‘Oh, you did. A pretty girl like you had her suitors, but they were all young and struggling. No one could compete with Mahmoud. No one could match him. I didn’t hesitate, Nabilah, not once.’
‘You didn’t care that I would be so far away? You didn’t care that I would be alone?’
Qadriyyah sounded defensive. ‘I did not think of this country, Sudan. I did not visualise it. For me it was like a southern province, an extension of Egypt. And Mahmoud is not a foreigner.’
‘He is, Mama. He loves Egypt, but he is Sudanese.’
‘But that’s not how I saw him first. His automobile, his accent, his favourite dishes – he was one of us. And if he
was
truly Sudanese, he would want you to dress in a to be like every other Sudanese woman. He would insist that Farouk and Ferial speak with a Sudanese accent. But he doesn’t!’
‘When he was ill, he spoke all the time with a Sudanese accent.’ Tears welled up in Nabilah’s eyes, but she held them in
check. ‘At work, he is inseparable from Idris, and I am sure he loves Nassir and Nur more than he loves Farouk and Ferial!’
‘Nonsense, Nabilah. He doesn’t deny you or your children anything.’
‘Oh I used to be more confident,’ she admitted. ‘He hardly ever used to visit Waheeba, and at the mention of her name he would make all sorts of expressions of disgust. But now, every day, every single day, he is at her hoash!’
‘To visit his invalid son,’ argued Qadriyyah. ‘He goes there for Nur, not for Waheeba.’
‘I know,’ sighed Nabilah. ‘It’s the accident that changed the situation, to
her
advantage. The other day I went to see her and she frightened me. I am afraid she might harm me or the children.’
‘Well, you made a mistake that day. You should not have gone to see her alone. Mahmoud Bey should have accompanied you. In his presence she would not dare say a word against you. Look how she was today, a shadow in the background, as unobtrusive as a servant!’
‘You are right, Mama.’ Nabilah smiled and kissed her mother.
‘Remember how contented you were in the early years of your marriage when you were living in Cairo? And last summer, when you were together in London. Keep your husband close to you, my girl.’ Qadriyyah stood up to retire to bed. ‘No one, no matter how wicked or clever, would be able to drive a wedge between you.’
When Mahmoud came home, Nabilah was sitting up in bed reading a magazine.
‘Look what I got for you,’ he laughed.
It was a small black top hat. He sat next to her on the bed and took out his lighter. She put the magazine down and prepared herself for one of those party tricks he was so fond of. He set light to the top of the hat, and out slithered a black snake.
She squealed when the warm rubber caressed her neck. The snake’s skin felt real and its length increased.
‘Take it away from me!’ She was breathless and flustered, but it was precisely her agitation that Mahmoud was enjoying, the excitement in her eyes and voice. He laughed out loud when she crawled to the other end of the bed, silk nightdress riding up her thighs.
After bidding Qadriyyah and Mohsin farewell at the airport, Mahmoud remained in Khartoum on business and Nabilah set off with the driver back to Umdurman. She found the separation from her mother even more painful than she had expected, and immediately began to count the months until summer when it would be her turn to travel with the children to Cairo. Although Mahmoud had secured more than one position for Uncle Mohsin, her stepfather had turned them all down. He was unable to pull himself away from Cairo and was too weary, he said, to start afresh. It was a severe disappointment to Nabilah and she had to content herself with Qadriyyah’s gratitude that the couple had, at least, gained an intermission from the political climate in Egypt and enjoyed a rejuvenating change.
Just before the bridge, the car thudded to a halt and broke Nabilah’s reverie. The problem was a punctured tyre And she had to stand in the sun while the driver replaced the wheel. In Cairo there would be a vender selling cool drinks, there would be other ladies walking about and she would entertain herself by studying their dresses, hairstyles and shoes. There would be buses and trams. There would be, at the very least, a bit of shade. But here it was nothing stretching out into nothing. It was a harsh country, a harsh climate. She took her compact out of her handbag and powdered her nose.
Subdued and thirsty, she returned home and headed straight for the ice box. As she was getting herself a cold glass of water, Farouk came running in.
‘Ferial’s hurt,’ he said.
‘Did she hurt herself playing in the garden?’
Before he could reply she turned to see Batool and the nanny carrying Ferial into the room. It was strange to see Batool here. Usually, she never came to this side of the saraya and was constantly with Waheeba. This raised Nabilah’s suspicions. Ferial looked dazed and in shock and she was wrapped in a light cotton sheet. The nanny and Batool laid her down on the sofa and Batool put a pillow under her head.
‘What happened? What have you done to her, Batool?’ Nabilah knelt next to Ferial. ‘What’s wrong, my darling, what’s hurting you?’
Tears ran down the girl’s face and Nabilah’s anxiety rose.
‘Aren’t you going to tell me?’
Ferial’s face was unharmed, no bruises. Her arms were fine. She pulled away the sheet.
‘She’s been circumcised,’ Batool said. ‘Today was Zeinab’s circumcision and Aunt Waheeba said Ferial should be circumcised, too.’
At first Nabilah’s mind couldn’t absorb this information. She stared at her daughter. Under the sheet, Ferial was naked from the waist down. The wound was raw, fresh, the soft vulnerable folds removed, and in their place, the flesh stitched up. Nabilah cried out. It was as if her own body had been punctured, her insides sucked out.
‘Farouk, go to your room,’ she whispered.
He must not see his sister like this. She gathered her strength to stand up and face Batool. She slapped her. She hit her once, twice with all her fury. Batool screamed. She raised her arms to shield herself and her to be collapsed.
‘Why are you hitting me? Didn’t you know? I thought they told you!’
‘Liar!’ shouted Nabilah. ‘How dare you! How dare you touch my child!’
She grabbed Batool’s long braids and pushed her against the wall.
Batool let out a wail.
‘You are cruel, cruel. You hate me, but I am just a poor girl. I was just doing as I was told.’
Faced with such obtuseness, Nabilah’s anger began to subside. She now wanted to know details, wanted Batool to speak instead of scream. She wanted Ferial to stop crying. Already the child was distraught, not only from the ordeal she had endured, but now the sight of her mother attacking Batool.
The facts were revealed, piece by piece, through Batool’s hiccups and sobs. While Nabilah was at the airport, Ferial was lured over to Waheeba’s quarters. She was told that Zeinab was having a party and that there would be sweets and many girls her age to play with. Indeed, it
was
a celebration of sorts for Zeinab, though it was kept low-key because Mahmoud had forbidden circumcision in his household ever since the procedure was declared illegal by the Anglo-Egyptian government. Clearly, his authority had been overridden by Waheeba, who insisted that her granddaughter must follow tradition. Zeinab was dressed in a new red satin dress and the women of the neighbourhood were invited. They sang wedding songs, and the older girls danced, miming the bridal pigeon dance. Only the best midwife was summoned for the Abuzeid girls. She injected them first with procaine and the instruments she used were sterilised. Afterwards, to prevent infection, she administered penicillin.
Batool reassured Nabilah that the stitches would be removed after two days, then Ferial would be up and about. She would be like other Sudanese girls, girls like Soraya and Fatma. If Ferial was now in pain, Zeinab was in pain, too. If Ferial was now traumatised, Zeinab was traumatised, too. Waheeba herself had held the girls down one by one, gripping their knees apart. The deed was done and the procedure was irreversible. The slice of a knife, the tug and cutting away of flesh, and Ferial was someone else, one of
them
. She could never ever be like her mother again.
Nabilah surrendered to the nightmare. It held her in a vice.
Such unnecessary pain, such stupidity and malice. She dismissed Batool.
‘Don’t ever set foot in my house again. I don’t want to see your face.’ She fired the nanny for not protecting Ferial. ‘Pack your belongings. First thing tomorrow morning I want you on that train back to Egypt.’
The girl started to cry. Farouk, caught in the middle of this, was also reprimanded for not looking after his sister, and yelled at even more for wanting to see her wound. Nabilah wanted to summon a doctor to check on Ferial. Yes, she would bring in an English doctor, scandal or no scandal, and expose Waheeba’s crime. However, the telephone lines were down. She ran to catch the driver but it was too late. He had already gone back to Khartoum to pump the punctured tyre with air and wait on Mahmoud.
Ferial would not allow Nabilah out of her sight. Her light-skinned, smooth-haired daughter brought so low, whimpering and clinging. She needed help to drink, to eat, to change into her nightdress. She needed help to pass urine – and that was the most difficult process of all, because the fear of burning her wound made her hold herself back. So much did Nabilah empathise with her, so much was her reaction visceral, that she herself, when her bladder felt full, could not pass water. She sat on the toilet seat, trembling and crying, but not for long, because Ferial called out to her and she scrambled to her feet again. In the end, the two of them lay down on the bed. The power failed and the ceiling fan came to a halt. Darkness and heat: this ghastly accursed country. Nabilah moved the children out to the terrace. A bit of fresh air, but Ferial would not settle.
‘My feet hurt,’ she whined.
Her feet! What now? Nabilah lit a candle and examined her daughter’s feet. True enough, there were red welts running sideways on the bridge of each foot. She washed them down and applied mercurochrome, struggling to identify the cause. She came to understand that during the circumcision Ferial had
been placed on an angharaib without a mattress. Waheeba held down her upper body while her heels were tucked through the strings of the bed so that she wouldn’t kick the midwife. That was why there were now marks on her feet from the ropes that made up the base of the angharaib.
‘Where were you, Mummy? Why did you go out and leave me? Why did you let them do this to me?’
The reproach grated on Nabilah’s nerves. She kissed Ferial, she wept and mumbled apologies. She smoothed her daughter’s hair and promised everything from candyfloss to ice cream to a trip to the zoo. Rage still pulsed inside her, and she began to fret over the consequences. In the short term, the risk of haemorrhage, septicaemia, urinary and genital infections. Time and again, she checked Ferial’s temperature. She encouraged her to drink more liquids and pass more urine. But even if all went well in the next few days, until the stitches were removed, there would still be long-term consequences. She recalled the horror stories she had heard since arriving in Sudan. Brides, whose wedding nights were a disaster because of too tight an infibulation; the story of a baby’s head damaged during labour, endless complications.
When Nabilah had first heard these stories, they had sounded abstract and distant, folklorist tales of backward women. Now her own flesh and blood was incriminated. In the future, when Ferial got married, she would suffer pain and alienation from pleasure. A progressive, liberal man might not even want to marry her in the first place. He would have to be Sudanese, one of
them
, and Nabilah, casting her vision to the future, had always wished that her children would marry Egyptians. Even more consequences: every time Ferial had a baby, it would be necessary to slit the circumcision skin fold during labour and stitch it up again afterwards. Nabilah could visualise the future scene in a modern Cairo hospital, the obstetrician shaking his head, disgusted to come across such barbarity, the kind of barbarity only found among peasants and the uneducated. Nabilah’s face burnt
with shame. She dragged herself away from Ferial’s side, stumbling in the dark until she reached the bathroom and retched in disgust. A pulse beat in her head. Why? Why all this? Waheeba had struck her a terrible blow, but she must be strong for Ferial’s sake.
There was no one Nabilah could talk to until Mahmoud came home. Farouk, after she had made amends with him, was fast asleep. This was a blessing, as she had neither the energy nor the peace of mind to answer his questions. Ferial continued to cling and whimper, reproachful and unforgiving. But who could blame the poor child?
‘Go to sleep, my love. Close your eyes so that your body can rest and be better again.’
She herself was wide awake and alert. She stared up at the sky and the twinkling stars were mocking and cunning. What should she do next? Would she ever be able to get back at Waheeba? Ferial sighed and started to doze off. In turn, Nabilah relaxed a little. Mahmoud would surely be furious; Waheeba had done something he had explicitly forbidden. In his own house, she had flaunted his wishes, let alone the deviousness of taking Ferial behind her mother’s back. He will divorce her, Nabilah thought. He must. Waheeba would be cast out in disgrace. And that would be the ultimate retribution.
Earlier that same evening, after bidding his in-laws farewell at the airport, Mahmoud went smiling to Barclays Bank
(Dominions, Colonies and Overseas)
. The news was official. Earlier this morning, the Financial Secretary had called for a special meeting of the Legislative Assembly to reveal a budget surplus of twenty million pounds. Due to the Korean War and increased demand from post-war Britain, cotton prices had risen to unprecedented heights – prosperous times for the government, and prosperous times for the man whose name was synonymous with the private sector. With the backing of the bank, Mahmoud had established almost all of the private cotton schemes. The trade figures for 1951 were published today. Nigel Harrison had the details and the two men beamed over the results.