Habib gave Ezra his bed. He promised he would find him aspirin, peroxide, if any shops were standing. Singing made you money, Habib thought. Singing gave you cash. He thought about the uncle and wondered if he knew, and this thought made him laugh. Before he left, he stood a moment on the threshold and watched Ezra fall asleep. The swollen eye already seemed much better in the dark, receding like a bloom. Habib would have liked a photograph of Ezra in the bed, but for that kind of picture you couldn’t ask a passing photo man, you needed your own camera, and that was beyond dreams. Habib sighed, passed his hand across his chest, and let his fingers linger where he felt his own heart beat. An awful day, it was, for everyone. But things were better when you had people around. Sleeping bodies made the air sweet, so he always thought, showed a place was safe. The uncle, curled up on the mat, and lovely darling Ezra, who would have to heal, and who—here Habib felt tender—might stay there for days.
In the evening, Ezra woke and asked Habib to take him out onto the stoop. “I want to see,” he said. “I’d like to see what’s happened, sitting down.” The uncle came out, too, rubbing his sore belly, wondering would there be something to eat. Habib brought out a tray of tangerines, a gray plaid thermos full of tea. “Some for you?” he asked the uncle. And the uncle had to smile, although he didn’t want to. That man-woman! he thought. But he remembered that you couldn’t always tell just who might be an angel in disguise, a test from God to you. Habib had taken care of Ezra, hadn’t he, almost like a nurse? Ezra looked all right, except for that one side of his face—fat and rippled like a green tomoko fruit, eyelids tiny like a clam in the middle of the swell. Still bad, yes, but not so broken. He’d ask him in a while what had gone on in the city, who had beaten him. But some questions could wait; Ezra didn’t always tell him what was going on. One approached him like a dove. The uncle poured some tea from the cup Habib had given him into the saucer, held it to his lips, and looked into the road. One of Habib’s cats came out, Aziza, a spotted rust and white one, thin but very clean.
Ezra’s one eye let him watch the sunset. The cat jumped onto the stoop and sat beside him, worked her front paws on his knee. He thought about the bus park, the sly look on Iffat’s face just before he jumped. He wondered about the white man and those two young ones, who had looked so dirty, as if they’d chosen to be so, and frightened. Their hair long like warriors’ but that trembling at the lips. He wondered idly, too, about the woman he had left at Abuu’s Guest and Rest, and why, though he recalled the white man’s face and the two boys, and though he’d looked at her so hard and walked right there beside her, he could not see in his mind’s eye exactly what she had been like. He didn’t know her name, or where she hoped to go. By then, Ezra recalled, his chest had really hurt. He’d been most aware of his own mouth—a weight, it had been then, a swollen thing he carried with his face, not a part of it he knew.
In front of them Habib Pawpaw’s wall was ruins, still a jagged sea, but purplish, softer in the slipping light. Ezra tried to make out hearts and diamonds in the bricks. A truck zoomed by, tarps flapping. Ezra thought about the bus again, how surprised the passengers had been. How when he’d opened up the hold and seen that emptiness he’d felt as though someone had hit him—and yet later someone had, and it hadn’t felt like that. He wondered, very briefly, was this anything like that? Ezra didn’t think so. No it wasn’t. Not at all. This wasn’t really a surprise. This was probably not even, Ezra knew, the worst he’d ever see. In his one eye, the rubble inked, grew darker, melted to the ground. Beyond the widened road, beyond a line of palm trees, the sun had gone quite red, the sky around it orange. Leaving their black trails, aeroplanes dug into the sky, some moving down to land, others reaching up. They watched one hum its way across, the steady blinking lights.
Then darkness really came. From somewhere not too far away, they heard a radio come on, a sputter, a song burst and a crumple. Then another crackle and a hiss as the dial turned. Habib passed a bit of tangerine to Ezra. The uncle asked for some. Looking at the two young men beside him, the nephew and the neighbor, something in him woke. A person never really knew what hit them when it did. Talking would take time, all that making of a story, for having it make sense. If you could survive it, that was the key thing. Habib spat out a pip. The other cat came out, ran after it, and stumbled in the bricks. Ezra shifted, raised a hand to test the air, set it down again. “Tomorrow,” said the uncle. In his ears the rush of traffic was distant and subdued, something like a river. “We’ll see it better then.”
Sisters for Shama
Indian Ocean Coast, 1989
Upstairs, Shama’s family has eaten, and her man—an old man, now—is more asleep than dogs. Shama’s children, grown-up kids with kiddies of their own, have waddled back to work on Sam Ouko Street and New Post Office Road. The grandchildren have scurried past my downstairs room, pointed through the doorway, made the usual faces, and gone outside to bark. Shama’s husband’s mother, so much older than her crumpled, hairless son that she barely ever sleeps, and so enormous she must roll into the kitchen seated on the footstool I gave wheels to long ago to ease her rotten legs, has settled by the taps and bats her little hands across the dishes and the cups. With all the crashing and the splashing, no one hears what I bestow on Shama in the darkness of my room: in exchange for Shama’s food, I talk about lost children.
In Shama’s youth, when I never noticed her, and she didn’t think of me, Shama’s spine was straight. Between that little-girlish time and the day she took me in, she has become a hunchback. Don’t mind, I say, don’t mind, although it troubles me. With Shama’s pointed face protruding so far from her chest, her thickening mustache, that nice bosom, her soft long trousers and light feet, Shama is as pretty as a picture. When I tell her so she says she must remind me of myself, though I’ve nothing at the top and she is lighter than I am. “But both of us mustachio’ed,” Shama says. She points at her own down and tips her foremost finger towards me, so I will think of mine. “Both of us grown old.”
After I have eaten all the soup, or the chooko or pilau or whatever she has made, I lie back and talk. It’s what I do for Shama, though she thinks it’s all for nothing, or that more likely it’s for me. Here’s what everyone forgets: right here in this town, to her mama’s second girl, Shama at the start was a baby’s older sister.
For fifteen years the two grew up slim side by sister-side, until the younger girl woke up, and—leaving poor Shama behind without a blessing or a word—she vanished. Here one windy coastal day and gone the very next. Run off with a man? you ask. Eaten by a lion? Taken into slavery by a European thief? No one ever knew. Not a letter, not a line, not a jar of lime achari with a message in the lid. Imagine.
It’s difficult, of course, to know what boils in someone else, but when you’re old and still, as I am, and have such elephantine feet, there’s nothing left to do but close your eyes and conjure. Someone else might ask themselves about the origins of cane juice and who invented that machine, or why they chose a coffeepot and seven cups for that fountain by the fort, but—other folk aside—I think about poor Shama’s long-gone little girl.
An absent-sibling toothache, I believe, has bent my Shama’s back, and I and no one else will be the one to cure it. I am the only person who can see that she is ever, ever sad. The sister-pain has weighed her jaws so fiercely it’s caused a crushing in her neck and been too much for Shama’s back to stand: this missing-sister gap become an ever-growing hump!
I know the little-sister wound still throbs in Shama’s heart. In my room while she’s upstairs, I imagine Shama weeping all the time, dripping tears in the karai to fritter up her feelings, or crying at the pillows on the sofa. All the dampness in the house, the mold that streaks my walls, I think, springs from Shama’s eyes. Of course, when Shama comes to me or passes by and pokes a hand into my room, she looks perfectly at ease. No signs of wetness or of redness puff up Shama’s peepers. Shama’s very brave. I know better only, because, as I am sure you
will agree, people who must lie down in the dark see what others can’t.
Like I said, I talk. And so before too long I hope to find a made-up girl to outdo the run-off sibling and give Shama’s spine a break. Or so. A hot-water story for the slivers in my Shama’s sister-heart. Some time after I have talked in just the perfect way, Shama will speak out: “Oh! That one ended nicely!” Or “Yes, that could have happened to my sister!” For several days she’ll think of what I’ve said and soon her crooked neck will loosen and her shoulders sit up straight. She’ll think, Ah-ha, there’s happiness sometimes! I will resuscitate, revise, give a real-life story to, and kick all sibling shadows out the windy door. But the thing cannot be done directly. I have been working on some options.
This is what we do: In the morning after Shama’s kids have gone away to work and the grandchildren are all industrious at school, while her husband’s mother shouts that there’s no money to be had from feeding invalids and sinners, Shama brings me porridge. As she’s thumping down the steps, she hums a little tune to drown out Bibi’s voice. She doesn’t stay to talk but goes back up to cook. After they have all come home and eaten and gone away again, she comes back down for stories, this time with thick food, with fish, and sometimes a fresh fruit.
Shama’s grown quite stubborn and she stays with me till dusk. Then she goes back up to pray and wash and make another meal. Upstairs Bibi does the dishes to provoke from Shama a reaction: she ought to be asleep, instead, and leave those things for Shama to wash up. While Bibi soaps and shines the plates, or sometimes later —if there is a film—Shama puts her man to bed and comes downstairs again with waterbread and honey or pakoras if she has some, and she’ll let me talk some more, until both of us feel sleep. There’s time, you see, for making little sisters. And like I said, I’ve got some new ones at the ready. I’ll make Shama listen close.
Dear Shama, I’ll begin. I started as a child and grew. She’ll laugh. “We all begin that way!” I’ll wave my fingers at her as though at a fly, though of course she’s seen my point. I’ve lied through all my teeth, Shama, and thus can love quite sharply. “Sharply?” She will sniff and squint her eyes. “If truth shows its fine face,” she’ll say, “all else will move aside.” She’ll settle happily against the wall, bring an ankle to her thigh, and with a shake of her high head will purse her lips at me. “No good can come from lies.” I’m sure I don’t agree, and I know Shama for herself quite often holds another view, but let’s not get off course.
Sit still, I’ll say. While I have not been everywhere, exactly (and who has, after all?), I have traveled in my time. Feats and quakings I have never once experienced I can perfectly imagine. Qualified, I am. And also, don’t forget, motherless, and lost. Shama will take hold of my poor hands, and I will shake her off to show I’m hard enough for whatever is afoot. So look, I’ll say, to capture her attention: before a boy can calculate his funds or wipe himself alone or speak out his own name, there is first of all a mother. A mother is the start. Shama won’t think about her missing girl at first if I begin this way, with mothers and moreover with the mention of a son. Deflect, go sneaking! People who love sharply learn to hide their better tools.
I will spread apart my hands and bring them back together, to prepare the introduction. Mothers. Something to consider: now and then, indeed more often than we think, a boy has more than one. Before Shama can say a single word, I’ll introduce the decoy. Slyly. Little Khaled, for example. Shama will take note. “Khaled,” she’ll repeat, a little doubtful at the first, and I will gesture with lips tight please be quiet or I’ll stop. Khaled, I’ll go on. Two-times-over talented, and a selfish boy to boot. Unlike but not unlike a thousand other boys, Khaled found himself with two.
Shama will give out a little sigh and tuck her legs behind her spreading hips, which, unless I speak surely, may shatter too one day from all that rolling loss. “Two?” Oh yes, the boy was very lucky. Two mothers! What a joy. More care, you think: All’s well. Good for little Khaled. “Sure,” Shama will agree. “Two mothers. Nothing wrong with that. Not a big surprise.” But-but, I will go on, too much mother-love is only flattering on screen. Shama will curl her tongue between her lips and pointed upper teeth to affect a serious look. She’ll nod. I’ll keep my eyes fixed on her pretty, wrinkled face. By this point I will have her. We both like the cinema.
Shh. Now listen. Khaled’s Mother One, who stretched and clawed and pushed and pushed to let the creature out? Ayeesha, good-looking and gifted. Grew up to be an actress (films, let’s keep these jewels in mind). Ayeesha. She’s the real beginning. And, I’ll say to Shama, because things that start out far away don’t look as though they’re yours, Ayeesha lived in Egypt.
Shama now and then is skeptical with me. She’ll pretend to be upset. “What foolishness is this, yakhe? In Egypt? Have you even been?” I have, I’ll say, though Shama’s forehead, which when at rest is not much bigger than my palm, will grow smaller with a frown. I have been to Egypt and to top it off have seen the oldest talkies. And what’s more, I will remind her, though Shama says it can’t be true, I have been a sailor-lover at all harbors of the Gulf. And so.
Egypt, in a sleepy town with seven date palms and a mosque, creeper roses sneaking in the schoolyard, and, as all small towns must have, a dangerous, deep well. Ayeesha. Just sixteen. A brainy girl, she was, good with shapes and numbers. Not badly shaped herself, Ayeesha was the kind of handsome that can tear a shirt in two. And she had (bad news or good news?) particularly fine feet. More handsome as the days went by, nice face, some curves, and pretty feet, Ayeesha was exactly on the verge of things. Her little heart was ready for some music.
“Feet?” says Shama. Despite the hope of hearts in song, talk of toes has stumped her. With a question on her face, she gestures to her ankle. Yes, I say. I motion to the lumps beneath my blanket, which, had I to wear them on my shoulders, would make me a hunchback, too. Nice feet. Now listen. Back to this girl’s heart. “Oh yes.” Shama’s little mouth is round and twisted like a sugared noodle nest. Eyes aroll, she makes a show of grumbling. “Go on, then.” Shama’s own foot sways above her knee. “Song.”
The first to pluck a tune with this Ayeesha’s girly strings was a dreamy teacher in his twenties who now and then wrote plays. Ayeesha entered this man’s classroom for her final year of school, looking forward to, perhaps, a nice grade on a test (she was clever, after all) and later, who can say, a civil service post.
We already know Ayeesha’s lowest parts were pretty. And as it happened, this dreamy man’s soft head was so filled up with misted things he could not stand to look too closely on the world that glittered at the level of his head. He often looked down at the ground. On that ground, spectacular and firm, Ayeesha’s feet were sugar roses and the wings of pretty birds. Ayeesha’s feet, permit me, sang. Shaken from his reveries by an accidental, first-time notice of her feet, the teacher thought he’d never seen appendages so fine. As though he’d never known a heel before, or sole. After teacher’s second look, the shake became a quake. The vision of those feet kicked right into his heart. Quite oddly, at Ayeesha’s able feet, this man who had never once been tripped up by a passion, or treated any girl with less than great respect, or felt with any shivers the fragility of elbows, wrists, or knees, was suddenly a shipwreck. He began to minister his classes never looking up, eyes along her ankles.
He scrawled notes across the board without seeing what he wrote, without once turning his own spine or bottom to the room. He tapped his fingers on the desk without ascertaining first what things he finger-tapped: a frightened piece of paper, for example, or a rare and lonely pencil, leery of the floor. Perhaps the other girls he taught, Ayeesha’s chums, her less lovely and less clever, but not quite jealous, twins, lacked imagination. It did not occur to them he might have been habitually vulnerable to feet (which he was not) or to their friend Ayeesha’s in particular (which he was) or that anything exciting, toes tensed and light-fingered, was waiting in the wings. They thought, with
shrugs, floor-love. A handicap, a tic, who knows? Our teacher’s strange, they thought, at the beginning, but we are only students here, and we must never, never mind.
The teacher’s ogling of young Ayeesha’s feet brought him (he would spell out through a poem, later, in old age) a refreshment that—as the poem was to prove—could not be described. Forgive me: he had never felt so grounded. He was able to write quatrains about feet. Toes splayed like shiny leaves of date palms, soles like desert slopes, bones like ribs on sated cows, ankles like the billowed sails of dhows. He saw her footprints in his books, heard Ayeesha’s steps in dreams.
Ayeesha’s feet both focused and disturbed him. He knew he must look odd. Now and then, exhausted by his passion, he tried, when teaching, to seek out other toes. Most girls, after all, do have a full collection. But what did this man find? Salma’s feet, long and fleshless, ten prongs beneath her chair. Khadija? Flatter than the plains, big toe aswoop far forward, ungainly hillock dwarfing all the rest. Naima? Sweet, but seven on each side. Always, always, in the midst of talk about an epic, or bridges built in China, to Ayeesha’s feet he would helplessly return.
If the teacher asked a question, he did not look up to choose a timid girl whose hand was finally raised. Eyes on dear Ayeesha’s feet, he simply stood until a brave one coughed and lobbed the answer to him like a homemade rubber ball to thunk him on the head. If he wrote a poem on the board, he wrote it eyes still fastened to the ground. How his chalky letters looped, betraying their own words, how plums were prims and goats were gowns without his even knowing! By and by, Ayeesha’s girlfriends did catch on, though not quite sure to what. They could not help themselves. They passed notes to one another, made wild signs in the air. Eventually, they laughed. And once they’d started laughing, as you can imagine, it was hard for them to stop.
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