Throwing Sparks (11 page)

I thought the covers would conceal my frenzied movements, but Aunt Khayriyyah saw me, as though she had been lying in wait for just such an act to provoke her anger. It was my first sexual encounter and, at first blush, a foretaste of my unbridled physical appetites.

Before I could finish, Aunt Khayriyyah barged in and burst into a screaming fit that went on the better part of three days. Even much later, whenever she recalled that event, she would grab me with one hand and pinch whatever part of my body her other hand could reach. If that did not quell her fury, she would get hold of a length of cord and use it to vent her wrath, screaming the foulest obscenities her tongue could muster as she whipped me.

Aunt Khayriyyah humiliated me with all manner of punishment and I harboured untold bitterness towards this odious woman no man would ever look at.

‘Come on, boy,’ she would later say viciously. ‘Pump it up like a jack-hammer.’ My aunt was using the nickname the young men in the neighbourhood originally gave me, although the moniker was later shortened to ‘Hammer’. We used to say those on the receiving end had been ‘hammered’.

The hanky-panky under the covers with my cousin was disastrous at first in that I became the object of everyone’s scrutiny. Gradually, however, people looked elsewhere, except for Aunt Khayriyyah, who continued to watch my every move.

To this day and after all of these years, I still do not understand what impelled her to lead me astray, or what her motives were for crippling me. It was enough to drive anyone to assist Azrael, the Angel of Death, to set her hateful soul free.

6

Nothing falls upwards, for the heavens are beyond our reach. The act of falling is what brings us down.

When I was on the verge of the precipice, absolutely no one extended a hand to prevent my fall. Everyone just stood by and watched. My fall was not the type that ends with blood splattering everywhere.

My father died when he fell from scaffolding. His workmates climbed down and carried him carefully to the hos­pital where he was hooked up to a respirator. But his lungs collapsed from the pressure of the oxygen and he had to be taken off the respirator after his internal organs were satur­ated with blood.

It was my half-brother Ibrahim who took charge of the burial and hosted the condolence gathering with the help of some of our relatives. It may not have been deliberate, but even though I was the eldest of our father’s children, I stood behind Ibrahim in the condolence line.

We were hardly old enough for such a line, and a host of close relatives jostled to the front. I found myself almost at the end of the line; at any rate, I felt I had little connection with the recently departed.

Even some of Ibrahim’s friends were further up the line than I was and did not even bother to offer me their condolences. To them, I was just a failure – a heretic even – and had been written off as the lowest of the low.

Aunt Khayriyyah mourned her brother a long time. She blamed his fall on my mother and me, and secretly vowed to make our lives a living hell.

There is no helping hand for those who have gone astray.

Due to gravitational pull, falling is actually a gradual pro­cess. It occurs as a succession of moments, each taking us a little further down, closer to the bottom. We do not hit rock bottom in one fell swoop.

Aunt Khayriyyah knocked me off balance, brought me to the edge of the precipice and then proceeded to push me into its gravitational embrace.

She did not watch me like a hawk out of any genuine desire to set me straight. Rather, she used my deviant behaviour to vent her own, deep-seated rancour towards my mother, a woman she detested because she felt my father had married below his station. Aunt Khayriyyah did little to conceal her hostility; her every breath exuded bitterness.

She was bent on demonstrating my mother’s womb carried only rotten seed, and blamed her for my bad behaviour in every imaginable way. Sometimes, she would claim that she feared I might land in jail; other times, she would point out that my debauchery was at odds with our lineage. Once, she even went so far as to say that she feared I would be struck blind and tossed into a shallow grave.

I likened my aunt to a bush of prickly pears, its limbs sharp with spikes and its fruit covered in a down of thistles.

She never found a way out of her bitter wasteland. She was ten years older than my father, but no one had ever asked for her hand in marriage: no one could covet that fruit or coax any femininity from that harsh and desolate bush.

Aunt Khayriyyah was a thin, hard woman, inflexible as a tempered steel rod; even her smell was vaguely metallic. She never talked when she could bellow, and her tongue dripped with the same venom that coursed through her veins. There was simply never a moment when she was not mean.

Even when she was supposedly offering well-intentioned advice, she was in fact leading me astray. She made sure that once I had set out, there was no turning back. She goaded and taunted me as I climbed the neighbourhood blacklist until I came in second only to Issa.

Aunt Khayriyyah was the first person to train me in the ways of evil. Any misdeed on my part and she was there, first as the facilitator and then as the prosecutor. She was the first to find out about my misdemeanours because it was invariably she who had set me up.

We stumble on pleasure by chance and become hooked. Draining the cup to the last drop, we do not realise that it is leading to our downfall. Sensual gratification provides exquisite moments of abandon, but every time we experience the bliss of dissolution, the pool of darkness widens. Still we persist until we go into freefall. Sensuality is the chasm set in our path to snatch our lives from us and to alienate us from life.

I had been given the job of looking after Aunt Khayriyyah’s sheep and making sure they were all in by evening, tied up in the pen right behind our house. She had a prized ram that earned its keep by propagating her own modest flock as well as by servicing the neighbours’ ewes for a fee.

The ram was tethered separately from the rest of the sheep and whenever my aunt selected the ewes she wanted ser­viced, she watched them in the act. She would watch with bated breath and enraptured as the ram leapt up tirelessly on to the ewes.

‘I want you to be virile, like this ram,’ she told me. ‘You need to make up for your father who planted his seed in polluted soil.’

I was too young to understand the exact meaning of virility or to comprehend her implacable contempt for my mother. All I wanted was her approval and I longed to be worthy of her pride, like the ram. So I began doing what I had seen the ram do, jumping on top of the ewes and slithering off their backs.

Just as a spark lit by friction grows into fire, so too the precocious kindling of physical excitement leads to an insati­able desire for consummation.

In my mind, I was doing something truly great that would gain me Aunt Khayriyyah’s unquestioning approval. I excelled in the role of the noble ram, cleaving, rubbing, cresting and, finally, experiencing the delectable languor that spread through my joints. I had no understanding of the nature of this precocious pleasure: all I wanted was for my aunt to be pleased with me. I went at the ewes hoping to demonstrate my prowess.

My aunt began to notice that I was gone a long time when she sent me to the sheep pen, and she came to realise that I was trying to follow the example of her prized ram. She was convinced the ram and I were of the same ilk, but before savouring her vindictiveness and punishing me, she would enjoy the sight a few more times.

She grabbed hold of my ear, her nails digging into the soft flesh. ‘May God curse you, boy!’ she cried. ‘Only the damned do it with sheep!’

I froze.

‘Son of a bitch, now you’ve ruined their meat. And their milk!’

I was upset and confused partly because I had genuinely believed she would have approved. But instead of praise, I had been given the usual tongue-lashing.

But I was hooked and rubbed against anything that came my way to pleasure myself.

Aunt Khayriyyah began to take a different approach, goading me to forms of deviancy she carefully selected. Dangling me like a bucket, she flung me down into the well of debauchery.

One of the neighbour’s young daughters, Souad, came to our house carrying a tray of stew that her mother had prepared. It was a gift to my mother who had been unwell. Aunt Khayriyyah went to the door.

‘Looks like you’re going to be well-endowed, girl. Just like your mother,’ said Aunt Khayriyyah as she ran her hand over the girl’s little breasts, already beginning to bud with the approach of puberty. She turned and, winking at me, added, ‘Now
that’s
what I call meat on the bone.’

I gave up chasing Aunt Khayriyyah’s ewes and pursued Souad instead. She was not only accessible but she welcomed my trailing behind her as we searched the neighbourhood for a safe place to play. She turned down all of my suggestions, and in the end she chose where and when we should go to avoid getting caught.

Souad wanted one riyal since, she insisted, grooms had to pay their brides a dowry. I disagreed and we started to argue, our voices carrying in the stillness of nightfall. I offered her half the sum, but she flatly refused, so I promised her the remainder just as soon as I got hold of some money. I proceeded to fish around for some change I kept tucked in my undergarments.

I had thought we would be on a secret mission somewhere without leaving a trace. She had chosen Jalal Mukbir’s house, wedged between two sharp bends in the alleyway, because it was her favourite place to go and play bride and groom. It was also suitably dark since she had broken the light in the stairwell.

The night we chose for this children’s wedding was ill-starred, however. We did not know that Jalal Mukbir’s wife had invited a group of women to come and celebrate the circumcision of her second child or that the stairwell light had recently been fixed.

We stood in a corner of the stairwell, with only a faint glimmer of light from the roof, arguing about whether or not I could touch her buttocks. I got annoyed with her and cursed and, pulling her towards me, yanked her hair.

At first she fought back but then she gave in so that when, a minute later, the stairs were flooded with light from the landing above, we were caught clinging to each other half naked and grunting like two puppies learning to pant. We were just getting to the part where I had to push into her.

After a moment of stunned silence, all hell broke loose as the women on the landing above erupted into a frenzy of shouting and screaming. I pulled up my underwear and bolted out of the building, running for my life.

After that, the women warned their daughters – and their sons too – never to go near me or play with me again. The older girls, especially, were on notice.

The following day I could tell that all the boys from my circle of friends were avoiding me. Tahani tried to invite me to join her set of friends, but her older brother would not hear of it. Her eyes followed me as I went in search of a group of children who would let me play with them.

Souad was a child-sized whore.

Little girls learn very young that their smile is marketable, and that is the first step to perdition. They become harlots while still young and attractive and later, in their waning years, they become go-betweens. This opinion was proven when I ran into Souad at the Palace gates thirty years later. (I also used that chance encounter to pay off my long-standing debt of half a riyal.)

Souad was a child whose mother encouraged her to dally with the boys of the neighbourhood and wrest whatever she could from them by fooling around. Souad was born of a woman with a loose tongue and a demeanour to match. She was the offspring of a reluctant marriage which the groom disavowed immediately after the wedding ceremony. As the fruit of that unhappy union, Souad became the neighbourhood’s plaything – boys toyed with her according to the extent of their bargaining skills.

Her mother had led the way. Women are like wooden planks, she told Souad, ever ready for a nail, be it crooked or straight. It did not matter whether the plank was thick or thin, whether it was hard or soft, long or short, as long as the owner of the nail could pay the price for hammering it into the wood.

Souad was nicknamed the ‘Bride’ because she loved to play bride and groom and especially loved to pocket the loose change that the boys handed her for a chance to hammer their nails in.

When she had suggested going to Jalal Mukbir’s house, I never imagined that
I
would end up being a feast for the eyes of the women glaring down at us from the landing, their eyes practically popping out of their sockets. The incident inflamed the lust of the women, three of whom started to stalk me. There were countless retellings of what had been observed, and a good deal of exaggeration inevitably crept into the many versions, including the rumour that I had a third leg.

The first to try to verify the claim was Souad’s mother herself. She repeatedly tried to entice me to come to her house when everyone was asleep. After that, there was Mona, whose husband worked for the health directorate, and then Iman. All three devised ways to be alone with me and see for themselves what all the tongues were wagging about after the scandal with Souad.

Transgressing became a way of life.

I was young and hot-headed and I left a broken heart here and there. The three of us – Osama, Issa and I – hurtled into young adulthood reckless and hardened.