Gravel Heart(38)

*

At the beginning of my final year I moved to a one-bedroomed upstairs flat with an annoying leaking cistern the landlord’s plumber could not fix. There would be silence for some weeks, then in the early hours of the night I would hear the unhurried whisper of water escaping and the gentle gurgle of the cistern running into the toilet bowl. At times I thought I could put a face to the leak. I had a dread that the toilet bowl would overflow and bring the ceiling down on the downstairs flat. I could not sleep once I started to think like that and could not make the dread go away.

In my early years in London, I could not always hold off vivid visions of my father’s lonely decrepitude. Had he begged in the streets? I am sure he never did that but I saw him approaching people with outstretched hand, a vivid image that I dreaded recalling and could not dismiss. And I woke up in the middle of the night to the echo of a cry that had escaped me because I feared the self-hurt my mother would inflict on herself in her silent guilt. I must die – because I have done wrong and cannot put it right.

An elderly Chinese couple lived in the downstairs flat, mostly in silence it seemed to me except for the hiss of frying when it was warm enough for them to open the kitchen window. On some weekend days, a young Chinese woman visited them and brought them their shopping. Sometimes she cleaned up in the little garden, weeding and refreshing the pots with supermarket bedding plants, and every now and then, when it was dry, she hung out their bedding to air. I guessed she was their daughter, and while she was there I could hear her voice, raised and querulous, as if she was hectoring them in their gentle lives. But perhaps words spoken by an unfamiliar voice in an unknown language sounded aggressive to an ignorant ear. Perhaps she was only telling them stories of her working week. The old couple never went into the garden themselves, and I had only ever seen them outside twice, both times walking unspeaking, one behind the other, towards the main road, wrinkled and shrunken with age. He was wearing an old, baggy suit that had perhaps fitted better once, and she was wearing what seemed like layers of blouses and jackets. They looked as if they were heading to an event: a reunion, or a funeral, or a visit to a hospital. I raised my arm in greeting but they ignored me.

Dear Mama,

Salamu na baada ya salamu, here’s another new address for you. Thank you for your last letter, which I almost did not get because I had moved during the summer. I am sorry to hear that you had to go to the hospital in Dar for checks. You did not say for what. I hope the results were OK. I had a bit of a scare myself a few days ago. I was reading in my room, when suddenly I felt cold and shivery and began to sweat. Shetani anapita, as we used to say. But the cold sweat did not pass for several minutes. I thought I was having some kind of an attack, my heart, my lungs, my spleen, what could it be?

The next morning I went to the clinic at the university, expecting the worst, but the doctor could find nothing wrong. It was the first time I had a proper detailed medical check-up: heart, lungs, blood pressure, blood sugar, everything in good shape. The doctor was laughing by the end, telling me I did not know how lucky I was to be so well. I felt so good afterwards.

You ask me to come and visit and I will do that when I can afford it, and thank you for the telephone number. I will know how to get in touch if something urgent comes up. Love to Munira and tell her I wish her luck in secondary school.

Love,





Salim I wrote to my father too, not letters, sometimes a few lines in my notebook or a paragraph that I allowed to roam back and forth in my head. I composed brief bewildering apothegms in the voice of al Biruni or Alhaj Ahmed ibn Khalas al Khalas al-Aduwi or whoever, and imagined my father reading them, sitting in a low-slung chair under a tree in Kuala Lumpur: In abeyance I faced the wood and saw a dazzling glimmer of the garden of the knowing, who willed the arbitration of the affairs of the beloved.

Dear Baba, I live with a sense of dissembling. I do not know how to speak about the things that sadden me, about the feeling of loss that is with me at all times, the sense of wrong-doing. And perhaps no one knows how to ask. Even those who might have done, don’t know how to enquire into what troubles someone like me. Is that how it was for you? Perhaps no one knows another well enough to care, or does not want to presume, or cannot see any troubling thing to ask about. In any case, if anyone does ask I would not know where to begin: with my mother and what befell her, with you, with Uncle Amir, with my journey into this wilderness, with how much I loathe this life, this place, this cringing?

If anyone asks I think I will smile and let the moment pass. It is something I try to teach myself. It would be easier to lie or to evade, to tell a story about a holiday house on the beach, or the walk to school, or to speak about the big rains. I used to love the big rains with a dread I could not explain even to myself: the ancient light, the water-logged land about to slide off the edge of the world, the croaking of beasts in the shadows. I expect you have monster rains there in Kuala Lumpur.

Yours,





Salim *

After graduation I stayed on in Brighton. It was too far to return home, and I had not earnt the right because I had achieved nothing in the years I had been away. If I returned penniless and empty-handed I would be at the mercy of the man with the unspeakable name who was my mother’s lover, who would find a job for me and take me in hand and quarter me in his stables. I could return to London but I had come to dislike the bustle and chaos and dirt of the city since going to live in Brighton. Maybe I would stay here a little longer before bowing to the inevitable.