News of issa’s unexpected appearance in the neighbourhood had swept through the alleyways and reached his father, Abu Issa. No sooner did Abu Issa hear the news than he began to prepare to welcome his son home. He was going to let bygones be bygones and forgive Issa for his belligerence; all he wanted after this long absence was to inhale the boy’s smell again.
Abu Issa set about rearranging the furniture in the house, thinking of where his son would want to sit. He ran through his mind the most important things he would say to his son in the course of apologising to him, playing a series of scenarios, until he settled on the simplest and most heartfelt: he would clasp Issa’s hands, kiss them and then implore him to return home with his mother and reunite the family under one roof.
But his enthusiasm faded as midnight drew near.
Abu Issa showed up on our doorstep at one in the morning saying that whoever had put out the news that his son was in the neighbourhood had to be an abject liar. He refused to believe Issa could have been in the neighbourhood without so much as knocking on the door of his family home.
I had seen Issa barely an hour earlier – our first meeting – when he had sniffed at my attire and told me to return the following night better prepared for the Palace. ‘Issa was here,’ I confirmed.
‘And you didn’t bring him to see me, Tariq?’ he asked reproachfully. ‘Didn’t you tell him that his father is no longer the man he once was?’
‘He has also changed,’ I offered by way of a reply as I brought to mind his fancy car, his new clothes and his affected speech.
‘Didn’t you tell him that I’ve become incontinent, that I’m going crazy thinking about him and his mother?’ Abu Issa asked. ‘All right, leave me out of it. Didn’t you tell him that his brothers miss their mother?’
I could not tell him that Issa had refused to come inside the neighbourhood and had said there was no one there who meant a thing to him any more.
Long before this, when her son had disappeared for an entire week, Umm Issa had become convinced that he would never return home. She set about trying to glean snippets of information about his whereabouts from his closest friends, but none of us had any idea how to reach him and our guesses failed to satisfy her.
Umm Issa wanted to know for sure that her son was all right and since no one in her family would accompany her to search for him, she started asking the neighbours for help. Whenever her husband left the house, Umm Issa would go out and rope some young man into driving her around the places she thought she might find her son.
Eventually it got back to Abu Issa that his wife was going out unaccompanied by a family member. Livid with rage, he ambushed her when she returned from one of her excursions in the car of the neighbourhood’s money changer. He flung the car door open and set upon her right in the alleyway, hurling insults at her and accusing her of carrying on with the young men of the neighbourhood using the pretext of looking for her son. He swore that if she went out one more time he would break her bones and she would never walk again.
Umm Issa became a prisoner of her own home and of her tears. Nothing could console her or provide relief; when one of her aunts tried to intercede on her behalf, Abu Issa became even more enraged and intensified his cruel and humiliating treatment by strapping his wife to the foot of his mother’s sofa.
Issa stole back into their home one morning, after he had made sure that his father was gone for the day, and he took his mother away. He disowned his father and told his grandmother to convey the message to her son that he would never again set eyes on his wife.
Abu Issa would die without either of his two most fervent wishes being granted: to be reunited, by the grace of God, with his wife and eldest son, and to sail out to the open sea one last time.
* * *
Issa did not express himself obliquely or cryptically. Life in the streets had divested him of any notion of shame and he was quite blunt about the reason for his reappearance in the neighbourhood. During our second meeting, when I slipped into his car, he told me, ‘Those vital juices of yours have a price and from now on, they will bring in their weight in gold.’
I sealed the deal with a nod. He probably thought it was debauchery and greed that motivated me. What he did not realise was that only moments earlier I had ruined Tahani and was now a fugitive. I had her blood on my hands and her disgraced honour on my conscience. As his car bumped along the narrow twisting lanes, the men of the neighbourhood were out scouting the alleyways for the thief who had broken into Salih Khaybari’s house.
I went to work at the Palace with Issa’s warning ringing in my ears. ‘Don’t even think about objecting to anything,’ he said several times as he steered me into the Master’s presence.
The Sayyid looked me up and down, his eyes travelling over every inch of my body and general appearance. He told me to take a few steps, then to turn, and then to stride from one corner of the room to the other.
‘I hear from Issa that your life is tied up in your loins,’ he said.
The Master had me come towards him and as I stood facing him he ordered me to get closer and then closer again, until I was less than a metre away.
Without further ado, he commanded, ‘Take off your trousers.’
Just like that! The man’s coarseness far exceeded anything which we, so-called street kids, were capable of. For someone immersed in a life of opulent luxury, his vulgarity was unbelievable – and it was like that throughout my employment at the Palace. I was the object of insults and profanity unheard of even among the lowest riff-raff. He was compulsively profane and not a day went by when he did not hurl obscenities at me.
By the end of my time at the Palace I knew why he had such a filthy vocabulary. But standing in front of him at our very first meeting, it never occurred to me that his depravity could so far exceed that of pimps and whores with a hallowed history in the business.
Standing before him with my trousers around my ankles and frozen with embarrassment, I had no idea what I was supposed to do or what he expected of me.
‘Take off your underwear,’ he ordered gruffly.
I fumbled around trying to delay, but a Filipino manservant swiftly stepped forward and his fleeting hands stripped me naked. I burned with shame.
Not content simply to look, the Master tugged and prodded provocatively at my manhood, which had the last traces of Tahani’s virginity, the rosy blood of her maidenhead, still clinging to it. ‘I’m entitled to check for myself the thickness of the stick that will chastise my enemies, right?’
He pulled and tossed my member this way and that, making his own assessment. He flipped it to the right, then to the left, raised it, lowered it, pulled and stretched, and finally released it as nonchalantly as if he were examining a fish for its freshness.
‘Do you always walk around with visible traces of your aggression?’ he asked with a nauseating laugh.
I burned with shame.
Then he looked towards Issa and issued his verdict: ‘He’ll do.’
I pulled up my clothes while the Master, with a sneer of distaste, reached for a tissue from a box on a marble-top table and began to wipe his hand. This was a signal to the Filipino, who nodded eagerly and flashed a wooden smile as he jumped into action.
Issa was just as obsequious. As soon as the Master had uttered his opinion, Issa left the room, nodding deferentially as he went. I was left in the care of the Filipino who walked me down the corridors of the Palace, sometimes a few steps ahead, sometimes propelling me from behind, as we went through a series of doorways. Whenever I slackened the pace, he stopped smiling and urged me on, until we came to a comfortable-looking bedroom flanked by a small antechamber and a bathroom.
He told me to step into the bathroom and, when I remained rooted to the spot, he substituted miming gestures for his pidgin Arabic, indicating I should undress fully this time. Seeing me hesitate, he came up to me and took the matter into his own hands, stripping me of one item of clothing after another, smiling all the while. I grabbed his hand forcefully, but he treated me like a poorly disciplined child making a fuss over bath time. His features clouded over as the hint of a threat hung in the air.
I submitted to a thorough scrubbing. Every dead and dry cell on my body was exfoliated, my skin was conditioned with almond, walnut and pomegranate oils, lotions and ointments were rubbed on and, finally, a dusting of warm-scented powder was applied to attenuate the shine. I glowed.
I put on a cotton robe and the Filipino servant left me to lie down, my head swirling with unanswered questions. Issa had communicated no details about my prospective work beyond urging me to demonstrate total compliance with any command I was given. The image of Tahani’s tear-stained face overshadowed any other thought and her pleading cries crowded out every concern I had. I could not imagine what was about to happen nor anticipate that what I had just been subjected to was a harbinger of things to come.
The sound of approaching voices put an end to my reverie and the Master burst into the suite accompanied by four men who laughed and jostled raucously as a fifth man was dragged in wailing and flanked by two black manservants. The man was imploring the Master, swearing on his life that he would never again be guilty of insubordination.
His pleas for mercy mingled with Tahani’s and their two voices reverberated through my mind.
Working quickly together, the servants stripped the man naked and threw him on to the bed where I lay. The Master seated himself across from the bed, flanked by a stony-faced acolyte on either side, while the other two busied themselves setting up a video camera and the African servants stood at attention by the door.
‘I want to hear him screaming at the top of his lungs,’ the Master said.
Only then, seeing the naked man on the bed, begging for mercy, did I finally realise with rising dread what was expected of me – the nature of the work I was to do at the Palace. I could not conceive carrying out the task expected of me, especially with all those eyes following my every move and being recorded on camera to boot.
‘I can’t do anything under these conditions,’ I said, the vexation I felt showing in the words that tumbled from my lips.
The Master looked pointedly towards the figures of the two black manservants looming at the door and winked at me. ‘Those two will take good care of you then … and you’ll end up being known as a whore.’
At that moment, the door opened and a smartly dressed waiter stepped in with a trolley filled with an array of alcoholic beverages. I had never seen anything like it. He busied himself mixing drinks for the Master and his acolytes, and complied with an order to pour one more drink, which he thrust towards me.
‘This should help you take care of business,’ the Master said. ‘But don’t make it a habit.’
The victim’s skin was as soft and clear as that of a woman stepping out of a scented bath; despite that, I imagined that he would not be easy to handle. I was not used to docile prey. He had not stopped pleading for mercy, his face streaming with tears, swearing he would be as a ring to the Master’s finger. His entreaties fell on deaf ears, however. I too felt like crying out to be spared the task that awaited me. Notwithstanding the general mirth the pleading seemed to induce, the Master’s sharp glances clearly indicated that his patience was exhausted.
I needed a few moments to recover myself, but with the threat of being administered my own medicine by the two Africans, I quickly complied, following the directions of the cameraman who seemed experienced at filming such scenes. He asked me to repeat several moves as if he were producing a film to be entered into some competition.
That night I was overcome with disgust at what I had been doing all these years in the dark alleyways of the neighbourhood. I had abused many young boys, completely indifferent to their suffering, and here I was about to get a taste of my own medicine. Even though I had engaged in countless acts of sodomy, I felt as if it were I who was being raped – that I was the one vainly begging for mercy.
* * *
I learned that my position at the Palace was an important one and that I was replacing someone whose ‘flame’ had gone out and who had served the first Master – Sayyid al-kabeer – in the same capacity. All indications were that the old-timer, Uncle Muhammad, was the retired punisher. I yearned to verify this but it was many years before the opportunity presented itself – or, to be honest, before I summoned up the courage to ask Uncle Muhammad directly.
Life inside the high Palace walls was something else entirely. Principles and values had no place there; we espoused whatever values the moment dictated, whichever ones best suited the Master’s mood.
Whether it was an inability to say ‘no’ or inherent depravity, it took me many years to understand fully the extent of my debauchery. Worldly pleasures are worthless when we do not choose them ourselves. In my view, that is the reason for boredom. The Palace devotees thought otherwise, however. Their hedonism knew no limits and they were forever searching for some new form of gratification – turning to perversion if all else failed. Perverts and deviants are basically motivated by boredom: tired of what is socially acceptable, they seek whatever is novel or uncommon to break the monotony of routine pleasures.
The Master was so jaded that he had a special reward for anyone who could entice him with a new distraction. He had grown disconsolate about most worldly pleasures and felt there were no carnal delights left for him to experience. He enjoyed mutilating servants as much as he delighted in trading jokes with his brother or bringing in dancing-girls and singers from far-flung places. He also indulged in several marriages to celebrities, pretty news anchorwomen and the like, and frequented the world’s biggest casinos. Watching his rivals being sodomised was his latest thrill.
On my very first night at the Palace, before I had even met the Master, Uncle Muhammad had taken me aside and said, ‘Mark my words – don’t hang around here too long.’
I was sitting, waiting to be shown in, when he offered me a cup of coffee in the traditional manner: bowing, as he had done faithfully for the first Master of the Palace. He poured the coffee ceremoniously into my cup and accompanied his cascading gesture with a small torrent of words that I did not fully grasp at the time.
‘You’ll get singed,’ he warned, ‘like a moth dancing too close to a flame. To the high and mighty of these halls, we’re just a temporary convenience. Just like a tissue for a snotty nose, you’ll be discarded soon after use.’ When I responded with silence, he reminded me that money was the root of all evil.
A life of destitution is holier than anything I encountered at the Palace, where nothing was sacred and everything permissible. Without limits to freedom and nothing to push against or to hold us back, freedom is meaningless. I learned late in life that without obstacles or barriers, freedom is a mirage.
* * *
On Friday evenings, Aunt Khayriyyah would sit behind her lattice-screen window hoping for a little breeze to dry off her weekly henna application. Whenever she caught sight of me hanging around aimlessly on the street, she would launch into her usual vituperation. ‘Mind you don’t scrape that rear-end of yours sitting in the dirt!’
We thought we would die, as we had lived, drowning in rubbish. The filthy neighbourhood was a Babel of residents who hailed from every corner of the earth and who trickled into the streets every Thursday night like cheap dye that stains everything.
Only one area of the neighbourhood had retained any social cohesion and was still inhabited by the original settlers. The other districts were populated by more recent arrivals, a motley collection of people from the southern part of the country – the Ghamad, the Zahharis, the Qahtanis, the Shahranis, the ’Asiris, the Yamis, the Jazzanis – and a hodge-podge of Bedu from outlying desert areas. There were also expatriate communities of Yemenis, Levantine Arabs, Egyptians, Sudanese, Somalis and Eritreans, as well as Indians, Afghans, Indonesians, Chadians, Chinese and Kurds, and Bokhari Uzbeks, Turkmen, and Kyrgyz who had fled the hell-hole of the Soviet Union.
Catapulted together, this multifarious assemblage of humanity spread deep into the neighbourhood, sharing the daily grind of life all the while dreaming of escape. Soon, it was no longer enough to say that you lived in the Firepit because dozens of smaller contiguous neighbourhoods had sprung up that were named after some event or community. The Firepit had its own elusive history, one that its inhabitants had colluded in writing. Every event in that history – good or bad – could be attributed to someone who lived there.
The Hadhramis from Yemen were the most numerous and were well-regarded by the wider community. The next largest group were the Africans, mostly Somalis, Chadians and Nigerians who were known for their unflagging vigour and unrepentant licentiousness. No one, whether newcomers or long-established residents, was interested in further classifying the residents of the neighbourhood.
The award for manliness would go to whoever took on one of the Africans. If you backed down from the contest, your friends would consider you a coward and it was then best to make yourself scarce and not stray too far from home.
That was a life lesson that I learned early on. I had lain in wait for the least spirited among the African boys and assaulted him right in front of his peers. I laid into him and did not back off until I had secured my reputation as a tough guy.
We did such twisted things in the alleyways that we were often shunned and sometimes beaten by elders in the community who hoped to reform us. In their view, our actions were beyond the pale, and this only drove us to greater secretiveness.
Our depravity exposed us to imprisonment, banishment or a thrashing at the very least. It was like a red light. The opposite was true at the Palace, where no vile act committed within its towering walls would ever be exposed.
* * *
The Palace comprised two distinct wings: one for the Master’s family, including a retinue of nannies and concubines, and the other for guests. The two areas were not completely separate since various structures within the compound were common to both, notably the halls, foyers, lounges, gardens and recreational areas.
Only a handful of people ventured into the wing that housed members of the Master’s family, foremost among whom was Issa. He was responsible for seeing to the requirements and needs of the women. It was rare to have any news of that side of the Palace and no one knew exactly the connections between the Master and the various women who emerged from a door deep inside.
The women were assigned chauffeurs from a host of Islamic nations, each of them a paragon of honour, temperance and piety. The cars that conveyed the women used one of two roads: one that ran right through the middle of the compound, which was closed during celebrations and festivities, and a back road that followed the perimeter of the Palace along the seafront. This was the preferred route when there were too many visitors and during wild parties.
A luxury car glided to a stop near the family compound and a woman with bewitching eyes rolled down the window. Her niqab slipped momentarily off her face to reveal a lustrous complexion and to suggest many other charms besides those distracting eyes.
‘Isn’t Issa back from his trip yet?’ the beguiling young woman asked.
When Issa was away, everything was topsy-turvy – at least that was how it felt. I realised that the young woman was repeating the question and that I had been staring at her the whole time. I was flummoxed.
‘Is Issa back from his trip?’ she repeated.
She was annoyed by my staring into her eyes and urged me to respond as I searched for the ineffable charms that might lurk behind that veil.
‘Lower your gaze or say goodbye to your eyesight!’ she snapped.
Coming to my senses, I mumbled a halting apology which she ignored. She raised her hand against the tinted window and the car resumed its stately passage through the compound.
When I was younger, a sure path to stealing a woman’s heart – and body – was through her eyes. The secret was to gaze into a woman’s eyes longingly and then make all the other moves to reach what lay behind them. It was a lesson I had learned from Mona. ‘Women love being looked at,’ she had told me. ‘They love feeling that you are entranced by them. It gives them a heady sense of their femininity.’
The only woman I have ever known to dislike being looked at was Aunt Khayriyyah. Finding herself being stared at was likely to bring out her most warped traits and spark uncontrolled rage. The merest glance at her would ignite whatever fire lay smouldering inside her. If you wanted to see her enraged or find out first-hand what a mean and spiteful person she was, all you had to do was stare into her eyes.
The men in the neighbourhood knew that looking her in the eye was likely to set off a torrent of obscenities and went out of their way to avoid her, stepping briskly out of view if they happened to come across her in the street. No suitor ever darkened her doorway for fear of that inextinguishable wrath.
Since she was unable to spark anyone’s interest when she was still of marriageable age, she remained a spinster. Knowing that men would always flee from her, she began pursuing women. She did this openly, but the women she approached fled her as much as any man had done and alerted all their friends to my aunt’s perversion.
After everyone was gone, only she and I were left in the house, with our grudges and watchfulness. Whenever she suspected I might uncover something she wanted kept secret, she would start gossiping about me at her women’s gatherings, excoriating me for what she described as my perversions.
My aunt had watched my every move ever since I was a child. She was responsible for running the household and my mother had no say in my upbringing.
‘Aren’t you coming home?’ she called out one day, craning her neck from the window looking out on to the back alley. I heard her but deliberately ignored her. I was chasing a boy who had snatched a wooden toy Tahani had been playing with in the alleyway next to his.
Aunt Khayriyyah resumed her conversation with the neighbour, the imam’s wife. Water levels in the storage tanks were at their lowest level and another poor rainy season was in sight. Prayers for rain had been fruitless; not a rain cloud had appeared despite the oratorical skills of the mosque’s imam.
Three whole years had gone by without a drop of rain. Whenever the imam’s wife heard him imploring the Almighty for a shower, she could not help but recall how boorish and nasty her husband was to her and thought about how mercy should begin at home. ‘The All-Merciful shows no mercy for the merciless,’ she repeated like a refrain.
Tahani was leaning against a motorcycle that had been abandoned on our street ever since its owner had been run over and died. She held out her hands, smiling, as I returned the toy to her. But she ran off as soon as she heard her mother screeching about her playing with me.
Aunt Khayriyyah began complaining to another neighbour about her hair falling out in great big clumps. She lamented the loss of the locks which, she claimed, had drawn every boy in the neighbourhood to flock under the windows of her father’s house.
‘You mean that the windows in your day had no latticework?’ the neighbour asked.
‘Just as bitchy as your mother, aren’t you?’ Aunt Khayriyyah shot back, bristling.
She went back inside the house, muttering about the curse that had been cast on her and that had resulted in a wasted life, imprisoned inside her brother’s home.
Hopping over the piles of rubbish lying in front of our house, I stepped through the rotting, termite-ridden doorway whose squeak was as shrill as my aunt’s voice. To me, she was as decrepit as the old door and I wished she would give up on her mite-ridden situation.
Aunt Khayriyyah frowned at my empty hands. ‘Didn’t I send you to fetch water?’
‘There isn’t a drop of water to be had anywhere.’
‘That’s how it is with the likes of you,’ she snapped, slapping her thighs in frustration. Then she reached over to grab my ear. ‘Now go,’ she said, pulling me down, ‘and don’t come back until you’ve got some.’
I found a water-bearer willing to deliver. Almost immediately after his donkey cart pulled up at our house with the order, there was an altercation that brought out all the neighbours.
My aunt started screaming bloody murder and hitting the water-bearer with a broom, claiming that he had been ogling her. When his screams rose to counter hers, the neighbours came running to the rescue. They burst into the house, pinned his arms behind his back and started to thrash him. As the blows rained down, the water-bearer collapsed unconscious on the floor and his attackers switched to delivering first aid instead of punches. They propped him up and splashed water on his face until he regained consciousness.
Before the poor man had even caught his breath, my aunt was inciting the neighbours to give him another thrashing. She began hollering as soon as the man was able to sit up. ‘Look at him!’ she screamed. ‘Look! He’s still making eyes at me!’ She threw the broom at him.
The crowd looked at him and realised he had a tic which made him look as if he were constantly winking. They could barely conceal their amusement and helped him out of the house, apologising for their behaviour. All the man wanted was to be gone. He struggled to his feet and jumped up on to the seat of his donkey cart with a practised hop, cursing my aunt and the men who had come to her aid.
‘By God, I wouldn’t glance at that thing if I were a donkey,’ he exclaimed. ‘I’ll be damned if that’s a woman.’ He was already moving away at a lively trot and had to turn his head back to deliver the parting shot: ‘That’s a woe-man!’
Unbeknownst to my aunt, the water-bearer’s name stuck. Following the incident, it gained wide currency among the women of the neighbourhood and no man ever cast the shadow of a glance at the woe-man.