The Fortune Men Page 14

  ‘Allahu akbar, subhaanak-Allaahumma, wa bihamdik, wa tabaarakasmuk, wa ta’aalaa jadduk, wa laa ilaaha ghayruk …’

  Then pauses to remember the next part, ‘… a’auodu billaahi minash-shaytaanir rajeem bis-millaahir rahmaanir raheem.’

  Then the opening surah of the Qur’an, ‘… al-hamdu lillaahi, rabbil’aalameen, arrahmaanir raheem, maaliki yawmideen, iyyaaka na-budo, wa-iyyaaka nasta’een, ihdinassiraatalmusta qeem, siraatal ladheena, an’amta alayhim, ghayril maghduobi’ alayhim, waladduaaalleen, ameen …’

  The prayer flows from him like a song, like water bubbling up to the surface of a desert. Crouched on his heels at the end of the prayer, he lingers and dives into supplementary prayers. He pulls surah after surah from the well of his mind: some poured into him at cane-point by the macalims of his childhood, some overheard from his pious, fearful mother, others patched together from makeshift funerals for men buried at sea. He will ask the warders for a Qur’an, he decides, turn this captivity into something good for his soul.

  Mahmood lies on his back, his eyes tracing the cracks in the painted ceiling from one corner to another, his head cradled by his interlocked fingers. The cell is bright and he can hear laughter from the exercise yard; he hasn’t left his cell since he was charged with murder and moved to this new wing, or opened the Qur’an that a warder pushed through the hatch in the door. He is wary of mixing with the other prisoners in the hospital, expecting to find some in the full flush of TB or, even worse, men who look well but carry an arsenal of poxes, bacteria and viruses that he might pass on to his beautiful sons. He’ll ask the doctor if they are contagious and then venture out of the fetid room.

  Maybe he should tell the doctor his real age too. It probably won’t make a difference, he knows, but perhaps they’ll go a little easier on a twenty-four- rather than a twenty-eight-year-old. He should show the doctor that his life isn’t cheap, tell him that he was born in Qorkii, the year of registration, the year of famine. Delivered safely in the middle of nowhere, between Arabsiyo and Berbera, to a mother well past forty, Mahmood had arrived into a world wet and red from the slaughter of emaciated animals, a world of Indian civil servants under shady trees scribbling nomads on to welfare lists, of sacks of government rice and stewed wild plants. The drought had lasted three years already and had followed an outbreak of rinderpest in livestock imported from Europe. Out of his father’s thirty-eight camels, only ten remained, of his seventy-two cattle only five, and as for the sheep, well, their bones would make good fertilizer. The goat hides had gone to Aden for a measly price, the market glutted, the British Customs officials taking their usual tribute of tax.

  Mahmood had heard all of this over and over again from his mother, Shankaroon, the abaar and gaajo she had faced, the many times she had snatched him from the clutches of death, her self-sacrifice, her ingenuity, the frayed rope tied tight around her waist to staunch her own hunger pains. The story of his life recited in the poetry of her melodious, melancholic buraanbur. He knew every detail of how she trekked four days to a welfare camp in Bulahar, carrying him in a sling on her back, only to be told by a Yemeni fisherman, as she approached the coast, that no one who entered the camp came out alive. An outbreak of smallpox had cut down those already weakened by hunger, he said. She staggered back in the direction she came, the horizon melting into a yellow mist, only to wake up lashed to the back of a geel, Mahmood in the arms of a tall, raven-black woman, feeding at her breast as she marched beside the camel. That woman nourished them both and then deposited mother and child at the nearest settlement, before venturing further into the eroded, skeleton-strewn miyi. His mother never mentioned the saviour’s name or clan, if she ever even knew it, but gave meaningful looks to suggest it was clearly not a mere human they had encountered. Jinn? Angel? Reincarnated ancestor? It wasn’t for her to pretend to know.

  It made him feel guilty as a child, that she had suffered so much for him, that she loved him so hard when sometimes, when he looked at her beside him on the sleeping mat – weather-beaten, pockmarked, jangling with silver bangles and holy talismans – she frightened him. He had been a frail boy, stunted by that famine, and she had tormented him with every kind of medicine: frankincense suppositories, myrrh mouthwashes, acacia tea, malmal sap, amulets tied to his arms and legs to prevent the evil eye, emetic powders from Indian traders, injections and pills from British doctors, the words of the Qur’an washed from a slate and poured down his throat, his stars consulted by a long-haired faallow, his wrists and ankles burned with metal to cure chronic malaria. Finally, his mother made fine cuts in his abdomen and rubbed in coarse salt. He’ll never forget the yelp that broke from him when she did that, her soft words and tight grip as he fought her off, his stomach burning as if set alight. That last medicine put him on his feet and made a wanderer of him, a dalmar, happy to put as much distance between him and his mother as possible.

  When his elderly father, Hussein, returned after four years working as a trader in Aden, he had enough ten-rupee notes secreted within his white-bandaged legs that he could afford the rent and licence for a shop in Hargeisa, where many of his clan already lived. Mahmood moved with his four brothers and parents into a one-room mud-brick bungalow while their camels, marked with their characteristic star-shaped brandings, were sent away with an uncle. With the animals went also the turmoil that a season of drought, rinderpest, anthrax or locusts might bring upon the family, and while Mahmood lost the craggy, wild desert he gained the novelty and intrigue of town life. Hargeisa had once been just the widest point of a long watercourse where elephants gathered during the gu rains, and nomads watered their beasts, but then the sheikhs had come. A jamaca had been established there at the end of the last century, a sanctuary for the devout, destitute or captive, away from the tumult of the Dervish war and the profane harshness of nomadic life. They planted sorghum in the valley, grew bananas, mangoes and pomegranates along the riverbank, built an angular, lime-washed mosque and spent the evenings in prayer. Mahmood arrived after the town had already been coarsened. One paved road, fifteen eating houses, thirty-two general merchandise stores, a half-hearted jail, a basic infirmary and an Irish District Commissioner were all it took to make it the third-largest town in the protectorate.

  His father’s shop sold tea, millet, meat, white cotton, grey sheeting, rice, sugar, salt, grass fodder and whatever nomads traded with him. The income stretched far enough to employ a young, pretty jariyad to do the chores for their mother, who had grown fat, slow and pious with her comfortable life. Mahmood clung around the knees of the long-plaited Oromo maid, Ebado, and would not nap until she had sung to him or rubbed his tired feet with oil. He massaged her thin shoulders in return, then her little brown hands, rebraided the loose ends of her rows and rows of tight plaits, stole handfuls of sugar to gift her. His mother, jealous and vengeful, sent him to a dugsi run by the puritanical salihiyya order, where the macalim rocked back and forth to measure the rhythm of the kitab verses, and punished slow learners with vicious pinches that raised bloody welts on their skin. The macalim taught Mahmood that becoming a man was like turning wood into charcoal: a process of destruction until something pure and fiercely incandescent emerged. Tears softened the soul while pain toughened it. That was a lesson Mahmood understood quickly and effortlessly; everything in his life had already suggested it.

  When his father was selected by the Governor as an Akil to adjudicate religious cases, it was a surprise to Mahmood that the aloof old merchant with his neat columns of rupees, annas and pices had once cared enough about religion to travel to Harar and Jeddah to study the holy texts. His preening mother, on the other hand, clicked her tusbah and glowed with pleasure. She attended every court he presided over – the forbidden marriages, the ugly divorces, custody battles, inheritance disputes and compensation demands – muttering her own unforgiving commentary on the proceedings. Strange women appeared at their home, their tearful voices disturbing Mahmood’s nap, begging his mother to intercede on their be
half because their husbands had abandoned them, or taken their children away, or insulted them more deeply than they could bear. Boiling up pan after pan of spiced tea, his mother tried to resolve these problems herself, meddling intensely and swearing Mahmood to secrecy. Fortunately for his mother, his father would have greater concerns in the few years before his death.

  Mahmood first saw the Haji at the age of eight, during an Eid march by the whole salihiyya order through the town. Bearing a small yellow flag with a red star and crescent, Mahmood marched in columns three boys wide, from the livestock market in the north to Sheikh Madar’s tomb in the south, past the abattoir, the police station and jail, the small strip of smoky mukhbazars, and the District Commissioner’s broad bungalow. At Sheikh Madar’s tomb, they prayed and then listened to a sermon by an elegantly robed and turbaned man with a white beard. Standing at the rear of the crowd, Mahmood heard just some phrases and lines of poetry, the unmistakable war poetry of the Dervish. The Haji’s rasping, imploring voice must have fixed itself in his memory, though, because when he heard it weeks later in his father’s shop, as the two men chit-chatted over Customs taxes, he recognized it immediately. ‘The Haji is one of our own, a clansman and brother,’ his father said, apologizing for his son’s wary expression, ‘come kiss the great man’s hand.’ The smooth white smile he gave Mahmood belied the trouble the Haji would bring to their door.

  Between that day and the day his aabbo died, he doesn’t remember a time when his father was not talking about something the Haji had said or done. It was through the Haji that Mahmood learnt Somali convicts were sometimes flogged with nine-stranded whips in the jail, and that street boys dependent on government rations were caned if they refused to clean the streets. He climbed a mango tree, one day, pretending to pick fruit but aiming to see into the jail yard and prove the Haji’s report with his own eyes. The sight that met him was more shocking than a pen of shackled, blood-soaked men would have been. Grown men in long shirts and cropped trousers were milling around the brown sand, some watering bright flowers and leafy vegetables, others repairing thick, multi-stranded ropes; under a hibiscus tree a man pedalled a loom while convicts seated around him wove baskets or cut out patterns in leather. The prisoners did their women’s work in absolute silence and Mahmood stole down the tree before they caught sight of him. It was worse than a flogging, or was it? He couldn’t tell. The British did this to men they got hold of, he had seen that, made them into their cooks, nannies and laundry washers. Beat them like disobedient wives and made sure they could never be respected as real men again. The ragged orphans who had settled in Hargeisa in the hope that some relative would find them, who did the dirty abattoir work, or came from the weakest, poorest clans, were easy targets, but in that yard were locals he had seen before, at that time puff-chested and pugnacious. When Mahmood returned to the shop, he asked the Haji how he knew so much about the British.

  The Haji rubbed the black callus on his forehead where his head hit the ground during salaat, and tucked a fold of his turban behind his ear. After exchanging a look with Mahmood’s father, he leant an elbow on the wooden counter and looked up at the ceiling with his pale brown eyes. ‘I lived in Berbera as a young man, worked as an office clerk for the infidels, bought my food with the haram money they forced out of our nomads and traders. I speak their language well, very well, and I heard them speaking of us as children, but I thought in time we would become a new Aden, with ships coming from all over the world, that we would have trains like India, that they would push the Abyssinians back to their highlands. Nothing, we got nothing.’ He dusted his palms together. ‘Then I heard poetry so strong it stopped my heart. I followed it out into the desert, into the battlefield, into a world of death and piety. For that I was deported, forced out of my homeland by men from a country we will never see. They sent me to Mauritius, a little island of statue worshippers, where I wandered place to place, known by no one.’ He blinked, as if about to shed a tear, then regained himself. ‘Once our leader, our poet, had passed on to akhirah they gave me permission, per-miss-ion, haa, to come home, thinking I had been defanged, when now I’m pure poison to them.’

  Once Mahmood had finished with the dugsi, at around eleven years of age, he worked alongside his brothers in the shop. He had learnt to recite a third of the Qur’an but that knowledge was quickly submerged beneath the songs, jokes, riddles, maahmaah, goods prices, tax levies, dhow times and foreign words he had learnt while shuttling between Aden and Hargeisa with his brother Hashi. With all five sons now out buying and selling for him, Mahmood’s father set his mind to buying lorries to extend their reach to rural parts of the country. Keeping his plans quiet so as not to arouse competition or envy, their father applied for a transport licence and sent a camel as a gift to the District Commissioner. Perhaps if he had spoken to an astrologer first he would have postponed his plans, as that year his sub-clan almost went to war with the British. It started with a fight over a woman, a flirtatious young thing with thick ankles and pearly teeth. A fight that started with fists ended with a dagger stuck between the ribs of a teenage Eidegalle poet. The assailant fled into the miyi, seeking protection within his clan from the Eidegalle. Usually, it would be a matter of time, of cooling blood, then the negotiation of a suitable diya payment, but now the British wanted to be the sole adjudicators of murder cases. They said they wanted to teach Somalis the sanctity of life, even if it meant learning it at the end of a hangman’s noose. As the weeks stretched on and the boy’s clan refused to surrender him, the Haji perceived the magnitude of the moment. This was his clan, his blood, and he would raise the cry of ‘tolaay!’ so loud they would hear it in Westminster.

  While Mahmood’s father chewed his lip nervously, the Haji convened shir after shir of the clan’s elders to encourage them to resist the British demands. Mahmood watched as the Haji, holding a hand over his silk-clad heart, a fire illuminating his strong profile, laid out all the reasons why it would be haram to hand the culprit over for execution. Hadn’t the Eidegalle already accepted the terms of the diya? Hadn’t the British paid blood money when a drunken English mechanic had shot and killed a nomad boy? Hadn’t they called it ‘criminal negligence’ and paid just a portion of the compensation due? Wasn’t it against the very spirit of Islam to cold-bloodedly kill a man when there was still some chance of peace and restitution? He would publicly declare as infidel any Muslim who played any part in this injustice. The henna-bearded and shaven-headed elders supped their tea and murmured ‘na’am’ and ‘waa sidaa’, but Mahmood caught some of them exchanging furtive glances too.

  One old man, wearing perhaps twenty yards of white cotton wrapped around his stringy body, rose to his feet and shook his head, ‘You cannot call kuffar anyone who in their hearts believes in God and his word. You become the sinner in that case.’

  The Haji scowled, vexed that he had been contradicted and his train of thought broken. ‘It is simple, Halane, you cannot clutch to your bosom a man who has declared faith and allegiance to a foreign king. Can a man go in two directions at the same time? Can he ride two horses? Can he be a slave to Allah and to a gaal at the same time?’ The Haji shook his head with disgust at his own question. ‘No, astaghfirullah, only Allah is worthy of worship and obedience. The British people are a simple, servile people. They are peasants, satisfied working their lords’ lands, who cannot understand xorriyadda, our love of freedom. I know them, they are never happier than when they meet someone more important than themselves, then they bow and plead, “Sir, sir, I am your humble servant.” They consider Somalis wild because every man is his own master, but they forget we have one powerful master, Al-Rab, Al-Raheem. We need only our land, Allah will be our sustenance for everything else.’

  The clan, with the Haji as its de facto suldaan, held its nerve, until the Camel Corps finally arrived on their grazing lands, just a few dozen miles outside Hargeisa. The news arrived at the shop the same afternoon. A young mud-streaked nomad with a black ostrich feather in his
hair had ridden immediately to rouse the town. He washed his face and drank a goatskin of water before breathily recounting the events to the gathered men. A British captain, backed by nearly fifty mounted and armed Somali askaris, had arrived at the Biyo Kulule reservoir and demanded the surrender of the suspect and the three men accused of harbouring him. Speaking through an army interpreter, an elder told them to go find them in hell. Realizing there would be no capitulation to his order, the captain commanded his troops to round up the livestock as forfeited goods. Two men who ran to disperse the camels were shot in the back, and the elder who had spoken bluntly was trussed up and taken prisoner. With tall grain-fed camels, the Corps used their geeljire wrangling skills to herd the various animals and drag them away, leaving a few old worthless bulls and calves that wouldn’t survive the jilaal without their mother’s milk.

  Mahmood’s father advised an immediate surrender of the wanted men, but the Haji won the argument again. ‘Blood is on the ground, blood is on the ground,’ he kept repeating, as if delighted by the idea. Another raid on another watering place resulted in five dead and a man known as Farah of the Hundred losing all hundred of his camels. When the third raid arrived, the nomads were waiting; they had dusted down and oiled the rifles kept hidden after the Dervish war. Shots were fired on both sides and a fork in the road approached; either a return to the bombardment and massacres of the Sheikh’s time, or a drawing back of daggers on both sides. After an assembly of all the suldaans, boqors, garaads, akils and qadis of the whole Habr Awal clan, the youth who had started the trouble was finally retrieved from his hiding place and sent to wrestle his fate alone. Even after the trial, in which the Governor played judge, prosecution and jury, the Haji had one last card hidden behind his back. He had managed to convert an unknown number of Somali policemen to his cause, and one by one they refused to prepare the execution shed. After nine rebellious constables were sentenced to hard labour, the inevitable hanging quietly went ahead and the sheeko was brought to a close.