Gravel Heart(80)

What I understood in Kuala Lumpur was that my father had faith not only in religion but in people. I had lost that faith and seeing how he lived his life made me recognise it again and think of it as a possibility. He died some years ago, Maalim Yahya, and he was mourned by hundreds of people among whom he had been a stranger until a decade or two before. Hundreds and hundreds of people in Kuala Lumpur walked in his funeral procession. He left enough money for his wife to live on comfortably, and his daughters had both found homes and families in Kuala Lumpur. Then I heard from my sister that Saida had died, may God have mercy on her soul, and I knew that I was no longer of any use there. I thought I would come back and finish my days here. Let me tell you what it was like in Kuala Lumpur. It is a surprisingly hospitable city.





11

OUR DOUBTS ARE TRAITORS

Baba asked me if I was tempted to stay.

I hesitated for a moment and then changed the subject. I told him about the friends I made when I first went to London, Reshat and Mahmood. ‘Reshat could make a filthy joke out of almost anything,’ I told him, ‘especially if it had noble words associated with it. Those big words like justice or the future or responsibility brought out the worst in him. You’d hate to share a parent with him or take him on a journey with you or do something with him where you needed to trust him, but for a couple of hours a day he was entertaining. Mahmood was quite different, always smiling, a gentle, kind friend. There were others I did not know well, from everywhere, India, the West Indies, Malaysia, Iran.’

‘I never thought of it like that,’ Baba said. ‘I imagined you surrounded by angry English men and superior madams.’

‘That as well, but not all the time,’ I said. ‘It’s not as simple as the lies they told us about themselves or the lies we chose to believe. Anyway, it’s not all angry English men and superior madams, there are hungry ones and foolish ones and righteous ones too.’

‘Yes, I know,’ Baba said, smiling at my vehemence.

‘The whole world ends up in London somehow,’ I said. ‘The British never left anyone in peace and squeezed everything good out of everybody and took it home, and now a bedraggled lot of niggers and turks have come to share in it.’

‘Tell me about Mahmood, your gentle smiling friend,’ he said.

‘When I first met Mahmood … we used to call him Mood … I did not know that there were Muslims in Sierra Leone. I didn’t at first believe him when he told me that three-quarters of the people there were Muslim. I had always thought that Sierra Leone was a country invented by the British to send liberated African slaves to, a missionary reservation peopled by devout Christians. I must have read that somewhere or heard it in a history class, and must have imagined that the land was emptied for their arrival. The only book I had read about Sierra Leone at that time was something by Graham Greene, and I did not remember any mention of Muslims in it apart from the corrupt Syrians whom all the English characters spoke about sneeringly. That was how people like you and I came to know of so much of the world, reading about it from people who despised us. Reshat said that Cyprus too was three-quarters Muslim only the Greeks and the British falsified the population figures, but he was lying. Reshat was always over the top like that, and even if you caught him out, he just laughed as if all along he had meant to make an outrageous joke.’

I told my father about Mr Mgeni and the OAU house. ‘That’s where I lived for a while,’ I said. ‘We called it that because everyone who lived in it was an African. Mr Mgeni lived next door. He came from Malindi … no, not our Malindi, the Kenya Malindi … but he was a mswahili, one of us. There were Peter and Mannie, and Basil and Sophie later in Brighton, but I’ve lost touch with all of them.’

‘So you are not tempted to stay,’ Baba said.

I said I was but I was also tempted to go. When I was a child, I sometimes heard dogs barking and howling in the late hours of the night. In my childhood terror I thought it was the howling of wicked souls calling others like them to a sinful gathering – they filled us with such stuff when we were children – and that if I did not stop my ears and cover my head, I would be compelled to go and join them. I felt something like that now although not quite so literally. If I stayed it would be to stop my ears and cover my head so that I should not be compelled to join the other scavengers living off the rich people’s garbage. To stay would be restful, in a place of content despite its deprivations, somewhere I could walk familiar streets and meet people I had known forever and breathe the air that was like old love.

‘But I lost my freedom to chance,’ I said, ‘or at least to chance ordered by events put in train by others, which I could not change or influence. My freedom is of no importance to anyone else and from a way of looking at it, it’s of no importance at all. But it leaves me torn about what to do, whether to stay or to go back to a life I find debilitating and which I fear will shrivel me up as it did Mr Mgeni. I feel I need to go back to that incomplete life I live there until it yields something to me, or not. I have not done anything in all these years, or nothing much. I don’t know what I was waiting for. When I heard the news of Mama’s passing away and that you were back, it made me want to come back too. I came to hear from you what Mama would never have been able to tell me. Once you left us, I don’t suppose she had any choice but to see through what she had brought about, to wear that garment as if it was one she had chosen for herself. I did not think it was something she would ever be able to speak about.’