Women of Sand and Myrrh (17 page)

I thought of running away from the new house whose floor was unwelcoming to my jumping step, and whose walls rebuffed my laughter. Then one morning I felt blood on the inside of my thighs and knew that I’d grown up. I remembered what I’d said when I wanted them all to have pity on me and change their minds about making me get married: ‘Are you going to marry me off when I’m not even a woman yet?’ My aunt had answered, ‘God willing you won’t become a woman before he’s been in you! As well as marrying Tawi’s daughter, he’s getting you when you’re still a little girl so you can grow up at his house and he can raise you.’ I asked Khaizuran for a piece of cloth, refusing to tell her what it was for. Then I began to cry. I wanted to go home for an hour, but Reehan refused to let me, insisting that there were three days to go before I was due to visit my family.

Khaizuran discovered that Ibrahim had fewer and fewer headcloths with every day that passed, and that some of the family’s sheets had had strips torn off them. Then Reehan found bits of sheet, headcloths and even underclothes with bloodstains on them, tied up in a dress and hanging in a bundle on the back of the bathroom door.

Every time I woke to the sound of the dawn call to prayer, I thought of my mother and my aunt listening to the same call without me there; all that separated me from them was two streets and a few houses, and I sat sadly, unable to understand why they didn’t love me, and why they’d sent me away, since I hadn’t been greedy or made my clothes dirty. And why did I have to take Reehan as my new mother and aunt combined, and listen to her and sit with her relations and her neighbours instead of with my family?

I cried every time I visited them, refusing to go back to Reehan’s house with Khaizuran, and when my mother and my aunt visited me and brought Awatef with them I was overjoyed and my courage came back to me. I walked about
the house with firmer footsteps; even my voice changed: there was a ring to it; and I felt secure and happy as if I knew that Reehan couldn’t criticize me or tell me off in front of my own people. I took Awatef into my room. She tried on my eight gold rings and the silver one off my thumb, then my gold dress, and said enviously, ‘You are lucky!’ She asked about Ibrahim and what we did when we were in bed. I pushed my hair back off my forehead and didn’t answer.

When my mother heard that I was pregnant she trilled for joy, kissed me on the cheek and put out a hand to feel my stomach. She closed her eyes and even though Reehan had come in and was standing waiting for my mother, Taj al-Arus, to open her eyes, she said, ‘God willing, your child will be in your womb for nine months and not a day longer; God willing your child will come out with thick eyebrows and curtains of hair in his eyes, and with hair on his head and on his stomach and between his legs.’ I wished my mother would be quiet: I didn’t want Reehan and her daughter, or even Khaizuran, to hear this talk. I didn’t know that the details of my birth and the story of my mother’s four-year pregnancy were known near and far. To my surprise Reehan adjusted her veil and remarked ‘That’s just talk, Taj. Fairy tales. The Almighty doesn’t make mistakes, and He has power over all things.’

My mother was nonplussed for a moment, not knowing how to answer Reehan who’d just accused her of lying. She was visiting us alone; for the first time she’d come without my aunt, who was unwell. She wanted to speak up for herself but she was afraid that Reehan would be angry and take it out on me. She changed the subject: ‘O Tamr, my precious, O Tamr, my love. Perhaps you’re tired and you ought to lie down?’ ‘No, mother,’ I replied eagerly, then after a pause I added boldly, ‘But I want to go with you and visit my aunt.’

There was a general silence broken by my mother who said, ‘And leave your husband Ibrahim at night? You shouldn’t do that, my daughter. The day after tomorrow you
can visit us and your aunt will be better.’

I began to cry and found that I was shaking. I would have liked to throw myself into my mother’s arms and hold on to her and ask her to tell me the story of the Little Fish. I didn’t feel married or pregnant, even if Ibrahim had lain on top of me and jiggled up and down and made a sticky liquid come out, and now my stomach had swollen out. I cried louder, picturing myself left alone with Reehan, and my mother Taj al-Arus rebuked me: ‘No, Tamr. I don’t like the way you’re behaving. How can you cry when you’re at home with your family?’ Later on she told me that she’d been thinking something quite different: ‘Their coffee’s like hot water and so’s their tea; there’s no taste to them. And the dates aren’t easy on the teeth or sweet to the tongue.’ She said that she’d been wishing she could have seen me living like a sheikh’s wife, with dresses which shone as bright as stars and my hair smelling of jasmine, henna patterns on my hands and dozens of maids in attendance bearing trays of tea and coffee and dates. Then she’d heard me shouting, ‘I want to go home. I don’t like this house.’

I didn’t come back to life properly until the next time I visited my family. My aunt was bent on taking me and all the women of the house on a trip, once she’d persuaded Rashid. We climbed merrily into the car, which was to take us wherever we wished: into the desert, to the streets where the only shops were, to the hill always known as the mountain, and to the seaside. She made the car stop so that we could look out of the window. We pointed to some beautiful birds and cried out in wonder, ‘Glory be to God.’ My mother put out a hand to cover my eyes. ‘Don’t look,’ she ordered. ‘Don’t admire them. If you gasp in wonder and say that those birds are beautiful, the child in your womb might grow feathers.’ The return trip to my aunt’s house was another excursion in itself, and when we arrived there was drumming and singing and dancing all the afternoon and into the night. ‘You’re pregnant. Don’t dance,’ they told me, proud of me.
They swung their long hair about; my mother danced, and Batul danced a dance which was different from the others except for the swinging hair. They all sang to me and smiled at me. I sat with my hands resting on my stomach and counted the days to my next visit.

When my mother left Reehan’s house, Reehan ignored my bad mood, perhaps because my mother had entreated her to remember that I was still young and ignorant. But she did remark, ‘I’ve never known your poor mother Taj to hold a conversation before. She’s quite normal.’ I didn’t make any comment, but I felt angry. I couldn’t defend my mother; everybody knew the story of Taj al-Arus, and nobody – child, girl or woman – left my mother without having heard her life history.

When I felt the labour pains starting I fled to my aunt’s house. I didn’t want to be in pain and to push and strain in front of Reehan. To my mind she didn’t deserve to be there even at this special event.

They fetched Aleeya Tattoo to me; she forbade me to make a noise then she shouted herself as she pulled and pushed, as if she were the one giving birth. ‘It’s a boy! It’s a boy!’ she cried as she pulled him out. ‘Glory be to the Creator! His eyes are dark, he’s as beautiful as the moon, and he’s got a big prick: he’ll only have male children. His chest’s powerful. You can see the breeding in him. Naturally, since his mother’s descended from sheikhs and his father from merchants.’ She was lying: we weren’t descended from sheikhs! Then she turned to Nasab and Taj al-Arus, screaming, ‘Cover her eyes! She mustn’t see the afterbirth. Go and dig deep, deep and bury the afterbirth deep, deep, because the dogs are always hungry.’

Once again I fled from Reehan’s house and my son Muhammad was in my arms. It was an ordinary afternoon, the same as all the rest, and as usual Awatef had slipped in to see me when everyone in the house was asleep and the fans and air-conditioners were going full blast. We laughed a lot
and chewed gum and cracked seeds between our teeth, tried on rings and imitated Reehan’s glowering expressions and Khaizuran’s walk, and Awatef snored, imitating the sounds rising up from Reehan’s bedroom and the sitting-room where Ibrahim and his father had stretched out directly after the meal. Awatef wanted to scribble in Ibrahim’s school books but I stopped her.

We padded cat-like to the kitchen. The smell of onions and garlic and the recent meal pervaded it. We began opening the cupboards, poking around for nothing in particular. Awatef took two sticks of incense and hid them in her pocket and I took a packet of sugar candy. We went on opening more cupboards until we heard someone clearing his or her throat.

Muhammad was still in his bed. I picked him up and he went on sleeping. I said to Awatef, ‘He’s my child and they don’t even let me hold him. I want to take him and leave. Yesterday Reehan boiled a piece of lead to protect him from the evil eye and it shot out of the pot and grazed his forehead.’

Awatef winked at me and said, ‘Come on, let’s run away.’

I wanted to put the idea out of my head because I knew that this time I wouldn’t come back. Ibrahim’s family wouldn’t even try and fetch me back. The scandal of my running away to have the baby in my aunt’s house still occasionally cropped up in conversations and caused a stir. But all the same I took down a small suitcase from on top of the chest and put Muhammad’s clean nappies and a packet of dried milk in it. I whispered to Awatef, ‘You take this and I’ll carry Muhammad.’

Without hesitation Awatef nodded her head, stifling her laughter. We held our breaths and went along on tiptoe. We didn’t talk until we were just a few metres away from our house. The first words my aunt spoke when she saw us were, ‘O Tamr, O Awatef, you’re the colour of turmeric.’

^*
Taj means ‘crown’ in Arabic, and Taj al-Arus ‘the bride’s crown’.

5

Women normally flocked to my place in the afternoon and at sunset with their children and their relatives, bringing lengths of material and cuttings from fashion and hairdressing magazines. But during this month of Ramadan, I opened from nine in the evening and was closed all the afternoon just like the other businesses. I stayed in the shop from the morning onwards, the hair dryers idle around me, the clean towels folded one on top of the other: around the walls were photographs of hairstyles, a nature scene, and in the middle of one wall there was a clock which wasn’t working; Filipino music played and a smell of food made its way down into my lungs. I felt hungry; the seamstress and the stylist were in the kitchen cooking, singing along with the cassette tape and writing letters. I wondered anxiously how I was going to get back to my brother’s house in the early morning; the place wouldn’t close before five and sometime tonight Jameela and her six daughters were coming to have their hair done before they went away the following day. I couldn’t sleep in the shop: my brother’s orders. ‘Sleep by yourself in the same place as the Filipino women?’ Perhaps I would ask Jameela to accompany me to the house to keep Rashid quiet.

I forgot what was troubling me as the women came cheerfully pressing on the doorbell, knocking at the door, and sat down, chose fashions, posed in front of the mirror, went into the other room to have their dresses fitted or stuck their heads under the sprays in the basins to have their hair washed. They left their abayas flung down on the chairs, all except the client waiting her turn, who kept hers around her shoulders. I sat at my table content at the throngs of women around me, the heads under the dryers and the money in the till, already more than I’d expected to take that night.

I got up from the table and walked proudly around, at ease
with every step I took now among the women who sat waiting to be called, as if they were in a government clinic. I’d felt that I had to open up a place like this to establish my independence, and I’d become well-known among families here and in other areas. The old women who accompanied their daughters, just to watch, made me pleased because the fact that they came and sat there in my shop meant that they trusted me and gave my venture their blessing.

Gradually I became unafraid of the morning and of Rashid. The door bell rang insistently. Before I opened the door I asked as usual, ‘Who is it?’ and heard my mother’s voice reply. I turned in delight to the women sitting behind me and said excitedly, ‘It’s my mother and my aunt.’ To myself I added, ‘My aunt must have convinced Rashid.’

I turned the key in the door and before I opened it, I said to the women, ‘Veil yourselves. My cousin will carry his mother in.’

They rushed into the inner room while the women under the dryers threw their abayas over the hairdryers so that their heads and the dryers were hidden from view. When I saw that my son Muhammad had come to help his cousin I was overjoyed: I cried, ‘God protect you from the evil eye; stay alive for me, Muhammad,’ then I laughed at myself for what I’d said. My aunt didn’t want her son and Muhammad to lift her out of the wheelchair on to the ground where I’d spread out a mat in the twinkling of an eye: ‘I want to see Tamr’s place,’ she said to the men, ‘So goodbye to you.’

I locked the door behind the two of them and bent eagerly to kiss my aunt who took my face in her hands, saying, ‘I said to Rashid, let’s go and give our blessing to our darling Tamr’s new place.’ I wriggled free from my aunt’s hands and went up to my mother to kiss her, and joked, ‘Crown of the Bride and Crown for my Head, welcome. What do you say? Shall we take my aunt around and you can both give me your blessing for opening this place?’

I didn’t let go of my mother’s arm until she had wheeled
my aunt’s chair into the sewing room. They touched all the dresses hanging up there, the sewing machines, the scissors and the clippings of material. My mother shouted, ‘God is great! A headless jinnee!’ and pointed to the mannequin which the seamstress had made out of cloth stuffed with paper and rags because she hadn’t been allowed to buy a wooden dressmaker’s dummy. She began striking it with the flat of her hand until it toppled over. I introduced them to the two Filipinos. My mother smiled at them and said, ‘I wouldn’t like to see them in my dreams.’ Then she added, ‘Poor things. They haven’t much money and they’re far away from home.’ We proceeded to the next room where the Filipinos slept. The two women examined everything, even the calendar on the wall; they fingered the two girls’ letters and their numerous lipsticks, the little magnifying mirror, the rush fan, and their clothes which were folded on their beds. If the stylist hadn’t come into the room pretending to look for something, Taj al-Arus and Nasab wouldn’t have agreed to leave the room unti they’d discovered the secret of the large orange candle burning in the centre of the table. Meanwhile I was keen to know the details of Rashid’s allowing them to visit the shop; I asked them, ‘Where’s Batul?’ ‘She’s coming,’ replied my mother. ‘She’s waiting while Rashid takes Ahlam to her friend’s house.’ Rashid hadn’t commented when Batul had said to him, ‘I was going to take Ahlam with me to the salon, but she’s scared that one of the women’ll see her and like the look of her and tell her son or some other male relative about her. I know these young girls go around in wraps as thick as camel hide, and it’s certainly not because they’re thinking about what’s forbidden and what’s allowed in religion – they just don’t want to get married yet.’