Songs of Enchantment

  Dad astonished us that day. He swore that our room was the great atrium of a fabulous palace. The walls were draped with rich cloth. There were bloodstones in the eyes of warrior statues. The ceiling was glorious with royal chandeliers. Twinkling glass was everywhere, and even his three-legged chair was a mighty velvet sofa. And as he described the great atrium of his blindness, marvelling at how much and how miraculously our lives had improved, how our true royal condition had finally caught up with our poverty, mum looked at me with an expression that seemed to wonder if it wasn’t better in some ways that dad retained his blindness and his enchanted palace rather than live again in the dreariness that sight would bring.

  5

  THE SECRET AGONY OF TYGERS

  DAD BECAME HUMBLE in the presence of his mysterious kingdom. Everywhere he turned he saw his subjects. Mythic warrior-kings, long dead, paid visits to his court. They came with ritual beads thick round their necks, their crowns so weighty that they couldn’t walk without the help of their royal entourage. Dad made us realise that there was much in common between kings and the blind. In his kingdom, dad was a prince. He spoke of our obscure royal birth, of mum being a princess of a small kingdom in the country. He spoke of his father as being one of the heirs to the throne in his home town. Everywhere dad saw animals with crowns on their heads. He saw tigers and leopards, lions and jaguars. He saw hunters who went out into the forests and who returned with boars that had tusks of bronze, ostriches with lapis lazuli eyes, unicorns with horns of topaz. There were many beautiful women in his court, and they were his handmaidens, They bathed him with milk and saffron oil. They were so beautiful that dad became suspicious of them. Sitting in his three-legged chair, he followed them in his mind as they went out for the afternoon. He noticed that as soon as they entered the forest they turned into wonderful antelopes. Dad spoke of the rich gift of songs they brought back to him from their other kingdom.

  Sometimes his eyes hurt so much that he said there were butterflies in his head trying to get out. Sometimes the world drifted in a great bowl of milk. He swore that Ade came to him and begged him to bury his father. Then he began to speak of something growing in his eyes. He kept trying to get it out and we had to restrain him. Eventually, for his own good, we got some of the compound men to tie his hands behind his back. Dad would sit silently, surveying the peaceful splendour of his kingdom. Apparently, he had fifteen children and three wives and he kept getting their names confused. Mum watched him, marvelling. And I watched him knowing that something had struck his head and had burst open a strange door that opened him to fragments of another life.

  Sometimes when he was quiet we were afraid for him. His silence became deep and unfathomable. His breathing became shallow. We never knew if he slept at night. He would sit there in his chair, his eyes open, and he would spend hours talking to his father who he said was right there in the room. They had long conversations in a language that even dad couldn’t properly understand. Sometimes dad spoke about a stream with the moon as a canoe which his father was paddling. Sometimes he sat still, his facial muscles all bunched up, his sweat dampening the air. He would sit up deep into the night, re-dreaming the world, and I would be unable to follow him on his crepuscular journeys to the remote places of his vision.

  We were very sad for him. He didn’t eat, didn’t drink, and even the mosquito coil began to enrage him. Through all this, mum carried on with the hawking of her meagre provisions, treading the endless winding roads that led to new settlements, her feet blistering on the heated sand and stones, her face darkening under the onslaught of sunstrokes. And when she returned exhausted she would sometimes suffer the bizarre transferences of dad’s blindness, and for twenty minutes she would see holes in objects and walls and in me.

  Dad stayed silent and often I tried to console him by reading aloud from books on precious stones and Egyptian astrology. At no point during all this did he want the door shut.

  Sometimes he amazed us by saying that he could see the wind.

  ‘The wind has many colours,’ he would say. ‘When the weather is cool, the wind is red. When it is hot, the wind is blue. But the colours keep flowing and they can be very beautiful. And when a bad neighbour is passing our door-front, the colour of the wind changes a little.’

  Then after a long silence he would cry out and say:

  ‘Everything is alive.’

  We would wait for him to continue. After two hours, when we had completely forgotten the original statement, he would say:

  ‘The table has been listening to us. The walls have senses. The ceiling has eyes. The bed breathes and suffers all our tossing and all our dreams. The secret stories of our lives are stored in all these pots and pans and spoons. My boots know more about me than I do.’

  Then he would be silent. After another five minutes he would say:

  ‘This chair I am sitting on has been talking to me, releasing its stories. It used to belong to an Englishman who died in this country. He died of malaria. He had a child by one of our women and he disowned the poor boy. His wife didn’t enjoy sex. The chair then travelled from the expatriate quarters of the city and passed through two families and was nearly burned when a house caught fire. Then it was stolen, then sold, and I don’t know how it got here.’

  There was another pause. Fearing it would go on for ever, I asked:

  ‘What about your kingdom?’

  ‘What kingdom?’ he said.

  I stayed silent. The evening darkened the room. Dad forbade us to light a candle, saying it made the darkness in his eyes worse. We ate in the darkness, listening to the corpse of Ade’s father getting more bloated with the night. Later, as the wind blew its strange colours into our room, I saw the form of Madame Koto standing on dad’s head.

  ‘I am carrying a mountain,’ dad said.

  He became sober. He shrank into himself. His neck disappeared. Nothing I did could budge Madame Koto’s form from dad’s head. And as the night grew deeper dad began to cry, but he disguised the pain in a weird kind of laughter which made mum’s jaws ache. Her eyes burned in the darkness, and mum saw more as dad saw less. The uncanny transferences began to operate again. The weight pressed down on dad, and we found it hard to move: my limbs became heavy, as if I were a boy in an elephant’s body; and mum walked with an unbearable lassitude, as if she were two years pregnant with twins. The weight on dad made me sweat all the time. At night I heard him grinding his teeth and we had to keep waking him up because we feared his teeth might crumble in his mouth. Our sleep became oppressed. In our dreams we were unable to move or speak. It seemed as if the house was actually on top of us all through the night. In the morning it came as a shock to find that dad’s hair was flattened and his scalp bleeding. There had been nothing visibly on him. Dad complained of excruciating headaches and as it grew worse he spoke of being in an unrecognisable country where people were thrown in fires or thrown to crocodiles, in a city where the poor lived in caves. He said our room was a catacomb and that there were worms on the walls. He rejected the plate of fried bush-meat we gave him, saying that it was a live animal, and the rice we fed him made him cry out again, saying:

  ‘EVERYTHING IS ALIVE!’

  He spoke of tormentors everywhere. He said a wizard was whipping him with a lash made of crocodile hide. We didn’t believe him at first, but when we looked at his back we were horrified to find it covered in fresh welts. Other times he said the wizard was making razor incisions on his flesh and we noticed that he came out in strange cuts and blisters.

  ‘Fight them!’ I said. ‘Fight them, Black Tyger!’

  ‘I am a blind Tyger,’ he replied gravely.

  I saw dad’s spirit shrink, and his other form became smaller as Madame Koto’s form became greater on his head.

  ‘I see blood everywhere,’ said dad.

  His eyes had turned red. I stared into them intently.

  ‘A seven-headed spirit is staring at me,’ he said.

  I began to cry.


  ‘Shut up,’ he said. ‘That noise makes the weight on my head heavier.’

  I fell silent, swallowing my tears. After a while mum began to sing in a low voice. She sang sweetly and her voice made me sad. I didn’t understand her song.

  ‘Don’t sing for me,’ dad growled. ‘There is blood in my ears.’

  Mum stopped singing. We didn’t look in his ears to see if what he said was true. We were very afraid. Dad began to moan. He held his head. As the pain grew worse, he said:

  ‘The wizard is hammering a nail into my ear-drums.’

  Mum opened her mouth in alarm. Dad continued:

  ‘My head is full of pressures. I am breathing the air of diamonds.’

  We stared at him, wondering what he was going to say next. His silence expanded the spaces in our heads. I became quite terrified of dad’s blindness.

  Sometimes, as I stared at him intensely, his blindness would enter me for a moment, and I would make out the solitary form of an angel hovering just below our ceiling. Dad would suddenly cry:

  ‘I can see!’

  At that precise moment the angel’s form would dissolve. Already, dad had jumped up, his face brightening with a diamond joy. My eyes cleared. Then dad would sit down again, disconsolately, and in a scared voice he would say:

  ‘It’s gone. The darkness has returned. All I see now is the wind stirring just beneath the ceiling.’

  It became so bad that mum began to talk of getting a herbalist to treat dad. She mentioned a few names, outlining the awesomeness of their reputations. Dad refused such treatment. He swore. He accused mum of trying to get herbalists of dubious politics to make his blindness permanent. He went on and on, ranting about how we were making faces at him, mocking his blindness, sticking feathers in his hair, tickling his nose, shadow-boxing round him, and blowing hot air into his eyes. We were dumbfounded by his accusations. And when we failed to deny them he took them for the truth. He wouldn’t let us touch him. He became suspicious of the food. He demanded that we tell him our exact positions at any given moment. This went on for a whole day. When he slept, snoring heavily, he would wake up all of a sudden, calling my name, saying that an angel was offering him precious stones. He wouldn’t take them. And when the angel left, Madame Koto started to dance on his head.

  ‘Take me outside,’ he cried. ‘This room is full of demons!’

  I led him out into the street. Neighbours greeted us, offering profuse condolences, and dad growled at them.

  ‘Who was that?’ dad asked, after a particular neighbour had gone.

  I told him.

  ‘I never knew how ugly he was till I couldn’t see him,’ dad said.

  Then as I led him down the street he asked me to describe things to him. He wanted the minutest details about objects and the world. I did my best, and dad kept saying:

  ‘It’s not the same place. Nothing is the same. What colour is the sky?’

  I tried to describe its mixture of lilac and brutish gold.

  ‘Even the sky has changed. I see it as green. What about the road? Describe it.’

  I tried again and he shook his head as if everything were betraying him, and he said:

  ‘The road is like a river. It won’t keep still. It keeps moving. Where is it going, eh?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Take me to the front of Madame Koto’s bar and tell me what is happening.’

  I didn’t want to take him there. For the past three days a terrible smell had been drifting over from the area in front of the bar. We had heard that at night strange forms had been converging above the bushes where I had last seen the corpse. Nightmares went there to get fat and, like birds with monstrous wings, they circled around Madame Koto’s bar and widened their flight to the rest of the street. We no longer went near the bushes at night, but the place became the centre of our discontent and unease. In the evenings, when the forest began to speak in nocturnal murmurs, people with ragged clothes and bad dreams raw in their eyes gathered there. They waited, and watched, and were silent. None of those who went while there was still some light in the sky, none of those who were unaccountably magnetised by the rumours of the dark converging forms, not one of them noticed the bad smell. Apparently, it got less the closer you were to its source. No one noticed the smell any more, and no one spoke. They were like a brooding Greek chorus that had been deprived of speech.

  I took dad to three different places, deceiving him that he was in front of Madame Koto’s bar, and each time with increasing anger he said that he couldn’t see the palace of his enemy. When we finally got there he became agitated, pointing at trees that bore garnet fruits, pointing at the palace gates with their beautiful bronze statue of a half man, half crocodile. He kept asking me to describe what I saw and when I did he marvelled at how different it was from what he perceived. He kept asking me questions about colours, angles, textures, shadow forms. He saw ghosts where I saw bushes. He saw a fountain of yellow light where I saw the pool of stagnant blood. Plants with streaks of lilac had flowered in the pool. I described everything dutifully – everything except the corpse, which I never looked at, and never saw. But by its shadow, which was a form surrounding it – solid in the muted orange lights of the dust-peppered evening – by its shadow I knew that the corpse was bloating and growing fat with all the fevers and bad dreams of the road.

  Dad asked me about the corpse, which he had heard about, and couldn’t remember.

  ‘Is it there?’

  ‘It has walked away,’ I said.

  ‘Where to?’

  ‘To another city.’

  ‘What city?’

  ‘A city of gold.’

  Dad hit me on the head.

  ‘Look!’ he said. ‘Tell me if it is there.’

  I looked. I couldn’t see it. I told him so.

  ‘I can smell a corpse,’ he said. ‘It must be there.’

  ‘It’s not. I can’t see anything,’ I said.

  Dad cocked his ears.

  ‘I can hear something singing. The song is coming from the ground.’

  ‘It’s the wind.’

  ‘I know the songs of the wind. This one is different.’

  He pointed in the direction of the shadows.

  ‘It’s only the flies,’ I said.

  ‘Can flies sing?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘In one voice?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Like a human being?’

  ‘Yes.’

  He was silent. He listened again.

  ‘Whatever is singing is asking me not to forget him. Is someone there?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What do you see then?’

  ‘Only the road and the flies.’

  ‘Describe the flies.’

  ‘They are big and blue and they have strange eyes.’

  ‘What is strange about their eyes?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Are the flies looking at me?’

  ‘A lizard is looking at you.’

  ‘Describe it.’

  ‘It has a red tail and a yellow mark on its head.’

  ‘Can you catch it?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘It is talking to me.’

  ‘I can’t catch it.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘The darkness is coming and I don’t want to leave you alone.’

  Dad was silent. Behind us, around us, the sullen brooding crowd were themselves becoming shadows. They seemed to be dissolving. Their faces were like the lineaments of ancient soapstone statues. Their eyes were dull.

  ‘Something is going to happen,’ dad said. ‘I can smell it.’

  ‘Let’s go home,’ I said. ‘The clouds are coming down. It’s going to rain.’

  ‘I can’t smell rain.’

  I tried to drag dad home, but he was immovable. He had acquired immense weight. As I was pulling him he suddenly snatched his hand from mine and, staggerin
g towards Madame Koto’s bar, began to bellow out his challenges. He defied her to send the worst of her demons and wizards, he shouted that he was ready for anything she could hurl at him, and that not everyone would keep silent for ever. He went quite berserk, stamping one way, staggering another, shouting and foaming. It took all the silent gathered people to hold him, and it took mum whispering something in his ears to restrain him. The moment dad stopped raging, he cried out that the weight on his head had multiplied. Everyone thought he had gone completely mad. Dad had challenged Madame Koto in public, but she had replied to him in secret, and in silence.

  Dad carried Madame Koto’s weight home, carried it in his sleep, and woke up to it. But that evening, as we led him home, he could barely move. His eyes bulged as if his secret agony would make them burst out of their sockets. The veins in his eyes were blue and green.

  I never saw dad more sober than he looked that evening. The shadow-minions of Madame Koto surrounded us, followed us home, filling our footsteps, measuring the psychic vibrations of our souls. Dad was very sober and he walked as if he were a midget in a world of monoliths. He cowered from the empty spaces. Noises antagonised him. The wind made him tremble. He was even scared of the leaves that were blown into his face.