MEMORIES OF A CAIRO FUGITIVE

I remember when I was about four or five years old, a fox had made a burrow against the foundation of our home and whelped her kits inside. I know that I was very young, four or five, because I was still small enough to fit under the back stairs to the oleander grove, but I was clearly no fool at all because I had told nobody of my discovery. I visited the foxes every day for at least a few minutes and checked to see how the kits were growing. The vixen I found impossibly beautiful, so sleek and elegant, and, for some odd reason, rather trusting of a small human child around her babies, four there were, four tiny unformed molecules of fox. As time passed, the kits opened their eyes, found their legs, and found their courage. Soon they were beginning to poke their heads out of the safety of the burrow, and then they would trot excitedly around the perimeter of the oleander grove. It was a day during this period of the foxes’ development that I recalled as I walked the streets of Cairo for the first time. I was seated at the base of my favorite oleander tree with my lesson books, daydreaming, when one of the kits, unaccompanied and unafraid, approached me. He clearly recognized me, or at least saw me as no threat at all, or else he would have stayed far away. I was suddenly in love with this tiny fox kit. He was so small, so awkward, his fur blotchy in color, much as my own skin has always been blotchy, and he looked to me so alluringly soft that I just could not refrain from stroking his little piebald shoulders with my little piebald hand. It was a moment of the purest delight, which was quickly interrupted by my mother calling out to me, “Manik, don’t touch that animal!” I quickly pulled my hand away, the kit scurried back to the safety of the burrow, and my mother came running to me and pulled me up in her arms. Yes, I was very young indeed, for I was still light enough for my mother to hold on her hip, and considered too young to have known any better when it came to touching animals. She didn’t scold me, but gave me a warning. “Don’t touch any animals, Manik. It isn’t safe, it isn’t clean, and you aren’t supposed to do that sort of thing.” I wagged my long-locked head obediently. My mother had assumed that I was ignorant, but I already knew this prohibition, and knew perfectly well that I was not supposed to be petting that fox kit for these precise reasons. In fact I had resisted touching the kits for so long, but when faced with this charming little kit with his soft little cloud of fur, I simply could not help myself. I then remember my mother, perhaps sensing some anxious remorse coming from me, kissing and nuzzling my fat little cheeks and running her long, slim fingers through my cotton-white hair until I laughed. Then, one of two things happened, I can’t recall which one, but either one would have had the same result: my mother turning her face away from me and bringing me back indoors. My father could have spotted my mother giving me some undeserved affection, or I could have looked gleefully up into my mother’s face with my left eye wide open and burning bright red. Either one of these things would have reminded my mother that, although for a moment she had found me irresistible, I was not to be touched. In my early childhood, this state of affairs between my mother and me was the norm. On one hand I was her infant son, her own innocent flesh and blood that loved her more than life itself, who was sweet natured, studious, prayerful, harmless, bashful, and fundamentally obedient. I was kept sparkling clean and fragrant, I never made unnecessary noise, and I was quite chubby in a very darling way. Inevitably my mother’s hands and lips were pressed against me, sometimes with great enthusiasm and passion, but it was never an uncomplicated love. I was born inauspiciously, early, with partially depigmented skin, wholly depigmented hair, and one eye the color of the Delong Star ruby. Although the pundit had declared me an incarnation of the Devi’s Consort, whatever it is that means, I was generally considered bad news, a curse on my father’s family. Of course my mother wanted to touch me, but it had to be furtive, and fraught with emotions. As I walked though Cairo today, I was touched by hundreds of people, furtively, fraught with emotions, mostly by children. They grabbed at my hands, stroking my fingers down the length. They pressed their palms into my flesh, as I suppose I look soft to the touch, which is because I am. I’m sure that if Hadleigh had not cut off my long queue, they would have been tugging on my hair as well. I was clearly harmless, I was irresistible, but I was obviously not meant to be touched, for as soon as these foreign hands made their squeeze of me, they jerked away as if from a flame. It started to aggravate me. I took off my black goggles and gave them all a view of a proper flame and they dispersed. The oddest fact of all, and in many ways the most cheering, was that in spite of having been caressed by every urchin in metropolitan Cairo, it was Hadleigh that was pick-pocketed while I was spared. I suppose there are a few advantages to being a forbidden pleasure.