Gravel Heart(68)

Perhaps it was this feeling of crisis looming that was giving me a sense of foreboding, something worse than the usual disquiet with the general shortage of everything we lived with all the time. My whole life from childhood had been hand to mouth like that. My father had never earnt enough for us to be comfortable while he lived here, although if reports of fabulous salaries in Dubai were true, that would no longer be the case. What I earnt myself was barely enough when the scarcity of essentials made life so expensive. Amir kept whatever he earnt. I would not have accepted anything from him anyway, but I would have liked to have been able to say so. It would have made the burden of it a little easier to bear. But I really feared that something would befall Amir that would cause Saida pain. She took too much responsibility for him, and saw her obligation to care for him as unconditional and undiminishing. I did not say this to her, nor did I say anything to Amir about finding regular work. His singing with the band had made a name for him and given him a thrill, and perhaps it might lead to something. The band had already featured on a live radio programme. But I feared and dared not say that Amir now lived by rules very different from ours, and that I thought I would find repellent. I felt I could smell that life on him, see it in the hardened look in his eyes and the scornful glances that sometimes betrayed his feelings. When I spoke about my worries to Saida she defended him angrily, and I hated the venom of these exchanges so much that I hardly dared to mention his name to her again. Amir must have sensed this atmosphere in the house, and guessed that it was to do with him, but it just became another thing we did not speak about.

It was around that time that we had a conversation about television. Despite food shortages, crumbling houses and the lack of every conceivable luxury from toilet soap to chilli pepper, the government decided it was time there was a television service in the country. Not only would there be a television service, but it would be the first colour broadcasting anywhere in Africa south of the Sahara. It was, no doubt, the President’s whim to grant his subjects this luxury while denying them others, and also to have a laugh at all those other big mouths north and south of us who did not yet have colour television. It seemed to many people a frivolity in those hard times. Amir, however, began to agitate for us to get a set.

‘We don’t have the money for that,’ Saida said. ‘They bring us televisions when there is no rice or onions or flour, when sugar has become like gold dust, and we’ll soon be eating grass and weeds like goats.’

‘You can ask your father to send you one from Dubai,’ Amir said to me, ignoring Saida. ‘I hear they are really cheap there, and top-quality Japanese models as well. Why didn’t you go with your family when they moved there? I hear everyone is living a life of luxury in the Emirates.’

I could tell that Amir was teasing me, provoking me, yet it was not a question he had asked me before, not straight out like that: why didn’t you go with your family when they moved there? Because I did not want to live like a stranger, like a vagrant in someone else’s country. I did not want to live among people whose language I did not speak and whose wealth would allow them to despise and patronise me. I wanted to stay here where I knew who I was and knew what was required of me.

Now Saida too repeated Amir’s question. ‘Why didn’t you go with your family when they moved there?’ she asked, glancing at her brother and smiling with him.

Because of you. I had already told her that. The words would not come, though. I sat frozen in front of them, my tongue the size of a fist while they exchanged glances again and laughed. After a moment they moved on, assuming perhaps that I did not wish to reply, and my terror slowly subsided. I felt foolish and rejected and did not know how to explain my ineptitude. I thought I had seen a glimpse of Amir’s dislike in those exchanged smiles. I thought I had seen a glimpse of his contempt.

In the mid-1970s many things began to change. The President was assassinated in the early years of the decade and never got to watch the colour television service he had ordered for his subjects. The appointment of a new President did not at first diminish the arbitrary violence of the state, which had the assassins to deal with now, many of them former allies, in addition to the other enemies it had been busy persecuting for a while. There were show trials to be held, expulsions to be ordered and vengeful exiles and reluctant clemencies to be decreed. The new President, though, was a milder man, a former school teacher, a Master Boy Scout, and was reputed to be pious.

His government began to make gradual changes whose small humanity would sound paltry to those accustomed to living in more fortunate places. People were allowed to travel, to send and receive money (although mostly it was to receive) and those who had been expelled earlier were allowed to return. The government’s autocratic grip was loosened slightly by allowing citizens participation in local affairs. Elections were announced, campaign rallies were allowed, vociferous speeches and denunciations were made, although in the end the results of the ballot were not allowed to disrupt the proper order of things. New businesses opened, small in scale and sometimes cautious revivals of former enterprises, but more often they were the investments of those who had been plundering the state over the last few years: boutiques, coffee bars, travel agencies, hotels to cater for the tourist overflow from mainland package holidays.

In the atmosphere of change the new President brought about, Amir too found work with a travel agency, which added to the considerable glamour his singing career had already brought him. The job only paid a small salary and Saida said it would be mean to ask him to contribute to the household expenses. To keep the peace, I agreed. I could see, though, that the job was doing Amir good. He wore a short-sleeved white shirt and black tie to work, together with a silver tie-pin showing an aeroplane ascending, and he took calls from the head office in Nairobi and sent cables to Addis Ababa and Hong Kong. People courted him to secure their travel arrangements, which so often seemed mysteriously vulnerable to the caprices of agents and officials. He came home with stories of the cock-up in Kigali that meant a twenty-four-hour delay for passengers en route to Brussels, or the flight to Cairo that only had seven passengers on board. I could see just how much pleasure it gave Amir to be able to say the names of the places people were travelling to, how the association with those places allowed him to patronise us with his sophistication.