Gravel Heart Read online

  They stayed with Auntie Asha’s family when they came home but Uncle Amir had used his connections to get the old family house back. His Excellency the Minister would certainly have had something to do with it too. It was now being repaired and redecorated so next time they came they would stay there, Uncle Amir said. My mother asked if any of their things were still in the house and Uncle Amir looked pityingly at her and told her there was only junk and old rubbish there. Still, our parents would have been happy, my mother said.

  Uncle Amir visited us every few days and sometimes Auntie Asha came too, but not often. When she came her talk was mostly about her children and their lives in London, how precocious were the former and how complicated and stylish the latter, how hectic and brilliant and expensive. She talked all the time when she visited, as if she knew that we wanted to hear about these things, that we were eager for them, our eyes round with admiration for their sophisticated lives. There was nowhere to sit in comfort in our house except in the bedrooms or round the dining table in the entrance room, and we sat there while Auntie Asha leant back in the chair, talking cheerfully as her bangled arm swept the air.

  One evening Uncle Amir came on his own to have a talk with his sister. He announced this as soon as he arrived, glancing briefly and, it seemed, involuntarily towards me, frowning with the importance of the business he had come to discuss. That look was such an obvious clue the talk was going to be about me that while Uncle Amir was sipping his welcome tea, I went to my room, and with unaccustomed decisiveness turned off the light, put my ear to the hole in the wall and waited to eavesdrop. I guessed that if they wanted to talk hush-hush they would go to my mother’s room rather than sit in the outer room, in case I came out again.

  I did not hear everything. Uncle Amir’s voice came through strongly but I could not catch very much of what my mother said. Her pitch was too low and some of what she said was mumbled or perhaps would have been completed by a gesture, but I heard enough to work out the rest. Uncle Amir said he would take me to London. I was a hard-working and clever boy, he said, and it would be a pity to waste that talent. But he would not tell me about the plan until after I had completed school and passed my examinations. He did not want me to stop working and think that the future was all mapped out for me. My mother said she was grateful but was he sure he could afford it? It would not be fair to take me so far away and then leave me to manage for myself.

  ‘Of course he will have to manage for himself to some extent,’ said my uncle. ‘That is the point. To learn to look after himself in the big world. What do you think everyone else has to do? What do you think I had to do to get to where I am? When I was in Dublin, I had to take summer jobs on building sites and factories and eat chips and cheap mince night after night. But no, I don’t intend to abandon the brat there without assistance. We have room in our house, and the embassy subsidy will easily absorb one more mouth to feed. When our eldest was born, I set up a trust, an insurance policy into which I have been paying money for our children’s education, and recently I added more contributions so it will cover some of his education expenses as well. He will have to get a part-time job, this is not going to be a holiday. He’ll probably not have enough money to visit home for a while either, so if you let him go, you have to be prepared not to see him for some time.’

  After what seemed a long silence, when maybe they were talking softly, Uncle Amir’s voice came through again. ‘No, no, not like that. And anyway, it’s my way of paying you back for what you did for me all those years ago. Although you haven’t done too badly yourself, after all.’ He laughed loudly after he said that. I did not hear my mother’s reply. ‘It’s OK, I’ll take him to London with me. I know he’s becoming a nuisance here, causing trouble at home and getting bored, and sooner or later he is bound to turn bad. It will also be good to get him away from that feeble-minded man and give him a new start. I don’t like the way he goes to see him every day.’

  She said, ‘Thank you for thinking of him. He will be grateful to you forever, as I will be.’

  My first thoughts were not ones of excitement but disquiet. Uncle Amir’s and Auntie Asha’s affectations about living in London made them seem silly to me and the idea of going there to live with them was unattractive. How unbearably hot it is back here, is the water safe to drink, this chicken is so tough, I can’t eat this bread, oh all these flies, we don’t have flies like these in London. It was mostly Auntie Asha who talked like that, but Uncle Amir sat beside her and looked quite comfortable with her tone of voice, and now and then added something sneering and condescending to advance her case. Then also I had not heard Uncle Amir mention Baba in that way before, feeble-minded man, although I knew that was how most people must think of him. I had never heard that tone of open contempt used about him, although somehow it did not surprise me. It was what I would have expected a man so full of worldliness as Uncle Amir to think of someone as uncertain as my broken Baba.

  I did not know why I had to be taken away from him. My father had no desire for me, and hardly anything to do with me. I took him his lunch and carried away his empty dishes, and I sat with him at times while he silently darned his ragged clothes and talked to him about whatever I pleased. It did not seem to matter what I said, my father rarely asked me anything or remarked on what I said. Sometimes he looked at me for a moment longer than I expected as if untangling a detail in what I was saying, and sometimes, unaccountably, he smiled at me with a kind of relish that confused me, and sometimes he exclaimed words that I did not fully understand. I thought his head must fill up with air sometimes. When we passed each other in the streets, we did not always speak.

  When Uncle Amir mentioned my father in conversation, which only occurred very rarely, he called him Masud and never said anything cruel. What I overheard him say through that hole in the wall was spoken with the freedom of a familiar thought, and it made me understand that this was Uncle Amir’s suppressed opinion of my father and I found that I minded and wanted to defend him from such disregard, even though it was something he had brought upon himself with such dedicated self-neglect.

  When I finished school and the offer to go to London was passed on by my mother, I asked her why Uncle Amir was doing this, and she said because you are like a son to him. I did not ask what she had done for him that he wanted to pay her back for. I was not supposed to know Uncle Amir had said that. I found that when the invitation came, all my doubts evaporated and I could not resist the opportunity to go and see what was out there, could not resist the glamour of living in London. After that, preparations for my departure overtook all other feelings and concerns for a while.

  I knew that my mother was considering a move to a flat her lover had rented for her. Munira was then three, and her father wanted to see more of her and was insistent that they should move to more spacious accommodation. He did not want his daughter growing up in a hut, I said, to wound my mother. She was hesitating because of me. She knew I wanted nothing to do with that man whose name I never spoke, and that I would make a fuss about moving. I had given up my campaign of sabotage by then but had not relented in my hostility to her lover, and perhaps she feared I might renew the campaign and come up with another atrocity in the new flat. In short, I knew I would be in the way, and when the London offer came up, I was happy to go to that fabled city and see what I could make of myself there. What harm could it do?

  It was the last Friday in July when I went to see my father for the final time. He was only forty years old but he looked older, aged. I told him that I was leaving that afternoon, and my father sat very still for a moment and then turned to look at me. It was a long, considering look, towards the end of which I thought I saw something like a gleam in his eyes. What did it mean? Was it amusement? Had he arrived at a new understanding in that long moment? It was unsettling. What was going through the old Baba’s mind? It never occurred to me that it could be distress. I had told him about going to London before, but he had not appeared to take any noti
ce. It was when I said, today, this afternoon that he turned that long, considering look on me.

  ‘I’m going to London to live with Uncle Amir and his family,’ I told him, ignoring the feeling of unease this gave me. ‘He asked for me and he’ll send me to school. They both asked for me to join them. London, can you imagine?’

  My father nodded slowly, as if thinking about what I had said or maybe whether he needed to say anything. Our eyes briefly touched as they glided past each other, and I shivered slightly at the intensity of the contact. His eyes looked dejected. ‘You won’t come back,’ he said. Then he sighed and looked down and spoke firmly but softly, as if to himself. ‘Listen to me. Open your eyes in the dark and recollect your blessings. Don’t fear the dark places in your mind, otherwise rage will blacken your sight.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ I asked him. My father sometimes spoke incomprehensible words, like an inchoate poetry, and it took me a long time to realise that these were often quotations from something he had read. He had taken to reading his father’s old texts and papers, which he had asked me to fetch for him from the trunk where he had stored them. I wondered if this little gem was from there. ‘Where does that come from?’ I asked again when he did not reply.

  ‘It doesn’t come from anywhere. It’s just a thought,’ he finally said. ‘Recollect your blessings, that is the beginning of love. That is from Abu Said Ahmad ibn Isa-al-Kharraz.’

  I was not sure if this was a real quotation or something my father made up. When he came up with his Ahmed ibn Khalas al Khalas al-Aduwi or whoever, I sometimes wondered if there really had been such a person or if my father was showing off in learned epigrams, doing his mayaani yaani.

  ‘Can you say it again?’ I asked, and he looked up and repeated what he had said. Recollect your blessings, that is the beginning of love. Asking him to repeat it was a mean trick to see if it would come out differently the second time, but it did not. Repetition did not make the meaning of the words any clearer though.

  ‘It was one of my old father’s nutmegs,’ he continued. ‘Listen to me: I have been nowhere, but as you travel keep your ear close to your heart.’

  This was a conversation by our standards, but I was not sure what my father meant. Was it a warning about what was to come or just a general reminder not to forget where I came from? Was it wisdom? Was it a test or was he rambling? Should I just forget it? I smiled non-committally, allowing my expression to mean whatever he would like it to mean, and watched as my father glanced back at me and shook his head, his smile broadening. That shake of the head meant that he knew I had not understood him but he was not going to explain. It was at moments like these that I was convinced of his lucidity, and wanted to say to him stop this, stop acting so defeated, let us be up and doing and talk about hopeful things. What has got into you to allow yourself to be crushed like this? Tell me about the dreams of your youth. Come, Baba, let’s go for a walk with a heart for any fate. The breeze under the casuarina trees will be sweetest at this time of day. But I did not, because my father’s sadness had hardened over the years and his silence was impenetrable, and I was too young and did not have the self-assurance to break it. In a way, I was awed by his misery, by his lethargy, by his self-neglect, and I imagined how deep his disappointment at the loss of my mother’s love must have been for him to live like that with such resigned dedication. Then even as I watched, my father dropped his eyes and retreated to his hiding place. As I rose to go he rose too and somewhat hesitantly touched my shoulder.

  Before I left the shop, I went to say goodbye to Khamis’s wife, who reached forward and kissed me on the cheek. I had not had much to do with her in my coming and going and that kiss took me by surprise.

  ‘Look after yourself and we’ll look after him until you come back, inshaallah,’ she said, ‘he won’t be any trouble.’

  I shook Khamis’s hand and waved as I cycled away, farewell to feeding the prisoner. I did not know who was going to bring his basket for him after I left. As I rode home with a feeling of relief that the episode was over, the anxieties and excitement of the imminent journey reappeared, and I went through the list of all that I had to make sure not to forget and the hazards that I had to avoid. Like Baba, I had never travelled out of the country.

  Before we parted, my mother said to me, ‘You’ll come back, I know that, only don’t keep me waiting forever. You’ll write to me often, won’t you?’

  ‘I’ll write to you every day,’ I said, and watched her smile at my exaggeration.

  That afternoon I boarded a flight to London via Addis Ababa and later remembered very little of the journey. I was so overwhelmed by the strangeness of everything – the inside of the aircraft cabin, the land spread out below, the very idea of being above the clouds. I was so anxious not to do anything stupid. I felt that I was on the brink of something momentous and had no idea that I was just another innocent about to be put through the mill.

  Two years after I left, my father’s father whom I had never met, Maalim Yahya, came back. He was then seventy years old and living in Kuala Lumpur where he had moved to after Dubai. The old scholar came to collect his only son whom rumour announced to have lost his mind. My father made no protest as his father arranged the travel and flight documents, found a barber who came to the shop to give Baba a trim, bought him some new clothes, and, on the appointed day, arrived in a taxi and took him away from that room where for endless years he had lived a life of squalid loneliness and resigned dejection because of love. I imagined that as they boarded their flight to Kuala Lumpur, there would have been tears in my father’s eyes as there were in mine.

  PART TWO

  3

  I WILL WRITE TO YOU EVERY DAY

  When I went to live with Uncle Amir in London, it was his wish that I should study for a career in business. Medicine was beyond my abilities and qualifications, he said, and required brilliance and a sense of vocation I did not have, although it would have been pleasing to have a doctor in the family. We would all have felt smarter somehow. Uncle Amir said this with a grin on his face intended to mean he was just making a joke.

  ‘In any case, I will not be able to support you through the long period of training that profession requires,’ he said. ‘Too much money. How about law? Although that too will take a long time before you are a properly qualified practising lawyer. You don’t just leave college and become one, you know. And I cannot get over a prejudice that lawyers sometimes cause needless fitna just for a fee. It’s old-fashioned of me but you have to draw a line somewhere. But Business Studies! Business Studies is respectable and flexible, and you can study and work, adding to your qualifications as you gain experience, and make plenty of money besides. In your circumstances, it is the perfect option and it will allow you to work anywhere in the world, because the language of business is the same everywhere. Make money! Think of the outcomes: accountancy, management, consultancy, and at the end of it all plenty of money in the bank. Are we agreed?’

  It would have sounded cowardly to tell him that I should have preferred to study literature, and perhaps I did not know how much I did at the time. By the time I left for London, I had worked my way through most of my father’s books, had made good progress through the school library shelves, had borrowed and exchanged books with friends, and I thought of myself as someone with proven credentials as a future student of literature. I could quote lines from ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ (Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter), from Leaves of Grass and ‘A Dream Deferred’ (What happens to a dream deferred?/Does it dry up/Like a raisin in the sun?). In addition to scores of mysteries and adventure stories I had read David Copperfield, Anna Karenina, Another Country, Things Fall Apart, The Mystic Masseur and so on. When I came to London I realised how unimpressive my credentials were, how much there was to read, how much there was to work through. I did not find this a discouraging discovery. It did not matter, anyway, because by the time I came to this realisation, events had already moved on and
my opinion was no longer required. Uncle Amir had different plans for me and I did not have the courage to say anything about how I might have preferred to proceed with my life. He had brought me to London and it seemed right that he should also be able to select my future for me. It would have been ungrateful of me to prevent him.

  I was moved by the pleasure they took in my arrival. They both beamed smiles at me and Auntie Asha spoke to me as if I was a diffident younger brother who needed to be brought out of himself. This is your new home now, she said. I was too flustered to take in everything immediately, but I noticed the amplitude of space and the expensive furnishings and felt a mean kind of content. Not everyone lived in a house like this even if it did belong to the embassy. When Auntie Asha took me upstairs to show me my room, she gave me a quick hug of welcome, smiling at me as if we shared a secret. The room was luxurious: a large bed, a dark wardrobe the depth of a coffin, a wide desk, a chest of drawers, a bookshelf, a comfortable reading chair, and still left enough space in the middle for a rug. A whole family lived in a room of this size where I had come from. I made a mental note of that as a line I would put in my first letter to my mother. My suitcase, which I had bought new just before I left, looked cheap and flimsy and tiny on that rug, like a cardboard box. I sat on the bed when I was left alone, looking around the room, gazing out of the darkened window then at the clean bare desk with its angled lamp, and I smiled. That is the desk where I will sit and write to you about the wonders I encounter, Mama, and I won’t allow the thought of my ignorance to discourage me. I allowed this resolution to overcome the slight feeling of panic I sensed at the edge of my mind. What was I doing here?