IF GOD WILLS

The muezzin is making his warbling plea, calling the faithful to prayer, as Saleem hikes up his white djellaba and flips it over his head.  The strange, eastern dissonance of this song seems to be coming from some extinct lost creature, howling at the moon in the morning sun. I imagine fangs and talons and a forked tail twitching in its primordial night. The sound is sacrilegiously seductive to my western ear. Fear of falling, fear of flying, fear of being claustrophobically clothed in armour, fear of raw nakedness, is all the same to me in that instant.

Standing there in freeze frame, with his arms raised in the slow motion of shrugging off his robe, Saleem’s body, in his white underpants, still wearing his socks and shoes, looks vulnerable and awkward. It looks like the body of a reluctant diver preparing to plunge unwillingly into the depths of an uncharted abyss. I catch my breath in wonder at his unaffected, artless beauty.

I look out the window at the little mosque that rises like a shining ornate sculpture from the burnt sienna earth across the narrow valley. It’s ten in the morning and a bright sunlit day in late winter and a brisk breeze is chilling the air. It must be snowing on the berg again.

Saleem sits on the bare mattress that’s placed on the scratched and faded linoleum floor, with the crumpled bright blue and crimson duvet surrounding him like gentle, undulating waves and pulls off his dusty shoes and deftly, with swift expertise, rips off his socks. He tries to hide the hole that had given me a glimpse of the sensuous curve and the shiny pink nail of his big toe. I am intoxicated by the mundane domesticity of this scene.

I look down on his straight, jet purple hair ruffled from removing his kufi; the frowning expanse of his brow; the surprised abrupt dashes of his eyebrows; the tender, transparent skin of his eyelids; his long dark curling eyelashes; the curved dramatic protrusion of his Arabian nose; the erotic plumpness of his lips; the pink tip of his tongue that darts out and wets the sensitive softness of those lips that look like ripened fruit about to burst. I am tempted to bite into them and feel their ripe juices dribble down my chin and wet my beard with their sticky sweetness. A thin web of hair has crept down the nape of his tanned neck, invading its naked defencelessness.

I can smell the pungent aroma of onions and masala and hear the hiss of frying coming from the kitchen that’s separated from this room only by a thin cotton cloth embroidered with ornate minarets and palm trees.

I wonder what his mother is thinking as she stands throwing spices in the pan. With the burqa that covers her face and her long robe she floats above the hissing stove like a black ghost while her boy is only a few feet away with this adult white infidel.

Saleem pulls off his briefs and the sight of his shock of black, black hair and his curved, hooded, blossoming manhood uncurling like a viper disturbed from its sleep, falling from the warmth of its pouch, suddenly stuns me and the brightness and stark sterility of the morning, the acrid smells of cooking, accentuate the solemn, divine debauchery of this moment.

I lie down fully clothed next to Saleem and allow him to undress me; slowly, deliberately, patiently untying my shoe laces; pulling off my shoes and my pristine white cotton socks and anointing each exposed toe one by one with a blessing from his wet lips.

His skin is the colour of cinnamon bark and smells of squashed oranges and incense and tastes like sweet molasses dripping from my tongue.

I am lost in him and his simple, innocent, trusting surrender to the touches of my fingertips and tongue and teeth and lips. He has a callous on the tender underside of his foot and its brutal harshness is somehow shockingly, unexpectedly, accentuating his perfection, and I linger there awhile.

Touching him is like ripping the wings off butterflies or crushing a rose. It’s as though he is flowering before me; as though petals are falling from his eyelashes and the tender shoots of vines are creeping from his lips, and his soil is pulsating with the hot, exquisitely painful birth of his secret desires.

Afterwards we sit at the small kitchen table eating vegetable samosas and drinking milky sweet tea while Saleem’s mother bustles about clothed in her mysterious anonymity.

The scrawny yellow cur that had bared his teeth when I arrived doesn’t snarl now as I feed him my pungent, oil soaked samosas under the table, while mother and son laugh at a private joke I did not, and was not, meant to understand.

I am an outsider who, for some inexplicable reason, has been allowed a glimpse of one forbidden moment in a world I could never hope to comprehend. When I leave, Saleem whispers, “Maktoub (it was written by fate), we will meet again, inchallah (if God wills).”

(Drawing: Saleem by Carlton)
© Carlton Carr 2013
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