Missing Out

All his life Majdy had known Samra, as a cousin of his sister’s best friend, as the daughter of so-and-so. There was no sudden meeting between them, no adolescent romance. He had detached memories of her: a black-and-white photograph of a child squinting her eyes in the sun, standing with his sister and others in front of the giraffes’ cage at the zoo. A teenager in a blue dress with her hair in a single braid, holding a tray of Pepsi bottles at a friend’s engagement party. And the horrific story that had fascinated him in his childhood – Samra getting bitten by a stray dog and having to have thirty rabies injections in her stomach.

In 1985, he had seen her through grapevines, behind a carport over which the leaves climbed and weaved a criss-cross maze. He was pressing the doorbell of a house near the university, on one of the smaller side roads which housed the university’s staff. On the main road, the students were demonstrating against the proposed execution of an opposition-party leader. While they were marching for justice, Majdy was searching for Professor Singh, lecturer in topology, to beg for a reference letter. It was for one of those numerous grants to do postgraduate research that he was always chasing. From where he was, he could hear the shouting. It came to him in waves, rising and falling, rhythmic and melodious. He could not make out the exact words.

They never let the students get very far; they never let them reach the marketplace where they would swell in numbers and cause a riot. Where other grievances and older pains would join the cry against the injustice of that one death. And deprivation might shake off its hypnotic slumber and lash out in the monotonous heat of the day. Down university Road until the first roundabout and then the tear gas would blind them, send them running back, tumbling through the dust and the fallen banners on the ground.

She was crying when she and her friend came running and stood underneath the carport of the house adjacent to the professor’s. Crying from the gas and laughing. ‘I tore my sandal, it’s ruined,’ he heard her say. She held it in her hand, the tears running in parentheses down her dust-coated face. Her tobe had fallen down, collapsed around her waist and knees, and her hair had escaped the one braid it was tied into and stuck out from her head in triangular spikes. At the nape of her neck, tight little ringlets glistened with sweat, dark and sleek. Laden with moisture, they lay undisturbed and appeared detached from everything else, the tear gas and the dust, her torn sandal, her fallen tobe. There was a zeer in front of the house and he watched her lift the wooden cover, fill the tin mug with water and begin to wash her face. She smoothed her hair with water, searched through it for hairpins which she prised open with her teeth and locked the wayward strands.