Chapter 4

Back in her kitchen, Fareeha drained the cold dregs of her morning coffee and sat down on the rickety chair. She put her left hand on her stomach, then her right, holding herself like a pregnant woman. ‘interfering old woman,’ she muttered, sliding her left hand down further, into her groin. ‘Ouch!.’ She winced and quickly pulled her fingers back. ‘Still there,’ she said. She found her feet and stood up, trying to blank out the dread that had reared up. It wouldn’t be a serious problem for a while yet, she told herself. But she knew that even if she did get it seen to by a doctor, and even if her husband dragged himself back to her, she would still be in no rush to satisfy Mrs. Sharwalla’s desire to see the next generation.

She staggered back to the doorway, looked out into her garden, and wondered at her neighbour’s continuing acceptance of the old ways. Mrs. Sharwalla’s firstborn had been conceived on the night of her marriage; romantic foreplay culminating in a passionate conception? Hardly. If Mrs. Sharwalla’s graphic vignette was true, Farooq had lost his temper with the shy teenager and chased her screaming around the bedroom. He caught her, tied her right hand to the metal frame of the bed, then raped her. Afterwards, to his cheering family, he had proudly displayed the crisp white bed-sheet splattered with the virgin’s blood he had drawn. Yoosuf, the result of that night of violence, had been shot in the previous war.

At least Hassan had treated her better than that, not a lot, though—and certainly in the beginning.

She turned her back on the garden and tried to fill her mind with more immediate troubles: the mess in her kitchen, her front door, the gossip her neighbour had brought her, and how she was going to be able to pay double for her daily bread.

‘Somebody should do something about it.’

Mrs. Sharwalla’s words came back to her and she carried them around the kitchen with a wet cloth and a stiff broom. Coughing all the while on the clouds of dust that she pushed up. Funny, she thought, she hadn’t coughed on Mahmoud’s smoke.

She sat down and let the aroma once more fill her mind. Despite her rapturous response to Mahmoud’s early-morning cigarette—his last—Fareeha was not one of Sa’ An’s many smokers. The priests had long been back in their temples, allowing tolerance to seep into the vacuum; but still, few women smoked. Fareeha had in fact never in her whole life inhaled the product of fresh smouldering leaf and had until now only sniffed at the exhaled vapours of café hookahs and her own husband’s rough cigarettes. She remembered his choice: medium cut, black Turkish leaf, hand-rolled by the starving wives of Sa’ An and bought for a dirham a dozen at the local bazaar—always the cheapest for her good husband! She felt sorry for the old goatherd, Mahmoud, whose life seemed to be even more pitiable than her own: fleeing to the mountains! smoking goat shit! That was what he had said, wasn’t it?

Fareeha bolted up but not to continue with the housework—that could wait. She picked up a few things then walked to the front door, where she scuffed off her slippers and pushed her toes into her tatty sandals.

‘Do it myself if I had both my eyes.’

The words came back to her as she slipped through the flap of linoleum, adjusting her dark headscarf and smoothing down her long navy-blue dress.

*

Fareeha trudged through the already hot and dusty streets with a dry tongue and a growling stomach. Since the groundwater had recently gone bad she could never bring herself to drink enough and often went thirsty. Not eating enough, however, was nothing new—the larder had been bare for a long time. She put her hand to her forehead and raised he eyes to heaven; let it be, she thought, if this is his will. And if she couldn’t find anything in the bazaar, well, that too would be the way it was meant to be.

She saw the barber’s shop, shimmering on the corner ahead, and as usual she purposefully crossed the road to avoid passing it. It wasn’t the group of lecherous old men that she knew would be languishing inside and would no doubt be leering out at her—she had got used to the unwanted attention of men years ago. It was the glass front window, one of the few left in the whole city, that drove her away: she just couldn’t trust herself not to look at her own reflection in it and was scared at what she would see if she did: a skinny, drawn woman with sunken eyes and a lustreless complexion, lined, old beyond her years. She shuddered as she stepped over the kerb, keeping her head strained to the right. Despite Mrs. Sharwalla’s continuing jokes about passing on her good looks to the next generation, Fareeha knew that her beauty had died—and she was forever fearful of any reminder. She hurried on.

That single cup of coffee was not enough to get her all the way there and by the time she reached the municipal park, she was exhausted. A towering palm, whose fronds were still green and strong from the winter rains, invited her in and she sat in its cool shade. The park had been renamed since the revolution and it was now called Liberation Plaza, although few people chose to enjoy their new-found freedom there and it was hardly a plaza—at ten o’clock on this hot morning the dusty circle of concrete was almost deserted.

After five minutes, during which she breathed more than she did anything else, Fareeha noticed a red turban float into the park. Beneath it walked a gaunt and rakish man, wobbly on his legs. Even from a distance she could see that he exposed too much skin and was dressed badly, in tatty garments that were of no better quality than the rag wrapped around his head. He had his arm around a long wooden box, holding it tight to the stacked ribs of his torso, as if it were a baby and he were its mother. He scrutinised the park before wobbling up to the person nearest to him: a man sitting on a bench near the entrance. The raggedy man spoke and offered something from the box; the seated man shook his head.

Cigarettes, Fareeha said to herself; he’s selling cigarettes.

Without managing to maintain a straight line, the hawker came towards Fareeha but passed by without a sales pitch. He was tracking other prey: an older man who was managing to stay inside a jacket on this sweltering morning. The man became furtive as the vendor approached; he shifted his weight on the bench and shoved a hand inside a trouser pocket. When the hawker stopped, the man raised his head and spoke.

Fareeha was watching obliquely, with her head pointing towards the dry fountain in the middle of the park, but she heard clearly—Lightning Strikes—the man had asked for Lightning Strikes, and even she knew that they were the cheapest manufactured cigarettes that could be bought in Sa’ An. Not as cheap as the hand-rolled kind that her husband smoked, but almost.

‘One please,’ the man said.

One! Fareeha turned her head to look directly at them, so surprised was she at the request. She watched the man hand over several coins then she looked away.

The vendor, however, seen again from the corner of her eye, did not seem dispirited at his meagre sell; in fact, he smiled and thanked his customer warmly as he dropped the coins into his own trouser pocket.

Fareeha watched the red turban wobble back in front of her; and as soon as it was out of sight, beyond the waterless fountain, she saw the jacketed man pop the cigarette between his lips and pull out a lighter from his jacket’s inside pocket. The tip flamed and then seemed to go dead as the man heaved in, expanding the jacket on his chest. The relief on his face was clearly visible until it was partly hidden behind a cloud of exhaled blue smoke.

Such a price! Fareeha thought she had seen five or six gleaming coins slide into the dirty hand of the hawker; but that couldn’t be so! She bit her lip and half stood up to go over and ask the smoker exactly how much silver he had handed over for his pleasure.

‘Somebody should do something about it.’

Fareeha heard her neighbour whoop, before she fell back onto the bench.

*

As always, Fareeha could smell the bazaar before she could hear it, and she could hear it before she could see it. And when she did finally see it she was surprised at how small it had become—the stink and noise had not forewarned her.

Her hunger drove her to a bread stall first and after a few minutes of fierce haggling she could afford breakfast, a small one. A shipment of wheat would be arriving at the harbour in a couple of days and when the price dropped (it always did), she’d buy a bigger one. She paid the stall-holder a few dirhams extra for a smear of goat’s cheese, which he wiped inside the bread. She forsook tea and scrounged a glass of well water instead; but before drinking, she held the succulent bread in her mouth for as long as her dignity would allow her to. At last she raised the glass to her lips and turned away from the stall. But as the water touched her throat she choked and brought it back up. She coughed towards the figure coming towards her. It wasn’t the bitter taste or the brownish colour of the well water that had made her choke: it was Jameela Sharwalla, her one-eyed neighbour.

‘Not again,’ Fareeha muttered to herself. She raised a hand to her mouth, half wiping away the drips, half trying to hide herself. But it was too late: Mrs. Sharwalla had seen her.

‘Fareeha, my dear,’ she called over.

From a distance, she looked even larger than she had earlier in the morning over the garden fence. Fareeha waited with the half-full glass of murky water still in her hand, wondering how her neighbour could keep so well fed. It was not until she greeted her, however, that she realised that the swelling around her middle was in fact caused by the small packets that she had stuffed into the waistband of her skirts and partly covered by a flapping piece of sackcloth.

‘My dear,’ she whooped, ‘you didn’t say that you’d be here this morning.’ Then she noticed Fareeha’s eyes directed at her stomach. ‘Oh,’ she said, touching the sackcloth, ‘peanuts.’ Her one eye narrowed and in a softer voice she added, ‘I don’t use a basket anymore, I got tired of the thieving.’

Fareeha knew that Mrs. Sharwalla’s husband farmed peanuts, which she would bring to the bazaar to sell as she wandered down the aisles. She had long ago given up the expense of renting her own stall; now, it seemed, she had even given up her basket too.

Jameela Sharwalla was one of the few women left in the city whom Fareeha knew. Most of her younger female friends had become victims of the war in one way or another. Some had fled south into government-held territory; some had gone over the Gulf as refugees; others had died. Many of the houses in her neighbourhood were empty and half of the occupied ones had new families in them. Fareeha’s one-eyed neighbour, Jameela Sharwalla, was about the only friend she had left—but she didn’t like meeting her too often.

‘How’s business?’ Fareeha wanted to know about the peanuts but couldn’t bring herself to mention Mrs. Sharwalla’s husband, Farooq, the man who had taken her eye.

Mrs. Sharwalla whooped and scowled before saying anything intelligible. ‘My husband never stops complaining about the work.’ She whooped again and then calmed down. ‘Me,’ she continued, ‘why, I just get on with life; but he can’t. And now that he’s had to give up smoking, it’s a thousand times worse.’

‘Give up smoking?’ Fareeha said.

Mrs. Sharwalla looked at Fareeha with widened eyes ‘Suppose you wouldn’t know would you? What with your man being gone and everything.’

‘Know what?’

‘The price of tobacco. Up, up, and up.’ She whooped again for added affect.

‘Everything’s up,’ Fareeha replied.

‘Up, yes; but not up into the heavens like tobacco.’

‘So, how much is a packet these days?’

‘Farooq stopped buying his Golden Delight when they reached five dirhams. He switched to Lightning Strikes, but last week even they went over five.’ Mrs. Sharwalla stopped and focussed her eye on the glass of muddy water in Fareeha’s hand. ‘Somebody should do something about it,’ she said. ‘Do it myself if I had both my eyes.’

‘He could smoke hand-rolled cigarettes,’ Fareeha offered, ‘Hassan always did.’

‘Can’t,’ Mrs. Sharwalla said, ‘not since he got his cough.’

Fareeha tried to give her neighbour a sympathetic frown and even groaned a little. She knew well of Farooq’s temper and could imagine how it must have festered since he’d given up smoking. She worried about Mrs. Sharwalla’s other eye.

‘Oh no need to be sorry—I’m not. The doctor has been telling him to quit for years, even before he got his cough, but he wouldn’t. Now that he can’t afford them, he’s quit! What does that tell you about a man? Eh?’

‘Well, I’m not really sure,’ Fareeha said, knowing full well that an extra dirham on a pack of cigarettes could sway a man’s habits far more than the words of all the doctors in the Gulf. ‘That must have been a long time ago? The doctor I mean.’

Mrs. Sharwalla confirmed that it had been many years before. ‘. . . not a single doctor left now,’ she said, ‘unless you include those two butchers who work in the hospital.’ She clucked.

‘Yes,’ Fareeha said, ‘and they have bigger things to deal with now than smoker’s cough.’ She paused. ‘But a little pleasure can’t be such a bad thing, can it? I mean smoking.’

Mrs. Sharwalla scowled and said, ‘when you’re hungry?’ She then fingered the bulging waistband of her skirts. ‘One thing I can tell you, though: I’m selling more peanuts now that they’re all quitting smoking.’

‘That’s good,’ Fareeha said.

‘Yes it’s good, but half of them want to barter, offering me useless knickknacks for a packet of my peanuts; you wouldn’t believe what they want to give me!’ Mrs. Sharwalla started to scoff but suddenly stopped and smiled as a man approached her with a gleaming coin held between his thumb and forefinger. ‘Somebody should do something about it,’ she said quickly. ‘Do it myself if I had both my eyes.’ She turned towards her customer leaving Fareeha holding her glass of brown water.

Fareeha closed her eyes and drank the liquid in one long draught. She gave the empty glass back to the bread seller and walked on.

She left the stench and hubbub of the bazaar and turned into a quieter street, at the end of which, on a corner, she saw a café. She noticed its bright, striped awning at once and began to make her way towards it. Around a table, under the covering, sat a group of men, too many to count from a distance, and as she got closer she noticed a hookah sitting on the pavement beside them. When she was close enough to see clearly what was going on, she stopped and pretended to look in a shop window, keeping an oblique eye on them. Greasy hands fumbled the mouthpiece around the table as each man in turn took hold of it, gave it a hefty puff, coughed violently, and passed it on to the next. Nobody spoke. Some of the smoke that they were making wafted along the cracked pavement towards her; she saw it and cocked her nose in anticipation of the coming pleasure. But instead of tickling her with the same spicy aroma she had tasted earlier that day from Mahmoud’s cigarette—his last—the smoke bit into the sensitive membrane of her nose, causing her almost to gag on its acrid smell. She held onto the wooden window-frame of the shop and coughed; and when she had recovered, Mahmoud’s words came back to her and she wondered if indeed the citizens of Sa’ An were already smoking goat shit.

She could not watch any more, kept her head turned away, and quickly walked back up the street from where she had come, trying to forget that pitiful sight and that horrible smell.

‘Somebody should do something about it.’

Smoking as a species of joy in Sa’ An, she thought, as she smelt her way back to the bazaar, was endangered, almost extinct. And those who could still afford to preserve it, did so on self-degrading terms.

‘Do it myself if I had both of my eyes.’