Fungus seems to be growing on my right foot. The sole is white from the sequential layers of flaking. I scratch deeply. I eat into the gaps between my toes. I itch. I should bleed. So raw. So big. The itch. My nails. Embedded. Into fructified cream. The mass of fungus and digested epidermis. My foot is emaciating. Before my eyes. I fear. The friendship between right and left. One careless touch. The embracing bridge. The crossover complete. The scratching of the left. Begins. And I think to myself “why are there no words for the gaps or the non-pointy other side of the pointy bits?” Why no words for the other side of the elbow or the other side of the knee? Why no word for the gaps between your toes or the gaps between your fingers or even your teeth? Why? Why are they nameless? Devoid of glamour for their lack of identity? Is it that you hide them? When the flesh of the lower and upper arms. That soft, semi-wobbling upholstery wrapped around your humorous and the radius and ulna. When they kiss or momentarily smother each other. Is there then, just a gap? That would permanently exist. If you never straightened your arm. What if you straightened your toes? Could you achieve undersides without pointy opponents? Or if you could find a hole with a purpose, as you parted the fleshy caress. Could this be the arm crack? Like the bum crack. The only other gap with a label.

So, gaps without purpose have no name. Invisible. Over-shadowed by their more prominent other. Am I a gap? And Ruqsana a point? I have a name. Where is my hole with a purpose? Or am I smothered between human upholstery?

I continue to scratch. The under surface of my toes. They could bleed. Soon. The torn semi-attached flesh near the roots of the toes. They weep. Clear water. Not puss. But, I’m not going to make my tea with it. The cinnamon and cardamom masala may mask the unpleasant aroma, and may even mask the taste. But, think about the residue. As you boiled the tea in a pan.

And a fly came and sat on my shoulder to lick the sweat off my skin. And suddenly, I saw every hair follicle and a forest of sprouting fine hairs through compound eyes focused on multiple visions of saline pools. I became a landscape strewn with tiny fragments of flaking skin and eight-legged mites crawling out of every hole and gorging themselves on discarded pieces of epidermis, and then crawling back into holes again. A cyclical nature of mite history just unfolded in front of me. I see a round cave. Translucent. Copulation tent of young dying males and pregnant females. As they made their final journey out of their mothers’ bodies as excrement or to populate the crowded terrain of my body. What do mite talk about? Could the mites at the base of my neck communicate with those near my feet? Perhaps comment on the local cuisine. Telepathically. Or even like elephants. Using sonar.

“Hmmm. Mine has the subtle aroma of brie. It’s rather good. “

“Mine’s quite bland. But, I can eat as much as I want!”

It was all clear to me. A mite universe of telepathic chat between individuals on different bodily planets. Comparing notes about the great flood that always takes place a few hours after the bright white blindness emerges out of the coolness of the dark. And the slippery consistency of the main course that for a while tastes and smells so strange.

“It’s poison, I said. I tried to hide down my hole. Harry couldn’t help herself. I told her not to touch the stuff. Silly bugger. Went belly up. All eight legs up in the air. Got stuck and then got washed away, she did. Couldn’t even eat her. Give her a good send off.”

Then I thought about my breasts. What about the mites that lived there? Did they know? Were they aware of the special status of their countries? Did they appreciate a visit from their cousins on my arms during those rare moments I stood naked in front of the mirror watching myself and casually folding my arms? How did they stop those foreign buggers from staying? From trying to blend with the local ladies. Great battles were fought, I was sure, between the arm clans and the boob clans. Or may be there’s no such thing as mite xenophobia? The only perfect Utopian society where men dies very early and women inherit the ‘earth’.

I looked up and saw Ruqsana swinging from the light bulb. She was smiling. Happy, I thought about my Utopian notions of women inheriting the ‘earth’. She then stretched down her right arm and beckoned me with her long index finger. I stood up. Unable to refuse. She gently caressed my left cheek and then moved her hand away. And then I was on the floor of my room recovering, half-dazed, from a thunderous slap across my face. I looked up. She was laughing. She was always like that. She gave you a little and then took away a lot more. She always remained fourteen, though in reality half an hour older than me. The same hair. The same dress. The same pair of shoes with the same pair of socks. Strangely, not reeking of mildew or rank with the laminations of foot sweat.

I looked down at my foot and focused on the ball that I was trying not to scratch. I looked up again. She was gone. She must have squeezed out through the ventilation holes. I’d seen her doing that once. Or somehow got under the carpet and slipped down the gaps between the floor boards. She could always have gone away with the wind that freely entered my room through the rattly old windows. And then there was the keyhole. She went out that way once when I wasn’t in my room and then slipped under the toilet door just as I was painfully dealing with a rather sensitive constipation problem. She laughed at me and ran off with the toilet paper. I took off my salwar and knickers and walked out, trying really hard with my left hand to stop my kameez from getting stuck inside my bum crack. Then, I went into the bathroom and had a shower. I was watched by a spider and a couple of silverfish. Intrigued by the jet of water coming out of the shower head. Though, may be they were really looking at the undigested chilli seeds and fragments of accidentally swallowed bay leaf that had fallen into the water and down the plug hole. I was also being watched, I noticed, by Ruqsana peering through the condensation of the bathroom window. The glass was patterned so not possible to see through. I was impressed by her spiderman skills. Looking into an upstairs window and pressing your face against the glass isn’t easy. I was also disturbed by it.

Luckily, nobody else had been home at that time. My mother and father had taken Faruq and Meenah out shopping for new clothes. They wouldn’t have accepted my Ruqsana explanation for my indiscretion. Faruq and Meenah don’t know her and mother and father pretend she never existed. It must be painful for Ruqsana to see her bed covered in Meenah’s smell and childish shapes and colours. Meenah always cried whenever I scooped her off the floor and away from her games into my arms, just as Ruqsana leapt off the wall with a plank of wood in her hand, ready to violently strike the little child. I came into the room once to find Ruqsana dropping strips of one of Meenah’s favourite dresses from the ceiling. She’d been happily playing with the orange plastic handled scissors while the little girl was eating downstairs. Poor Meenah. Ruqsana never felt such rage towards Faruq. I picked up every strip and every strand of loose purple fibre and put them in a brown paper bag. I scrunched the bag into a small ball and put it into another paper bag. I scrunched this into a small ball too and put this into a final paper bag. This one once contained fiery, but fragrant, green chillies. Having scrunched all of this into the smallest ball I could, I tightly surrounded it with string. I marvelled at my craftsmanship. I considered giving this to Meenah as a toy. I stood tall. Shoulders stretched back. I was a genius inventor. I was the president of a toy empire. People congratulated me on my originality of vision.

“Shaquilla, what fantastic ideas you have. People said you were a bit stupid. But I always told them, ‘you’ll see. Shaquilla’s really a quiet little genius!’”

I then looked down again at the pathetic string ball in my left hand, with its awkward knots and slightly deformed shape, and felt embarrassed. And small again. I saw Meenah and Faruq playing with it, and one day the string snapping and a purple flame emerging from inside. Could Ruqsana get the blame? No. Even, as small children, she always got me into trouble. I buried the ball in the garden, behind the blackberry bushes, where it could be safe from my mother’s potatoes. And then I saw Mr Hebitullah, the old Chinese lodger on the top floor, looking down at me from his bedside window with great attention. I couldn’t make out his features and he probably couldn’t mine, but I knew he was fascinated. Either that or he was staring vacantly through me. Sitting on the banks of the Yangtse, painting. Or in an old Shanghai bar, charming the ladies of the night.

Old Mr Hebitullah, or Dwen Li Hebitullah, as I once heard him referred to as, lived on the top floor of our house with this second son. I don’t know his name. I suppose you could call the top floor an attic apartment. The pair had been living there so long that I often imagined them like roosting bats with a preservation order, hanging upside down from the wooden beams at night. Wings folded or in a floppy relaxed state. I could never decide.

I seldom saw the pair, except from a distance. I would hide behind the clumsy textures of a plane tree or inside a drop of water that managed not to get evaporated from the centre of a white magnolia blossom, whenever I saw them approaching the house on my way back from a rare shopping trip. I was caught out once though. I hand just entered through the front door and was taking out the key to our ground and first floor part of the house from my bag, when I heard the key turning and the old man entering. His son wasn’t there. Probably just dropped off his father and then went off to work. I know that every surface of skin and every example of keratin on my body, except for my hands and a patch around my eyes, was covered. I know too that, according to Islamic Shariah, there was no prohibition against going in front of someone of his grand age. But I also know that old men have burning desires too, and sometimes the urgency of their need to quench, so much the deeper. I thought too that the fragmentary nature of his sight of me might have fuelled a lively imagination. One in which a soft naked body, complete with firm voluptuous breasts resided inside the shapeless layers of black Lady Hamilton drapery. I was embarrassed. I blushed, and then I saw his deeply wrinkled, oily, shrivelled, single-toothed face. He smiled and was just about to say something. I turned the key and fled. And for days, whenever I heard him pacing up and down his room at strange hours of the night, I would imagine him excited and confused. In turmoil. With the nubile vision in his head and between his legs. I had failed. Islam was supposed to protect women from the burden of attracting men. And then, one night, as I lay feeling ashamed, I thought to myself, “Isn’t it funny? With all the billions of Chinese in this world, my father manages to find a Muslim form Xi’an for his lodger.” He always went to Friday prayer at the Regents Park mosque without fail, but prayed at home the rest of the time. The stairs to this attic were usually too much for him.

And as I’m sitting at my desk, deliciously scratching the big toe of my right foot with the nails of my left hand, it dawns on me how rampantly verbose I’ve been and yet, haven’t talked about what I was supposed to be talking about. How it all began. If you’ve bothered to read any of my earlier ramblings, you’ll know some of this already. You’ll also know why the numbers. Well, if you’ve cracked it that is. If not, you’re still counting and cube-rooting. A modern day Champollion with a serious mission to decipher.

So, how did it all begin? Well, some of what I say are based on what I’ve seen or smelled or tasted or even felt with the surface of my fingertips or any other surface of skin. Other bits will be based on stories that I’ve grown up with. Those myths and legends that colour the texture of my thoughts. So, don’t blame me for any inaccuracies. I’m writing in my get-out clause right now.

The English language is funny. So beautiful in its richness and maturity and yet absurd in some of its logic. But, not as absurd as French. I had to learn it at school for years, and for years I wondered why the French insisted on multiplying twenty by four, adding ten and then adding nine, just to say the number ninety nine. Why? But, coming back to English. What is all this second cousin twice removed stuff? While the Bengalis are busy laying tenuous claim to even the most distant relative as if they’ve all suckled from the same mother’s breasts, the English seem to be intent on removing people. Not just once, but sometimes, two or three times. How many times do you have to remove someone before they disappear altogether? The Bengali system is easier. Everyone on the same generational level as you are either your brothers and sisters or your cousins. Those on the level below are sons, daughters, nieces or nephews, while those on the level above are mother, father, uncle or aunt, with all the grandparents on the level above that. No twice removing stunts required. So, when I, sticking to Bengali logic, mention a cousin this or an auntie that, they may be one of your twice or thrice removed variety. Concentrate. Or be confused.



---Jib, One evening in August 2001. In the kitchen of my Huangdao apartment in China. Complete darkness, except for a small torch. Narrator: Shaquilla. ‘Shaquilla’s Papers’