The Orphan of Mecca, Book Two

By Harvey Havel

In Book Two of The Orphan of Mecca trilogy, Amina Mitra has no choice but to abandon her newborn child to the Great Mosque of Mecca, Islam's holiest place. The child is then taken to an orphanage by the religious police (mutawaffs) and stays there until he is of good enough age to live on his own. The orphan, Ekaja, finds work in a Meccan tourist bazaar that is well known for its wealthy international travelers and global corporate visitors. There, he meets an American who wants Ekaja to work for him. But this is not ordinary work. The American wants to turn him into a spy for the Central Intelligence agency. Ekaja then must choose between loyalty to the CIA and loyalty to his own people regardless of how perverted their view of Islam has become.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Harvey Havel
• Release date: May 4, 2017
• ISBN: 9781311129734

Harvey Havel

HARVEY HAVELAuthorHarvey Havel is a short-story writer and novelist. His first novel, Noble McCloud, A Novel, was published in November of 1999. His second novel, The Imam, A Novel, was published in 2000.Over the years of being a professional writer, Havel has published his third novel, Freedom of Association. He worked on several other books and published his eighth novel, Charlie Zero's Last-Ditch Attempt, and his ninth, The Orphan of Mecca, Book One, which was released last year. His new novel, Mr. Big, is his latest work about a Black-American football player who deals with injury and institutionalized racism. It’s his fifteenth book He has just released his sixteenth book, a novel titled The Wild Gypsy of Arbor Hill, and his seventeenth will be a non-fiction political essay about America’s current political crisis, written in 2019.Havel is formerly a writing instructor at Bergen Community College in Paramus, New Jersey. He also taught writing and literature at the College of St. Rose in Albany as well as SUNY Albany.Copies of his books and short stories, both new and used, may be purchased at all online retailers and by special order at other fine bookstores.

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The Orphan of Mecca

(Book Two)

By

Harvey Havel

Copyright © 2016 by Harvey Havel

All rights reserved. All characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publishers, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review to be printed in a newspaper, magazine or journal.

License Notes. This e-book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. It may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with someone else, please purchase an additional copy for each reader. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your favorite retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Books by Harvey Havel:

Noble McCloud (1999)

The Imam (2000)

Freedom of Association (2006)

From Poets to Protagonists (2009)

Harvey Havel's Blog, Essays (2011)

Stories from the Fall of the Empire (2011)

Two Tickets to Memphis (2012)

Mother, A Memoir (2013)

Charlie Zero's Last-Ditch Attempt (2014)

The Orphan of Mecca, Book One (2016)

The Orphan of Mecca, Book Two (2016)

The Orphan of Mecca, Book Three (2016)

An Adjunct Down (2016)

The Thruway Killers (2017)

Chapter Twenty-Eight

The infant lay in the front of the Mosque on some steps. He was wrapped in his mother’s precious scarf along with a soft blanket. His young mother, Amina, knew there was no other way. In his tiny beautiful face she saw Raja, the man she loved, the man she desperately believed to be his father. How different things were back then. How much confidence Raja had. It was a time of happiness and profound hope that this time Bangladesh would be its own sovereign nation. It should have been a time of prosperity. It could have been time to celebrate the heroes of the movement and throw out the kahki-clothed men with machine guns and bayonets. Instead, they received nothing other than streams of blood scalded away by the fires of chaos. How long ago that seemed. Bangladesh was nothing more than a tragedy now. Amina had no idea how to return home.

Amina leaned into her sleeping baby’s face. He was weak and had low birth weight. She nuzzled her nose into his neck and felt the warmth coming from him. She picked him up one last time. She whispered a prayer. Amina couldn‘t let go, but she knew she had to. She wrapped a scarf around his head. She placed him gently on the steps again. She put her hands to her mouth to muffle her wails and tiptoed unseen quickly into the daylight. Soon after, several women in the Mosque heard the abandoned infant’s cries, and ran outside to find this beautiful baby with hazel eyes and walnut skin.

Their immediate reaction was to pick up and cuddle the baby, but instead they called for the help of the mutawaffs, or religious police. The mutawaff agent, a woman, took the baby from the women who had found him and cradled him in her arms. She immediately made preparations to take him to the local orphanage.

There are no adoptions or foster care allowed in Saudi Arabia. To keep the racial lines pure and in step with what the kingdom wants out of its citizens, other family members than the natural parents may adopt a child, but taking orphaned children into one’s family is still discouraged if not prohibited outright. Children who are abandoned by their parent or parents, whether on the steps of a wealthy couple’s home or even at a mosque, must be sent to an orphanage until the child is of the appropriate age to leave the orphanage and live on his own.

The trip was a short, which was also good because the mutawaff decided that she had better hurry. She had noticed that the baby’s forehead was very warm and that the baby was sick, probably due to his low birth weight. When she arrived at the orphanage, a downtrodden building made of cinderblocks and the look and feel of bureaucracy, funded, of course, by the House of Saud, the religion officer immediately gave the child to one of the nurses who put his small body in an incubator. The child was deemed pre-mature by the head nurse.

There were several other incubators in the orphanage, as they were filled with infants, mostly from Northern and Central Africa, judging by their skin color which varied from dark brown to black. Their mothers had immigrated to Saudi Arabia as illegal aliens to give birth to their child and thereby offer their children a chance at better lives, even though they knew their children would be sent to such an orphanage before anything could take place.

After Amina’s child had been placed in his incubator, an imam from the local city mosque stopped by to name him. Hearing the child had been found in the Great Mosque, the imam decided to name him Ekaja-Quddus, which in translation means, ‘Servant of the Holy.’ He and the nurses all hoped that his name would be the trajectory of his life on earth. The nurses came to change him and feed the pre-mature tot every few hours, but then returned him to the incubator where the temperature was warm and the ventilated air was pure.

Ekaja, as the nurses called him, remained in his incubator for almost a full month until he gained enough weight to be transferred to a crib. The nurses surrounded him with love and care. They stroked his soft skin, let him grip their fingers, and held and cuddled him often. They let him hold onto the scarf his mother gave him. Many of the nurses fell in love with Ekaja, just as his mother had. They commented on how different he looked from the other infants. They could not believe that the mother had left such a beautiful creature behind. He would always be an infant searching for his mother, they said to each other.

Ekaja remained in the maternity ward quite a while longer than usual, until he had caught up to a proper weight. The nurses could no longer keep him after a year of living in the bigger hospital. Eventually, they had to transfer him to a larger ward where the children were bigger than he. The nurses all knew of this, and many of them wanted him to remain a child in their protected care, but alas, the head nurse had decided that it was time for Ekaja to move on in the hope that he would cope living amongst the other children.

On the night before Ekaja was to leave the larger ward, he couldn’t stop his helpless cries. Usually on weekend nights only one nurse was on duty and cared for the children. This particular nurse recently had a child of her own. To stop Ekaja from crying, the nurse tried holding him most of the night and rocking him in her arms. But the child couldn’t be silenced no matter what she did. When she grew tired of holding him and caressing him, she opened up her nurse’s blouse, and let Ekaja suckle her own breast. She knew that this was highly unorthodox, but after a time, she knew that that’s what Ekaja truly wanted. He must have missed his natural mother’s milk.

Miraculously, Ekaja stopped crying and soon fell asleep with his head resting peacefully on her bare breast. He slept through the night. The next morning, he moved to the toddler’s ward, and there the nurses treated the children differently and played more of a supervisory role. They allowed him to keep the scarf his mother gave him. The children were young, but they had to be made into men at some point, and so the nurses didn’t give Ekaja too much motherly affection, or at least no more than they gave the other children. During most of the day the children were left to play with each other. Although the rooms where the kids were kept were sparsely appointed, wealthy Arabs in Mecca donated toys to the orphanage for the kids to play with, and Ekaja seemed quite happy with his circumstances. They still clothed him in diapers until one of the nurses taught him how to go to the bathroom on his own. The nurses taught all of the kids to do that at a certain set age. Ekaja found it difficult to crouch down over a hole in floor, but after a few months he learned how to do it on his own. He began to rely on his mother’s cotton scarf. The fabric smelled like her. He wouldn’t let go of it. It provided security but also was the only reminder of where he came from. He held on to the scarf with his small, delicate fingers.

At this particular stage of their care, the children were basically well fed on baby food and clothed well in Arab garb, but from that point forward the resources for the children dwindled dramatically. The orphanage only provided one set of Arab garb for the children, and the food changed over from baby’s mush to pita bread and hummus. They ate a strictly Arab diet without too much deviation. Also their portions of hummus, taboleh, pita bread, and couscous were getting smaller. Ekaja didn’t cry or complain, though. He became aware that the nurses were much bigger and taller than he was and could be rather strict, so he went out of his way to please them. For an odd reason, though, he couldn’t let go of his mother’s scarf.

Ekaja remained in the toddler’s area for a full year. They then transferred him to a ward where the children were older, as that was how the system worked. When he had reached the tender age of six, he had grown too comfortable under the care of the nurses, the good food, the many toys, and his fellow African orphans. Just when he thought that nothing would ever change and that he would stay comfortably with the nurses forever, Ekaja reached the next rung in the ladder.

After staying in the ward of the older kids, the nurses transferred him to the boarding school adjacent to the nursery. It was the first time he had come into contact with Arab girls and boys of the same age. The young girls were housed in a different complex entirely. Ekaja immediately noticed that in the boys department of the school, these strict but kind nurses had vanished from sight and had been replaced with the authority of middle-aged Arab men with cold, steely gazes. It was a good thing that the nurses in the nursery didn’t pamper him too much.

The boys now started their formal schooling which consisted of being taught basic concepts in mathematics and Arabic before moving into the maddrassa. Here, at the age of six, Ekaja also learned how to wear his clothes, and to take a mid-afternoon nap even though he was quite adamant that he didn’t need one. Naturally, though, the orphanage knew better as he always fell asleep during nap time no matter how stubborn he could be, and he was often the last one to awake. Sometimes Ekaja would be paired up with other boys to work on simple projects, like learning the Arabic alphabet and helping each other solve math problems. The child they paired him with the most often was a much taller African boy whom the city imam had named Nabil. In Arabic, this meant ‘a man who is good in archery along with being noble, intelligent, and dexterous.’ Nabil and Ekaja usually played together when the busy schedule at the school permitted them. Yet he still missed the women in the hospital and especially the mystery woman who left him the scarf.

At night, after a sparse dinner, all of the kids returned to their rooms furnished with a bunk bed, small cubby holes, and a couple of small desks. He shared this space with Nabil for a full year. A stern Arab housemaster supervised the dorm and carefully monitored each child’s activities, also to prevent the children to escape, which some did successfully. The housemaster made sure that every child had fallen asleep before closing the door of his own quarters.

Let’s go outside tonight, said Ekaja from the bottom bunk, one night.

Where do you want to go, asked Nabil, half asleep.

I want to go home.

This is home. And besides, if you go out, the housemaster will catch you, and he will beat you.

You really think so?

Yes, I know so. I don’t want to get a beating from the housemaster.

I guess not, said Ekaja resignedly.

Nevertheless, Ekaja secretly wanted to be free, and get out of the school. He pushed these ideas about escape aside, because he was afraid of the beating that would await him. So he behaved and attended to his lessons until something somewhat awkward kept recurring in the dorm at night.

Ekaja heard the creak of the dorm master’s door open after the children fell asleep. He heard the dorm master’s footsteps in the hallway. Ekaja slipped out of bed quietly and crawled on his hands and knees so that he wouldn’t be noticed when he stuck his head out to see what the dorm master was doing in the hallway.

Ekaja couldn’t hear what went on in those quarters, but he assumed that the dorm master had some special activity organized for the children almost every night of the week. Each night the dorm master followed the same routine until finally one night he entered Ekaja’s and Nabil’s room.

While Ekaja pretended to be soundly asleep in the bottom bunk, the dorm master shook Nabil awake on the top bunk and told him to follow him back to his quarters. Nabil, being the obedient soul that he was, rubbed his eyes of sleep and slipped down the length out of the bunk bed. Nabil was gone for roughly a half-hour before he returned and climbed up to the top bunk whimpering softly.

Nabil, what happened? whispered Ekaja.

Nabil didn’t want to answer him at first. He’d rather take the pain than tell Ekaja why he pained so much.

Why are you crying, Nabil? Did the dorm master give you a beating?

You don’t want to go in there, cried Nabil quietly, but tomorrow night it’s your turn.

The next morning, Ekaja went with the other children to the class room where their teacher continued with his lessons on the Arabic language and also how to add and subtract numbers. He noticed that some of the other students in his dorm walked with a limp to their seats, and it especially pained them to sit down for Islamic story time. Usually these stories came directly from the Qur’an, such as the Prophet Muhammad’s conquest of the pagans. Ekaja, however, didn’t pay much attention to these stories as he became increasingly worried about returning to the dorm that night.

Nabil, he kept asking, what will happen to me tonight?

I’m not allowed to say, he said, and no matter how many times you ask, I’m not telling you. You can ask somebody else, but they won’t say anything either.

Ekaja now became really scared. He felt it would be dangerous to be sleeping in the dorm that night. That evening, instead of going to his cubicle, he put on his Arab clothing, found the exit to the building in the darkness and fled to the nursery and to the nurses and the safety he had experienced there. The nurses let him into the building and kindly received him, but he dared not to tell them what he had seen was happening in the dorm at night, only that he worried about being beaten by the dorm master.

"Oh, sweetie, that’s what they’re supposed