Gravel Heart(12)

At about the time when I moved to my own room or soon after, the woman neighbour who lived at the back of our house died and a short while later her son disappeared. He was a fisherman and it was said that one day he went out to sea alone in his outrigger as was his practice and never came back. Their house remained empty for some years and then turned into a ruin. Later, when I went to live in other places, I realised that ours was a house without echoes, its noises muffled by the soft walls.

I began delivering the daily lunch basket when I was eleven years old. My father had been gone for many years then and I had become used to not hurting when I thought of him. The sight of him looking so shaggy and beaten in the streets helped me to do that. I had seen so little of him since he left us, and he was so silent and far away when I greeted him as we passed in the street, that I was not sure he knew who I was any more. What I knew was that he wanted nothing to do with me. I was afraid of him because he seemed like someone who was unpredictable, someone who had lost his mind. So when my mother asked me if I would take the basket of food to him, I could not restrain my shameful tears and said that I did not want to because I was afraid of him. I expected my mother to get angry, to yelp at me with the unexpected fury that occasionally overcame her, but she did not. I saw that she was making an effort to control herself. She made me sit with her and she explained that I should never fear my Baba, because he was the only Baba I would ever have, and that when I had finished crying I was to dry my face and take the food to him and wish him good health. I did not really see how thinking that he was the only Baba I would ever have would make me less afraid but I appreciated the effort she was making and did my best to suppress my anxiety.

The next day I delivered the basket to the shopkeeper Khamis, a silent slow-moving man who said my name softly and smiled as he accepted the basket and said hujambo to me: Salim, how are you? You have come to see your Baba. I hoped that my father was not in and I could leave the basket and go, but he was in and Khamis called him to collect it himself and to greet his son. When Baba came out, I could not look him in the eye and could only mumble a greeting. He took the basket from me and thanked me, then handed me yesterday’s empty basket for me to take home. It was like taking food to a prisoner. My father was always in when I took his basket to him and he handed me the empty one every day for years. I got used to it after a while, and within a few months I could not believe that I was once afraid of him in whose eyes, as I learnt to look into them, I saw only detachment and defeat.

In exchange for taking away the television, my mother allowed me to keep one of the boxes of my father’s old books in my room. There were several of them. She did not care much for reading but thought it was good for me. There is nothing more important than reading, she told me, although later when I became an avid reader she counselled moderation. When she woke up in the night to use the bathroom and saw that my light was still on in the early hours on a school day, she banged on my door and shouted for me to go to sleep. I was about ten when I learnt to read a whole book, all words and no pictures, and I remember it was a book called The Tempest Tribes, found in one of my father’s boxes, about people who lived in jungles and mountains and caves and who rebelled against their tyrannical jungle king because a kind stranger from England came and explained to them how unjust and backward their jungle king was. On reflection I think the story must have happened somewhere in Asia because there was a beautiful princess in it, and there was no story with a beautiful princess set in an African jungle. I did not understand all of it, sometimes because the words were new and long, and sometimes because I could not work out what was going on, but I read every page regardless. After that I started on another book and another one after that. It took me a long time to read through the whole box and I did not read everything in it. I found it easier to read the mysteries and Westerns and the alfu-leila-uleila stories. Then I went to my mother for another box and it went on like that until I had all five of them in my room.

One day I put one of the books in the basket for my father, and slowly over the months and years that followed I delivered more of the books with his lunch, after I had read them to my own satisfaction. Some of them I re-read several times before I parted with them, especially the mysteries and the Westerns. I read Riders of the Purple Sage six times before I handed it over to him, and even then I was not certain I was doing the right thing. Some of the books I did not part with at all because I never tired of them: Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare, Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh, and the Arabian Nights stories. The story of the humble woodcutter who stumbled on the young bride imprisoned in a cellar by a jinn haunted me for many years: how he fell in love with her and tried to help her escape and how the jinn took his revenge. When eventually I delivered the basket directly to my father’s room at the back of the shop, and he allowed me in there to sit with him for a while, I found the books lined spine upward in an old fruit crate, like objects he cherished.

In the meantime Uncle Amir came back from Dublin in triumph. He returned with his girlfriend, Auntie Asha, who had herself been doing her A-levels at a boarding school in Suffolk. She was the daughter of the former vice-president, and had been Uncle Amir’s girlfriend even before he went to Dublin. She visited him there several times, and during the vacations they travelled to London and Paris and Madrid. They were now betrothed. His living arrangements were all in hand, or in his future wife’s hands, my mother said. A flat was rented for him even before he returned, because apparently there was no room for him and his belongings in the old house.