Gravel Heart(79)

‘I cannot bear to return,’ I told her. ‘I cannot bear to see what you are doing.’ She asked me where I was sleeping and I told her where I rented a room. The shopkeeper and his wife lived in another room at the back and there was a shared yard and washroom. It was enough.

‘Come back home,’ Saida said.

I shook my head because I could not speak. She had taken everything away, there was nothing there for me.

The following day, when I returned to my room after work, Khamis told me that someone had brought something for me. It was a dish of cassava and a piece of fried fish. I ate the food for supper and left the cleaned dishes in the shop before I went to work. When I returned from work, I found that Saida had taken the empty dishes away and left some rice and spinach for me. She brought me something every day after that and left it in the shop, and later you did. Sometimes, when I was in, Khamis called me out to accept the basket myself, and I went out and accepted the food with words of gratitude. Whenever I saw her, I struggled to prevent myself from breaking down with grief. I should have fought for her, but I did not have the strength to overcome those two shameless men who had taken over her life. I was not sure if she even wanted me to try. In a silent place in my mind, I knew that she had already given me up, and that the food she brought me every day was atonement for what she could not help but do.

I could not speak for days after I left her. As the weeks and months passed I felt a deep self-hatred that I could not voice. I deserved contempt and disdain for my cowardice and self-pity and spinelessness. But even as I hated and despised this person just as everyone else did, I learnt to live with him, and I closed the door on the world with him. I thought that way I would learn to make peace with failure, learn to live with it honourably. I did not know how to think of myself differently, how not to take myself so seriously, how not to take the world so seriously. I was tortured by vivid images of their embraces, and night after night I murdered him. I was a dog, I felt like a dog. I did not think there was anything I could do about all of this. You ask why did I not speak. If I spoke I could only condemn myself for my puniness and cowardice. My life was empty, without pleasure or purpose. I could not bear that Saida had abandoned me in such a way. Nothing seemed worth the trouble after losing her. I lost my way, that was how I was. I was ashamed of what had been forced on us and that we could not prevent it, that I could not prevent it. I had no strength left for anything, and if it had not been for Khamis and his late wife, I would not at first have been able to manage the merest minimum of care necessary for self-respect. I don’t know why they bothered to help, but they did. Their debt of gratitude to my father had been more than repaid but their care for me was without end.

As for Amir, everything blossomed for him after that. You know that better than I do, how the favours came his way and how he knew to make the most of his luck. Then he took you away to London and I thought I would never see you again. As for Saida, it turned out that Hakim could not satisfy himself of her for a long time. What he had intended as her humiliation turned into a passion he did not wish to give up. I suppose he had fallen in love with her, and for all I know, she learnt to return some of the love he felt for her because she did not leave him even after her brother was safe, and then they had the daughter. People can get used to many things. Then when I was in Kuala Lumpur she wrote to me to say she had applied for a divorce so she could re-marry. She did not need to. I had deserted her. She wrote as a gesture of kindness, I suppose. I don’t know how she found out where to write. Kuala Lumpur was a convalescence for me but I have never been able to love again because shame emptied my body and left me without vitality. At a certain age, you don’t understand how long life is. You think it’s all over for you, but it’s not, not for a long time. You just don’t understand how little strength the body needs to keep on living, how it goes on doing so despite you.

I’ve been waiting to tell you this for many years, even though for a long time it was for the wrong reasons. I wanted you to know who was to blame but you were too young and I did not have the strength. In the end I thought maybe you had chosen your side. Now I just want you to know since you want to know. It was my father who taught me to speak in this way. I did not understand him, not until he came and took me with him to Kuala Lumpur. Some of us like to think we were once better people than we have become but I was wrong about him. He prayed for me and I was not grateful at first but then I began to see a man who never gave up trying, a man of faith, and I had misunderstood that for many years, because I thought he was a man of narrow ideas.

In Kuala Lumpur he worked as a scholar in an Islamic college, teaching and explaining the writings he had been studying all his life. But then in his own time, and with his own money, he started an orphanage school, where children could receive a free elementary education. School still was not cheap in Kuala Lumpur even where it was free. Parents had to pay for tests, for books, for writing paper, for uniforms. My father’s school gave these orphan children a start. He did this in addition to his duties as an imam. Other volunteers taught in the school, members of the congregation and some of his students, and I taught there too, to help at first and then to liberate myself from the paralysing misery that had taken over my life. I never became a scholar and I did not share his piety but I did what I could to please him when for so long I had desired nothing but to thwart him. I was grateful that he had come and fished me out of that sadness. Away from the disappointment and shame I felt here, I began to feel a return of my strength. I had become accustomed to the feeling that there was no relief or absolution for what had befallen me and what I had done, but there I felt the beginning of something else.