Cinnamon tea, sweet in chipped glasses. Roasted watermelon seeds, the salt dissolving in our mouths, the empty shells falling around like leaves. The Ostrich, a forgotten shell on his lip, slides down from the car’s bumper, raises his arms, head back and turns around in circles. Under his arms there are patches of wetness. His weak eyes brave the midday sun. Laughter bubbles inside him letting loose the shell from his lip. ‘The fan,’ he says, laughing more, bending forward and slapping his hands together. ‘The fan in the common room fell down from the ceiling. You should have seen it. It went whizzing around the room like a spinning top.’ We exclaim, we ask questions, no one was hurt, hardly anyone was in the room at the time. He found it funny. Perhaps this is the essence of my country, what I miss most. Those everyday miracles, the poise between normality and chaos. The awe and the breathtaking gratitude for simple things. A place where people say, ‘Allah alone is eternal.’

I weave paper ribbons with holes, chains; the edges of each sheet are sharp. Grapefruit juice – no one buys for themselves alone, always sharing, competing in generosity (our downfall, Majdy says, the downfall of a whole people, a primitive tribal mentality and so inefficient). Pink grapefruit juice, frothy at the top, jagged pieces of ice struck out of large slabs with particles of sand frozen inside. ‘Am Ali, the man who makes the juice has to hold down the cover of the mixer. He can make only two glasses at a time and when the electricity fails he can make none. Aubergine sandwiches, the baked plant crushed to a pulp, red hot with pepper, the bread in thin loaves. Bread is rationed now. I stood in a queue for bread every morning in the two months I was back in Khartoum.

Coming across the Ostrich in the library, his nose literally in a large book. Not on Cost-Benefit Analysis, Rostow’s take-off, Pareto’s curves, not for him. He would be reading poetry from old, musty books that perhaps no one looked at except him. He once looked up at me as I passed, his eyes bulging from the strain he was putting them through. He quoted the Andalusian poet Ibn Zaydun, ‘Yes, I have remembered you with longing, at al-Zahra, when the horizon was bright and the face of the earth gave pleasure, and the breeze was soft in the late afternoon, as if it had pity on me.’ I smiled at him then, wondering if he could see my smile, knowing he was memorising the poem.