Authors: John Freeman
A few hours later a group of children running after dragonflies on the edge of a pond discovered the body of a newborn girl floating in dark red water. Suspecting that it was the jettisoned fruit of a sinful union, the holy men and women refused to allow it to be buried in the graveyard proper. Its resting place was to be the patch of adjacent ground reserved for those wives, mothers, sisters and daughters who had disgraced their families by running away from home.
The divide wasn’t just on the surface: an ‘underground wall’ – delving to the depth of fifteen feet – kept the dishonourable corpses separate from the honourable ones.
W
amaq and his brother Qes were travelling towards the mosque on their motorbike when they ran out of petrol.
Qes, riding pillion, and the more daring of the two, hopped backwards on to the ground before the machine had come to a halt. He was sixteen years old, his hair long and disorderly, and he had a mole above the right corner of his mouth that was considered lucky or unlucky, depending on the part of the country. Wamaq was a year older but no taller. He wore a green cap embroidered with tiny orange beads and dozens of circular mirror pieces, fragments of the world sliding in and out of them as he moved. There was a faint but permanent welt under his jaw. He had acquired it at the age of eleven when, to make him confess to the theft of a wristwatch, a policeman had put a noose around his neck and made him stand out in the open on a block of ice, the sun and the warmth of his own body strangling him slowly as they melted the ice.
Wamaq got down and lowered the battered 50cc motorbike on to the ground, leaving it there for a minute. The dregs in the petrol tank could be made to flow into the carburettor that way, good for another kilometre or so.
The last time they were in the area the brothers had found work on a crew constructing the river-island mosque. Having heard Qes’s singing voice during the daylight hours, the other workers had insisted he make the first ever call to prayer from the mosque. He made believable every song he sang, as though he’d written it himself. You could hear his life in his voice. Afterwards Wamaq and Qes and the others were told to move on and to stay away for a period. The brothers were returning after about twenty months.
As he stood beside the horizontal motorbike, Wamaq wiped his sweat-covered face on his sleeve and looked around. Qes had taken a small music box from his rucksack and was turning its crank: the inch-long steel drum began to rotate, its pins catching against a metal comb – and the air filled with a melody of the purest notes. Qes had made the device himself and the music too was his own invention.
These brothers were what they appeared at first glance: two of the millions of youths who did menial work across the land – almost invisible, poor but resourceful, the lines on the palms of their hands shifting and realigning hourly. Their mother had had tuberculosis, and their father was an imam who had been cast out of his mosque for drinking alcohol, swaying a little while making the call to prayer, taking quick mouthfuls from a bottle of
sugarcane
liquor before giving his brilliant and far-famed Friday sermons, saying he needed it for inspiration and eloquence. When their parents died, the boys continued to drift on their own.
As Wamaq got the motorbike running again, Qes walked to the edge of the path and positioned the music box on a large stone. ‘Do you think it can be seen?’ he asked his brother without turning around.
‘Yes, I am sure someone will find it. Let’s go.’
They resumed their journey. Qes had lost count of the number of music boxes he’d dispersed around the province, all issuing the same song when operated.
‘We are hoping to find work,’ Wamaq said to the man on the bicycle who was going in the same direction as them. He had reduced the speed of the motorbike to be able to converse with the stranger.
‘There aren’t many good jobs here,’ the man replied, adding, ‘You are young – try Dubai. Or a Western country, if you can get in.’
They were gliding side by side. Wamaq and Qes introduced themselves and after being silent for a while the man asked, ‘What kind of a name is Wamaq?’
‘I was named after a poet.’
‘A poet?’ The man looked at him.
‘
At night my lost memory of you returned
.’
‘That’s a film song.’
‘It’s a poem of his turned into a song for a film, yes.’
The man gave a frown. ‘I am sure I heard somewhere that he was a …’ He struggled to recall the word. ‘… a socialist. Allah annihilate them.’
Wamaq didn’t know what a socialist was but he felt compelled to defend his name. ‘So what if a person is a socialist? As long as he keeps the promises he makes.’
The man did not respond and soon went down a side path, raising a hand in farewell.
The brothers were taken aback by the transformation the mosque had brought to the riverbank. It was a combination of a small bazaar and a circus of holy attractions. Things were being weighed and measured with a view to profit in either this life or the next. There were twenty boats for pilgrims wishing to cross the water. The mosque itself had been expanded and was large enough to be clearly visible from the bank, almost occupying the entire middle of the oval-shaped island – a handsome marble facade attached to a wide complex of prayer rooms and verandas, and courtyards that incorporated many of the ancient banyan trees. The original dome, a fibreglass replica of the one on Muhammad’s mausoleum, which had been ferried across with difficulty on the last night of construction, had now been replaced with several varicoloured tiled domes, all with milk-white doves sitting on them.
The ascetic as well as the ambitious; men of genuine piety as well as those who just hoped to rub up against women and good-looking boys; gentle mendicants as well as jihadis who fantasized about nothing but what they’d do to the American president if ever they got hold of him. Wamaq and Qes explored the throng on the riverbank, drinking chilled Pepsi-Colas and sharing a packet of savoury cumin biscuits. The precarious wandering life had instilled in them a reluctance to interfere, and so they didn’t say anything when they learned that the mosque was believed to be the work of angels.
Within the hour they had both found jobs – Wamaq as a boatman, rowing back and forth between the riverbank and the island, and Qes as a manual worker, digging and lifting. They rented bedding and sleeping space at the caravanserai and were given a locker for their rucksacks, and a safe space at the back to park the motorbike. As they were having their lunch at a roadside restaurant, a little girl appeared and stood grinning at them. Wamaq looked at her. ‘What is it?’
She gave a shy nod in Qes’s direction. ‘Is it true?’
‘You’re famous already,’ he said to Qes.
Qes smiled at her, lifted the spoon from the bowl of lentils before him and licked it clean. The girl laughed with thrilled delight when he held it to his heart and it remained hanging there.
She went away merrily and he detached the spoon from his body and put it back in the bowl.
‘How far away is the place where you’d be working?’ Wamaq asked.
‘It’s a big house half a mile away. They must be adding an extension.’
‘It’ll be hard work. You can take the motorbike if you want.’
‘No one ever drowned in sweat.’ He drank from his glass and said, ‘And I know I can take the motorbike if I want.’
‘Stay below thirty.’
Qes sighed.
‘And don’t fight with them and get yourself fired again.’
‘I did not fight the last time. He tricked me into reading a sentence in a newspaper.’ Most factory owners preferred, and some openly advertised for, an illiterate workforce, fearing arguments from even the most basically educated employees.
The small kit of implements with which he made his music boxes was the only personal possession Qes cared about, and he spent the rest of the afternoon bending steel nails into cranks, cutting strips of metal into eighteen-note combs and then screwing them in place against the rotating drum. By the time they went to bed that night he’d almost completed a new one.
H
ow was work?’ Wamaq asked him the next evening. They were among the doves on the mosque roof, having climbed a tree and gone along one of its sturdy branches.
‘Don’t ask!’ Qes gave a small laugh. He was right at the top of one of the domes, sitting with his arms and legs loosely wrapped around the six-foot finial – looking downriver and wearing a garland of red roses like a wreath around his head. ‘We won’t be building any extensions. The people who own the house think a secret tunnel leads into it. So we were told to dig holes around the house at random – just pick a spot and start digging, stop after five or six feet. Then fill the hole up and start again somewhere else.’
‘Too much money makes you mad,’ Wamaq said from the base of the dome, where he was resting his back against the arabesques. In the distance, a train crossed the steel bridge put up during the days of the British, its mighty criss-crossing girders made in Sheffield.
‘I wonder if he’s looking for treasure,’ said Qes.
The next day, in a secluded section at the back of the mansion, he saw a lion looking out at him through a broken windowpane. It was some moments before he realized it was a mounted specimen. He went closer and looked in. The large dusty room was filled with leopards and cheetahs, falcons and deer of several kinds, a black bear on its hind legs with a great V of white fur on its chest. A hundred inert eyes watched him as he climbed in and moved through the room, dozens of delicate cages hanging on long chains from the ceiling above him, containing lifeless bulbuls, golden orioles, hoopoes. He unlatched the door at the far end and went part way down the corridor. Returning, he took the music box from his pocket and worked the crank, the notes detaching themselves from the comb to begin drifting among the static creatures.
The next day he went back and saw that the music box he’d left balanced on the head of a white heron was missing. When he told Wamaq about the room, Wamaq asked him if the following day they could exchange jobs so that he too could see it.
He was feeling the softness of the fur on the neck of a mounted saluki, whose collar read:
This hound saved her owner from a wolf attack, 1912
, when he heard someone speak his name.
‘Wamaq.’
She stood leaning against the door frame.
‘Leila.’
‘I heard music two days ago …’ she said dazedly. ‘I went towards it through the house but it stopped before I could find where it was coming from.’
He moved towards her.
‘No, don’t come near me,’ she said, raising a hand in his direction. ‘Where is Qes?’
‘He is here. He’s been looking for you ever since your family married you off. We have been making our way through the province. He thinks I don’t know, but when he is sure you aren’t in the vicinity, he gets himself into a fight and we have to move on, to look for you elsewhere.’
‘I found the music box yesterday.’
‘He’s left hundreds of them. Everywhere. He was convinced you’d either find one or hear it being played, that you would remember the song he made up just for you.’ Wamaq reached out his arm towards her. ‘Shall I take you to him?’
‘I can’t.’
‘What happened there? The bruise on your throat.’
She said nothing and would not look at him.
He felt he was being suffocated. ‘I’ll make him pay for it,’ he whispered.
She seemed to come alive. ‘Don’t even think about it. Go away – both of you. You don’t know what these people are capable of.’ She came forward and pressed the music box into Wamaq’s hand. Then she turned and left the room, shutting the door behind her. He heard the bolt being secured.
Three times that evening on the mosque roof Qes asked him in irritation, ‘What?’ and only then did Wamaq realize that he’d been staring at his brother while sunk deep in thought, following his movements. He quickly pretended to look elsewhere – the worshippers appeared doll-like on their prayer mats on the verandas far below, the great scarlet flame of the sunset before him – but soon he repeated the affront. Qes walked off in the end, muttering. Wamaq found him in the backyard of the caravanserai, cleaning the motorbike.
‘Stop doing that. I have something to tell you,’ Wamaq said, removing his mirror-embroidered cap. He was looking down but he could see Qes in the circular pieces shining in his hands. ‘Before I tell you, I want to make sure you won’t react stupidly. Are you going to pay attention and stay calm and do as I say?’
There was no answer. He looked up – Qes had gone so still that Wamaq felt a deep coldness in his own body.
‘You know where Leila is,’ his brother said. ‘You’ve seen her … No, you’ve
met
her, at the big house. She heard my music two days ago …’ He seemed to be putting the pieces of a story together. ‘She … she ran around the house looking for the source of the music. But I stopped playing and she didn’t know which way to turn.’
Wamaq was looking down on all the small images of Qes in his hands. Qes had made him promise that if he died, one of his music boxes would be buried with him, so he could continue his search for Leila in the next world.
After a while Wamaq asked, ‘What are you going to do?’
Qes looked at him.
Deep in the night a few hours later, Qes got up from beside Wamaq, walked the motorbike out of the caravanserai and began his journey towards the mansion. He climbed the boundary wall and then, not allowing himself to be detected by the guard, entered the room at the back. Lowering himself on to the floor among the creatures, he began to wait.
L
eila picked up the shirt made of thin white paper and examined it with care. It rustled softly and was meant to represent the garment worn by Joseph, contact with which had restored sight to his father’s eyes. Minutely inscribed with Quranic verses and prayers, as well as talismanic letters and their numerological equivalents, it was to be worn by Leila under her clothes as protection against misfortune, evil forces and enemies. She studied the writing and floral decorations that covered every part of the garment’s surface like a page from an illuminated book, and had to struggle not to reveal her distress when she failed to locate the secret message she was expecting.