Saud Alsanousi - The Bamboo Stalk

I tried as hard as I could to make my voice sound normal. ‘Yes, I’m fine, but the water’s cold, brother,’ I said.

How could a dead tortoise leave such a gap? She didn’t have a voice for me to miss, and wasn’t even a permanent presence since she spent much of her time under sofas, cut off from everything, hidden in her shell and oblivious to the world. By her death all I lost was my own presence and my voice, which I only heard when I spoke to her, and the lettuce leaves in the fridge.

No one was better than Inang Choleng at putting up with my fickle moods — my sadness, my anger, my complaining — and now she was dead. My companion had died in Ibrahim’s room after sharing my wanderings — in the annex of Grandmother’s house and in my large flat in Jabriya.

What loneliness! Kuwait was closing its last doors on me, just when I thought I was part of it. I suddenly felt that it wasn’t my place, that I must have been wrong when I thought that a bamboo stalk could take root anywhere.

‘He who does not know how to look back at where he came from will never get to his destination,’ Rizal once said. But apparently I had misread his remark. I believed in it as if it were a prophecy. I saw Kuwait as the place I had come from, since I was born there, and it was the place I had decided to return to after an absence, but when I looked behind me all I saw was the Philippines — Manila, Valenzuela, Mendoza’s land.

Suddenly Kuwait felt claustrophobic, no bigger than Ibrahim Salam’s room. It felt even smaller, the size of a box of matches, and I was just one of the matches.

I remembered that phrase they often used: ‘Kuwait’s a small place.’

* * *

It was a boring day, like all the other days. I balanced the laptop on my knees to check if there was a message from Merla, but there was nothing but messages from my mother and annoying adverts.

Had Merla read my emails , I wondered. If only I knew.

But I could find out.

Suddenly I remembered something that hit me like a thunderbolt. Why hadn’t I thought of it all this time? Wasn’t it me who set up Merla’s email account in the first place? I had chosen the password. What if she had never changed it? In that case I could check myself.

I opened the email page in the browser and put in Merla’s details — her username and the password I had chosen. Amazingly it took me straight to her inbox. My heart raced. Dozens of messages appeared on the list: my emails with the subject lines I had chosen, emails from Maria and many other messages. But the important thing was that the subject line for my emails and Maria’s emails were not in bold, which showed that someone had opened them to read them, unlike the other messages, which were still in bold. That meant Merla was still around.

I felt a throbbing in my temples. With trembling fingers, pressing the keys hard down on the keyboard, I wrote her a message. I waited and then checked what happened to it. Within a few hours the subject line on the message had switched from bold to plain.

I hadn’t cried when I thought that Merla had gone missing, but I cried buckets for joy when she reappeared. The tears poured out whenever the subject line changed, showing that Merla was there.

Now it was fun. I would send a message, saying everything I wanted to say to my dear cousin, day after day. I could see someone was reading them. I felt more and more confident that she was somewhere, reading my confessions.

19

Ibrahim was busy going through the week’s newspapers looking for stories about the Philippines to translate and send to the Philippine newspapers. It was summer. The Boracay crazies were going round the world spreading their craziness. Maybe that summer they were operating in Spain, or London, France, Thailand or Malaysia. Maybe they would come across some half-Kuwaiti on the beach in one of those countries, God alone knows.

I found myself more alone than I had ever been. I had no work and no place of my own. The temperature was in the fifties, enough to melt me and my bicycle if I thought of going outside. My tortoise had died. My friends were abroad. It was impossible to meet my sister now that she had moved to her other grandmother’s house. My father, as always, only existed in pictures. My mother and Mama Aida were in another part of the planet, and Merla, although I believed she was around, wasn’t close by. I was avoiding Ghassan because I didn’t want to add to his troubles.

I had no incentive to stay in Kuwait much longer but I didn’t have enough money to buy a ticket to the Philippines. I was at a loss.

During her summer break Khawla read Father’s unfinished novel, for the millionth time perhaps. She was sad. ‘It’ll take me many years to finish it off,’ she said. She translated some passages of the book for me. As a dedication he had written: ‘To the two of you, Kuwait and you.’ The Arabic made it clear he was referring to a woman. Khawla said that for the years she had been reading the novel she thought Father was referring to her mother, Iman. But with repeated readings, she realised that he really meant the girl he had been in love with as a student, the one that Grandmother had rejected.

‘The one that, if he had married her, he wouldn’t have got involved with Josephine,’ I joked.

From what Khawla read to me I realised that my father also felt alienated in some way in his own country. After our conversation I asked Ibrahim for some paper and a pen and I began to write in English:

Although I’m different from you, and perhaps also backward compared with you in many ways, although I look like a stranger among you, despite my accent and the way I pronounce words, despite all these things I have the same documents as you have, I have exactly the same rights and the same duties as you have, and despite everything, I have had only love for this place, but you, for some reason I’m not aware of, prevented me from loving the place where I was born and for which my father died. You prevented me from carrying out my duties and you deprived me of my most basic rights.

When I was still young in the Philippines, your country was the dream. I say ‘your country’ and not ‘my country’ because in spite of my documents, it is not my country. In years past Kuwait was the paradise that I would one day win and that people in the Philippines predicted for me.

I was a stranger, and I still am. I have tried by various means to fit in with everything, although it has been hard, everything.

I have tried to break through the barriers and the walls that stood between us, but every time I managed to cross the barrier I was driven back. You disagree on many things but you agree on one thing — rejecting me. I’m like a grain of pollen or a speck of dust that comes to you on the wind after a long odyssey. As soon as you breathe it in, it irritates your nose and you sneeze it out. It goes back to wandering again and you whisper ‘Thank God’ and others reply ‘Bless you’. ‘God guide us and God guide you,’ they say. So it’s Praise the Lord, and May He Grant You Mercy and Guidance, while my fate is curses and ruin.

I tried my hardest to be one of you, but you didn’t make any effort. I forgive you, because it doesn’t matter to you. Do you mind if I continue with my story about something that doesn’t matter to you?

I will go on. I might feel somewhat relieved when I’ve let out all the words bottled up inside me. When I go back to the Philippines I want to have lost any desire to talk about you, or about myself when I was in your country.

Damn Darwin and his stupid theory. How can humans be descended from apes when I stopped being human when I was with you? I retrogressed and turned into a lower creature whose descendants might one day produce apes. That proves Darwin’s theory, but the wrong way round!