Gravel Heart Read online

  I was in the headmaster’s office to be praised for a story I had written about a cycle ride to the country. The topic we were given came from our English Language textbook: What did you do on your holidays? Below the topic question was a drawing, which was intended to give us ideas. It showed two smiling children, a boy and a girl, running after a ball on the beach, free-flowing blond hair streaming behind them, while an adult woman with short blonde hair and a sleeveless blouse looked smilingly on. Another drawing on the same page showed two more children, or perhaps the same ones, this time with hair blowing about their faces, playing in front of a building, with trees and a windmill and a donkey and some chickens in the background. What did we do on our holidays … as if we were like the children pictured in our school books, whose hair blew about our faces when we ran, and who went to the seaside on our holidays or went to our grandfather’s farm during the summer and had adventures in the haunted old house by the mill. Holidays were when the government school was closed, because there was no holiday from Koran school and the word of God, except for the days of Idd and the Maulid, or because of bed-ridden illness. A headache or a gut-ache or even a glistening grazed knee were not enough for a reprieve, although running blood was indisputable. On ordinary days, we went to government school in the morning and Koran school in the afternoon. During school holidays we went to Koran school all day, not to the seaside where our frizzy curly hair did not stream behind us as we ran nor to grandfather’s farm where there was no windmill and where our hair did not blow about our faces.

  But I had made good progress with the Koran compared to many other boys in my class, and by the time I wrote the story of the cycle ride to the country, I had finished with Koran school. I had escaped, which is to say I had completed reading the Koran twice, from beginning to end, to the satisfaction of my teacher, who had listened to me read every single line of every page over the years, correcting my pronunciation and making me repeat a verse until I could read it without stumbling. By the time I stopped attending Koran school I could read the Koran fluently and with the appropriate intonation without understanding anything much of what I read. I knew the stories, I loved the stories, because there were always occasions for the teachers to re-tell the travails and triumphs of the Prophet. One of the teachers at our Koran school in Msikiti Barza was an expert storyteller. When he stood up on those occasions we were told to put our tablets and volumes away and listen because it was a day that commemorated an important religious event, there was usually no further need to hush the students. He told us about the Prophet’s birth, about the miraj, about the entrance to Medina. I loved the story of the angel who came to the young orphan boy herding sheep on the hills of Makka, split open his chest and washed his heart with driven snow. However many times I heard that story in my boyhood, it moved me and thrilled me, a heart made pure with driven snow. The angel must have brought it down with him from snow-laden clouds, because I don’t expect he would have been able to find that commodity on a Makkan hillside.

  So what did the escaped ex-Koran school youngsters do during the holidays? They did not do anything in particular. They slept late, wandered the streets through the long day, gossiped, played cards or went for a swim, which did not amount to the seaside as it was only a few minutes’ walk from home. No one did anything worth writing about, or if anyone did, it was likely to be something forbidden and so could not be written about in a classroom exercise. But I was asked to write about my holiday highlights, not to grumble about the absurdity of the task. So I made up a story about a cycle ride to the country, and named the trees that provided me with shade, and described the boy who pointed me in the right direction when I got lost, and the girl I spoke to but who disappeared before I could find out her name, and the blinding whiteness of the sand when I reached the sea.

  My teacher liked it and showed it to the headmaster, who wanted me to make a fair copy in my best handwriting – the school did not have a typewriter – so it could be put on the noticeboard for everyone to admire. That was what I was in his office for, to be praised for what I had done. Then when the headmaster ran out of praise, yet could see that I was still standing patiently in front of him instead of grinning with pleasure and shuffling to be released, he pointed to the photograph in the manner of someone bestowing a parting gift. Take this and go. In the photograph, my father’s father, Maalim Yahya, was standing at the end of a line behind a row of seated colleagues, a tall, thin, ascetic-looking man who returned the gaze of the camera with the look of someone suffering an ordeal. Or perhaps he was struggling with a very bad headache as my father sometimes used to do. My mother told me that my father inherited his headaches from his father, who was severely afflicted in that regard. He was wearing a jacket over his kanzu, a gesture towards his government-school role. My father looked nothing like Maalim Yahya, he must have taken after his mother whom I have never met or seen in a photograph.

  At that time, respectable women did not allow themselves to be photographed for fear of the dishonour to their husbands if other men saw their image. But this fear was not the only reason to refuse as some men were also resistant, and in both cases it was from suspicion that the production of the image would take something of their being and hold it captive. Even when I was a child, although that was later than the time of Maalim Yahya’s photograph, if a tourist from the cruise ships wandered the streets with a camera, people watched warily for the moment when the foreigner lifted it to take a shot and then several voices screamed in a frenzy of prohibition, to frighten him or her off. Behind the tourist an argument would start between those who feared for the loss of their souls and those who scoffed at such nonsense. For these kinds of reasons, I had not seen a photograph of my father’s mother and so could not tell for certain if he did take after her. After seeing the photograph of Maalim Yahya, though, I thought that I had taken a little bit after him in shape and complexion. The recognition pleased me, it connected me to people and events that my father’s silence had cut me off from.

  The date on the photograph in the headmaster’s office was December 1963, which would have been the end of the school year just before the revolution. Maalim Yahya lost his job soon after that, which was why he went to work in Dubai. The rest of the family, his wife and two daughters, followed but my father stayed behind. None of them ever came back while I was there, not even for a visit, and aside from that school picture I saw in the headmaster’s office I had no image of my father’s family. When I was very young, it did not occur to me that I should have one. My mother and my father were the world to me, and the snippets of stories I heard as a child sustained me even though the people they told of seemed so distant.

  *

  I knew more about my mother’s family. My mother’s name was Saida and her family had once been well off, not wealthy by any means but well-off enough to own a piece of farming land and their own house near the Court House. During her childhood that part of town was occupied by the grandees, by people connected to the sultan’s government, who lived in the seclusion of their walled gardens, and by European colonial officials, who lived in huge old Arab houses by the sea, and marked their ceremonial imperial rituals with white linen uniforms adorned with fantasy medals and wore cork helmets festooned with feathers and carried swords in gilt-edged scabbards, like conquerors. They gave themselves tin-god titles and pretended that they were aristocrats. Both varieties of grandees thought themselves gifted by nature, which had created them noble and granted them the right to rule as well as the burden that it brought.

  My mother’s father, Ahmed Musa Ibrahim, was an educated man, a travelled man, who had no time for these self-deluding patrician airs. He preferred to speak about justice and liberty and the right to self-fulfilment. He would pay for these words in due course. He had spent two years at Makerere College in Uganda and one year at Edinburgh University in Scotland, completing a Diploma in Public Health. In between his studies at those two institutions he spent several weeks in Cairo, visi
ting a friend who was a student in Education at the American University. Then he travelled through Beirut and stayed in Istanbul for three weeks on his way to London. The years in Kampala and Edinburgh, and his time in those other fabulous cities, gave him an air of incomparable glamour and sophistication, and when he started to speak about one or other of the famous sights encountered on his travels, his audience fell reverently silent. Or that was how my mother told it, that his words were held in such respect. He worked in the laboratories of the Department of Health, a short walk from home. His main work was in the malaria eradication campaign, but he also contributed to the cholera and dysentery control project, analysing samples and participating in seminars. Some people addressed him as Doctor and consulted him about their ailments, but he laughed them off and told them that he worked in the rat-catchers’ department and knew nothing about hernias and haemorrhoids and chest pains and fevers.

  I have seen a photograph of him too, taken at the back of the Department of Health building, near the gate to the yard where the departmental vehicles were parked. He wore a white linen suit, the middle button of his jacket done up, and a red tarbush at a dashing angle. His head was tilted to one side so the tassel hung a little away from the tarbush. His right calf was crossed over his left, drawing attention to his brown shoes, and his right arm leant against the unmistakable neem tree by the gate. In the distance behind him loomed the giant flamboyant that shaded the road running by the building. He stood in a jaunty, cheery pose in which he was play-acting his modernity, a cosmopolitan traveller to some of the world’s great metropolises, Cairo, Beirut and Istanbul on the way to London and Edinburgh. The tarbush may have been abolished as backward in Atatürk’s Turkish Republic, and it may have been on its way out in other places in the 1950s (Egypt, Iraq, Tunisia) where it was becoming an emblem of corrupt bashas and beys and the defeated armies of Arab nationalism, but the news had not yet reached my mother’s father, at least not when the photograph was taken. To him it was still a sign of sophisticated Islamic modernity, secular and practical in place of the medieval turban. The white linen suit was more ambiguous: that it was a suit was a salute to Europe, as were the brown shoes in a sandal-wearing culture, but the suit was white, which when worn with modesty was the colour of homage and prayer and pilgrimage, the colour of purity and devotion. The photograph was saved from any air of vanity by the exaggerated crossing of the calves and by the uncertain, half-apologetic smile on his round chubby face, as if he was wondering if he had gone too far in his dressing-up.

  Ahmed Musa Ibrahim hovered on the fringes of a group of anti-colonial intellectuals, people like him who thought themselves connected to the world, and who knew about Saad Zaghloul Pasha, the Egyptian statesman (hence the tarbush), and Gandhi and Nehru, and Habib Bourguiba, the Tunisian insurrectionist, and Marshal Tito – nationalist leaders who had refused to be cowed and crushed by imperial bullies of different political shades. These anti-colonial intellectuals Saida’s father associated with wanted to become modern too, like the nationalists they admired. They wanted to be able to determine the outcome of their lives without the overbearing presence of the British and their self-righteous and sanctimonious display of self-congratulatory restraint. Those who had dealings with them, like Saida’s father, knew that that self-deprecatory mannerism really disguised a smug and condescending arrogance towards everyone, and especially towards over-educated natives like him, whose proper fate was subservience and ignorance. Yes, he knew them all right. They chuckled over babu stories about their natives and their Emperor-Seth-like aspirations to modernity – Diploma in Public Health (Failed) – and then humbly praised themselves for their long-suffering kindnesses to the charges they had appointed themselves to rule over. What else could they do? When they were confronted with their manipulative and intimidating methods … well, there were times, inevitably, when one had to be cruel to be kind.

  ‘No one bid the British to come here,’ my mother’s father said. ‘They came because they are covetous and cannot help wanting to fill the world with their presence.’

  It was the 1950s in a colonised territory, not the place to speak in this way. The British authorities preferred to forget that they were conquerors who ruled by coercion and punishment, and considered any outspoken comment on this as sedition. The empire was very fond of that word, but it was almost too late for words like that: sedition and legitimate government and constituted authority. It was time for them to go. There were heated debates late into the night; shouted conversations in cafés, rallies where activists spoke with hatred and derision; friends fell out and turned secretive as political lines were re-drawn. They were heady times, exulting times, watching British police officers scowl powerlessly on the fringes of rallies as the crowds roared, knowing that the departure of the mabeberu and their lackeys and stooges was unavoidable.

  The times being as they were, it was inevitable that Saida’s father became involved in politics. So in the years just before independence, he had to leave his job because he could not work for a colonial government while he was plotting its downfall. The particulars of his appointment explicitly, and quite reasonably, forbade him from doing so and promised to send him to prison if he transgressed. He went to work on his land instead, growing vegetables for the market, or rather giving orders and employing others to do the hardest work while he stood nearby with arms akimbo. It may have looked as if he was doing nothing, he liked to tell his family, but if he were not there the work would immediately stop and those labourers of his would go to sleep under the nearest tree. We have no discipline, that’s our biggest problem, he would say.

  He became an informal adviser to one of the political parties, was active in the voter-registration drive and in the literacy-classes movement. He donated to the party and gave fund-raising speeches in local meetings and participated in the organisation of the rallies, which simultaneously offered a raucous challenge to the colonial order and taunted political rivals. He was visible to everyone as an activist, and there was street-corner talk already that he was likely to be given a junior ministerial post in the future. When it came to determining the outcome of their lives, things did not work out as he and his intellectual and political friends anticipated, though. He was killed during the revolution because he did all that he did for the wrong political party.

  My mother knew all this first-hand because she was fourteen when her father was taken away. When she spoke about him, it was always with a certain solemnity. She hardly ever mentioned the stories he might have told, or something ridiculous that might have happened one holiday, when perhaps he tripped and spilled a bowl of fruit salad over his trousers, or dropped an expensive glass bowl, or reversed his car into a tree. It was only occasionally that I caught a glimpse of the chubby-faced, smiling man in the photograph: how he loved to sing along with Mohammed Abdel Wahab, making his voice gravelly like the great singer; how he played the air-guitar and pretended to be a rock’n’roller when Elvis Presley was played on the radio, swivelling his hips and rolling on the balls of his feet like the King. But more often she spoke of him as a personage: about his political activities, his generosity to people, his crisply ironed cotton jackets, how esteemed he was. Her mourning for him was so profound that it had diminished those other more everyday memories of him and turned him into a figure of tragedy.

  She returned to the story of his arrest several times. When news of the uprising reached them, their father’s instructions were that if soldiers or gunmen appeared at the house, which they were certain to do as he was such a well-known campaigner for the other party, there was to be no yelling and screaming. Everyone but him was to lock themself in an inner room because there were rumours of assault and violence and he did not want his wife and his children to be exposed to insult or harm. The people who were doing this had been badly misled but there was no need for hysterics on any account. He would talk to them when they came and then they would all wait for everything to calm down. When they heard the jeep
stop outside the house, Saida and her younger brother Amir ran to obey the instructions, urged on by their parents, but their mother refused to leave her husband on his own and there was no time for their father to insist.

  They heard the soldiers banging on the door with their gun butts but there was no shouting after that, just a murmur of conversation as their father had promised. Their mother later said that she knew every one of the four soldiers by name, and she called them out one after the other to them so they would remember. My mother said the names to me too, so that I would remember, but I have tried not to do so. The talking did not amount to anything. They did not realise the violence the victors had in mind and how quickly cruelty begets more cruelty. Their father was taken away by the revolutionaries and they never saw him again, nor was his body returned, nor any announcement made of his death. He disappeared. I cannot describe, my mother said. When she came to this point in her telling she would have to stop for a while. The family land and the house were confiscated and became state property, to be given away to a zealot or a functionary of the revolution, or to his mistress or cousin. The announcement of the confiscation was made on the radio, with the instruction that all confiscated houses were to be vacated immediately. Their mother was too frightened to resist or to ignore this announcement as some people did. They moved in with their grandmother, leaving everything behind except what they could carry in their bags. Their grandmother was really their mother’s aunt, but there was no word for that, only a description, so she became their grandmother, their Bibi.