Intolerable: A Memoir of Extremes Read Online Free Page A

without a healthy rotation of them. He never made a will, even though he knew he was dying, but he made every effort to look good. I’m an out and proud gay man, but there was something about my father’s last gasp of heterosexuality and harmless flirting that I found appealing, even romantic. I never told my mother, of course.
    It was fitting that his last act of gallantry took place in England. His awareness of himself as a virile young man came about in London in the late 1940s, when he left Aden, his wife and his three children for a year-long training in business. (Four decades later I’d follow a similar path to England, but for different reasons and outcomes.) He’d tell us about taking room and board near Marble Arch and having a close but undefined relationship with his landlady. My older brother Helmi found these stories unsavoury and didn’t trust their accuracy. We probably have some mixed-race brothers or sisters in London, Helmi would say disapprovingly. If only, I’d tell myself. I loved my father’s stories and wanted them to be true. Before my first trip to England in 1984, that country and its culture—from Charles Dickens novels to Cliff Richard songs—evoked nothing but romantic associations in my mind. That my father was part of that romantic tradition was all a young boy in Cairo of the early 1970s wanted to hear.
    I also knew how Mohamed loved my mother. Yes, theirs was an arranged marriage that would now be illegal in most parts of the world, since the bride had just turned fourteen, but somehow they survived fifty years, eleven children, four countries and a decade-long estrangement later in their lives. As Safia stayed home and cranked out children, Mohamed turned real-estate flipping into a viable business for the first time in Aden’s relatively short municipal history. He would either renovate or build low-rises, add storefronts and rent out every last square foot to the local business community or the British and Indian civil servants whose job it was to manage Aden. He was a businessman through and through, so when his own brother wanted to open a small business in one of his buildings, he charged him full rent—including a deposit. No wonder my siblings and I always sensed some resentment from our uncles towards their brother. My mother told me that they refused to take his hand-me-down clothes on principle, and in later years, when Safia or Mohamed was in a more sombre mood, they talked about how the uncles secretly relished his financial fall from grace.
    I have a more realistic and sympathetic view of my father after talking about him more with my siblings. He wasn’t a ruthless man by any means, but he protected his business interests with a certain ferocity. The very nature of his livelihood depended on gentrifying and building on top of old houses, which inevitably meant buying out or simply evicting long-term residents. He did his best to find them suitable alternatives, but he cared nothing for their emotional attachment to place. Homes—aside from his own—were businesses and he liked to keep sentimentality at bay.
    Mohamed was by nature a collector, of real estate, women and children. The thing he wanted most from Safia, however, was a male child. She let him down four times in a row. My mother gave birth to four girls: Fathia in 1946, Faiza in 1947, Farida in 1949 and Ferial in 1951. Their names all started with an F , as Mohamed admired the women in the Egyptian royal family of King Farouk, all of whose names started with that same letter. His own mother, Bahga, a Yemeni of distant Indian roots, thought Safia was the problem and began matchmaking for her son, doing the rounds of respectable families to check out potential new brides. I don’t think Safia ever forgave her mother-in-law for that, and the relationship between the two of them remained frosty and occasionally hostile until my grandmother’s death in 1977. For one thing, Bahga, who had very fair skin, never