‘He came to see you?’ asked Amir, still whispering, his voice incredulous.
‘We went to try and see the girl’s father, to plead for you, but he is out of the country,’ she said. ‘How do you know these people?’
‘Not so loud,’ Amir said, nodding towards the partly open door. ‘What did he say?’
‘He plans to punish you,’ she said. ‘He is the one who ordered your arrest, and he is very angry with you. That was why I wanted to hear your side of this, to see if they had any kind of case.’
Amir shook his head. ‘Of course I did not rape Asha,’ he said. ‘I didn’t know anything about her age. I’ve met her a few times, and we became friendly. She came to a party at the hotel,’ Amir said and then paused to consider his words. ‘I did not force her. She came back to the hotel three times after that, looking for me. She wanted me to be her boyfriend.’
Saida nodded. ‘Her brother says you raped her and she is under-age. Apparently that is what Asha reported to him. Two crimes. Against her and against his family.’
‘No,’ Amir said softly, and ran his hand wearily across his face. ‘How can you believe such a thing? Of course I did not rape her. She came back to the hotel three times … it was her idea. She wanted me to show her a suite. It was her idea. How can you say such a thing?’ Then after a moment he asked: ‘What will happen now? How did you get permission to see me?’
‘Hakim arranged it,’ Saida said. ‘He wanted me to see that you are unharmed … yet. Do you know him? Is he another of your new friends?’
Amir nodded. ‘I know him a little. He is a hard man. He likes to be like that. Is there anything we can do? Did he say anything else?’
Saida nodded back. ‘He told me it is all up to him what punishment is decreed for you. He has made me a humiliating offer. If I yield to him, he will release you. Do you understand? If I sleep with him until he has had his fill, he will let you go free.’
‘Oh my God, what a swine,’ said Amir. He was silent for a long while after that, thinking over what she had said. Then he asked, as she knew he would: ‘Will you do it?’
‘Oh, Amir, you have a heart of stone,’ she said.
‘They will hurt me here,’ he said, pleading. ‘They may keep me here for decades … or worse … even kill me. You don’t know how hard that man is. How can it be wrong to save a brother’s life? However he thinks of it, you can say that you are doing a noble and courageous thing, saving your brother’s life.’
‘And Masud? How will I explain this to him?’ she asked.
‘He doesn’t have to know,’ Amir said, smiling triumphantly now, thinking she was going to agree. ‘No one needs to know. People do these things all the time.’
*
I did not know about this when I came home, and not for some while afterwards. That evening, while Saida was still debating with herself what to do and how much to tell me, I asked her about the car that had come for her. Our neighbour Bi Maryam had told me that a government car came and took her somewhere. Was there any news of Handsome Boy? That was Bi Maryam’s name for Amir. Saida started to tell me about the events of the day, and once she began, she told me everything, blow by blow, back and forth, until I felt nauseated, until I felt as if I had been there.
I said to her, ‘Don’t do it. You mustn’t do it.’ I pleaded with her half the night. I gripped her wrists and gently shook her, I wept, but the more I said, the more clearly she saw that none of it was worth sacrificing her brother’s life. ‘His life is not at risk,’ I said. ‘If what he says is true, the girl will get him out. That beast will keep Amir in jail for a few days or even months, but then the girl will plead with the father and get him out. Do not make our lives into nightmare and dishonour for nothing. His life is not at risk.’
But she could not persuade herself, and could only see that she had lost her father and her mother, and was now about to lose her brother when all that was required of her was to submit to a man. ‘You must help me, Masud,’ she said to me. ‘You must stay by me. You must not abandon me. You must not allow me to lose heart. I will not be able to do this without you. He will want to see me a few times and then it will be over. No one will ever know.’
‘No,’ I said, ‘it won’t be over. That man has told you he wants you to yield to him until he is satisfied. It will not be a few times and then it’s over. It will never be over until he has exhausted and humiliated you.’
But all my pleadings failed. One afternoon, a few days later, a car with private number plates parked under the tree and Saida got into it as arranged. When she came home that evening, you and I were sitting at the table drinking ginger tea with buns from the café. Saida went through to the bathroom to wash and change. Neither she nor I spoke about where she had been that afternoon. We did not speak about anything for days, just what was necessary. At the end of the week Amir was released from jail and came home, smiling and animated, as if he had taken part in a witty prank. On another afternoon, the following week, Saida left the house to go to Hakim as arranged. She had asked him not to send the car as he had the week before, and she walked to where she had to go.
While she was gone, I retrieved the jewellery my mother had given to me for safe-keeping, and the letter she’d sent to me when she arrived in Dubai, and my father’s letter when I married Saida. I put them and a few clothes in a bag and left. I cycled aimlessly for an hour or so, not sure if I really wanted to go, not really ready to lose her and my whole life, and then I headed slowly back to the house. When Saida went to Hakim for the third time, I knew I could not bear to live there any more, could not bear Saida and her brother, who in my shamed heart I imagined was chuckling and sniggering about me and my stupidity and my cowardice and my shame. I did not know what to do. I never knew what to do at any important moment in my life. I was always inept. I did not know how to speak to Saida about what she was doing. I was overwhelmed by what she was doing. I did not know why she was doing it any more.
*
Baba was weeping, his gaunt body heaving as he tried to control himself. I rose and switched off the light, and sat down at the table close to his bed. After a short while there was silence, and then he said, ‘I’m sorry. It gets harder to control the tears with age.’
‘Do you want me to put the light back on?’ I asked.
‘No,’ he said. ‘Leave it like this.’
*
While Saida was away for the fourth afternoon later that same week, I collected the few belongings I chose to take and, without waiting for her to return, I cycled to this place. I knew Khamis would let me stay. My father had helped him when he was in trouble with the authorities and I knew he would help me. They gave me this room where we are now. I did not think I would stay for so long but could not face recriminations and explanations. Amir came to the Water Authority office the next morning to find me and tell me Saida wanted me to go home. I could not raise my eyes to look at him and went on reading through the notes on my desk, or pretending to. I heard Amir sigh briefly and then leave. Later that afternoon, Saida herself came to the office, so close to our home, and asked me to come back. I walked outside with her because I was afraid I would break down in front of everyone.
‘I cannot bear to return,’ I told her. ‘I cannot bear to see what you are doing.’ She asked me where I was sleeping and I told her where I rented a room. The shopkeeper and his wife lived in another room at the back and there was a shared yard and washroom. It was enough.
‘Come back home,’ Saida said.
I shook my head because I could not speak. She had taken everything away, there was nothing there for me.
The following day, when I returned to my room after work, Khamis told me that someone had brought something for me. It was a dish of cassava and a piece of fried fish. I ate the food for supper and left the cleaned dishes in the shop before I went to work. When I returned from work, I found that Saida had taken the empty dishes away and left some rice and spinach for me. She brought me something every da
y after that and left it in the shop, and later you did. Sometimes, when I was in, Khamis called me out to accept the basket myself, and I went out and accepted the food with words of gratitude. Whenever I saw her, I struggled to prevent myself from breaking down with grief. I should have fought for her, but I did not have the strength to overcome those two shameless men who had taken over her life. I was not sure if she even wanted me to try. In a silent place in my mind, I knew that she had already given me up, and that the food she brought me every day was atonement for what she could not help but do.
I could not speak for days after I left her. As the weeks and months passed I felt a deep self-hatred that I could not voice. I deserved contempt and disdain for my cowardice and self-pity and spinelessness. But even as I hated and despised this person just as everyone else did, I learnt to live with him, and I closed the door on the world with him. I thought that way I would learn to make peace with failure, learn to live with it honourably. I did not know how to think of myself differently, how not to take myself so seriously, how not to take the world so seriously. I was tortured by vivid images of their embraces, and night after night I murdered him. I was a dog, I felt like a dog. I did not think there was anything I could do about all of this. You ask why did I not speak. If I spoke I could only condemn myself for my puniness and cowardice. My life was empty, without pleasure or purpose. I could not bear that Saida had abandoned me in such a way. Nothing seemed worth the trouble after losing her. I lost my way, that was how I was. I was ashamed of what had been forced on us and that we could not prevent it, that I could not prevent it. I had no strength left for anything, and if it had not been for Khamis and his late wife, I would not at first have been able to manage the merest minimum of care necessary for self-respect. I don’t know why they bothered to help, but they did. Their debt of gratitude to my father had been more than repaid but their care for me was without end.
As for Amir, everything blossomed for him after that. You know that better than I do, how the favours came his way and how he knew to make the most of his luck. Then he took you away to London and I thought I would never see you again. As for Saida, it turned out that Hakim could not satisfy himself of her for a long time. What he had intended as her humiliation turned into a passion he did not wish to give up. I suppose he had fallen in love with her, and for all I know, she learnt to return some of the love he felt for her because she did not leave him even after her brother was safe, and then they had the daughter. People can get used to many things. Then when I was in Kuala Lumpur she wrote to me to say she had applied for a divorce so she could re-marry. She did not need to. I had deserted her. She wrote as a gesture of kindness, I suppose. I don’t know how she found out where to write. Kuala Lumpur was a convalescence for me but I have never been able to love again because shame emptied my body and left me without vitality. At a certain age, you don’t understand how long life is. You think it’s all over for you, but it’s not, not for a long time. You just don’t understand how little strength the body needs to keep on living, how it goes on doing so despite you.
I’ve been waiting to tell you this for many years, even though for a long time it was for the wrong reasons. I wanted you to know who was to blame but you were too young and I did not have the strength. In the end I thought maybe you had chosen your side. Now I just want you to know since you want to know. It was my father who taught me to speak in this way. I did not understand him, not until he came and took me with him to Kuala Lumpur. Some of us like to think we were once better people than we have become but I was wrong about him. He prayed for me and I was not grateful at first but then I began to see a man who never gave up trying, a man of faith, and I had misunderstood that for many years, because I thought he was a man of narrow ideas.
In Kuala Lumpur he worked as a scholar in an Islamic college, teaching and explaining the writings he had been studying all his life. But then in his own time, and with his own money, he started an orphanage school, where children could receive a free elementary education. School still was not cheap in Kuala Lumpur even where it was free. Parents had to pay for tests, for books, for writing paper, for uniforms. My father’s school gave these orphan children a start. He did this in addition to his duties as an imam. Other volunteers taught in the school, members of the congregation and some of his students, and I taught there too, to help at first and then to liberate myself from the paralysing misery that had taken over my life. I never became a scholar and I did not share his piety but I did what I could to please him when for so long I had desired nothing but to thwart him. I was grateful that he had come and fished me out of that sadness. Away from the disappointment and shame I felt here, I began to feel a return of my strength. I had become accustomed to the feeling that there was no relief or absolution for what had befallen me and what I had done, but there I felt the beginning of something else.
What I understood in Kuala Lumpur was that my father had faith not only in religion but in people. I had lost that faith and seeing how he lived his life made me recognise it again and think of it as a possibility. He died some years ago, Maalim Yahya, and he was mourned by hundreds of people among whom he had been a stranger until a decade or two before. Hundreds and hundreds of people in Kuala Lumpur walked in his funeral procession. He left enough money for his wife to live on comfortably, and his daughters had both found homes and families in Kuala Lumpur. Then I heard from my sister that Saida had died, may God have mercy on her soul, and I knew that I was no longer of any use there. I thought I would come back and finish my days here. Let me tell you what it was like in Kuala Lumpur. It is a surprisingly hospitable city.
11
OUR DOUBTS ARE TRAITORS
Baba asked me if I was tempted to stay.
I hesitated for a moment and then changed the subject. I told him about the friends I made when I first went to London, Reshat and Mahmood. ‘Reshat could make a filthy joke out of almost anything,’ I told him, ‘especially if it had noble words associated with it. Those big words like justice or the future or responsibility brought out the worst in him. You’d hate to share a parent with him or take him on a journey with you or do something with him where you needed to trust him, but for a couple of hours a day he was entertaining. Mahmood was quite different, always smiling, a gentle, kind friend. There were others I did not know well, from everywhere, India, the West Indies, Malaysia, Iran.’
‘I never thought of it like that,’ Baba said. ‘I imagined you surrounded by angry English men and superior madams.’
‘That as well, but not all the time,’ I said. ‘It’s not as simple as the lies they told us about themselves or the lies we chose to believe. Anyway, it’s not all angry English men and superior madams, there are hungry ones and foolish ones and righteous ones too.’
‘Yes, I know,’ Baba said, smiling at my vehemence.
‘The whole world ends up in London somehow,’ I said. ‘The British never left anyone in peace and squeezed everything good out of everybody and took it home, and now a bedraggled lot of niggers and turks have come to share in it.’
‘Tell me about Mahmood, your gentle smiling friend,’ he said.
‘When I first met Mahmood … we used to call him Mood … I did not know that there were Muslims in Sierra Leone. I didn’t at first believe him when he told me that three-quarters of the people there were Muslim. I had always thought that Sierra Leone was a country invented by the British to send liberated African slaves to, a missionary reservation peopled by devout Christians. I must have read that somewhere or heard it in a history class, and must have imagined that the land was emptied for their arrival. The only book I had read about Sierra Leone at that time was something by Graham Greene, and I did not remember any mention of Muslims in it apart from the corrupt Syrians whom all the English characters spoke about sneeringly. That was how people like you and I came to know of so much of the world, reading about it from people who despised us. Reshat said that Cyprus too was three-quarters Muslim only the Greeks a
nd the British falsified the population figures, but he was lying. Reshat was always over the top like that, and even if you caught him out, he just laughed as if all along he had meant to make an outrageous joke.’
I told my father about Mr Mgeni and the OAU house. ‘That’s where I lived for a while,’ I said. ‘We called it that because everyone who lived in it was an African. Mr Mgeni lived next door. He came from Malindi … no, not our Malindi, the Kenya Malindi … but he was a mswahili, one of us. There were Peter and Mannie, and Basil and Sophie later in Brighton, but I’ve lost touch with all of them.’
‘So you are not tempted to stay,’ Baba said.
I said I was but I was also tempted to go. When I was a child, I sometimes heard dogs barking and howling in the late hours of the night. In my childhood terror I thought it was the howling of wicked souls calling others like them to a sinful gathering – they filled us with such stuff when we were children – and that if I did not stop my ears and cover my head, I would be compelled to go and join them. I felt something like that now although not quite so literally. If I stayed it would be to stop my ears and cover my head so that I should not be compelled to join the other scavengers living off the rich people’s garbage. To stay would be restful, in a place of content despite its deprivations, somewhere I could walk familiar streets and meet people I had known forever and breathe the air that was like old love.
‘But I lost my freedom to chance,’ I said, ‘or at least to chance ordered by events put in train by others, which I could not change or influence. My freedom is of no importance to anyone else and from a way of looking at it, it’s of no importance at all. But it leaves me torn about what to do, whether to stay or to go back to a life I find debilitating and which I fear will shrivel me up as it did Mr Mgeni. I feel I need to go back to that incomplete life I live there until it yields something to me, or not. I have not done anything in all these years, or nothing much. I don’t know what I was waiting for. When I heard the news of Mama’s passing away and that you were back, it made me want to come back too. I came to hear from you what Mama would never have been able to tell me. Once you left us, I don’t suppose she had any choice but to see through what she had brought about, to wear that garment as if it was one she had chosen for herself. I did not think it was something she would ever be able to speak about.’
Gravel Heart Page 26