The Bamboo Stalk (22 page)

‘What does the book say about grandfather and his brother?' I asked.

Before she had time to answer, the study door flew open and slammed against the wall. I shuddered at the sight of Grandmother leaning on the Indian maid with one arm and holding the door frame with her other hand. She was scowling and, without looking at me, she scolded Khawla with words I didn't understand. Khawla blushed, then took Grandmother's arm to support her in place of the maid. She turned to me in embarrassment and said, ‘You'd better go back to your room, Isa.'

Khawla told me later that Grandmother didn't trust me and had blamed me for the fact that Khawla and I had been alone in the study together with the door closed. ‘You shouldn't be together. If a boy and a girl are alone together, the devil soon
joins them,' Grandmother told her.

Khawla went off with Grandmother. I went back to my room, leaving the devil alone in the study.

 

11

On the morning of the next day, I woke up early to a voice calling the two maids: ‘Miri, Luza, Miri, Luza.' I didn't hear either answering. The same voice started angrily calling someone else, but I couldn't make out the other name. I went to the bathroom, which was between my room and the room of Raju and Babu. Old Babu was looking at me through the kitchen window. I ignored him. In the inner courtyard Raju was holding a hose and spraying water on the floor to wash it. He looked at me too. They both looked suspicious of me, as if to say ‘Who's this intruder?' My self-confidence replied, ‘I'm one of the family.' I felt that even the door of the bathroom I shared with Raju and Babu saw me as an intruder on their space. Neither of them approached me to talk to me, and I didn't take the initiative either. The instructions not to mix seemed to have reached them too. I washed my face and brushed my teeth, but so early in the morning I couldn't bring myself to have a shower when it was so cold outside.

Back in my room I didn't know what to do.
What next?
I thought. I began switching the television from channel to channel. Nothing interesting. I sat down at the laptop and browsed the Internet. My stomach told me it was empty. I was hungry. They hadn't offered me anything for supper the previous night. Had they perhaps prepared this fully equipped room for me but forgotten that I needed to eat? I opened the little fridge in the corner. Tins of milk, orange juice, mango, soft drinks, mineral water, fruit,
apples, oranges and pineapple. As soon as I caught sight of the pineapple I shut the fridge door, with memories of the story of Pinya and Mendoza's ranting.

I picked up the phone that Hind had given me. It was a new Nokia with one camera at the front and one at the back. I was reluctant to call Khawla and ask her for something to eat. Just as I was calling Ghassan to ask him what I should do there was a knocking on the door and I called off. I opened the door and there was Babu looking dour. ‘
Taal
,' he said, then turned his back and walked towards the kitchen. The word wasn't new to me at all. Taal was the name of the famous volcano in Batangas province. I stood in the doorway, unsure what the old Indian might have meant. Did he really mean the Batangas volcano? He went back to the kitchen without looking back. I was still standing there looking towards the kitchen, which was next to the annex. Babu leaned out of the window, beckoned me and shouted, ‘
Taal
!' Apparently the volcano was about to spew lava. I went to where he was beckoning. He pulled back a chair at a small table and put a glass of milk down among various dishes: fried eggs, boiled eggs, cheese, olives, slices of tomato and cucumber. He gestured to me to sit down, then turned to the stove, where he resumed his work.

I began to eat in silence.
I wish Khawla could eat with me
, I said to myself.

Before I'd finished, Luza, the Filipina maid, came in with a large round tray carrying the remains of a meal not much different from what I had been offered. The maid smiled at me. ‘How are you?' she asked in my language, which I missed.

‘I'm well,' I said. Babu turned to us, hiding a smile, rather different from the person who had been frowning when he invited me to eat. He pointed at me, then spoke to the maid in Arabic.
She burst out laughing. ‘What did he say?' I asked her.

‘He said the old lady used to make fun of us when she saw us watching Indian movies. “How can you believe these stories?” she would say. And now her grandson turns up, just like in an Indian movie!' said the maid.

I was taken aback when she said ‘her grandson', which contradicted what Khawla had told me about the servants not knowing who I was.

‘And how do you know about me?' I asked.

She pulled out a chair and sat opposite me at the table. ‘Don't you be like them too!' she said. ‘They treat us as if we have no feelings and don't understand anything.'

‘You mean it was just a feeling you had that led you to the truth?' I said.

She shook her head. Before she could continue the old Indian maid came in smiling. She was holding a broom and a plastic basket. The Filipina maid pointed to the cook and said, ‘Many years ago the old lady accused Babu of getting Josephine pregnant.'

I was stunned. All the things my mother had told me came back. She pointed at the Indian maid and introduced us. ‘Lakshmi, Babu's wife, is the maid who replaced your mother after she and your father were thrown out,' she said. ‘She was the first person to see you in your father's arms when he came to visit the old lady after the months he lived outside the house.'

Everyone was smiling.

‘Does the family know that you know all this?' I asked.

‘No, we have no feelings and we understand nothing,' said the Filipina.

Babu took the plates off the table. ‘Miri, Luza,' someone called from outside. It was Grandmother calling. Lakshmi went off and
the Filipina maid prepared to follow her.

‘Thank you, Luza,' I said. ‘And by the way, that's an odd name,' I added.

She stopped at the kitchen door and turned. ‘My name's Luzviminda. The old lady didn't like it, so she took off some of the letters and kept the rest.'

‘Luza, Luza,' Grandmother called again, then followed it up with a word similar to the word the parrot cried whenever it called the same name.

‘Coming, Madam,' Luzviminda replied, hurrying off. I pushed my chair back to get up. Luzviminda stuck her head round the kitchen door, saying, ‘The old lady didn't like the name Lakshmi either. You can call her Miri like your grandmother does.'

She laughed and hurried off. I thanked old Babu for the delicious breakfast and left the kitchen. I stretched out on the bed in my room, repeating to myself: ‘Luzviminda, Luzviminda, Luz Vi Minda.' That was a purely Filipino name. Why didn't the maid have a Spanish or English name like many Filipinas? Teresa or Mercedes or Marilyn or Angeline?

The name was a composite of the first part of the name of each of the three main island groups in the Philippines – Luzon in the north, Visayas in the centre and Mindanao in the south. At first I decided to call her Luza, the name my grandmother had chosen for her, so that I wouldn't think of the map of the Philippines every time I called her, since I very much needed to discover a new geography. But then I remembered how confused I myself could be about names and I had pangs of conscience. So I went back on my decision and stuck to Luzviminda, unchanged.

 

12

That's how I spent the first months in my grandmother's house, having three meals a day in the kitchen. The servants avoided me and wouldn't speak to me in the courtyard but they changed completely once we were together in the kitchen, out of sight of the others. They chatted away and treated me well, except for Raju the driver, who avoided me. He was the only one who didn't know anything about me, and he wasn't on good terms with the other servants, who often warned me about him. I began to pick up some simple words of Arabic. I understood some and I would sometimes use Arabic in the same way as the servants in their dealings with the family or among themselves, when they spoke a mixture of English and broken Arabic.

In my room I spent the time watching television or films on DVD or browsing the Internet. I opened an email account for Merla and sent her the address and password by SMS, so then it was easy to communicate with her. I really missed her. Merla, my forbidden love. I spent lots of time writing to her or answering her messages.

At sunset I would go out for a walk in the neighbourhood. I would go to the central market and hang out in the shops nearby, then spend about an hour in the pedestrian street that ran parallel to the main street. The pedestrian street was long, with nothing to distinguish it. There were large houses on both sides, and on the other side lay the main road. On one part of the road, a stretch of
no more than 200 metres, there were beautiful trees on both sides of the road. That was my favourite spot. I used to sit under a big blue sign that read
Damascus Street
, with my back to one of those water coolers that were common on the pedestrian street. People install them for charitable purposes, to quench the thirst of pedestrians or workmen on hot days. I would sit on the ground facing the main street, with a sandy area behind me without any houses. The cars on the main street would drive fast and make an irritating noise but I had to put up with the din in order to be close to the trees. It was the best place of all, compared with the others. I looked at the sandy area behind me and spoke to myself. ‘If it was mine,' I said, ‘I would plant it with mango and jackfruit trees, pineapple and banana and all the other trees that grew on Mendoza's land.'

Khawla visited me every day but she didn't come into my room. She just stood at the door, sometimes chatting for hours like that, without either of us approaching the other. While Khawla and I were chatting, from time to time I could hear the upper-floor window sliding up and down in its frame. It was Grandmother looking out from her room, monitoring us and making sure that Khawla didn't come into my room. Khawla didn't go out much. She went to school in the morning. Sometimes she went out shopping or to cafés with Hind. She rarely saw her mother because Grandmother was uneasy about her granddaughter being in her stepfather's house and Iman's husband wouldn't let Iman visit the home of her former husband. All Khawla had was the phone or quick meetings with her mother outside.

Hind decided to give me her share of the pension my father's relatives were awarded because of his work in the resistance. It had been shared among her, Grandmother and Khawla. Although
some of the pension should have been mine, I hadn't asked for it. Hind would also send the servants every now and then with presents and clothes and phone top-up cards so that I could stay in touch with my family in the Philippines. I sent her an SMS by mobile whenever the servants brought me presents from her:
Thanks, Auntie Hind
. She would answer with just one word:
Welcome
. One day she took me to a government department that deals with official papers. She submitted some papers to them and was given some other papers. On a later visit to the same place we got a nationality certificate. It was a little booklet with four pages and a black cover with Arabic words in gold. In the middle there was an emblem like the one on the banknotes. On the second page there was a picture of me and underneath it said in Arabic:
You are officially Kuwaiti
. That's what Hind told me, without turning to look at me, as she drove home. I said to myself,
Yes, but what am I as far as the family's concerned?
I only met Hind very rarely, mostly by chance in the courtyard, but I saw her now and then on television, talking about things I didn't understand.

Awatif and Nouriya, my other aunts, visited my grandmother every week with their husbands and children. When they were visiting I was forbidden to leave my room in case my uncles, Ahmad and Faisal, found out about me. Although Awatif had shown some sympathy for me at first, she later deferred to her sister Nouriya, who said, ‘Ahmad and Faisal are friends and if Ahmad found out about the Filipino, word might reach my husband. You'd only blame yourself if that were to happen.' Awatif was weak. One day she gave me, through Khawla, a copy of the Qur'an in English and a prayer mat. After that she disappeared under orders from Nouriya, but I gathered from Khawla that she was always asking whether I prayed. I kept away from all of them.
The answer was for me to go out on the day they visited, so their family visits coincided with my visits to Ghassan. He came to pick me up from the house. We either ate out or sometimes in his flat.

In the summer Grandmother spent the weekend, Thursday and Friday, in the beach house with Hind and Khawla. She let me go with them if she knew that none of her other grandchildren would be coming. Grandmother wouldn't let her other grandchildren have any contact with me, or even know about me, because one rotten fish spoils the rest, as they say. I don't know, should I find fault with Khawla for telling me everything Grandmother said about me, or should I thank her? She was honest with me, but her honesty was hurtful.

The family gave me a separate suite in the beach house, on the side away from the sea. I wasn't allowed to go into the main part of the house or go close to the sea, especially if Nouriya was there. The weekly trip to the beach house was like going to prison. We would set off in two cars, one with Grandmother and Khawla, driven by Hind, and the other with Babu, Lakshmi and Luzviminda, driven by Raju. I don't need to say which car I went in.

The sea was beautiful at night. In fact I never saw it at any other time to compare, because I spent the whole day confined to my miserable room, killing time on the laptop. At night one weekend I left my room and headed for the sea. I walked past three big awnings. Under the first one there was a big generator for when there was a power cut. Under the second there was an old Jeep so covered in dust that it was impossible to make out what colour it was. The third awning was over a small boat. I stood there and examined it.
It must be the one!
I thought. All the incidents this old boat had witnessed, all the people it had
carried – my father, Ghassan, Walid, many fish, chicken guts, and my mother.