Gravel Heart(20)

*

Uncle Amir’s and Auntie Asha’s fabled London life turned out to be frantic and I had to play my part in it and bustle about just like everyone else. It made me think of the way I had lived with my mother for all those years, how quietly we went about our days and nights. Homesickness probably made the memory of it seem even calmer. We hardly ever spoke crossly to each other, or not until the later years when I turned saboteur to make plain my feelings about her lover, and even that we resolved somehow. She hid or locked away whatever she thought I would destroy, if she could, and I did not have the spitefulness to carry the matter through, and reprieved necessary household objects from my rage. In any case I could not sustain the anger and after a while I felt I was being perverse, punishing her for her betrayals and lies. As I shared the anxious, frantic lives of Uncle Amir and Auntie Asha, I thought back to the accommodating way my mother lived with me and I missed her.

Dear Mama,

Salamu na baada ya salamu, I hope you are well and sister Munira is well. I hope you received the letter I sent you several days ago. I am enclosing a picture of Hyde Park, which I cut out of a magazine. I haven’t been there yet, but I hear it’s not far and we’ll go there one of these days. This is how it looks when it’s warm, so that’s something to look forward to.

It is now October and I started college last week. Everything is going perfectly except that it is getting so cold. This morning I was woken by cramp in my calves and when I am outside I cannot prevent my teeth from chattering. I used to think it was a joke that your teeth would do that, but it’s true, they do, and there is nothing you can do about it. Chatter, chatter, chatter, whatever you do.

London is full of people from everywhere in the world. I just had not expected to see that, Indians, Arabs, Africans, Chinese, and I don’t know where all the European people come from but they are not all English. That is only from what I’ve seen in the few streets I have walked through and this is a huge city. When a double-decker bus goes by and you see the faces through the window, it is like a glimpse of a page in an illustrated children’s encyclopaedia under the title People of the World. Everywhere you go, you have to push your way through crowds and hold on to your possessions. Maybe not in Hyde Park because it looks so roomy, but more or less everywhere else.

I walk to college almost every day. I make myself do that so I will lose my fear of the streets but also because I prefer it. It takes me about forty minutes to get there, but it’s better than struggling with all those people on the buses or the underground. To be honest, I think I’m scared of that press of people. It gets so crowded on the underground that I feel as if I can’t breathe. Trains that travel under the ground! We are so backward! It is not really far and the walk is more peaceful. You just cannot imagine how enormous this city is. Remember how it used to take me ten minutes to ride to school. Don’t worry, I’m not going to turn into you-know-who, talking about London as if it is a place of magic. Uncle Amir and Auntie Asha send their regards. They are looking after me very well and have made me feel as if I am at home. I think of you and Baba. Who is taking his lunch basket to him?

Love,





Salim

I tried not to mind their impatience. At first Auntie Asha treated me like a guest and took my side against Uncle Amir or the children. That only lasted for a few weeks. Afterwards I could not be sure how she would be with me. When she called for me by shouting my name as she sometimes did, I had to drop whatever I was doing and run to her, to avoid her accusing me of disrespect. I was not used to that tone or to the raised voices and the hectoring words and being blamed for so much that was not my doing. Do you think you have a servant in this house? she would say when I had not been quick enough to carry out an instruction. Sometimes she talked to me with confiding affection, as if I were a younger brother. At other times she spoke to me as if I were a lazy servant, or rebuked me for a mishap to the children as she would an inattentive ayah. Then for a while she would not speak to me at all, as if in the grip of a deep resentment.

Perhaps my presence disturbed the balance of my uncle’s and aunt’s lives, intruded into their ease. Both of them had a wounded way of speaking as if the whole world was against them whenever the smallest thing went wrong. But they weren’t like that all the time, and I tried to fit in as required. I reminded myself to be grateful. I went to college every day and attended all my classes. I looked after the children when required, gave them milk and biscuits when I was told to, and sat with them when their parents went out. They were sophisticated children, who knew already that their lives were going to turn out eventful and fulfilling.

One sunny weekend day we walked to Hyde Park, which was even closer to where we lived than I realised. I chased about with the children while Auntie Asha looked on, smiling and applauding our antics, and Uncle Amir took photographs. He got me to sit for some quieter shots to send home to my mama: here is the young man having family fun in the famous Hyde Park in London where everything is the most famous in the world. When he got the photographs back a few days later Uncle Amir frowned at the quiet ones he had taken of me. I was grinning widely in every one of them

‘That grin has obliterated any sign of personality or style,’ he told me. ‘You look like a buffoon. Why are you grinning like that?’

‘I don’t know. I think cameras make me nervous,’ I said.

Uncle Amir looked at me with astonishment. ‘Stop talking like a child,’ he said.