Gravel Heart(9)

‘Bibi went to find a taxi and we took our mother home. Throughout the night she struggled more and more to breathe and to say something, but she only managed explosive gasps now and then in which a confused noise that resembled a word could be heard. By the following morning her breathing was such a torment to her that we dare not move her, dare not speak to her in case she attempted a reply, dare not leave her, could not bear to listen to her. A few hours later she died. She could no longer breathe. Her heart burst. I was fourteen and Amir was ten, and I was relieved my mother’s agony was over. It may sound terrible to say that but it was a relief when it was over.

‘After my mother died, I realised I did not have a photograph of her. We had left so much behind in the old house and were afraid to ask for it back: clothes, furniture, clocks, books, photographs. Then as the days passed I began to fear that I was losing the memory of my mother’s face. My eyes could not focus on her and my mother’s features became imprecise and shifting. When I moved closer, my mother moved her head slightly, turning her face away, hiding from me. It was because I had not really looked at her when she was alive, had not looked at her as if I intended to remember her face always, had not held her hand while she struggled for breath and had not properly loved her as I should have done. The thought made me feel panicked and ashamed, but as the weeks passed my mother’s face slowly came back to me – sometimes a flash of her eyes or the shape of her smile as her face retreated into shadows – but slowly the details emerged and every night, for a while, I called her image to me before I fell asleep in case she tried to hide herself away again. I still call up her face at night sometimes, just to see if she will come.’





2

AFTER BABA LEFT

Saida and Masud, those were their names, my mother and my father. They met at an event organised by the Youth League of the Party when they were both at school. I got that information from pestering my mother about when they first met, pleading with her while she sat in a sullen silence. ‘It’s just a simple question, Ma,’ I persisted. Her reluctance to tell me was part of her general reluctance to talk about my father and herself as they used to be. In the end she told me that it was something organised by the Youth League: they were always nagging us and bullying us in those days, to volunteer on building sites, to sing praise songs to the President every morning, to attend rallies. It was just bullying. But she would not say more about Baba and her and it went on for years like that. If I gave her direct factual questions, sometimes she answered those but not if I wanted details of how it was with them.

I know that he was twenty-one and she was twenty when they married, not too young by our customs. I was born two years later, and just a few days after that Bibi died. After her death, Uncle Amir moved into the house with us too. So at last I was present on the same stage as the main actors in my early life although it would be a while before I had any understanding of the events that I was part of. Uncle Amir was the prince of our kingdom and I grew up adoring him. He made me laugh and brought me little presents and let me play with his transistor radio. When I had a piece of fatty meat on my plate that I could not eat, or a slice of kidney or a lump of yoghurt, he took it away before my mother noticed. But I adored him because my parents did too; I did not stop to think why they did so.

My father was a different man then from the father I knew later but I was too young to form memories of him I can deliver in a lucid narrative. I just remember a kind of gentleness and that heaving laughter and other endless, very clear little fragments: sitting on his lap, a hug, a story, the look in his eyes as he listened to me. I do not remember who took me to my first day in Koran school when I was five. I expect he did because he was very eager I should begin as soon as I was allowed to. I can remember clearly that the first lesson was the letters of the alphabet, which my mother had already taught me. Aliph, be te, he, khe. I can see that moment as if I were there now looking on. It was definitely my father who took me to my first day in government school when I was nearly seven, and there our first test was to read the alphabet backwards starting with Z. This was to thwart the cheating ruses of the colonised, just in case we had memorised the sequence of letters without really learning to read them. But my mother had also taught me how to read the Roman alphabet so my first day there was a happy one.

In that year I started government school, where I was happy from the very first day, my mother began work in a government office, and one of Uncle Amir’s friends opened a hotel for tourists in Shangani called the Coral Reef Inn and appointed him the manager in charge of social activities. It was the beginning of a tourist invasion which no one had seen anything like before. It took a little while to get going properly but that was when it started. The government relaxed foreign exchange regulations and people from rich countries wanted to come in and take a look at our derelict little island. It was also in that year I was seven that my father left us.

The moment of his leaving passed without my noticing at first. The everyday turmoil in my seven-year-old mind must have been absorbing and profound because it took me some time to understand that something important had happened to our lives. I slept in the same room as my parents and immediately registered my father’s absence, but when I asked after him my mother told me that he had gone away for a few days. It was the beginning of a series of important lies which my mother would tell me for the next many years, but when I was seven I had no reason to disbelieve her. It would have seemed to me like the usual comings and goings of the grown-ups, whose affairs were never completely comprehensible to me. I did not understand then that the air of mystery was sometimes fugitive and devious, and sometimes an attempt to disguise anxiety and muddle. Uncle Amir had also been away for a few days but then he came back just before my father went away.