A Multiple Existence
Muhsin Khalid
A life history a person conceals within himself resembles his walking. The walking of some one like me is probably clumsy, resembling the identity of another man walking in the opposite direction. I must be the only man in this world whom the difference between his own age and that of his father is only seven years. This is because my father was once a fat, lustful baby and hence matured before the natural time for manhood. My mother was a naïve and easy to tempt girl, until she was twelve years old. She was standing on the other side of the stream. He came along riding his father’s donkey, which he had stolen when his father dismounted to perform his prayers. He waved at her a thick sugar cane from which sweet was dripping like a punctured water-skin,. She thought she would eat the sugar cane of "that" fat boy and will not help him picking the tomatoes, so she followed him. He threw the sugar cane to her on the ground when the donkey reached the middle of a thick grassy field. She got up from the ground, after a prolonged wallowing in two sweets: the sugar cane sweet with its normal temptation, and another sweet for which she had found a mouth only that day.
And so, like a disaster dragged from the spines of the fields under oppressive heat, they brought about a guy like me.
In truth, I wouldn’t say that my fate proved somewhat shortsighted, and no, I’m not saddened by this existence which some presumably wise people had managed to salvage for me when they stopped my folks from butchering that lustful one and that naïve one, never. In fact I do fully accept this random birth which is seeking a sweetness that is not his and is so sure of its ability to avoid a function of some sort. I do accept it like any lunatic who is totally ignorant of the beginning of his story, and hence its end cannot cause him a sadness of any sort.
I do accept, with the endurance of a more venturesome than godly soul, to be the person I’m, rather than be the outcome of a hypothetical incident, had that lustful one fell off his father’s donkey and never have met with that naïve one.
This way, and with the bitterness of someone who could have been a mere fall lost in the universe, I deal with my life. I wouldn’t tell you of all the social tragedies associated with this type of birth, nor its religious tragedies, because if I do, the life history inside me shall resemble my walking, while I still insist that it resembles the identity of a man walking in the opposite direction.
As you can see, I have become reconciled with an existence that is neither subordinated to society nor to religion. The government, for example, has decided to admit me to a boarding school, based on everybody’s scores, without paying any attention to the story of the lustful boy and the easy to tempt girl. I do not care much to talk to you in this direction either. I have earlier heard people saying “ I don’t care less about so-and-so”, once again, and in the name of religion , they say “ A true Muslim is one who worries about the distresses of other Muslims”. What is certain is, they are always there with a sugar cane in between, tempting of a bastard, accepted neither by the society nor by the “individual” who is, in other words, a sample of the society’s religion. This is what makes me live every moment that could have vanished and become totally meaningless had that lustful one fell off the donkey, with the feeling of someone coming out of an abyss in nothingness.
The sophistication of this existence consummates when we notice the possibility of assuming its nothingness. Its peculiarity, however, is summed up in a misfortune which we cannot discover unless it is manifested in a tangible bastard. This is why I always feel that I’m a living proof of a universal issue and the only person who exists as a testimony of a profound absentee.
In a civilization such as this , where no one can create a different type of existence without the help of a deceitful sugar cane, and in an existence like this, where people need to have the sense of a notional institution, such as the government in order to be neutral, I realized I ‘m not in pursuit of a sweet of some sort, and I’m not being pursued by any dictates of partiality to any side that will not find me useful any way.
I do not want to tell you that people are as bad as their birth may dictate. I often met with people whose beauty fatigued me despite their bad origin, and others whose fathers rolled over their mothers on natural beds, not just fell over them from the height of a donkey, and yet delved into life through a crack in its skin, like malignant boils. Nor would I like to give you any idea about my badness or beauty, never. Only an unwise person would engage in such matters of judging people, including myself.
The serene surface of the lake hides crocodiles underneath, this is a notion that describes the life histories inside people. It circulates amongst people as a folk proverb, normally followed by loud laughter at the person so described. Never mind, the trees by the river bank are so ungenerous, they throw their shades on its waters. This is a notion so secluded in its selfishness and its begging for a sugar cane to the extent of suggesting , not to history, but to nature, to be neither nature nor history. And due to the peculiarity of my experience, I judged them both as banal and meaningless.
The famous battle of the sugar cone, for instance, which occurred during the reign of Sultan Hussain and wiped out most of the Maalia Arabs and two thirds of the Hamar Arabs; why was it named the battle of the sugar cone? The answer is the same one that ruled out the possibility of me being a neglected fall in the universe instead of being me. The Maalia Arabs attacked a group of traders known then as “Abdul Aziz’s Zareba folks” and forcefully seized form them the entire supply of sugar they brought from Egypt. Sultan Hussain, a presumably wise man as well, summoned Sheikh Muniem Wad Makki, head of the Hamar Arabs, and gave him permission to settle his prolonged animosity with the Maalia Arabs.
Having mobilized all his men and allies, Sheikh Wad Makki asked them to drop one or more of the Maalia fighters heads beside each sugar cone, and bring back all sugar cones gagged by the strings that hold the dead fighters pants. In addition to their legitimate right to have a sugar cause of some sort, the Maalia were well known of their courage and savagery, a fact that rendered their vast lands entirely empty, except of them and the wild animals, or only the wild animals over their dead bodies. And so that was the way it happened, the braves of both tribes perished and only the sugar remained glittering and the sand stretched across the desert, until other Hamaries, being so numerous, came for it. It was said however, that the wind bereaved every one that day, and the sugar cones scattered all over the desert and the wilderness, and so it was called the Battle of the Sugar Cone.
People like the Maalia , the Hamar and others die two deaths; one remains with them all the time, as a symptom of the sweet things they miss. The other is a type of existence they will constantly live through when their shortfall is consummated. For the existence of people is more paradoxical than the existence of death as a consummation. As for me, my existence is saturated with sugar, because my story is purely of its making. For this reason my existence is free of narcissism, because I do not love myself sufficiently. It is also devoid of arrogance, because I do not despise others as much as they should be. Hastily, everything about me happens hastily, the river reconfirms its existence hastily. The birth of peoples’ internal life does not occur only historically, not even qualitatively , if you guessed I would say so, but also hastily; the way a river sniffs through its bed in a gallop. And I wish I were able to explain all that to Salwa.
Existence, no matter how sufferings, may render it distant, barren, incomprehensible and cut off from our identity, shall never be a phenomenon for its bearer. And no matter how desires and yearnings may render it certain and tangible, we shall never be certain of it the way philosophy is certain of its intentions. Under the punishing heat of our Summer, we look at the distant railway line at midday and things appear concealed behind their shadows in an awesome intermittence and ambiguity; the mirage continues to re-establish their distancing existence every second. In the bitter cold of Winter, and while we look at the remote fields or the other side of the river and the so called “Abu Shahlal” by laymen appears, bringing things amazingly close, having coated them with splendid dewdrops, you almost talk in whisper to the man on the other side of the river, never doubting that he could hear you. Existence splits itself in order to set up the game of its cunning, deceitful and distancing hiddenness, then further splits itself in order to come closer and clear up in an intermingling with manifestation it knows. Existence presents itself in its intermittent form in some places and non-stagnant in a place, as the potential variation of the seasons; not the duration of the protracted and the absolute.
When I climbed to the rooftop of the train heading to “Al Damazeen” town, I didn’t know much about the movement of things around me. My entire life was that of someone traveling inside. But when the trees, the houses and animals moved, in what looks and what does not look like its walk, I realized the great gallop, and my existence which was on the rooftop. I did not discover any new concepts of time if you reckoned so. The idea that time can only be captured through motion appealed to me for no reason other than its simplicity and childish validity, the wisdom of physics. Nature. And I do not think that I mean that existence also needs motion in order to be definable, this is likely to lead me to scientific assumptions and philosophizing, which I wouldn’t care to delve in. All that I would like to express is the notion that man is born heading towards some place , and may die along the way without having the opportunity to see his progression through binoculars. I was fatigued by the idea that there exist binoculars that widen vision and deepen perception and pleasure, dissociation from or merger with existence and existing things, do a lot of things, yet remain ambiguous and undiscovered. In fact I wonder what makes me think this way? Is it because Salwa died without me noticing her existence along side my ex-existence ? Basically, my relationship with her was kind of bizarre or semi-crazy. I didn’t find her such as crazy or psychologically imbalanced as the rumors go about her in the village. I recall when I asked her, for the first time: “What is your name?” she , laughed at me sarcastically, how could I start my dialogue with a 17 years old girl by asking about her name, I might as well added “you little one?” She answered, condemning the fact that I share others their insinuation that she is mentally feeble: I’m more enlightened than you are, even if you have been sent to schools! I was kind of embarrassed, is there any one in the village who does not know the name of the other? She had every right to have ridiculed me saying : Are you born here with us or in another country?
“I’m honestly sorry Salwa”
“Oh yes, you better talk straight” and she laughed innocently, happy for the acquaintance and the fact that I remembered her name, not by way of gloating or as an expression of triumph.
“I did not mean anything, may be it is just because it is the first time I have ever talked to you”
“Never mind, do these educated ones ever feel embarrassed any way?”
I found her nice. Basically, she is known around the village as the prettiest girl, in terms of appearance , except that beauty is bewitched.
The day she drowned in the river at night, she was saying to her female companions, while wading through the river’s waters “Hey girls, I’m truly sick and tired of this tomato- picking thing. Now, how do I differ from Wad Al Harti’s oxen? “ And her female companions laughingly call on her : Hey girl, you better come out, you will drown, this spot is an irrigation ditch, next thing you will even be seeking tomato picking, in vain, well , unless the fish picks on your own body. And she laughs: So what, I rather be taken away by the river than waste my life picking tomatoes . Honestly this inauspicious, never ending farming of yours have robbed away my very soul. Hey listen Bakheeta, if the river took me to the land of the mermen, I shall get you a bridegroom. Bakheeta the old maid laughingly responds “ Oh, dear one, I know you will be thinking of me, how sweet”
Existence when some one born to be a farm hand jokes with it, or when he thinks he can drag it towards the sowing realm; the only thing he had learnt in his entire life. This is the very matter that brought out the whole village and all neighboring villages to find a lost existence which they did not know where the foam had cast.
They were stumbling in their way to the interior of the bushy islands scattered along the river “the carad”. The darkness was endless, torches were in their hands falling and rising with them as often as the number of pits and whirlpools. Stillness and water spilling shouting and wailing of women all over the place. Their echo rebounding from across the river, somehow intimate and telling of something,. The waves breaking in some far away places concealed by darkness, the shouting of night river birds, the heaving of boats and the sharpness of calls. All that commotion was calling for an existence that stole into the realm of sowing, which is more deeper than the wisdom of the trees, more deeper than slumber.
“Pull the boat Khalil, use only the pole for searching, do not get your legs into the water, Allah is the only Almighty”
“Spread the net Wad Al Harti, let it sink down, it seems there is something immersed down here”
“Hey folks, markers cannot be driven into the river’s rocks, look for sand and shallow spots”
Existence when sought by panicky men in the depth of the river and darkness. The existence of that Salwa was by no means more precious than this missing existence of hers. An existence drowned and was over with, what do they want from it? Existence, according to man’s established habit, and not his best wisdom, must be placed in a cerecloth and an embalmment of human compassion. It ought to have a recognized framework of valediction . The torches were enwrapped by lean arms and talismans of beliefs they hold in their existence. Women’s weepy and beseeching hands raised towards the sky; existence when followed by a demonstration of grief. I heard the stumbling steps of Mahmood, my grandfather, on the ground of the bushy islands. A number of hands reached out to assist him . They brought his saddlebag and spread it out on a dry spot for him to sit on. I was a mere bewildered spectator of the events, however, when I heard his religious mutterings and forbearance: “one day walking the earth …..the other day lying down on the deep rocks”, I wept with a bitterness utterly unfamiliar to me in my ex-existence, I recalled his voice when he was jesting with Salwa during the onions harvest. She was famous of her hard work and her big appetite, my grandfather says to Wad Al Naeem:
“Look at her sweat Wad Al Naeem, see how it is gushing, I swear to God she equals hundred men, a blessed girl, her hard work cannot be matched by all of King Solomon’s Jinn.”
“But her defect, my brother Mahmood, is that her stomach is haunted, it is as if there is a mill in there”
Hag .. hag … hag.. roars Wad Al Harti with his ripply voice, loosening the cow rope in his hand to, laughingly, protest “ What mill ? there is a ten meter crocodile lying inside her stomach.”
Are they looking now for a hand for work and a stomach for eating? Or are they looking for an existence their sorrows had assumed and their torches missed in the night? Or for something they have never known at all?
The way the river’s existence is thought of remains the same; it takes away men, crops and children, but also wins them seasons of gold, then once again becomes an unbeliever in God, and takes away seasons with their souls. This is the river’s existence that since eternity had lived with their existence side by side. The juxtaposition of two existences is an act of kindness and a pitfall , abundance and famine, a beginning and an end that should be magnified until it overfills the heart and the eye.
Her existence was joyful, pure and vigorous, like the jinn who built Solomon’s Kingdom. ! “Spread the net Wad Al Harty, let it sink down, it seems to me there is something immersed down here” , and here it is, at this moment in time, a mere something immersed in the river and can be salvaged by a fisherman’s net or anchor.
Duf ..duf…duf.., big boats and small boats towed into the darkness of the river and out of it, men wading, women floundering with their weeping in the glittering waves. A bitter and painful tragedy like this missing existence of Salwa. She used to come to me, excited as a child: “ did you see the game my grandfather brought me, it was given to him by a trader who brought it from the South."
“No, I didn’t see it”
“let us go play it”. I asked her: Where? She pulled me from the hand without answering. She took me into a barn prepared for storing corn and beans, and there she had already prepared a clean and tidy place for her naïve privacy, and for this game in particular, which is meant to provide its players with a selective existence. “What is the name of this game? I have never seen it before”
“My grandfather told me it is called “Tonj” in the native tongue, but why don’t you sit here, closer I said ,so that I can teach you”. When I get close to sitting on the chair, she winked her eyes and they shone with simplicity, hinting she could have pulled the chair away and let me fall, then a sweet gesture by the finger, meaning: OK, you are spared. She continued her introduction of the game:
“Its name in the native tongue is only a language of birds, gibberish, I have named it “Um Burooj” ([1]). I only laugh not telling her that ”Um Burooj” sounds like a language of cranes, Autumn cranes in particular. May be she meant those things that look like openings leading to one another in an ascending order, like towers. My mind gets busy. The game was of such intense existence, we were absenting our selves from our existence and merge into its existence and destiny which are wholly virtual. It looks, more or less, like the Snakes & Ladders game, may be only in the sense of conversion with the existence that has been left to whatever it may disclose, and to its anticipated and changing revelation.
Duf ..duf…duf.., each one and each thing is stumbling in the water searching for her. I couldn’t bear Salwa’s existence that has been lost, nor the idea of searching for it in such a wrong place like the river, so I ran back to the barn. We were there only yesterday afternoon, our game left unfinished because my grandfather called on me to cater for some guests who came to visit at the time.
The dice we were using was lying where we left it. It was made of pure ivory. It wasn’t in the hexahedron shape with the normal six sides, but an unusual dice with twelve sides. The numbering begins with one and ends with twelve. The paramount number in this dice is twelve instead of six. Numbers are placed in some ancient African numeration, close to Roman Numbers. The dice with its twelve numbers match with the signs of the Zodiac What a, probably plotted, coincidence! The dice was still on the same spot where we had left it, seeking some fortune for us, while we wait for the fate it is going to bring to us. The small elephant was standing on the same square of its static and heavy movement, the small foxes, colorful sea birds and swans. The owl was standing on the square that signals the player’s end. Oh, what a perfect, great game it was. The Southerners brought it from the neighboring forest, not inspired by the meditations of an idleness of some sort. The lion is the square of the triumphant and the road to it passes through the lioness square which you need to cross by ladders of flying ropes. The pattern of the grass, the lake in the middle, the tiny roads winding like the forest’s trails …. what a majestic perfection. Your loss in a game like this is absolutely certain, and so is your hut, to which you will get if you managed to pass your hazardous fate. Existence here is a great wish and very much looked forward to. Hence , you go out with your axe or your digging hoe, and get yourself an existence from the sweat of your hard work. Despite my anger at them, I came to believe in the wisdom of existence when lost, when people search for it as a tangible thing that could be found by one of the methods of finding other creatures. At present , they follow the river’s current, towards the spot where it normally drags drowned things. they know such spots by the odor and color of the water. They call the spot towards which the current draw things “Al Shaimah”([2]). Here the color of the water is dusty and the mud smells much stronger than in other spots. Here they are then, allocating a physical form to existence and track it as a definitive thing. The boats beat strongly, and swing sideways if they enter the current’s den. Let them find Salwa’s existence by the knowledge of their existence, which existed along side the river’s existence since the beginning of time. Let them find the thing they thought was Salwa’s existence, but a guy like me wouldn’t know where to search. I brought the old lantern more and more closer to the “ Tonj, Um Burooj” game. The ladders with squares carved in bright ebony started to shine and glow. When my grandfather had called on me, it was my turn to cast the dice. She had already took her turn playing, and pushed her exquisitely tiny feet towards the spot close to where the present lantern stands as she cast the dice, the way she normally does when she thinks she is going to win. She said laughingly:
“ Hey listen bookish man, a slap for a slap”, meaning the winner shall have the right to slap the looser on the face. The glow of her beautiful, rosy cheeks blurred my eyes. I laughed and said to myself : you must accept the punishment of a higher game in order to enjoy the reward of lower one.
The noises of their search and their shouting in the river came to my ears from a distance, like the chattering of birds when they wake up at dawn and screech amid that strange clamor, like covering of the distance between the frailty of dying and sleeping and the intensity of living, when the creatures wake up and pour their existence in a cup, it is my turn then. With a cold sadness, brimful of frustration, I threw the dice without following it with my eyes. The dice was rolling through, changing its own fortunes and the destinies of its casters with every move, until it finally stopped, glittering and glowing on the hanging ladders.
Translated by: Hashim Habeeb Allah
([1] ) Translator’s note: “Burooj” in Arabic means towers
([2] ) Translator’s Note: “Al Shaimah” in Arabic means whirlpool
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