Gravel Heart(5)

The date on the photograph in the headmaster’s office was December 1963, which would have been the end of the school year just before the revolution. Maalim Yahya lost his job soon after that, which was why he went to work in Dubai. The rest of the family, his wife and two daughters, followed but my father stayed behind. None of them ever came back while I was there, not even for a visit, and aside from that school picture I saw in the headmaster’s office I had no image of my father’s family. When I was very young, it did not occur to me that I should have one. My mother and my father were the world to me, and the snippets of stories I heard as a child sustained me even though the people they told of seemed so distant.

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I knew more about my mother’s family. My mother’s name was Saida and her family had once been well off, not wealthy by any means but well-off enough to own a piece of farming land and their own house near the Court House. During her childhood that part of town was occupied by the grandees, by people connected to the sultan’s government, who lived in the seclusion of their walled gardens, and by European colonial officials, who lived in huge old Arab houses by the sea, and marked their ceremonial imperial rituals with white linen uniforms adorned with fantasy medals and wore cork helmets festooned with feathers and carried swords in gilt-edged scabbards, like conquerors. They gave themselves tin-god titles and pretended that they were aristocrats. Both varieties of grandees thought themselves gifted by nature, which had created them noble and granted them the right to rule as well as the burden that it brought.

My mother’s father, Ahmed Musa Ibrahim, was an educated man, a travelled man, who had no time for these self-deluding patrician airs. He preferred to speak about justice and liberty and the right to self-fulfilment. He would pay for these words in due course. He had spent two years at Makerere College in Uganda and one year at Edinburgh University in Scotland, completing a Diploma in Public Health. In between his studies at those two institutions he spent several weeks in Cairo, visiting a friend who was a student in Education at the American University. Then he travelled through Beirut and stayed in Istanbul for three weeks on his way to London. The years in Kampala and Edinburgh, and his time in those other fabulous cities, gave him an air of incomparable glamour and sophistication, and when he started to speak about one or other of the famous sights encountered on his travels, his audience fell reverently silent. Or that was how my mother told it, that his words were held in such respect. He worked in the laboratories of the Department of Health, a short walk from home. His main work was in the malaria eradication campaign, but he also contributed to the cholera and dysentery control project, analysing samples and participating in seminars. Some people addressed him as Doctor and consulted him about their ailments, but he laughed them off and told them that he worked in the rat-catchers’ department and knew nothing about hernias and haemorrhoids and chest pains and fevers.

I have seen a photograph of him too, taken at the back of the Department of Health building, near the gate to the yard where the departmental vehicles were parked. He wore a white linen suit, the middle button of his jacket done up, and a red tarbush at a dashing angle. His head was tilted to one side so the tassel hung a little away from the tarbush. His right calf was crossed over his left, drawing attention to his brown shoes, and his right arm leant against the unmistakable neem tree by the gate. In the distance behind him loomed the giant flamboyant that shaded the road running by the building. He stood in a jaunty, cheery pose in which he was play-acting his modernity, a cosmopolitan traveller to some of the world’s great metropolises, Cairo, Beirut and Istanbul on the way to London and Edinburgh. The tarbush may have been abolished as backward in Atatürk’s Turkish Republic, and it may have been on its way out in other places in the 1950s (Egypt, Iraq, Tunisia) where it was becoming an emblem of corrupt bashas and beys and the defeated armies of Arab nationalism, but the news had not yet reached my mother’s father, at least not when the photograph was taken. To him it was still a sign of sophisticated Islamic modernity, secular and practical in place of the medieval turban. The white linen suit was more ambiguous: that it was a suit was a salute to Europe, as were the brown shoes in a sandal-wearing culture, but the suit was white, which when worn with modesty was the colour of homage and prayer and pilgrimage, the colour of purity and devotion. The photograph was saved from any air of vanity by the exaggerated crossing of the calves and by the uncertain, half-apologetic smile on his round chubby face, as if he was wondering if he had gone too far in his dressing-up.

Ahmed Musa Ibrahim hovered on the fringes of a group of anti-colonial intellectuals, people like him who thought themselves connected to the world, and who knew about Saad Zaghloul Pasha, the Egyptian statesman (hence the tarbush), and Gandhi and Nehru, and Habib Bourguiba, the Tunisian insurrectionist, and Marshal Tito – nationalist leaders who had refused to be cowed and crushed by imperial bullies of different political shades. These anti-colonial intellectuals Saida’s father associated with wanted to become modern too, like the nationalists they admired. They wanted to be able to determine the outcome of their lives without the overbearing presence of the British and their self-righteous and sanctimonious display of self-congratulatory restraint. Those who had dealings with them, like Saida’s father, knew that that self-deprecatory mannerism really disguised a smug and condescending arrogance towards everyone, and especially towards over-educated natives like him, whose proper fate was subservience and ignorance. Yes, he knew them all right. They chuckled over babu stories about their natives and their Emperor-Seth-like aspirations to modernity – Diploma in Public Health (Failed) – and then humbly praised themselves for their long-suffering kindnesses to the charges they had appointed themselves to rule over. What else could they do? When they were confronted with their manipulative and intimidating methods … well, there were times, inevitably, when one had to be cruel to be kind.