Gravel Heart(15)
‘Is Baba so sad because he still loves you?’ I asked.
My mother glanced at me and smiled, no doubt amused by my naivety about the human capacity for hatred. ‘You ask so many questions. I don’t think so. Perhaps he is sad because he is disappointed and ashamed of what he thought he loved. Do you know what I mean? Then he chose to ruin his life.’
I shivered because I was listening to a half-truth. It happened when she lied to me or told me an incomplete story about her absences. ‘Why did you do it?’ I asked, and then watched as my mother wiped a hand across her brow and turned her face away from me.
After Munira’s arrival, I became disobedient and difficult. I did not always respond when my mother called me, and I walked away from her when she rebuked me. There were times when I found her repulsive and could not bear to be near her. I did not hide my disdain from her. I shut myself away in my room whenever I was home and kept out of her way, doing schoolwork or reading. When she sent me on an errand I took hours and sometimes deliberately bought the wrong thing or sometimes bought nothing, just put the money back in her hand without explanation and walked away as she shouted with rage. Once she sent me out to buy a tin of powdered milk for Munira’s feed and I returned with a can of fly-spray. I suppose that was the limit. She was not producing enough milk and Munira was yelling at her and I played that prank on her. She shouted at me then with such ferocity that Munira began to scream, and I turned round without a word and went to get the milk.
It did not stop me, though, and I intensified my disobedience with adolescent perversity and malice. The next time she asked me to buy bread from the café, I came back forty minutes later with a box of buttons that I had gone all the way to Darajani for. In the house, I carried out various acts of sabotage. I destroyed the fridge, cut the aerial wire for the new TV, and stole or hid anything else that I thought was a gift from my mother’s lover. I intended to smash all the expensive toys that were bought for Munira because I knew their source, but I found myself unable to do so. To my surprise, because I had hardened myself to this mission of destruction, I found that I liked having her with us when I had thought I would not. I liked holding her and feeling her compact completeness and her plump helplessness. So I only sacrificed the odd toy I thought too ugly to survive.
My mother was surprised at first by the campaign of destruction, and pleaded with me to be sensible, but later she said nothing when every few weeks something else was broken or disappeared. When once the man planned to visit, and my mother told me about it, I stayed away all day, walking for miles out of town and returning home exhausted in the dark. I could not tell her, but I grieved for the air of barely perceptible melancholy she carried around her all the time, and I was made sad by the thought of the hard-faced man exchanging intimacies with her and mocking my poor Baba. She never let that man visit the house again, at least not that I knew.
A few months after Munira came my mother installed a telephone in her room. I guessed it was so that the man who was her lover could ring her to ask about the baby. I bided my time for the opportunity to cut the wires and crush the mechanism as I was sure I would do sooner or later. Then I found out that I could hear the shrill ringing of the phone clearly in some parts of my room even with the door shut. Sometimes I could even hear Munira crying and my mother’s voice soothing her. We had lived so quietly before that I had not noticed the way sound travelled between the rooms. I would have heard the television except that she hardly ever watched on her own, and when she did often turned the volume down low.
It did not take me long to work it out. The sound came from behind a framed print of a Bombay skyline, which dated back to the days when Uncle Amir worked for the travel agency. I left it on the wall because it was the only framed picture I had in the room and because I loved the sweep of the bay in the foreground. On the floor below the print was an old pencil stub I had not seen before. When I removed the print, I found a hole in the wall about one centimetre in diameter, and guessed that the pencil stub had fallen out of it. It looked as if the hole might once have been where an electric wire came out of the wall to the light switch. The pencil stub fitted into it perfectly. When I took it out again and put my eye to the hole, I found out that my mother’s bed was directly in my eyeline. She was not in the room at the time, so I put the pencil plug back and hung the picture in front of it again. I understood immediately that through this hole Uncle Amir had spied on my parents.
When I was a child and Uncle Amir lived with us, I adored him. He had been there from the earliest days of my life, always teasing and laughing and saying outrageous things about people. He never told me that I should not do anything, not in those young days, and sometimes he winked at me behind my mother’s back when she told me off. He knew what was going on in the world, knew about songs and films and football stars, knew about what to like and not to like. To me as a child Uncle Amir seemed fearless and smart. Afterwards when he left to study, and then to travel everywhere as a diplomat, he became a figure of legend and glamour to me. He always came back with something for me, a token of one of the exotic places he visited: a shirt from Miami, a digital clock from Stockholm, a mug with the Union Jack from London. There were times when I wished Uncle Amir was my father, rather than the silently sorrowful and bedraggled man to whom I took a basketful of food every day. It was a wish that made me feel treacherous and unworthy, a sleazy and muddled little boy, a betrayer, but I did think it more than once.