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member of the family, would sit himself down armed with the green, leather-bound family Qur’an , his mouth working silently as his fingers ran along the Ayat of each Surah
    And I? Even in those early days I had an interest in art and architecture, was in awe of the majesty of buildings, intrigued by the process that could turn four walls and a roof into something rich and powerful and glorious or, equally, ugly and inhospitable. So even then I would steal into the kitchen to sharpen my pencil with one of the chopping knives, pocket the scraps of rough paper used by the market women to wrap up vegetables and spices, brought home by Fatuma and then discarded. These I would recycle for my sketches, drawings modelled on photographs I had seen of the wonders of Islamic architecture, the mosques and palaces of Istanbul and Isfahan, Damascus and Cairo, Fès and Agadez. These juvenile masterpieces were displayed all over the house, stuck up on the whitewashed walls in every room, evidence of my perceived talent and the pride my parents felt for me.
    So you see, my childhood was a time of happiness, of family love and parental care and support. By the time I was nineteen my early dreams of becoming an architect were made concrete by my remarkable school-leaving exam results. With a scholarship guaranteed, I was all set for a rosy future, my plans mapped out for me: a degree in architecture in Egypt, then a job in my Eritrean homeland or, more likely, Addis Ababa, one of the new generation of east African professionals set to lead the region from its colonial past to a bright new dawn of technical and cultural self-sufficiency.
    A month later my father was dead, victim of a heart attack at the age of forty-five, and I was driving his taxi, my educational ambitions turned to dust.
    I am being called for breakfast. It seems a good place to pause, marking as it does the end of adolescence and the beginning of adulthood. That is, the period before I met you, my angel.
     
    ***
     
    I am back in my cell, my stomach churning from the unfamiliar diet I am subjected to here: dry, cold toast, tasteless as cardboard, lumpy lukewarm porridge, soggy cornflakes. To protect my digestive system, I eat little and stick to the sweet milky tea.
    So where was I? Oh yes, the catastrophe of my father’s death. By that time, my brother had a year to go at teacher training college, both sisters still at school, a considerable household with no income, so I made the obvious choice. After all, my father’s taxi was sitting outside the house. It was a straightforward decision. One day I was queuing for a student visa at the Egyptian Embassy, the next I was ferrying the great and the good of Asmara between the Medebar Market, the Great Mosque and the Governer’s Palace, hauling my compatriots to and from the airport or train station.
    And I did not resent my state of affairs. As you well know, I was not, have never been particularly religious, more out of ignorance than considered thought. I left that to my elder brother. But I suppose I accepted my father’s death and my changed circumstances with a quiet fatalism. After all, I loved my family, and felt a filial obligation to protect my mother. I suppose that my golden mapped-out future was still an abstraction for me. You do not miss what you have never had.
    So I became a taxi-driver, stepping into my father’s shoes, even inheriting some of his regular clients. At home, things changed gradually. My mother never really recovered from my father’s death, survived him by three cheerless years during which she rarely left the house, ate almost nothing, leaving the running of the household to Fatuma and my sisters. She finally succumbed to her broken heart half-way through the month of Ramadan. Meanwhile, my brother finished his studies and got his first posting in a school just outside Mendefera. My elder sister got married, the younger one found a job as a secretary in the Ministry of