Abbas Khider - The Village Indian

I landed in Libya. Or, to be precise, I landed in Benghazi. A small seaside town, it didn’t have a lot to offer other than the sea and numerous beaches — in terms of women, I mean, of course. True, there was a nice selection from Asia and Africa, even Europe, especially Romania, but it wasn’t easy to speak to them, let alone touch them. I think that if the government had permitted it, the men would have hung signs on their women: ‘Haram — Danger! Don’t touch!’ On Fridays, you felt like you were in the Sahara. Not a woman to be seen in the streets. Wherever you looked, nothing but believers in a hurry, keen not to miss Friday prayer. In the evenings, too, it was as if the women had all been blown away, except a few foreign girls who, almost always, were accompanied by a man. As usual, there were also a few whores, foreigners mostly, especially from Morocco.

In Benghazi, my hobby of ‘looking at women’ developed into a science, the theory at its root being what I called ‘the analysis of female arses’. With Hasan, a fellow countryman, I hung around Tibisti, the beach in the centre of town, to view the women out for an afternoon walk. In next to no time we’d identified the crucial differences between the different types of arses and arrived at the conclusion that a particular arse could easily be attributed to a particular nationality. Big, curvy arses were Libyan or Egyptian. This, in my opinion, was because of the large amount of noodles and beans traditionally eaten in those countries. Small, firm asses, on the other hand, were Tunisian and Moroccan. Because, as Hasan supposed, those women moved about a lot and had to work as hard as men. Small, broad and slightly flabby asses — on very thin legs, often — were Sudanese or Somali. Perhaps because of starvation, and the merciless sun. Those on firm, fleshy legs were Mauritanian because. . Well, why do you think? Our theory was hardly likely to play a significant role in the wider field of international science. But Hasan and I had great fun with it. And that was all that mattered.

As if that weren’t enough, I finally had a bit of luck with work — and not just with my depleted escape fund. Right away, in the first few months, I found a position as an Arabic teacher in a primary school. I was kept busy all day every day until a priest’s daughter suddenly stood before me in the form of Jasmin, the new English teacher, who instantly caused my now-almost-abnormal compulsion to write to flare up again. This time it was paper carefully removed from the centre of the students’ exercise books when they handed them in to be corrected. From each, I took exactly one sheet.

After one particular dream, I desperately needed paper. The dream had made me tremble really fiercely. There it was again — the temple, and round me the priest’s daughter and my muses, Fatima, Suad and Jasmin, who, item by item, were removing their clothes and sliding them gently across the ground for me to write on. That night, I crept into my colleague’s room — a maths teacher — and pinched paper from his notebook.

Jasmin was from a very traditional family. She was already twenty-four and her mother was horrified that she wasn’t married yet. It wasn’t long before I heard that a teacher was asking for her hand. I was relieved to have a bit more distance between us. It wasn’t that I didn’t like Jasmin. On the contrary, I liked her a lot. I was living, though, in constant fear of someone discovering what we were up to. For we were meeting twice a month at the home of her married sister; she was aiding and abetting us by making her home available to us. There, we did all kinds of things to each other. I even wrote a poem on her body once, with lipstick. Unlike with Suad, I let Jasmin read almost all my poems, including those I’d written about her body on the very paper I’d removed from books at school.

In the end, she went to her husband a virgin. As the customs of this country demand. ‘A woman must enter marriage as a virgin.’ That had been clear to me from the very beginning and I had to take bloody good care that she remain one. It had also been clear to me from the very beginning that our relationship didn’t have a future. Jasmin’s family would never have agreed to their daughter going to a foreigner, an Iraqi no less, with nothing to his name but a few poems. Several times already, I’d heard of accidents involving foreigners in relationships with the locals. I still remember how the teachers at school once sat together, discussing such a case. A neighbouring school had been witness to a tragic accident a few months before. A music teacher, a Moroccan called Malik, had been murdered. The culprit was never found, no doubt because the police never looked for him. The head teacher said he’d seen the dead man with his own eyes, lying on the ground outside the main door of the school, covered in blood. With a bullet in his head. Shortly before that, another rumour had gone round — Malik had slept with Leila, the chemistry teacher. Soon after the tragic incident, Leila had married someone important. A member of the president’s personal army.

So far, so good. Jasmin got married too. My urge to steal paper faded and my contract at the school drew to an end. I had to look for another job. And so, I set out for another town.

Tripoli was big. Very Big. In the beginning, I often got lost in the old parts of town, the bazaars and pedestrian zones. The atmosphere wasn’t bad, though. You could move about freely, even talk to the women. What’s more, the streets were full of foreign women. Any number of whores in the hotels, clubs and other city-centre locations. Usually foreigners, like the underlings of the local pimps.

It took me a while to find work in this big city. First, at a pizza place, then at a beach cafe where I could also sleep at night. From morning till evening, I had to serve the customers with tea or juices and run one film after another on the video recorder. The cafe closed in the evening but a few men would still be sitting, waiting for me to pop in a porno. That was my job, and the men were dealers, junkies, thieves, fences, gays, foreigners and men who had nothing to do all day but watch films at the cafe. Indian films by day. Porn by night.

Things weren’t going especially well for me at the time. I desperately wanted a new job but it wasn’t easy. The country was full of foreigners who were ready to do anything and that too for hardly any pay. Then, one day, the cafe owner said I could stay in an apartment in a newly constructed building in the centre of town. I was relieved to not have to spend another night at the cafe. There, I couldn’t sleep until very late but I still had to wake up early. And it was never really quiet. Often, I couldn’t sleep a wink because of the cries and groans of the gay men, trying — at night and very close by — to satisfy their urges. The poor gays — often, they allowed the worst sort to mount them and were then surprised when the same ones beat them up or did who-knows-what to them. Each morning at eight, I had to open the cafe and help my gay Egyptian colleague Jamal to tend his wounds from the night before. And so the apartment in the newly constructed building was my saviour though it was only a tiny room, lit by only a bulb in the ceiling. In it lived four other foreign workers — one from Chad, one from Tunisia, one from Egypt and one from Syria.

Sadly, I was there for only two days before I had to flee. But not because there was only one toilet for twenty people or because the apartment was crawling with lice. No, no, it was because my Syrian flatmate had fucked up. The very first night we’d all been sitting together, he’d boasted, his chest swelling with pride, ‘We have a world-class porno here!’

‘Oh no — I’m sick of stupid porn flicks!’