Mr Allah’s House

We lived for a short time at the top of the longest outdoor escalator in the world. It begins in a weather-protected pedestrian corridor above Des Voeux Road, one of Hong Kong island’s busiest streets. Shortly after the escalator begins its climb, passing the old-school Gage Street Wet Market, where meat, fish, flowers, fruit, vegetables and clothes can be purchased at open air stalls, it negotiates a dog-leg around another busy street before making a steep ascent up what was once a hillside on Hong Kong’s Victoria Peak. After gliding by the boutique restaurants and wine bars of Soho the commercial real estate gives way to Mid-Levels, a vertically populated neighbourhood where we had our home, a spacious rented apartment on the sixth floor of an old building a stone’s throw from the escalator terminus.

Imagine, if you will, the dawn-to-dark pounding of a quartet of pile drivers in concert with a chorus of jackhammers… coming from a construction site across the road from our apartment, supplemented with a road crew in full throttle outside our street door. Living in central Hong Kong requires co-existing with the clamour of heavy machinery and the unending white noise of traffic, but sometimes it can all get a bit too much: as I dressed Owain – then just two years old – I told him we were going to escape from the awful racket; he asked me where we were going: on a visit to Mr Allah’s house, I said.

The presence of the Jamia Mosque in our neighbourhood was an anomaly and a blessing: built in the 1840s it is still there after every other structure from that time has disappeared; nestled behind a brick wall whose crumbling capstones are a meal-time perch for feral cats waiting to be fed by a resident from the nearby flats, the mosque is a refuge from the ferment and a place of unexpected tranquillity. In the grounds are a number of decaying residential buildings housing the local Muslim poor, allowed to live there for free by the Trust which owns the property.

For the faithful and the merely curious, the escalator’s design engineer incorporated a stepping off point adjacent to the mosque’s entrance, a stone arch enclosing a pair of elaborate wrought iron gates, both iron and stone coloured a vivid turquoise. On our frequent journeys up and down the escalator I would always acknowledge Mr Allah’s house to Owain by singing a mantra to him consisting of the name Allah repeated in thirteen cadences; sometimes, if we had no pressing business, we’d step off the escalator and hang out in the mosque.

Owain and I were sitting on one of the old stone benches and I was explaining to him that just as we remove our outside footwear when we come home, the shoes he could see outside the open doorway to the prayer hall belonged to the people who had come to visit Mr Allah’s house. As I was explaining this to him we could see the caretaker through the doorway sweeping his way across the prayer mat covering the prayer hall floor. “Mr Allah,” pointed out Owain. Couldn’t deny it.

Another man who had been hand washing his laundry in a trough under a lean-to meandered over and graciously greeted Owain with a “Good morning”; equally courteously Owain replied with a “Good morning” to him. As the three of us sat in the shade talking Mr Allah, who had finished his sweeping, wandered over, with a smile for Owain and a gift: a lurid looking bubble gun, which Owain was immensely pleased with. Thus concluded our visit to Mr Allah’s house.

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