Gravel Heart(6)

‘No one bid the British to come here,’ my mother’s father said. ‘They came because they are covetous and cannot help wanting to fill the world with their presence.’

It was the 1950s in a colonised territory, not the place to speak in this way. The British authorities preferred to forget that they were conquerors who ruled by coercion and punishment, and considered any outspoken comment on this as sedition. The empire was very fond of that word, but it was almost too late for words like that: sedition and legitimate government and constituted authority. It was time for them to go. There were heated debates late into the night; shouted conversations in cafés, rallies where activists spoke with hatred and derision; friends fell out and turned secretive as political lines were re-drawn. They were heady times, exulting times, watching British police officers scowl powerlessly on the fringes of rallies as the crowds roared, knowing that the departure of the mabeberu and their lackeys and stooges was unavoidable.

The times being as they were, it was inevitable that Saida’s father became involved in politics. So in the years just before independence, he had to leave his job because he could not work for a colonial government while he was plotting its downfall. The particulars of his appointment explicitly, and quite reasonably, forbade him from doing so and promised to send him to prison if he transgressed. He went to work on his land instead, growing vegetables for the market, or rather giving orders and employing others to do the hardest work while he stood nearby with arms akimbo. It may have looked as if he was doing nothing, he liked to tell his family, but if he were not there the work would immediately stop and those labourers of his would go to sleep under the nearest tree. We have no discipline, that’s our biggest problem, he would say.

He became an informal adviser to one of the political parties, was active in the voter-registration drive and in the literacy-classes movement. He donated to the party and gave fund-raising speeches in local meetings and participated in the organisation of the rallies, which simultaneously offered a raucous challenge to the colonial order and taunted political rivals. He was visible to everyone as an activist, and there was street-corner talk already that he was likely to be given a junior ministerial post in the future. When it came to determining the outcome of their lives, things did not work out as he and his intellectual and political friends anticipated, though. He was killed during the revolution because he did all that he did for the wrong political party.

My mother knew all this first-hand because she was fourteen when her father was taken away. When she spoke about him, it was always with a certain solemnity. She hardly ever mentioned the stories he might have told, or something ridiculous that might have happened one holiday, when perhaps he tripped and spilled a bowl of fruit salad over his trousers, or dropped an expensive glass bowl, or reversed his car into a tree. It was only occasionally that I caught a glimpse of the chubby-faced, smiling man in the photograph: how he loved to sing along with Mohammed Abdel Wahab, making his voice gravelly like the great singer; how he played the air-guitar and pretended to be a rock’n’roller when Elvis Presley was played on the radio, swivelling his hips and rolling on the balls of his feet like the King. But more often she spoke of him as a personage: about his political activities, his generosity to people, his crisply ironed cotton jackets, how esteemed he was. Her mourning for him was so profound that it had diminished those other more everyday memories of him and turned him into a figure of tragedy.

She returned to the story of his arrest several times. When news of the uprising reached them, their father’s instructions were that if soldiers or gunmen appeared at the house, which they were certain to do as he was such a well-known campaigner for the other party, there was to be no yelling and screaming. Everyone but him was to lock themself in an inner room because there were rumours of assault and violence and he did not want his wife and his children to be exposed to insult or harm. The people who were doing this had been badly misled but there was no need for hysterics on any account. He would talk to them when they came and then they would all wait for everything to calm down. When they heard the jeep stop outside the house, Saida and her younger brother Amir ran to obey the instructions, urged on by their parents, but their mother refused to leave her husband on his own and there was no time for their father to insist.

They heard the soldiers banging on the door with their gun butts but there was no shouting after that, just a murmur of conversation as their father had promised. Their mother later said that she knew every one of the four soldiers by name, and she called them out one after the other to them so they would remember. My mother said the names to me too, so that I would remember, but I have tried not to do so. The talking did not amount to anything. They did not realise the violence the victors had in mind and how quickly cruelty begets more cruelty. Their father was taken away by the revolutionaries and they never saw him again, nor was his body returned, nor any announcement made of his death. He disappeared. I cannot describe, my mother said. When she came to this point in her telling she would have to stop for a while. The family land and the house were confiscated and became state property, to be given away to a zealot or a functionary of the revolution, or to his mistress or cousin. The announcement of the confiscation was made on the radio, with the instruction that all confiscated houses were to be vacated immediately. Their mother was too frightened to resist or to ignore this announcement as some people did. They moved in with their grandmother, leaving everything behind except what they could carry in their bags. Their grandmother was really their mother’s aunt, but there was no word for that, only a description, so she became their grandmother, their Bibi.