That Other Me

by Maha Gargash

  There is no need. The boys are in a good humor, even when their note is refused. Asma cries out to them, “They say they don’t want to be bothered, that you should leave them alone.” The boys seem amused. The driver of the Toyota leans out the window and pounds his chest. “Now, why would you do that? Don’t you realize my heart is burning here?” He slips some money into Asma’s open hand and motions to her to go back and plead his case.

  Back by the Fiat, Asma says, “Take pity on him.” She mimics his stance with her fist glued to her ribcage. “His heart, God protect it, has burst into flames.” She takes note of the girls’ response and skips back to the Toyota. “The girl in the driving seat says you should drink a bottle of water to put it out.”

  “Tell that big mouth that my messages are for the princess. You must make her understand that nothing can quench the fire in me.”

  And so it goes for the next few minutes, until the boys start sending songs. Once more, the mouthpiece is Asma. With a squeaky voice filled with the murmur of the lovesick, she sings of the boy’s burning desire in a melody she creates right then and there. The princess laughs, and this time she turns her head fully, flashing the boys a smile filled with the suggestion of intimacy. She really is beautiful. It’s Dalal!

  I know her actions are all in jest, but what does Adel think of her? I don’t dare look at him. “That’s it, let’s go.”

  “Soon.”

  “No, now.”

  He raises his hands. “Remember the dying man’s last request?”

  “No more requests, no more joking.” Stern, unsmiling, I stare ahead. “I have to get back to the sakan immediately.”

  Adel drops me off at a safe spot a few streets away from the sakan. Just as I open the door, he grins and says, “By the way, wasn’t that your cousin back there?” I don’t answer, just slam the door and forge ahead blindly without a thought spared for direction until I find myself lost, standing in front of a café I’ve never seen before. There are a few outdoor tables under an arching trellis covered with vines. It’s quiet and I pause for a moment, listening to the soothing gurgles of the shishas. I fix my sight on the smoke hovering in slowly dispersing clouds and touch my cheek with the same pressure that Adel had. Instead of smiling with the memory, I scowl.

  He was cool, curious, passionate, intense, playful, and unpredictable all in one evening, his mood flying in different directions like a leaf caught in a crazy wind. His behavior confuses me. Previously I had thought he was a sensitive man, but after he licked the mango juice in that suggestive way I don’t know what to make of him. He seemed to find pleasure in seeing me fidget and squirm. Why? The questions shuffle and shift in my head. And what about Dalal? Did he recognize her straightaway?

  I do not need the complication of Adel in my life. I’ll make a list of everything that has puzzled me today and ask him. Once I get the answers, I’ll never see him again.

  7

  MAJED

  With the plumber still working in the dining room, Aisha has set up lunch in the family room. I hear the racket before entering, and even though I know what it will be like in there, somehow it seems that the children have become noisier, more boisterous, since I saw them the week before. “Wee-wah, wee-wah, wee-wah!”

  A long time ago I decided it was important for the family to congregate for lunch every Friday in my house, so that I could get a sense of fullness, pride, and achievement over this other kind of wealth: eight sons and daughters, five of them married, who have bequeathed me with twenty-one grandchildren. Standing frozen at the door and watching the chaos in front of me, I’m filled with a longing to reverse that decision. But that would be very un-grandfather-like.

  No one notices me until I raise my voice. “These . . . these monkeys! Why doesn’t anyone control them?” And then my children and in-laws hurry to greet me with handshakes and kisses on the forehead.

  “They’re just excited to see you, Baba,” says Nadia, the third eldest of my four daughters and the only one who is somewhat timid. Maybe I only think that because she does not make as much noise as the rest.

  “So excited, they haven’t noticed me standing here for the last few minutes?”

  My second-eldest daughter, Amal, orders the kids to get up. “Say hello to your grandfather.”

  Only the older children rise. Their faces are long and their voices full of the moping boredom of their teen years, or perhaps they are sulking because they’d rather be somewhere else. The little ones keep running in circles around the three palm-frond mats Aisha laid on the floor. “Wee-wah, wee-wah, wee-wah!”

  “Why can’t they sit still with a book in their hands, use all that energy to get educated?” I complain.

  The mothers laugh, and my eldest daughter, Mona, explains, “God bless them, they’re too small to be thinking for themselves.”

  “I don’t need you to tell me that,” I say to her. “You talk to me as if I haven’t had children of my own, as if I haven’t watched over you lot.” I like to say this even though we all know I left most of their upbringing to their mother, who was more than efficient in keeping them away from me. I pretend I don’t notice the shrewd smiles that Mona and Amal exchange as they drag the smallest children, kicking and hollering, toward me. No sooner do the children place their hurried kisses on my cheeks than they rush away, grabbing all the cushions on the couches for a rough thrash and tumble. Two of the little ones whack wooden swords just as Aisha, carrying a bowl of what smells like fish curry, hurries by, barely missing them. This time I ignore them.

  I turn to join the men, my sons and sons-in-law, at the far end of the room, but I catch sight of Aisha’s sister, Shamma, seated with them and arguing a point with my eldest son, Saif. He is red-faced with annoyance, hardly hearing her as she lectures him about something to do with the need for more housing for the less fortunate, as if she were Mother Teresa. Why can’t she go discuss recipes and children (even if she doesn’t have any) with the women? Saif’s debating skills are artless and unexceptional, and I can tell he’s losing ground. He would already have unleashed that flaming temper had it not been for the interjections of my second-eldest son, Ahmad, who puts to good use his canny skills at playing the role of appeaser.

  Shamma’s is a rare visit that clouds my mood. I spot her bare neck as she turns her head and adjusts her shayla, her hair cut short just like a boy’s—no doubt for the purpose of being inflammatory. “Marhaba, Ammi,” she says in greeting, shrugging the argument to one side and rising to shake my hand. I sniff and nod my hello back at her from a distance, deciding not to get pulled into the discussion because, simply, she has no business being on this side of the room with the men.

  It was in the early 1980s that, after a couple of years of marriage, she divorced her husband with the excuse that he was a lazy drunk, indifferent toward her. To the chagrin of her family, she didn’t go back to live with them. Instead she rented an apartment and sought employment at the Ministry of Public Works. Then she took study leave to get a degree in architectural engineering (a most unusual vocation for a woman) at the Emirates University in Al-Ain, and returned to the ministry once she was done to work as an engineer in the Tenders and Contracts Department. What business does she have sticking her nose in a man’s world, as if she were his equal? That’s what I’d like to know.

  I’d hoped I would be able to reflect on what Mustafa just told me in the majlis, but that will have to wait. The spacious living room suddenly seems too small, with all these people in it. And here comes another one.

  With stick in hand, my mother trudges into the room, looking weighed down, wearing all that heavy gold in traditional designs. Through her burka she keeps her eyes fixed to the ground like a grazing sheep. “Mama Al-Ouda!” the children sing, and frog-leap to hug her, diving at her knees like a giant wave and nuzzling their faces into her ankles.

  “Get them away,” she grumbles. “Do you want me to fall and break my bones?” Mona yanks them off and marches them all the way out
to the kitchen to be fed by the maids.

  Amal says, “We can proudly say you’re the only woman of your age who hasn’t broken any bones.”

  “Tuff, tuff,” Mama Al-Ouda lets out, and fake spits into her burka to ward off wicked spirits. She waves her hand in front of her face and rubs her fingers for extra protection. “Hib-hib, salt in your gaze to remove the evil eye.”

  “Say ‘masha’Allah,’ ” Aisha says, carrying in another bowl, which smells like shrimp curry.

  “Masha’Allah!” everyone chimes, and we take turns greeting Mama Al-Ouda.

  Two of the older children carry in a chair and a side table for my mother, who at eighty-seven suffers from nothing more than stiff joints and slight loss of hearing. The rest of us settle on the floor. In the middle are two large trays of rice mixed with meat, and a tray of plain white rice to be eaten with the three varieties of curry and two types of fried fish. Placed along the edges of the mats are plates of radishes, Indian pickles, and dates. Cans of fizzy Coca-Cola, 7 Up, and Mirinda sit to my side, as do two jugs of limboo and a bottle of Tabasco.

  Bending forward over the mats, we scoop rice and meat with our right hands. The room is quiet, as if someone had flicked off a switch that was responsible for the ruckus of moments earlier. We are like a pack of wolves. Only Aisha eats slowly, tipping her burka discreetly to one side with every mouthful. There is some civility, a dignity I might say, to the way she twirls the rice into marble-sized balls, dirtying only the tips of her thumb and the two fingers closest to it.

  With our tummies filling, an animated discussion starts. There’s the plumber’s failure to locate the source of the leakage, and our two new maids, hired to replace one we had to send back to the Philippines. “I just don’t know,” says Aisha, shaking her head, “how I’m going to manage. They’re proving to be nowhere near as efficient or clever, impossible to train.” Any conversation among the women about the help is bound to bring out every dogged opinion, and the discussion could carry on until the end of the meal.

  With the exception of pleasant-faced Nadia, my daughters are not easy on the eyes: their eyebrows flit up and down like bat wings, their mouths are pinched, and their eyes are scrunched and wrinkly like prunes. They have hard faces with voices to match, an undertone of spite and vindictiveness, a viper’s hiss, as they spit their words out. I don’t look at them. I gather a handful of white rice and pour chicken curry on it, stirring the mixture to the right consistency: not too dry and not too soggy.

  “Mother, I think you were too good to that maid,” says Amal. “You gave her money for her mother’s gallbladder operation, for her children’s schooling in the Philippines; you even fixed her rotten teeth.”

  “Yeah,” says my youngest daughter, Nouf, who is Mariam’s age but like her twin, Badr, is still struggling to finish school. “They were yellow and black when she arrived, and she left with a set of white fangs.”

  The teenagers laugh as I finish molding the lump of softened rice. It fits like a ball in my palm. Hunched over the mat, I cram it into my mouth in one quick move while glancing at Shamma, who has lifted her finger and is about to chide them over their lack of sympathy toward the destitute. But Amal cuts in, “And the clothes! So many dresses you gave her . . .”

  “Slippers, too,” Mona adds, her face reddening at the memory of the treacherous maid. “And then what does she do—what does that sneaky girl do—to repay us?” She pauses for effect and skims the bewildered expressions around her, even though it’s a story they can all recount backward. “She gives favors to men, and in her quarters at the back of the house, too. Right under our noses!”

  “I just don’t understand why she did this to us,” says Aisha.

  “Because she’s a snake,” says Nouf, laughing like a maniac. No one else reacts, and there’s a lull as the verbal slaughter abates. The only sound is my mother’s teeth crunching ice, a habit she developed the day she discovered ice. She’s been quiet; her practice is to filter information, squirreling away the bits that reinforce her beliefs and chucking out the rest. And when there’s a comment to be made, she’ll make it in a voice of self-proclaimed wisdom. Her bangles clink as she shifts on her chair.

  “It’s always better to have a stupid maid than a clever one,” she declares. This opens another discussion, but I can’t follow it because they are all speaking at the same time. So I busy my head with what Mustafa told me earlier.

  “A composer,” he had said, “means that someone wants to be a singer.”

  “What do you mean, someone? Stop speaking in riddles and tell me!”

  The hairs on his head were starting to rise. He dipped his fingers in his glass of water and smoothed them back in place. “Your daughter Dalal.”

  “How can that be? Doesn’t she know the scandal she would cause? What’s she trying to prove?” Then I asked Mustafa a question that was both pointless and absurd. “How can her mother allow it?”

  Ah, that Zohra! She had been a neglected child. Orphaned at fifteen when her parents died in a car accident, Zohra had been taken in by her reluctant maternal grandparents. They fed her and clothed her. They did their duty in providing a roof over her head. And in case she didn’t notice, they made sure to point out their sacrifices daily. I took her away from all that.

  “I don’t think you should panic, bey,” said Mustafa, his voice barely audible. “You know what the chances are of getting into that business.”

  “No, I don’t.”

  He looked at me. “Well, they’re small.”

  “How small?”

  “Very, very small. Tiny. I’d say a dot.”

  “Just as tiny as getting on a television program, right here in Dubai?” I punched the cushion on my lap and Mustafa jerked his head back toward the door as if someone had knocked. “She managed, didn’t she?” Dalal Majed: that’s the name they’d used on the show. I suppose I should be thankful they didn’t use my family name. Still, I had felt exposed. And it did nothing to console my injured pride at having been disobeyed. “It went on for three months. Every Thursday night she kept appearing on that show. Disgraceful!”

  “Please, bey, calm your nerves,” said Mustafa. “Insha’Allah, this whole situation will fizzle to nothing.”

  “How can I calm my nerves?” I barked, and crossed my arms in a huff. I watched him stare at his feet, twiddling his thumbs as he waited for the moment to pass. But my head was brimming with Zohra.

  She was a blind kitten; that’s what she was. I taught her to open her eyes and command a view of the world. I had gathered her to my chest and built in her a confidence that she is now using to hurt me—to exploit our daughter. The insult of it!

  Zohra hadn’t even panicked when I found out that my daughter was singing on live television. When we spoke, there was a bored rasp to her voice; I was sure she was holding back a yawn. She had said, “You can’t tell us what to do, I’m not married to you anymore,” or something of the sort. I was livid, and at that precise moment I made the decision to stop sending her money. Every day I looked forward to receiving her apology. I imagined her groveling and promising never to go against my word again. The days passed and I waited. Nothing happened.

  My mind ticked like a dysfunctional clock as I tried to figure out when exactly Zohra had lost her respect for me. It was as if there was no history between us, as if that was not my daughter on the screen under those bright lights, on display for any man to watch and dream of in that lustful way that only men can.

  Then, months later, Mustafa told me that she’d taken Dalal and left the country, that they were living in an apartment in Cairo.

  “How are they managing? There’s rent, food, clothes, transportation. I haven’t sent her a dirham for over a year.”

  “Well, I can check about that.”

  I tightened my lips and fixed my eyes on Mustafa’s bowed head. “Listen to me: we cannot let them get out of control.”

  Mustafa snapped to attention and stood up like a capable soldier. Wi
th his skull in the path of the air conditioner, his hairs started leaping and shuddering like battery-powered stick men. He stepped out of the current of air and smacked his hair back to sleep. “We must control them, bey.”

  “Yes, we must keep an eye on them,” I mutter to myself now, and absentmindedly rub my temples with food-smeared fingers. Grains of rice cling to my head and a stream of curry trickles down the side of my face. My family freezes but, realizing I am deep in thought, says nothing.

  It’s my mother who breaks the stillness. She raps a bone on her plate. When the marrow does not slide out, she pokes the bone under her burka and sucks. The noise is like water pulled down a drain. Aisha rushes to the bathroom to bring me a moistened towel, which I use to wipe my face. The chatter resumes, as if my blurting out some vague statement and dirtying my face were the most natural occurrence. This time they talk about Mariam.

  “Why does she get to study abroad?” moans Nouf.

  “Because she’s cleverer than you,” says Badr. “If you get the same marks, then you can go abroad to study, too. You don’t even know what you want to study.”

  “Not true,” says Nouf. “The thing I want to study can only be found abroad, in London.” She lifts her hands to her face and shapes a square around her eyes. “I want to be a photographer, and work for one of those magazines that sends you all over the world to places untouched by humans. The other day I saw a picture of the most beautiful jungle. There was light coming through the trees—only someone with a photographer’s eye would notice that—and I thought, Yes, that’s what I want to be.”

  “You know that jungle mud can’t be wiped off with makeup remover?” Badr says. “You’d have to use bathroom cleaner. But you’d have to be careful, because it might strip the skin off your face.” Nouf touches her cheek. “And what kind of heels would you wear? Pointy or platform?” Badr snickers.