The Bamboo Stalk (38 page)

‘So, how did it go?' I asked Turki. He didn't answer.

Mahdi stepped in: ‘It began perfectly.'

‘And then?' I asked.

‘It ended really badly,' replied Mishaal. They went back to talking in Arabic and I understood some words but not others.

For the first time I found myself interrupting them. ‘Could you let me in on the conversation? Please,' I said.

They turned towards me. Turki nodded and said, ‘Your aunt is crazy.'

‘She's lost the election,' added Mahdi.

‘But the results haven't come out yet. Today isn't even voting day,' I said in surprise. ‘We read the results on the faces of the people who walked out of the meeting,' said Turki.

‘You shouldn't say everything you know, even if it's true. Your aunt is reckless,' Mishaal concluded. Abdullah, who had been silent
so far, spoke in English that I could hardly understand. His theme was that women are governed by their emotions, but I couldn't work out if this was criticism or praise.

*   *   *

After Hind made her speech she had started to take questions from the audience. Everything was fine. She was confident, quick-witted, with an answer to every question. The last question, or what turned out to be the last question, came from an elderly woman who seemed eager to put Hind on the spot. ‘In the past we only heard about you in the context of what you call the rights of the bidoon. Their cause was one of your priorities,' the woman said.

‘And it still is,' Hind responded immediately.

‘Do all the bidoons deserve Kuwaiti nationality?' the woman asked.

‘Yes, of course, in just the same way as other Kuwaitis,' Hind replied, or blurted out, as they put it.

The woman picked up her handbag and stood up. She shook her head in protest as she began to leave the hall. ‘God have mercy on Isa al-Tarouf,' she said. The hall rang with applause as soon as the old woman mentioned my grandfather's name. She walked out and many other members of the audience followed her out. The meeting broke up before my aunt had a chance to explain what she meant.

I called Khawla to console her. She was shocked and sad. ‘People don't want to listen. They didn't give her a chance,' she said bitterly. I asked how Hind was. ‘She's fine, but Grandmother is very upset,' she said, fighting back tears. ‘Grandmother's in her room, with Awatif and Nouriya trying to calm her down.'

‘And you? How are you, Khawla?' I said, speaking gently in response to her sadness.

She gave a long sigh. ‘Me? I don't know. I almost believe what Grandmother believes,' she said. She started breathing rapidly. ‘Everything that happens to us is because of him. Ghassan is a curse,' she added.

 

17

The elections took place on 17 May 2008. It was no surprise that Hind lost, especially after some newspapers reported what she had said at the meeting. One well-known newspaper had a banner headline reading:
Casting Doubt on the Patriotism of Citizens: Hind al-Tarouf says Kuwaitis Don't Deserve to Have Kuwaiti Citizenship
.

There was a mournful atmosphere in the
diwaniya
, given the reaction in the newspapers that attacked my aunt. The Boracay gang knew the result before it was declared. Hind's defeat was no surprise to me: the real surprise was that Nouriya had carried out the threat she made when she came to visit. She had been telling the truth when she warned me and now she had done it. It wasn't unexpected that Grandmother would stop paying me my allowance, but for Aunt Hind to do so too!

I suddenly found that all I had was what I earned from working in the restaurant and the allowance from the government, and the two amounts would hardly cover the rent. I started spending from my savings, month after month. I worked out how much money I would need in the future and found that, if things continued as they were, I would be broke within a few months.

The gang offered to help me financially. Jabir was the most enthusiastic, maybe because he felt guilty. Mishaal invited me to move into his flat on the eighth floor of my building. ‘I only need it at weekends,' he said.

‘You can live temporarily in the
diwaniya
, until you find a place to live that suits you,' offered Turki.

Ibrahim Salam, although his place was small, didn't hesitate to help. ‘My little room has made space for you before and it won't hesitate to take you in again, my brother,' he said. After much discussion back and forth, he reluctantly agreed to rent me space to sleep in his room for thirty dinars a month.

*   *   *

Only one week after I moved into Ibrahim's room, the shift leader in the restaurant called me aside. ‘You'd better make some plans for the future. This is your last week working here.' And the reason? No reason.

I made up a reason of my own – Kuwait was spitting me out.

Khawla called me a few days later. ‘Have you really been fired from your job?' she asked. ‘Damn! Nouriya did that,' she said.

Disputes broke out in the Tarouf household. Hind and Awatif had a serious disagreement with Nouriya, who was behind me losing my job. ‘Leave the kid alone,' they told her.

Nouriya was furious with Hind because of what she had said in the election campaign and because she had lost. ‘If Isa al-Tarouf were still alive, you would have been the death of him,' she said.

Grandmother was in a bad way because of what was happening in the house. The sisters were at odds. Khawla left to live in her other grandmother's house, saying the situation in Grandmother's house was unbearable. ‘Grandmother slaps her thighs all day long in grief, and asks God to have mercy on her husband and on Rashid. She lifts her arms to heaven and says, “May God avenge you, Ghassan.”'

‘Khawla, I want to understand. Please. These are complicated things,' I said.

There was silence from the other end of the line. ‘Please, answer me,' I said. Still silence. ‘Who's the reason for all these problems?' She still didn't utter a word. I spoke louder. ‘Ghassan?' I asked.

‘No,' she said faintly.

I lowered my voice too, afraid of the most likely answer: ‘Me?'

‘No,' she said, louder this time.

I let out a sigh of relief – relief that I had been cleared of blame.

‘There's no one else,' she continued. I didn't say anything. ‘It's the Taroufs,' she concluded.

 

18

I left a lettuce leaf in the middle of Ibrahim's room while I waited for Inang Choleng. I'd forgotten to feed her for some time. She wasn't in the habit of going without food for long. I was really anxious. I found her under the computer table, dried up inside her broken shell.

Inang Choleng had died – that silent, patient creature that was so good at listening and never complained. That morning was so sad.
O God, you alone know how much I wept.
Who could console me? Who would understand why I was crying over her? When Ibrahim came back from work he saw the sadness on my face. I didn't tell him about the tortoise when he asked me. What was the use of talking about something he wouldn't understand? I left him in the main room and escaped to the bathroom. I turned on all the taps in the basin and the shower and burst out crying, unable to hold it back. Ibrahim knocked on the door when he heard me sobbing. ‘Brother! Are you all right?' he said.

I tried as hard as I could to make my voice sound normal. ‘Yes, I'm fine, but the water's cold, brother,' I said.

How could a dead tortoise leave such a gap? She didn't have a voice for me to miss, and wasn't even a permanent presence since she spent much of her time under sofas, cut off from everything, hidden in her shell and oblivious to the world. By her death all I lost was my own presence and my voice, which I
only heard when I spoke to her, and the lettuce leaves in the fridge.

No one was better than Inang Choleng at putting up with my fickle moods – my sadness, my anger, my complaining – and now she was dead. My companion had died in Ibrahim's room after sharing my wanderings – in the annex of Grandmother's house and in my large flat in Jabriya.

What loneliness! Kuwait was closing its last doors on me, just when I thought I was part of it. I suddenly felt that it wasn't my place, that I must have been wrong when I thought that a bamboo stalk could take root anywhere.

‘He who does not know how to look back at where he came from will never get to his destination,' Rizal once said. But apparently I had misread his remark. I believed in it as if it were a prophecy. I saw Kuwait as the place I had come from, since I was born there, and it was the place I had decided to return to after an absence, but when I looked behind me all I saw was the Philippines – Manila, Valenzuela, Mendoza's land.

Suddenly Kuwait felt claustrophobic, no bigger than Ibrahim Salam's room. It felt even smaller, the size of a box of matches, and I was just one of the matches.

I remembered that phrase they often used: ‘Kuwait's a small place.'

*   *   *

It was a boring day, like all the other days. I balanced the laptop on my knees to check if there was a message from Merla, but there was nothing but messages from my mother and annoying adverts.

Had Merla read my emails
, I wondered. If only I knew.

But I could find out.

Suddenly I remembered something that hit me like a thunderbolt. Why hadn't I thought of it all this time? Wasn't it me who set up Merla's email account in the first place? I had chosen the password. What if she had never changed it? In that case I could check myself.

I opened the email page in the browser and put in Merla's details – her username and the password I had chosen. Amazingly it took me straight to her inbox. My heart raced. Dozens of messages appeared on the list: my emails with the subject lines I had chosen, emails from Maria and many other messages. But the important thing was that the subject line for my emails and Maria's emails were not in bold, which showed that someone had opened them to read them, unlike the other messages, which were still in bold. That meant Merla was still around.

I felt a throbbing in my temples. With trembling fingers, pressing the keys hard down on the keyboard, I wrote her a message. I waited and then checked what happened to it. Within a few hours the subject line on the message had switched from bold to plain.

I hadn't cried when I thought that Merla had gone missing, but I cried buckets for joy when she reappeared. The tears poured out whenever the subject line changed, showing that Merla was there.

Now it was fun. I would send a message, saying everything I wanted to say to my dear cousin, day after day. I could see someone was reading them. I felt more and more confident that she was somewhere, reading my confessions.

 

19

Ibrahim was busy going through the week's newspapers looking for stories about the Philippines to translate and send to the Philippine newspapers. It was summer. The Boracay crazies were going round the world spreading their craziness. Maybe that summer they were operating in Spain, or London, France, Thailand or Malaysia. Maybe they would come across some half-Kuwaiti on the beach in one of those countries, God alone knows.

I found myself more alone than I had ever been. I had no work and no place of my own. The temperature was in the fifties, enough to melt me and my bicycle if I thought of going outside. My tortoise had died. My friends were abroad. It was impossible to meet my sister now that she had moved to her other grandmother's house. My father, as always, only existed in pictures. My mother and Mama Aida were in another part of the planet, and Merla, although I believed she was around, wasn't close by. I was avoiding Ghassan because I didn't want to add to his troubles.

I had no incentive to stay in Kuwait much longer but I didn't have enough money to buy a ticket to the Philippines. I was at a loss.

During her summer break Khawla read Father's unfinished novel, for the millionth time perhaps. She was sad. ‘It'll take me many years to finish it off,' she said. She translated some passages of the book for me. As a dedication he had written: ‘To the two of you, Kuwait and you.' The Arabic made it clear he was referring to
a woman. Khawla said that for the years she had been reading the novel she thought Father was referring to her mother, Iman. But with repeated readings, she realised that he really meant the girl he had been in love with as a student, the one that Grandmother had rejected.

‘The one that, if he had married her, he wouldn't have got involved with Josephine,' I joked.

From what Khawla read to me I realised that my father also felt alienated in some way in his own country. After our conversation I asked Ibrahim for some paper and a pen and I began to write in English:

Although I'm different from you, and perhaps also backward compared with you in many ways, although I look like a stranger among you, despite my accent and the way I pronounce words, despite all these things I have the same documents as you have, I have exactly the same rights and the same duties as you have, and despite everything, I have had only love for this place, but you, for some reason I'm not aware of, prevented me from loving the place where I was born and for which my father died. You prevented me from carrying out my duties and you deprived me of my most basic rights.

When I was still young in the Philippines, your country was the dream. I say ‘your country' and not ‘my country' because in spite of my documents, it is not my country. In years past Kuwait was the paradise that I would one day win and that people in the Philippines predicted for me.

I was a stranger, and I still am. I have tried by various means to fit in with everything, although it has been hard, everything.

I have tried to break through the barriers and the walls that stood between us, but every time I managed to cross the barrier I was driven back. You disagree on many things but you agree
on one thing – rejecting me. I'm like a grain of pollen or a speck of dust that comes to you on the wind after a long odyssey. As soon as you breathe it in, it irritates your nose and you sneeze it out. It goes back to wandering again and you whisper ‘Thank God' and others reply ‘Bless you'. ‘God guide us and God guide you,' they say. So it's Praise the Lord, and May He Grant You Mercy and Guidance, while my fate is curses and ruin.