Gravel Heart(54)

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We spent several days in gentle nostalgic conversations and repeated visits to the café before we approached the hard questions. I went to him in the morning and we took a walk for him to do his chores, buy some fruit for his lunch, get new batteries for his radio, stop at the café for a bun and a cup of tea, and then we went back to his room and talked for a while until lunch-time when I went to be with Munira, who liked to have the mornings to herself for revision. Daddy’s cousin, Bi Rahma, came in the morning to prepare lunch for us and clean the flat and bring greetings from the big house, which I had not yet visited but was due to do imminently.

Later in the afternoon I went to see my father again and we sat with Khamis for a while and then went for another walk to the sea-side or strolled the streets as people do at that time of day, exchanging greetings, catching up. When are you coming back to join your father? Did you bring your family with you? What do you mean, you’re not married? This was how it was for the first few days, and conversations with both my father and Munira were mostly about me. What had it been like for me all these years? What was it like living in London? Where did I work? What did I do? Are the English as arrogant as they seem?

I gave an upbeat account of my life in England and to my surprise it lifted the burden of the years slightly. To my even greater surprise I found that I missed it. When I asked my father any questions he replied in his own way. He did not answer directly and I did not press, and hardly ever prompted him. I thought I was being careful not to panic him but Baba was talking with complete fluency and it seemed without reservation, and I began to feel that sooner or later he would tell me all there was to tell. I just had to let him do it his own way. I was surprised by his fluency, not only because he had been so silent before but because I could not remember him being so well informed.

At the beginning of the following week Munira went away to Dar es Salaam to take her final examinations in Business Studies and planned to be away for four days. On the first night she was away, Baba invited me to join him at the café for a supper of goat curry and parathas, with a side-dish of fried red mullet. The food was glittering with grease but Baba addressed himself to it without hesitation. He was enjoying himself, leaning forward to avoid dripping on his clothes. I ate with diligence because I did not want jokes about having become an Englishman. It was food I loved too, but I preferred it in the home-made style: a lot less oil and not quite so many bones and such cheap cuts of meat. Baba laughed when I told him that, heaving a little as he used to years ago. He said that he had developed a taste for café rubbish and had missed it when he was away in Kuala Lumpur. It made him nostalgic for his youth. I said I did not think it could be good for his health, all that grease, but he waved that away without replying.

Afterwards we went back to his room and he talked for so long that in the end I stretched out on the mat while he lay on his bed, talking through the night. At times he prevaricated in his way, approaching a crisis in the telling and then turning away from it. But as the night wore on, he grew confiding and intimate. He wanted, it seemed, to tell me everything. He could not tell the story directly, and sometimes broke off for lengthy periods when I thought he might have fallen asleep. He could not do the telling as if it was a testimony or a summary. He talked and then stopped, as if living again what he had described or checking it for accuracy, reluctant to revisit certain events at times and at others smiling and fluent, leaning up on one elbow to see how I had taken what he had said.

Some of it came from what my mother had told him because it concerned events he could not have been present at. Sometimes he remembered a detail that required him to rewind to a moment he had described earlier, and then to consider how that may have changed something else. Once I asked him a question because I had not understood a detail and that threw him for some moments, and he was silent as if recalled to his senses. Then he asked me if I really wanted to hear all this old stuff? Was I not tired? Did I not want to return to my mother’s flat in Kiponda and get some sleep? I did not ask any more questions after that. I left my father to roam through his account as he chose.

In the morning I went back to the flat for some sleep and returned later in the afternoon to see Baba again. We took a walk around town while he pointed out places that he had talked about. Our old house and the warren of lanes nearby were still there, as were the blocks of flats on the main road, but there was garbage and litter in the lanes and the backs of the blocks of flats were filthy, with black iridescent pools and pieces of metal junk and abandoned furniture. There were so many people everywhere and so many more cars on the roads and so much more noise than I remembered. Then after our walk we went to the café for our greasy portion before returning to Baba’s room for more of what he wanted to tell me. So then another night of talking and listening followed. At some point late on this second night when the streets were already dark and silent and in his telling he was approaching the time when love failed, when he lost my mother, Baba rose and switched the light off. It will be easier for me to say these things in the dark, he said. His voice in the darkness seemed very close to me. This is what he told me.





9

THE FIRST NIGHT

My father, Maalim Yahya, was a teacher, as you know. He taught religion in the same school you went to as a child, although by that time he was no longer here and you never met him. I should say he taught the religion of Islam not the idea or philosophy of religion. I don’t know if religion was still taught like that when you were at school.