Secrets: a Novel, page 10
I loved falling asleep to my father’s lullaby singing, a lullaby he himself would compose. I didn’t like it when he chanted the traditional one, in which the mother of the baby goes away to a place no one knows about. Nor does anyone know if she has been raped by camel herdsmen or if she has fallen asleep in the shade of a tree. In my father’s version, Mother rides away on an elephant traveling northwards, to a country devastated by internecine wars and famines. At three I could write my name in the defunct Somali script, in Arabic, and in Roman orthography. I could read faster than I could speak an entire sentence in any tongue.
With his eyes open and mouth closed, my father slept in my mother’s arms, her eyes closed and mouth open, snoring. Their latenight whispers were cuud music to my half-alert ears. So were the grunts of their lovemaking on which I eavesdropped. Now and then I received an unintentional kick from one or the other of them, as they rolled on their backs. If they became conscious of my awoken state, they would cease their lovemaking and act prudently.
I didn’t dare ask, but somehow I sensed deep in the flow of my blood that my parents had no intention of having me. Things my mother said suggested this. Because my father spoke less vociferously, and invested all his energy in his vocation and in looking after me, I never knew from him one way or the other. My mother had venom. I feared the hate in her eyes. My father took care not to involve me in his doings, if he could.
My mother had loads of ambition. Because of this, she was often bad-mouthed by other women, who described her either as pushy or as lacking in the grace of femininity. My mother equally displeased men, many of whom couldn’t stand her guts. A man I knew compared her to a bee-eater, with its ungregarious nature, its fretfulness. Bee-eaters are birds known for hunting on the wing and for snapping up the weaker airborne insects. I could understand why men were fearful of her, but not why other women were hostile to her. This was anathema to me. “To think that she won’t look after her son herself! It’s a real shame.”
My father wasn’t alone when I reemerged. He had a visitor with him, a woman.
By then my head had cleared. My father was on his feet, with his back to me, repairing a belt bedecked with Venetian sequins. The belt mounted on an easel, he placed himself at an artist’s distance, his shorter than usual forefinger moving like a lizard’s head, up and down, his bifocals on, his whole body stooped as though paying homage to a pagan deity. I watched him in appreciative quietness, comparing him in my mind to a man engaged in writing a very long disaster signal in codes. He was as still as a man tying such a disaster signal with a string to a pigeon’s leg, the bird blessed with nuuro power. When my shadow fell across his vision and he turned around to look at me, I remarked that a scowl was wreathing the frontiers of his face. Silent, he moved toward a chair padded with cushions, into which he dropped. “It won’t take long,” he said to me apologetically.
“I am sorry for barging in like this,” the woman said to me. “I didn’t know he had another customer.”
“I am not a customer,” I said. “I am his son.”
Nervous and because she had nothing better to do with her hands, the woman bundled her hair into a huge topknot. This contrasted with her gold earlobe disks and her silver anklets.
My father, holding a cloth in the loose grip of his left hand and making a hurried effort at cleaning away some dirt, looked rather bemused when the woman asked, “Is this Damac’s son?”
In my mother’s inexactitudes Yaqut was “the father of my child.” I don’t recall ever hearing my mother refer to him as her husband. Now, this is not unusual in a country where women resorted to all sorts of coded nomenclatures when it came to their husbands. Women were more adept than men in defining the hidden in the obvious, and of ensconcing the apparent in the inapparent. Unless my mother was underlining the importance of something altogether different.
My father concentrated wholeheartedly on what he had been hired to do. His hand in his toolbox, and not moving, he reminded me of an artist recalling a fault in a work long completed. I felt he was regretfully bothered by something, his inability to correct an error. He held a trowel in midair, and he brooded. There was a kind of piteous sadness about him as he pulled out a screwdriver. He held both in the same hand and thought what to do next.
The woman and I chatted randomly about this and that. From her accent, I could tell that she came from the Central Region, which is where my mother hailed from. And Timir and Sholoongo too.
After a while she said, “Your mother was ranting and raging all day apparently about an evil woman who holds your soul in her witch’s clasp.”
I didn’t contest it, because this sounded like something my mother would say. My father’s eyes avoiding mine, he did something not in keeping with his character: he provoked a client. He said, “This lady is our neighbor, and an acquaintance of your mother’s. Now I cannot vouch for the truth of what some of our other neighbors say: that she manufactures stories, which she then attributes to other persons and spreads these as truths.”
“People are just mean,” she said.
“You are in search of a confirmation for a gossip you’ve picked up somewhere, aren’t you?” my father said. “And it is your intention to learn more. Is that not why you’ve hired me to repair this?”
Shocked, the woman got up, snatching her beaded belt out of my father’s grasp, and left.
Neither of us spoke anything for a long time.
“Would you throw out Sholoongo if you were me?” I asked.
My father talked about the possible consequences, mainly negative ones. In a roundabout way he got to the Somali mystical notion of nabsi, whose boomerang effect is said to produce very unenviable results in the person choosing not to return another’s loving advances favorably. If a man or a woman shows interest in you, Somalis suggest, treat them with civility lest love’s nabsi should cause you irreparable harm. Nabsi is both a weapon and a means by which the weak turn the fight to their benefit. “Give Sholoongo a couple more days,” he said. “And if I were you, I would seek Nonno’s counsel. He might know what to do.”
A fat, squat pigeon sat on my lap, unafraid.
My father said, “You see what happens when you visit and stay a long while? Even our feathered friends aren’t scared of you anymore. Imagine!”
I got up to leave.
“I would love you to stay for supper,” he said, “only your mother may be in a fire-breathing mood. I wouldn’t be here when she gets back if I were you.”
We hugged. I left.
I went home, intending among other things to speak with Sholoongo. Alas, she was not there, but there was evidence of her presence in the apartment. This comprised several sheets of amusing reading matter in her longhand. I browsed through it, undisturbed. In one sense, it could serve as a key to her state of mind. Here I give the relevant passages from the piece. It is entitled “The Kettle Calling the Crow Black.”
I believe K was ten when, in his eagerness to seduce me, he disrobed in record quickness, faster than it took me to enjoy the flavor of the chocolate he had brought along that day. He associated food with sex, and would invariably ask if I had eaten, or if I would like to. He was perverse, taking relish in the sound of munching food, claiming that this turned him on. Food before sex!
He would then drag me to a secret corner, to whisper an earful of obscenities. He would boast about his voyeuristic exploits: a man mounting a woman from behind, an African-American woman taking the manhood of her landlord in her mouth. He was obsessed with sex all right, but he was decent enough to withhold the names of the persons involved.
K has a sadistic side to him, one day wanting to bind my feet in a bandage, another day insisting that we make love in a particular position, for we would enjoy it more. One night he applied one of Fidow’s herbal concoctions to my private parts, just for the heck of it, and later he said he would want to try it again, with some improvement Because my left foot was smaller than my right, he said that a slight defect in a partner’s feet might interfere with the access, that is to say with the penetration.
His obsessions were food, feet, and sex!
But I remember the day I dissuaded him from coming into me because I had my monthly. You cannot imagine how keen he was to question me about my period. Half in earnest, I told him that a woman’s monthly was in so concentrated a form that if one froze it, one could mold a human out of it. He wondered if his father, who was adept at giving shapes to things, might make a baby out of it, a sibling for him, to whom he would do what he believed Timir and I did to each other.
At some point he wondered what the blood of the menses would taste like. Mischievous, I encouraged him to try it. “Not bad!” he said, having tasted it. Then I told him (I learnt this from my father, who was well-traveled because a seaman) that there were some countries whose people called a woman’s blood red milk. They drank it in the belief that they would attain longevity. Before I knew it, K had emptied the blood that was in the thimble in a gulp. He asked for more.
“Now you will become pregnant,” I said.
He was most pleased!
I stayed up until the small hours, waiting for Sholoongo. I was vexed. Eventually I went to bed, thinking that tables were being turned: a mirror seeing its reflection in the quicksand of another mirror’s mercury. And I couldn’t help observing that Sholoongo was, on the one hand, presenting herself in a good light and, on the other, employing corrupt tactics to influence my decision. Blackmail. In other words, she was truthful to her memory, and I to mine. Truth, after all, has its dynamism, and memory its momentary lapses.
Chapter Four
On his way to a festivity Kalaman (in a dream) comes across a heap of elephant bones, partially but hastily covered with a scatter of broken trees and other debris. Not far from this devastation there is a tamarind tree. The tree has died recently, it appears, from being ring-barked by a woodpecker. On the distant horizon a pillar of sand shoots heavenwards, its summit culminating in a shape resembling a mushroom’s head. Farther east, a mirage forms and unforms, salt efflorescences, vapory, an obstinate fog refusing to be lifted.
In all, there are about a hundred persons, most of them women, with children of either sex. A feast is being held, as if in homage to an ancient deity. The day is clear, the weather pleasant, the sky dressed here and there with the whitest of clouds. These cast dark shadows on the ground, dark flutters of a candle in nervous agitation. A select number of the women and the men are busy attending to a huge fire. Others attend to the cauldrons already bubbling over with water, to which they add salt. Now and then, the people look expectantly up at the heavens, apparently anxious to feed their famished inner demons on a manna of hope. They all, every single one of them, act as if they are waiting for the late arrival of a divine promise.
There’s a lot of rejoicing. The younger ones sing nursery rhymes, those a bit older challenge one another in games requiring a strong spirit of competitiveness, and those in their twenties dance, the expression on their faces becoming more eager the longer they court, the brightness in their eyes reflecting the true joy in their hearts. Some of the women burn sweet-smelling incense in stone urns, which they pass around. Some of the other women apply cinnamon-scented oil to their skins. An older woman, with a flying fish on a line, is shaving the hair of a girl with a honey badger on a lead. After she’s cut the young woman’s hair, the older one digs a hole in the ground. She performs the act as solemnly as a devout Parsee prepares a corpse for the carrion eaters. In the meantime the young girl draws a crude representation of an ostrich, a totem whose significance is known to the attentive barber.
All of a sudden, a mass of locusts, migrating in myriads, covers first the forehead, then the flanks, and finally the full extent of the heavens’ body. Obviously excited, the men and women strip down to their underclothes, hoping to gather robefuls of the windfall. They behave as if they look forward rather anxiously to the moment when they might satiate their inner hunger. There has been a famine in the region, a drought lasting for a long time, cattle decimated, humans reduced to skeletons, emaciated hands outstretched, begging for food.
Presently everyone’s ears are filled with the sound of the locusts flying across the brow of the sky, and everyone’s eyes with the sight of locusts in motion. No sooner have the people begun to fear that the locusts will just fly over them, and that they, the victims, will not have the opportunity to take their vengeance on them, than the insects lose their balance and fall in cataracts, wings first, straight into the boiling cauldrons. To everyone’s utter delight, it turns out that the catch they collect in their spread-out garments becomes ever more bounteous.
Taken out of the bubbly pots, the cooked insects are laid on the grass to dry. After this they are peppered, salted, and then passed around. The eaters have as many helpings as they please. They remove the heads, pull apart the stomachs, and tail the locusts with the expertise of an adept shrimper plucking off the inedible segment of a shellfish. A great many of them gorge themselves with abandoned relish. Those with seasonings are generous in sharing them with those without. Those who have brought along other additives or pickled condiments do likewise. A couple of the unreconstructed men dictate outdated instructions to their womenfolk to prepare their portions in the best clarified butter. Others insist on supplementing their share with browned onions, garlic, and boiled basmati rice.
But there is an old man, with a crow for a totem, who does not partake of the feast. This lowers a damper on the spirit of those in his circle, especially that of a young man standing near him. While eating voraciously, the young man is making a proud display of a mantis in religious meditation. It is he who asks the old one why he is not partaking of the meal, why he is not rejoicing.
In reply the old man says glumly, “We are witnessing a tragedy, a community frenziedly placating an unease in its mind by filling its belly. We are bearing testimony to the foolish doings of a community doggedly refusing to take notice of its spiritual drought, which it mistakes for another type of want. If I refuse to eat, it is because I am asking, is it worth our humbling our human status by feeding on the locusts? Are we not engaging in a lowly form of self-abuse, eating the locusts because they have wrought havoc on our lives, because they have deprived us of our harvests?”
The boy with the mantis says, “Why does that worry you?”
“It worries me, and I hope I am not alone in thinking this,” argues the old man, “that we are preparing ourselves for the day when we will feed on our neighbors, in boiled versions, on account of suspecting our age-old neighbors of dispossessing us of our share of food, or of denying us our rightful place. I hope, too, that we do not consider anyone refusing to eat with us to be a deviant, worthy of being ostracized.”
A man with a chameleon on a leash reacts hostilely to the noneater’s remarks, which he describes as utterly simplistic. The man says, “Does it occur to my honorable peer and age-mate that the members of our downtrodden society cannot help being vengeful, that he who has suffered untold injustices may not know how to express so much pent-up frustration? What are these forsaken people to do but eat the insects that have ravaged their crops, given there is no other way of avenging so much injustice? How are they to keep body and soul together if they do not eat the locusts? In any case, who is he to preach from a high moral ground? And how dare he blame our people for being incapable of telling a physical hunger from a spiritual one? Pray, what are they expected to make of the ubiquitous famines, which have not only rendered the marrow in their bones dry but have also deprived them of their self-pride, the power of reasoning, their humanity?”
“Like dictatorships,” retorts the old man with a crow for a totem, “famines produce a boomerang effect among other things, a beastly backlash. Where dictatorships reign, famines reign too. However, I doubt if we should be debating about finding an outlet for people’s anger, or about placating their hunger, but about squaring the circle, in expectation of dealing with the root causes of famines, of ignoramus dictatorships, injustices.”
A woman who has not spoken till then says, “We’re doomed if we do, and damned if we don’t.” This speaker has in her embrace a lizard with an agitated head, with eyes darting outbursts of nervous tension.
The man with the chameleon on a leash utters his lines as though they are excerpted from a longer dirge. He chants, “We are the drought, the breeders of these monstrous dictators; we are the sons of the sycophants, the offspring of the accursed. We visit the havoc of famine on our heads. No rivers rise in us, no good blood runs in us.”
Hardly has he finished talking than a cataclysmic shock is felt, heard, and then seen, in that order, an earthquake with an epicenter which might be plotted on the ocean floor several kilometers to the east of the festival site. All of a sudden, the sky caves in, and there is a huge flood, the earth turning into a cavern. On the precipice of the opened cavern hang a lot of screaming men, women, and children who anticipate, with fear and horror, the prospect of falling into the tumultuous waters below.
Between two mouthfuls of water a woman and a man, both drowning, exchange their last hyperboles, the woman saying, “This is death giving notice!” and her companion lamenting, “A famine followed by floods, the eye of a hurricane in an ascending whirlwind culminating in a storm.”
Then, just as suddenly, the sky clears. On the far horizon a mirage is retreating. It is replaced by a rainbow, on whose heel drifts of sand rise in apparent fascination toward the sun, a tsunami of seismic tremors, mere waves undulating the sequined waters of the ocean’s surface. A tidal blend of crows’ cries come and go faint. None of this makes sense to the sleeper, the dreamer, Kalaman, who, in a startle, shouts the bisyllabic “Waaq!” He sits up, rubs his eyes red, irritates them awake.
