In the Sea There Are Crocodiles - Fabio Geda [10]
In the samavat there were single rooms for those who had more money, big rooms for families with children, which was where I’d stayed with Mother, and the men’s dormitory. I never went into the single rooms, not even later. Other people cleaned them. People came in and out constantly, speaking languages I couldn’t understand. There was always smoke and noise. But I wasn’t interested in all that coming and going and kept myself out of trouble.
When they saw that I wasn’t someone who made a mess of things—not all the time, anyway—I started taking chay to the shops. The first few times I was scared of making a mistake or being swindled, but then I learned, and it became the best thing that could have happened to me. There was one place in particular that I liked: a shop that sold sandals, where every morning, about ten, I took shir chay, tea with milk, with naan tandoori made specially for osta sahib, the owner. The shop was close to a school.
I would go in, put the tray on the little table, greet osta sahib as kaka Rahim had taught me to, and take the money, counting it quickly, without making it too obvious that I was checking every coin, so osta sahib wouldn’t think that I didn’t trust him (it was kaka Rahim who had trained me to do that). Then I’d say goodbye, leave the shop and instead of going straight back to the samavat, I’d walk around the block until I came to the wall outside the school yard and wait for break time.
I liked it when the bell rang and the doors were flung open and the children came out into the yard, yelling and starting to play. As they played, I would imagine myself yelling and playing and calling out to my Nava friends. In my head I would call to them by their names, and kick the ball, and argue that someone had cheated in our battle to break each other’s kite strings, or that it wasn’t fair if I had to stay out of the buzul-bazi tournament for too long, just because the bone I needed was still boiling in the pot and I’d lost the old one. I walked slowly on purpose, so that I could spend more time listening to the children. I reasoned that if kaka Rahim saw me walking, he would probably not be as angry as if he saw me standing still.
Some mornings I was early taking the chay to the shop, and I would see the schoolchildren going in, all neat and clean and well combed, and I would feel bad and turn my head away. I couldn’t look at them. But afterward, at break time, I liked hearing them.
You know, Enaiat, I’d never thought about that.
About what?
About the fact that hearing something is very different from looking at it. It’s less painful. That’s it, isn’t it? You can use your imagination, and transform reality.
Yes. Or at least that’s how it was for me.
I write in a room with a balcony that overlooks a primary school. Sometimes, I take a coffee break about four, and I stop and watch the parents coming to pick up their children. I watch the children coming out into the playground when the bell rings, and lining up just inside the gates, and getting up on tiptoe to peer into the crowd of adults, trying to see their parents, and the parents waving their arms when they spot them and opening their eyes and mouths wide and puffing out their chests. Everything holds its breath at that moment, even the trees and the buildings. The whole city holds its breath. Then all the questions start—how was their day, what homework do they have, how was the swimming lesson—and the mothers doing up the zips of their children’s jackets to protect them from the cold and pulling their hats down over their foreheads and ears. Then everyone bundles into their cars and off they go.
Yes, I used to see them like that sometimes, too.
Can you look at them now, Enaiat?
Clothes. I had two pirhan. Whenever I washed one, I would wear the other and hang the wet one up to dry. Once it was dried, I would put it in a cloth bag in the corner, next to my mattress. And every evening I would check it was still there.
As the days, weeks and months passed, kaka Rahim realized that I was good (and again