Maps (19 page)

“Why are some countries referred to as ‘Motherland and others as Fatherland'?” Askar asked Misra one day when both were in a mood to talk “What is the logic behind it?”

She didn't know, she said.

“I wonder if it indicates a people's mind, I mean if their choice indicates what kind of people they are. People of the heart, people of the head, if you know what I mean.”

She was silent for a long time.

“You know, of course, that Somalia is seen by her poets as a woman—one who has made it her habit to betray her man, the Somali, don't you?” she said.

He nodded, “Yes.”

“You know the poem in which the poet sees Somalia as a beautiful woman dressed in silk, perfumed with the most exotic scents, and this woman accepts all the advances made by the other men—to be precise, the five men who propose to her. She goes, sleeps with them, bears each a child named after its progenitor and has a number of miscarriages,” she said, stopped—and wouldn't look at him, as though she were apologetic.

He asked, “How do Ethiopian poets see the country?”

“I don't know,” she said and was very sad.

What could he say that would make her interested in the flow of their conversation? First, he pulled a sheet over his bared thighs on which he had redrawn the map of the land so far reconquered by the Somalis, then he gave himself time to study her expressions, her movements—deciding that she was, in all probability, having her period. It was something he envied her: the fact that she had periods whose monthly occurrences, he thought, had cleansing aspects about them. “You get rid of the bad blood,” she told him once, jokingly, “and you do the same a month later and so on and so forth until you reach old age. Men don't have it,” Karin had explained. “Why not?” he had inquired. He couldn't now remember for the life of him what explanation Misra had given, but could remember thinking about her periods whenever he stood by the tree in their compound and saw its life flow into waste and he tasted the sap and was coincidentally sick the following day believing that the tree, born the same day as he, although taller and shadier than he, was poisonous. Was life a poisonous potion which, if taken in the right doses, offers sustenance, but if not kills?

She was saying, “Do you know that Somalis are fond of talking about their country, in their poetry at any rate, as though she were a camel—the basis of this being that a camel is, after all, ‘the Mother of Men', do you?”

“Camel, the Mother of Men?” he repeated.

Silence. Then, suddenly, there was an explosion, and after a small pause, another, then a third and after that a fourth. Had the war come to Kallafo? Almost. For there was an ochlocratic roar every now and again. Curious, Askar came out, wanting to know what might have caused it. Whereupon he saw a group of young boys running in the direction of the “Hill of Government”, and at the head of the group was a boy a year or two older than Askar and this boy was the group's flag-bearer. The five-starred flag of Somalia fluttered in the vainglory of victory.

And Askar became the child he was—he abandoned thinking philosophically, he gave up the thought whether or no Misra too needed a mother in the same way he did and ran and joined the boys and girls of his age. For them, it was fun to be on the winning side, it was fun to disarm the disheartened, already defeated Ethiopian soldiery—for them, war was fun. It was fun to be strong, fun to be the toughest, fun to lead.

Askar proved to be the toughest when it came to receiving Aw-Adan's humiliating lashes. He didn't flinch if caned. He found his first fans among the other pupils. He was also the most brilliant, needing no time at all in order to commit any verse to memory: he heard a verse once and he gave it back in the form he was given it. Aw-Adan nicknamed him “little devil”, his peers “little hero”.

He was naughty, pulling loose the girls' plaits or skirts, calling them names or challenging older boys to wrestling duels. He was very active, he was a busybody, arranging football matches to happen, organizing running events and other physical challenges to take place. Boys liked to gather round him. Before he was six, Askar became the undisputed leader. Besides, he had one advantage over all the other boys. Misra appeared to be more tolerant than most other parents. She didn't mind how many of them he brought home with him to share his lunch, didn't mind his going away as long as he showed up for his meals, didn't mind if he omitted his siesta in the afternoon. At times, however, he would invite her to go and watch him—she being the only adult member in the audience.

Misra discovered, to her pleasure, that the children's inventiveness never ceased to surprise hen And she watched them, with admiration, as they built an effigy resembling one day this historical figure, the following day another, whose portrait they had seen—and they took shots at Aw-Adan's effigy one morning and in the evening, they burnt Haile Selassie's. They sculptured the Emperor's image out of tins, bits of wood and metal scraps, but you could see the likeness of the constructed effigy to the small-bodied man who ruled the Ethiopian Empire for nearly five decades. But did they know that Haile Selassie had died? Of course, Askar did. And so why were they burning the image of a man who had fallen out of popular favour? “Do you think,” Askar said, “that contemporary Ethiopia can be seen in an image other than the one created by Haile Selassie or Menelik?”

She agreed with him. She became a member of his fan club. Why, he was capable of drawing a dividing line between personalities that were in the public memory and those that were not. Why, Askar never contributed a scrap towards the construction of an effigy in the likeness of Uncle Qorrax. It was not that Qorrax's children would have minded. They wouldVe been the first to rally round their leader, their cousin. His awareness of the thin line separating the personal from the political was such that he brought the play to an abrupt halt the moment he suspected it had crossed into the forbidden territory.

Askar and his friends had, themselves, a large repertoire of pieces which they often enacted. His was the largest stock. His body, it appeared, was an instrument where different parts produced different sounds and different bird noises. He made the weird twang of a boy born with a cleft palate, for instance. Then, immediately thereafter, turned outwards his upper eyelid as though he were showing it to an eye doctor. But he didn't stop there. Now, he acted as if struck with paralysis and foamed at the mouth; now, he was a child bom with a weak mind. And before the enthralled crowd recovered its breath, Askar would move away slightly, then turn round and look at everybody with crossed eyes. Then he became a hunchback or a child with rickety legs.

One day, he and his group of playmates sneaked into the orchard belonging to the Adenese and they let the camel loose. Before they untied the beast, Askar took off the blindfold. You can imagine—a beast that for decades, day in and day out, turned round and round, now hauling a cart, now helping in the mill, now pulling bucketfiils of water from a well—a beast that had remained blindfolded day and night for years, never seeing natural or artificial light—and not only did they let it loose, but they removed its blindfold. The beast cried a most hideous cry: and died. When questioned, each denied he was present when this occurred. But they all mentioned Askar's name. Not that he had done it, no. It was possible, they insinuated, that he might know who had been responsible.

They could not go unpunished. Uncle Qorrax suggested that he should be made very busy. And a school in which to discipline these unruly boys was started with Aw-Adan appointed as its headmaster. Arithmetic. Geography. History. Arabic. The school's name was Kallafo Public School, since it was funded and founded by the community, and since the Ethiopian government didn't provide any schooling facilities for the Somalis in the Ogaden. So, for the first week or so, Askar returned home exhausted. Naturally, the morning's Koranic School plus the afternoon's arithmetic, etc., took their toll and by the time he staggered home, he wasn't willing to spend his energy on inventing a new set of rules for games to be thoroughly enjoyed by an improvised audience.

A fortnight later, he thought of new games, which attracted larger audiences. Misra heard that the young man in her charge had been up to no good. And there was no way she could've held him in the house. What was the point of beating him? At times, he removed his shirt from his back, brought a cane himself and asked her to “go on, punish me, go on”.

She only pleaded, “Please, do not attract
eyes
to yourself. People can be bad, envious, wicked. People's
eyes
can make you fall ill. They are terrible when they are bad, people's
eyes
.

He paid her pleas no heed.

He was taken ill.

He looked bloodless—too weak “How do you feel?” she asked.

He shook his head. He had no temperature, thank God. Neither did he vomit. He ate as normally as he used to. And yet he was “sick”. The “sickness” showed in his look, which appeared startled. What could be the matter? His head between his hands, he said, “I don't know.” It was a weird kind of illness. “Bad eyes are wicked!” Karin had commented.

“Is there any part of you that is in pain? Your head, your stomach, your heart? Tell me.” Misra touched him all over. “Which part of your body does pain reside in?”

“I cannot think” he said. “It's that kind of sickness!”

“What do you mean, you cannot
think?”

He said, “It's odd, but it feels as if my brain has ceased thinking, as if I will never have new thoughts. It's a strange sensation but that's what I feel. No fresh ideas. And my eyes—look at them. Pale as white meat.”

Misra thought, it is the bad eye. All that night, she prayed and prayed and prayed. Oh Lord, protect my little man from the rash of measles; from diarrheal diseases and complications; from conjunctival sightlessness; from tubercular and whooping coughs. Protect him, oh Lordj from droplet-bone infections and from migratory parasites—and such diseases for which we have no names. Oh Lord, restore to him his thinking faculties. Amen!

A day later, she consulted Qorrax and Aw-Adan. Interestingly enough, each suggested two remedies. Aw-Adan offered to read selected verses of the Koran over Askar's body “astraddle the bed in satanic pain”; alternatively, he said, someone ought to belt the jinn out of the little devil. Uncle Qorrax suggested he sent his wife, “Shahrawello”, over—she was an expert at blood-letting. Otherwise, he went on, he would pay for the
cuudis:
“Blood-letting works when the blood of the patient is bad; fumigating if there is suspicion that somebody's covetous, evil eye needs to be appeased,” said Uncle Qorrax.

Askar retorted, “Blood-letting? For whom? For me? No, thank you.”

Half-serious, Misra said: “Maybe that's what you need.”

“I've seen it done, no, thank you.”

He remembered someone saying that Shahrawello prescribed blood-letting for Uncle Qorrax if he wasn't happy with his performance in bed, if he wasn't content with his respiratory system or if he was believed to be suffering from bronchitis. Hours later, she would show him the blood that had rushed to the surface and which she managed to capture in the cup, a cup full of darkened blood which she held before him as evidence. Uncle Qorrax would stare at the dark blood and, nodding with approval, would say, “You see, I told you. I am not well.” Some people were of the opinion that Qorrax was healthy until Shahrawello decided it was time his pride was punctured. To humiliate him, people said, she made him lie on a mat on the floor, helpless and submissive. Flames, tumblers, used razor-blades—she gave him the works. Lethargic, and drained of blood, he would remain on his back, at the same spot for hours. From then on, he beat his wives less often. From then on, he bullied his children less frequently. And this was the amazing thing—Qorrax acknowledged his unlimited gratitude to Shahrawello who, he said, kept him fit and on good form.

“No blood-letting for me. No, thank you,” said Askar now.

“What about
cuudis?”

He said, “No, thank you.”

He had watched it done. Karin was the patient. Poor woman, he thought. They forced her to tell lies, heaps of lies. Otherwise, how could she give as her name the name of a man? How could Karin say, looking straight at her “confessor”, “My name is Abdullahi”, giving as her own an identity which didn't match her real identity. Maybe, it was because they “fumigated” her by placing a towel above her head, making her sweat, making her swelter under the suffocating smoke and she coughed and coughed. The woman who had been hired to dispel the bad eye out of Karin's system spoke to Karin in a language which definitely was not Somali. A couple of other women beat Karin on the chest as though she were a tin drum, they beat her on the back of the neck like one who's choked on a large piece of meat but won't vomit it out voluntarily. Askar wondered if Karin might have swallowed the “bad eye”. No? Although it didn't make any sense, he wasn't averse to the idea.

“The Koran, then?”

No, no. He knew the Koran from back to front. He didn't want it read over his body astraddle a bed—not by Aw-Adan. Who knows, argued Askar, the man might have weird ideas. What if he read the wrong passages of the Koran, passages, say, which could make him turn into an epileptic? He had heard of such a story. As a matter of fact, he knew the brother of the boy to whom a similar experience had happened. A “priest” had chosen the wrong passages of the Koran deliberately, mischievously, and read it over the little boy whom he didn't like. Did Misra know what became of the boy? “He now has extra fluid flowing into his skull. They tell me his brain is over-flooded like a river with burst banks.”

Misra was worried. “Who is this boy? Does he really exist?”