The Penguin Book of Migration Literature

by Dohra Ahmad

  “How was Dubai?” he’d asked, with his usual playful tone, as if she’d only been away on a short vacation, with the same honeyed voice that sometimes made it hard for her to take him seriously. “I’m so relieved you’re back for good,” he’d added before she had time to respond, turning her irritation into a yearning in her throat—he had not yet heard about what had happened in Dubai.

  Her eyes followed the fat vein above his left eyebrow, the only sign she knew of his nervousness. It travelled up in an uncertain path and forked right under his hairline, dividing his forehead into two, almost identical, flat planes. She ached to follow its path with her finger the way she used to. She wanted to tell him how, when she first moved to Dubai, often, when she found her employers’ prayer rugs laid out on the floor, she’d think of him. When the whole family went out shopping or to visit with friends, she’d lie down on the floor beside the rug and, propped on her elbow, brush her palm against the velvety prints of minarets and the Kaaba, follow the intricate patterns of arabesque and mysterious words embroidered into the fabric, all the while dreaming of his fingers on her skin.

  “Take your dirty hands off my prayer rug, ya kafira!” her madam had yelled at her once, bursting into the room and swinging her shopping bags at her. Sara knew not to touch the Quran but didn’t know a rug could also be too precious for her Christian hands. Nevertheless, she’d felt such a perverse pleasure seeing her madam’s reaction that she wished she could tell her about the sexual thoughts she’d just had. Later on, lying on her thin mattress on the kitchen floor where she slept, she’d wondered if Omar would have disapproved too.

  Jealousy and competition are rife among those who manage to find work in the Middle East, so it was only a matter of time before her secret was out. She tried to tell Omar of the abuse that led her to prostitution. She wanted him to know that every time her employer attacked her, she fought him off with all her might, and that, when he invariably overpowered her, she refused to look at his face, keeping her eyes shut or on the ceiling to deny him the acknowledgement he sought. But she couldn’t find words to describe her ordeal.

  Once Omar found out what had happened, he couldn’t look her in the eye or touch her, as though she had become a leper overnight. At least in the eyes of the other neighbours, she could see envy mixed with disapproval as they ogled her foreign-made clothes and gold jewellery. His attitude enraged her. She snickered at his discomfort, donning the protective mask of an only girl-child who’d learned at an early age that laughter can be as powerful an arsenal against fear or shame as a fist. What did he expect her to do? Run back home and wait for him to rescue her? Yet, after the heat of the moment had passed, she wished Omar would see through her facade and that, once the shock of the news had subsided from his mind, he’d come back to her.

  She should have known better. No matter how much things have changed from the time of her parents, women will always bear the brunt of any transgression. “The markings of Eve’s daughters,” her mother would have said. Why did she expect Omar to be above this?

  She only admitted her defeat after he’d left for Canada again, this time with just a vague promise to keep in touch. How naive she’d been for thinking that they could someday pick up from where they’d left off four years earlier when, for months, she’d lived spellbound by Omar’s vivid aspirations for their future together. The way he held her close that night on her parents’ doorstep, dragging out the moment of separation before he’d left. In spite of herself, she’d believed in his power to whisk her away from that miserable neighbourhood, that dead-end of a life.

  “Good riddance. What did you expect from a Muslim?” her mother had said in an attempt at consolation, but both women knew that what Sara had done would always cling to her, staining her chances of marriage to any man, Muslim or Christian. Her only choice was to go back to the Middle East, make good money, and support her family, not wallow in self-pity.

  * * *

  —

  Omar takes the spaghetti sauce he and Marianne had prepared on the weekend out of the freezer and places it in the microwave. He leans on the granite countertop and watches the day die outside his window, the suburban desolation turn into a dim crescent moon of serenity. He opens the box of whole-wheat spaghetti he bought and adds the contents to the hot water on the stove. With his palm, he slowly pushes the tips of the dry pasta into the water as the submerged parts soften and curve.

  His cellphone rings.

  “Hon, can you run and pick up some salad and a dessert? I’m stuck in traffic,” his wife says through an ambulance siren in the distance.

  “I got the salad but not dessert.”

  “You know how much my mom loves cake . . . Please?”

  He had forgotten his in-laws were coming to dinner tonight. Irritation mounts in him. He has always been good at massaging people’s egos into liking him, except for his in-laws. In five years, he hasn’t been able to get through to them. Whenever they show interest in him, it feels suspect, their insinuations just out of reach of his rugged English. His mother-in-law annoys him: her perfectly coiffed salt-and-pepper hair, stiff and flat on her head, her big inquisitive eyes and non-stop chatter. She makes him think of a grey parrot. She uses words such as “marvellous” or “extraordinary” after every sentence he utters, equally impressed by his ability to remove stains from carpets as she is by his answers to questions about his life back home. His father-in-law’s approach is more direct, more directly aimed at emasculating him.

  “Trust me, baby, it might come off wrong to you but they don’t mean any harm,” Marianne would say once they’re alone, wrapping her plump arms around his neck. “They’re just old and set in their old ways, you know? Anyway, you’ll graduate soon, get a good job, and make Daddy proud, okay?” she’d tease, guiding his hands to her ample breasts.

  He can’t complain, though. Marianne has been good to him. After his trip to Ethiopia, he’d decided to leave his stained past with Sara behind and fully embrace the comfortable and uncomplicated life Marianne offered. “Home is what you make it,” he’d heard someone say on the bus once. And this saying had stayed with him. After all, he’d come a long way, so why provoke fate by wanting to have it all? And until now, this thought had sustained him.

  The clock above the hickory kitchen cabinets chimes 6 p.m. He turns the stove off and strains the cooked noodles in a colander. He should have just waited until Marianne was home to boil the pasta.

  As he picks up his winter coat from the hallway closet again, he catches a glimpse of his reflection in the hallway mirror. His mind leaps toward Sara again. The little girl who laughed off the officers’ threats at the police station next to their compound. Her devilish glee. And the other, grown one, who stood up to his condemnation with fortitude and pride. He decides to call Sara one more time before he heads out to the grocery store. He puts his winter coat down on a stool in the kitchen and reaches in his shirt pocket for the piece of paper where he’d written Sara’s employers’ number and a calling card. He dials the numbers on the calling card first, then Sara’s employers’.

  “May I speak to Sara, please,” he says, surprised that the line connected on the first try this time. “I’m her cousin, calling from Canada,” he continues, as Sara’s mother had instructed him to do to avoid raising any suspicion.

  “From Canada?” the man on the other end asks, his voice full of sleep. “Wait.”

  Omar hears grumbling in the background. He imagines the man explaining the late-night call to his wife. He pictures Sara apologizing to them as she hurries to the phone. He feels a nervous rush overcome his body. He takes a deep breath and tries to rehearse what he will say to her but the sentences disappear before he’s done forming them.

  The voices at the other end of the line become louder. He hears a man and a woman arguing but he can’t understand what they’re saying. After what seems like an hour, the man picks up the phone and with an
accusatory tone says: “She’s not here. She is gone.”

  Before Omar has time to ask any more questions, the man yells at him in Arabic and hangs up.

  Omar stares at the phone in his hand, trying to understand what just happened. He starts to dial the number again. Then it dawns on him: Sara has managed to escape from her employers’ house.

  He picks up his winter jacket again, closes the door behind him, and faces the shimmering snow dancing in the wind. What really bothers him is not so much what she’d done but what others had done to her body. This knowledge still digs into his chest like a crooked rib and there isn’t much he can do about it. He stands in the doorway for a moment. He focuses on a thought forming in the back of his consciousness, the way a photographer sharpens the contours of an image by manipulating the lens. Maybe it’s the fresh cold air that clears his mind a little or maybe it’s the small piece of good news he’d just heard, but he feels hope, a small and shrivelled hope that’s true, but one that’s as flammable as tinder. Perhaps with time, he’ll learn to live with that nudging in his chest the way people accept their wounds when they realize they won’t die from them. Another hope he nurses is that Sara will forgive him for having broken his promise to sponsor her and for having shunned her for doing what she had to do. This one is the most fragile of his aspirations.

  He touches his chest on the side where the piece of paper with Sara’s contact numbers is tucked in his shirt pocket as if this gesture might nudge events toward a favourable outcome. He takes a deep breath to alleviate the guilt, worry, and longing inside then walks into the dark night to the same grocery store, thinking of how ludicrous the idea of a grown person demanding dessert after each meal would sound to anyone back home.

  * * *

  —

  Sara’s employers will soon notice she’s gone. They have treated her fairly; they even took her on a vacation to their village by the sea once, although she would have preferred a few days off instead. Nonetheless, they’d refused to give her her passport back when she told them last week she wanted to return home. Instead, they dismissed her worries and tried to appease her, promising that if the rebels pushed any closer to Damascus, they’d take her out of Syria themselves. If she’d learned anything from her time in the Middle East, it was not to trust any Arab. Even her friend Lily, who is lucky enough to work for a nice couple in Kuwait that let her call long distance for free, had agreed with her.

  She wonders if Omar is worrying about her at this instant, as she waits in a filthy room for a van that might or might not come. Or if he is leading the life of a Canadian man with his Canadian wife in a safe and comfortable Canadian home, oblivious to the misery or dangers of a world thousands of kilometres away from his. She tries in vain to imagine him at a dinner table with his wife. Her memory of his physique is frozen in a picture he’d sent her a few months after he’d moved to Ottawa: the wide collars of his winter jacket turned up to his ears, his slender body scrunched up, his smile like a grimace of pain. He looked as if he were being swallowed by the whitewashed Canadian landscape of clouds and snow and imploring the viewer to rescue him. She’d felt such anguish for him then. It’s his turn now. She wants him to be worried sick for her. She wants him gutted by guilt and remorse. After all, it’s his fault she’s in this mess.

  She stretches her legs in front of her and pulls a water bottle out of her bag. She takes a few sips and passes it to her neighbour, examining the woman as she gulps down the rest. She wonders if this woman is thinking about some man too. And if she’s despising herself for thinking of him at a time like this. For caring about what he thought, what he did, if he’d come back to her or wait for her, whatever the case may be.

  She gets up and paces back and forth, unconcerned with her travel companions’ stares, then stops in her tracks to listen to the muffled voices of men outside the closed door. A man wearing a heavy wool jacket with a few buttons missing opens the door and with the urgency of the hunted yells: “Yalla, get up, the car is here!”

  The Ugandan woman jerks her head right to left and again but remains seated, as though she has been tricked one too many times to trust her luck now. Sara picks up her duffle bag with one hand and extends an arm to help the woman up. She attempts an encouraging smile even though her own heart is beating so violently she fears it might break out of her chest, taking her life with it. But if she has to die, she would rather die on the move, heading somewhere.

  Everyone shuffles through the apartment door. The freezing strong January wind washes over Sara’s face, dousing her nervousness. In the distance, a muezzin calls the faithful to prayer. The travellers hand their fare to the man in the wool jacket and one by one take their seats in an old Toyota HiAce that reminds Sara of the minivan taxis that are ubiquitous in Addis Ababa’s streets. She takes her seat in the tightly packed, beat-up van for the hour or so ride to Beirut. As the vehicle starts to move, she leans her head against the headrest and covers her nose and mouth with her scarf against the smell of sweat and exhaust fumes.

  She thinks of what could happen if they get caught after they cross the border. Would the Lebanese hand them over to the Syrians? She thinks of the possibility of dying here. The thought of leaving this earth without seeing Omar again, without any hope for reconciliation, digs a hole in her heart. She thinks of all the ways people have of hurting each other. She’d practised letting Omar fade from her consciousness, piece by piece. Eventually I’ll just go on living, as people always do, she’d told herself time and again. Was she wrong to have sneered at his reaction? Was she too selfish, too hard-headed? They have been a part of each other’s lives since childhood. All that entangled history, all the memories: some hard and painful like ice, others as warm and nourishing as summer rain. Some of it might eventually dissipate but she knows Omar will endure in her mind and body for a very long time. And if she dies before she makes it home, she knows she will linger in Omar’s memories as well. Of this much she is certain. But she can’t indulge in regrets and hope for a future with him right now. What’s important, what has so far stood the test of time, is her will to fight, her determination to hold herself together. And to make it home, to her parents’. The other home, the one she once dreamed up with Omar, might have after all only been just that: a dream.

  Sara feels someone shaking her by the arm. She opens her eyes and looks at the Ugandan woman beside her. The woman points at dim lights in the distance: “Lebanon?” she asks, suddenly realizing it was possible to make it out of Syria.

  Sara rubs her eyes to clear her mind of sleep, surprised that she’d dozed off. She checks her watch: it has been forty minutes since they left the apartment in Damascus. At the horizon, the pink dusty sky has started to extract itself from the dark mountains.

  “Should be. But I don’t know,” she says. “Did the driver stop anywhere? A checkpoint?”

  The woman gives Sara a puzzled look.

  “Are we in Lebanon?” Sara asks the Indian-looking man in front of her.

  “Yes,” the man whispers, but with doubt in his eyes.

  Or is it disbelief? Sara is not sure. The other passengers are all searching the misty darkness outside for signs of deliverance, their backs and necks stiff with suspense, their hands clasping their meagre possessions. Whatever comes next, Sara realizes she won’t be facing it alone and this awareness of a shared destiny gives her the strength she needs to keep calm.

  She turns to the Ugandan woman and offers her the most reassuring smile she can muster.

  GENERATIONS

  defining myself my own way any way many many ways

  —TATO LAVIERA, “AMERÍCAN”

  MENA ABDULLAH

  THE TIME OF THE PEACOCK

  When I was little everything was wonderful; the world was our farm and we were all loved. Rashida and Lal and I, Father and our mother, Ama: we loved one another and everything turned to good.

  I remember in autumn, how we burn
ed the great baskets of leaves by the Gwydir and watched the fires burning in the river while Ama told us stories of Krishna the Flute-player and his moving mountains. And when the fires had gone down and the stories were alive in our heads we threw cobs of corn into the fires and cooked them. One for each of us—Rashida and Lal and I, Father and our mother.

  Winter I remember, when the frost bit and stung and the wind pulled our hair. At night by the fire in the warmth of the house, we could hear the dingoes howling.

  Then it was spring and the good year was born again. The sticks of the jasmine vine covered themselves with flowers.

  One spring I remember was the time of the peacock when I learnt the word secret and began to grow up. After that spring everything somehow was different, was older. I was not little any more, and the baby came.

  I had just learnt to count. I thought I could count anything. I counted fingers and toes, the steps and the windows, even the hills. But this day in spring the hills were wrong.

  There should have been five. I knew that there should have been five. I counted them over and over—“Ek, do, tin, panch”—but it was no good. There was one too many, a strange hill, a leftover. It looked familiar, and I knew it, but it made more than five and worried me. I thought of Krishna and the mountains that moved to protect the cow-herds, the travellers lost because of them, and I was frightened because it seemed to me that our hills had moved.

  I ran through the house and out into the garden to tell Ama the thing that Krishna had done and to ask her how we could please him. But when I saw her I forgot all about them; I was as young as that. I just stopped and jumped, up and down.