Intolerable: A Memoir of Extremes Read Online Free

And maybe I’m just trying to fill in the gaps, not just between one family, but between the Arab and Western worlds.
    I don’t know when, how or if the changes in the Arab world will end, but I know that my story begins in Aden.

CHAPTER ONE
    ADEN
    Camelot
    E verything I heard about Aden from my parents made it sound like a place I’d missed out on by being born too late. My older siblings—all ten of them—spoke of it in an equally glowing tone. Forget New York and fly over London; Aden was the place to be, family lore would have me believe. It all came to a violent end in 1967, when the wave of decolonization spreading throughout the Arab world and beyond reached Aden. The Brits were out, the nationalist socialists in and the party over.
    I was just over three years old when we left and remembered nothing of it. Such was my father’s love for Aden that he would repeatedly ask me as a child if I recalled anything, anything at all, about those first three years. “How could you not remember?” he asked, over and over, teasingly but impatiently. “Leave him alone,” my mother would say, and park me back in front of the TV or at my desk. I perfected that rescue-me look and she often responded just in time. It probably wasn’t the city itself—its streets, ports or even the people—that Mohamed wished I’d remember but his life as one of its most powerful and influential businessmen. It was a far cry from the severely depressed, beaten-down middle-aged man who for thirty years after our exile kept trying and failing to come close to his glory days in Aden in the 1950s and ‘60s.
    I wish I’d known that father and that Aden. History books tell a more complicated and less rosy story about the city, but as so much of my family’s experience was documented in photographs where everyone looked so happy and healthy, I’m siding with the Al-Solaylee version of this Camelot.

    The youngest six children on an outing in the Port of Aden in 1966. (Left to right: Hanna, Wahbi, Raja’a, Khairy, Hoda and me.)
    This little port city at the southern tip of the Arabian Peninsula became a safe haven for trade and an early colonial melting pot. The British administered it, the Indians lived within it, the Jews felt safe on its lands and Yemenis like my father saw opportunities for business and for family life. I’d say family and money were Mohamed’s main preoccupations, except that as a rich and handsome young man, he was also a certified womanizer. My uncle Oubad, my father’s youngest brother, often talked to me and my three brothers—these stories, he thought, were not for my sisters—of my father’s philandering ways. “The things your father has done! Your mother is a saint for forgiving him,” Oubad prefaced every tale. The stories ran along similar lines: Mohamed escaping over rooftops and through back alleys to avoid getting caught in flagrante by a paramour’s father or, in some cases, husband. Or Father inviting unsuspecting females to his office to show off the plans for his next development. My favourite, because of its Mad Men sordidness for is it glamour?), my father flirting with flight attendants on the local airline, skyborne and on the ground. Aden was the Monte Carlo of the Arabian Sea, and Mohamed was its Cary Grant. Growing up in Beirut and then Cairo, two cities I know and remember well, I could still see traces of the dapper ladies’ man in my father.
    Right up to his last few weeks, in fact. As a last chance to stem the spread of cancer in his lungs, Mohamed travelled to England in 1995 for private treatment in Liverpool, where one of my sisters was living. I was still writing my doctoral thesis and commuted between Nottingham and Liverpool to spend time with him. He charmed the ladies even on his hospital bed. He knew there’d be female nurses in hospital and came prepared; he brought ties in dazzling quantity with him to England because he didn’t want to look underdressed (or poor)