6

Nothing falls upwards, for the heavens are beyond our reach. The act of falling is what brings us down.

When I was on the verge of the precipice, absolutely no one extended a hand to prevent my fall. Everyone just stood by and watched. My fall was not the type that ends with blood splattering everywhere.

My father died when he fell from scaffolding. His workmates climbed down and carried him carefully to the hos­pital where he was hooked up to a respirator. But his lungs collapsed from the pressure of the oxygen and he had to be taken off the respirator after his internal organs were satur­ated with blood.

It was my half-brother Ibrahim who took charge of the burial and hosted the condolence gathering with the help of some of our relatives. It may not have been deliberate, but even though I was the eldest of our father’s children, I stood behind Ibrahim in the condolence line.

We were hardly old enough for such a line, and a host of close relatives jostled to the front. I found myself almost at the end of the line; at any rate, I felt I had little connection with the recently departed.

Even some of Ibrahim’s friends were further up the line than I was and did not even bother to offer me their condolences. To them, I was just a failure – a heretic even – and had been written off as the lowest of the low.

Aunt Khayriyyah mourned her brother a long time. She blamed his fall on my mother and me, and secretly vowed to make our lives a living hell.

There is no helping hand for those who have gone astray.

Due to gravitational pull, falling is actually a gradual pro­cess. It occurs as a succession of moments, each taking us a little further down, closer to the bottom. We do not hit rock bottom in one fell swoop.

Aunt Khayriyyah knocked me off balance, brought me to the edge of the precipice and then proceeded to push me into its gravitational embrace.

She did not watch me like a hawk out of any genuine desire to set me straight. Rather, she used my deviant behaviour to vent her own, deep-seated rancour towards my mother, a woman she detested because she felt my father had married below his station. Aunt Khayriyyah did little to conceal her hostility; her every breath exuded bitterness.

She was bent on demonstrating my mother’s womb carried only rotten seed, and blamed her for my bad behaviour in every imaginable way. Sometimes, she would claim that she feared I might land in jail; other times, she would point out that my debauchery was at odds with our lineage. Once, she even went so far as to say that she feared I would be struck blind and tossed into a shallow grave.

I likened my aunt to a bush of prickly pears, its limbs sharp with spikes and its fruit covered in a down of thistles.

She never found a way out of her bitter wasteland. She was ten years older than my father, but no one had ever asked for her hand in marriage: no one could covet that fruit or coax any femininity from that harsh and desolate bush.

Aunt Khayriyyah was a thin, hard woman, inflexible as a tempered steel rod; even her smell was vaguely metallic. She never talked when she could bellow, and her tongue dripped with the same venom that coursed through her veins. There was simply never a moment when she was not mean.

Even when she was supposedly offering well-intentioned advice, she was in fact leading me astray. She made sure that once I had set out, there was no turning back. She goaded and taunted me as I climbed the neighbourhood blacklist until I came in second only to Issa.

Aunt Khayriyyah was the first person to train me in the ways of evil. Any misdeed on my part and she was there, first as the facilitator and then as the prosecutor. She was the first to find out about my misdemeanours because it was invariably she who had set me up.

We stumble on pleasure by chance and become hooked. Draining the cup to the last drop, we do not realise that it is leading to our downfall. Sensual gratification provides exquisite moments of abandon, but every time we experience the bliss of dissolution, the pool of darkness widens. Still we persist until we go into freefall. Sensuality is the chasm set in our path to snatch our lives from us and to alienate us from life.

I had been given the job of looking after Aunt Khayriyyah’s sheep and making sure they were all in by evening, tied up in the pen right behind our house. She had a prized ram that earned its keep by propagating her own modest flock as well as by servicing the neighbours’ ewes for a fee.

The ram was tethered separately from the rest of the sheep and whenever my aunt selected the ewes she wanted ser­viced, she watched them in the act. She would watch with bated breath and enraptured as the ram leapt up tirelessly on to the ewes.

‘I want you to be virile, like this ram,’ she told me. ‘You need to make up for your father who planted his seed in polluted soil.’

I was too young to understand the exact meaning of virility or to comprehend her implacable contempt for my mother. All I wanted was her approval and I longed to be worthy of her pride, like the ram. So I began doing what I had seen the ram do, jumping on top of the ewes and slithering off their backs.

Just as a spark lit by friction grows into fire, so too the precocious kindling of physical excitement leads to an insati­able desire for consummation.

In my mind, I was doing something truly great that would gain me Aunt Khayriyyah’s unquestioning approval. I excelled in the role of the noble ram, cleaving, rubbing, cresting and, finally, experiencing the delectable languor that spread through my joints. I had no understanding of the nature of this precocious pleasure: all I wanted was for my aunt to be pleased with me. I went at the ewes hoping to demonstrate my prowess.

My aunt began to notice that I was gone a long time when she sent me to the sheep pen, and she came to realise that I was trying to follow the example of her prized ram. She was convinced the ram and I were of the same ilk, but before savouring her vindictiveness and punishing me, she would enjoy the sight a few more times.

She grabbed hold of my ear, her nails digging into the soft flesh. ‘May God curse you, boy!’ she cried. ‘Only the damned do it with sheep!’

I froze.

‘Son of a bitch, now you’ve ruined their meat. And their milk!’

I was upset and confused partly because I had genuinely believed she would have approved. But instead of praise, I had been given the usual tongue-lashing.

But I was hooked and rubbed against anything that came my way to pleasure myself.

Aunt Khayriyyah began to take a different approach, goading me to forms of deviancy she carefully selected. Dangling me like a bucket, she flung me down into the well of debauchery.

One of the neighbour’s young daughters, Souad, came to our house carrying a tray of stew that her mother had prepared. It was a gift to my mother who had been unwell. Aunt Khayriyyah went to the door.

‘Looks like you’re going to be well-endowed, girl. Just like your mother,’ said Aunt Khayriyyah as she ran her hand over the girl’s little breasts, already beginning to bud with the approach of puberty. She turned and, winking at me, added, ‘Now that’s what I call meat on the bone.’

I gave up chasing Aunt Khayriyyah’s ewes and pursued Souad instead. She was not only accessible but she welcomed my trailing behind her as we searched the neighbourhood for a safe place to play. She turned down all of my suggestions, and in the end she chose where and when we should go to avoid getting caught.

Souad wanted one riyal since, she insisted, grooms had to pay their brides a dowry. I disagreed and we started to argue, our voices carrying in the stillness of nightfall. I offered her half the sum, but she flatly refused, so I promised her the remainder just as soon as I got hold of some money. I proceeded to fish around for some change I kept tucked in my undergarments.

I had thought we would be on a secret mission somewhere without leaving a trace. She had chosen Jalal Mukbir’s house, wedged between two sharp bends in the alleyway, because it was her favourite place to go and play bride and groom. It was also suitably dark since she had broken the light in the stairwell.

The night we chose for this children’s wedding was ill-starred, however. We did not know that Jalal Mukbir’s wife had invited a group of women to come and celebrate the circumcision of her second child or that the stairwell light had recently been fixed.

We stood in a corner of the stairwell, with only a faint glimmer of light from the roof, arguing about whether or not I could touch her buttocks. I got annoyed with her and cursed and, pulling her towards me, yanked her hair.

At first she fought back but then she gave in so that when, a minute later, the stairs were flooded with light from the landing above, we were caught clinging to each other half naked and grunting like two puppies learning to pant. We were just getting to the part where I had to push into her.

After a moment of stunned silence, all hell broke loose as the women on the landing above erupted into a frenzy of shouting and screaming. I pulled up my underwear and bolted out of the building, running for my life.

After that, the women warned their daughters – and their sons too – never to go near me or play with me again. The older girls, especially, were on notice.

The following day I could tell that all the boys from my circle of friends were avoiding me. Tahani tried to invite me to join her set of friends, but her older brother would not hear of it. Her eyes followed me as I went in search of a group of children who would let me play with them.

Souad was a child-sized whore.

Little girls learn very young that their smile is marketable, and that is the first step to perdition. They become harlots while still young and attractive and later, in their waning years, they become go-betweens. This opinion was proven when I ran into Souad at the Palace gates thirty years later. (I also used that chance encounter to pay off my long-standing debt of half a riyal.)

Souad was a child whose mother encouraged her to dally with the boys of the neighbourhood and wrest whatever she could from them by fooling around. Souad was born of a woman with a loose tongue and a demeanour to match. She was the offspring of a reluctant marriage which the groom disavowed immediately after the wedding ceremony. As the fruit of that unhappy union, Souad became the neighbourhood’s plaything – boys toyed with her according to the extent of their bargaining skills.

Her mother had led the way. Women are like wooden planks, she told Souad, ever ready for a nail, be it crooked or straight. It did not matter whether the plank was thick or thin, whether it was hard or soft, long or short, as long as the owner of the nail could pay the price for hammering it into the wood.

Souad was nicknamed the ‘Bride’ because she loved to play bride and groom and especially loved to pocket the loose change that the boys handed her for a chance to hammer their nails in.

When she had suggested going to Jalal Mukbir’s house, I never imagined that I would end up being a feast for the eyes of the women glaring down at us from the landing, their eyes practically popping out of their sockets. The incident inflamed the lust of the women, three of whom started to stalk me. There were countless retellings of what had been observed, and a good deal of exaggeration inevitably crept into the many versions, including the rumour that I had a third leg.

The first to try to verify the claim was Souad’s mother herself. She repeatedly tried to entice me to come to her house when everyone was asleep. After that, there was Mona, whose husband worked for the health directorate, and then Iman. All three devised ways to be alone with me and see for themselves what all the tongues were wagging about after the scandal with Souad.

Transgressing became a way of life.

I was young and hot-headed and I left a broken heart here and there. The three of us – Osama, Issa and I – hurtled into young adulthood reckless and hardened.

*  *  *

Even when we are accustomed to promiscuity from a young age, we occasionally yearn for the warm and comforting embrace of tenderness. We enjoy recollecting moments of unsullied intimacy and feeling released from the squalor of our aberrant behaviour.

Tahani was tender-hearted and always stood by me. Even after my name was dirt and none of the other children wanted to play with me, she found ways to include me; she managed to find some justification for us to be together.

We walked the first stretch of the way to school together, down a long winding street that came to a fork. Then she would go on her way to the girls’ school and I would catch the bus to mine.

Many girls walked to school, either alone or in groups. The boys walked behind, ogling them brazenly even though they wore abayas. Boys and girls from our neighbourhood woke up looking forward to this early morning interlude when furtive love messages could be exchanged – a word here, a glance there – before we filed into our different schools.

Tahani chose to walk to school by herself and never strayed far from my footsteps.

We walked in silence, our hearts aflutter, after listening to pop songs we thought were written just for us. We walked to school closer and closer together until, one morning, our hands brushed against each other. After school that day, whenever I looked up at her window, she would be there, her face behind the lattice, watching me smile or wave.        

I was caught between two window screens: Tahani’s amorous glances from one and Aunt Khayriyyah’s unrelenting surveillance from the other. I would escape into the alleyways where I could hope that no one would be tracking me.

I already had an atrocious reputation in the neighbourhood which, with every new scandal, was further tarnished. Despite her attempts, Tahani could not convince those around her that I was not in fact a complete scoundrel. She confided that she wished I would stop misbehaving, which provided everyone with an excuse to shun me. She also warned me to stay away from her first cousin, Osama, as well as from Issa.

Vowing to put the past behind me, I did as she wished. I stopped chasing other girls and gave up the company of Issa and Osama.

I even started going to the mosque. I noted the looks of utter disbelief from the worshippers as I prostrated myself, remorseful and teary-eyed. My half-brother Ibrahim was the happiest to see me there, plying me with books and urging me to attend recitation practice.

But a bitter plant will not turn sweet regardless of how much it is watered. A leopard does not change its spots.

*  *  *

Ibrahim and I came from the same wellspring, although we were born of two different women. While we were sown in radically different soils, we mirrored one another. From earliest childhood, the mosque had captured Ibrahim’s heart. He spent most of his time there, diligently engrossed in prayer or memorising the Qur’an, which of course won him favour in our father’s eyes. The disparity in our conduct was so great that not only was it immediately visible but it also became proverbial. One of the older men in the neighbourhood coined his own phrase to express the dramatic difference between us: ‘Tariq and Ibrahim come from the same water – one is a stinking lech and the other a paragon of virtue.’

After Ibrahim suggested I should attend a religious study group at the mosque, I readily agreed because I really did want to cleanse myself and come closer to God. We gathered in a circle around the sheikh who led the study group and who, fixing his disapproving gaze on me, preached about how homosexuality and fornication were unanimously condemned by all religious traditions. He stared into my face, enunciating his words slowly, keeping his jaws tightly clenched.

‘Only those who abandon the way of sin are truly repentant for the days they have squandered.’ He looked straight into my eyes as he added, ‘I believe some of you truly regret the grave offences you have committed and that have angered the Merciful.’ He paused for effect. ‘But not all sins are created equal. The sins of some among us today are enough to shake the very throne of the Creator. And I submit to you that a dog’s crooked tail can never be straightened.’ He paused again and then added for good measure, ‘Never – even if he enters the mosque and sits among us.’

At that point, he broke from his formal sermonising tone into a vulgar vernacular as he recounted the rumours about the three of us – Issa, Osama and me – without naming any names.

That was the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back. I started to heckle him and jeered at his vulgarity until, after several interruptions, he threw me out.

First impressions are indelible. A sinner who tries to redeem himself faces a bar that is always set that much higher, always just out of reach. I went from one study group to another and listened to a succession of speakers expounding on the nature of sin, ruminating on the subject like some pre-digested and regurgitated fodder. Like cardamom whose seeds are ground to a powder while the pod resists pulverisation, our transgressions were excoriated but we emerged unscathed.

Eager to support my search for guidance, Ibrahim accompanied me to religious lectures at various mosques. On one such occasion, the officiating imam gave a sermon after the evening prayer on the life of the Islamic scholar, Sufyan al-Thawri, a deeply flawed man who had also needed guidance. The imam focused on the error of al-Thawri’s ways but made almost no reference to his legacy.

Time and again, preachers would cite the Hadith to demonstrate that man was able to overcome sinfulness through rectitude. However, they only ever emphasised the wrong­doing and not the good deeds. Human beings, including prophets, do not appreciate being singled out only for their errors and weaknesses.

During another deadening study group, and maybe by way of providing material for gossip, the sheikh enumerated all the errors and sins of the prophets. He had found enough material for an entire series of sermons and he developed the theme at various sessions after evening prayers. I went along with this until he got to the sinfulness of the venerable prophet Jonah, at which point I decided I could not stand another minute of this stupid, bullying nonsense. I got up to leave, convinced that my struggle to turn over a new leaf was in vain; I had already started to believe that I would never be able to put my own sinfulness behind me, just as an apple could never fall upwards.

Whenever she saw me getting ready to go and attend prayers or the study groups at the mosque, Aunt Khayriyyah would mutter, ‘You won’t be doing this for long. There is a streak of wickedness in you.’

The mosque circuit did not last more than a few months, after which I was back to my old tricks. Only Ibrahim and Tahani were sorry to see me give up on the mosque.

The downturn began with a nocturnal adventure with Mona, one of the three women who had stalked me after the scandal with Souad. I was on my way to the mosque when she burst out of her house, her cleavage openly showing, and asked me to come in and repair a faulty fuse in her bedroom. Her husband was away on a mission for the health directorate to vaccinate residents of coastal villages against meningitis.

I had many subsequent opportunities to sneak in to repair her bedroom light, though the lamp remained broken long after her husband’s return.

*  *  *

All these decades later, I have come to feel sorry about my lapse, now that my strength has been sapped and I stagger behind Ibrahim like a stone rolling down a precipice.

My work at the Palace did not brook a moral conscience. Regardless of the job, the mere fact of working there required the suspension of any kind of moral standard. The only way to get a return on one’s investment from working inside the Palace was to disregard the values that existed on the outside. That is why I embraced every forbidden pleasure, convinced that my destiny lay in only one direction, that of hell.

I occasionally managed to shake off this despondency by bringing to mind conversations with Ibrahim.

‘What happens when you trip up?’ he once asked me. ‘Do you stay on the ground or do you get up?’ I did not feel like talking, so he answered for me. ‘You get up, dust yourself off and keep going.’ He added earnestly, ‘That’s what living is all about – you fall, you get back on your feet, you clean up and you get on with your life.’

He reminded me that God loves the return of sinners to his side, and quoted the Qur’anic verse: ‘Oh my servants who have transgressed against themselves, do not despair of God’s mercy. God forgives all sins: He is All-Forgiving, Compassionate to each.’

Even though I often went to Mecca on work-related business, it took me thirty-one years to summon up the courage to set foot inside the Mosque of the Holy Sanctuary.

On my way into and out of the city, I would drive by the gates of the Sanctuary and pause to watch the pilgrims as they picked their way among all the cars. I envied their serene faces, subdued voices and their general air of contentment. I would look up at the lofty minarets that broadcast the call to prayer, a balm to the worshippers’ hearts that dislodged any build-up of sediment and decay corroding their spirits. The faithful responded to the call feeling as secure as the pigeons who had made the Kaaba their home.

There have been many times when I decided to return to the fold – and equally many when I recoiled from the very thought. Nothing could pull me away from the darkness that had descended on my soul so long ago.

*  *  *

Left to my own devices on the streets, my day would really only start at around ten o’clock in the evening. I would roam the narrow alleyways to hang out with the drunks and listen to them rant about their woes, to look for someone to play balut, and to ogle the neighbours’ daughters. (This particularly angered Tahani who got wind of what I was up to from those girls who knew about our relationship.)

I also chased the boys we all lusted after. I undertook many a crowing exploit and Lu’ayy was the exception that proved the rule. He was the little creep who nearly landed me in jail. His father showed up at the police station charging that I had molested his son. My life could have taken a dramatically different course had it not been for the apathetic officer who registered the complaint.

Seeing that the process was going nowhere, Lu’ayy’s father moved his family out of town before I could hammer his son. It was a valuable lesson for me: from that day, I realised that the children of the well-to-do were a real nuisance to those of us bent on the pursuit of cheap pleasures.

After I was done cruising, I would stop by a grocery store in one of the dodgier parts of the neighbourhood, where a solitary lamp cast a ghostly light on a deserted and narrow alley.

Mustafa Qannas would emerge from the alleyway under the cover of darkness, trudging heavily, mumbling incoherently and humming a little ditty that seemed directed at me:

 

‘Pretty boy’s gone away, gone, gone pretty boy.

Kith and kin drool over him, but he’s afraid of strangers.

In her lap his mama holds him, and her heart I swear

 will break.

’Cos I will hold him like lovers do, like lovers do.’

 

Mustafa would offer me some of his revolting moonshine and I would oblige by pretending to take a few sips. He was about ten years older than me and, in his mid-twenties, was already thinking of settling down. But his wretched state and notorious reputation barred him from every door. Consequently, he spent all his time chasing after boys whom he wooed with this kind of banter.

He took the departure of Lu’ayy very badly and channelled his longing for the boy by reciting snatches of poetry. Sometimes he accompanied the words by plucking on an Arabian lyre – a simsimiyya – whose slack strings he was forever tightening. He had made the simsimiyya himself and it simply would not stay in tune.

He held me responsible for his misery after Lu’ayy was gone from the neighbourhood. When, at the height of his intoxication, Mustafa would start to slap his head with both hands and begin to wail, I would hurry away. I knew better than to stay around after he warned me once, dead sober, ‘If I find you anywhere near me when I start crying, I’m going to kill you.’

My father criticised me endlessly for keeping the company of drunks and often came looking for me in the middle of the night. If he happened to find me, he would grab me by the hair and drag me behind him like a rag doll without uttering a word – his iron grip conveying all I needed to know about the feelings roiling inside him.

As he dragged me through the alleyways, I had visions of knives being honed and waiting to spill my blood. Every time he found me in the middle of the night, I could swear he was going to kill me. But as soon as we got home, he would fling me in my aunt’s face, muttering, ‘Tie him up somewhere near you. I’ll take care of him in the morning.’

Having been roused against his will, he would go straight back to bed and fall asleep. Since he was always out of the door at dawn, he would leave the house before making good on his threat.

*  *  *

The geography of our house changed radically with the sudden decline in our numbers. Soon, no one was left but the desiccated and vitriolic Aunt Khayriyyah.

To her, I was like mould encrusted in her drinking cup that she could not dislodge. She despised me and would say I was a ‘stinking egg destined for a heap of rotting rubbish’.        

She would hurl insults at me whenever she ran out of patience, and justified her outbursts by claiming she was only trying to mend my wicked ways. She loudly lamented that my father’s lineage had not ended before I came on the scene.

Aunt Khayriyyah would rack her brain to find some defective strain that had entered her lineage, adamant that it was impossible I issued from the noble line of men in her family. She kept on with her insinuations until she got to my maternal grandmother’s questionable chastity. This doubt was based on a murky rumour, whispered by the women of the family, each iteration of which added a lurid detail. In the final version of the tale, my grandmother was alleged to have brought a lover into her bed during one of her husband’s absences and, by his return, her belly was already swollen from the infidelity.

Aunt Khayriyyah had no evidence for any of this, apart from the stories spread by family members. She was nevertheless convinced that my maternal grandmother Saniyya had desecrated her own, once pristine lineage. Since Saniyya’s womb was polluted by some impure sap, my parents’ marriage meant my aunt’s lineage was now tainted.

As a result, our family had split into two rival and hostile branches. According to Aunt Khayriyyah, the first, of pure lineage, was dedicated to the mercantile trades, while the other was defiled by whatever parasitic seed had stuck to and then spewed out of Saniyya’s womb.

Aunt Khayriyyah could not help yearning for her origins despite being cut off from them for all those years; she could not get over the circumstances that had compelled her to live with her only brother and his sullied wife. She claimed my father had been lured in by my mother’s scheming ways and, in marrying her, had violated the purity of stock so prized by the family.

Their union was an historic mistake and she was unable to forgive my father on two counts: first, for having forced her to leave the family, which prized purity of lineage above all else, and second, for recklessly associating with the filth that was my mother, thereby tainting his own lineage. As far as Aunt Khayriyyah was concerned, my mother followed in her own mother’s footsteps in her indiscriminate and insatiable appetite for semen.

Her suspicion that I was evidence of that rotten seed clinging to her brother was confirmed once she and I were the only two people left in the house. After my father’s death, my mother remarried, taking for a new husband her first cousin on Saniyya’s side.

As talk of family history was on everyone’s lips, I came to learn that my mother had twice stood in the way of Aunt Khayriyyah getting married, condemning her to spinsterhood for the rest of her life. Her first potential suitor had been my mother’s own brother. She managed to put him off from the start with descriptions of her sister-in-law’s fulminating mouth and rank armpits.

The second budding suitor was a man of no fixed abode who was looking for a woman to take him in. In this case and perhaps overplaying her hand, my mother had accused my father of being so insensitive as to throw his sister into the jaws of a passing stranger. So my father ended up showing him the door.

That was how Aunt Khayriyyah came to harbour the well of venom and vitriol towards my mother.