In my twenties I chose to be an academic. I knew I had no head for business, finding it more natural to bargain up than down (“Oh that’s too cheap, surely I need to pay you more?”). As a child, I loved libraries, the ordered way the books sat on the polished wooden shelves. The atmosphere was deceptively demure. Just about any book I opened transported me to another world, often wild and unknown.
So I had opted for the sanctuary of studying. There was so much going on in my imagination, and no limits on the ideas that could feed it, that I congratulated myself on making the right decision.
But I was intrigued by people who threw themselves wholeheartedly into the real world. Take Kheila, for instance, my dear childhood friend. When the exit laws relaxed (a temporary measure as it turned out), she took herself off travelling. She was not satisfied with reading a book about the desert, she had to see the never-ending baking sand for herself.
When the exit laws got tough again, Kheila returned. Perhaps she was worried about exile and never seeing her family again. Anyway, before long, she was caught up in all sorts of shenanigans. I had lived in our city of birth all my life but it took Kheila coming back to realise what it contained.
Kheila teased me for my intellectual existence while I marvelled at her recklessness.
I once asked Kheila: “How did you get involved in the Resistance?”
It turned out she had started as a nurse, before she went travelling. When she got back, in her early thirties, she quickly found her old contacts, and found the atmosphere more charged, more serious. It was no longer a talking shop but a place of action.
Kheila took her long draw on her chillum and blew out the perfumed smoke. It was thanks to people like Kheila that women could do that in public now.
“Like everything momentous, it started small,” she continued. “Someone asked me to deliver a note. Secretly of course. I did it for the excitement.”
I thought Kheila brave.
“I didn’t realise what I was doing,” she said. “So it’s not bravery, really.”
Kheila’s words never left me. They made sense: that an act of insignificance can jump-start your new life.
Because if we really knew what lay ahead, surely we would stay at the crossroads forever, clinging on to that wooden post for dear life?
Tags: fiction
