Maps (2 page)

II

To Misra, you existed first and foremost in the weird stare: you were, to her, your eyes, which, once they found her, focused on her guilt—her self! She caught the look you cast in her direction the way a clumsy child grabs a ball and she framed the stare in the memory of her photographic brain. She developed it, printed it in different colours, each of which expressed her mood. She was sure, for instance, that you saw her the way she was: a miserable woman, with no child and no friends; a woman who, that dusk—would you believe it?—menstruated right in front of you, under that most powerful stare of yours. She saw, in that look of yours, her father, whom she saw last when she was barely five.

“Annoy a child and you'll discover the adult in him,” she would repeat, believing it to be a proverb. “Please an adult with gifts and the child therein re-emerges.” And she annoyed you, she pleased you, and she was sufficiently patient to watch the adult in you come out and display itself. Not only did she see her father in you but also the child in herself: she saw a different terrain of land, and she heard a different language spoken and she watched, on the screen of her past, a number of pictures replayed as though they were real and as painful as yesterday. She sought her childhood in you and she hid her most treasured secrets which she was willing to impart to you and you alone. In you, too, she saw a princess, barely five, a pretty princess surrounded with servants and well-wishers, one who could have anything she pleased and who was loved by her mother, but not so much by her father because she was a girl and wouldn't inherit his title—wouldn't continue his line. A princess!

To you, too, although you were too small to understand, she told secrets about your parents no one else was ready to tell you. She told you why your mother had been hiding in the room where she had found the two of you and why she died in a quiet secretive way She also whispered in your ears things about your father, who had died a few months before your birth, in mysterious circumstances, in a prison, for his ideals. Your mother took refuge in a room tucked away in the backyard of a rich man's house and it was in there that she gave birth to you—in hiding.

Possibly you would have died of the chill you were exposed to, if Misra hadn't walked in accidentally. Fortunately for you, anyway, Misra had found the room in which you were, a most convenient place to hide from Aw-Adan, who had been pestering her with advances she didn't wish to return in like manner. The room had been open and she stumbled into it, closing the door immediately behind her. She didn't realize until later that you and your mother were there: you alive and your mother dead. Hers would have to remain the only evidence one has and one has to take her word for it. She would insist that she didn't know until later who your father was. Why she waited until she had washed and fed you and mothered you—these are things of which she refuses to speak At any rate, by the time the community of relations had been informed of your existence and your mother's death, some sixteen or so hours had gone past, and it was during this time that you and Misra had become acquainted and that she made sure no one else set eyes on you. Of course, no one dared challenge her statement. As a matter of fact, it was thought very wise that you were kept an untalked-about secret, considering whose son you were; so no one outside the immediate family knew about you for a long time. It was for this reason that your mother's corpse was buried in haste and secretly too, your mother who left behind her no trace save yourself— you who were assigned to Misra as a ward, or some said as if you were her child. You were the whisper to be softly spoken. Your name was to become two syllables no one uttered openly, which meant that not only were there no Koranic blessings said in either of your ears to welcome you to this world but your presence here in this universe was not at all celebrated. You did not exist as far as many were concerned; nor did you have any identity as the country's bureaucracy required. Askar! The letter "s" in your name was gently said so as to arouse no suspicions; whereas the “k” was held in the cosiness of a tongue couched in the unspoken secrets of a sound. As-kar! It was the “r” which rolled like a cow in the hot sand after half-a-day's grazing. Askar!

The point of you was that, in small and large ways, you determined what Misra's life would be like the moment you took it over. From the moment you “took her life over”, her personality underwent a considerable change. She became a mother to you. She began walking with a slight stoop and her hip, as though ready to carry you, protruded to the side. She no longer saw as much of Aw-Adan, the priest, as she used to, a priest who used to teach her, on a daily basis, a few suras of the Koran and in whom she was slightly interested. That interest deteriorated with the passage of the days and finally petered out the way light fades when there is no more paraffin in the lamp. The point of you was that. in small and large ways, Misra, now that you were hers, saw her own childhood “as a category cradled in a bed of memories, one of which was nurtured in thoughts which alienated the child in her.”  She had had a “fatherless” child herself and the child had died a few months before you were bom. She was sad she had had to feed you on a bottle; she was sad she couldn't suckle you, offer you her own milk, her soul. Her own child had been eighteen months when he died and she had only just weaned him. Very often, in the secret chambers of her unuttered thoughts, there would cross an idea: that she probably had some milk of motherhood in her. And she would bare her breasts and make you suck them; you would turn away and refuse to be suckled and she would cry and cry and be miserable. Your crying would provide the unsung half of the chorus. She would promise you and promise herself never to try to breast-feed you again. Although she did, again and again. The question nobody is in a privileged enough position to answer, is whether or not your mother suckled you just before she died. You are in no position to confirm that. But Misra is “obsessed” with the thought that you were breast-fed by her. When pressed, she would insist, “I know, I know for sure that she did.”

Your father existed for you in a photograph of him you saw, in which he stands behind an army tank, green as the backdrop in the picture, and you were told that he had “liberated” the tank, while fighting for the Western Somali Liberation Movement, of which he remained an active member until his last second, brave as the stories narrated about him. Your mother existed for you in a suckle you do not even recall and there is nobody to dispute Misra's theory that your mother actually suckled you. One thing is very clear. You did not inherit from her any treasures; if anything, she bequeathed to you only a journal and stories told you in snippets by others. And what did you bequeath to Misra? There is a photograph taken when you were very, very small; there is a hand, most definitely yours, stretched outwards, away from your own body, searching for
another
hand—most probably hers, a hand to touch, a hand to help and to give assurances. Also, there is one of the pictures which she still has and which has survived all the turmoil of wars and travel and displacements, a picture in which you are alone, in a bathtub, half-standing and playfully splashing in the joy of the water's soapy foaminess. In the photograph, there is a hand of a woman—Misra's most likely—a hand reaching out to make contact with yours but which accidentally “hovers”, like a hawk, over your private parts—which the hand doesn't quite touch! And there is, in the picture, a patch of a stain, dark as blood, a stain which your eyes fall on and which you stare at.

But most important of all, you bequeathed to Misra the look in your eye when she walked in that evening, running away from Aw-Adan's lusty attentions. At times, she saw you reproduce a look which she associated with what she could remember of her own father; and at others, she saw another which she identified as her son's—before he was taken ill and died.

It was a great pity, she thought, that there was no maternal milk she could offer to you, her young charge. But there was plenty of her and she gave it: she kept you warm by tucking you between her breasts, she held you close to her body so she could sense your movements, so she might attend to you whenever you stirred: you shared a bed, the two of you, and she smelled of your urine precisely in the same way you smelled of her sweat: upon your body were printed impressions of her fingerprints, the previous night's moisture: yours and hers.

III

She nourished you, not only on food paid for by a community of relations, but on a body of opinion totally her own. With you, young as you were, needy and self-sufficient as an infant, she could choose to be herself—she could walk about in front of you in the nude if she wanted to, or could invite Aw-Adan to share, with the two of you, the small bed which creaked when they made love, a bed onto whose sagged middle you rolled, sandwiched as you were between them. When awake, and if you were the only person in the room, Misra spoke
at
you, saying whatever it was that she had intended to, talking about the things which bothered or pleased her. But there was something she did only in your or Aw-Adan's presence. She spoke Amharic. She cursed people in her language. To her, it didn't matter whether you understood it or not. What mattered to her was the look in your eyes, the look of surprise or incomprehension; a look which took her back to the first encounter: yours and hers.

Because of her relations with you, and because you were so attached to her, Misra's status in the community became a controversial topic. To many members of the community, she was but that “maidservant who came from somewhere else, up north” and they treated her despicably, looking down upon her and calling her all sorts of things. It was said that her name wasn't even Misra. However, no one bothered to check the source of the rumour. No one took the trouble to reach the bottom of the mystery. But who was she really? To you, she was the cosmos and hers was the body of ideas upon which your growing mind nourished. It didn't matter in the least whether she came from upper Ethiopia or not, neither did it matter in the least if she had been abducted by a warrior from one of the clans north of yours when she was seven. Maidservant or no, she meant the world to you. Also, you believed that no one knew her as well as you did, no one needed her as much as you and nobody studied the changes in her moods as often as you. In short, you missed her immensely when she wasn't with you. And so, with a self-abandon many began to associate with you, you cried and cried until she was brought to you. With a similar self-surrender, you displayed the pleasure of her company. Which was what made some say that she had bewitched you.

She taught you how best you should make use of your own body. She helped you leam to wash it, she assisted you in watching it grow, like the day's shadow, from the shortest to the longest purposelessness of an hour; she familiarized you with the limitations of your own body. When it came to your soul, when it came to how to help your brain develop, she said she couldn't trust herself to deal with that satisfactorily. Not then, anyway. Was this why she went and sought Aw-Adan's help?

Aw-Adan and you didn't take to each other right from your first encounter. You didn't like the way he out-stared you, nor did you like him when Misra paid him all her attention, leaving you more or less to yourself. He commented on the look in your eyes: a look he described as “wicked and satanic”. To defend you, she described the look in your eyes as “adulted”. Aw-Adan did not appear at all convinced. Then she went on to say, “To have met death when not quite a being, perhaps this explains why he exists primarily in the look in his eyes. Perhaps his stars have conferred upon him the fortune of holding simultaneously multiple citizenships of different kingdoms: that of the living and that of the dead; not to mention that of being an infant and an adult at the same time.” Disappointed with her explanation, Aw-Adan went away, promising he would never see her again.

But he came back. He was in love with her—or so she believed. And as usual, he couldn't resist commenting upon the fact that she had organized her life around you: you were “her time” as he put it; for she awoke, first thing in the morning, not to say her prayers but to attend to your needs. And what was she to you? To you, said Aw-Adan, she was your “space”: you moved about her body in the manner an insect crawls up a wall, even-legged, sure-footed and confident. And he continued, “Allah is the space and time of all Muslims, but not to you, Misra, Askar is.” He didn't see anything wrong in what he said. But then how could he? He was jealous.