9781852426385

Chapter One

Breath sticks in my throat, I do not know where to turn, yet I turn -- like a fish caught up in the eddy, with no power in my limbs.

It was the eddy that first gave me the dying feeling.

‘Do you see that, son?’ said my father, pointing with his finger stiff with arthritis. ‘It will swallow you up.’

The monsoon had caused the waters to swell and my father was warning me off bathing in the flooded canal. But my father had only one leg. He never swam. And it was the month of August, hot, windless, drawing sweat from every pore of the body.

Outside the flooding season the eddies were small and no stronger than me. I dived into them without fear and caught with my hands little trapped fishes, which my mother fried whole in ghee for me to eat. But when the floods came the currents dug holes in the earth underneath, making room for big water-whirlwinds with a dip in the middle going down and down. Older boys said that you could catch fish as big as a spread hand that spun powerless in the centre of them. I could sit on the branch of a tree by the canal bank or float out of reach and look at the big mud-coloured conch in constant motion folding back on itself for hours, dreaming of the silver fish within it. It threw an invisible ring of rope like a lasso round my head, pulling me in. After my father left me standing there on that day, I jumped into the canal. I would swim to the edge of the circle, I thought, and look at the fish suspended upright on their tails and turning and turning as the boys had said. I swam too near. Spinning in that black and breathless spiral, I lost my own centre of wind and sank, till my feet touched the muddy earth below. My arms and legs were beating the water like those of a puny frog with no escape, when a bottom current slapped me out of reach of the eddy's strike. I saw no fish. But the waters fell short and above me was the sky. I vomited streams of water, lying flat on the bank and weeping, begging for God's face to appear in the sky and save me. With nosefuls of water still dense in my head, I could not breathe. I rolled over and knew that I was dying. Some bigger boys picked me off the ground and hung me upside down from the tree and I lived.

At the age of nine, I had crossed my first black water and glimpsed the end of life. Nineteen more years were to pass before I crossed my second, and was hurled into another vortex where for years I drew no breath of the living, only that of the half-dead, unseen and unheard. But never, not even when my very existence on this earth was denied by other men did I have the wind taken from my chest. In my forty-four years of life I have fought through much and made progress. Today, they have shut the door on me and locked it and give me no answer. And to think that they are none other than my very own wife and daughter who love me, and whom I love from the depth of my heart. What have I done wrong? My breath is trapped in my throat. Did I ever think that after thirty-five years of life's endeavours I would once again have a knife in my gut and in my heart a dying feeling? What do I do, wait till they return and then tell them what I have crossed and uncrossed, passed and not passed?

I cannot think. But I can remember. It is all in here, wrapped up within the sheets of my body. Anybody can think, but to remember is to face one's own existence. I had qualities. Never put off till tomorrow what I could do on the day. If a floorboard creaked or a knob fell off the door, I got down to it right there and then, unmindful of my need for rest after a hard day at work. I earned to provide all necessary requirements, and some even that were not essential. I had qualities of education, for a start: at school I was the special favourite of my English master who daily asked me to recite the poem of golden daffodils, lonely as a cloud I wandered and so on, while he shut his eyes the more to enjoy the scenery of the poem on his brain. After I had finished the poem I was told to read a page from the book of essays and was held up before the whole class as having command of language, grammar, vocabulary, which no-one else attained. That was the one shining time of my life. There have been other good times, victories over tall barriers against which I had to push and strive, but no great and golden time again; for when you are in the tenth class and all the boys look up to you, that is a victory which is no longer an achievement and has not even a reason for being, it is a miracle. I was destined to pass the matriculation examination in the first division, said the English master, and then seek a position in the government department, with benefits for self and family accruing to such position. But I was thwarted.

Half-way through my tenth year in school my father sat me down and spoke.

‘I am only a third-share tenant with one good leg on four acres of land, you know, son. I cannot pay for school fees and books and pencils and feed you on top. You have to work.’

I had respect for my father, but I did not want to toil on a few acres of no-rain land as he had done. So I made my first choice: I wanted to work with iron tools. I went and sat at the blacksmith's hut, just looking and running occasional errands for him. After a few days, the blacksmith had a word with my father and took me in as an apprentice. There was no money in it at first, but I ate from his hearth twice a day. Four years I spent there, learning all the skills. When the old blacksmith had nothing more to teach me, I began to think of working independently of him. I needed a hut of my own. But where? That was the first big question. I literally dug up the answer to that one in due course. There was a little strip of land on which no-one would dare to set foot.

A long time ago, someone went mad on that land. The plot, measuring approximately six yards by seven, was under the ‘shadow’, it was said, of a jinn. One night a passing lad emptied his impatient bladder on the spot. Enraged by this, the jinn pounced on him. The boy fell on the ground and lay there, shivering, for two whole days, uttering squeals of suffering. By the time he rose to his feet on the third day, the boy had jumped several ages. He had the face of an old man, creased and set as if in stone. He had lost his natural faculties; the jinn, having taken over his earthly body, had entered his spirit. Forever afterwards, this boy-man wandered from village to village, begging for food, inhabiting wild places, speaking in tongues. In the world's eyes, he had gone out of his mind. But even at the age of nine when I first heard the story, I thought differently: having surrendered his person to a foreign being, he had actually become one himself. This seemed at the time to round up the picture in my mind. It took me another five years to bring the story to a satisfactory end: this man, having lost human abilities, was denied in return the special powers that went with the foreign being. As a result, the change in his existence occurred only to the extent of bodily dysfunction, while the soul got consumed altogether; he had suffered a living death. No wonder then that he roamed the earth like a man with no destination, as if exiled from the world. Inside me, this story never died, and as the time came for me to contemplate moving to my own place, it came to my aid in the form of a blessed thought: the boy-man had been punished for desecrating the land over which lingered the shadow of the jinn, but conversely, what if the jinn, his shadow and the land were honoured in some way?

‘There is the shadow on it, do you not know?’ the owner said to me. ‘If you want the weight of it on your neck, then it is your neck. The land is no longer mine, it is "his".’

‘I only want to provide him with shade from the sun,’ I said. ‘It will please him.’

The landlord moved away as if already certain of seeing me come to a bad end. My mother went to the mosque Imam and got a taveez from him. She had it threaded and bound in leather, and slung it round my neck. It was to protect me from the doings of all the beings foreign to human kind. Thus armed, I went and put my foot on the jinn's land. This was to be my first conquest. From all the trees available to me, I chose the seeds of the dhrake, for this tree's rapid growth and the dark shade of its crowded top, and for the whistling sound the wind makes through its thin leaves, pointing to a life of its own. I sowed twelve dhrake seeds all round the plot of land. Around each one of them, once they had broken surface, I constructed brick shelters to provide protection from the cruel sun and from the herds of goats that laid waste to every green leaf in their path. Every single day, after finishing work at the blacksmith's forge, I went to water the plants, staying there longer and longer, never tiring. Seeing them suck up nourishment from the soil and become heavier, taller, greener, I already felt as if, at the age of twenty, I were the father of twelve children. Every night, I would sit there until late, growing familiar with the dark, driving the fear of the jinn from my heart, until I began to feel that I had made the land my very own. Within a year, the trees were six feet tall and thick at the top. Among them, with every penny that I had saved during five years of working at the forge, I built a hut with my own hands.

I soon found that carrying on an independent trade was a different matter. There was much fearful talk: no way was the jinn, they said, going to allow a fire to be lighted on his territory. But the mosque Imam had already told me that just as humans are made of dust and angels from light, so jinns are composed of fire: my jinn would not object. Day by day, I passed this knowledge on to the people of the village. Eventually, my endeavours bore fruit and the village folk began to come to me with work. In time, I grew to be more than a blacksmith in their eyes; I was the one who had banished fear of the unseen creatures of fire from their hearts. I had attained a stature which, though not as high as the landlord or the mosque Imam, was nevertheless deserving of some respect. Within three years, I had saved enough money to build two extra rooms in my father's house. Then I was ready to fulfil the desire of my heart -- to make Salma my wife.

It had started many years before when we were children. We were playing in the fields. Wild boars, scourge of crops, had dug up hollows in the earth. Moles had then burrowed into the sides of these dips to lay tunnels under the surface. Rabbits and hedgehogs followed the moles and we, the children of the village, followed the animals, scraping the soil off the walls of their passages for days with our fingers, until they were wide enough to crawl into. We called these ‘graves’. I was lying on my back, hiding in my favourite grave, looking up at a spot of the sky through the air hole, when a delighted shriek of discovery shot through the earth. Above me, the small round patch of the sky had disappeared. In its place were two eyes, a nose and a mouth. This face, with no ears, cheeks, chin or a head of hair, had filled my grave with a yell that was mingled with a whiff of sweet and sour fruit. She had been eating a pear. For the first time in all my playing days, I shivered with happiness at being found. The smell of fresh, ripe pears, wherever I come across it, at whatever time, reminds me of her half-face framed within a hole in the ground. During the years before I was ready to wed I saw my cousin Salma nearly every day in the village, but nothing in my vision replaced that first picture and the breath bearing the fragrance of pears, as though it were the beginning of the whole of my remembrance. In my twenty-fourth year, we were married.

I would still be sitting in my hut today, working among my trees, not getting rich but feeding and clothing my family, earning the respect of many for whom I'd done good, sound work, often on credit, had it not been for the man who appeared one day in the village, dressed in nice, English clothes, looking prosperous and happy. He was, it turned out, an agent of the agents in the city, who undertook, in return for ‘expenses’, to send anyone who wanted to go, to England. There, he said, we could earn ten, twenty, a hundred times the amount of money we were earning here, and buy with it merchandise like English electrical goods. There was no electricity in our village, but it was no matter. I remember going on one occasion to another village as part of a wedding party. The room where one group of us was seated before the start of the feast was furnished with items of electrical application bought from England. They were placed neatly on the wooden shelves fixed to the wall and appeared, from the shine on their surface, regularly dusted: a shaver, a small food mixer, a power drill. There was even a sewing machine and a record player, sitting side by side on a large table by the wall. There was no electricity in that village either. But these things were meant for purposes other than their usage; they were possessions which indicated enterprise and success. We knew that people had been going to England for years, although no-one from our own village had yet taken this step. I was the first to make up my mind to go. I am not a religious man, but I was happy in the belief that in return for my labours in this world and my success in the occupation of feared land, I was being offered by God almighty another world of bright prospects. I consulted my father. He, as usual, clenched his fist and brought it down on his bad leg.

‘You are a grown man of full years, are you not? If your mind is made up, it is made up.’ He rapped his leg again, producing the familiar sound of knuckles on wood. ‘There used to be a leg here. I left it in Burma during the war.’

‘I know,’ I said.

‘What do you know?’

‘You have told me many times.’

‘You do not know the whole of it, do you?’ he said. ‘We ate rats, snakes, scorpions, worms and grass. Most did not come back. I did. Do you know how? I kept my head down and my mouth shut, that is how. So here is the trick: when you are not among your own people, keep your head down, let everything pass over you, and you will stay alive. Go and fight your war.’

Next, I came to the main question: money. Five thousand rupees, to be exact, as the down payment. No-one would buy my hut, or the tools or the trees, for as the news of my leaving spread, the fear of the jinn returned to the people. What was I to do?

Long before we were married, Salma knew that the gold was hers. I used to go to my uncle's house when I was small and once, as we were looking in the secret places of the house, Salma had pointed it out to me. It was buried under sheets at the bottom of a trunk, tied up with a rough white cloth at the neck, making the shape of a fist. It had belonged to her mother, who had died. On her death-bed, my aunt, Salma's mother, had got her husband to utter a pledge that the gold would go to her only daughter. During all the time of pouring sweat over hot irons to make horseshoes, shovels, spades and sickles, axles for bullockcarts and hinges and hoes, there were no more gold ornaments for Salma other than those she had brought with her as dowry, still tied up, fist-like, in the same rough cloth with a piece of string, now a little whiter on account of being washed on the occasion of our marriage. There was no way I could pay the agents' fee; the gold had to be sold.

I had decided upon the time: the night. I was going to make my wife happy in the night by the power of my loins, and then ask for gold. It was a tough night. I tried many ways, many angles, used all my strength and stayed long with her but could not make her happy. She had sensed it; she would not close her eyes, or utter a sound, or go to sleep. In the end, I left her side and went to the trunk. There was no gold. In anger, I looked to my wife. She was half sitting up in bed with her eyes wide open and both hands at once holding and covering up the top of her stomach. I had to force open her hands: the little bundle of gold; it was as if it took birth from her body at that very moment. She did not open her mouth or say anything when I took it from her, but there was a terror in her eyes worse than death, or birth. The gold was not the only thing she possessed; she had me, and the children, and some other things. She had even accepted my going away for a while. But the gold was another matter. She had not had to work for it, or suffer for its sake; it was simply hers, like her hands or feet or childhood -- a gift. I said to myself, let the time pass, it will heal. In the following four weeks, during which I got five thousand rupees from the goldsmith in town and, upon the payment of the sum to the agent, a false passport plus details of travel arrangements, her face gradually adopted the look of a barren field, as if her features, having taken in the terror of that night, were left only as solitary objects upon her front. I vowed to myself that I would restore, with money, with gold, the life that would put her face together again. A face with its inheritance taken away is no face. For her first face -- my dearest possession -- I had overcome a strip of land that would give itself to no-one; for her second, I was going to win another world.

My father was only half right. It was a war all right, but there were no medals. I worked ten, twelve hours a day, six, sometimes seven days a week. For the room, which I shared, and the provision of a mattress and three blankets, I paid one pound. I limited my food expenditure to one pound. After that I had to put aside three pounds each week for the rest of the agent's ‘expenses’ money, a procedure which had been agreed upon and contracted for at the outset. Whatever was then left of my total weekly wage I sent straight back to Salma once a month through Baba Rehman, who dealt in black currency and gave a good rate of exchange. In every letter to my wife, I impressed upon her to buy land in the village so that by the time I made my return there were enough acres to my home on which we could live in comfort. This was the final goal of all of us at the time -- although there was always a question mark to it. Whether hidden under crates of frozen fish in big lorries or spat on to a deserted beach like washed-up drowned men with itineraries in their pockets, we got here one way or the other. What none of us knew was how to go back. Each night, as I lay down on the mattress after a long day's work and closed my eyes, I pictured Salma as I had seen her at the moment of my departing from home. She was standing outside the door of the house, her shiny black hair washed, massaged and combed tightly back, carrying my daughter Parvin, who was eight months old then, in the crook of her right elbow. My son Hasan, already grown beyond his twenty months, stood by her side, holding his mother's hand and looking up at her. She looked clean, smelled of mustard oil and soap, and there was desolation in her face. Each night, my heart bled. She loved me. She has always loved me. And I love her too. In the few years that I spent over here away from her, time neither passed nor stopped altogether but seemed to slip, hour by hour, into a hole in the ground and disappear. It was only at night, viewing the scene of my departure from home in the back of my shut eyelids that I had the feeling for a few minutes that I existed, before sleep overcame my tired limbs and carried me away. The rest of the time we, all seventeen of us, lived our half-lives in the daylight hours, coming fully into our own for a short while only when we came home to the dark of that cave-like house, to sit and talk and do as real men do everywhere, dream of lumpsums of money and ways of escaping.

My wife and my son and daughter gave to me each night the gift of a brief life parallel to the one I had all those years ago, so why do they not help me now? My son, though he too has turned away from me, is a boy and can be no cause of disrepute no matter what he does. A daughter is a different matter. She bears the honour of my name and that of my forefathers. So beautiful, so able, who would have thought that she would turn out like this, stand in front of me and answer back, say no to what is required of her?

Excerpted from émigré journeys by Abdullah Hussein. Copyright © 2000 by Abdullah Hussein. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

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Emigre Journeys

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