Gravel Heart(57)

Several weeks later, safely in Dubai, my father sent word to us that he had found a house to rent and had arranged a loan in advance of his salary to bring his family to join him. He did not tell us about the difficulties he had had to face in finding somewhere to rent, how expensive it was and how humiliating the arrangements he had been forced to agree to for the loan. As husband and father it was his duty to put up with all that and no more needed to be said about it.

What humiliating arrangements? He told me about that later. He had to find six people to guarantee the loan. They had to be paid a fee and insisted on seeing his bank account. He had to pay a lump sum in goodwill and to commit himself to large monthly repayments, which he could only do by taking more loans. It was a nightmare but he did it all and did not tell us anything about it until later. So far as my mother was concerned, the money was now available for the family to join him.

When my mother Mahfudha told me of my father’s instructions, I said that they should go without me. I refused to leave. I was seventeen then, living in the house where I grew up and where later you grew up, and I was in the final year of secondary school. In the recent past, I had had trouble with my father, he whom everyone respected for his learning and found deserving of God’s blessing. I did not wish to quibble about my father’s deserts but I found him demanding and unreasonable and increasingly bad-tempered at times, and felt that he expected me to be more enthusiastic in my obedience to God than I was or felt inclined to be. As I mentioned earlier, I grew less desperate for God’s blessing in my teens. That was probably one of the reasons why he was bad-tempered with me, and because he had lost his government school job and was worrying about finding work in the Gulf.

I found it difficult to contain my impatience with these demands my father was making on me even when I rebuked myself for my petulance and lectured myself about my duty to obey. I knew that my slouching and shrugging and I don’t know in answer to most questions made me seem childish but the knowledge did not make it any easier to bear my father’s irritation and harassment of me. He chased me to go to prayers – I would be failing in my duty if I do not and God would punish me, he told me – and he corrected me for transgressions that sometimes came as news to me. I liked to stay in bed late when there was no school, as all young people do, but my father disapproved and shook me awake to get me up so I could do something useful.

‘Do your schoolwork,’ he would say.

‘It’s the holidays,’ I would reply. ‘I don’t have any schoolwork.’

‘Don’t be cheeky with me, you little goat turd. You can prepare for next term. Or you can read the Koran with me, go to the market for your mother, or even just go for a walk and get some exercise. Don’t just lie there like an old rag all day. Don’t waste the life that God has given you.’

My father also disapproved of my love for the cinema. When I was younger I loved to go there. To Maalim Yahya it was corruption and venality, kufuru, an affront to morality and a complete waste of money. I agreed on the last point. After the revolution the government became stupid about censorship. It was the influence of the Soviets and the East Germans, I expect. We were ignorant cinema-goers who went to watch whatever the proprietors put on for us and these were mostly Hollywood and British films and Indian films, cowboys, spies, musicals, love stories, Tarzan. So many films were mutilated by the censor or were banned at the last minute and something else was shown instead, another film or an old newsreel or a cartoon, but I still liked to go.

Everyone knew who the censor was, and that he was a loud-mouthed, timid man who cut anything that he thought the powerful might dislike: no Sindbad or Aladdin or Ali Baba because film-makers who liked those stories could not imagine these people without a turban, which meant a suspicious nostalgia for the overthrown sultans, none of those silk robes and flowing beards and kissing of fingertips for the same reason, no spy thrillers because the Russians were always the villains and the Russians were now the government’s friends, no empire adventures because the British were so sneeringly superior and always defeated their dark-skinned antagonists, and no undressed black people because that made them look like savages. Instead there was a steady supply of melodramatic Indian musicals in which the heroines exploded into energetic dances every few minutes, strident Chinese operas in which short thin young women with heavy make-up screeched for hours, and underdressed Italian versions of mythic Greek heroes, with ridiculous special effects. Not all the films were plain rubbish but many were, and many were incomprehensible or endless (the Russian ones), but I still liked to go. It was a waste of money but not a lot of money. I loved that darkened pit and its flashing lights, and how I could come out of one world and enter another, and then return to my own an hour or two later.

But it was not just the cinema my father disapproved of. He disliked my friends, or rather the people I moved around with as I made my escape, the noisy ones who laughed loudly and swaggered on the edges of discourtesy as they roamed the streets. Hooligans my father called them, which was not true. They were only playing at being hooligans, messing about, pretending to be bad. What my father really meant was they did not go to the mosque, which was true. Perhaps it was the inevitable bickering between father and son, and if I had been wiser I would have said to myself that one day we would have a laugh about this. But I was not wiser, I was going on seventeen and I lived in a place where fathers were used to having their way in this kind of exchange. I knew enough about my father to understand his detailed sense of the respect owed to him as a parent and as a man of virtue, and I knew that what he wished from me was complete submission. That was what I believed was happening between us, and maybe that was what always happened between fathers and sons.