Tears of the Desert by Halima Bashir Read Free Book Online

We’d have one row of clay horses with rag doll warriors facing another, and on the order to attack the ranks would advance. “
Haribah! Haribah!
”—War! War!—we’d shout, although little Mo never sounded quite as enthusiastic as we girls did. Each side’s horseman would pick an opposing horseman to fight. Of course, the clay horses would eventually break, and the last one left standing would be declared the winner.
    Often, it would take us several days to make replacement horses. Water was in limited supply, and Grandma used to grumble that it was for drinking, not for making playthings. I’d have to wait until no one was around and then scoop up a bowl-full, hoping that Grandma wasn’t watching. If that failed, we’d head down to the village well to see if we could scrape up enough mud from around there. But there were usually several other children with the same idea, so the competition was fierce.
    My favorite game of all was the “moon-bone” game. I used to keep one of Grandma’s goat’s thighbones hidden in the rafters of the hut. On an evening when the moon was full I’d run out into the yard and cry out: “
Keyoh adum jaghi gogo keyh!
”—let’s play the moon-bone game! It was as if all the neighborhood kids had been waiting to hear those words. At the center of our hamlet was an open area similar to an English village green. Crowds of children would rush down there, their parents bringing tea and milk and hot snacks.
    It was so nice to be out under the bright moon, enjoying the cool of the night without needing oil lamps to light our way. The children would line up in a row, with their backs toward me, and I’d throw the goat’s thighbone as far as I could. Then I’d yell out “Start!” Everyone would go racing off searching for the bone. It would be lying in the grass somewhere, glistening blue-white in the silvery moonlight. Whoever found it would cry out: “I’ve found the treasure! I’ve found the treasure!” and then race back to the starting point.
    Of course, all the other children would be trying to snatch the bone out of their hands, so this is when the game became really fun. Sometimes there’d be a huge pileup, as one child dove onto whoever had found it, and everyone else jumped on top of them. Parents would be watching, laughing, and yelling out excitedly. I could hear my father calling out his support for me, and that always spurred me on to win.
    What I loved most about the moon-bone game was its total unpredictability. The main advantages you might have over the others were speed, and skill at fighting. And for some reason—most likely Grandma’s influence—I seemed to excel at both. Once the others realized what a tough, merciless fighter I was, they seemed to hold back from tackling me. Whenever I won my mother would cook me some
fangasso—
sweet doughnuts, deep-fried in oil. I’d eat them finger-scalding hot and dipped in milk.
    But of course life could never be one long episode of fun and games. Shortly after our fight with the four Fur boys I landed myself in some real trouble. As ours was a Muslim village there was supposed to be no alcohol, but there were always people who broke the rules. A handful of women specialized in making sorghum beer
—goro.
They couldn’t do so openly, but they had private drinking dens in their homes. We could always tell which men were their best customers, because drinking
goro
made them have big, bulbous stomachs.
    The location of the beer dens was communicated by word of mouth. Some of the beer women had the reputation for making good, strong brews, but others would water it down. The drinkers would gather tot gether, sitting on a rug on the floor or on little stools. The beer women would serve big trays of smoked lamb, and
goro
by the half-gourd full. Often the men would drink too much and it would end in a big fight. The beer women made certain that they only had cheap furnishings, as everything would get smashed