Admiring Silence Read online

  Uncle Hashim knew how to deal with them, too, and did so with a kind of style which made him seem unsoiled by his dealings. He gave and took with equal courtesy, so that those he dealt with felt slightly flattered by their exchanges. His restraint was finely modulated. His voice was never raised except in greeting, yet an edge in his eye and tone gave a glimpse of the inner metal. When a shoplifter was caught in the area, he was first brought to Uncle Hashim, who then advised if he should be taken to the police or given a little beating to put him straight. If people argued about money, or some other honourable matter, they were sure to ask Uncle Hashim to arbitrate in the end. On every notable date – the eve of Ramadhan, Idd, the maulid Nabi, the return of a long-absent traveller – he invited a few people to his house to eat with him. As time had passed, Uncle Hashim had grown in wisdom. To him now every created thing had allegorical meaning. God created it all, and Uncle Hashim submitted himself to Him every day and prayed for guidance and mercy.

  Emma called him your cut-throat uncle. Uncle Hashim would have stared with amazement at her directness, and then smiled with pleasure. He liked to think himself practical and attentive to his limitations, and Emma’s assessment would have appeared as a flattering form of the same thing, that he recognized the boundaries of his interest and pressed home every advantage.

  At first, my parents were too preoccupied with themselves to notice anyone else. They were full of smiles and a new significance. My father’s college was six miles out of town by the sea, and he left early in the morning to catch the special bus for students who lived in town. Most of the students were boarders, and the out-of-town site comprised their quarters and their playing fields as well as their class-rooms. Classes went on into the afternoon, so all the students ate lunch in the college dining-hall together. By the time my father came home, shiny and sweaty from the long day, my mother would have done the washing, cooked and cleared lunch for Uncle Hashim and for herself, and cooked the supper. So, free of all her chores, she was ready to be attentive to him. He bathed himself in the warm water she had ready in a bucket, scooping the water over himself and humming with an undertone of anticipation, and then he joined her in their room. Later he went for a stroll and sat in the café for a while, but he returned home soon after sunset, and did not go out again until the following morning.

  Their life together was an idyll. They stayed up talking into the early hours, whispering with their heads inches away from each other, telling stories about what had befallen them. He told her how his father, a short, combative man who loved to demonstrate his strength, ruled the family like a dictator. He forced everyone to wake when he woke up, issuing orders for the day’s tasks without consulting anyone’s wishes or opinions. It was important, he said, that they should live and behave as a family. His rules about what was acceptable and what was not in this regard were detailed and mostly inflexible: they consisted of everyone doing what he said. He worked the hardest and longest of all of them, talking all the time at anyone within hearing – hectoring, blaming, advising – leaving not a chink of space for eccentric ideas to take root. If he sensed resistance, he glowered with his crushing smile and said, So you think you know better than me.

  My father, the youngest of the family, had two brothers and one sister. The sister was the eldest, eight years older than my father. None of them had been allowed to go to school, even though they asked. At the brothers’ request to join the school which had just been opened, his father had grinned with surprise, a special grin which he kept for such absurdities. You can’t be serious, he said. I need you on the land. He berated the sister for days about her wanting to go to school so she could do filthy things with boys. It had been his practice never to hit his daughter. He left that to her mother, while he dealt with the boys when need arose, which it did regularly. But in his rantings about her desire to go to school, her disgusting betrayal of his care, her filthy plot to dishonour herself and her family, he came close to slapping her several times, only prevented from doing so because her mother never strayed far when he began his harangues, and threw herself at him with cries of warning and pleas for mercy.

  When my father was seven years old, his eldest brother, who was thirteen, had taken him by the hand one morning and walked with him the one and a bit miles to the school on the main road to town. His father had said nothing as his mother fussed about his hair and his dirty feet, making these ugly noises to keep him from intervening. His mother often fussed over him, protecting him from his father’s rages and saving him from the harshest of the chores decreed for him. When his father was defeated in this way, he called him ayal mama, mother’s boy. After he started school, his father called him this all the time for the first few weeks, as if he had forgotten his name, but also to make it clear that it was only because his mother made such a fuss that he was allowing these insane goings-on. But whenever he thought it necessary, he told my father to stay behind and help with the work. Sometimes this staying-behind lasted for several weeks, until it was obvious that there was nothing for my father to do, when one of his brothers or his sister would say sharply to him, What are you hanging around here for? Go back to school. He missed so much school-time in this way that he had to repeat years because he was absent during examinations or was simply too unprepared to pass them. Then when he completed Standard Eight and was offered a place at the teaching college, his father refused to pay the fees, though these were only thirty-two shillings per term, a sum so small that it could only be a token of the student’s goodwill and commitment, yet impossible for someone like my father to find for himself.

  By this time my father’s sister was already married. Her husband came from a family which was distantly related. He lived in the town and was apprenticed to a house-painter. It was this sister who went to see the relatives on her mother’s side, and took with her a gold bracelet which her mother had given her to pawn for the fees. In this way my father came to live in town and go to college. His relatives fed him and gave him a place to stay. Times were hard then, just after the war, and there were food shortages of all kinds, so he was grateful to them for the way they had taken him in with such little fuss, and he tried not to be a burden. His sister would have had him, she said, but they rented one room in a poor quarter of the town, and struggled to feed themselves. He was better off with the relatives. She came to visit him now and then, and whenever she had been to the country to visit the family, she brought them all gifts of fruit.

  He made friends at the college, and in the late afternoon after class he strolled on the sea-front with some of them while they gossiped and teased each other frenziedly. After the sunset prayer, they went to the café or went home to eat, while some of the older ones went for another stroll in search of more secret pleasures. My father had no money and felt very conscious of this when he sat in the café, empty-handed and on the edges of the crowd, listening to the exchanges. Every evening they came back to the subject of India’s independence, marvelling at the collapse of British resolve. One evening, one of the big talkers at the café was making fun of Gandhi as the naked banya who had scared the British away with his lingam. My father found himself speaking heatedly about the power of the skinny old man who refused to be intimidated by the crushing force of the British Empire, and the disarming impact of his non-violence, and how his willingness to give his life for the liberation of India gave energy to hundreds of thousands. When he had finished he expected to be mocked, but everyone was polite, and he left gratefully soon after.

  He stayed home in the evenings after that, feeling sure that everyone despised him for his poverty and for his high-handed intervention in their conversations. After supper he did whatever college work he had, which was never much, and then read through his text books: geography and history had the best stories. He had been given a tiny room which was previously a store – there were still two locked trunks one on top of the other at the foot of his bed – and the room had not been wired for electricity. So he worked by the
light of a kerosene lamp which sat on the trunks while he balanced a board across his lap as a writing surface. He could only half open the door, and when he changed or dressed he had to stand in one place or lie down on his bed. But he was grateful for the security and the privacy of his little space. No one harangued him about anything, and he was free to withdraw whenever he wished.

  He had caught glimpses of my mother on the terrace, coming and going between the lines of washing, and had looked away politely in case she should see him and take offence at his scrutiny. One Sunday morning, when he had lain late in bed, he was leaning on the wall by the little slit of his window, looking idly down at the terrace and wondering what he could do to fill the empty day. He saw her come out with a bucket full of washing and watched her as she hung it up. She stretched for the line, frowning in the mid-morning sun, and he saw that she was beautiful. He watched her for only a minute and then drew back, but after that as soon as he entered his cell he went to the window to see if she was on the terrace. Once she caught a glimpse of him and he retreated in confusion, but the next time he stood his ground, though he pretended to be looking in another direction. He found out that she sat on the terrace in the evening, and he took to standing by his window, looking towards her and falling in love with her, imagining the fragrance of roses and lavender swirling around her. Sometimes she sang, or she stretched out on the mat, gazing at the sky. She only stayed for half an hour or so, and did not always even glance in his direction, but he waited for the moment every day, woke up with anticipation of it, stumbled through the day towards it. Very occasionally she did not appear, when perhaps they had a guest in the house or she had gone to call on a bereaved family or to celebrate a wedding (he explained to himself), and then he felt abandoned and sore in his heart, as if she had died and left him for ever.

  Whenever he saw Uncle Hashim in the streets he felt absurd about his secret love. He greeted him politely when they passed, as did everyone, even though Uncle Hashim was only in his late twenties. He was a tall man, with a firm assertive stride and an unambiguously assured manner. Whenever he saw him, my father felt as if he had been laughably naughty to have spent all those dark hours staring at this man’s sister and making fantasies about her. Then one evening Uncle Hashim came on the terrace and turned and saw my father there at the window, prying dishonourably on women’s lives. My father was sure he had been seen. The slit in the wall was the only window on that side of the house, and for some reason he thought that everyone knew he lived in the tiny store-room in his relatives’ house. At the least he expected exposure and scorn, perhaps a beating. But Uncle Hashim did not even break his stride when they next passed in the street, while my father was already cringing in expectation of a blow or an insult. Even more surprisingly, he was shown marked favour, so much so that his relatives began to say among themselves that Uncle Hashim must want him for his sister, and so it unmistakably proved.

  My father’s sister worked out the strategy. She would speak to the relatives, and get their uncle to go and have a quiet chat with Uncle Hashim, just to see how matters stood. In the meantime, my father was to go home for a few days – he had only been once in the seven months he had been living in town – and explain what was going on to their father. Would she not come with him? She would come later, she said. In a few days.

  So this is the kind of education you’ve been getting, his father said. That’s not what I sent you to school for. One of his brothers farted at this point. It was done deliberately to provoke, for his father could not bear anyone farting within earshot of him, was driven into a frenzy by it, felt it as a deliberate insult to his person and his honour. He rose and chased after his son, down the front steps into the grove of breadfruit trees, shouting obscenities and curses, as far as the first open field of maize, where he stopped for a few minutes for a final round of malediction and a piss against the trunk of a coconut tree, and then strode back to the house. So this is the kind of education I sent you to town for, he said when he had finished describing the intimate shortcomings of his son. I’ve no money for a dowry, and your two elder brothers are still not married. My father had nothing to say except that he loved the girl and that he thought her elder brother wished for the marriage. It seemed as if his father could keep the conversation going for years, in between insisting that my father change into working clothes and come out on the land. After a few days of this, his sister turned up with the arrangements that had been agreed between their uncle and Uncle Hashim.

  My mother was a willing party to these arrangements, and even before she was officially betrothed to my father, she uncovered her face and spoke to him when they met in the streets, marvelling at his clear smile and his laughing voice. People saw them like this and grinned as they saw how things were. When it came to signing the marriage certificate, she put her thumb on it and wrote an X. She had never been to school at all, she told my father, though Uncle Hashim had attended up to Standard Five. Her father had opposed the idea when her mother asked. Other mothers were beginning to insist that their daughters should be sent to school as well as their sons, which is what had emboldened her mother to raise the matter. But he had said no, and that was that. After her parents’ passing away, she had gently asked Uncle Hashim, expecting a refusal or worse, if it was too late for her to go to school (she was then thirteen), and he said it was. In later years she would lament to him about that, accusing him of keeping her as ignorant as a beast when an opportunity had been there for her to educate herself a little, perhaps learn to read and write and do sums, so she would not have felt quite such a child when these things needed to be done. She told my father about that time during those first months, when the stories seemed endless, and the desire for them and for other intimacies seemed impossible to satisfy.

  I remember the first time your sister visited me after the wedding, my mother said, lying as close as she could to his miraculous warmth, their heads close together. His sister had stared at my mother’s gold bracelets, part of Uncle Hashim’s wedding gift to her, with such calculation that my mother had laughed. It was as if she was weighing them with her eyes, which then travelled around the reception room looking at the rugs and the mirrors and the stoppered glass jars that their father had bought as decoration when he furnished his new house. Despite the crudeness of this appraisal, my mother was still inclined to like her sister-in-law because of the stories her husband had told her. They laughed over her antics, and he explained how poor she and her husband were. And anyway, all their lives they had been poor. Their house in the country was overcrowded and primitive, with only two rooms and a store. His parents slept in one room and the three brothers had slept on a mat in the other. His sister had slept in the hallway. There was no electricity, their water came from the well at the end of the yard and there was a pit-latrine at the other end of the backyard. Everything about that house reeked of paltriness and poverty.

  So my mother did not at first mind the cold scrutiny she was subjected to by her sister-in-law. But when she began to come to the house just before lunch, not once or twice, but every other week or so, to ask Uncle Hashim for help with the rent, or to say that they had run out of cooking oil, or that her husband’s last pair of sandals had broken and she had no idea when he could get another pair, my mother felt humiliated by her display. It brought disgrace to her husband, who did not know about these visits because no one told him, but who none the less was the one who had made them possible.

  Uncle Hashim did not appear troubled by them. He greeted my father’s sister politely whenever she came, and asked about her health and her family’s health as he handed out whatever had been asked of him. He gave my mother the daily housekeeping as he had been doing for the last couple of years (and sometimes brought some nice fish to add to the one she bought daily), and every month gave her some money for herself and for my father. He just gave her the money, giving no explanation and requiring no account. Here, take this. And my mother took the notes with cupped hands an
d understood. People she had known for years as Auntie this and Bibi that called on her now entreatingly, recounting petty tales of woe for small alms. Uncle Hashim’s money allowed her to act with dignity towards these old mothers. My father’s fees also came out of this money, as did the new shirts and trousers he bought to wear to college, as well as the odd bit of material for a new blouse for her. Sometimes my mother suggested something my father should get: a new pair of sandals at Idd or another bag for his books, and once she gave him a belt which she had had the cobbler make for him. It was the same cobbler who had made the sandals for him, proper makbadhi in beautiful soft leather, and who had refused payment when he went to collect them, saying he would settle up with Uncle Hashim. When he exchanged casual greetings with people in the streets he heard them say after him that he was Uncle Hashim’s brother-in-law – mkwewe wake – and sometimes they asked that they should be remembered to him.

  It came to him slowly, over a year or so, that he had grown to fear Uncle Hashim. He had always been intimidated by his assurance, but now he was afraid of his displeasure and was sure that Uncle Hashim felt only scorn for him. He did not feel this all the time, and not because of anything Uncle Hashim said, though he had a way of smiling at him which he found quelling. They even sat together at times, and exchanged their days’ news or stories they had picked up in the streets, but it was always clear that Uncle Hashim preferred these exchanges to be brief. Sometimes my father would forget his fear and his dependence. It might be while he was at college, immersed in work or playing hard at games. Or when he was sitting alone in their room lost in one of the books he borrowed from his friends, or when my mother came to lie beside him in the dark at the end of the evening. But sooner or later every day, without drama or suddenness, these feelings of dread and misery rose from somewhere inside him and made him feel as if he was drowning. Then he felt his shoulders drop and his chest cave in and a strange soreness in his temples. He would throw his shoulders back and stride off in one direction or another, barking at himself and slapping his thigh (surreptitiously, so people should not think him mad as well as pitiful), trying to free himself from the sensation of choking. But after a few wild strides he would slow down and feel himself subsiding again. Whenever he thought of himself and how things were with him, he felt himself burning.