Gravel Heart(13)

‘His new relatives are big people,’ my mother said sarcastically, although it was true.

The wedding was imminent and there was no question of the newly-weds moving into an old slum. That was how my mother mimicked the way the powerful relatives talked about us, though I had not heard anyone except Uncle Amir use that word for our house. They would only live in the flat for a short while because he was due to take up a diplomatic posting soon after the wedding. He came to see us every few days, once driving Auntie Asha’s new white Toyota Corolla. He did not stay for long that time, because he had to leave the new car some distance away and was not sure how safe it was there. ‘Who would dare touch a car with government plates? He just wanted to tell us that he was driving a new car,’ my mother said afterwards.

It was as if his time in Europe had anointed Uncle Amir with even more glamour, and vigorously polished his halo of personality and style. Perhaps it was my mother’s sarcasm about his new relatives that started me off but I found myself resisting Uncle Amir’s seduction in a way I had not done before. Or perhaps I was getting older (I was nearly thirteen!). He moved in a different way. The jerky restless movements were more restrained. His manner was unhurried, like someone who knew that admiring and envious eyes were always on him. He laughed differently, in a more controlled manner, giving a demonstration of how to laugh with restraint. Now and then the old joker broke out, and then Uncle Amir would grin mischievously at us, as if he had used strong language but did not want us to take offence. But I did not completely resist seduction. I cherished the gifts he brought me, among them a short-sleeved jersey with UCD written in big letters across the back, which I wore whenever it was clean so that it was faded and threadbare in a matter of months. I loved the photographs of their travels in Europe that Uncle Amir displayed when he was in the mood: sitting at a table in a pavement café in Brussels, Auntie Asha and him in front of the Eiffel Tower, both of them standing by stone lions in a park in Madrid, strolling round Regent’s Park Zoo, leaning against a parapet by the Thames. Uncle Amir’s and Auntie Asha’s presence made those places more real to me and less like fantasy cityscapes on TV.

The wedding was a grand affair attended by ministers and ambassadors and army uniforms and their wives, the guests swaggering in their suits and stroking their jewels. The celebrations were held in a marquee erected in the private gardens of the house of the former vice-president, Auntie Asha’s father. My mother was persuaded to sit on a podium with the dignitaries while the speeches were made, and I was required by Uncle Amir to wear black trousers and a tie. Afterwards I wandered the grounds and gaped at their extent and their serenity and the labour that had gone into creating that atmosphere of tranquillity out of such shrill air. Soon after his wedding to Auntie Asha, Uncle Amir was posted to the consulate in Bombay for a three-year mission. Before he left for India he bought me a bicycle as a gift, which changed my doubts about him to shamed gratitude.

I was in my second year in secondary school when my sister Munira was born. By this time I had a better understanding of the situation we were in. My mother had never said anything to me about what was going on in her life and nor had Uncle Amir. No one outside had said anything to me either, not even in mockery, except once, but bits and pieces had drifted into view and I had added them up. I had understood that something shameful was connected to my father, which was why it was a matter not to be spoken about. I had acquiesced to this prohibition because I too felt the shame for my father and my mother regardless of the cause. I was surrounded by silences and it did not seem strange that I was not to ask questions about unspoken events in the past. It had taken me a long time to add things up because I was an inept and unworldly child with eyes only for books. Nobody taught me to see the vileness of things and I saw like an idiot, understanding nothing.

I saw my father every day when I cycled to Mwembeladu with his basket of food. I did that as soon as I came home from school and then went back for my own lunch. I no longer waited at the front of the shop for him to come out but went right to the back, greeting Khamis’s wife before going to my father’s little room. My father did not go out very much apart from in the morning to sit at his stall in the market, although he did not do much selling, helping out if he was required and sometimes leaving early to return to his room. I took him clean clothes every Saturday, and clean bedding which I changed while he ate his food. If he let me. Sometimes he asked me to leave the bed alone and I would have to wait until the following day or the day after that to change the sheets. My daily visit did not take long, often I was in a hurry to get back for my own lunch. I put the basket of food on the small table that my father kept clear and where sometimes he read, or did his sewing repairs, or just sat still with his hands folded together, staring out of the window with far-gazing eyes. Then I picked up the basket with the empty dishes and asked if he was well and if there was anything he needed. I waited a moment to see if he would speak to me, which sometimes he did and sometimes he did not. Sometimes he said, I am content, alhamdulillah. Then I walked through to the front of the shop, said goodbye to Khamis, mounted my bicycle and rode home. That was what I did every day.

I was fourteen years old then and a person can feel old and wise at that age even when he really had no idea, and what he took for wisdom was only a precocious intuition arrived at without humility, just a little shit working things out for himself. I thought my father was a spineless and defeated man who had allowed himself to be humiliated into silence and craziness, that he had lost his mind or had lost his nerve, and I thought I had an idea why he had turned out like that although no one had told me. I thought my father was shameful, the owner of a shameful, useless body, and had shamed himself as well as me. I also knew that when my mother went out some afternoons, it was to see a man, and sometimes a car dropped her off two streets away in the evening. I thought she was ashamed of those visits and that they were something to do with the sadness in her life. When she came back from those outings sometimes she did not speak to me for hours.