by Mai Al-Nakib
“Time to go,” whispered Mishari.
“Yes,” Mish‘al concurred.
III
An odd and inexplicable flash of light. Where was it coming from? Sitting at the bottom of the stairs, I tried to peer into the darkness at the top.
“Isn’t it strange how that keeps happening?”
“What does?”
“That flash. Every once in a while I see a flash.”
“I hadn’t noticed.”
I wasn’t surprised he hadn’t noticed. All he could think about was that some girl, the love of his life no less, had broken up with him. This compact, earnest boy had recently moved to the American School of Kuwait, ASK. I don’t know how we became friends – the only Kuwaiti boy I would ever befriend and not for long – but my patience over his misfortune was fast running out. Even here, at this remarkable party (and it really was astonishing: a villa empty of furniture, police bouncers at the door, a bar on every floor), all he could do was go on and on about the pain, the ache, the sorrow. I wanted to stuff his broken heart with a bouquet of pink carnations.
At the end of the year, I would add to the hurt of his heart a bit myself, would go with him to a dance – as his friend, that was the agreement – and then leave him for Jonas. This little gentleman would soon be angry with me. But that was still months and months away, forever in adolescent time.
“Look, I’m going inside to dance for a while. Coming?”
“You go ahead. I think I’ll stay out here.”
He stood as I stood – was he ever polite – then sat back down and lit another cigarette. I didn’t see him again that night. I couldn’t understand the extent of his sorrow over a girl. It felt sticky, unseemly for a boy already sixteen. I was trying hard to be nice to the new guy, but I couldn’t be around it all for too long. It felt like waking up smothered by sheets hiked over your chest. It felt like clenched fists.
Walking into the tar black room at the top of the stairs was a wide stretch of relief. The place was nothing – a black box with blacked-out windows, dark and moist, with kids leaning against walls. The place was everything. I wandered into the middle of it, into the dancing center, crowded bodies parting for a split second to let me in. Hands thrust up, pushing high, torsos swaying, determined, and, suddenly, strange arms catching me. “Holy girl your lips of clay.” Someone’s liquid breath against my neck. Again, that flash – in it, chandelier crystals floated above us then disappeared. I threw my head back and fell into the music, into alien arms. “Will whisper words of yesterday.” I was outside the new boy’s heartache. I was free. I would guard against his wall of lost potential. His weariness would not be mine. “Absolute a principle to make your heart invincible.” I would dance in the black box forever, my arms waving, my hips gliding – watch me.
Another flash and there he was, leaning against the wall, white kerchief knotted around his neck. “A girl to make a dream come true.” I saw Jonas see me.
The Diary
It hadn’t started out as a diary. It began as a log of quietly observed and methodically recorded details.
Monday, June 16, 1980. Rip in black trash bag. Smells very bad. Sticky trail left along sidewalk. Small birds whispering outside window. Yellow skies in afternoon before storm. Bright lightening comes after cracking thunder. Fish fingers are not always crispy.
For a while, it was page after page of carefully chronicled minutiae. Mina carried the notebook – made in China, black with red triangle corners and binding – everywhere. At the unlikeliest moment, before going down a slide, seconds after the lights dimmed in a movie theater, the instant she blew out her birthday candles, she would flip it open, write something down, slam it shut again.
Wednesday, March 11, 1981. Mirrors reflect light and eggplants do too. Smoke rises even as hot wax sinks. Marbles get dusty when played with. Sometimes the sun hangs pink and low. Cages can’t trap light.
Her father found his daughter’s habit disconcerting and intriguing. Her mother was initially encouraging, then mildly curious, but as time passed, increasingly uneasy.
The first-person pronoun changed everything. Two years after she first began to write in the notebooks, Mina, with her cropped fringe and slow-blinking eyes, discovered that describing objects wasn’t the only thing words could do. Her words, initially shy, were now more boldly wrapping themselves around her and other people.
Saturday, September 25, 1982. He doesn’t always wipe his mouth with the napkin his mother packs in his lunch. Sometimes he trades his plain milk for chocolate. When he raises his left hand to answer a question, he rests his right hand over his heart, like Napoleon. I wonder if he knows I watch him and that I carry him home with me after school.
Language was slinking into smooth, dark corners, places with sharp crevices oozing disorder. She worked her way through the jumble, slow at times, other times quick.
Tuesday, February 7, 1984. I continue to obsess over the things others remember. We all carry little packets of memories. Some of us put our packets into little boxes. Some of our boxes have keys that are sometimes worn on a leather cord around the neck, sometimes kept in a bank security box opened with yet another key, sometimes plunked in a drawer of trinkets and trash. Some of us keep our packets on shelves, others in closets. I have a suspicion that our packets are actually all laced together so that if any are dropped or misplaced or buried, it won’t be forever. Though there is no guarantee they will return to the original holder. I am constantly tripping over dropped packets and lost keys.
Notebooks, always made in China, always smelling of an apothecary shop in Beijing or Shanghai, were filled at an extraordinary rate. By the time Mina turned fourteen, the diary was her second skin, her life lived twice.
That year, a teacher gave Mina books to read, other people’s writing. He noticed her in a classroom of forty kids, mostly because she hadn’t noticed him. He was too old for her to notice. He tried to convince himself that it didn’t really matter. It didn’t matter, he told himself, that she smelled of sea salt. It didn’t matter that she bit her lower lip when she stared unnervingly, never at him, with his horn-rimmed glasses, tan slacks, checked shirts, and moustache. It didn’t matter that she still hadn’t quite learned how to arrange her legs under the navy blue skirt of her uniform. It didn’t matter that her eyes, when the sun hit them, were brown and not the olive-stone black they appeared indoors. What mattered to him ultimately, desperately, was that the potential he saw coiled tight in her, as tight as the knot in his own stomach whenever she passed his room, had to be released. He could not leave it to her parents. How could they possibly see the future of this child they had conceived? Parents cling to their children’s pasts; they belong to them. Most cannot fathom that their children’s yet-to-comes will never be theirs. They grasp with gentle tentacles, drowning their oblivious offspring in love or guilt. Against these parental impulses, against his better judgment, he started to unravel Mina’s coil, bit by bit. He selected authors for her to read: Kafka, Woolf, Durrell, Márquez, Kundera. She carefully read each one, curled up on the small landing of the carpeted stairs at home, her skin warmed by slants of afternoon sun.
She had been reading her whole life, so this was nothing new. Her mother, who had inherited the obsessive reading gene from her father, had read tirelessly to her improbably alert baby, everything from Mother Goose to Dr. Seuss. When her grandfather died, her mother had given Mina one of his books, a first edition of The Wizard of Oz. Mina could smell her grandfather’s life in the pages of that old book, which had found its unlikely desert home only because, in his youth, a curious Arab man had become captivated by the story of a childhood that could never have been his own. In it she smelled pipe smoke and cigarettes, whiskey and gripe water. She smelled the dust of his old projector which had worn out reels and reels of Laurel and Hardy, whom he preferred, only slightly, over the Marx Brothers. She smelled his overfull but fully ordered bedroom, its cool gray marble floors and heavy velvet curtains pulled almost c
ompletely shut, allowing only the slightest splinter of daylight to prick in and illuminate the suspended dust. She smelled his big creaky bed, quilted with neat piles of paper, and even the plastic of the ivory Ericofon he was so proud of, its dial hidden from sight. She smelled her mother’s childhood in Pune, layers of mango ice cream, sliced papaya, and jackfruit.
The pages of that old book were heavy with her grandfather’s losses. His small trading company in India had gone bankrupt, and during the sad voyage back to Kuwait, he had lost his restless audacity too. The desert had never been to his liking and working for the national oil company – where, after all, it was only one thing everyone was after – had violated his sense of enterprise. His life became less about what he was doing or going to do and more about what he had already done. Every weekend, Mina and her cousins would flock to his quarters – a library, a bedroom, and the avocado green tiled bathroom where soon he would have his heart attack quickly and alone, the false teeth he used to frighten and delight the children still floating in a small glass beside the sink. He would recount to them how he had sailed off to India in a dhow, against the wishes of his parents, to look for rubies, sapphires, emeralds, and other glittering things. He would tell them how he had met their grandmother, where else but in a garden, under a banyan tree, and how her father, their great grandfather, had openly balked at the idea of his precious fairy daughter marrying an unreliable Arab jewel trader, however keenly intelligent and well-read. Love won the day, and soon many children were born.
“My mother?” Mina would always ask at this point.
“Indeed, your mother. My youngest and” – he would whisper in an aside to his beloved granddaughter – “favorite. I had wanted to name her Mina but was not allowed to on the obstinate authority of your grandmother. So when you were born, Mina, I insisted that your mother give you the name I had chosen especially for her all those years ago. And she did, my darling daughter. So, here you are Mina, Mina, full of my dreams, full of my love.” Those last words he would often chant to her playfully but also, she thought, with nostalgia. “Mina, Mina, full of my dreams, full of my love.”
* * *
While Mina consumed books with hunger and without discrimination as a child, it was on the edge of young adulthood, with the books earnestly selected for her by a fawning teacher, that words began to seep into her living moments. Sometimes there was confusion.
Tuesday, January 1, 1985. I must create a life to look back on, a life I can search for in the future, time now that will inevitably be lost only to be found once again. I must live my life then write about it. Or maybe I should write my life then live it.
Like her grandfather before her, Mina felt the restless urgency to move, the longing for travel. But Mina was much younger than her grandfather had been when he sailed away romantically on a handmade dhow in search of adventure. Plus, she was not an Arab man but an Arab girl, and trouble was inescapably enfolded in the pages of her wayward desires.
It was the year of the carefully selected books that Mina began to craft encounters. One morning in winter, she jumped out of her bedroom window and hitched a ride to the sea in the truck of a mildly shocked but mostly amused Bedouin man. He told her that his own three daughters were never out of his sight and wouldn’t dream of being in a car with a stranger.
“But they’re out of your sight now.”
“Yes, but their mother is with them.”
“What if she isn’t?”
“She must be.”
“But she’s out of your sight too.”
“Yes, but I can see her in my mind’s eye.”
“But can that eye really see?”
“It sees what’s important.” She gave him the last word but he seemed less amused. Mina noticed that he had a sharp frown crease cutting into his brow. She had made him uneasy. He dropped her off where she asked, mumbled something unintelligible, and drove off. The rocks where she sat were warmer and lonelier than she had expected. She noted this in the diary.
Then there was the boy she would run with who kept a mysterious, small leather pouch in his pocket. She would wait for him to walk in through the school gates. He would see her, peripherally, but pretend he hadn’t. He would normally arrive seconds before the bell rang; she wished he would come earlier. One afternoon, during lunch break, she ran and he gave chase. She flew into the boys’ locker room. It was empty. She dashed into the showers and stopped. He bumped into her from behind, lifted her up, put her down again. They looked into each other’s eyes.
“What’s in the pouch?”
Instead of answering, he bit her arm hard, like he wanted to take a bite out of it. He ran out. She rubbed the spit left behind into her skin.
Later she invented reasons for why she had a bruise in the shape of teeth on her arm, one for each person who asked.
“I bit my own arm in my sleep because I had a toothache.”
“My cousin has a monkey that bites the arms of girls who don’t wear gingham dresses.”
“An accident with a plunger.”
Everything but what had really happened, which belonged, in part, to the diary.
Sometimes, instead of spending the night at her best friend’s house as she had told her parents, she would skip off to one of the weekend parties thrown in inexplicably empty villas with designated floors for drinking and dancing, a policeman guarding the front door. Mina would try to take furtive photographs. She got the idea at a party once after noticing flashes that could have been lightening but were more likely something else. It was not risk-free to take pictures since, like her, many weren’t supposed to be at these parties and certainly wanted no material evidence that proved otherwise. In the middle of dancing she would pull out her little camera, raise it above her head, aim it downwards, and snap phantom photos. Usually people were too drunk to register the sudden flash in the dark or, if they did, couldn’t figure out what it was.
One night, Mina found herself on an undesignated floor. There didn’t seem to be anyone around, unusual for these parties. The area was unlit, but it looked like an extremely narrow corridor led from the top of the stairs to an open door. Mina felt her way along the corridor. She began to hear a distinct scratching and clicking sound. At the end of the corridor, she poked her head through the door and made out a wide figure huddled in the dark, completely still but for her hands.
“Who are you?” Silence. Mina asked again in Arabic.
Though she was sitting only about a meter away, the old woman’s voice echoed as if from across a wide valley. “I have to finish removing the stones from this rice. It must be ready in time.”
“In time for what?”
“In time for lunch. The men will bring the fish. Fish out of water must be plunged immediately into pools of rice.”
“But do you live here? Who are you?” Mina noticed that the scratching and clicking came from the woman’s fingernails running across an empty tin plate. There was no rice in the plate and no discarded stones either. She took photos of the absences so she could write about them later.
* * *
Mina had always been fascinated by her grandmother’s collection of birds. Her grandmother had only agreed to leave India to return with her husband to his Arabian land on the condition that she be permitted to bring along her birds, each and every one. If Mina’s grandfather’s quarters were clouded with suspended book and projector dust, her grandmother’s quarters were strewn with floating bird feathers. Screaming greens and shiny blues, upbeat yellows and fancy pinks, Mina felt like she had stepped into a conjuror’s box of tricks whenever she made her way through the room. Her grandmother spent her mornings in private, drinking tea, milky and sweet, and talking to the macaws, the mynas, the rose-ringed parakeets, the cockatoos, each in turn. Mina would listen through a small crack in the door. She would catch fragments of sentences in her grandmother’s lilting voice. Did she hear her grandmother tell the birds that madness ran in the family like an ostrich through the savanna? Was t
hat why she had decided to escape India? Could the murmurs about her own children be true? Only in the pages of Mina’s diary did her birdwoman grandmother take flight. As far as everyone else was concerned, she was a no-nonsense old lady who happened to like birds.
At first, Mina didn’t realize she was crafting encounters, and even after it began to dawn on her, she wasn’t quite sure why. It was only at the end of that year, when the boy with the pouch revealed its contents to her, that she began to understand. All along, she had been crafting encounters that would make good stories. Stories to keep you up all night reading them as they helped put you to sleep. Stories you wished would never end as they pushed you to finish. Stories that would leave holes in you even as they provided plugs. Stories for only some to believe and even them only sometimes. They were the kinds of stories Mina had been writing in the diary all year without realizing. The diary compulsion had become overpowering, impossible to fight. It wasn’t just the absurd or atmospheric that would be recorded. Everything – every conversation, every experience, every thought, every feeling – was filtered through the diary lens. From the loss of religion to the loss of virginity, the diary was a testament to the life of a young girl living at cross-purposes with a crusty society. Mina was protected from the potential crush of its wrath only because she was discreet and because few could be bothered to investigate the incessant scribbling of a child. Though she was changing no faster than the desert landscape overrun by petrodollar construction, it was too fast for the self-appointed guardians of customs and traditions in whose name all manner of things were kept in check. Unless there was money to be made.
The diaries took over Mina’s room. Notebooks and scraps of paper to be transferred into notebooks were stashed in every available corner. Under her bed, between her bed frame and mattress, behind her dresser, among the books on her bookshelves: diaries. This awkward stashing was her feeble attempt at secrecy. She told herself she didn’t want anyone to read her words but would sometimes relish the thrill of imagining what it would be like if curiosity got the better of someone. What would they think about her narrow escapes, her hits and misses, her nows or nevers? She often wrote with imagined eyes hovering over her shoulders but registered those eyes as a dare rather than a threat. She could not predict that when the imagined happened, when hovering eyes landed, there would be no pleasure in it, no thrill, nothing but a vortex of shame and guilt.