“I want you to think of it like this,’ said Misra to you one night. “You are a blind man and I am your stick, and it is I who leads you into the centre of human activities. Your appearance makes everyone fall silent, it makes them lower the volume of their chatter. And you too become conscious and you interpret their silence as a ploy to exclude you, and you feel you’re being watched and that you’re being denied entry into their world. From then on, you hold on to the stick, both as guide and protector. Since you cannot sense sympathy in their silences, you think it is hate. You, the blind man, and I, the stick. And together we pierce the sore — that’s their conscience.”
You said, “No wonder they don’t like me!”
Again, Misra changed the subject to less demanding topics, topics that were less burdensome than the notions of “guilt” or “conscience”. And she lulled you to and led you to sleep: gently, slowly, with a voice that changed rhythms and a lullaby sung in a language that wasn’t your own. Some of the tales she told you had plenty of blood in them, there was no denying that. In a couple of these, there were even human-eating types — with Dhegdheer dying not and the heavens raining not! On occasion, she would give, in outline, the moral of the tale before she narrated it to you, and at times she would let you retell it so you had the opportunity of offering your own interpretation. Years later, you discovered (it was Karin who gave you the information) that Misra used to have these tales told to her when you were away from the compound so she could feed your fantasies on them when you returned. Admittedly, this endeared her to you.
Unlike Uncle Qorrax’s children, you never stole things from anyone. You mentioned your needs — and Misra met them. If she couldn’t, she told you why. And she trained you not to value money or possessions. Also, no visiting relation unfolded secretly onto your outstretched palm a coin a parent might not have given you. Uncle Qorrax’s children, you knew, stole from their father. They conspired to do so — one of them would keep an eye on him, say, when he was in the lavatory and the others would rummage his pockets and take away a small sum that he wouldn’t notice and share it among themselves. Often, they timed it so it coincided with the arrival of nomads, who had come to buy provisions from his shop, pitching their tents in their compound, when there was a great deal of movement. They knew he dared not put embarrassing questions to these guest-clients. His sons knew he would never offer them or their mothers anything they could do without. It was his “public” persona that insisted on being generous at times. He could be kind to his children and wives when “others” were there; he could even be generous. When alone with them, he was a miser. So, they stole from him when he wasn’t there,
Misra had a public and a private persona too. She was warmer and kinder when alone with you, calling you all kinds of endearments, sharing with you secrets no other soul knew about. And in any case, you needn’t have stolen anything from Misra or from yourself. It was when she wore the mask of the public persona that you “stole” from her time a few moments of tenderness which you exchanged surreptitiously.
And when Misra was in season and therefore nervous, you were entrusted to Karin, who was equally kind, equally generous — and who treated you, not as a child, but as a grandchild. Because you were two generations apart, Karin indulged you in a way which didn’t meet Misra’s patent of approval. The two women were the best of friends — the one with an ailing husband who had lain on his back for years and who was confined to a mattress on the floor from where he saw, whenever he looked up at the ceiling, a portrait of Ernest Bevin; the other, a woman who, by virtue of her foreignness, felt she had access to the Somali cosmos — if there is anything like that — only through you. Karin baby-minded for her. Likewise, when she was indisposed, Misra looked after the old man. Conveniently for the three of you, Karin and her husband’s compound lay between yours and Uncle Qorrax’s. And so you were content to go from one compound to the other without ever needing to touch the fringes of the third — namely Qorrax’s.
But Qorrax called at yours when he chose, preferably when you began breathing shallowly through your nose, almost asleep. He would wait until your dream had taken you to a watery destinatio — where it was moist, green and all your own — your Eden. Then he would come into bed with Misra.
Oh, how you hated him!
V
On the other hand, you loved Uncle Hilaal and his wife, Salaado, directly you met them. The flow of their warmth was comforting — sweet as spring water. And everything either of them did or said, once you gave it a thought, appeared as necessary as the blood of life. You loved Hilaal and Salaado, you loved the sea and you loved Mogadiscio.
You began writing letters to Misra a few months after your arrival in Mogadiscio. But you never finished writing even one single letter, suspecting, rightly, that she wouldn’t be able to read Somali although she spoke it well enough. You were most distressed when you leamt that there never was a mail service through the official channels between Somalia and Ethiopia. Uncle Hilaal told you that letters had to be sent to other destinations, preferably via a European rechannelling system, like letters between a person living in apartheid South Africa and another in black Africa or a correspondence between one person residing in Syria and the other in Israel. So, apart from the wall of separation the Somali orthography raised between the two of you, there was also the official Ethiopian line of thinking, which was inimical to any communication taking place between Somalis living on either side of the de facto border between Ethiopia and Somalia. There were, indeed, rumours to the effect that a number of people suspected of holding Somali sympathies had been summarily executed, some were said to be still in jails serving sentences a military tribunal passed on them. You couldn’t vouch for the truth of all that you heard, but you heard reports in which a man entered the Ogaden on foot, one day, and was apprehended. In his holdall, they found letters said to have been written by one member of the Western Somali Liberation Front to another. The man was sentenced to death, there being no question In the mind of the tribunal that he was a saboteur.
You began most of your letters with the standard greetings and then penned something like this: “Perhaps you don’t remember me any more and perhaps you do. But I am the Askar who, for years, was strapped to your body, was almost one with it. I am sorry I’ve been beastly and haven’t written … but!” And so on and so forth. In them, you spoke lovingly of Hilaal and Salaado, describing them as kind-hearted, enlightened and highly educated. However, you were sad, you said, because they didn’t have “a festivity of goings-on” as in Uncle Qorrax’s compound, where there were many people, relatives and others, who came, who called and were entertained and where one felt one was a member of a community “Here,” you went on in one of those unposted and unfinished letters, “it appears as though it were a great virtue to be self-sufficient — and Uncle Hilaal and Salaado are. And I am the child they’ve been awaiting all these years. I am a godsend to them, although I am sure this isn’t the right way of putting it since they both strike one, at first, as not being at all religious. They lavish their love on me. And this matters greatly to me.”