, as was the way Fatimah voiced her opinion with an ease of manner she did not display in class.
‘We can make a beginning by handing this to the Principal,’ one young man was saying. ‘He is the first we must throw out of the country if he continues to insist we learn English and study British history. Let’s start with him –’
‘Don’t waste your time,’ another interrupted. ‘It’s the government that makes these polic
ies we must attack. Why waste time on schoolteachers and such? They’re just stooges.’
‘Because it is educators who are weakening us instead of giving us strength. Unless we reform the educational system, we will not get a serious independence movement started.’
‘That way you’ll have to wait a few more generations. Reform? What has to be done is simply close it all down. Strike!’
That word led to such an uproar of enthusiasm that the proprietor came rushing in to silence them. It was his son who was leading this ring, and he got an earful of abuse from his father who warned him to take care or clear out. ‘It is bad enough to have a son who won’t lift a finger for the family business,’ he stormed, ‘must we have one who is headed for the prison?’ ‘Better to go to prison than live as slaves,’ the boy shouted, excited by the presence of his friends. This made his father so angry that he landed a slap on the back of the boy’s head whereupon his mother, who had been kneading dough at a table at the back, came up to scream at the father. Everything became very confused and the students who were torn between admiration for their leader and hilarity at his situation, decided to make themselves scarce on this occasion, and slipped away as discreetly as they could.
Laila was so excited that she forgot to pin her kerchief about her head on leaving the coffee shop, and had to be sternly reminded by Fatimah who added, ‘And if you can’t keep a secret, you had better let me know now. I can only bring you here if you promise not to let yourself be seen.’ Laila made the promise fervently.
The news did, however, somehow filter out. The young women in the hostel were heard to say to each other, ‘So, the girl from Alexandria has joined Fatimah’s circle. How does Fatimah get her to be her tail, eh? Has she a handsome brother that any of you know of?’ The parents in Alexandria received reports from those of Alma’s friends that Laila had failed to visit regularly as promised but who remained – they pointed out to the parents – responsible and vigilant. This was the news that had come to them: Laila had joined a revolutionary student group and was in danger of being expelled from school, arrested by the police, imprisoned – who knew what, if she were not stopped.