During Abd al-Ghani’s wedding, his sister Aisha was the happiest of girls. As far as she was concerned, weddings were festivals that filled her imagination with sweet dreams. Ever since she had matured and left her innocent childhood behind, she had been deprived of the enjoyment of such celebrations.
Young girls were normally not allowed to attend wedding ceremonies for fear that their mothers would be accused of peddling their wares on the market. No beautiful girl who was from an illustrious background and had a rich father would ever appear in public as a way of attracting the attention of prominent families, when one of the mothers might decide to come and ask for the girl’s hand. The only way to get a glimpse of such girls was in the bosom of the family, inside the house; the only time the girl would leave the house was to go to the bathhouse or to visit her grandparents. However, a family celebration provided a golden opportunity for the girl to have some fun and to appear as a rosebud in a society where only fully opened flowers would be seen on such occasions.
Aisha was overjoyed by her brother’s wedding. For the first time she was fully aware of what was happening as she witnessed a wedding ceremony. She was wearing beautiful clothes and was free of the restraints imposed by her mother’s watchful eye, her father’s worries, and her brother’s strict control. She was also participating in the preparations for the occasion and was happily wearing herself out helping with the various entertainments involved. For the first time too she would be sitting with the older female guests and conversing freely with them.
Indeed, people did start looking at her. She was lively, energetic, and blooming. A child no more, she had become a young woman, lovely and enticing. People did not normally look at a girl like her just to assess her beauty and discover her talents; part of their interest involved thoughts about possible marriages and selecting a prospective bridegroom for this beautiful rose that had now fully opened and was ready to be picked.
It was not just Aisha’s beauty that made people look at her. Hajj Muhammad’s financial and social status had several of the women present thinking carefully about a closer connection. If he had not actually had a daughter, they would certainly have wished he had one so that a relationship, and a powerful link with another noble family, could be established. These thoughts were going through the minds of the female guests as they noticed Aisha moving among them with such grace and liveliness. A whole series of comments ensued.
‘God grant that I may come to your wedding!’
‘Enough. It’s already time to celebrate your wedding as well.’
‘I dearly hope that I can be of help at your wedding celebration.’
The young girl blushed bashfully. For the first time, she was hearing words that gave her the idea that she too would one day be a bride and people would celebrate her marriage. She did her best to hide herself from these words and the peering eyes that kept staring at her. But those same words beset her as much in secret as they did in the open. Wherever she went, all she heard was more comments.
‘Well, Khaduj, when will you be celebrating Aisha’s wedding?’
‘God bless her beauty and youth!’
‘You don’t need matchmakers. The whole house is full of them!’
‘Aisha, would you agree to be married to my son?’
Aisha would have much preferred not to have to avoid these comments, smiles, and stares that took in her attributes with both affection and anticipation. She liked hearing the words – they were like sweet melodies that moved from her ears to her very core, which thirsted for such tunes. However, as it was, modesty forced her to direct her stumbling footsteps away from all these ladies and servant-women as they continued to extol her beauty and wish her a happy future life. Even if modesty had not forced her to move away, she would have had to do it in any case. No young woman of marriageable age was allowed to look at such ladies and servants, or listen to chatter about her beauty and marriage prospects, without fleeing as soon as possible and hiding from these people whose sole right it was to discuss the affairs of men and women.
So, she fled – but she was unable to escape the magic of the words that now enveloped her entire being. She could feel them in her heart as though her ears were still listening.
‘It’s time you were married—’
‘Would you agree to marry my son?’
‘God grant that I may come to your wedding!’
All of the sweet and wonderful words were still ringing in her ears. But, gradually, the magic began to fade and a more rational approach took over. ‘“Marry my son?” Am I to be a bride one day? A wife for a husband? A woman for a man? A man!’
Her thoughts came to a halt at that word, ‘man’. Her memory, and her conscious and unconscious imagination, contained many visions and images of such a creature. She had never met a man outside her family in her entire life, and all she knew came from conversations with the servant-women, who would talk to her and explain what the word really meant.
‘Aisha,’ Yasmine would whisper to her, ‘men are shifty. My little one, you should never trust any of them. If one of them stares at you, make sure you look away. He’s only staring out of his own lust. Men eat fruit, then they spit out the pips. Make sure you’re never one of those pips.’
When Aisha had started to emerge from her childhood and become a teenager, a whole host of words had battered her ears.
‘Men destroy a girl’s moral compass, Aisha. If you set eyes on a man, you must realise that there’s some scandal involved.’
‘Scandal?’ Aisha had asked.
Her young mind could not fully grasp the dimensions of the word ‘scandal’, but it obviously implied some major risk, something that was both hurtful and damaging.
‘There was a beautiful young girl your age,’ another story went, ‘just as beautiful as you are. The man involved deceived her, then laughed at her. Her family disowned her, and the wretch himself did the same. She was left with no family and no one to look after her.’
Such stories made Aisha even more confused and distressed. ‘What did the man do?’ she wondered. ‘How did he deceive her? How did he come to laugh at her? Why did her family disown her?’
She could not answer any of these questions because her young mind had yet to learn how to give meaning to such terms; she did not understand what Yasmine meant by giving her this dire warning. It was only the expression on Yasmine’s face, serious and rigid, that gave her an inkling of what was intended. She looked straight into Aisha’s eyes as she spoke, but hardly had she done so before she deliberately looked away. Yasmine’s eyes hid a lot, but at the same time they also expressed a great deal. Aisha made sure to pay close attention to her careful warnings whenever they were alone together.
‘Listen, Aisha! Men will tempt you, they’ll say they love you. Young girls don’t understand men. Make sure that no man ever tempts you or tries to say he loves you. You don’t even realise what lies beyond the initial temptation and declaration of love.’
Aisha now lived in mortal terror. Yasmine’s words had created a threatening picture of men in her mind. But now, here were all these ladies and servant-women wishing her to have a husband, a bridegroom… a man!
She may have been able to escape the talk of these women and servant-girls about her beauty and wishing her to find a husband and spouse, but the words they used stuck to her and filled her world with echoes that went deep. It was almost as though her ears could only pick up the words ‘husband’, ‘bridegroom’, and ‘man’.
‘This is the temptation that Dada Yasmine has been warning me about,’ she told herself. ‘A man falls in love with me from afar; his name evokes a persistent curiosity inside me. I need to be clever about this, so I won’t suffer the same fate as that girl who was disowned by both her family and the man in question.’
As the celebrations of Abd al-Ghani’s wedding proceeded, Aisha no longer listened to the compliments and aspirations. The female guests’ honeyed words no longer filled her ears with notions of a bridegroom. However, she did open her eyes to a brand-new phenomenon in the house: Saadiyya, Abd al-Ghani’s wife. She was about the same age as Aisha, a little older but not that much. A young, beautiful prize, but one who had a groom, a husband, a man! She was living inside their house as though no man had ever hoodwinked her, or laughed at her. Her morals were still unsullied. She looked happy with the way things were going, her feelings evident in the sparkle of her beautiful, honey-coloured eyes. Her tawny cheeks were a brilliant rosy red, and her eyes were lined with dark black kohl. Aisha wondered whether Saadiyya had looked that way before she was discovered and married to a man.
‘How is it,’ Aisha asked herself, ‘that Saadiyya does not feel utterly disgusted’ – in Aisha’s case, the effects of the concept had now reached the point of nausea – ‘at the mere mention of the word “bridegroom” or “man”?’ It seemed to Aisha the reason was that she did not have someone like Yasmine beside her to explain what bridegrooms and men were all about. However, Saadiyya was happy; she seemed to have discovered some new world, one where she did not need to run away, or feel disgusted and nauseous.
This small idea now plunged Aisha into a terrifying vortex. The blood in her veins kept pulsing with a summons she had never known before, challenging her personal calm, putting her on edge, and making her feel a sense of revolt, or defiance – a new paradigm invading her untroubled youth, a summons that occasionally pulled at her sense of modesty and filled her with dread at the thought of this interloping idea that had transformed her into a modern girl living in a modern world.
The vortex continued to envelop Aisha and her small idea. The words that she had heard from the ladies and servant-women attending the wedding celebrations were delightful and pleasant, with dimensions and horizons that had never confronted her before: groom, husband, a world strewn with roses and blooms giving off a lovely scent from afar for a thirsty soul. When? When would that distance be shortened, overlaid with a world of roses and flowers?
Still that vortex.
Man? Groom? Husband?
Yasmine’s advice still rang in Aisha’s young ears, as though she were hearing it for the first time. ‘If you set eyes on a man, you must realise that there’s some scandal involved. If any man stares at you, avoid any eye contact.’
Then she thought, ‘The world of roses involves scandal? The Devil’s started washing his feet inside my heart. No, no, I’ll never have any thoughts about men. They’re dirty and scurrilous. They destroy your morals, they…’
And still the vortex.
‘Saadiyya has a husband, a bridegroom, a man. Even so, her tiny eyes radiate happiness. She’s obviously happy, happy in the arms of a man…’
Aisha spent a lengthy adolescence in this frightening perplexity, its length not measured in months or years. Instead, it was measured in frightful phrases that violently jolted her feelings, phrases that sent her into a dangerous mental state whose primary focus was men.