Throwing Sparks Read Online Free PDF Page A

me knowingly. I only understood the insinuation later, when she began to tell me that all my actions were evil and to hold me responsible for every misfortune and mishap that befell anyone in the neighbourhood.
    A very long time has passed since Aunt Khayriyyah’s insinu­ating question and Hamdan’s desperate bid to find a way into the Palace. Like every other boy from the neighbourhood, Hamdan spent much of his leisure time looking for a breach in the road whose course had been diverted to prevent access to the main gates.
    Dr Khalid Bannan, who was in the Master’s inner circle, loved to hold forth and pontificate on the rags-to-riches dream. ‘Dreams are the drug we inject to induce an instant of oblivion in which all of our wishes, both fair and foul, can be fulfilled,’ he would say. ‘But dreams are like sleep, and the dreamer is in a trance when the body slows down.’
    Referencing his wealth of scientific knowledge as a professor of psychology, he dispensed advice liberally to whoever was present at Palace events, regardless of whether or not his advice was pertinent to his listener.
    On the brink of old age, I look back on the ‘dream-drug’ that made us all so high – magic stuff so pure that most of the neighbourhood boys became instantly hooked. Life passed us by while we remained in this state of protracted stupor.
    Once on the inside, I remembered the Firepit – the old neighbourhood – and dreamed of going back. I yearned for it with the same longing that once propelled me so obsessively to enter Paradise.
    That realisation came as a crushing blow. I have no doubt that every single one of us who entered the Palace has had such moments of nail-biting regret, unequalled by any others.
    Back in the days when the neighbourhood’s inhabitants swirled around the Palace full of hopes and dreams, boys stood and pointed at its towering walls and heads were filled with lush dreams of fertile ground behind the massive gates. Few of us could imagine that we would be inside the Palace in our old age pointing to our dilapidated neighbourhood and longing with every fibre of our being to return to those Elysian Fields of our youth. We sit and rake through our memories in the hope of collecting some scraps from a long-buried past. Decades have passed since the pigeons took flight from the rooftops of our ramshackle houses, fluttering in unruly formations towards the Palace and its gardens. Even the birds were enticed by the bright vision bordering the shore – a pillow offering rest to the weary bones of dreamers.
    Every day, Hamdan would run through the stately avenue that bisected the city and our universe: Paradise here, the Firepit there.
    It was Hamdan who first coined the name the ‘Firepit’.
    Every day after the sunset prayer – adhan al-maghrib – he set off with his tattered school satchel to attend a literacy class at night school. He wanted to obtain his primary school certificate in order to improve on his rank of private in the army; after ten compliant years in the service, he had not gained a single stripe. He was spurred to do this after his father-in-law referred to him as ‘an ass’ and said that ‘iron wouldn’t turn to gold even in a million years’. These words were uttered when the father came to retrieve his daughter, Hamdan’s wife, and take her away.
    Hamdan had dropped out of school early and, as a young adult, no one would give him a job besides the army. So while the other boys of the neighbourhood started better jobs and progressed within their chosen careers, Hamdan laboured away as a private in the army for ten years.
    He thought literacy classes would help him to advance and so he persevered with night school in order to gain the respect of his father-in-law and his superior officers. As soon as he completed the sunset prayer at the local mosque, before the imam had even intoned the closing of prayer and with his tattered school satchel and prayer mat vying for space,