If you wait long enough on the dusty corner of a side street, you will inevitably see a little boy walk by, a wooden top coiled by string and, from time to time, pausing to flick it down to the ground and send it spinning in the dirt.
My obsession with this toy, called a trombiya, began earlier this week when my host father, grinning, ushered me away from the table and hurried me downstairs. For a short writing assignment as part of my program, I chose to describe this moment.
Standing in the doorway, my host father reaches into his pocket and pulls out a tangled mess of brown string and a small, pear-shaped object with a metal tip. He calls me closer and speedily coils the cord about the toy, saving exactly enough length to wrap the string twice around his hairy knuckle. He opens his hand to show me and the toy – years ago sanded smooth and painted a glossy red, now chipped and faded – looks awkward and small in his wide palm. He raises the toy to his ear and smiles to himself as he throws his wrist downwards. The top bounces off the dry, rocky earth with a metallic clang then rolls under the family’s Mercedes some distance away. I crawl underneath to retrieve it. As I begin to stand, he hands the string down to me with a curt nod, but in my hands the top feels large and unwieldy and my fingers fumble with the string.
It took me the better part of a day to get the hang of spinning a trombiya. I went out around the streets of Mohamid with my little brother and played tops with different groups of kids, all of whom played slightly different games, none of which I understand.
Eventually, we came upon one group huddled around a trombiya that lay in the dirt. One by one, each child flicked their top over head and into the earth with great force, attempting to strike the toy in the center of the circle while the others laughed, jeered and, as best as I could understand hurled insults at each other with their shrill child voices. When it came to my turn, I lashed the top downwards, splitting it in half. The children immediately fell silent and stared at me and I, afraid that I had committed a cardinal sin, stammered out an awkward apology in a language I do not understand. Eventually, the game resumed with a different trombiya, and we moved on.
As I later found out, splitting the top was the goal of the game, so I guess I won. To them, I must have seemed like a brutish Orc, bigger and stronger but too dim to understand my basic surroundings.
To complete the image, here is a video of my little brother and I playing with a trombiya.