“CATCH it! Catch it! Over there! Get him... he’s out!”
It was impossible to tell which way the ball would bounce on the compacted mud of the cricket field and the cloud of dust nearly choked Jack to death.
But, despite the conditions, every evening in Sanaam was devoted to the sport. Dozens and sometimes even hundreds of men would gather in the square of scrubland – the one patch of ground which refused to be swallowed by the surrounding slums.
All remaining space had been consumed by the influx of new workers who continued to arrive from the east in search of work. But attempts to build on the field had been firmly rebutted. Any new shacks were immediately torn down by older residents protecting their games, he had been told.
The pitch was barely half the size of a normal field; around it was a thick perimeter of bodies, where men talked and smoked as they watched. Although the ball acted with alarming independence, both batsmen and fielders countered with lightning reflexes. In the absence of any other diversion, cricket was all they had to fill up the hours between shifts.
During the day men and women worked sixteen hour shifts in withering heat, but seemed to act as if it were the mildest spring day. Jack could barely move in the debilitating midday sun which, even with air control, penetrated into every room and corner of his new home. Yet the men and boys he played with at the end of each day, whose brown skins were turned charcoal by the baking sun, would uncomplainingly labour amidst the dirt and dust.
Most worked at the construction. Although the blackwater had ceased to flow, the profits from its historic sale continued. New hydro stations needed to be built to support the vast city and its roller tubes. New homes were needed for the skilled staff who work there. New shops and offices continued to spring up.
Jack’s new friends wore a rainbow hue of overalls – some blue, red and even pink – depending on which project they worked upon. In all cases the bright colours contrasted with the bruised hue of their skins.
At the insistence of one of the boys, a little older than himself, Jack had looked into one of their shelters. Twenty men were crammed into a space perhaps half that of his bunk room at school. Each had the space under or above his cot for personal possessions – although some possessed only what they wore. Others had stuck up photographs of family or pictures cut from newspaper or a dog-eared magazine.
With Khalid’s warning about the slums still in his mind, Jack had ventured out hesitantly.
But far from posing any danger, his presence seemed to attract only curiosity. He had been bombarded with questions when Khalid’s assistant Asif had brought him to the cricket ground. His new friends all told him the same story. They had come to get rich working here, send money back and return home to buy land, property or start their own businesses. All Jack spoke with had been living there at least three years. Yet every man in the bunk vowed they were on the cusp of leaving. Just one more year…. Yes, me too… We will get a bonus if we complete before the end of the year…
Jack had not played any sport in years other than chess. There was a dim memory of being shown how to hold the bat. Someone had bowling to him slowly, the ball thrown underarm. Was it the man he had called father or had it been Strang? He had tried not to think about the message he had received over the Wep in Alexandria. The message – was it genuine – from a father telling him that he was not really his son? Had the constant movement over the last few weeks prevented him from fully absorbing the news?
There were memories of a chess match long ago. It was early morning and sunlight flooded onto the board. Pawn to e4, with black moving c5. He responds by bring out his knight to f3, and black retaliates by moving d6.
A man, an older man, had shown him the moves, had coaxed him, had cajoled him into victory.
His pawn to d3, his opponent moved his knight to c6. How was it he could remember the moves so clearly? Something had happened. Yes, something had changed that day.
He shook his head. He didn’t want to think about it now.
He would rather dwell on the beautiful Saira, Khalid’s daughter who had stuck her head through into the lobby as Jack and Zarius were shown around the workshop-hotel.
He had normally little trouble in getting women to speak to him. But every attempt to speak to his host’s daughter had been firmly ignored. She was older than he was, certainly by a few years, and spent much of her time out of the workshop. They had been in the slums for two weeks now, and he had failed to elicit a conversation. Mostly she was nowhere to be seen. His queries about Khalid’s beautiful but distant daughter were met by silence from his new friends. The woman, said and older boy, was “influenced” and should be avoided at all costs. His new friends avoided even mentioning the guesthouse and its inhabitants. Jack soon noticed, that despite the teeming streets, its entrance was always clear, passers-by seemed to keep a respectful distance from the doorway. It was the only solid building for miles around and thereby the source of some uncertainty, Khalid pronounced.
From the top of his new home, Jack was able to make out the very edges of the ramshackle city. The humming and whirring which filled his ears every day suddenly made sense. There were hundreds, if not thousands, of roof turbines which rattled in the warm breeze. These were primitive blackwater-run generators and second-hand cooling units scavenged from building sites or sold off by hotels perpetually refurbishing in pursuit of the elusive eighth star.
Hydropower had not seemed to have reached Sanaam. The makeshift architecture, the clumsy amalgam of surplus building materials had not been connected to the gleaming avenues of the main city, its apartments, hotels and shopping arcades. And yet there was logic to the unruly slum streets. Traffic and pedestrians managed to carry out their business. Animals in rotary cages slowly pulled broken engines or the rusty shells of cars along the main streets. The energy crisis had led to a number of inventive solutions. The horse-cycle was not one of them. Although designs varied, it was essentially a cart platform with a giant wheel at its centre in which a horse or ponies would stand. The animal’s natural walking motion driving a belt that turned the cart’s wheels in theory multiplying its force and speed in a smooth, rotary action. The reality was that the contraption was prone to failure and required constant repair and that mules were so reluctant to use that the benefits of hitching it up had to be carefully weighed.
For two weeks they had waited for Ibn Nahim, the man indebted to Jack’s father. Amid the hovels, a Wep console had been found and a message keyed out to the bracelet maker asking when they could collect the items they needed to re-enter civilisation.
His reply: more time was needed. It was safer for Jack and Zarius to wait in the workers’ city, where the authorities dared bit probe too closely, than roam the roller tubes in Media as they had done before. After long hours of indolence, as had happened on his ship journey, Jack found that he needed an occupation. It was a strange surprise given his indolence while at school.
Khalid’s manservant Asif had attached himself Jack, who found himself fielding questions about the world outside the desert slums. But in turn, he was shown how to clean and sort the various components brought into the workshop for repair. The work served no purpose, gave him no money, but helped kill time during the long desert days.
As the sun fell, the bits would go to the cricket field and wait for the men to return. The yard workers had few advantages in life and, indeed, their prospects looked quite dim. But despite this they were friendlier and more optimistic than anyone Jack had met at his many schools. Khalid was impressed with the long list of schools which Jack had to his name, not thinking anything about the reason why any pupil had should have the need to have enrolled in so many?
“You have been to Buckley, Levenhall, Rydings in Canada, and the Sauree?” he bellowed in unsuppressed admiration. “I beat hundreds of other children to win a bursary at the American school in Karachi – where all our lessons were in English. Even our Urd
u lessons we received from a native English speaker - but you must be extremely knowledgeable from attending such places?”
Jack nodded and bowed politely. It was best to not to dispute his host’s view.
The last person in the household remained aloof. Though Saira lived under the same roof, days would go by without her presence being felt. When Jack did see her she was distracted and distant. He concluded that whatever chores she performed around the riad must be done in the dead of the night. Despite his deepest, most courtly bows, at best he could elicit only one word answers to his questions.
Meanwhile, Zarius was acting strangely. Once more, he withdrew and spent most of the day in his quarters. Somehow, probably with the help of Asif, he had acquired long flowing robes of Arab design. At night he would take long walks through the deserted streets, much to Khalid’s alarm, a pencil-thin moustache held above his lip with what appeared to be a fine wire.
As the days passed, Jack gradually acclimatised to the temperature. Even in the impossible heat, life managed to take hold. Mean grey cacti clung to the shaded gaps between clumsy metal wall sheets. Over the turbine roar and perpetual croak of broken water pumps, birds strained their voices. Tiny flighty creatures barely the size of his thumb, would dart from rooftops to the roadside taking nervous pecks at the parched broken ground or dips in the splashed water from a leaky condenser.
Asif was returning a repaired water unit to a client one morning, when Jack spotted Saira leaving the house, a rucksack slung over her shoulder. She dressed quite differently from the robed women that inhabited Sanaam – in Western fashion, wearing light cotton and a top, cut just below the elbows, and long black hair flowing freely behind her. No doubt, this was at least one of the reasons for the gossip. She nodded vaguely at Jack as she made for the door, her fine features contorted into their usual pained expression. Before she disappeared, Jack called after her.
“Wait,” he bowed hurriedly. “I’ll come with you.”
She shrugged as if it was too much effort to object. Dropping the bolts he had been cleaning, he followed her out onto the street. He knew her unresponsive ways and said nothing as they walked through the winding streets. Passers-by looked at them with barely contained disgust. Their contorted features shocked Jack. They must really hate her. Saira ignored the stares and brushed through the crowds. After several turns, the makeshift streets thinned out and Jack could see vast white dunes rising above the metal huts. Soon they were passing the last shelter and stood, for the first time, on open sand. The noise and bustle he had lived with for the last fortnight had fallen away and the wind was the only sound he could hear.
Saira did not turn around as she spoke: “Do you still want to come?”
“Yes, but where are we going?”
“Out there.”
She did not point but the direction was plain enough. It took around half an hour to scale the first sand dune. For every two steps Jack took, he fell one behind in the sand. Following closely in Saira’s path, he eventually managed to copy her sideways walking, using the side of his shoe to dig into the sand and minimise slippage.
The sun had fallen to its evening position and was resting on the horizon. The grains were still hot from the midday zenith and burned his hands as he tried to scramble up the slope. Eventually they reached the crest and were able to follow its spine, away from the city and into the emptiness. Silvery patches of salt were the only interruption in the undulating flats which seemed to fade into the sky. They had been walking for another half-hour when Saira began to speak.
“I know the stories the people tell about me,” she said. “Most of them have never had any education. There was once a school once in Sanaam but it closed down. No-one was interested in educating their sons, never mind their daughters, when they can scavenge for metal and beg in the city. When they get old enough they can go to the worksites and bring more money in. All they have is their bloody cricket and their dreams of retiring rich – but none of them leave.”
It was the most he had ever heard her say. But there was no emotion in her voice. The words were dry and matter-of-fact.
“That’s why my father came out here. When he arrived they could not get enough engineers. My mother and I were supposed to join him but the date kept getting put back because of one project or another. Eventually the day was set. All my clothes and toys were packed and ready. Then news came that there had been an accident. A steel girder had not been secured to its hoist. The chain slipped and the metal swung out of place. It missed my father’s head by only a fraction of an inch, crushing his foot instead. But, by the time he was ready for work again, a replacement was taken on. We stayed in Karachi waiting for his call but it never came.”
Jack, still wheezing for breath, managed to gasp out a question.
“So you were never born here? I thought you-”
“No, it wasn’t until I was a grown woman and engaged to be married that I decided to ask what had happened to my father. I had, of course, assumed that he had died and the details withheld. We moved to Islamabad to be with my mother’s family. It was very different to where I had been before. We lived in a big house with our grandparents and my uncles and aunts and cousins. We did not play on the street with the other children and were driven to school. Seeing I was of age, my mother felt she could not withhold the secret. With my far out of work, she had no longer seen the marriage as advantageous and left. So it was I now knew my father did not die and was, to the best of my mother’s knowledge, still living in Media. Now I knew my family did not approve of the man I was to marry – who was from Europe and had different ways. If it was my mother’s plan to halt my own marriage with this news, it was successful but not in the way she hoped. After learning the truth, a long darkness fell over me. Rather than rejoicing that my father was alive I instead dwelt on the lost years of his company. My beloved eventually led me out of that darkness. He was patient with me and I accepted his love. Gradually I started to see the fact that I had given me a gift I never thought I could receive: I had my father back.”
Jack shifted his weight in the sand, trying not to fall as he listened. Missing fathers. Distant fathers. Dead fathers. The story resonated with him more than she could know. But Sarah quietly continued, almost uncaring as to whether her audience was listening.
“Farrell and I married with great show, the next day we were to set off for Media. Although a Westerner, he worked hard to learn many of the traditions and after the ceremony and feasting we were eventually alone. As we dressed for the night, he went to check the next morning’s carriage to the airport. I never saw him alive again. His body was found in the lobby an hour later. Even the doctors couldn’t say how he died. I married five more men – don’t ask why. If you do I can’t really tell you why. All of them have lost their lives in exactly the same way. Why do those people say I am cursed? It’s because I am.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN