The River and the Book Read Free

at the writing. There were no gaps between the letters and they ran down the page, line after line, in a heavy block. Every now and then there was a red letter among the black, like a flower in a field of dark earth.
    “What does it say?” I asked.
    “It is a poem. A very old poem. But it is always new.” My mother turned a page, and revealed a picture. I snuggled up close to her, so I could look at it. It was a drawing of a woman seated at a table next to a little girl. They were both reading a book. The woman looked like my mother, and the girl looked like me. The more I stared at the drawing, the more like us it was: there was even a doll lying on the table.
    There was writing underneath, and I asked my mother what it said.
    “It says:
Kulafir begins to teach Simbala the secrets of the Book
,” she said.
    I don’t remember being surprised or afraid to see a picture of myself in a book that was older than I could imagine. I think I was pleased. But for many years after my mother died I searched for that drawing. Although I leafed through every single page over and over, I never found it again.

5
    Once I lived in a place where I knew the name for everything. Now I live in a city that is full of new things. If I went back to my village tomorrow – if my village is still there as I remember it – and tried to tell my family about what I have seen, they would wrinkle their brows, they would be perplexed. They would try to understand, because they are courteous, but what I told them would be beyond their comprehension. They would think, like I did when I was a child listening to the traders, that I was telling them marvellous fables.
    I am not sure that I understand the city very well. I am still an outsider; I am still learning the rules and the words. The knowledge I spent so many hard years learning has no place here. In any case, not many people are interested. My knowledge comes from the old life, the backward and ignorant world of peasants. To understand takes too much time, and who has time? Nobody has any time.
    Sometimes it seems to me that those who are interested, the foreigners who do have time, are the worst of all. They think that the things I know are exotic and strange, and my knowledge excites them. They treat me like some kind of priestess. The more I try to explain, the more their imaginations fatten and distort. They wear our clothes and decorate their houses with our gods, and they learn enough of our language to order food from a hawker and to observe the cruder courtesies, and they burn incense as if they lived in temples. They think knowledge is something you can buy, and I often wonder why they come to me instead of consulting the sages of their own lands. If I didn’t know better, I would think that they do not have sages of their own.
    Sometimes it frightens me to look into their eyes. It is as if a hard barrier divides their soul from themselves. Their soul cries like a lost child deep inside them, but all they hear is a faint echo of its sobbing. They can’t break down the barrier and take its hand and comfort it, because they don’t even know that the barrier is there. They only know that they are unhappy, and they believe that happiness is something that can be found, and that when they find it, it will solve everything.
    On the other hand, as Mely likes to remind me when I complain too much, these people are the reason why I am not so poor that I have to live in a shack made of boxes. They pay me generously. I try not to be ungrateful, and I try to remember my grandmother’s admonition that one should not mock the desires or questions of others, no matter how trivial or stupid they might seem. I deal with them as honestly as I can, but I know I cannot give them what they want. A gift must be received as well as given, a poem must be listened to with the ears of the soul, and their souls are crying so hard they can hear nothing. They make me feel like a fraud, and I begin to doubt