When agitated, you stretched out your hands in front of you like a blind man in search of landmarks and if you touched someone other than Misra, you burst instantly into the wildest and most furious convulsive cry. But if Misra were there, you fell silent, you would touch her and then touch yourself. It seemed to her that you could discover yourself only in her. “By touching me, he knows he is there,” she once confided in a man you were later to refer to as Aw-Adan.
There was something maternal about the cosmos Misra introduced you to from the day it was decided you were her charge, from the moment she could call you, in the privacy of the room allotted to the two of you, whatever endearments she mustered in her language. But to her you were most often “my man” or variations thereof — especially whenever you wet yourself; especially when washing you, touching and squeezing your manhood or wiping, rather roughly, your anus. Occasionally, however, she would gently spank you on the bottom and address you differently. But she always remained maternal, just like the cosmos, giving and giving. “While,” she said to you, “man is the child receiving into himself the cosmos itself, the cosmos grows larger, like a hole, the more she gives.” Admittedly this was something impenetrable to your own comprehension. To you, whether what she said made sense or no, she was the cosmos. She was the one that took you away from “yourself”, as it were, she was the one who took you back into the world-of-the-womb and of innocence, and washed you clean in the water of a new life and a new christening, to produce in you the correct etches of a young self, with no pained memories, replacing your missing parents with her abundant self which she offered generously to you — her newly rediscovered child! And you?
II
To Misra, you existed first and foremost in the weird stare: you were, to her, your eyes, which, once they found her, focused on her guilt — her self! She caught the look you cast in her direction the way a clumsy child grabs a ball and she framed the stare in the memory of her photographic brain. She developed it, printed it in different colours, each of which expressed her mood. She was sure, for instance, that you saw her the way she was: a miserable woman, with no child and no friends; a woman who, that dusk — would you believe it? — menstruated right in front of you, under that most powerful stare of yours. She saw, in that look of yours, her father, whom she saw last when she was barely five.
“Annoy a child and you’ll discover the adult in him,” she would repeat, believing it to be a proverb. “Please an adult with gifts and the child therein re-emerges.” And she annoyed you, she pleased you, and she was sufficiently patient to watch the adult in you come out and display itself. Not only did she see her father in you but also the child in herself: she saw a different terrain of land, and she heard a different language spoken and she watched, on the screen of her past, a number of pictures replayed as though they were real and as painful as yesterday. She sought her childhood in you and she hid her most treasured secrets which she was willing to impart to you and you alone. In you, too, she saw a princess, barely five, a pretty princess surrounded with servants and well-wishers, one who could have anything she pleased and who was loved by her mother, but not so much by her father because she was a girl and wouldn’t inherit his title — wouldn’t continue his line. A princess!
To you, too, although you were too small to understand, she told secrets about your parents no one else was ready to tell you. She told you why your mother had been hiding in the room where she had found the two of you and why she died in a quiet secretive way She also whispered in your ears things about your father, who had died a few months before your birth, in mysterious circumstances, in a prison, for his ideals. Your mother took refuge in a room tucked away in the backyard of a rich man’s house and it was in there that she gave birth to you — in hiding.
Possibly you would have died of the chill you were exposed to, if Misra hadn’t walked in accidentally. Fortunately for you, anyway, Misra had found the room in which you were, a most convenient place to hide from Aw-Adan, who had been pestering her with advances she didn’t wish to return in like manner. The room had been open and she stumbled into it, closing the door immediately behind her. She didn’t realize until later that you and your mother were there: you alive and your mother dead. Hers would have to remain the only evidence one has and one has to take her word for it. She would insist that she didn’t know until later who your father was. Why she waited until she had washed and fed you and mothered you — these are things of which she refuses to speak At any rate, by the time the community of relations had been informed of your existence and your mother’s death, some sixteen or so hours had gone past, and it was during this time that you and Misra had become acquainted and that she made sure no one else set eyes on you. Of course, no one dared challenge her statement. As a matter of fact, it was thought very wise that you were kept an untalked-about secret, considering whose son you were; so no one outside the immediate family knew about you for a long time. It was for this reason that your mother’s corpse was buried in haste and secretly too, your mother who left behind her no trace save yourself— you who were assigned to Misra as a ward, or some said as if you were her child. You were the whisper to be softly spoken. Your name was to become two syllables no one uttered openly, which meant that not only were there no Koranic blessings said in either of your ears to welcome you to this world but your presence here in this universe was not at all celebrated. You did not exist as far as many were concerned; nor did you have any identity as the country’s bureaucracy required. Askar! The letter "s" in your name was gently said so as to arouse no suspicions; whereas the “k” was held in the cosiness of a tongue couched in the unspoken secrets of a sound. As-kar! It was the “r” which rolled like a cow in the hot sand after half-a-day’s grazing. Askar!
The point of you was that, in small and large ways, you determined what Misra’s life would be like the moment you took it over. From the moment you “took her life over”, her personality underwent a considerable change. She became a mother to you. She began walking with a slight stoop and her hip, as though ready to carry you, protruded to the side. She no longer saw as much of Aw-Adan, the priest, as she used to, a priest who used to teach her, on a daily basis, a few suras of the Koran and in whom she was slightly interested. That interest deteriorated with the passage of the days and finally petered out the way light fades when there is no more paraffin in the lamp. The point of you was that. in small and large ways, Misra, now that you were hers, saw her own childhood “as a category cradled in a bed of memories, one of which was nurtured in thoughts which alienated the child in her.” She had had a “fatherless” child herself and the child had died a few months before you were bom. She was sad she had had to feed you on a bottle; she was sad she couldn’t suckle you, offer you her own milk, her soul. Her own child had been eighteen months when he died and she had only just weaned him. Very often, in the secret chambers of her unuttered thoughts, there would cross an idea: that she probably had some milk of motherhood in her. And she would bare her breasts and make you suck them; you would turn away and refuse to be suckled and she would cry and cry and be miserable. Your crying would provide the unsung half of the chorus. She would promise you and promise herself never to try to breast-feed you again. Although she did, again and again. The question nobody is in a privileged enough position to answer, is whether or not your mother suckled you just before she died. You are in no position to confirm that. But Misra is “obsessed” with the thought that you were breast-fed by her. When pressed, she would insist, “I know, I know for sure that she did.”