It is all horribly wrong, Kathmiya realized as soon as she saw the watery pink streak on her dingy sheet.
There were no witnesses, there was no celebration, there was only a sticky desire that should have been resisted and a hollow, upside-down feeling like an overturned boat floating on the water.
She stared at her lover, who appeared more handsome than ever now that she was determined to leave him. But what choice did she have? Run off with him and live…where? She had already been driven out of the marshes. And now she could not even stay in Basra.
As she wrote him a final note, the magnitude of her shame burned at Kathmiya’s skin.
Then she stumbled out of the house with nothing but the little ring in her worn pocket. When the sun-warmed air hit her face, Kathmiya knew there was only one place in the whole city of thousands of people where anyone would receive her.
She wasn’t sure how to tell her mother, only that she had to see her. Jamila had to forgive and help her daughter. If not, Kathmiya would be good and truly ruined.
When Kathmiya knocked at Nafisa’s front door, she was met with a rude look of surprise. “I thought you would be with your mother,” the widow said. “Your father being ill and all.”
Ali was sick and no one had even told Kathmiya! She wanted to sink back into her familiar, comfortable red world of anger, but how dare she? After what she had done? Jamila was her only lifeline to the family, and it was fraying. Heat and friction could break it completely.
Back at Leah and Salim’s home, Kathmiya felt more empty than before: Shafiq had not waited for her. The message in her note kept him away. She wrote it that way on purpose, but she had also been testing him, mad, irrational girl that she was, hoping that he would find her after she left.
“My father is ill. I have to go home,” Kathmiya told the family. Only she knew the buried secret: that she would never return. The ruse made leaving all the more difficult, because her good-bye was supposed to be temporary, not anguished. She hugged Aziza close and felt her soft toddler skin and thought, Is that it?
One last night in that little maid’s room. Too late to appreciate the security she had enjoyed there, the safety of the small life she could have had if she had followed the old widow’s advice.
Kathmiya had not been home to the marshes for months. She had never been openly ostracized but she had exiled herself, deciding to return only in triumph.
Now, instead, she was on the ferry again with nothing but her clay vase, her burgundy dress, her red book and oh, that ring. A reminder of the terrible cataclysm she had brought on herself, but also a keepsake that still promised there could be a way out.
As she approached the wetlands where she lived, she tried to summon her inner resources. Perhaps it was Allah’s will that Ali got sick so she could see her family now. Torn and soiled she was, but home.
It was daytime when she arrived at the small hut, but the clouds overhead blotted the colors, as though the ash from the charcoal fires had settled on the green grass, the blue water, the pale straw.
Kathmiya suddenly remembered a little song that the weavers used to sing. The melody danced in her heart. I belong here, she realized.
It was right to abandon Shafiq, she insisted to the part of herself that lingered in his arms.
Natural melodies. Placid waters. Heart and home.
As Kathmiya approached the house, a child scampered forward, Fatimah’s youngest, now walking, as little and light as a doll. The girl was barefoot and dressed in a too-big shirt, a sharp contrast to pampered Aziza with her neat jumpers. But in her niece’s winsome smile, the innocence of her life, the simplicity of this world, Kathmiya found a measure of tranquility.
She was feeling calm despite her shame when Fatimah came out, stunned to see her. “What are you doing here?” she asked quietly.
Facing her sister, Kathmiya experienced, for the first time, a release from her perpetual resentment. The grave sin she had committed retroactively justified all of the ill treatment she had suffered. It was suddenly only natural that Fatimah should enjoy stability and happiness; she was the better woman. Eager to atone, Kathmiya was meek for the first time in her memory. “I heard Abuyah was sick, so I came to see him.”
“He’s fine,” Fatimah said dismissively, but she looked curious, as though she noticed something was different. “Just a little tired.”
“May I see him then?” The old Kathmiya would have barged in, but having sinned, she didn’t dare.
Fatimah sighed. “We’ve moved back home, my family. We’re looking after him. So just don’t worry about us,” she said softly. Then, as though she sensed her own triumph over Kathmiya’s spirit and was more secure than ever, she managed a kind tone. “Another day, perhaps, you can come back. But leave us be now. Go with Allah.”
But I have nowhere to go, Kathmiya thought. Still, she said nothing, just turned back toward the thick reeds and headed to the ferry. It would not leave again until morning, but for this cowed, disgraced young girl, the wait was just another penance she deserved.
The marshes didn’t have a proper port like in Basra, only a shore where boats slipped by like they did everywhere, home-grown canoes rowed by local people who took passengers to the larger stops where they could board commercial ferries from far-off cities. Kathmiya made her way there by evening. She rested against her little burlap sack of possessions, but she couldn’t sleep.
The yellow-headed blackbird’s night song, like the sound of a rusty gate swinging open, didn’t trouble Kathmiya; she was disturbed by the doubt tugging at her heart. Her rapturous acceptance of this suffering as just punishment for all of her wrongs was, in truth, wearing thin.
That old widow and her advice.
Although she wanted to cling to the simple belief that she was the worse woman, and that Fatimah had a right to a husband and home where Kathmiya did not, the chain of events told a different story. If Kathmiya had been safely married off in the marshes, she never even would have met Shafiq.
Yet, part of her wanted to be with him. That is sin enough, she thought.
Since waking up skin against skin and realizing she had to leave, Kathmiya had not indulged in self-pity. But now, trying to get comfortable on the small pack of belongings that was all she had in the world, she felt overwhelmed by a mushrooming sadness.
She tried to push her mind back to the idea of finding a place in society—of being humble, like the disgraced and undeserving woman that she was, but Kathmiya couldn’t rest her thoughts there. Finally, she took out the pink sapphire ring and held it delicately. She could feel the smooth stone and twisted gold band. Still there, still hers, still with the ability to sparkle, even though she couldn’t see that in the dark night.
Kathmiya was intuitive enough to understand what the ring stood for, but she was unable to figure any possible way its inspirational origin could lead her to safety.
Dawn broke over the horizon, sending a shimmering glow across the waters and reminding Kathmiya yet again of the heart-rending beauty of the world she was about to leave.
She turned over, then felt a quick panic until she found the ring between two pebbles colored gray like a pair of pigeons.
She hesitated before putting it in her pocket. Bury it in the moist ground? Accept her fate and forget that anyone had ever tried to love her?
She could keep it in her pocket…or not.
She put the ring on her finger.
Stared at its facets.
Admired it, really.
And then rummaged past her burgundy dress and few other clothes and one bar of soap and clay vase until she found the red barn book.
The dinar was inside, as inscrutable as ever, but now Kathmiya understood why it had fascinated Shafiq: it was from that place, that America where he was planning to go.
She turned the book’s pages from back to front, thinking she was reading it forward, until she got to what she took to be the end. And there, above more indecipherable words, were two symbols: a flag and a cross.
Kathmiya had never paid much attention to these markings stamped in the book, and had no hope of reading the inscription penned underneath them. She had never, for that matter, noticed either symbol anywhere in the city. But she had always understood that the book came from a faraway country. And she had explored enough of Basra to know that there was one neighborhood where all the foreign people lived.
She still had no idea who had given her the treasure, but she was going to try to find out.
Kathmiya boarded the next ferry headed south and realized, for the first time in two days, that she was ravenously hungry.