Shaping the Grayness

The first time she saw them they were shadows on her wall. Flat and gray they moved soundlessly, one shape springing from the other. Then she went on a class trip to the zoo and saw the sullen animals in their cages. The monkeys waited greedily for her to throw food to them while the lion lay sprawled on the cemented floor, a good deal of his mane missing. In a securely netted cage the snake lay with its face turned away from its visitors. She decided she liked them better on the wall, shadow animals at least looked more alive.

Laila watched her father’s thick brown fingers clasp and unclasp themselves in front of the flashlight. On the wall the shapes would often grow huge and threatening but she saw how lovingly the hands cast them. The fingers tickled and teased each other wrapping around each other tightly and then letting go, coaxing just the right kind of shape onto the wall. In the spotlight they took on a kind of dancers flexibility interacting with one another to put up a mime-like performance.

Her father wasn’t half as articulate with his tongue as he was with his hands. Even the shadow animals seldom spoke, they just moved. A camel would stretch it mouth open wide as if to bellow but if there was ever a sound Laila didn’t hear it. She liked to imagine that the other camels in the desert would hear the shadow, and would reply. In the animals movements, some shifting furtively and restlessly while others languidly chewing cud in their nonexistent mouths, there was a great deal of comfort for her.

Once Laila took the flashlight outside the house to play, but was bewildered to find that in the daylight it gave off only a feeble glow. She wondered if this was because it had grown timid in front of the Sun. At night its light was so much brighter with her shadow animals gliding across the cemented floor and growing tangled in the bushes. Yet when she pointed it at the sky it stubbornly refused to extend itself further. It was content to leave the sky unpenetrated. She switched it off disappointed.

Her aunts had warned her not to roam around in the dark. Night is the time of darkness and evil they had said. Inside the house there were shadows but there was also darkness. Darkness was not a shadow, it was just darkness with no light. But when darkness met with light it changed into a shadow. That’s how Laila understood the hows of shadow casting. The way she saw it, everyone was full of darkness. Which explained why the dentist always held a little light when he looked inside her mouth, because it was dark inside. When it wanted to come out the darkness would seep from the soles of her feet but on meeting the light outside it became a shadow.

Laila remained curiously silent when her father died. At the funeral they wouldn’t let her see the body, they said she was too young. She wanted to see if he still had a shadow, did the darkness inside leave once the life had gone? She knew that if her father could talk in his death he would have let her see for herself, but her aunts pushed her away. In her rage she ran out of the house. She sorely missed her father who would have put an end to all these women who wept in closemouthed, descending notes. Sitting outside in the afternoon heat she switched the flashlight on and stared into the light for a long time. The light blurred into colored smudges in front of her eyes, and for a while she was happy that the flashes of orange and green were all that she could see.