098
Babe Rainbow
Keep your glow on
Babe Rainbow...
Abdul Bakr bin Ahmed Nazir - but who could say all that lot? He was a gentle, beautiful human being with magic in his hands, though he stood six foot four. We just called him "Bakr" and he built amazing rice paper dragons, cylinders, multiplaned fighting kites, Codies, even self-destruct will-o-the-wisps that soared up, up, up, then burst into fragments of glittering foil and scattered to earth. All at night; he couldn't risk attracting an air raid, flying brightly coloured kites by day. At night, though, we watched his paper miracles soar in moonlight or eclipse the stars and a little bit of each of us soared with them.
Dancin' to a slow dance...
He was an illustrator from elsewhere, more at home with the watercolours, papers, inks and aerodynamics of his kites than with rubberised paint or plastique, but idealism made him a reluctant soldier, sniffing the borders of a tiny adopted country, using his knowledge of colour and its chemistry in the service of camouflage and sabotage. His battalion commander was Leyla, or Colonel Bina Aleyesha binti Raman Aziz, calm and serene, as reluctant a combatant as Bakr, who encouraged festivals around the kite flying moonlit nights.
There's a show on you know
And they're all gonna be there...
Bakr had a mouse. He found it as a baby, dying of thirst outside its nest beside its dehydrated mother, and weaned it on goat's milk. It lived inside his shirt when he was awake, always knowing when to move as he donned or shucked his pack. On warm nights, while he slept, it would curl up in his helmet, wrapping itself in his socks; on cold ones it crept inside the cuff of his shirt and slept there. He called it "Sourire": an affectionate pun.
It must be hard, lookin' up at the sun
When you know deep inside...
One day, a fluke mortar shell hit Bakr. It didn't (as with so many) land beside him, leaving him broken; it hit him, and there was nothing left.
Calm, serene Leyla turned berserker; at gunpoint, she made us search for something to bury but all we managed was a few buckets of damp red sand, scraps of bone and hair ... and Sourire, still just recognisable, whom we had to scrape off a wall two hundred metres away.
Keep your glow on
Babe Rainbow...
As I watch the kites on the beach I remember him gentling a dragon into the moonbright night sky while Sourire peeked out from his collar. I very rarely think of the other thing; just sometimes, like today, it creeps up on me.