The next day Elaine propped up a For Sale sign in the garden. And everything followed quickly after that.

Coloured Lights

I cried a little as the bus started to fill up with people on Charing Cross Road and passed the stone lions in Trafalgar Square. Not proper crying with sobs and moans but a few silly tears and water dribbling from my nose. It was not the West Indian conductor who checked my pass that day but a young boy who looked bored. The West Indian conductor is very friendly with me; he tells me I look like one of his daughters and that he wants to visit the Sudan one day, to see Africa for the first time. When I tell him of our bread queues and sugar coupons, he looks embarrassed and turns to leave me to collect the fares of other passengers. I was crying for Taha or maybe because I was homesick, not only for my daughters or my family but sick with longing for the heat, the sweat and the water of the Nile. The English word ‘homesick’ is a good one; we do not have exactly the same word in Arabic. In Arabic my state would have been described as ‘yearning for the homeland’ or the ‘sorrow of alienation’ and there is also truth in this. I was alienated from this place where darkness descended unnaturally at 4pm and people went about their business as if nothing had happened.

I was in a country which Taha had never visited and yet his memory was closer to me than it had been for years. Perhaps it was my new solitude, perhaps he came to me in dreams I could not recall. Or was my mind reeling from the newness surrounding me? I was in London on a one-year contract with the BBC World Service. Each day as I read the news in Arabic, my voice, cool and distant, reached my husband in Kuwait, and my parents who were looking after my daughters in Khartoum.