Gravel Heart(2)

I started Koran school soon after the trauma and deceit of that event. Attendance at the school required me to put on a calf-length kanzu and a kofia, and almost certainly a pair of shorts so that my hands did not wander playfully under there as boys’ hands tend to do. And once I learnt to cover my nakedness, especially after it had been tricked and mutilated into a kind of prominence, I would not have been able to uncover it with the same freedom as before, and I would not have found myself sitting on our doorstep in a little slip of a vest. So it was certain that I was about four when I sat there in the sun with my father Masud while he fed me candy floss. For years I felt in my flesh the fondness of that moment.

That was the doorstep of the house I was born in, the house I spent all of my childhood in, the house I abandoned because I was left with little choice. In later years, in my banishment, I pictured the house inch by inch. I don’t know if it was lying nostalgia or painful proper longing, but I paced its rooms and breathed its smells for years after I left. Just inside the front door was the kitchen area: no power points or fitted cupboards or electric oven or even a sink. It was a simple unmodern kitchen, although it had once been primitive in its gloom, its walls grimy with charcoal fumes. Like the inside of a beast’s mouth, my mother told me. Traces of that grime still came through as a grey under-shine on the walls despite several washes of lime. In the corner nearest the door was a water tap for washing dishes and doing the laundry, the floor around it pitted and crumbling from the force of the water on the poor concrete. To the left-hand side of the door was a mat, never quite losing its vegetable smell over the years, and that was where we ate and where my mother received visitors. Male visitors did not come inside the house, at least not while my mother was young, or at least not all male visitors. That was how it was when I was a little boy but later a table and chairs replaced the mat, and many other changes were made to the kitchen to make it clean and modern.

A door closed off this large entrance room from the rest of the house, our deep interior, which consisted of two rooms, a small hallway and a bathroom. The bigger of the two interior rooms was where my parents and I slept. I had a large cot which I loved. One panel slid up and down, and when I was in the cot and the panel was up and the mosquito net was tucked in, I felt as if I was in a craft of some kind, moving invisibly through the air. I have never lost that feeling of safety when I sleep under a mosquito net. Whenever my mother was busy and wanted me out of the way, she put me in the cot because she knew I was content in there. Sometimes I asked to be allowed in it myself, with the side-panel up, and then for hours I pretended I was hidden away in my own secret room, safe from all danger. It was still comfortable enough for me when I was ten years old. Later my sister Munira slept in the same cot.

Uncle Amir, my mother’s brother, slept in the other room. A door led from the hallway to the narrow backyard where there was just enough room for a washing line. The backyard wall adjoined the yard of the neighbours who lived behind us, a man living quietly with his mother. They lived so quietly that for a long time I did not know the man’s name because no one spoke to him or about him. His mother never went out. I don’t know whether it was because she was ill, or whether the habit of seclusion had made her frightened of the outside. They had no electricity in the house and it was so dark in there that when I was sent round with a bowl of plums as a gift – plums were rare in those days – I could hardly make out her features in the gloom. I almost never heard any noise from their yard, just sometimes a man coughing softly or the clang of a pot. If I had to go to the toilet at night I tried if possible not to open my eyes, feeling my way to the bathroom in the dark. I never even looked at the back door at night but I could not help imagining a shadow looming over the wall in the diffused glow of a turned-down oil lamp.

There was no garden or pavement in front of the house, so a visitor stepped off the street straight into the entrance room. On hot days when the door was left open, the slight breeze lifted the door-curtain in a lazy billow into the room. Sitting in the sun on that doorstep with my stick of candy floss meant my father and I would have had our feet on the road, assuming my legs were long enough to reach the ground, and we would have seen life trickling by. It was only a quiet lane, just wide enough for two bicycles to pass each other, with care. The tin roofs of our house and the one opposite almost met overhead to create a quiet twilight chamber which cooled the air and would have intimidated a stranger with its sense of intimacy and enclosure. The sun shone on the house steps for only a brief while in the day, peering in between the overhanging roofs, and that would have been the moment of the candy-floss stick.

No car could come down these lanes nor was ever intended to. These were streets built for the shuffle and slap of human feet, and for bodies to rub shoulders against each other, and for voices to murmur and reverberate their courtesies and curses and outcries. Any freighting that was necessary was done by handcarts and human muscles. Nor was the road straight like a proper road, though it was paved with old flagstones, worn by time and traffic and the water, which ran over them during the rains. Sometimes, late at night, the crack of hard-shod feet on the flags filled the lane with menace. Soon after it passed our house the road turned to the right, and a short while after that to the right again. Aside from the big roads that led out into the country, our roads bent and turned every few metres, fitting themselves to the way people lived their lives. In our part of the town there were no mansions and courtyards and walled gardens, and people lived their lives in a small way. That was how it was when I was a child, when the lanes were quiet and empty, not as crowded and dirty as they became later.