Sing Like You Know the Words (4 page)

Ali Abbas was renting a single
room in a part of town not far from the university. Each morning,
in the early hours, he’d be waiting as a dismal light started to
penetrate the thin curtains. Within a few minutes the drapes would
seem translucent with the unattractive yellow glow that gradually
seeped into the grey darkness of the tiny room.

He’d already been awake for
hours. Not long after four thirty, to the accompanying sound of an
electric milk float rattling past and the staccato carillon of
empty bottles being jolted in metal crates, he would abandon
thoughts of sleep. When the dawn came, he’d be sitting quietly next
to the window, sipping weak tea and reading; pausing frequently to
polish the thick lenses of his black rimmed reading glasses.

Really this was the only time of
day when the light in his room was any good. It was tempting to
compare this meagre glow to the brilliant sunlight they’d enjoyed
at home, but that would have been false sentimentality. The truth
was that home was a fading memory; and maybe his family had been
wrong ever to call it home.

He lifted a corner of the
curtain, the better to observe the pale light of the day that was
leaking into the world. The morning was dry and it seemed as if any
gasp of a breeze had died out in the empty alley. Litter and dead
leaves lay in a mingled heap without so much as a rustle. He had no
idea where the leaves could have come from.

The view from his window was of
a back alley that was partly obscured by the high brick walls of
the terrace yards. This house had no wall, and beyond what he would
have called the garden, he could glimpse a roughly cobbled section
of street. Dustbins that the neighbours had put out for collection
the previous night were stationed like iron sentinels along the
alley.

To Ali Abbas, the dustbins were
unfamiliar and strange; galvanized cylinders with the sides pressed
into corrugations, capped with heavy lids of metal or vinyl that
were jammed hard down on the contents or balanced precariously on
the rubbish of overfilled bins. Once a week a council vehicle
squeezed down the alley in the early morning and the rough men,
cheerful and boisterous, collected the bins and emptied their
contents into the wagon or onto the street, making a great show of
hoisting the heavy receptacles onto their shoulders, and ensuring
that a robust banging and scraping of iron was heard down the
terraces as they made their progress.

Ali Abbas had seen nothing quite
like it before arriving in this country. Like so much else that was
strange to him about England, there was a ritualistic aspect to the
refuse collection that he found strangely comforting. It was
regular and orderly, clumsy and inefficient, but always the same.
You could see that bins had been emptied in that same way for a
long time. The process belonged to a style of living where things
happened as you expected.

This society was organized
around shared routines, as his previous life had been. He could
still remember it, though not so clearly now. Curiously it was the
far away times, when he’d been very small, that left the most
impression. Then at least, the sense of routine had been strong, in
the days before the trouble started. He remembered sitting with an
aunt in one of his father’s stores, playing and watching the
customers come and go, listening to their conversation and
absorbing the slow rhythm of the day that was the same as every
other day. He couldn’t remember that he’d ever been troubled by
uncertainty in those days.

But that was long ago and he
told himself that he did not much miss the past. It was only that
now his life was very different. It was time for him to prepare
breakfast, though he was not feeling the least bit hungry. A cup of
tea was enough. The aunts were always telling his mother that she
should get him to eat more: he was too thin. But Ali Abbas did not
have time to be interested in food (and maybe the aunts were too
much interested in food if it came to that). There were so many
other claims on his thoughts.

For example, the problem of the
lectures troubled him. If he was honest, Ali Abbas was dismayed
that so many of his fellow students seemed to regard lectures as
worth attending only if they had nothing more interesting to do,
such as sleeping. He reminded himself that it was different for the
others. Their parents had not needed to make sacrifices. In
England, everyone was entitled to study for a degree, provided only
that they appeared to be clever enough. That had never been the
case in Uganda and certainly once the troubles started, education
had been as hard to get as everything else.

Before that time, his parents
had been well-off, maybe even rich, though none of them had
realized it. His mother had servants around the house. He
remembered overhearing snatches of family conversation that he
hadn’t understood at the time were his father urging her to be
discreet about the domestic help.

When they had to leave home and
come to England, everything they had was left behind, but even so
they had been happy for a while; relieved to escape the African
madness and grateful that the home country had honoured the promise
stamped on their British passports (his father had never doubted
it). They counted themselves lucky; everyone knew stories about
other families who had not been so fortunate.

But relief only buoys the
spirits for so long and afterwards they started to reflect on all
that was lost. For a young boy with only vague memories looking
back and a life ahead of him, the loss was not so serious, but
these days there was a nervous edge to his mother’s voice, and a
tired anxiety in the lines around his father’s eyes that made him
seem older than his years.

In what he said, father clung
tightly to the fatalistic optimism that is part of the stock in
trade of small merchants everywhere; men who are constantly at the
mercy of events that are bigger than they are, that they cannot
hope to influence or even fully understand. But Ali Abbas had
noticed that on certain days, for no reason that he could discover,
his father’s hands would start to tremble, involuntarily, as if his
grip was failing. Of course, father had started in business again
and things were not going so badly now, but it seemed that he could
not free himself from the fear that at any moment, everything he
had worked for could be snatched away from him once more.

At university, Ali Abbas noticed
that most of the students did not have much contact with home. In
fact they never seemed to talk about their families, let alone
speak with them. There was a strange form of egoism all around,
that he couldn’t quite comprehend, as if all the students were
completely absorbed by the question of who they were, or who they
wanted to be, and had no time for anything else. Ali Abbas phoned
home every other night. Usually he spoke to his mother and father
and one or both of the sisters. It was hard to imagine a life where
you didn’t feel the need to keep in touch like that.

Comparing his life to the other
students made him embarrassed with himself. He pictured himself
hurrying to a phone box to make the call at the allotted hour.
Maybe he was making himself ridiculous, but then he reminded
himself of what they always told each other at home; that nothing
was more important than family. He couldn’t help how he felt
though; he wasn’t exactly ashamed about ringing home all the time,
but it did make him feel not quite adult.

And the monotony of those
dialogues, where neither party had anything new to say, sometimes
left him feeling desperate. He argued with himself about that too.
It doesn’t matter so much what we say as that we speak. And
monotony is calming; it can be a comfort; but not when it’s that
grinding dullness that leaves you wanting to scream. In any case,
it was too late to stage a revolt against the calls now. He should
have said something in the first weeks of his first term. Now the
routine was fixed; if he missed a day or two, his mother would drag
father up here to find him. She’d insist that some kind of tragedy
must have struck him. The image of his mother turning up at the
lecture theatre was a painful one; it was the way his daydreams
turned, more and more frequently, when he thought about home

He felt guilty about that.
Remember, that the family is who you are, he told himself often. It
has given you everything, not just the opportunity to learn, but
the motivation. This is why you have to understand big events like
the one that uprooted us. Perhaps one day you could even have a
part in the big events.

For Ali Abbas, politics and
economics were of more than academic interest: they were levers
that he’d seen were long enough to move the world on its axis. One
day he hoped to play some part in the movement. He wasn’t sure how
just yet. But now he had let his tea go cold and it was time to go
to lectures. No breakfast again today.

***

It was another of those morning
lectures that seemed to have too many empty seats. Steve Kirk, one
of the few students who Ali Abbas knew well enough to have an
occasional conversation with, complained that most of the lecturers
just re-hashed what was written in the recommended books, without
any comment or insight (and sometimes without apparent
understanding, Ali Abbas was too polite to add). Why bother going
to a lecture, Steve would say, where the lecturer is even more
bored than the students; when you could read the same information
in bed or at the library?

This line of argument disturbed
Ali Abbas, partly because he found it difficult to disagree with.
He wanted to insist that Steve was missing the point of what it was
to be at the university, but as usual he could not find the words
to express his argument. And the rest of what he wanted to say
about personal responsibility sounded ridiculously pompous even to
himself.

In any case Stephen was not here
and Ali Abbas was left to ponder what benefit he might gain by
sitting through today’s turgid recitation. The speaker was clumsily
summarising ideas that he had found vital and even exciting when
reading the original text, but which seemed more and more flat and
commonplace the longer this lecture droned on.

Afterwards, one of the girls; he
couldn’t remember her name, asked if she could borrow his notes of
the lecture from the previous week. She explained something about
having been away at a party that had unexpectedly taken up three
days. Not for the first time, Ali Abbas was glad that he never
drank. It was obvious that the girl was suffering from a hangover
even now and she had probably only dragged herself to the lecture
in hopes of begging notes from someone like him. Although he wanted
to help the girl, he was nervous as to when he might get his own
papers back.

-You could probably manage
without them, he told her. Everything that the professor said is in
chapters four, seven and eight of the textbook. I can give you the
references now if you like. The ideas are actually explained more
clearly in the book

-But I’d have to read the book
then love. And it’s such a thick one, I wouldn’t know where to
start. Go on be a darling. Thanks.

He carefully explained when and
why he needed the file back as a matter of urgency. The girl nodded
in agreement, but he could see that she wasn’t listening. Ali Abbas
handed over the notes, with misgivings. The girl thanked him and
quickly disappeared with her friends.

At eleven he visited the
refectory for a strong coffee, without milk or sugar, in accordance
with his routine. It was his only coffee of the day; the indulgence
he permitted himself before his tutorial and then afternoon in the
library.

While Ali Abbas was in the
library, he found himself musing about his fellow students. He knew
that everyone was aware that he knew the course material better
than any of them; but he was also conscious that they thought him
dull, maybe even stupid in a way that they had probably not
bothered to define to themselves. He had all the facts, but in
tutorials he offered few opinions of his own. When the other
students said things that they imagined were original, he naturally
related them to ideas that had been expressed more elegantly in the
books and commentaries he had already read. The consequence was
that everyone decided that he had nothing fresh to say for
himself.

Even his tutors seemed to be
afflicted by this ignorance of all that had already been said.
Everyone was so determined to be original that they preferred not
to know if anyone else had been there first.

He, on the other hand, did not
understand why they should place so much importance on what they
called expressing themselves. He didn’t want to be unkind, but it
was boring when they went on about subjects which it was clear they
had not studied in enough depth to have a valid opinion about. What
they expressed, badly, was an articulation of what others had said
or written earlier and with greater perceptiveness and style.

Ali Abbas couldn’t understand
how his colleagues hoped to express something new before they had
mastered the subject. But when he suggested as much to Steve Kirk,
Stephen laughed at him and told him that sometimes you had to be an
ignorant savage to be creative. Why was everyone so willing to
believe this, he wondered? Was it just an excuse for laziness, or
was he missing something?

And he didn’t want to tell his
parents how little his course mates applied themselves to their
studies. At first, neither parent would understand him; and then if
they did, they would worry about whether his course or his college
was a bad one. Ali Abbas had seen enough not to believe that other
universities were any different to this one. And since the apathy
he saw all around was a problem that he had not resolved to his own
satisfaction, there was no way to discuss it with his family.