The Year of Rice and Salt

There was this fundamental fact, however, which struck her every day when she left the zawiyya: she was no longer living in a harem. She could go where she chose, when she chose. This alone was enough to make her feel giddy and strange – free, solitary – almost too happy, to the point of disorientation, or even a kind of panic: once right in the midst of this euphoria she saw from behind a man emerging from the railway station and thought for a second it was her father, and was glad, relieved; but it wasn't him; and all the rest of that day her hands shook with anger, shame, fear, longing.

Later it happened again. It happened several times, and she came to regard the experience as a kind of ghost glimpsed in the mirror, her past life haunting her: her father, her uncles, her brother, her male cousins, always in actuality the faces of various strangers, just alike enough to give her a start, make her heart jump with fear, though she loved them all. She would have been so happy to think they were proud of her, that they cared enough to come after her. But if it meant returning to the harem, she never wanted to see them again. She would never again submit to rules from anyone. Even ordinary sane rules now gave her a quick surge of anger, an instantaneous and complete NO that would fill her like a shriek in the nerves. Islam in its literal meaning meant submission: but NO! She had lost that ability. A traffic policewoman, warning her not to cross the busy harbour road outside the crosswalks: Budur cursed her. The house rules in her zawiyya: her teeth would clench. Don't leave dirty plates in the sink, help wash the sheets every Thursday; NO.

But all that anger was trivial compared to the fact of her freedom. She woke in the morning, understood where she was, leapt out of bed full of amazed energy. An hour's vigorous work in the zawiyya had her groomed and fed, and some of the communal work done, bathrooms cleaned, dishes, all the chores that had to be done over and over again, all the chores that at home had been performed by the servants but how much finer it was to do such work for an hour than to have other human beings sacrificing their whole lives to it! How clear it was that this was a model for all human labour and relations!

Those things done, she was off into the fresh ocean air, like a cold salty wet drug, sometimes with a shopping list, sometimes only with her bag of books and writing materials. Wherever she was going she would go by the harbour, to see the ocean outside the jetty, and the wind whipping the flags; and one fine morning she stood at the end of the jetty with nowhere to go, and nothing to do; and no one in the world knew where she was at that moment, except for her. My God, the feel of that! The harbour crowded with ships, the brown water running out to sea on the ebb tide, the sky a pale wash of clean azure, and all of a sudden she bloomed, there were oceans of clouds in ber chest, she wept for joy. Ah, Nsara! Nsssarrrrra!

But first on her list of things to do, on many mornings, was to visit the White Crescent Disabled Soldiers' Home, a vast converted army barracks a long way up the river park. This was one of those duties Idelba had pointed her towards, and Budur found it both harrowing and uplifting – like going to the mosque on Friday was supposed to be and never really had been. The larger part of this barracks and hospital was taken up by a few thousand blind soldiers, rendered sightless by gas on the eastern front. In the mornings they sat in silence, in beds or chairs or wheelchairs as the case might be, as someone read to them, usually a woman: daily newspapers on their thin inky sheets, or various texts, or in some cases the Quran and the hadith, though these were less popular. Many of the men had been wounded as well as blinded, and could not walk or move; they sat there with half a face, or without legs, aware, it seemed, of how they must appear, and staring in the direction of the readers with a hungry ashamed look, as if they would kill and eat her if they could, from unrealizable love or bitter resentment, or both all mixed together. Such naked expressions Budur had never seen in her life, and she often kept her own gaze fixed on whatever text she was reading, as though, if she were to glance up at them they would know it and recoil, or hiss with disapprobation. Her periph eral vision revealed to her an audience out of a nightmare, as if one of the rooms of hell had extruded from the underworld to reveal its inhabitants, waiting to be processed, as they had waited and been processed in life. Despite her attempts not to look, every time she read to them Budur saw more than one of them weeping, no matter what it was she read, even the weather reports from Firanja or Africa or the New World. The weather actually was one of their favourite readings.