Read an excerpt of South by Babak Lakghomi below, one of our featured summer reads! Don't forget to save 25% off this book when you use code SOUTH25 from August 15 - August 21, 2024.
I ’d decided to drive instead of taking a plane to the South. I watched the sky turn red, the dunes deform and reshape. There were fewer cars the farther south I drove. The condition of the roads became worse.
Occasionally, a dilapidated gas station on the way. I filled up with gas and purchased water. Other than that, no sign of towns or villages. The cashiers looked surprised to see a car other than trucks loaded with machinery on that road.
At night I stopped the car by the roadside to sleep. The desert night was cold. I no longer had any phone coverage.
Putting up my tent and slipping into my sleeping bag reminded me of being with Tara. We would’ve had a campfire if she were here. How quickly she’d set it. Her hands snapping the twigs, piling the dry branches. Her hair long and damp. The thorns sizzling. The smell of pine leaves when she’d blow into the fire.
I was still cold in the flimsy sleeping bag. The wind flapped the tent cover and I could hear the layers of the deep rock crack beneath the sand. I listened to the strange music of the earth until I fell asleep.
When I woke up the next day, the tent was covered in sand.
My back ached. I left my tent, cleared the sand that piled over the car with my hands.
The corpse of a dead bird by the tent. Lost its way, got trapped in the desert.
I went back inside the car. I turned up the heat, rubbed my hands together, ate cold red beans out of a tin can.
I had felt connected to Tara again right before departing, but now, as I ate this cold meal in silence, she seemed like a memory from the far past.
Here I was in the middle of nowhere. Yet I had hoped this would be the kind of trip that would help change things.
I laughed at the idea myself, at being naive enough to suppress my numerous doubts about the trip. I packed my sleeping bag and disassembled the tent. The wind blew. It made folding the tent hard. It took me a while to get back on the main road again.
I continued driving. Dried-out streams, sun-burnt palms. Tiny bugs hit the windshield and left yellow stains on the glass.
Once in a while, I’d pass a truck loaded with pumps, valves, or pipes. A sleepy driver trying to keep his eyes on the road.
The wind swirled the sand around. A black crow pecked at something by the side of the road.
After several hours of driving, signs of a village appeared in the distance. I could smell salt, the sweetness of the date trees.
I slowed down through the narrow alleys with walls made of clay. Kids ran after my car, shouting through the cloud of dust, waving their hands.
“Room, room,” they’d shout. They were offering to take me to a shelter.
I slowed the car, and one of the boys overtook the others. I stopped, rolled down the window. The other boys looked at him with envy. I asked him to jump in. He kept talking to me in a dialect I could barely understand, pointing his finger at the turns.
I heard “wind” and “bread” among his words. I heard “water” and “drought.”
Salt was inseparable from the soil. Cows soaked in shallow saline waters to get away from the heat. The tops of their coats burned under the sun. Patches of red, wounded flesh. Stains of salt on their backs. They lowed with a sound I’d not heard before.
When I got to the house, the boy’s father was ready to receive me as if he’d already known about my arrival. I wondered if many people passed through the village. I gave the boy a small tip and paid the deposit to the father. I was told that I could pay for the food and the room when I left.
The father showed me a fish inside a bucket filled with ice. “Baby shark,” he said.
We were still kilometres away from the sea, from the fishing boats, from where pearl hunters dived down deep, holding their breath for minutes at a time.
When I asked where the fish was from, the father laughed, curling his thick lips, showing his missing front teeth. An hour later, the father gutted the fish in front of me. Stray dogs circled, hoping to get something. The father added wood to the fire, boiled the fish inside a pot. I watched the sons and the father around the fire before going to my room, their faces red in the firelight.
The boy brought me my dinner on a metal tray, showed me my futon. He pushed his drooling baby brother out of the room and shut the door. The baby kept crying and scratching the door from the other side, like a cat. There was no fork to eat with. The fish was served with yellow rice.
I remembered the father’s hands gutting the fish. The wounded backs of the cows.
The aroma of the spices filled the room. I took several bites, using my hands to eat, but couldn’t eat much. I washed my hands in the bowl of water in the corner of the room. I opened the door and pushed the tray outside, then quickly shut the door to keep the little boy out.
The bedsheets smelled of camphor. I was anxious that I wouldn’t be able to sleep despite being tired. I was sensitive to new places, new smells. My sleeping had been worse since I had stopped drinking.
My neck was sore from the long drive and spending the previous night in the sleeping bag. I craved a hot shower. The boy had suggested that he could bring me some hot water to wash myself, but it wasn’t the same as a shower. I didn’t feel good about using their limited fresh water.
I took a muscle relaxant and a sleeping pill, gulped the pills down with some water. I don’t know how long it took me to go to sleep.
In my sleep, I heard laughter. I woke up, or thought I did. I felt the laughter getting closer, as if it was merely coming from inside my head. I tried to scream.
I woke up drenched in sweat, my mouth dry, like I’d been eating sand.
Outside, the sound of drums. The flames of a fire lit the room through the window.
I drank water from a clay cup left by my side. I left my futon and opened the door.
In the other room, the boy and his brothers were asleep on the floor beside their mother. The father’s futon was empty, but traces of his body were visible on the sheets.
I tiptoed through their bodies, left the house, and walked toward the fire.
They hit their drums. Bamboo sticks cut the hot air. Men wearing white clothes moved their bodies to the sound. They circled a man on his knees.
Women in veils looked like crows with metal beaks. One of them carried a plate of burning charcoal. Her right hand circulated the smoke, distributed it among the crowd.
Platters with bowls of rosewater, wild rue, dates around the fire.
The woman sprinkled rosewater on the sitting man’s face, rubbed ash on his forehead.
The boy’s father was standing among the other people. He held a chicken by its neck, a machete in his other hand.
The smell of wild rue and incense.
Blood splashing, spilling into rosewater.
I sat on the sand, several metres away from the crowd.
They dipped their bamboo sticks in blood.
“People of the wind,” they sang.
They threw a white cloth over the sitting man’s head and struck their drums.
“When a body is sick,” they sang.
“When the soul is weak.”
The drums bit harder. A man blew into his pipe.
“The wind is waiting.”
“They ride on the winds.”
“They come from the sea.”
The man convulsed under the cloth. When he started to scream, the drums stopped. His scream made something thump inside my ears.
The boy’s father drew the cloth away from the man’s face, held the man’s head in both his hands, stared at his eyes. He pulled the man’s neck toward himself and hit him in the back with his stick.
“Leave,” the father shouted. “Leave us,” he whispered.
When the man stopped convulsing, the father caressed his head. The father walked around, looking into everybody’s eyes, sprinkling water on their faces.
“Beware of the south winds,” he said when he came by my side. He rubbed the palm of his hand over my head. His hand was cold. All my body felt cold with his touch.
He looked like a different person, not the same man who had served me fish hours back.