Salih, who became Mansour, and would become my father, was born not long after the end of the Second World War. A new wave of inflation was sweeping across the country. Once again, flocks of emigrants were seeking meager incomes somewhere out there, at the ends of the wide world. His father, Salman, had lost all of his property except the shop and the little orchard. The child whose mother had found him so repugnant did not stop crying and screaming until Bint Aamir took him under her wing and gave him his new name. She sewed every one of his dishdashas with her own hands, through all the years until he grew up and became a man and got married. She took out portions from her rice at the midday meal and bread in the evening to supplement his share, even after easier circumstances returned to the family. By then, Salman was no longer personally locking up the huge metal chest that held the large sack of rice, the bags of flour, and the boxes of sugar, coffee, and tea. He had previously kept the key in his pocket and would open the chest for Bint Aamir before every meal, weighing out the measure of rice and flour that she would boil and bake, midday and evening.
Salman called her Bint Aamir, as did Athurayyaa and the neighbor women. Mansour called her Maah. That’s what we children called her, too. Through those many years of her long life spent in the house of Salman, and regardless of whether it was a time of prosperity or one of the intervals of hardship between easier times, she never stopped serving the family, working in the kitchen and all through the house. It was as though, at some early moment, what lodged at the base of her conscience was the conviction that only in this way could she repay the debt she believed she owed to this household for hosting her. She never forgot for an instant that this was not her house. She never overlooked or tried to ignore her status as guest, even if in reality she was shouldering all the household tasks and raising the family’s child. Her energy never flagged, so intent was she about assuring that her status in this family was deserved because of the service she gave, that it wasn’t bestowed as a favor or based only on the kind charity of others.
Did Mansour bring joy to her days? Every day at dawn he would toddle along behind her, as she balanced the rotund clay jahla on her head and walked to what was known as the Shariia, the main spring at the falaj, to fill it with water. Mansour always immersed his little feet in the falaj, plunging them into the irrigation canal to make little whirlpools. And then, on the way back, he did his solemn best to keep up with her long strides as he followed her tall figure. The early morning dew clung to his braids, which she plaited painstakingly every day until he turned twelve. Twelve years of life, through which he had managed to escape the perils of some unknown person’s malicious envy. But then his father took him by the arm, shaved off his hair, and said to him, “You’ve become a man now, Mansour. In a few years’ time, we will go on the Holy Pilgrimage together.”
Mansour didn’t seem to care much about having his hair cut. He didn’t have dreams about going on pilgrimage to Mecca, and as it turned out, he never would perform the hajj with his father. For Salman died a very few years later, a foreigner in Bombay, and was buried there, having traveled to the city this time seeking treatment for a constriction in his chest that was affecting his breathing.
His head shaven, Mansour immediately went back out into the nearby lanes to resume his ongoing performances for his friends. He had made it his specialty to hunt down scorpions, and once he had a heap of them, he bared his arms to create a couple of scorpion highways, while the other boys clapped and whistled. No scorpion had ever stung Mansour. Word spread among the boys that his mother Bint Aamir had drowned a scorpion in her breast milk when she was nursing him, and from that day on, no scorpion ever dared harm him. Others said she had scored and slit his arm lengthwise, sprinkled dried powdered scorpion along the incision, and sewed it up. And that was the real reason why the scorpions left him safe and sound.
Athurayyaa devoted her time entirely to prayer and acts of piety. She immersed herself in learning the Qur’an by heart, and performed extra prayers, praying and reciting from the Qur’an through the night. Meanwhile, Bint Aamir rose early every morning to take care of the needs of the household.
In Mansour’s first two years, he had an occasional habit of urinating into the soft dirt of the courtyard. This would leave Athurayyaa in anguish. That was her preferred spot for performing the dawn prayers, and Mansour had made it impure. It was her favorite corner for sitting with the neighborhood women in the late morning, and Mansour had soiled it. Bint Aamir would have to fetch a trowel and remove all the soiled dirt, creating a shallow depression which she filled with fresh, pure soil. Then she took Mansour to the falaj to bathe him. She pinched his ear to remind him that he must call her whenever he needed to pee, so that she could take him to the toilet. It was called the toilet but it was nothing more than a cramped little mud-brick shelter at the end of the house, with a lengthwise split in the ground where one did one’s business, and a tin pitcher for washing oneself. Bint Aamir filled the pitcher regularly from the little falaj that passed just south of the courtyard before completing its course toward the neighbors’ homes. That falaj then poured its waters into the date-palm orchards according to a strict, tightly regulated timing system based on the movement of the sun, as determined by the big sundial erected at a central location in the orchards and fields, since it was for everyone’s use.
Every few months, the shamis came to empty the sewer that formed in the basin at the bottom end of the toilet slit. He charged one qirsh for his services. People had gotten into the habit of calling him the Sewer Stool Man. Mansour called him that only once. His mother Athurayyaa heard him say it. She emptied a horn of hot peppercorns onto his tongue, to teach him never to call anyone by an insulting nickname, ever again.