Gravel Heart(62)

My team in the Water Authority office dealt with the supply to the town. We had less to do than our colleagues who dealt with the countryside, where the government was digging wells and laying pipes to villages and districts that had never had running water before. The countryside team was busy in its righteous task whereas a lot of the time there was no water supply to the town, either because the electricity was cut off and there was no power to work the pumps, or the pumps were broken and awaiting repair, or an unforeseen event other than these predictable mishaps had occurred. The pumps were often broken, sometimes for several days while a part was sent for from the mainland or from further afield. People learnt to cope: storing water, digging a well, doing without.

The water distribution system was old, most of it built by Sultan Barghash in the 1880s in the twilight days of Omani rule as the British were impatiently shuffling in the shadows of our small corner of the world, waiting to take charge. Before he became the sultan, Barghash had been exiled to Bombay by the British for attempting to displace his elder brother Majid, something the Omani princes felt compelled to do whenever opportunity presented itself. Their own father was reputed to have killed his cousin with his own hand, at the age of fifteen, to become the sultan: a sharpened jambiya in the chest during a royal banquet and then a chase through the countryside until the cousin dropped dead from his wounds, the accursed Wahhabi usurper.

The British had no business interfering in this internecine mayhem – they had not yet taken our little territory in hand for its own good – but they did so anyway because they wanted the world to run as they liked it, even if it was only a caprice on their part. Exile this one, replace that one, hang the malcontents, even bombard the whole town … why not? It was necessary in order to establish who was superior and had the power, and who should do precisely what he was told. Historians can always be found later to offer weighty policy explanations that prompted one petty meddling or another, to describe avarice and destruction in reasonable words. Alexander the Macedonian wept when he thought there was no more world to conquer, but he did not know how much of it there really was and how much of it needed to be put right and with what sternness. He had no idea how many sweet morsels lay hidden behind mountains and beyond deserts and across oceans, let alone that there was a whole New World to plunder.

In Bombay Barghash had his eyes opened to many things, among them the luxury of running water. When his brother Majid conveniently died young, Barghash returned as sultan and, among other magnanimities conferred on his subjects and himself, he built palaces and gardens and hamams. He installed running water and flushing toilets in his little town when such luxuries were unheard of in most European cities, although they were probably available in San Francisco and St Louis and New York City because the Americans wanted the world to see how advanced they were. The Americans were contemplating the construction of the Panama Canal around then, with its artificial lake and its six huge locks to raise and lower ships from one ocean to another, so a flushing toilet system would have been child’s play to them. But Sultan Barghash ruled over a few small islands, not a continent, and perhaps even to describe what he did as ruled was to flatter him, so providing running water for the town was an arduous enough undertaking for him. In any case, Sultan Barghash’s magnanimity was exercised over a hundred years before, and this world had aged and changed since then and his small town had grown. Some of the underground concrete pipes in the old town were cracked, and there was constant seepage and unaccounted water loss, so that even when the pumps were working, it was difficult to maintain adequate pressure. There was no money for repairs, or what money there was was in demand elsewhere, and there were so many other matters gone wrong in our lives and in our minds that to dwell on them was to despair.

So like everyone else I did what could be done and ignored the rest of the wreckage if I could. Houses were falling down in the night in the Old Town, weary and uncared for and out of strength. Once the rendering was cracked, rainwater soaked into the mortar, and sooner or later, however thick the walls, the houses cracked – datta – and collapsed. What could anyone do about any of it? I owned a small share in a market stall where I sometimes found more profitable employment than my office work. I paid for it out of the money my father sent me from Dubai. Other people did that if they could, or found extra work to top up their meagre salary, or if they were lucky enough to be employed in certain government offices and had the knowledge and audacity, they squeezed what they could out of the needy. It was not only government clerks who did this either. Teachers did not always turn up at school because they had another job that paid them better, or that paid them something, and children sometimes had unsupervised periods that they spent joyfully shouting and bickering and tormenting each other as if all day was an extended recess. In better-organised schools, children filled in the empty periods by spending several hours a week cleaning their classrooms, or the school toilets, or even the street outside the school.

*

I lived on my own in the house where I was born and which I had shared with my parents and my sisters, and under whose roof I had spent every single night of my life until then. I had never slept in that house for even a single night on my own. I thought I would be unnerved by its emptiness and silence, and would not be able to resist the night-time fears we all know since childhood. At first I was stunned by the silence in the house, and by the way outside noises came to me so differently, muted and close, and at times sinister. The sound of someone walking in the lane and clearing his throat made me tense, and I waited to hear the slap of sandals receding before I could breathe out. But once I bolted the windows and doors, tucked in the mosquito net and covered myself with a sheet, I felt safe and released, secure from all danger.