Swimming on the Lawn Page 8

  Mama laughs as she pours boiling water into the teapot. ‘It took a lot of time and money to get the houseboat towed back against the current.’

  The Bikka

  It seems extra hot today. We drive to the house where the bikka is to be held. When we arrive, Dad goes into the men’s salon, while we go into the women’s compound. There is a huge crowd of women and children. Most of the women wear white, the colour of mourning. We can hear crying and wailing coming from one of the rooms. Mama, with Amir on her hip, says she is going in to pay her respects to Uncle Omar’s sister. Selma clings to Mama’s free hand and goes in with her. Sami follows me as I make my way through the mourners towards the verandah. There are lots of people I don’t know, but they all know who I am. I shake hands with the women, some of whom pinch me on the cheek as a sign of affection, and I pretend it doesn’t hurt. On the verandah, children are chasing each other around a large, long, shiny-silver metal box on the floor. I realise that it must be Uncle Omar’s coffin. I touch it, and it is warm.

  The children running around are squealing and laughing. An old woman comes out of the room Mama had gone into, and shouts, ‘Go and play outside!’ The children are suddenly quiet, but they don’t move off the verandah. Sami and I go and stand in the doorway of the wailing room. It is dark in there after the bright light of the sun. Women sit on mats and mattresses on the floor, and I can smell the mint in the tea they are sipping. Every minute, a woman starts a wail, and some of the others join in. It seems like they are pretending to cry. Uncle Omar’s sister has red and swollen eyes, and there are tears on her cheeks, but she doesn’t make a sound. I can see Mama with Amir on her lap and her arm around Selma.

  A noise makes me turn away from the door. A group of men come in from the courtyard onto the verandah, and together lift the metal box. Sami and I follow them as they carry Uncle Omar’s coffin through the gate, into the street, and load it onto the back of a small lorry. Several men climb in the back to hold onto the coffin as the lorry very slowly moves away.

  More men come out of the house and cram themselves into the parked cars. I see Dad get into our car. Two men are squashed into the front passenger seat, and four more pack themselves into the back. I watch as clouds of dust seem to follow the procession to the cemetery.

  Tomatoes

  ‘Sit up straight and eat your breakfast,’ says Mama.

  ‘I’m not hungry,’ says Selma.

  ‘You didn’t drink your tea this morning and you didn’t eat your rusk,’ says Mama. ‘If you’re not feeling well you’d better not go with Farida.’

  ‘But I feel all right.’ Selma looks at me.

  I look back at Selma, but don’t say anything to Mama on her behalf. I break off a piece of bread and use it to scoop up a thick chunk of deep-fried Nile perch from the serving tray in the middle of the table. The crispy skin has little flecks of green herbs and I breathe in the warm smell of garlic, before dipping the piece of fish into the saucer of lime juice, salt, and chilli paste.

  It’s hard chewing such a large mouthful with my lips closed, so I put my hand up and pretend to smooth some hair away from my eyes, so Mama can’t see me from her end of the table. Dad has finished eating and is reading the newspaper.

  Sami is holding Goldie out of sight on his lap and feeding him a piece of cucumber.

  There is a bit of a breeze, but it is already hot and we have to keep waving the flies off our food. A couple of cats from next door have crossed the lawn and are watching and waiting. A few leaves fall onto the tablecloth. I look up into the tree branches above us, and stare at an old bit of knotted rope and the rubbed groove it has made through one of the branches. Our latest tyre swing hangs dusty and neglected on the other side of the tree.

  I realise Mama is talking to me.

  ‘All right. Selma can go with you, Farida, but don’t stay too long and don’t get in the way, and wash your hands before you go.’

  Selma runs to the house before Mama can change her mind, while I collect all the water glasses, put them onto the tray with the empty jug, and carry it across the grass and along the verandah to the kitchen.

  Selma hops about and watches me washing my hands. We run down the driveway, across the road and along the concrete slabs covering the drainage ditch. We hold our breath as we jump over a missing slab, but we can still smell that something is dead down there.

  Our friends Nadia and Azza are our age and go to the same school. They have two older brothers and four younger ones. As they are the only girls in the family they have to do a lot of housework as well as looking after the younger children. Living with them in their two-bedroom house is a very old granny who shows lots of gold teeth when she smiles.

  Under a tree by their kitchen door, Nadia and Azza are helping their heavily pregnant mother slice fresh tomatoes that they carefully put into buckets.

  ‘Good morning,’ Selma and I say together.

  They smile back and say hello without stopping their work. All three are squatting around a low wooden table that is only about six inches off the ground. Tomato juice is running off the tabletop and pooling in dark patches on the dirt.

  Selma doesn’t ask, but just squats down on the fourth side, reaches for a spare knife, and then carefully slices a tomato she has picked from the pile in the middle of the table. Nadia tips more tomatoes onto the diminishing pile from one of the shopping baskets that are lined up beside and behind her.

  I carry on watching for a while until Hosni, the second eldest brother, comes to fetch a bucket that is full of sliced tomatoes. I follow him around the side of the kitchen to what in our house are the servant’s quarters. In this house, they use the servant’s room as a space for the two eldest brothers to study and do their homework, as well as a room for sorting the clean washing and doing the ironing. The whole family sleeps in beds that are permanently left out in the backyard.

  Next to the ironing room is a toilet in a roofed brick-walled cubicle, and next to it a separate shower room without a roof. The walls around the shower are about six feet high and join onto the back of the ironing room. Hosni steps onto an overturned crate, then onto an oil drum, and lifts and balances the bucket of sliced tomatoes on top of the shower wall. He then scrambles up onto the wall, picks up the bucket and steps onto the toilet roof, then up again onto the roof of the ironing room. I kick off my flip-flops and climb up after him. There are large woven palm-frond mats on the almost flat roof, their corners held down with bricks. Anwar, the eldest son, is carefully laying out sliced tomatoes onto one of the mats, each slice slightly overlapping the previous one. Three mats are already full, with three more to go.

  ‘I’ll do those,’ I say, pointing to the bucket Hosni has started on.

  He looks at me and nods, and then climbs down to get another bucket. I know if I were his sister he would have told me to get down.

  The view is wonderful. I can see the road, which is empty of traffic, and I can see the garden next door, where a man with a hosepipe is watering the flowerpots lined up on the edge of his verandah. If I turn my head I can just see the roof of our house above the hedge that surrounds our garden. Our roof is the only one in our street that is made of whitewashed corrugated iron. Every other roof, including the one I am standing on, is made of asbestos. I know that if I go to the edge I could look down to where Selma is, but I don’t want Nadia’s mother to see me up here.

  I bend down and start making neat rows of tomatoes, and I feel the sun heating up the back of my head. At the end of each long row, I eat one slice.

  I think about how the tomatoes will be left to dry for three days. Each afternoon, just before sunset, the mats will be covered to keep them dry from the next morning’s dew. On the fourth day each mat will be carefully rolled into a long tube and the dried tomatoes tipped into old four-gallon ghee tins that are clean and dry. These will be sealed and put away in the pantry.

  When tomatoes are expensive, Nadia’s mother won’t need to buy any. Instead, she will crush a
few handfuls of the dried ones in her mortar, and add fresh garlic, peppercorns, and salt to make a paste to put in her stews.

  Tea

  Selma and I are at Nadia’s house playing a game of whist. It is my turn to be the dealer, and I have just turned the last card to show the trumps for that round when we hear Nadia and Azza’s father calling. The urgency in his voice has us all abandoning the cards, scrambling up off the warm floor tiles on the back verandah, and hurrying to the front of the house.

  Nadia runs up to her father as he gets into his car and starts the engine. The driver’s door is still open.

  ‘I’m going to get the midwife. You know what to do,’ he says. He slams the car door and drives off down the driveway. The car’s back wheels spray gravel as he accelerates out through the gateway.

  Azza goes to find her grandmother, while the rest of us run to the kitchen. Selma lights two of the gas rings on the cooker as Nadia fills a large cooking pot with water and then the kettle, and then puts them over the flames to heat up. We join the younger children of the family on the verandah outside the bedroom door. Their grandmother arrives drying her freshly washed hands on one end of the pale-green cotton scarf that is draped around her shoulders. She opens the door to the bedroom, but it is too dark inside for me to see anything before it closes behind her. We can hear Nadia’s mother’s voice gently repeating a prayer. ‘Oh merciful one, oh gentle one, oh merciful one …’

  ‘Do you think she is going to have the baby soon?’ asks one of the younger brothers.

  ‘No, it will be ages. The midwife isn’t even here yet,’ says another.

  ‘Is it going to be a boy or a girl?’

  ‘I think it’s going to be a boy.’

  ‘No it won’t, it will be a girl,’ says Azza. ‘We’ve already got six boys in our family, and only two girls.’

  ‘It’s going to be a boy!’ all the boys shout.

  ‘No it won’t,’ says Azza, quietly.

  But the boys yell even louder, ‘It’s going to be a boy!’

  The bedroom door opens and their grandmother stands there with her forefinger to her lips. She smiles. ‘Off you go, you noisy lot. Give your mother some peace. Go and play.’

  The bedroom door closes again and we all move away. I go back to the kitchen with Nadia, and we look at the water in the pot. It isn’t boiling yet.

  ‘What shall we do?’ asks Selma as she comes into the kitchen.

  ‘Well, we can’t go back to playing cards as someone needs to keep an eye on the water, and we can’t play in here – it’s too hot to concentrate.’

  ‘We need to dig a hole in the back garden by the wall,’ says Nadia.

  ‘What for?’ asks Selma.

  ‘For after the baby is born.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ asks Selma, ignoring my look and the shake of my head.

  Nadia doesn’t reply.

  The kettle starts to boil, and Nadia turns down the gas. ‘We’ll use this water to make some tea for Mama and Grandma,’ she says. She gets down the teapot and tea canister off the shelf by the stove while I get the tea tray off the draining board and find tea glasses and spoons. Selma gets the sugar out of the pantry, and Azza adds a few sprigs of dried mint into the teapot with the normal tea-leaves, before Nadia fills it with boiling water.

  Azza knocks on the bedroom door, and her grandmother comes out to the kitchen, pours out tea into two glasses and stirs three teaspoons of sugar into each, before taking them on the tray back to the bedroom. Azza refills the kettle with water and puts it back on the stove. The large saucepan is starting to boil and she turns down the gas to its lowest setting. The kitchen is filling with steam despite both doors and the window being open.

  I bend over and wipe my face with the hem of my dress.

  ‘We may as well dig that hole,’ says Nadia.

  We follow her out the back door to the lean-to in the corner of the yard, and get the mattock, which Selma wants to carry, as we make our way to the wall by the lemon tree.

  The ground is hard and dry. We take turns using the mattock, which seems to grow heavier with every swing. After about fifteen minutes of digging, and scooping dry dirt out of the hole, Nadia seems satisfied that it is big enough. We carry the mattock back, and then take turns washing our faces, hands, and legs under the outside tap. We squelch and skid in our flip-flops as we make our way to the bedroom door, and sit down on the floor. In the quiet we can hear the prayers still being chanted, and every so often we hear their grandmother talking in a low voice.

  ‘What is your mother going to call the baby?’ asks Selma.

  ‘She lets us suggest a name each, and then she chooses whichever she likes best,’ says Azza.

  ‘What name are you going to suggest?’

  ‘I’ve chosen Sharifa for a girl, but I can’t decide on a boy’s name yet. I’ve got three I quite like.’

  We hear a car coming up the drive. Doors slam and the midwife hurries up the verandah towards us carrying a big bag. We move out of the way as she goes into the bedroom.

  ‘Fetch me some tea,’ calls Nadia’s father, and he goes to sit further down the verandah in a wicker chair, and unfolds a newspaper.

  We go into the kitchen, which feels hotter than ever. Water is beading on the ceiling above the stove. Nadia makes a fresh pot of tea.

  The midwife comes in and drops a load of instruments into the simmering pot of water, and turns up the gas.

  ‘Here is my watch,’ she says to Nadia. ‘Turn off the gas when the water has been boiling for fifteen minutes. Then I want you to carefully pour out the water and put the pot aside to cool. Don’t touch any of the instruments.’

  When the midwife leaves we take turns peering into the pot. The bubbling water makes it difficult to see, but I recognise a pair of scissors, and I shiver.

  We decide to stand outside the kitchen because the boiling water is making even more steam. We take turns holding the watch, which must have the slowest seconds hand in the world. Passing it on after each minute, we start counting the seconds out loud, but soon grow tired of it. We reinspect the hole we’ve dug, and then pick lemons using our skirts as baskets, until the fifteen minutes are up.

  Back in the kitchen, Nadia pours most of the boiling water down the sink, but stops before any of the instruments tip out. Then she puts the pot on the windowsill to cool.

  One of Nadia’s brothers comes running in, and shouts, ‘Dad wants his tea! Now!’

  The tea had been made, but we had forgotten to pour out a glass and take it out to him. Nadia puts her hand on the side of the teapot and shakes her head. It isn’t hot enough. She quickly tips out the contents into the sink and there is just enough boiling water in the kettle to make half a pot. She carries the teapot and a glass out to the verandah and puts them on a side table by her father. We watch from the kitchen door as she comes to fetch the sugar and a teaspoon and hurries back.

  As Nadia puts three heaped teaspoons of sugar into the glass, her father folds his newspaper, and then watches as she carefully pours the tea. She then stirs fast, and I time the clinking sound the spoon makes on the glass at three stirs per second on the midwife’s watch. We are all as surprised as Nadia when her father just nods and dismisses her without any scolding. The relief on her face is probably echoed by ours as we quietly stand outside the steamy kitchen. Nadia fills the kettle again and puts it on the stove.

  Comments drift our way from the younger brothers who are loudly discussing the possible origins of the hole they’ve just discovered, making us laugh quietly.

  ‘Maybe a mongoose is digging a new burrow.’

  ‘Nah, it wouldn’t be going straight down. And if it is a mongoose, it must have decided it’s not a secret enough place. Anyone coming by would see it.’

  ‘This hole wasn’t here this morning. I would have noticed it.’

  ‘Do you think we should fill it in?’

  ‘Leave it alone!’ shouts Nadia, waving at them from the door. ‘It’s our hole. If you
want one to fill in, dig your own.’

  ‘What is it for?’

  ‘Never you mind!’

  The midwife comes into the kitchen and smiles at us. The vertical tribal scars on each fat cheek curve like crescent moons. Her fingers touch the outside of the saucepan that is cooling on the windowsill. I give her the watch, which she puts in her pocket before she washes her hands at the kitchen sink.

  ‘Would you and Grandma like some tea?’ Nadia asks.

  ‘Thank you. That would be good. I think your mother would like some too. She needs her strength. I’ll send your grandmother out with the tray in a few minutes.’ She picks up the pan of instruments and carries it away.

  ‘The teapot is on the verandah with Dad,’ says Azza. ‘And I’m not going to get it.’

  ‘It’s your turn. I made the tea and took it to him,’ says Nadia, her hand on her hip. An argument is about to start.

  ‘I’ll go,’ I say. ‘Your dad won’t say anything to me.’

  I walk out of the kitchen and along the verandah. Nadia’s father is reading the newspaper again. He has pushed the sleeves of his jellabiah up onto his shoulders to keep them away from the newsprint. His arms are so thin that his wristwatch with its metallic, silver-colour bracelet has slid almost to his elbow. It reminds me of a loose bicycle chain.

  As I pick up the teapot, he looks at me and says, ‘How’s your father?’

  ‘Very well, thank you.’

  ‘Good, good,’ he says, and goes back to reading the paper.

  I grab the sugar canister with my other hand and return quickly to the kitchen.

  ‘What did he say?’ ask Selma.