Tears of the Desert Read Free Page A

his way.
    The story of why Grandma had run away from Grandpa was an extraordinary one, my father added. Once he had heard it, it explained a lot about Grandma’s fierce nature. But we should keep it for another day. Everyone else had retired to their huts to sleep, and it was time that we joined them.
    My father ruffled my sleepy head. “So, now you know the story of how you got your name,” he told me. “And who knows, maybe one day you will be a healer—just like the village medicine woman, Halima.”
    My father didn’t know it, but his words were a prophecy of the future.

CHAPTER TWO
    Grandma’s Trip to the Lost Valley
    Often my father was away early, spending the day out in the fields tending to his livestock. Over a breakfast of
acidah
I couldn’t get the story of Grandpa and Grandma out of my mind. What had he done to her, I wondered, to provoke her to run away?
    I peeked at the smoky hearth. Grandma was staring fiercely into a huge black cooking pot, stirring the
acidah
mash until it reached just the right consistency. For a moment I thought about asking her what had happened, but I dismissed the idea right away. I knew what Grandma was like, having been on the receiving end of countless tongue-lashings and worse. Deep inside her chest beat a heart of gold, but her manner was always stern and fearsome.
    I called Grandma
“abu”
—Zaghawa for “grandmother.” She was tall and strong, and her round face was framed with plaited hair. In Zaghawa tradition a woman would plait her hair tight to her scalp, with one row running parallel to the forehead, and the rest running backward to hang down her neck. Grandma had two deep diagonal scars on her temples, and the left side of her face was a mass of tiny cut marks. This was the scarring of the Coube clan, and each clan had its own distinctive markings.
    We Zaghawa believe that scarring makes women look beautiful. One day Grandma had told me how her mother and grandmother had spent hours doing her cutting, when she was just a little girl. The two cuts to the temples had been made with a razor blade, but the tiny, shallow cuts to the cheek were made with a sliver of sharp stone. I thought it was wonderful, and I was dying to have it done to me when I was old enough.
    Grandma loved to wear bright
topes
in all the shades of the rainbow, just as if she were still a young, unmarried woman. She was over forty years old, but she was still regal and beautiful, and fit enough for hard work. She wore gold earrings, bracelets, and necklaces, decorated with gems of a gleaming red. Some of the jewelry was handed down from her ancestors. Darfur is rich in gold, especially if you go searching deep in the mountains.
    I couldn’t risk asking Grandma to tell me the story of how she came to leave Grandpa. So I decided to corner my mum and force it out of her. My beautiful mother was considered a bit of a soft touch in our family. She had exactly the same scars as Grandma, and if someone saw them together they’d know from the scars alone that they were closely related. The style and shape of the scarring is specific to the family.
    My mother was shorter than Grandma, and a little plump, which was just how Zaghawa men liked their women. Prior to getting married the bride is supposed to eat
damirgha—
a porridge made of durum wheat, milk, and yogurt. The idea is to fatten them up for the wedding day. After giving birth a mother has to lie on her bed for forty days and eat
damirgha.
Once again, the idea is to keep her plump, and to enable her to provide rich milk for the baby.
    People used to say that Grandma could never get plump. She was too “hot” and angry, and this would burn up any food that she had eaten. Even Grandma used to complain about it. “You’ll never be thin like me,” she’d grumble to my mother. “Your life is too easy and comfortable.” As for me, I resolved to be just like my mother: plump enough to be beautiful, without being incapacitated in any