Throwing Sparks (6 page)

Our generation was raised on fantasies and nursed on envy. Our sole inheritance was the jealousy that showed in our eyes as we leered at the mounds of savoury food, designer clothing and luxury cars, at the rivers of cash in shops and at the women who wandered through the souk wedged in between our houses and the winding alleys of the neighbourhood. The dreams nurtured on covetousness came true only in our imagin­ations. We pictured ourselves sitting in expensive restaurants, ordering endless courses of refined food. We wanted to own this or that fancy store. We fantasised that any woman could be ours for a wild evening. We clothed ourselves in those dreams until they were so soiled that we tossed them in the laundry pile and picked out fresh ones to dirty. That is what is meant by a life of hardship: a life of constantly chan­ging dream clothes that are all, in any case, illusory.

Several of the neighbourhood boys longed to leave this desert of dreams behind and went in search of the reality outside. They scattered to the four winds, like so many paper scraps floating in the air.

Our nights were like a sultry tunnel that we stole through in the incessant pursuit of furtive pleasures. As evening fell, we were overcome with suppressed longing, the flaming embers of our desire stoked by our fantasies, and we throbbed with lust against each other until we crested the wave and climaxed.

Tahani was the only bright spot in a life otherwise cloaked in darkness and gloom. She would wait for me every night like a bright guiding star shining the way for an errant wanderer.

At night her face was even more enchanting, framed by long flowing hair that nestled coyly between her twin domes whose fullness I had ascertained. Seeing her in the alleys of our neighbourhood, clutching her abaya tightly to reveal the ripeness of fruit ready for plucking and weary of waiting, I was stung by jealousy. I could no longer stand the mere exchange of letters and glances.

One day, I fell into step with her, handed her a note and hurried off. The note read: ‘If you don’t let me spend some time with you, you’ll never see me again.’

Tahani relented after I disappeared from view for two weeks, and started to let me into her bedroom at night. She would make sure everyone in her household was asleep before opening the door; it was so late that even the narrow lane deep inside the neighbourhood where we lived was fast asleep.

I would slip in and spend what was left of the night going back and forth tirelessly over the peaks of her two mounds, not daring to approach her virtue but inhaling the scent of her body sprinkled with aromatic oils and the mists of her desire.

One night, I almost reached the point of no return. But Tahani snapped out of the mood and dug her nails into whatever part of my body was within reach. She drew blood and I instinctively pulled away even though I was still wildly desperate for release. Shocked by what she had done, she sat me up to dab the scratch marks dry, licking the drops of blood with her tongue.

She started to cry as a stream of apologies rushed out of her. ‘I love you, Tariq, more than my soul,’ she said. ‘I don’t want your love to die in my heart.’

She looked away for a second.

‘I’ll be yours as long as I live.’ She added after a moment’s silence, ‘Just don’t spoil our love.’                        

*  *  *

Once the Palace was completed, it cast its shadow over the entire front of the neighbourhood, blocking the sea breeze. Between houses that were practically joined at the hip, the air hung so thick and heavy that it caused our chests to tighten.

A body submerged in water is full of ease; we, however, ended up feeling like sea monsters for whom dry land was a burial ground. Had we remained immersed any longer, we would have been swallowed whole. After the Palace was built and its massive walls obscured the blue waters, the sea no longer held the appeal it once had and going to the beach became an arduous task.

In the late afternoons, those of us who were swimming enthusiasts used to meet up with Waleed Khanbashi to be driven to the now distant shore. We would drag ourselves away from the waves only when night fell and our fear of lurking sea creatures outweighed our desire to remain in the cool water.

We emerged dripping and shivering, our teeth chattering wildly since we had nothing to dry off with until we returned to Waleed’s car. Being resourceful, he always brought along tatty old sarongs – two or three people having to share one – and charging each user half a riyal for that privilege. By the third person’s turn, the makeshift towel was hopelessly wet and useless.

Before the Palace was built, there were two places where we liked to submerge our bodies in the sea: the Plage, a stretch of shoreline to the south of Jeddah that fell into disuse after its access became unsafe, and Al-Hamra, which the city’s mayor turned into a promenade adorned with sculptures by international artists and kept gleaming by an army of labourers. For many of us from remote neighbourhoods, just being on the promenade was something to boast about and gave us bragging rights over kids from even more remote neighbourhoods. But it also deepened our sense of grievance when we remembered what this length of asphalt did to us.

More than just screening off the azure sea, the concrete walls lining the shore served to split the population, driving a deep wedge between people that was based on inequity and class.

Jeddah woke to hundreds of workers walling off its shoreline. The sea was parcelled off and no one batted an eyelid as city councillors and their retinue of bureaucrats, lawyers, brokers and developers all got their share. Nothing was left for the rest of the population.

The fishermen were the first to suffer from this de facto exclusion from their time-honoured fishing grounds. They never gave voice to their complaints and one after the other collected his fishing tackle and bid a heart-broken farewell to the sea. Their traditional way of life was gone for ever, buried as surely as the surf that once lapped at their feet.

When they first brought in the tonnes of earth from nearby wadis to reclaim the sea, Hamed Abu Gulumbo looked around for his favourite place on the shorefront and found it gone. He was a fisherman with a gift for poetic improvisation and from that moment, he began to hold impromptu poetry sessions with his fishing companions, warning them of the coming drought.

At first his friends mocked his verses and interpreted Hamed’s many references to the impending loss of their way of life as a lament for a deceased lover. His friends were amused by his poetry, all the more since he responded to their ridicule with even more verses. They were not yet overly concerned. Whenever they saw him, they teased, ‘So when are they going to steal the last wave from us?’

They changed their tune the day Uthman Kabashi got up and left, turning his back on all of them.

Uthman had inherited his trade from his shipbuilding father. Like him, Uthman was mild-mannered, tolerant and respectful. He was a man of his word who inspired trust. His trade was confined to selling affordable boats that he brought in from Port Sudan, giving the always cash-strapped fishermen plenty of time to pay for their new vessels. But one fine day without warning, the man whose word was gold reneged on all the contracts. This decision, which so undermined his standing, was made the instant he saw all the heavy earth-moving equipment on the shoreline, preparing to start work on the Palace foundations.

Uthman had close ties to the head fisherman, Sheikh Omar al-Qirsh, who knew his friend’s unimpeachable character in matters of business. Sheikh Omar had had no reservations in awarding Uthman contracts to supply the fishermen with waterproof boats that could withstand many years at sea.

‘What is going on, Sheikh Omar?’ asked Uthman as they took in the swarm of busy machines and labourers on the shore.

‘Well, you can see for yourself,’ replied Sheikh Omar. ‘They say the whole seafront will be reclaimed.’

That night, Uthman met the fishermen and told them he was cancelling all contracts. Faced with an eruption of accus­ations that he was breaking his word and reneging on his commitments, he tried to reason with them that he was only acting in their best interest. Clearly, he argued, business in this particular trade was about to founder and he did not want to see their meagre resources squandered on buying boats that would never set sail.

But his reasoning failed to convince the stubborn fishermen and so Uthman arranged for a private meeting with his friend Sheikh Omar.

‘I’m very sorry,’ he told him as he handed him all the advance money he had received for the new boats. ‘Please tell everyone how sorry I am.’

The fishermen had planned to lure Uthman to another meeting to pelt him with their turbans and force him to go back on his decision. But their plan was foiled when they caught sight of his huddled figure on a dinghy heading out to rendezvous with a freighter sailing to Port Sudan. Their deeply cherished dreams had evaporated and all that was left for them was to shower Uthman with their curses.

Uthman’s fall from grace did not last long, however. The men soon found out for themselves that they were being evicted from their fishing grounds. Long after the land grab, they finally acknowledged the new reality they had to contend with and realised that their beloved fishing spots had as little substance as the bleeding colours of brightly hued turbans floating in the water.

Issa’s father, Youssef Radini – or Abu Issa as he was better known – never forgave Uthman for cancelling the contracts, even though he knew Uthman was not to blame for the fishermen’s predicament. Abu Issa cursed Uthman to the end of his days, likening the man to a wide-eyed owl – a creature that never sees the light and that jinxes the day when it does.

But after most of the fishermen restored Uthman’s good name, they also started to pay attention to Hamed’s improvised poetry. Their change of heart brought no joy to Hamed.

‘We all failed to protect the sea,’ he said dismissively as he picked up his nets and tossed them into his skiff. ‘Now go find yourselves a new sea if you can.’

A deep slumber descended on the fishermen and a chill blew over the Firepit, leaving residents who lived on the water’s edge sedated and numb to the depredation of their land and fishing grounds. They were confident the sea could not be purloined since they thought their multitude of land titles and deeds of sale, duly stamped with thumbprints and tucked away in cupboards, would protect their interests. Their land, whether on the shore or adjacent to it, had been passed down from father to son for generations. But when they showed up with their documents in the halls of justice, they discovered the decree for expropriation had already been issued; flying in every direction, they lodged complaints. All their protests fell on deaf ears. The seafront was parcelled off to the highest bidders and the high and mighty succeeded in hiding the seafront from view.

That long stretch of shore was where neighbourhood folk used to head out at dusk to freshen up and to wash their sheep and cooking utensils. By the time residents awoke from their stupor, their patch of the sea was already buried under hundreds of thousands of tonnes of earth and divided up into valuable plots of real estate and housing developments. None of the carefully preserved deeds confirming their ownership could help them recover the lands of their ancestors. However many complaints and appeals they lodged, their skiffs were once more battered by the high waves on the open sea and all the heavy construction equipment just went on shifting earth, turning water into new land.

The fisherman-poet, Hamed, watched this vast carpeting of the sea with tears in his eyes and redoubled his output of free-flowing verses. But his voice could not compete with the roar of the engines and he watched helplessly as the new concrete jungle was poured over the sea that had given him life and cradled him. When the driver of a bulldozer reached his skiff’s mooring spot, Hamed could not bear the sight any longer and he threw himself in front of it. By the time his body could be pulled free, his family had already dug a grave for him at the cemetery.

Hamed died and his death accomplished nothing; no one did anything and the earthworks continued.

*  *  *

Sheikh Omar, the head fisherman, did his best to look for the silver lining on the horizon, beyond the bulldozers, and failed. Sighing heavily, he told his men, ‘Our mayor has turned Jeddah into a giant sugar cube and the swarm of flies feasting on it has dried up the sea.’

From there, it was all downhill: the fishermen’s moorings, our playgrounds, our swimming spots, all our favourite places, plunged down into the memory hole. We were being eaten alive. Drawn by the bloodletting of our mangled flesh, the sharks came in for the kill. Our playgrounds and swimming spots were stolen, and with them our childhood.

Day after day, the sea was walled in as we lay slumbering. Walls engendered more walls, followed by pavilions and palaces, beach bungalows and amusement parks. Now if we wanted to go swimming, we had to travel a good distance north.

The Palace had taken over our stomping grounds and become the object of everyone’s fantasy. It had a hold on our imaginations. Searching for some sliver of shore wide enough to swim in, our patience would be completely exhausted as we circumvented the gargantuan spread of the Palace grounds. Once the towering walls were in place and there were watchful eyes everywhere, we could not walk anywhere near the perimeter of the Palace, nor could we approach the inviting piers beyond.

When we were children, the shoreline was wide open. The sea’s endless expanse welcomed our mischievous play and the water buoyed our little bodies as we frolicked until sunset.