Gravel Heart(7)

‘You can’t imagine what that time was like,’ my mother said, trying again to describe it. ‘You cannot imagine the terror of it, the arrests, the deaths, the humiliations. People were driving each other mad with rumours of new outrages, new decrees, with news of further sorrows. But yes, you can imagine, you must try. Nothing stands between us and atrocities but words, so there is no choice but to try and imagine.’

In those first weeks it was impossible to believe that life could ever be any different from the panic they lived in at that time, she said. They all did what they could to show the men with guns that they were obedient, harmless, pathetic people without the slightest spark of defiance or rebellion. There was nothing to fear from them. They would not dream of causing their new rulers any annoyance or irritation. It took a while, but their lives became tolerable somehow amidst that terror. They stayed indoors at first, afraid of the dangers of the streets, except for Bibi, who went out to check on neighbours and to go to a shop whose keeper she knew and who had offered her some supplies. Anyone could see that she was a foolish old woman and not worth the trouble of terrorising. When they started to go out more regularly, it was to see how changed and quiet the streets were, how some houses stood empty or had new people staying in them, how armed men in unfamiliar uniforms stood on street corners or wandered into shops to help themselves to what they needed. They learnt to avoid eye contact, to avoid provocation, to avoid looking at the acts of malice performed in plain sight.

‘After a while,’ my mother told me, ‘it becomes as if these things did not really happen like that, as if you’re exaggerating if you speak of them. So you stop speaking and they recede even further away, become even more unreal, become even less possible to imagine, and you tell yourself it is time to move on, let them go, it is not worth the bother of remembering. But they do not let you go.

‘Our Bibi lived in Kikwajuni. Her house had an entrance room that was also the kitchen, just like ours has, but it was small and dark like a cave. She made sesame bread to sell and she cooked with firewood because that was what she had always done. The wood smoke made the walls black, and she herself had a shrunken, smudged look, as if the smoke had blackened her and dried her out. Her bread was famous, and perhaps the wood-smoke had something to do with that. Her customers were boys and girls on errands from their mothers, who came to the house throughout the afternoon and early evening because that was when she did her cooking. They were regular customers and she knew everybody who came and asked about their mothers and brothers and sisters. She did business in the old-fashioned way, accepting the coins without counting, refusing to raise prices, under-charging on a good order, throwing in a bread or two as a gift because a child was ill at home, and somehow she made enough for all of us to live on.

‘The house had one room beyond the kitchen where we all slept. The washroom was in the small walled yard at the back, where Bibi also kept her supply of firewood stacked on a platform a foot above the ground because she was afraid scorpions would hide in it otherwise – as if scorpions were afraid of heights. She was so afraid of scorpions! She had only ever encountered one as a child and then just briefly as it fell out of a cloth she picked up off the ground and immediately disappeared into a crack in the wall. For the rest of her life, she was on the lookout for scorpions to which she granted magical powers of hurt.

‘When we went to her after they took Baba away, she took us in without grumbling and comforted us as well as she could. We were her only relatives in the world, she said, not once but repeatedly. By that time she had been a widow for over thirteen years and had outlived her only son by a decade. My mother was her younger sister’s daughter, and in her sister’s absence she was Bibi’s daughter too. She said these things repeatedly, not forcefully, not insistently, and somehow it was reassuring and comforting. My mother said she was blessed. Wallahi, she would say, that woman is an angel. There was no room for complaint over the blows that had befallen us one after the other, Bibi told us. Someone wiser than us knew what it all meant. We were to say alhamdulillah and do what we could. She cried silently while we sobbed, warmed water for us to bathe with, and gave us her bed while she slept on the floor. The coir in the mattress was lumpy and old, and the room was small and stuffy, but it was all she could offer and it was not nothing. When my mother protested about how much work she was doing for us, Bibi scolded her sharply and told her it was none of her business. A child should not begrudge a mother’s love. She went to the market every morning to buy what was needed for our meals and get supplies for her business, a gaunt, shrivelled, tireless old woman who lived as if the world was a kinder place than it was, and who could not walk a few feet without someone greeting her by name and wishing her well.

‘After a while, my mother fretted that we were a burden to Bibi. My mother was not used to being this dependent, she who had always lived her life surrounded by family and laughter, waited upon by servants, beloved by her husband, made plump by contentment and affection. She who had slept in a comfortable upstairs room where a breeze blew through the open window all night long now lived an overcrowded life where she could not keep herself or her children clean. It was not what she was used to. She slept on a rope bed whose coir mattress was infested with vicious bedbugs which bulged with our blood. When we crushed the bedbugs they smelt like festering wounds, like decomposing meat. The room we slept in reeked of sweat and smoke and some nights my mother could not sleep at all because of our restlessness and Bibi’s snores on the floor beside her. But her greatest ordeal was using the unlit and cockroach-infested bathroom and latrine. She whispered to us about how revolted she was by everything in it but we were not to say anything to Bibi. She tried to make things better but could not manage it. Her helplessness made her feel useless. She did what she could to help in the kitchen, but it was not work she was used to and she often seemed to get in Bibi’s way, disrupting her customary preparations with questions and suggestions. The smoke was too much for her, and she did not have Bibi’s endurance or her touch for bread-making.