Throwing Sparks (12 page)

*  *  *

Even when we are accustomed to promiscuity from a young age, we occasionally yearn for the warm and comforting embrace of tenderness. We enjoy recollecting moments of unsullied intimacy and feeling released from the squalor of our aberrant behaviour.

Tahani was tender-hearted and always stood by me. Even after my name was dirt and none of the other children wanted to play with me, she found ways to include me; she managed to find some justification for us to be together.

We walked the first stretch of the way to school together, down a long winding street that came to a fork. Then she would go on her way to the girls’ school and I would catch the bus to mine.

Many girls walked to school, either alone or in groups. The boys walked behind, ogling them brazenly even though they wore abayas. Boys and girls from our neighbourhood woke up looking forward to this early morning interlude when furtive love messages could be exchanged – a word here, a glance there – before we filed into our different schools.

Tahani chose to walk to school by herself and never strayed far from my footsteps.

We walked in silence, our hearts aflutter, after listening to pop songs we thought were written just for us. We walked to school closer and closer together until, one morning, our hands brushed against each other. After school that day, whenever I looked up at her window, she would be there, her face behind the lattice, watching me smile or wave.        

I was caught between two window screens: Tahani’s amorous glances from one and Aunt Khayriyyah’s unrelenting surveillance from the other. I would escape into the alleyways where I could hope that no one would be tracking me.

I already had an atrocious reputation in the neighbourhood which, with every new scandal, was further tarnished. Despite her attempts, Tahani could not convince those around her that I was not in fact a complete scoundrel. She confided that she wished I would stop misbehaving, which provided everyone with an excuse to shun me. She also warned me to stay away from her first cousin, Osama, as well as from Issa.

Vowing to put the past behind me, I did as she wished. I stopped chasing other girls and gave up the company of Issa and Osama.

I even started going to the mosque. I noted the looks of utter disbelief from the worshippers as I prostrated myself, remorseful and teary-eyed. My half-brother Ibrahim was the happiest to see me there, plying me with books and urging me to attend recitation practice.

But a bitter plant will not turn sweet regardless of how much it is watered. A leopard does not change its spots.

*  *  *

Ibrahim and I came from the same wellspring, although we were born of two different women. While we were sown in radically different soils, we mirrored one another. From earliest childhood, the mosque had captured Ibrahim’s heart. He spent most of his time there, diligently engrossed in prayer or memorising the Qur’an, which of course won him favour in our father’s eyes. The disparity in our conduct was so great that not only was it immediately visible but it also became proverbial. One of the older men in the neighbourhood coined his own phrase to express the dramatic difference between us: ‘Tariq and Ibrahim come from the same water – one is a stinking lech and the other a paragon of virtue.’

After Ibrahim suggested I should attend a religious study group at the mosque, I readily agreed because I really did want to cleanse myself and come closer to God. We gathered in a circle around the sheikh who led the study group and who, fixing his disapproving gaze on me, preached about how homosexuality and fornication were unanimously condemned by all religious traditions. He stared into my face, enunciating his words slowly, keeping his jaws tightly clenched.

‘Only those who abandon the way of sin are truly repentant for the days they have squandered.’ He looked straight into my eyes as he added, ‘I believe some of you truly regret the grave offences you have committed and that have angered the Merciful.’ He paused for effect. ‘But not all sins are created equal. The sins of some among us today are enough to shake the very throne of the Creator. And I submit to you that a dog’s crooked tail can never be straightened.’ He paused again and then added for good measure, ‘
Never
– even if he enters the mosque and sits among us.’

At that point, he broke from his formal sermonising tone into a vulgar vernacular as he recounted the rumours about the three of us – Issa, Osama and me – without naming any names.

That was the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back. I started to heckle him and jeered at his vulgarity until, after several interruptions, he threw me out.

First impressions are indelible. A sinner who tries to redeem himself faces a bar that is always set that much higher, always just out of reach. I went from one study group to another and listened to a succession of speakers expounding on the nature of sin, ruminating on the subject like some pre-digested and regurgitated fodder. Like cardamom whose seeds are ground to a powder while the pod resists pulverisation, our transgressions were excoriated but we emerged unscathed.

Eager to support my search for guidance, Ibrahim accompanied me to religious lectures at various mosques. On one such occasion, the officiating imam gave a sermon after the evening prayer on the life of the Islamic scholar, Sufyan al-Thawri, a deeply flawed man who had also needed guidance. The imam focused on the error of al-Thawri’s ways but made almost no reference to his legacy.

Time and again, preachers would cite the Hadith to demonstrate that man was able to overcome sinfulness through rectitude. However, they only ever emphasised the wrong­doing and not the good deeds. Human beings, including prophets, do not appreciate being singled out only for their errors and weaknesses.

During another deadening study group, and maybe by way of providing material for gossip, the sheikh enumerated all the errors and sins of the prophets. He had found enough material for an entire series of sermons and he developed the theme at various sessions after evening prayers. I went along with this until he got to the sinfulness of the venerable prophet Jonah, at which point I decided I could not stand another minute of this stupid, bullying nonsense. I got up to leave, convinced that my struggle to turn over a new leaf was in vain; I had already started to believe that I would never be able to put my own sinfulness behind me, just as an apple could never fall upwards.

Whenever she saw me getting ready to go and attend prayers or the study groups at the mosque, Aunt Khayriyyah would mutter, ‘You won’t be doing this for long. There is a streak of wickedness in you.’

The mosque circuit did not last more than a few months, after which I was back to my old tricks. Only Ibrahim and Tahani were sorry to see me give up on the mosque.

The downturn began with a nocturnal adventure with Mona, one of the three women who had stalked me after the scandal with Souad. I was on my way to the mosque when she burst out of her house, her cleavage openly showing, and asked me to come in and repair a faulty fuse in her bedroom. Her husband was away on a mission for the health directorate to vaccinate residents of coastal villages against meningitis.

I had many subsequent opportunities to sneak in to repair her bedroom light, though the lamp remained broken long after her husband’s return.

*  *  *

All these decades later, I have come to feel sorry about my lapse, now that my strength has been sapped and I stagger behind Ibrahim like a stone rolling down a precipice.

My work at the Palace did not brook a moral conscience. Regardless of the job, the mere fact of working there required the suspension of any kind of moral standard. The only way to get a return on one’s investment from working inside the Palace was to disregard the values that existed on the outside. That is why I embraced every forbidden pleasure, convinced that my destiny lay in only one direction, that of hell.

I occasionally managed to shake off this despondency by bringing to mind conversations with Ibrahim.

‘What happens when you trip up?’ he once asked me. ‘Do you stay on the ground or do you get up?’ I did not feel like talking, so he answered for me. ‘You get up, dust yourself off and keep going.’ He added earnestly, ‘That’s what living is all about – you fall, you get back on your feet, you clean up and you get on with your life.’

He reminded me that God loves the return of sinners to his side, and quoted the Qur’anic verse: ‘Oh my servants who have transgressed against themselves, do not despair of God’s mercy. God forgives all sins: He is All-Forgiving, Compassionate to each.’

Even though I often went to Mecca on work-related business, it took me thirty-one years to summon up the courage to set foot inside the Mosque of the Holy Sanctuary.

On my way into and out of the city, I would drive by the gates of the Sanctuary and pause to watch the pilgrims as they picked their way among all the cars. I envied their serene faces, subdued voices and their general air of contentment. I would look up at the lofty minarets that broadcast the call to prayer, a balm to the worshippers’ hearts that dislodged any build-up of sediment and decay corroding their spirits. The faithful responded to the call feeling as secure as the pigeons who had made the Kaaba their home.

There have been many times when I decided to return to the fold – and equally many when I recoiled from the very thought. Nothing could pull me away from the darkness that had descended on my soul so long ago.

*  *  *

Left to my own devices on the streets, my day would really only start at around ten o’clock in the evening. I would roam the narrow alleyways to hang out with the drunks and listen to them rant about their woes, to look for someone to play
balut
, and to ogle the neighbours’ daughters. (This particularly angered Tahani who got wind of what I was up to from those girls who knew about our relationship.)

I also chased the boys we all lusted after. I undertook many a crowing exploit and Lu’ayy was the exception that proved the rule. He was the little creep who nearly landed me in jail. His father showed up at the police station charging that I had molested his son. My life could have taken a dramatically different course had it not been for the apathetic officer who registered the complaint.

Seeing that the process was going nowhere, Lu’ayy’s father moved his family out of town before I could hammer his son. It was a valuable lesson for me: from that day, I realised that the children of the well-to-do were a real nuisance to those of us bent on the pursuit of cheap pleasures.

After I was done cruising, I would stop by a grocery store in one of the dodgier parts of the neighbourhood, where a solitary lamp cast a ghostly light on a deserted and narrow alley.

Mustafa Qannas would emerge from the alleyway under the cover of darkness, trudging heavily, mumbling incoherently and humming a little ditty that seemed directed at me:

‘Pretty boy’s gone away, gone, gone pretty boy.

Kith and kin drool over him, but he’s afraid of strangers.

In her lap his mama holds him, and her heart I swear

 will break.

’Cos I will hold him like lovers do, like lovers do.’

Mustafa would offer me some of his revolting moonshine and I would oblige by pretending to take a few sips. He was about ten years older than me and, in his mid-twenties, was already thinking of settling down. But his wretched state and notorious reputation barred him from every door. Consequently, he spent all his time chasing after boys whom he wooed with this kind of banter.

He took the departure of Lu’ayy very badly and channelled his longing for the boy by reciting snatches of poetry. Sometimes he accompanied the words by plucking on an Arabian lyre – a
simsimiyya
– whose slack strings he was forever tightening. He had made the
simsimiyya
himself and it simply would not stay in tune.

He held me responsible for his misery after Lu’ayy was gone from the neighbourhood. When, at the height of his intoxication, Mustafa would start to slap his head with both hands and begin to wail, I would hurry away. I knew better than to stay around after he warned me once, dead sober, ‘If I find you anywhere near me when I start crying, I’m going to kill you.’

My father criticised me endlessly for keeping the company of drunks and often came looking for me in the middle of the night. If he happened to find me, he would grab me by the hair and drag me behind him like a rag doll without uttering a word – his iron grip conveying all I needed to know about the feelings roiling inside him.

As he dragged me through the alleyways, I had visions of knives being honed and waiting to spill my blood. Every time he found me in the middle of the night, I could swear he was going to kill me. But as soon as we got home, he would fling me in my aunt’s face, muttering, ‘Tie him up somewhere near you. I’ll take care of him in the morning.’

Having been roused against his will, he would go straight back to bed and fall asleep. Since he was always out of the door at dawn, he would leave the house before making good on his threat.

*  *  *

The geography of our house changed radically with the sudden decline in our numbers. Soon, no one was left but the desiccated and vitriolic Aunt Khayriyyah.

To her, I was like mould encrusted in her drinking cup that she could not dislodge. She despised me and would say I was a ‘stinking egg destined for a heap of rotting rubbish’.