Maps (17 page)

“You naughty little boy,” she said, teasing me.

I said, “I'm sorry.”

Again teasing me, she said, “I'm not sure if you are sorry.” And while laughing, she bent double, half-leaning against me, while supporting her great weight on her knees which were on the floor. A spatter of her saliva had begun to descend on the slate which was lying flat on the floor, nearer me. And I noticed the letters of a verse I had written on my bare thigh run into one another, with the letter “o” closing its eyes in misted tears as of remorse. The other letters were reduced to tawdry shapes and a straggle of formless figurines.

“You naughty thing,” I said, teasing her.

She stopped laughing to say, “I am sorry,” only to continue laughing away.

“I am not sure if you are sorry,” I said, teasing her as before.

In silence, we listened to the crickets call to one another. A little later, Misra was moving about, preparing a bath for me. I knew what she would do—she would dip her finger in the water to feel how warm it was, for she knew, more than anyone else, what my body could or couldn't take. Now she mixed hot and cold water and took a long time deciding whether the temperature was right. I asked myself if it was possible that she might have forgotten what she had known about my body in the few days she and I were separated by the slate or what had been written on it. Before I could answer the question myself, Misra was dragging me to the open courtyard: and under the starry night, we stood in the
baaf
. She was fully dressed and I, naked. And with a tin which had originally contained tomato-purée, or some such manufactured item, she scooped the lukewarm water and washed me. I felt her calloused palms on my young, smooth skin, and felt ticklish and laughed and laughed and laughed and was very, very happy as only children can be. She was playfully rough and rubbed the soap in my hair but said “I am sorry” when she realized that soaped water had entered my eyes. Then she kissed my soaped forehead and looked into my eyes, which I opened as she splashed water on my face. The moon was up and bright, the stars too, but I couldn't see the colour of the water which I imagined to be as blue as a bruise. I jumped up and down in glee, oblivious of the fact that the Koranic writings had ended up in the same
baaf
as the dirt between my toes. I decided I wouldn't hold the slate between my legs that night, and the following night too. Misra and I slept in each other's embrace and the slate was left in a comer until after I was made a man.

IV

The man who was brought to circumcise me, when my turn came, made me sit alone, insisting that I read a few Koranic verses of my choice—and that I wait for him as he honed the knife he was going to use against a sharp stone he had come along with. I was overcome by fear—fear of pain, fear of being lonely, fear of being separated forever from Misra. (She wasn't there anyway; she wasn't allowed to come. In her place, there came a man, one of my many uncles.) The sticky saliva in my mouth, the drumming of fright beating in my ears, the numbness of my body wherever I touched, felt: my legs, my hands, my thighs, my sex, what pain!

Then the man asked me to look up at the heavens and to concentrate on anything my eyes fell on. There was an aperture in the clouds and there was a bird which I spotted, a bird flying high and in haste towards the opening in the heavens. I concentrated on the bird's movements, concentrated on it until it became a dot in the heavenly distance. To mask my fear, I invested all my energy in the look and the bird's flight reminded me of similar flights of my own fantasies. When I looked again, I couldn't see the bird. I could only see a tapestry of clouds which was woven in order to provide the bird with a hiding-place. The world, I told myself, was in my eyes and the bird had flown away with it, carrying it in its beak, light as a straw, small as an atom. Now that I had lost sight of the bird (I wasn't sure if it was an eagle or if it wasn't!), there was nothing but sunlight for a long while, and the sun was in my eye and it blinded me to the rest of the cosmos. Until the bird re-emerged out of the sun's brightness, beautiful, feminine, playful, and it became again the centre of my world and I was inside of it, in flight, light as are children's fantasies, impervious to the realities surrounding me—and then, sudden as bushfire, ZAK!

It is such a horrid territory, the territory of pain. And I crossed it alone—no thought of Misra, no amount of consolatory remarks made by the uncle who had come with me and no verse of the Koran could've reduced the pain or even eliminated it altogether. Do I remember when the pain lodged in my body which it lived in for almost a month thereafter? It entered my groin first. Or rather, that is what I seem to remember. I recall thinking that I had seen the bird's apparition and that the rest of the world had been small as a speck in the sky—then the man pulled at the foreskin of my manhood, producing, first in my groin, then in the remaining parts of my body a pain so acute my ears were set ablaze with dolorous flames. These flames spread gradually—then my feet felt frozen, my eyes warm with tears, my cheeks moist with crying and my throat dry as the desert. It was only then that I looked and I saw blood—a pool of blood in whose waters I swam and which helped me cross to the other side so I would be a man—once and for all.

I saw the man break an egg. I couldn't tell why he did so. Perhaps the idea was to reduce the pain or help stop my losing any more blood. I thought that the white and yellow of the egg mixed well with my own blood and the colours which I saw, the beauty of what I saw, took the pain away, for at least a few decisive seconds. My bare thighs were spotted with cold sprouts of pained hair and I rubbed them, smoothing the hair-erections so the blood would return. I was helped to stand, I don't remember by whom, and was led away from the spot I had been sitting on. Possibly, the eggshell was the hat my manhood wore, possibly not; possibly, once the skin was pushed back, I was bandaged with cotton or other similar material, although I cannot remember anything save the pain, which made me faint. I awoke. Alone. On a bed.

Pain,
per se
, I discovered, was no problem. I could cope with it, I could dwell in its territory. But there was the problem of space. For pain not only defined my state of mind but my movements as well. I couldn't come into bodily contact with anybody, not even Misra. I became the bed's sole occupant. People kept their distance. I was like a man with an arm in plaster. And people were careful not to come unnecessarily near me, surrendering up the space surrounding them to me—how generous of them, I thought, how kind! Misra slept on a mat on the floor. Because I was sore, I was given the bed to myself. Traditionally, it is taboo for women to stay near newly circumcised boys, and so Misra was sent away. But I created such an uproar Uncle Qorrax allowed me to have my own way, yet again. I didn't care much for traditional taboos, especially when they severed me from somebody who wasn't herself Somali and whose psyche they wouldn't affect. When she was allowed to return to me, I didn't think “How kind of Uncle to allow her to come and stay by me in this hour of need”. No, I thought of how clever I had been in making her return possible. I had my own sheet to cover myself with, one that I had had to hold at a certain distance from the wound—again, a question of space, a question of the geographic dictates of pain. And once Misra was offered a bed of her own which was brought into our room, I began to claim
our
bed as mine—and I was delighted. One other item had had to go too—the slate which I had kept between my legs. I discovered I needed space for myself, that I couldn't tolerate anyone or anything standing in the space between myself and
where
I had intended to move. In short, the dimensions of my body occupied the centre of my world of pain, my preoccupations, and I took in the body's measurements, as it were, and followed the guidelines suggested by its dolorous perimeters. I moved or lay on the bed accordingly.

When asked how I was, I lied. I said I was well and that the pain had more or less confined itself to the
de facto
boundaries of the wound. The truth I didn't tell anyone was that I had, in effect, become two persons—one belonging to a vague past of which Misra was part, of which painlessness was a part, a vague past in which I shared wrappers with Misra, shared a bed with her. Yes, a vague past in which I felt so attached to Misra I couldn't imagine life without her. The other person, or if you prefer, the other half, was represented by the pain which inhabited the groin. I held the citizenship of the land of pain, I was issued with its passport and I couldn't envisage when it would expire or what would replace it or where the urge of travel away from it would eventually take me to, nor at what shores this would abandon me. In the territory of pain, there is a certain uncertainty, I thought, of a future outside of it.

On the fourth day, Uncle called on me. Misra placed herself between him and the bed which I lay on. And she explained what I had done, she talked about me in a way I thought recalled to me a history of her concern and worries; one in which she was the guide. She told Uncle how many times I got up to make water, how many spoonfuls of soup I had eaten, what I did and what I didn't do. She spoke about my condition as if I were a monument with a background worthy of delving into. Uncle, because he wanted to see the wound for himself, told Misra to leave us alone. It was only then that the thought that she hadn't seen it crossed my mind and I remembered her saying that society believed it to be bad for a woman to see a boy's wound of circumcision lest it fester and never heal. Anyway, she left us alone. Uncle, gentle and playful, took a peek at it and was visibly satisfied all was well. He called Misra to return, which she did. He asked her what gifts I might like.

She looked at me considerately, silently. Uncle looked from her to me and then back at her. Was she saying that I was now a man and I could decide for myself? Maybe. Uncle asked: “Is there anything you'd like brought to you as you lie in bed?”

I had already worked it all out in my head. I said, “A pen.”

“A pen?” he asked in disbelief.

I said, “A pen and a sheet of paper.”

Again, he looked at Misra, whose head nodded approvingly, and then at me. He was obviously pleased with the choice I made, especially when I added, “I would like to practise copying and recopying the verses of the Koran which I've already committed to memory. Otherwise, I might forget them.”

He was thoughtful for a second or so. Then, “Anything else?”

I was silent for a long time. To Misra, “Can you think of anything?”

I watched them exchange smiles. I knew they used to meet occasionally in the dark. I wondered if I was in their way; I wondered, did they need the bed on which I lay?

And again back to me: “Askar?”

If I could I would've said that I wanted Misra taken away from me, sent away somewhere else, away from me anyway for a week, a month or two. If she were away, I said to myself, perhaps the act of weaning would occur less painfully and I would be able to bear the loss well. I would, in time, be able to replace the loss with a gain, I thought, looking up at Uncle who was still awaiting a request from me.

“I can't think of anything else,” I said.

But Misra spoke and we both turned to her. (In the meantime, I realized that, while thinking thoughts and listening with attention to Uncle and Misra, I had taken temporary residence in a land-of-no-pain.) She said, “I can think of something he's always wanted.”

“Yes?”

“A globe,”' she said. “Or an atlas. He loves the blue of the sea. And a picture-book of horses and birds. Please get him a globe and a map of the seas and the oceans,” she appealed.

I was as surprised as my uncle. I didn't know I loved the blue of the sea—not then anyway—nor the world of the oceans, or picture-book horses and birds. But I was grateful to Misra—grateful that she chose to introduce me to a world in which I have felt happiest since then.

V