What the day owes the nigth

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MY FATHER was happy.

It had never occurred to me that he was capable of such an emotion.

Sometimes, the sight of his serene face disturbed me.

Hunkered on a pile of loose stones, knees clasped to his chin, he watched the breeze caress the slender stalks of wheat, breathe over them, scurry feverishly through them. The wheat fields billowed over the plains like the manes of thousands of horses galloping. It was like watching the sea as it rises and falls. And my father was smiling. I could not remember ever seeing him smile; it was not in his nature to show happiness – if he could be said to have ever felt such a thing. Moulded by adversity, his eyes usually bore a permanent look of desperation. His life had been an endless series of disappointments; he mistrusted the future, realising it to be traitorous and unknowable.

I had never known him to have friends.

We lived in isolation like ghosts on our patch of land, in the sidereal silence of those who have little to say to one another: my mother in the shadow of our shack, bent over her cooking pot, stirring a broth of root vegetables of questionable flavour; Zahra, my sister, three years my junior, crouched forgotten in some dark corner, so self-effacing that at times we did not even notice her; and me, a sickly, solitary boy, who had barely blossomed before I wilted, carrying my ten years like a burden.

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