These people’s dreams, their fears and crimes, became mine. I lived wondering whether I would end up a dreamer, a wanderer between countries and lovers, or someone who would stalk a victim through dark alleyways, or whether I would be a man of words, or even be transformed by the might of the divine into a woman like Saba whose moonlight-flooded curves I had pictured as my own.

My adolescence was full of possibilities, of becoming this or that, captive to ambition that changed with each night I spent in a different hut and listened to the hearts of those laying their heads next to mine, their breaths awakening gruesome thoughts as well as sensuous and compassionate ones. I am nothing but the sum of the many thoughts of those companions. Because, unbeknown to them, I became many things: an image of their generosity, a case study for their noble creeds, and a bearer of their most unbearable secrets.

Now here I am, I thought, awaiting Saba’s trial while sitting among the good and bad, among those who committed their crimes and deeds in silence.

There was no police station here. Just us and our conscience. The unwritten law of silence, of family honour, of solidarity among the dispossessed and the kinship of inter-family marriages kept the camp plodding ahead on this path of purity, like a stream flowing between rocks and mountains, all the dirt receding at its depth. Even God has been fooled by us, a girl once said to Saba. That girl, who was dying during the labour of a baby conceived in rape, was not even fifteen.

But since God is of our making, we are only fooling ourselves, Saba replied.

As I looked around me, I realized why the judge had used my cinema instead of his own hut, which also functioned as a courtroom. The committee of elders had brought out the whole camp to witness the downfall of Saba.

My large compound was full. Every chair under the tree was taken. Boys perched on the compound’s walls, like eagles, eyeing up the girls nestling on each other’s laps. We have lived like this for a long time now, on top of each other, under each other’s scrutiny. We policed, judged and imprisoned each other. How did Saba escape our gaze?

Babies crawled under the chairs, their lips still coated in their mother’s milk. The ears of the only cat in the camp perked up. The heat freed odours from bodies crammed together. The clerk paced up and down the gallery with an incense burner. I leaned towards the aroma coiling in the air.

And when the clerk requested silence, declaring that the elders were about to come, I went around the gallery embracing my fellow rootless people, reaffirming my existence in their arms.

I hugged the rapist and raised the chin of his neighbour, a boy who still walked with bowed head. I thanked the molester and his wife for putting food in my mouth all those months ago and patted his bastard son and his daughter with whom I had shared a bed. I wondered whether the time was right to tell his daughter that after her father had finished with her, he came to me, and to ask her if she’d heard my muffled screams as I heard hers. No. Nothing like that. She and I shook hands. And I turned to the next silenced guilt. Here I was pleading with the adulterer not to forget to take my powdered milk after the trial to feed her malnourished children since she had poisoned her husband and ascribed his death to God. But in her sleep, I had heard her confess and console herself at the same time: I killed one bastard, but how many has God himself taken away from us?