Chapter Five

THE FAMILY’S INDIAN summer might have continued for ever except for a group of Bangladeshi construction workers.

Within a month of her son agreeing that she could work, they had moved to a house in a good neighbourhood and, five days a week, she got on the bus with her daughters and went to her job. Never before had she felt so much purpose in her life, or such quiet enjoyment of her two girls. It came to an end two days after the construction workers started building a small office block next to the boy’s school.

Unfamiliar with the finer points of site preparation, the Bangladeshis drove a mechanical backhoe through the underground water and power lines, killing off the air-conditioning in the school. While the hapless driver looked at his barbecued machine, the kids cheered him from their windows, fully aware they would be given the rest of the day off.

The Saracen decided to surprise his mother and take her for lunch, but the Manama bus service was about as reliable as Jeddah’s and he arrived a few minutes after the Batelco building had closed for the break. Assuming she was inside in the staff cafeteria, he went to the mall to get a drink and to consider how he might spend his free afternoon.

He stepped off an escalator, saw her from thirty yards away and, in that moment, whatever small life he had constructed for himself in Bahrain fell to pieces. Unveiled and wearing lipstick, her Gucci sunglasses pushed up on to her head, she was having lunch at a café with a group of co-workers.

He stared at her unveiled face and make-up, shattered. She might as well have been naked in his eyes. Even worse than her immodesty, though, were the four men who were sitting at the large table. One look at them, and he knew they were not the fathers or brothers of any of the other women.

A wave of sudden retching, of betrayal, almost choked him and, just as he beat that back, he was swamped by the rolling desolation of failure: he realized that he had let his father down in the worst imaginable way.

He considered confronting his mother in front of them, covering her face and dragging her home – but somehow he managed to force his legs to walk away. Angry, wounded virtually beyond repair, he went to the only refuge he knew – the mosque – desperate for comfort and advice from the imam and the other soldiers of the Muslim Brotherhood.

He returned home so late that night and was deliberately so tardy in getting up the next morning that he didn’t see his mother and sisters until dinner time. Strangely, he made no reference to what he’d seen at the mall but, all through the meal, his mother was aware something was wrong.

When the girls had gone to bed she asked him what it was but, withdrawn and surly, he wouldn’t be corralled into talking about it. The only thing she could think of was that it had something to do with a girl, so she decided not to pressure him; she’d had brothers herself and she knew how hard the teenage years were for boys.

It took several days, but he finally sat down and spoke with her. With downcast eyes, he said that, after months of introspection, he had decided to follow a religious life and would one day – God willing – become an imam.

She looked at him, taken aback, but made no attempt to interrupt. Whatever dreams she’d had for her son, they had never included that.

He told her quietly that he knew a spiritual life was a hard road but, since the death of his father, religion had brought him greater consolation than anything else and, as the imam had told him on several occasions, it was a decision of which his father would have been immensely proud.

His mother knew that was true and, while it explained his recent silence, she couldn’t help but think there was something else about the decision she didn’t understand.

She stared at her only boy – every month looking more like his father and making her love him all the more deeply for it – trying to will him to tell her everything, but he just looked up and met her gaze, unwavering.

‘I’m sixteen in two weeks, ’ he said, ‘but I still need your permission to get a passport. I want to go to Pakistan for a month. ’

She said nothing, too shocked – Pakistan? Where did that come from?

‘It’s during the long summer vacation, so it won’t affect my studies, ’ he continued coolly. ‘Outside Quetta there’s a famous madrassah – a religious school – that has a perfect course for young men starting out. The imam tells me it will set the high standard for the rest of my career. ’

His mother nodded; she could almost hear the blind man saying it. What would he know about her son? The boy was tall and strong, surprisingly athletic, and she doubted that a life of religious study would ever satisfy him. ‘Even if I agreed – how could we afford it? ’ she asked, opting for the most reasonable-sounding objection first.

‘The course is free, ’ he said, ‘and the imam has offered to pay the air fare. Other members of the mosque have said they’ll write to friends to arrange accommodation. ’

She bit her lip – she should have anticipated something like that. ‘When would you leave? ’ she asked.

‘Ten days, ’ he replied, daring her to say it was too soon.

‘When?! ’

‘Ten days, ’ he repeated, knowing she had heard well enough.

It took her a moment to stop her heart’s wild tattoo. Only then could she try to address her fear that if she didn’t help him it might open a gulf which might never be healed.

‘What do you say? ’ he asked, the tone aggressive enough for her to understand the answer he expected.

‘I’d never stand in the way of such an honourable ambition, ’ she said at last. ‘But of course I have concerns of my own, so it depends on meeting with the imam and making sure I’m satisfied with the arrangements. ’

He smiled pleasantly as he got to his feet. ‘No problem. He’s expecting your call. ’

Two days later, reassured by her meeting, she signed the application for an expedited passport, and that afternoon he went to the office of Pakistan Air and bought his ticket.

By then his mother had realized he would be away for his birthday and, in the flurry of packing and shopping, she and the girls took on one extra burden – organizing a surprise birthday celebration for the day of his departure. It was a poorly kept secret, but he seemed to play along, feigning not to notice the extra food being brought in and the invitations going out to his school and the mosque.

By 4 a. m. on the day of the party, however, he was already awake and fully dressed. Silently he slid into his sisters’ room and stood at the end of their beds. They were exhausted, having stayed up until midnight completing the preparations, and neither of them stirred.

He looked at their lovely faces sailing quietly across the dark oceans of sleep, and perhaps it was only then he realized how much he loved them. But this was no time for weakness, and he tucked a copy of a Qur’an inscribed with his name under their pillows and kissed them one last time.

With a heart heavier than he could have imagined, he made his way down the hall and opened the door into his mother’s room. She was asleep on her side, facing him, lit by a soft glow spilling from a night-light in her bathroom.

Unknown to any of them, he had returned to the airline office three days earlier and changed his ticket to a 6 a. m. flight. Ever since seeing his mother in the mall, he had masked his feelings, but he wasn’t sure he could continue to suppress them during the emotional turmoil of what only he knew would be a farewell party. He had told them he would be home in a month, but that wasn’t true. In reality, he had no idea if they would ever see each other again.

Looking at his mother now, he knew there was no easy way. Growing up in the desert, he had only ever seen fog once in his life. Early one morning, his father had woken him and they had watched a wall of white vapour, otherworldly, roll towards them across the Red Sea. Now the memories came towards him like that: her belly growing large with one of his sisters, his father hitting her hard across the mouth for disobedience, her lovely face dancing with laughter at one of his jokes. The rolling mass of human emotion – hope to despair, childish love to bitter disappointment – wrapped its strange tendrils around him until he was lost in its white, shifting universe.

He would have remained adrift in tearful remembrance except for a distant muezzin calling the faithful to prayer. It meant dawn was breaking and he was already running late. He moved to the bed and bent close to the woman’s face, feeling her sleeping breath gentle on his cheek. They say that when men are dying in battle their fingers nearly always twist into the soil, trying to hold on to the earth and all the pain and love it holds.

The boy didn’t realize it but, had he looked down, he would have seen his fingers wrapping tight into the coverlet of his mother’s bed. As he kissed her forehead he murmured a single word, something he had never said to her before: he spoke her name, as if she were his child.

He pulled himself to his feet and backed out of the door, keeping his eyes on her for as long as possible. Quickly he grabbed his backpack, emerged into the new day and ran fast down the path lest the tears overwhelm him and make his feet follow his heart and turn him back.

At the far end of the street, as arranged, a car was waiting. Inside were the imam and two leading members of the Muslim Brotherhood. They greeted him as he scrambled into the back seat, the driver slipped the vehicle into gear and it sped off to drop him at the airport.

His mother woke two hours later, rising early to finish the arrangements for the party. In the kitchen she found a letter addressed to her. As she started reading it she felt as if cold water was rising up from the floor and crushing her lower body. She felt her legs go from under her, and she only just managed to find a chair before she fell.

He told her in simple prose about seeing her in the mall with her shame in full flower, of how he was certain his sisters were complicit in her behaviour and that his only ambition had been to protect the women, exactly as his father would have wanted.

As she read on, two pages in his best handwriting, she was taught a lesson many other parents have learned – it’s usually your children who wound you the most ferociously.

Finally she came to the last paragraph and realized she had been completely deceived by the imam. What she read destroyed the last strands of her tenuous control and she fell into a chasm of loss and guilt and terrible fear.

Her son wrote that he was going to Quetta but there was no famous madrassah there, just a different type of camp hidden in the high mountains. There he would undergo six weeks’ basic training before being taken along an old smugglers’ route and over the border into the battlefield.

He said he had never had any intention of following a religious life. Like any truly devout Muslim, he was going to Afghanistan – to wage jihad against the Soviet invaders who were killing the children of Islam.