1001 Nights Cast

Amir took one of my favourite photographs when Ahmed was very small, about ten months old. I have him in my lap and I am tickling him. He loved to be tickled when he was little. He hates it now, he thinks he’s too old. Seventeen: so old.

Amir loved to photograph us. All of us, his precious family. But a lot of the photos are pretty bad. He took them with his old camera, that he never really knew how to use. But it was the only camera for him. Tamuz, his uncle, got him a digital camera, but Amir never even got it out of the box. ‘They don’t last,’ he would say. ‘Where are they? All those digital images in the world? In thin air, nowhere, that’s where they are. Lost.’ If his old camera ever got jammed or stuck, he would take it all the way to the other side of the city, to an old man who would still take the time to fix it. And so, slowly over the years, the crazy photos piled up, in albums, on our walls, on the door of his office. Many of the photos are out of focus, or taken from strange angles, or had parts missing, but they were all precious. To him, and despite our teasing, also to us.

One day, in the middle of this war, he appeared at the kitchen window. I was cooking a curry with potato and shredded coconut. ‘Tamara,’ he said, ‘and all of you, all of you kids, come out to the van. I have something to show you.’ He had a very serious face. My heart was thumping. Surprises, in wartime, can be terrible. But as we got closer to the van, I could see it loaded up with green plastic. I thought of fake palms and umbrellas. He loved Bollywood and for one crazy moment I imagined that he had somehow brought home part of a Bollywood film set. He opened the van door and beamed, ‘Here it is! Our oasis!’ We still didn’t get it. We all stood there, staring at the green plastic. ‘Come on,’ he said, ‘it’s our pool!’

After that there was no stopping us. All the kids helped to drag the pool and its untidy green shade cloth up to the roof, and then to set it all up. Except Sima of course. She wanted to, but her legs were just not long enough.

And that’s pretty much where we stayed. Up on the roof. For the whole of that long, terrible summer. And it was an oasis, a shelter, at least in our minds. We laughed there so much, screamed and played: we forgot about where we were sometimes.

When he got hit, my Amir, all he wanted to do was stay by the pool, to recover there, but he had to be in hospital, for all the operations, for weeks.

That’s when Mahmud brought him the Super 8 camera. I think that’s what kept him going for so long. Because they couldn’t get them out, all those bits inside him, the bits of metal, of glass. Everything that caught inside him when that bomb went off. But the film camera helped him to fight. For those long weeks. And stories of the pool.

That’s where he wanted to film me. By the side of the pool, up on the left, under the yellow wall, where we would hide in the middle of a hot summer’s night, in each other’s arms, away from the kids for brief stolen moments, away from the gunfire. ‘When I get better’ he said, ‘I will film you by the pool. Even if it is winter by then, I want to film you by the pool.’

But in the end it was in the hospital. I had to help him to get the camera loaded. He was weak but he insisted. ‘I want to film you Tamara,’ he said, ‘and now I have the camera. In my hand.’ I heard it starting. I was peeling a mangosteen for him. He loved mangosteens. I’d found some in a stall in East Baghdad, where the Americans shop. I didn’t want him to film me. I was self-conscious. I cracked the fruit open. The purple juice got on my hands. I tore out the pieces and put them in his mouth, one by one. With the camera braced against his cheek, he ate the pieces. The camera went up and down with his chewing and his talking. He ate, and talked. ‘I want to film you, Tamara, for the way you move. You have such grace.’ He swallowed, breathed, kept filming. ‘Perhaps I should be content to just dream it, to just remember this, your grace. But I want to hold it…through my eyes.’ And so he held on, to that camera, for three and a half minutes until the cartridge ran out.

He died the next morning. It took me a long time to get the film developed but in the end, Ahmed found a place in Kansas to mail it to.

We watch it one year later.

In the film I am crying. I hand him each piece of mangosteen and he slowly eats each piece. The image moves up and down. It slips, it slides. At times it is just on the wall, or the floor. But mostly it’s on me. It does not look graceful. But it does look like love.