Gravel Heart(18)

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?