Free Tears of the Desert by Halima Bashir

through the forest, and eaten them all up. . . . Maybe in a way you’re right: Anything that kills and eats little children
has to be all right.
”
    With Grandma’s fierce comments about sharp claws and little children being eaten, Mo was close to tears. His bottom lip was quivering, which was always the first sign. As for Omer, he was loving it. I took hold of Mo’s hand, and tried to move the subject along a little.
    “So what did he do with the
hjar
?” I asked.
    “He skinned it, of course,” Grandma replied. “The
hjar
has a beautiful, bright yellow coat with brown spots. He rode back to the village with the skin slung over the donkey’s back. All the children came running and crying out in excitement: ‘Look! Look! The hunter has killed an
hjar
! The hunter has killed an
hjar
!’ He made his way to the marketplace and sold the skin for a lot of money. They used to make fine shoes out of the skin of the
hjar,
you know.”
    I wondered why it was that they didn’t
still
make
hjar-
skin shoes? Was it because most of the
hjars
had been killed? We knew there were a few leopards left, because occasionally we’d hear their calls. But they were deep in the forests of the Jebel Marra, and as far away from people as they could possible get.
    The next time the three of us were out as a group, Omer made a special point of tracking down the grandchildren of that old man, the village leopard-killer. He challenged them to a fight.
    “Ha!” Omer exclaimed, once he’d beaten them. “Ha! Your grandfather may have killed an
hjar,
but you can’t beat me! I’m going to be the greatest leopard killer there ever was!”
    While Grandma’s stories were always about the family, the clan or the tribe, my father would try to inform us about the wider world—about the history of Sudan, about foreign cultures and distant countries. Omer had no time for such things and Mohammed was indifferent, but for some reason I had a thirst for such knowledge. As for Grandma, she thought it positively dangerous to turn our minds away from the timeless certainties of the village. Their battle for control of our minds was at its fiercest when concerning the radio set.
    One day my father came home with a tiny, battered radio that he’d bought in the nearest big town. It had a shaky antenna that had been half-repaired with sticky tape. Each evening he would try to tune it in to the news, and he was a particular fan of the BBC World Service. He used to tell me that he didn’t believe a word of the Sudanese news until it was confirmed by the BBC. This was one of the earliest inklings I had that there were dark powers at work in our country, and that little they said could be trusted.
    We were one of the few houses in our village to have a radio. Oddly enough, bearing in mind that it was “newfangled technology from the outside world,” Grandma became its greatest fan. This was largely because it was such a status symbol. Every morning she would fetch it and place it outside her hut. Grandma didn’t care what she listened to, as long as it
wasn’t
the news. She would twiddle the dial until she ended up on some foreign music program, and then she’d leave it on that all day, at full volume. She couldn’t understand a word, of course. She just seemed to love the noise.
    When my father came home in the evening he’d retrieve the radio, place it back in the “living room” and start trying to retune it to the BBC. I knew he found this hugely frustrating, but he never complained. He just came up with a way to deal with it. On his next trip to town he purchased a much bigger radio set. This one was bright purple and shiny new. When he presented it to Grandma she was overjoyed. As status symbols went this really was it.
    My father quietly repossessed his little battered radio. He replaced it in the living room, where it remained permanently tuned to the BBC. What he had neglected to tell Grandma was that the new radio had a very limited range and