Missing Out

In his first term at college in London, Majdy wrote letters home announcing that he would not make it, threatening that he would give up and return. to call him on the phone, his mother made several trips to the Central Post Office in Khartoum, sat for hours on the low wooden bench, fanning her face with the edge of her tobe in the stifling heat, shooing away the barefooted children who passed by with loaded trays trying to sell her chewing gum, hairpins and matches. ‘Get away from my face,’ she snapped at the girl who had edged by her side and was almost leaning onto her lap. ‘Didn’t I just tell you I don’t want your stuff?’ on the third day she got through, wedged herself into a cubicle but did not close the glass door behind her. Majdy’s throat tightened when he heard her voice. In the cool corridor of the hostel he held the receiver and leaned his head against the wall, hiding his face in the crook of his arm. The students who passed him walked a little bit quicker, felt a little bit awkward hearing his voice heavy with tears, unnaturally loud, foreign words they could not understand echoing and hanging around the walls.

There in Khartoum, she also, in her own way, could not understand what he was saying. All this talk about the work being difficult was, of course, nonsense. Her son was brilliant. Her son always came top of his class. She had a newspaper photograph of him at sixteen when he got one of the highest marks in the secondary school Certificate, shaking the now-deposed president’s hand. His father had slain a sheep in celebration and distributed the meat among the beggars that slept outside the nearby mosque. His sisters had thrown a party for him, heady with singing and dancing. And she had circled the pot of burning incense over his head, made him step over it, back and forth, to ward off the envy and malice that was surely cloaking him. Ninety-nine per cent in the maths paper, she had ecstatically repeated to friends and relations. Ninety-nine per cent, and mind you, they took that extra mark from him just from sheer miserliness, just so as not to give him the full marks.

‘Take this thought of giving up out of your mind,’ she said to him on the long-distance line.

‘Can’t you understand I’ve failed my qualifying exam?’ the word ‘failed’ was heavy on his tongue. ‘The exam I need to be able to register for a PhD.’

‘So sit it again,’ she insisted. ‘You will pass inshallah and then come home for the summer. I myself will pay for the ticket. Don’t worry.’ she had independent means, that woman. And when she put the phone down, a project started brewing in her mind. She dawdled on her way home, plotting and wishing. A few hours later, refreshed from her siesta and the cup of tea with milk she always had at sunset, she gathered the family and launched a new campaign: ‘my Poor son All Alone in London needs A Wife’. That was how Majdy came to marry Samra. After banging his head against books, working the proofs again and again, copying curvaceous lambdas, gammas and sigmas from the blackboard and into the whirling mass of his dreams, he was ready to sit for his qualifying exam. In June he flew to Khartoum. In July he received the good news that he had passed, and by the end of summer he was returning to London accompanied by his new bride.