Gravel Heart(33)

I took my examinations in the summer of that year and passed. When Mannie heard the news he hugged me without a word and kissed me lightly on both cheeks. Peter grinned and grinned and then dragged me off to a Turkish café for a celebration meal and the first of many hours of advice about the life of a student. I wrote to Uncle Amir to tell him that I had passed my examinations and was going to start at university in two months. It was several weeks before I received his reply on embassy paper from Rome. I thought I knew what the letter would say. I held it in my hand for a while without opening it, contemplating the uncle I had once loved. I could not get over how he had taken me away from my home and discarded me to a life of such sterility. Dear Salim, his letter read, I am relieved to hear the news of your success and I wish you luck in your career as a university student. I expect you are telling me about it because you want me to pay your fees but I’m afraid I can’t do that. The trust I have been paying into has collapsed along with so many others, and I cannot afford to support you. I have received no word of thanks from you for anything I have ever done for you, and until your note arrived I had no idea what progress you were making with your life. You never sent us any news of yourself and did not even send us a greetings card now and then. I have learnt to accept this ingratitude even if it comes from a member of my family that I had once considered like my own son. But now, under these financial difficulties everyone is going through, and which seem to be getting worse each time they come round again, I have to look after the future of my own children and you have to learn to look after yourself. Your Auntie Asha and the children send regards.

I had been expecting that letter for a long time as a final act of spite from him, an expression of outrage for my ingratitude. I often wondered what had made Uncle Amir bring me to England. I did not believe it was a way of paying my mother back for something she had done for him. Or if it was, then that was only a small part of it. Uncle Amir would not have wanted to dwell too long on his part in messy events, whatever they were, and seeing my face in front of him every day would require him to do just that. I think it was to show that he was a man of substance with a sense of responsibility towards his family and the means to fulfil it. He swaggered into my life and plucked me out and brought me all the way to fabled London, but instead of giving grateful deference and eager obedience to his every command I proved obstinate and without talent, and harboured inexplicable grievances. To Uncle Amir and Auntie Asha, who would have long ago forgiven themselves for whatever chaos they brought to my life, I would have seemed quite the most ungrateful little shit imaginable. So I had been expecting all along, once I failed to play my part as the cringing dependent nephew, that sooner or later they would fling me away as they did.

But by the time Uncle Amir’s letter arrived from Rome, the solicitor Jafar Mustafa Hilal had produced the required papers and Mr Mgeni had helped me to arrange a student loan, and in September I moved to Brighton. Keep your money, Uncle Abhorréd. I could not resist the thought that everything was going to be different now.

I found a job in a café in Hove, Café Galileo, and took a room on campus. My room was small, painted white and blue, and had an aura of freedom. I went back to Camberwell for a weekend day trip and visited Mr Mgeni and Marjorie and Frederica. I wanted to see them and for them to see me in my transformed self, to say to me: haven’t you done well? We are proud of you. Mr Mgeni patted my knee every now and then and smiled in muted congratulation for the plot we had successfully hatched. Later I went next door to say hello and they welcomed me back with laughter and warmth. Even Amos seemed pleased to see me, and asked me to recite Shakespeare to them to prove that I was really a literary scholar at the university. Seeing Mr Mgeni and everyone there at the house was like going home and I laughed hard and genuinely but I could not wait to get back to Brighton.

I loved it there by the sea. I took bus rides further along the coast and walked on the cliffs, bracing myself against the cold breeze and listening to the waves crashing repeatedly against the rocky shore. Sometimes I sat on the shore and watched as the line of foam ran silently up the beach. Although I spent so much time alone, I did not feel lonely. It made me think of my father whom I had not thought about as much as I should have done. Those solitary walks made me think about his friendless retreats. I wrote an imaginary letter to him to tell him that.

Dear Baba,

I thought it would be something you would know about, how it feels to be silent and alone. Perhaps you don’t have time for that any more in Kuala Lumpur with all your family around you. I think you would have loved the cliffs and the restless sea and taking a walk in the rain. When the sun is on them, the cliffs look as if they are made of snow. Have you seen snow, Baba? I don’t think there’s snow in Kuala Lumpur. I have stood on ice. Can you imagine that? When you told me to keep my ear close to my heart, I think it was to warn me against hard-heartedness. I think I have understood now. Or were you just babbling? I hope you have found peace there in Kuala Lumpur. I have become a vagrant like you. Sometimes the darkness is hard and fills me with a kind of terror as it did when I was a child, and then I realise that everything lives on, that very little fades and imagination retrieves what does. I realise that I have forgotten nothing and probably never will.





Yours





Salim Dear Mama, I am sorry to have been so long in writing to you, despite my promise to be good. You must get tired of my apologies when I do nothing to put things right but I do mean to write more often, it’s just, well, I don’t know. Sometimes you seem so far away and the way I live seems unreal, like someone else’s life. Still, it is wrong of me to be so neglectful. I will write more regularly from now on. I have moved again and now live in Brighton where I am studying at the university. I love it here. It is a town by the sea, although it is nothing like our sea. I am sending you my new address.