Gravel Heart(4)

I was in the headmaster’s office to be praised for a story I had written about a cycle ride to the country. The topic we were given came from our English Language textbook: What did you do on your holidays? Below the topic question was a drawing, which was intended to give us ideas. It showed two smiling children, a boy and a girl, running after a ball on the beach, free-flowing blond hair streaming behind them, while an adult woman with short blonde hair and a sleeveless blouse looked smilingly on. Another drawing on the same page showed two more children, or perhaps the same ones, this time with hair blowing about their faces, playing in front of a building, with trees and a windmill and a donkey and some chickens in the background. What did we do on our holidays … as if we were like the children pictured in our school books, whose hair blew about our faces when we ran, and who went to the seaside on our holidays or went to our grandfather’s farm during the summer and had adventures in the haunted old house by the mill. Holidays were when the government school was closed, because there was no holiday from Koran school and the word of God, except for the days of Idd and the Maulid, or because of bed-ridden illness. A headache or a gut-ache or even a glistening grazed knee were not enough for a reprieve, although running blood was indisputable. On ordinary days, we went to government school in the morning and Koran school in the afternoon. During school holidays we went to Koran school all day, not to the seaside where our frizzy curly hair did not stream behind us as we ran nor to grandfather’s farm where there was no windmill and where our hair did not blow about our faces.

But I had made good progress with the Koran compared to many other boys in my class, and by the time I wrote the story of the cycle ride to the country, I had finished with Koran school. I had escaped, which is to say I had completed reading the Koran twice, from beginning to end, to the satisfaction of my teacher, who had listened to me read every single line of every page over the years, correcting my pronunciation and making me repeat a verse until I could read it without stumbling. By the time I stopped attending Koran school I could read the Koran fluently and with the appropriate intonation without understanding anything much of what I read. I knew the stories, I loved the stories, because there were always occasions for the teachers to re-tell the travails and triumphs of the Prophet. One of the teachers at our Koran school in Msikiti Barza was an expert storyteller. When he stood up on those occasions we were told to put our tablets and volumes away and listen because it was a day that commemorated an important religious event, there was usually no further need to hush the students. He told us about the Prophet’s birth, about the miraj, about the entrance to Medina. I loved the story of the angel who came to the young orphan boy herding sheep on the hills of Makka, split open his chest and washed his heart with driven snow. However many times I heard that story in my boyhood, it moved me and thrilled me, a heart made pure with driven snow. The angel must have brought it down with him from snow-laden clouds, because I don’t expect he would have been able to find that commodity on a Makkan hillside.

So what did the escaped ex-Koran school youngsters do during the holidays? They did not do anything in particular. They slept late, wandered the streets through the long day, gossiped, played cards or went for a swim, which did not amount to the seaside as it was only a few minutes’ walk from home. No one did anything worth writing about, or if anyone did, it was likely to be something forbidden and so could not be written about in a classroom exercise. But I was asked to write about my holiday highlights, not to grumble about the absurdity of the task. So I made up a story about a cycle ride to the country, and named the trees that provided me with shade, and described the boy who pointed me in the right direction when I got lost, and the girl I spoke to but who disappeared before I could find out her name, and the blinding whiteness of the sand when I reached the sea.

My teacher liked it and showed it to the headmaster, who wanted me to make a fair copy in my best handwriting – the school did not have a typewriter – so it could be put on the noticeboard for everyone to admire. That was what I was in his office for, to be praised for what I had done. Then when the headmaster ran out of praise, yet could see that I was still standing patiently in front of him instead of grinning with pleasure and shuffling to be released, he pointed to the photograph in the manner of someone bestowing a parting gift. Take this and go. In the photograph, my father’s father, Maalim Yahya, was standing at the end of a line behind a row of seated colleagues, a tall, thin, ascetic-looking man who returned the gaze of the camera with the look of someone suffering an ordeal. Or perhaps he was struggling with a very bad headache as my father sometimes used to do. My mother told me that my father inherited his headaches from his father, who was severely afflicted in that regard. He was wearing a jacket over his kanzu, a gesture towards his government-school role. My father looked nothing like Maalim Yahya, he must have taken after his mother whom I have never met or seen in a photograph.

At that time, respectable women did not allow themselves to be photographed for fear of the dishonour to their husbands if other men saw their image. But this fear was not the only reason to refuse as some men were also resistant, and in both cases it was from suspicion that the production of the image would take something of their being and hold it captive. Even when I was a child, although that was later than the time of Maalim Yahya’s photograph, if a tourist from the cruise ships wandered the streets with a camera, people watched warily for the moment when the foreigner lifted it to take a shot and then several voices screamed in a frenzy of prohibition, to frighten him or her off. Behind the tourist an argument would start between those who feared for the loss of their souls and those who scoffed at such nonsense. For these kinds of reasons, I had not seen a photograph of my father’s mother and so could not tell for certain if he did take after her. After seeing the photograph of Maalim Yahya, though, I thought that I had taken a little bit after him in shape and complexion. The recognition pleased me, it connected me to people and events that my father’s silence had cut me off from.