Nasiiba was saying, “Aren’t you going to work today, Mummy?”
Duniya’s decision was sudden. She said, “No.” There was a brief silence. “What about you? Aren’t you going to school?” she asked.
“I am not,” responded Nasiiba.
“Why not?”
“Because I will not,” said Nasiiba, typically.
Duniya uncovered her face and her eyes blinked, hurting for a while, until they were used to the dazzle of the bright sun.
Both women now turned towards their door, which was open to the central courtyard. A rush of wind blew past Duniya’s face and out of the window. Heralded by a clumsy footfall, Mataan spoke a greeting. Nasiiba did not return it. Duniya imagined her son’s open-mouthed expression. She could see him now in her mind’s eye, staring at his sister, nonplussed.
“Good morning, Mother,” Mataan said, raising his voice.
Duniya’s thoughts were busy elsewhere, determining whether she had seen a sparrow fold its wings and drop from the sky towards the earth. Because Duniya didn’t respond to her son’s salutation, Nasiiba took the opportunity to say, “Our mother is behaving strangely this morning, Mataan; she’s acting like a child refusing to take its food and saying no to everything.”
“Have you no respect for your elders, Twin-sister?”
“What do you know about respect, you?” Nasiiba retorted.
“All I’m suggesting is that you respect your mother,” he said.
“All I am saying is that it’s none of your business,” chanted Nasiiba.
“One would think…,” he began, but abandoned the thought in mid-sentence. He walked away making hardly any noise, like a burglar tiptoeing out of a place he has broken into mistakenly.
“Mataan?” Duniya called him back. She remembered that the night before he had come home not on his bicycle but in a woman’s car.
“Yes, Mother?” He was discreetly out of her eyes’ reach. He would never think of entering a room without knocking, even if the door were wide open.
When she didn’t speak, he said, “I meant to tell you when I got in last night, Mother,” and his voice trailed off.
She waited, hoping to hear about the woman he had been with.
“It’s about my bicycle, Mother,” he continued. “I was riding it last night and a man reversed into me and knocked me down. I meant to tell you when I got back.”
She sat up, her voice worried. “Are you hurt?” She wrapped a sheet around herself. “Come closer, let me see you.”
Mataan was tall and very thin. At school his nickname was Lungo, Italian for “long.” He touched his elbows where there were bruises, his knee-caps and a slightly bluish spot on his skin and rib-cage. “I wasn’t hurt much,” he said.
“I wish you wouldn’t ride your bicycle without lights at night.”
“But I had them on, Mother,” he said.
“Then why didn’t he see you?”
“Because he didn’t have his lights on.”
“Did you see the man who bumped into you? Did you take down his insurance details and all that?” Duniya asked.
Mataan nodded.
“Where is the bicycle now?” inquired his mother.
“At a friend’s place,” he said.
Nasiiba, who had held herself in check until now, said, “Ask him to name the friend at whose place he left his bicycle, Mummy.”
Mataan and Duniya both looked at her censoriously.
“Why are you looking at me like that, as if I slaughtered your favourite she-camel? I’m talking to my mother.”
“You’re being ludicrous,” he said, half-choking on the last word.
Duniya appealed to her children, “Please, no fighting.”
Nasiiba was livid. “Mother, could you explain why you won’t talk to me yet you chatter away to Mataan like a gossiping market woman?”
“Because he has been hurt in a bicycle accident.”
“You wouldn’t have taken any notice if I had been.”
“Now why is that?” asked Mataan.
“Because you’re a boy and I’m a girl,” said Nasiiba.
The twins’ exchanges reminded Duniya that for several nights Nasiiba had been grinding her teeth in her sleep, perhaps out of genuine stress over something.
In obvious fury Nasiiba was putting on a pair of jeans.
“Where are you going?” asked Duniya.
“Somewhere someone will talk to me when I speak to them.”
“I’ve made breakfast, aren’t you having any?” Mataan asked.
Nasiiba left the room, as if late for an appointment.
After breakfast Duniya read Taariq’s article in the day before’s paper:
THE STORY OF A COW
This is a true story. It happened in a village in Lower Juba in Somalia and involves two families related by marriage and by blood. I shall be vague about their identities, though precise enough to say that it took place during the middle months of the worst famine in the Horn of Africa this century.
These were difficult months, in particular for anyone vowing not only to survive the famine, but also to outlive it with their integrity untarnished. Many a person yielded to hunger and other forms of pressure, many who thought of themselves as good, honest and incorruptible discovered to their dismay that famines make aspiring to such ideals either foolhardy or at least questionable.
In this village lived two large families whose compounds entrances faced each other, whose children played together, whose young men and women danced with one another and intermarried. Before the famine, no one recalls a quarrel, light-hearted or serious, ever taking place between members of these compounds without it being stopped instantly. Disagreements likely to create friction were ended before anyone had time to comment on them, suspicions were allayed before they sowed seeds of hate in anyone’s mind, child or adult, male or female.
Then came the famine. The first nine months of it decimated the cattle, reducing their number to a handful of skinny beasts. Meanwhile the earth produced but little. One saw skinny cows whose bones stuck out so visibly that crows, mistaking these for dry eucalyptus twigs, alighted on them.
To quicken the pace of the story, let us concentrate on two representative household heads, who in accordance with the ethos of the day we shall assume to be men. Let’s call one Musa and the other Harun. Well skip unnecessary details and pick up the tale when there is only one surviving cow, and after all other families have left the area for foreign-run feeding centres. The remaining cow belonged to Harun.
For several days, the two families shared the small amount of milk produced by the famished cow, supplementing it with desert fruits collected by Musa, which he offered as his contribution. To the suggestion that he and his family trek to the nearest UNICEF-organized feeding place, Musa retorted that they would rather die than accept hand-outs of grain grown elsewhere, given by infidels for whom he had little respect, whose ways of worship and manners he either disagreed with or disapproved of, and whose humanity he doubted.
The land has ways of supporting those who trust in its bounty. It never ceased to surprise Musa how much there was to be had. He would go for a walk and come upon a rabbit crouching in the shade of a dust-laden acacia tree, or find a fat pigeon cuddling in the warmth of a nest of fortune, as if waiting for him; now and again a dik-dik would run after him, making of itself an offer. In exchange for the meats, Harun gave Musa’s baby daughter enough milk to wet her dry throat. Musa, however, divided everything with which nature supplied him in two equal halves, one his, the other Harun’s. One day, nature ran out of gifts with which to surprise Musa. And the cow yielded so little milk that Harun declared he could no longer spare a drop for Musa’s baby. The second day dawned, another night fell; the cow produced even less milk than before, insufficient for Harun’s family’s immediate needs. Musa prayed to God, who is said now and then to take from the rich to give to the poor. He prayed and waited.