Season of Migration to the North Read Online Free PDF

turning over the pages of the passport. Neither was I
particularly interested in looking at the other papers. My face must have been
charged with expectancy when I looked at him.
    Mustafa went on blowing out smoke from his cigarette for a
while. Then he said:   

 ‘ It’s a long story, but I won’t tell you everything .
Some details won’t be of great interest to you, while others… As you see, I was
born in Khartoum and grew up without a father, he having died several months
before I was born. He did none the less leave us something with which to meet
our needs — he used to trade in camels. I had no brothers or sisters, so life
was not difficult for my mother and me. When I think back, I see her clearly
with her thin lips resolutely closed, with something on her face like a mask, I
don’t know — a thick mask, as though her face were the surface of the sea. Do
you understand? It possessed not a single colour but a multitude, appearing and
disappearing and intermingling. We had no relatives. She and I acted as
relatives to each other. It was as if she were some stranger on the road with whom
circumstances had chanced to bring me. Perhaps it was I who was an odd
creature, or maybe it was my mother who was odd — I don’t know. We used not to
talk much. I used to have — you may be surprised — a warm feeling of being
free, that there was not a human being, by father or mother, to tie me down as
a tent peg to a particular spot, a particular domain. I would read and sleep,
go out and come in, play outside the house, loaf around the streets, and there
would be no one to order me about. Yet I had felt from childhood that I — that
I was different — I mean that I was not like other children of my age: I wasn’t
affected by anything, I didn’t cry when hit, wasn’t glad if the teacher praised
me in class, didn’t suffer from the things the rest did. I was like something
rounded, made of rubber: you throw it in the water and it doesn’t get wet, you
throw it on the ground and it bounces back. That was the time when we first had
schools. I remember now that people were not keen about them and so the
government would send its officials to scour the villages and tribal
communities, while the people would hide their sons — they thought of schools
as being a great evil that had come to them with the armies of occupation. I
was playing with some boys outside our house when along came a man dressed in uniform
riding a horse. He came to a stop above us. The other boys ran away and I
stayed on, looking at the horse and the man on it. He asked me my name and I
told him. “How old are you?” he said. "I don’t know" I said. "Do
you want to study at a school?” "What’s school?" I said to him. “A
nice stone building in the middle of a large garden on the banks of the Nile.
The bell rings and you go into class with the other pupils — you learn reading
and writing and arithmetic.” “Will I wear a turban like that?” I said to the
man, indicating the dome-like object on his head. The man laughed. “This isn’t
a turban,” he said. “It’s a hat.” He dismounted and placed it on my head and
the whole of my face disappeared inside it. “When you grow up,” the man said,
“and leave school and become an official in the government, you’ll wear a hat
like this.” “I’ll go to school,” I said to the man. He seated me behind him on
the horse and took me to just such a place as he had described, made of stone,
on the banks of the Nile, surrounded by trees and flowers. We went in to see a
bearded man wearing a jibba , who stood up, patted me on the head and
said: "But where’s your father?” When I told him my father was dead, he
said to me: “Who’s your guardian?” “I want to go to school,” I said to him. The
man looked at me kindly; then entered my name in a register. They asked me how
old I was and I said I didn’t know; and suddenly the bell rang and I fled from
them and entered one of