The Milk of Birds Read Online Free

new. People in America are very busy. They do not have time for greetings.
    What do you mean, Americans do not have time? They have mobiles, they have cars, but they do not have time? They may have more meat, more cloth, more medicine, but one thing that God gives in equal measure is time.
    You are as stubborn as a donkey, Adeeba says.
    What do you know of donkeys, City Girl? I tell her. I had a beautiful donkey, Madame Cannelli. I called her Cloudy because she was the soft gray of the sky before a summer rain. My father, God’s mercy upon him, bought her to help corral the herd, but in her heart she belonged to me. When she did not obey, my father beat her with one of the switches he piled beside the house. He beat us, too, so I knew that a switch brings obedience from the outside, not from the inside. Instead I tied some twigs together and scratched Cloudy’s back when we returned tired and dusty from gathering wood for the fire. I saved her watermelon rinds and filled her water hole. Not once did I have to beat her.
    We have a saying: You cannot feed your donkey only when you need to ride it. But that is what people do.
    Adeeba says my stories are as long as my greetings. If you are busy with your household, I apologize.
    I will let Adeeba rest her hand, but know that there are many words behind the few on this paper.
    Your sister, Nawra

    In the name of God, the Merciful and Compassionate
    27 March 2008
    Dear Madame K. C. Cannelli,
    Peace be upon you. How are you? Are you strong?
    Your gift comes but not your letters. Perhaps you could put them in the same envelope. At the beginning, Saida Julie said we must write our sisters in America every month, and they will write us. She has kind eyes, as green as the grass after the wadi floods, so I did not feel shy to ask what I should put in my letter. Perhaps I have not been saying the right thing. Perhaps Adeeba is right about the greetings. Know that I say them, but I have told Adeeba not to write them down.
    Most Americans do not know about Sudan, Saida Julie said. Anything you tell will be news.
    We have a saying: When God created Sudan, he laughed in delight. That is all I know. Adeeba tires of my sayings, but they are all I have left of Umm Jamila.
    Describe your village, Saida Julie said.
    Umm Jamila was wide and clean, with acacia trees on three sides shielding us from the wind and beyond them fields where we planted sorghum and millet. At the foot of the farhills we dropped our buckets in deep wells with water so clear and cool that whenever people drank from them they said, Praise the Lord!
    Many people lived in Umm Jamila, at least that is what I used to think, all my father’s people, my uncles and their wives, my cousins, my grandmother, and more than forty families besides. But it was nothing like this camp. Here you cannot smell your own dinner for all the cookpots steaming and cannot sleep for strangers crying out in their dreams. Even if you pick your way carefully, you step on what is left of someone’s life.
    In Umm Jamila, when my sisters and I returned with firewood on our heads, we walked three across holding hands. Most families had several houses, all with thick thatch roofs and strong mud walls we patched every year after the rains. My father slept in one. Another belonged to my father’s first wife, Kareema, God’s mercy upon her. My mother slept with the baby. We children shared a fourth until my father, God’s mercy upon him, gave it to the boys and built a separate one for my sisters and me and another for visitors. Our animals we fenced in a zariba . Around us my mother grew onions, sesame, watermelon, okra, tomatoes, cowpeas, all good things to eat. We picked the red hibiscus blossoms to make hot tea and cool karkade , which tickled our throats as we drank. And she had a mango tree she tended as if it were a baby. She sang to it.
    When we teased her, she used to say, I am not singing to my tree, I am just singing. She