They could not go unpunished. Uncle Qorrax suggested that he should be made very busy. And a school in which to discipline these unruly boys was started with Aw-Adan appointed as its headmaster. Arithmetic. Geography. History. Arabic. The school’s name was Kallafo Public School, since it was funded and founded by the community, and since the Ethiopian government didn’t provide any schooling facilities for the Somalis in the Ogaden. So, for the first week or so, Askar returned home exhausted. Naturally, the morning’s Koranic School plus the afternoon’s arithmetic, etc., took their toll and by the time he staggered home, he wasn’t willing to spend his energy on inventing a new set of rules for games to be thoroughly enjoyed by an improvised audience.
A fortnight later, he thought of new games, which attracted larger audiences. Misra heard that the young man in her charge had been up to no good. And there was no way she could’ve held him in the house. What was the point of beating him? At times, he removed his shirt from his back, brought a cane himself and asked her to “go on, punish me, go on”.
She only pleaded, “Please, do not attract eyes to yourself. People can be bad, envious, wicked. People’s eyes can make you fall ill. They are terrible when they are bad, people’s eyes.
He paid her pleas no heed.
He was taken ill.
He looked bloodless — too weak “How do you feel?” she asked.
He shook his head. He had no temperature, thank God. Neither did he vomit. He ate as normally as he used to. And yet he was “sick”. The “sickness” showed in his look, which appeared startled. What could be the matter? His head between his hands, he said, “I don’t know.” It was a weird kind of illness. “Bad eyes are wicked!” Karin had commented.
“Is there any part of you that is in pain? Your head, your stomach, your heart? Tell me.” Misra touched him all over. “Which part of your body does pain reside in?”
“I cannot think” he said. “It’s that kind of sickness!”
“What do you mean, you cannot think?”
He said, “It’s odd, but it feels as if my brain has ceased thinking, as if I will never have new thoughts. It’s a strange sensation but that’s what I feel. No fresh ideas. And my eyes — look at them. Pale as white meat.”
Misra thought, it is the bad eye. All that night, she prayed and prayed and prayed. Oh Lord, protect my little man from the rash of measles; from diarrheal diseases and complications; from conjunctival sightlessness; from tubercular and whooping coughs. Protect him, oh Lordj from droplet-bone infections and from migratory parasites — and such diseases for which we have no names. Oh Lord, restore to him his thinking faculties. Amen!
A day later, she consulted Qorrax and Aw-Adan. Interestingly enough, each suggested two remedies. Aw-Adan offered to read selected verses of the Koran over Askar’s body “astraddle the bed in satanic pain”; alternatively, he said, someone ought to belt the jinn out of the little devil. Uncle Qorrax suggested he sent his wife, “Shahrawello”, over — she was an expert at blood-letting. Otherwise, he went on, he would pay for the cuudis: “Blood-letting works when the blood of the patient is bad; fumigating if there is suspicion that somebody’s covetous, evil eye needs to be appeased,” said Uncle Qorrax.
Askar retorted, “Blood-letting? For whom? For me? No, thank you.”
Half-serious, Misra said: “Maybe that’s what you need.”
“I’ve seen it done, no, thank you.”
He remembered someone saying that Shahrawello prescribed blood-letting for Uncle Qorrax if he wasn’t happy with his performance in bed, if he wasn’t content with his respiratory system or if he was believed to be suffering from bronchitis. Hours later, she would show him the blood that had rushed to the surface and which she managed to capture in the cup, a cup full of darkened blood which she held before him as evidence. Uncle Qorrax would stare at the dark blood and, nodding with approval, would say, “You see, I told you. I am not well.” Some people were of the opinion that Qorrax was healthy until Shahrawello decided it was time his pride was punctured. To humiliate him, people said, she made him lie on a mat on the floor, helpless and submissive. Flames, tumblers, used razor-blades — she gave him the works. Lethargic, and drained of blood, he would remain on his back, at the same spot for hours. From then on, he beat his wives less often. From then on, he bullied his children less frequently. And this was the amazing thing — Qorrax acknowledged his unlimited gratitude to Shahrawello who, he said, kept him fit and on good form.
“No blood-letting for me. No, thank you,” said Askar now.
“What about cuudis?”
He said, “No, thank you.”
He had watched it done. Karin was the patient. Poor woman, he thought. They forced her to tell lies, heaps of lies. Otherwise, how could she give as her name the name of a man? How could Karin say, looking straight at her “confessor”, “My name is Abdullahi”, giving as her own an identity which didn’t match her real identity. Maybe, it was because they “fumigated” her by placing a towel above her head, making her sweat, making her swelter under the suffocating smoke and she coughed and coughed. The woman who had been hired to dispel the bad eye out of Karin’s system spoke to Karin in a language which definitely was not Somali. A couple of other women beat Karin on the chest as though she were a tin drum, they beat her on the back of the neck like one who’s choked on a large piece of meat but won’t vomit it out voluntarily. Askar wondered if Karin might have swallowed the “bad eye”. No? Although it didn’t make any sense, he wasn’t averse to the idea.
“The Koran, then?”
No, no. He knew the Koran from back to front. He didn’t want it read over his body astraddle a bed — not by Aw-Adan. Who knows, argued Askar, the man might have weird ideas. What if he read the wrong passages of the Koran, passages, say, which could make him turn into an epileptic? He had heard of such a story. As a matter of fact, he knew the brother of the boy to whom a similar experience had happened. A “priest” had chosen the wrong passages of the Koran deliberately, mischievously, and read it over the little boy whom he didn’t like. Did Misra know what became of the boy? “He now has extra fluid flowing into his skull. They tell me his brain is over-flooded like a river with burst banks.”
Misra was worried. “Who is this boy? Does he really exist?”
“His head is larger than the rest of his body; his sight has begun to fail, his hearing too. And all this because a wicked ‘priest’ has read the wrong passages of the Sacred Book over the body of an innocent boy.”
“That’s criminal,” said Misra.
“I agree with you,” he said.
They were silent for a few minutes. “So what do we do?” she said.
His eyes lit with mischief. He pretended to be thinking. “What?” she asked. “What is it, Askar?”
“Go and call Aw-Adan,” he suggested.
“And I ask him to bring along a copy of the Koran?”
“No.”
“What then?”
And he became the great actor she had known, and his stare was illumined with the kind of satanic naughtiness his eyes brightened with when he was being mischievous. “What then?” she repeated.
“Tell him to bring along his cane. I prefer his caning me with my eyes wide open to his reading the Koran over my body astraddle a sick bed when they are closed and trusting.”
In a moment, he was up and about. He was changing into a clean pair of shorts and looking for a T-shirt to match it. He was all right, she told herself. He was thinking. However, she saw him rummage in a cupboard. “But what are you looking for?” she said.