Yes, I did steal my father’s rifle. I went with Zarifa’s son Sanjar and our friend Marhun to hunt magpies. Sanjar warned me, If you don’t get hold of that rifle you’re not a man. Marhun added, And if you don’t come, we’ll roast you instead of the magpies. Anyway, once we were in the desert they attacked me and held me down. They tried to force me to say it: I am the slave, I am Abdallah the slave of Sanjar and Marhun.
But I didn’t say that. Instead, I said, I’ll tell Zarifa everything. So they left me alone. But they ate the magpies all by themselves. I swore that when I grew up I would eat a hundred magpies all by myself. But by the time I was nearly grown up it was against the law to hunt magpies.
Mayya never planted any basil. She liked growing native wild roses, sweet-smelling jasmine and also the other kind of jasmine that has a strong and piercing smell, as well as daisies and greens, lemon trees and quince bushes. The courtyard was vast, and she commandeered most of it for gardening. Once I asked her, Why aren’t you sewing, Mayya? You silly man, she said, you don’t understand anything. Why should I go on sewing when there are seamstresses everywhere you turn? And to be honest, I’m tired of it. But she got tired of studying, too, in just the same way. She lost hope about learning English and stopped going to evening classes. When I suggested we enrol Muhammad in the Hope School for special-needs children, she cried and cried. Then she said, My son is just like all the other boys. He’ll go to school just like his brother and his cousins. Muhammad was not like all the other children, but she did not want to see that. She never planted any basil. One night – it was a clear, quiet night – I asked her what she would think about maybe planting some basil? Its smell brings vipers! she said. On the night after the magpie hunt, Zarifa dressed my wounds – which were pretty bad – with salt and turmeric. All the while I babbled, asking one single question over and over. How did she die, Zarifa? How did my mama die?
Zarifa had not said a word all night. But now, finally, she said, Abdallah, my boy! You know what the proverb-maker says. Ignorance is bliss.
When Khawla began driving her car, Mayya suddenly insisted on learning how to drive. But she failed the test. The police were prejudiced against her, she announced. They were in conspiracy with Khawla. Mayya was sure of that. Khawla was pretty and she had style; there was an elegance about the way she did things. I hired a driver for Mayya but she threw him out after a few months. Mayya! I said. What have you done now! But all she could say was, Ya rajul, ya rajul, chiding me as though, being a man, I just didn’t understand. After Khawla’s divorce, when she opened a beauty salon in one of Muscat’s fanciest neighbourhoods, Mayya tried again to get a licence.
I did not listen to my cousin. I did not buy a building. I bought shares and then the stock market crashed. There was a lot of funny business that went on but the newspapers were quiet about it. They didn’t even print anything about the rape of Hanan and her schoolmates in the south.
Hanan was teaching at an elementary school way in the south, in Salalah Town, near the border It was the middle of the night when London phoned us. A gang of teenaged boys had assaulted the teachers’ dormitory, she said. There had been rapes. Hanan – she was raped. And people were silent. Who bought this loud silence? London nearly went mad. She stayed in the hospital with Hanan, her good friend, who had had a nervous breakdown.
I stayed next to my father in the hospital. Over and over, I moistened his dry lips with drops of water, and closed his eyes. And then I cried. Though I didn’t shed a single tear in front of people after his funeral. In my pressed white dishdasha, wearing my dagger and the requisite coloured turban, I remained there, at home, from morning to sundown, the entire three days, shaking hands with all of the men who came to offer condolences. Over and over I murmured, Al-baqaa lillah. Our lives are in God’s hands, their lives go on in ours. The well-wishers ate meat and rice and went away. In the evenings, I closed myself into his room. Something burned inside me, though I didn’t, and don’t, know what it was. Something was consuming me. In the hospital, my father in a coma, I pushed the turban back from the top of my forehead and brought the scars of my deep wound, still so visible, as close as I could to his open eyes. Then I pushed the robe off my shoulder which still carried the harsh marks of knife blades and rough palm-fibre ropes.
Do you remember the day of the magpies? I whispered to him. He did not move. The hand that had tied me up in palm fibres and had thrust me down the well to dangle there head-first for what seemed like hours, my head and body colliding against the edges of its stone walls, did not move. I whispered again, into his ear. Sanjar is a little younger than me, yes, like you said. But Sanjar dared me to steal the rifle. I was going to put it back where it belonged. I would have put it back, but Marhun told on me.
He didn’t move. I raised my voice. Sanjar fled, you didn’t hit Marhun, and I nearly died of fear, hanging upside down in the total blackness of the well, tied up in palm fibres and no idea when I might be untied.
The hand that had done all of that no longer moved. The hand remained there, passive, fused to the feeding tubes, completely motionless. I seized it. I moved it along the bumpy traces of my wounds. I pressed it hard into my flesh and burst into hopeless, desperate tears.
Asma
Asma went into the big room that the girls shared. Remote from the rest of the house, it was like a growth that had attached itself to the far corner of the courtyard. When Mayya and her sisters had reached a certain age, their mother began to worry. She would feel easier if they could be kept apart from the main bulk of the house. She didn’t want them to run into male relatives who might come into the main reception room. After all, men from the clan could appear at any time, coming to fulfil some family obligation. She asked her husband to have this room in the courtyard built for them.
As usual, Khawla was scrunched over in front of her mirror, but she had a small and unfamiliar object in her hands. What’s that, Khawla? Asma squatted down next to her sister. Khawla whispered the answer. Lipstick!
Asma gasped, took it from her sister’s hand, and inspected it. Bright red inside, the lipstick was concealed by its awesome shell, in the shape of a golden bird. Where did you get this thing? Asma asked her sister.
Khawla snatched it away from her. I asked Mayya to buy it for me in Muscat before she went in to the hospital to have the baby. Asma stared at the fancy golden bird and muttered, But my mother . . .
Khawla looked her in the eye. My mother won’t know anything about it unless . . . Asma nodded to reassure her and moved away, turning to the shelf where the books were now lined up, after their rescue from the damp and rot in the storeroom. She pawed through them until she found the volume bound in blue and read the title out in a loud voice. Musnad al-Imam al-Rabi’ bin Habib. The Well-Supported Prophetic Traditions Compiled by the Imam al-Rabi’ bin Habib. Turning over the dog-eared, disintegrating title page, she read the uneven scrawl on the page beneath:
The owner of this book, who beseeches for God’s mercy, is Masoud bin Hamid bin Muhammad, it having come into my possession as a gift from my friend and brother, Ali bin Salim bin Muhammad. I inscribe these words on this page, with my own hand, fleetingly mortal though it may be.
Asma did not like handwriting. It always reminded her of the day the school had opened in al-Awafi, a few years back. The school had opened but girls older than ten weren’t allowed in. They would only be admitted to the basic adult literacy classes, and those didn’t even begin to happen until some time later. Asma had heard that some of the lads who showed themselves able to write out their first names were allowed right away into the third grade, whatever their real age was. She hadn’t known how that could happen, since she was not there on the first day anyway. She was already too old to try for it. Then she was entered on the books for the adult literacy classes even though she wasn’t actually old enough for those. She had barely reached middle school when they closed down the classes. They said there weren’t enough students. In her sloppy, sloping hand,
the teacher wrote on the blackboard: Classes are cancelled due to lack of numbers. Asma walked out of the school. Ever since, uneven handwriting had made her sick.
Instead of preserving the beauty of your eyes you blind them through reading, Khawla remarked. Asma responded, but half under her breath. Shut up, stupid! Ever since you left school two years ago you haven’t so much as cracked a book’s cover open. Hardly even the Holy Book! If it weren’t for my mother’s whip hand in Ramadan you would never open it at all.
Khawla shrugged scornfully and turned her back, gazing again into her mirror. Asma skipped through some pages and suddenly, catching a particular passage, she smiled. She read it out loud.
Abu Hurayra, may God be pleased with him, recited: When the Messenger of God (may God’s prayers and mercy be upon him) was praying, he said to his wife, Aisha, hand me my robe. She said, But I am having my period. He said, That isn’t your fault and it doesn’t matter.
I was sure there was something, Asma bayed. I knew it! But Muezzin-Wife . . .
Asma began repeating the Prophet’s words to herself until she had memorised the passage. She wanted to tell her mother and Mayya every word. She giggled, imagining what a tizzy this would send Muezzin-Wife into – seeing them all eating together, in the knowledge that childbirths and periods and what have you didn’t soil anyone. She returned the book to its place amongst the others – Fruit for the Wayfarer with its ordinary paperbound cover, the Mustatraf bound in red velvet and printed at the Mahmudiyya Press in Cairo, the collection of poetry by the famous ancient Arab poet Antara in its leather binding and inside the old-fashioned lithograph type and the close handwritten commentary in the margins. There was also the book called The Stories of the Prophets, a small and worn volume printed in Calcutta, as well as a large tome, the pages yellowed, which was, the title page announced, Part Two of The Unique Necklace by the noble Imam Shihab al-Din Ahmad, Alone of his Age, the Era’s Sage, known (as it also said) as Ibn ‘Abd Rabbih, Son of the Servant of his Lord, from Andalusia, of the Malekite School of Islamic Law, God shower His beneficence on him and let him dwell in God’s broadest green paradise, Amen. In the margin (the title page went on to say) is inscribed the text Zahr al-adab wa-thamar al-albab by Abu Ishaq Ibrahim bin Ali, he who was known as al-Husari of Qayrawan, of the Malekite legal School of Islam, may God Almighty bless him.
Sometimes Asma’s father asked her to read to him from this tome. She found it difficult to follow the cramped script. Just as trying, Asma would find herself suddenly having to awkwardly shorten certain expressions containing words she was embarrassed to read out loud in her father’s presence.
On her shelf also was the story of Tawaddud the Jariya, a small book with a few pages ripped out. Years later Asma would remember two things about this story: the absence created by the ripped pages, and the simile comparing Tawuddud the Slave-Girl’s neck to the graceful stem of a silver ewer.
There was also the blue-spined book called Kalila and Dimna, the fables said to have been authored originally in Sanskrit by the Indian philosopher Bidpai, translated into Persian, and then translated into Arabic by the scholar Abdallah Ibn al-Muqaffa – a diminutive book no taller than a hand span, looking more like a little school notebook – printed at Sadir Press in Beirut in 1927. There was one passage from Kalila that Asma particularly liked to read out loud to Khawla, for its lyrical beauty, created by the repeated aas and haas, the feminine possessive pronoun at the end of so many nouns. Qaala al-ghuraab: za’amuu anna ardan min aradi . . . The crow said: They claimed that after the passage of years, lands where the elephants dwelt went dry. The water grew scarce, the wells dried up, the vegetation was killed off, the trees withered away and the elephants grew very thirsty . . .
There were also some books furnished by the Ministry of Heritage. Asma had begun reading some sections headed ‘On Matters of Purity’ but they were too boring and she stopped. They were odd, too – the very specific instructions that she couldn’t figure out, because they appeared to make no sense. For example, that one must do one’s intimate business on a soft surface rather than a hard one so that one’s pee sinks in rather than ricocheting and possibly soiling one’s body. Yet every bathroom she’d ever seen had hard surfaces. Another point she had fretted over was the legists’ directive on always wiping yourself with stones before you cleaned yourself with water. Never mind that people didn’t always live in the desert now! There were many other such instructions, which were apparently changeless since they were never updated in these texts, even though some of these books of the jurisprudents’ rules that Asma tried to read had been published quite recently. Asma only glanced at the thin little English-language books Mayya had bought from The Family Bookstore in Muscat before her marriage. No one could read them but Mayya had doggedly persisted in picking them up and even leafing through them.
As she always did, before turning away from the bookshelf Asma riffled through the few pages remaining from a book whose title she did not know. She had kept it apart from the other fragile, deteriorating books in the storeroom. In these pages she read that text, though she already knew it by heart, even if she did not understand it at all.
Some of those who fancy themselves philosophers claim that God, Mighty is He, created every soul in the shape of a ball. And then He split every one of these spheres into two, and apportioned to each and every human body one half. It is decreed that each body will meet the body that holds the other half of that rent soul. Between the two a passion arises from that ancient bond. From one human being to the next, the effect of this union will vary, according to the delicacy of each person’s nature.
Qamar, the Moon
Salima’s husband was returning from the evening’s conviviality at the nomads’ settlement when he was overpowered by a mad ecstasy. The sand under Azzan’s feet was very soft; he had slipped off his sandals to enjoy the quiet coolness of the desert surface. The full moon kept him friendly company, sending familiar shadows across the sandy mounds. From afar appeared the lights of al-Awafi, muted and remote, as though the village were a faraway world he did not know. He’d spent half the night in storytelling and conversation with his Bedouin friends – the usual singing and laughter, the music of a flute and a rebec.
Azzan had decided to return to al-Awafi on foot, turning down the offer of a ride in any of his friends’ four-wheel-drive jeeps. The homes of the Bedouin scattered beneath the lip of the vast sand dune were not very far away from al-Awafi, but at no point did the two settlements overlap. Al-Awafi held fast to the immobile stability of its agricultural roots. The Bedouin – despite all appearances of permanence, having settled in one locale and replaced their camelhair tents with cement block dwellings – scorned, even despised, the very idea of putting down roots. They relied first and foremost on pasturing camels and sheep. They held fast to their traditional loose garments and their free, untethered natures, preserving the impermeable boundaries that separated them from what was called ‘the life of the settled’.
These evening sessions were the only thing that could lift Azzan out of his gloom and depression. Mingling with his Bedouin friends, he could keep that heavy cloud from settling over his heart, from convincing him that stories and laughter were nothing but the banal and trivial games of this fleeting lower world, this den of sorrows. When he was with them, amidst the singing, the memory of his two dead sons no longer caught in his throat like a lump and he didn’t feel so weighed down by the world that all he wanted was to vanish and leave its false pretences behind. When he was with them, the notion that one could feel some joy at the pleasures of this world no longer churned up pangs of guilt from deep inside him. He could enjoy himself without the lurking worry that it was all a chimera he must avoid; he needed to be as alert to its dangers as he was on guard against the most vicious of traps.
As he walked over the sands, he repeated in his head some of the verses they’d sung, trying to match his steps to the beat of the tune. The face of his newborn granddaughter
appeared to him. He was only in his mid-forties but he had become a grandfather! Suddenly eager, he felt an urge to reach home right now, to go into the middle room where he would see her tiny face, asleep. He smiled to himself and was on the point of humming a tune when he was startled by the sight of a human shadow between the rises of sand. In the name of God! he muttered, and took two quick steps back. But the shadow came towards him slowly and without any flicker of hesitation.
Who’s there? Azzan called out.
Me.
He was startled to hear a woman’s voice coming back to him. A moment’s silence, and a tall woman stood close before him. She pulled off her burqu. He felt himself somehow grow calmer.
Who are you and what do you want?
The woman met his gaze with utter directness. Her pure, resolute beauty and the steady gleam in her large eyes disconcerted him. Her piercingly sweet fragrance and the way she stood right there – so close to him! – was even more disturbing. But it was her words that truly made him lose what was his already fragile sense of control.
I am Najiya. I am Qamar, the Moon. It is you I want.
For many years to come these words would reverberate through his head. I am Najiya, I am the Moon, Qamar, and it is you I want. Azzan had not known many women in the course of his life. Certainly he had never known a woman of such resolution and valour, a woman called after the moon itself. She deserved an even greater name than that, he would muse. She was more beautiful than any image he had ever seen or would ever see again in the whole of his life. In the moonlight she looked like he imagined an houri of Paradise must look, those women of heaven above, of whom God had given tidings to His believing servants. Now she swayed toward him, a silent movement that spoke her resolve. He gripped his sandals, shoved them tightly under his arm and fled, running as fast as he could in the direction of al-Awafi, unable to think a single thought about anything at all.
Celestial Bodies Page 4