The Bamboo Stalk by Saud Alsanousi Page B

left through the back door, carrying the curse of Isa with me, so that good fortune could enter the house through the front door. My mother had an appointment to meet the family of a
man who wanted to marry Awatif, my eldest sister.
    Josephine, there’s more to this than you imagine. I won’t keep playing a game when I don’t know the rules. I completed the divorce procedures a few hours before writing this letter. Believe me, this will be best for me and for you. As for Isa, I promise I won’t abandon him. I’ll take care of all his needs and I’ll send him whatever money he needs at the end of each month until the time comes when I can take him back. I promise I will do that when the time is right.
    Rashid
    Kuwait, September 1988
    My mother cried when I read out the words ‘I completed the divorce procedures
’,
despite the fact that she had read the letter years before and had married another man after Rashid. I cried too, but that was when I read about my grandmother saying ‘Mind you never bring that thing back here again
.’
    â€˜Why does Grandmother hate me, Mama?’ I asked. My mother was busy mopping up my tears with a handkerchief that was already soaked with her own.
    â€˜As Jesus said, even prophets are strangers in their own country,’ she said.
    â€˜So I’m a prophet?’ I asked her in surprise.
    â€˜God alone knows,’ she said, looking away towards the window.
    Frightened, I took her hands. ‘Mama, if I grow up and go to my father’s country as a prophet, won’t they crucify me there?’ I asked.
    She hugged me tight and laughed. ‘It was the Son of God that was crucified. Don’t worry. They won’t crucify you for being the son of Rashid,’ she said.
    Although he had let her down, Rashid still meant much to her.
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    My mother said she was stunned when she read the letter for the first time, not because of the divorce, which was how she expected the relationship to end (‘The decision wasn’t your father’s. A whole society stood behind him,’ she said), but because she was afraid of his promise. She couldn’t imagine being able to give me up to my father under any circumstances. That was at the beginning, but when she thought about it hard, unemotionally, she realised that everyone in the Philippines dreamed of living abroad in a country that provided stability and a decent life. Women gave up everything to marry Western men who would take them off to their countries, for the sake of an opportunity to live well and have a family, but men found it hard to fulfil this dream. In the Philippines it’s the dream of every man and woman to emigrate and settle in Europe, America or Canada, giving up everything – their past, their country and even their family.
    My mother realised that a secure future, of a kind rarely available to men, awaited me there in Kuwait, where the state provides citizens (and I was a citizen) with much more than even the most developed countries provide. My mother accepted my father’s promise, expected it to be fulfilled and prepared me for it. Although he had let her down and abandoned her by divorcing her, she would still say, ‘I never loved anyone as much as your father.’ Despite that love, about two years later my mother married Alberto. He was about tenyears older than her and he lived in our neighbourhood. He worked on merchant ships and sailed the oceans for eight months a year. He spent the other months with her in his little house near my grandfather’s land. My mother had a better life with her new husband and when he was in the Philippines she left me in the care of my Aunt Aida. My mother almost went back to work as a servant in the Gulf at about this time so that she could secure her own future and that of her new husband, but she dropped the idea after my father intervened.
    In a letter he sent more than two years after we left, he