time before? Jamal gently patted his father’s thigh as he lay there on the hospital bed. ‘What did you do? Can you hear me? You can’t be that ill, or they’d have punched holes in you and filled you up with tubes and hitched you to a machine,’ he said aloud.
Abbas opened his eyes suddenly, stared blankly for a moment and then shut them again. It shook Jamal, that sudden bloodshot stare, as if the dead had spoken, and then he felt unkind for the thought. You’re not that ill, look at you, huffing away like some pasha in his hammock, he said softly. But then he noticed that his breathing had changed, had grown slightly agitated. Should he call someone? He could hear staff moving about the other side of the curtain that surrounded the bed. After a moment, Ba heaved a small sigh and his breathing gradually became regular again. It was strange to be sitting beside his sleeping father, who lay there defenceless as he had never known him to be before. Usually he was such a light sleeper that, should you by some unusual chance have caught him dozing, he stirred as soon as you approached. Maybe those taut nerves of his were still working, and Jamal’s voice had penetrated through the drugs and made him open his eyes.
Jamal patted his father on the thigh once more. Don’t scare me like that again. Just rest now. Why do you never talk about your family? Because he never had, at least never to do much more than draw a sketchy picture of a miserly father and a put-upon mother. Sometimes, often, he talked about being a sailor and the countries he visited, or the various bad jobs he had had to do over the years before he settled into the one he did for the rest of his life, as an engineer in the electronics factory. But never about his family or even about where he came from. When they were younger Hanna or Jamal asked, in the uncomplicated way of children, about where their grandparents were or what they were like, or other questions of that kind, but most of the time their father brushed their questions aside, sometimes with a smile and sometimes without. You don’t want to know about that, he would say. Now and then he would tell them things, precious little things as they seemed to Jamal, but nothing very precise, nothing very concrete. It was as if he spoke out of a reverie, unguarded for a few moments, holding up a fragment of a whimsy before letting it float away into the blinding light.
He remembered how one Christmas he told them about rosewater. This is how we greet each other in our celebrations. On the first day of Idd, people called on each other to offer greetings and share a cup of coffee and, if they were well off enough, a small bite of halwa. In some houses, the host sprinkled his guests with rosewater as they arrived, shaking it out of a silver fountain into their hands and sometimes lightly showering their hair with it. When Hanna asked for more, because she wanted to know about these people and which houses they visited – as did Jamal but he did not have her fearlessness about asking – he told them about how rosewater was distilled from rose petals and how it was used in various foods as well as in religious ceremonies in all parts of the world from China to Argentina. He told them about Idd and gave them a travelogue: how Idd was celebrated in that country as opposed to another one, in which month of the lunar year it occurred, what a lunar year is. When they asked him about his home country, he said he was a monkey from Africa.
It did not take very long for them to learn not to ask him certain kinds of questions. Jamal could not bear the look of irritation on his face when they persisted with their questions. It was Hanna mostly, because she felt the deprivation more than he did. She preferred to pin down details, and sometimes she found Ba’s evasiveness so intensely frustrating that she had to leave the room.
‘No, not evasiveness, evasions, Beautiful One,’ she said later when they were old
Abbas opened his eyes suddenly, stared blankly for a moment and then shut them again. It shook Jamal, that sudden bloodshot stare, as if the dead had spoken, and then he felt unkind for the thought. You’re not that ill, look at you, huffing away like some pasha in his hammock, he said softly. But then he noticed that his breathing had changed, had grown slightly agitated. Should he call someone? He could hear staff moving about the other side of the curtain that surrounded the bed. After a moment, Ba heaved a small sigh and his breathing gradually became regular again. It was strange to be sitting beside his sleeping father, who lay there defenceless as he had never known him to be before. Usually he was such a light sleeper that, should you by some unusual chance have caught him dozing, he stirred as soon as you approached. Maybe those taut nerves of his were still working, and Jamal’s voice had penetrated through the drugs and made him open his eyes.
Jamal patted his father on the thigh once more. Don’t scare me like that again. Just rest now. Why do you never talk about your family? Because he never had, at least never to do much more than draw a sketchy picture of a miserly father and a put-upon mother. Sometimes, often, he talked about being a sailor and the countries he visited, or the various bad jobs he had had to do over the years before he settled into the one he did for the rest of his life, as an engineer in the electronics factory. But never about his family or even about where he came from. When they were younger Hanna or Jamal asked, in the uncomplicated way of children, about where their grandparents were or what they were like, or other questions of that kind, but most of the time their father brushed their questions aside, sometimes with a smile and sometimes without. You don’t want to know about that, he would say. Now and then he would tell them things, precious little things as they seemed to Jamal, but nothing very precise, nothing very concrete. It was as if he spoke out of a reverie, unguarded for a few moments, holding up a fragment of a whimsy before letting it float away into the blinding light.
He remembered how one Christmas he told them about rosewater. This is how we greet each other in our celebrations. On the first day of Idd, people called on each other to offer greetings and share a cup of coffee and, if they were well off enough, a small bite of halwa. In some houses, the host sprinkled his guests with rosewater as they arrived, shaking it out of a silver fountain into their hands and sometimes lightly showering their hair with it. When Hanna asked for more, because she wanted to know about these people and which houses they visited – as did Jamal but he did not have her fearlessness about asking – he told them about how rosewater was distilled from rose petals and how it was used in various foods as well as in religious ceremonies in all parts of the world from China to Argentina. He told them about Idd and gave them a travelogue: how Idd was celebrated in that country as opposed to another one, in which month of the lunar year it occurred, what a lunar year is. When they asked him about his home country, he said he was a monkey from Africa.
It did not take very long for them to learn not to ask him certain kinds of questions. Jamal could not bear the look of irritation on his face when they persisted with their questions. It was Hanna mostly, because she felt the deprivation more than he did. She preferred to pin down details, and sometimes she found Ba’s evasiveness so intensely frustrating that she had to leave the room.
‘No, not evasiveness, evasions, Beautiful One,’ she said later when they were old
Similar Books
