Short Story / The story teller

Rain falls steadily from the Manchester sky, grey and dreary drops drip from massed umbrellas. My eyes carelessly follow the shoes of splashing shoppers who jink around the puddles in the streets. The windscreen wipers swish passed my arc of vision at 5 second intervals, clearing the gathering drops. Each drop contains a minute red reflection of the stalled tail lights of the evening traffic. If I close my eyes I am in Pakistan, I am eight and sat on sun hot rocks, on the low ridge above my village, the fields are burnt brown. The country is golden from the heat, the sun a red disc receding.
Boys tumble and whoop in the dust around me. Noise and dirt swirl in the air. I love this time of day, a cool breeze starting up the fragrant evening air. I can see the whole village from my vantage point. I can see my mother at the front door of our house and my father walking up the street. Sandy earth runs through my fingers, still hot from the day. In an instant I am up, jumping and shouting, I leap onto one of the dust slides and tumble down the ridge into the pasture. I am racing for home.
My hair is full of dust, my clothes grass stained and dusty my father opens his mouth as if to say something but it is lost in a hug, I am enfolded by my mother. Swept up in her love I am lost in happiness. She has been diagnosed with tuberculosis and will be dead within months, she doesn’t have the time to be angry. In that place there wasn’t the time for medicine or the possibility of hope. To be ill was to accept and to die.
Her death is not the story I can tell, but it was the catalyst for the changes that shaped my life. Today I feel her presence. I often feel it as a loss, when I meet new people I experience a reluctance to commit.

My mother died late on a dark evening, I remember being woken at midnight, by I remember the gathering of people at our house. I recall her being lifted on a stretcher and carried from the bedroom. I saw my father leaning on the corner of the bed with his head in his hands. An Auntie told me they were taking my mother to hospital, my father’s expression told me more than she would.

I never saw my mother again and life changed abruptly for me. Two years passed in a dark dream of loss. my father re-married. My stepmother emerged as if from a fairy tale with cold hands and a foreign touch. without meaning to I drifted away my father into my own world.��£££ I couldn’t concentrate at school or even be bothered to go very often. The teacher, an old man, was about as interested as I was. He spent his time smoking marijuana and staring from the window. After his death the school failed to find a replacement for two years.
To get a meaningful education in those days was difficult, large sections of the rural population were illiterate. My father was not the kind of man to leave me to my own ruination though. At his request I found myself on a bus heading to a new home at my step mother’s parent’s house. In hindsight I can see that he acted from the best intentions but isolated and marooned two hours away from friends, family. I felt as isolated as if I had been exiled to the moon.

My prison was a large two story house with about 10 rooms. The extended family shared the cost of building it and it was much larger than my own home. It was a good house built from brick with a flat roof where we could sleep during the hot summer months. Buffalo and goats mixed with chickens and children in the yard. I knew absolutely no one there. On arrival I was shown up to a small room shared between a number of boys. I opened my bag up on the bed and stared down at the contents. There didn’t seem to be anything in it I would need. This would be my home for 5 years. When I looked up the room seemed full of strangers. I just wanted to sit down and cry.

The house was so full that it seemed odd that I was starved of company. Everyone seemed to be yelling for attention. My first friends were the animals I would spend hours after school playing with the dogs. At school I found solace in reading, I lost myself for hours in a book, I found a rental shop in the town where I could borrow books for very little money. In the evening I would sit out in the shadow of the porch with my books while the older men smoked a water pipe and told stories.

This was where I first met Baba. He was an old, old man with a profoundly hunched back and crooked tooth smile. He looked more like an old weather beaten tree with his gnarled skin, stooped trunk and grizzled hair. Perhaps I felt sorry for him or maybe he felt sorry for me but we struck up an odd friendship on that summer evening as we were both at the outside of the circle. He lived in a ‘kutte’ or makeshift shelter at the end of the lane. He had little more than the blanket he stood up in and he spoke little. He haunted the evening gatherings like a ghost. Beneath everyone’s attention he merely listened to the stories on the floor while I fetched and carried food from the house or water or tobacc
I have to admit that I was naïve at the time, I had little idea of the workings of the world and I was fascinated by the old mans grotesquely hunched back. In those times it was quite usual for younger children to be asked to walk on the backs of fathers and mothers, uncles and aunts, like the skilled hands of a chiropractor their little feet would cure sciatica and back pain expertly. In my mind I equated the hunch on baba’s back with the lack of care he had received from his family. To have such a hunch he must have been alone for a long time.

Baba’s loneliness echoed my own. His company brought me out of myself. I found it easier to talk to my new family as time passed and I would often take him little things up to his kutte and sit talking to him for what seemed like hours. In this way I gradually accepted my new situation. The old man gave me a great deal without knowing it and I will always be grateful. I never got the chance to tell him though.

After school one day I came back through the town, it was hot and the streets were crowded. I had picked up more books from the rental store and was eager to get home to lose myself in the stories. I almost fell over Baba who was begging in the main through fare. His eyes met mine and he got up without saying anything walked away from me. I was as embarrassed as he was and walked the other way. That was the last time that I saw him and to this day I feel haunted by the look on his face. I can only imagine that he had a sense of pride and felt that I would tell people about what he was doing. He never joined the evening group after that and when I went over to his shelter I found it empty of everything except dust.

Back in the rain thirty years later my reverie is interrupted by the traffic starting to move in front of me. The water droplets reflect a green light and moving traffic. I set off towards my destination, every moment along the road I pass people hurrying through the evening gloom. Hardly noticing any of them, even though each person we meet will change us in some small way. I suppose it is a gift to be able to appreciate them while you can.