Brown Rings on a Woman’s Head-Shawl

I walk through the antique streets of this city that carries so much history, my book-filled bag on my back, the laces on my trainers neatly tied. I walk through the streets, an alien here in my feelings, my gestures, my speech. As the poet al-Mutanabbi put it, “a stranger in face and hand and tongue.” I am thinking about Suroor’s pain, about filthiness, about the justifications people drum up. In the end everyone does what they want to do, and they always find ways to justify it. Their words of excuse come into existence along with the acts they validate—and it’s an easy birth these excuses have.

When I’m tired of walking, I sit down at a café, a table by the window overlooking the street, and I order a black coffee. I stop worrying over Suroor and her sister and people’s excuses. But I’m not really seeing this large cup or the black liquid it holds. What I see in front of me is a tiny cup filled with dark brown coffee gripped in fleshy, wrinkled fingers.

In my mind, I see the pale shadow cast by the house’s outer wall onto the ground inside the compound, and I see her sitting on a mat in the courtyard, her legs stretched in front of her, absorbed in drinking her coffee. She is not weighted down by thoughts. She is not remembering anything, not missing anything or wishing for it, not dreaming of anything as she sits under the ample shade of the bitter orange tree.

The children had grown up and her lap was empty now. Her one good eye had gone dull and she could barely see; there was no needle and thread in her hand these days, no length of fabric. Her legs were infirm now and she no longer made her way from the house out to the fields in the late afternoons. She sat. That’s all. She sat, drinking her coffee, nothing else; returning neighbors’ greetings when the women stopped by to say hello, as they were on their way home, waving away the relentless flies, once in a while uttering a couple of words or a sentence, sipping her coffee, without any of it returning her to the past, to memory. As if nothing existed beyond this moment, beyond drinking her coffee; or as if it were an eternal moment that had always existed and always would. As if the past never happened, as if her father’s justifications for throwing her out of his house, along with her brother, did not still linger somewhere inside her head. As if her brother’s youth—her brother’s life—had not collapsed beneath the many mud-brick walls he had built back then, receiving a paltry five bisa coins for every wall.

She sat in the gloomy shade drinking her coffee. The past was obscured now; the time when she had roasted the black-brown beans herself, and ground them by hand with her cast-iron pestle, and watched closely as the coffee began to boil in the little brass pot, lifting it off the heat at exactly the right moment. Now all she did was drag her body with its lifeless legs over the ground, from her room out to the shade of the wall in the courtyard. The Bengali would emerge from the kitchen with a thermos made in Taiwan, and a little cup, setting it all down beside her without looking at her, and then he would go away. Like us. Like all of us, we all went away, hurrying off to friends, to homework, to our little secrets, to the TV, to racing one another on our bicycles, to little quarrels in the neighborhood, while she remained there, sitting in the shade of the wall, even if she was not yet calling out, “Don’t go.” She conducted herself properly, suitably, as one must, understanding the justifications that people had, or not thinking much about them, self-contained, drinking her coffee.

I left the café, slinging my bag over my shoulder. The snow had started falling again, and I hugged my wool jacket closer around my body. How do our bodies find it so easy to obey clothing that they’ve never before learned to wear? When I was little, in the cold season she always insisted on bringing out that square green woolen shawl and knotting it around my neck. I never dared to object. In the summer, I wore whatever lightweight garments she had sewn for me, and in the winter I wrapped myself up in the shawl and breathed in the heavy, pungent smell of wool. When I started school, I changed out of the traditional clothing everyone wore in the village into my blue pinafore. And later, when I went to Muscat, I replaced my traditional village clothes with a skirt and blouse. When I traveled to this cold land, I changed out of my traditional clothes and wore a jacket and trousers instead. She never shed the clothes that were native to the village she came from. Even when her legs could no longer carry her and she had to drag herself out to the shade of the courtyard, she did not complain about her long, loose clothing getting in her way. She went on sitting there looking as she had looked, it seemed, for all eternity: in her bright-colored cotton tarha and the black tunic that fell below her knees, embroidered at the bodice, with light, colorful sleeves, and her closely fitting sirwal trousers beneath, showing their inches of fine silver embroidery around the cuffs. Never in her life had she put on an abaya, nor any garment other than these with which she had grown up. The small trunk in which she kept her clothing held a few tunics and pairs of finely worked sirwals, and nothing else. Her night clothes were simply the daytime clothes that had gotten too old, the fabric too thin to wear in daylight. There were no underclothes. Her small, carved wooden mandus held an array of little glass bottles, their colors faded, emptied of the perfumed oils they were meant to hold. That little chest also contained a silver anklet that had been her mother’s, a few fine Chinese porcelain bowls, and tightly packed rows of colorful tarhas all made out of similar cotton fabric, all with repeating designs: large red roses, or green trees, or yellow stars. Running down the long edges were a few words in Swahili, stamped onto the fabric in big letters that she couldn’t read, just as she couldn’t read any other language. In this village where she now lived—in our village—the women called these colorful African head-shawls ghadfas or liisus, but she called them masarrs, as she had always heard them called in her own village.

When she was still a girl, and her brother could provide barely enough food for the two of them, she had yearned for a colorful headdress like all the women had. She had longed desperately for that masarr, before she learned to let go of all yearnings and the foulness they could bring in their wake.

One day, she went to the owner of the only shop in her village. She greeted him and fell silent. As she stood there, not moving, he was busying himself with his stacks of canned food and jars of samna and honey. When he spoke, his voice was very loud, as though she were hard of hearing. “What does Bint Aamir want?”

My grandmother stared with her one good eye at the piles of dreamed-of masarrs. “I want a masarr,” she said, her voice little more than a hoarse whisper. The shopkeeper sighed. “But a masarr costs two qirsh, and you’re completely dependent on your brother, and all he gets are day wages.” He went back to his work, now straightening the imported fabrics, soft, expensive duryahi cloth and silk from India. But she didn’t go away. She just stood there. She wasn’t looking at the silks but at the cotton masarrs. A few years after Bint Aamir stood in the shop, their price would dwindle to less than a quarter-qirsh each. But at that time—in the days of hunger and inflation—a masarr did cost two entire qirsh. Her fist had never once closed around such a sum of money. The shopkeeper gazed at her quizzically. “I want to buy a masarr,” she said. “Bi-s-sabr, with your patience—on credit. I’ll make charcoal. I’ll bring you the two qirsh.” It all came out in one rush of breath. Bi-s-sabr wa-basakhkhim wa-barudd lak al-qirshayn. As the words came out, no longer imprisoned inside her, she felt her chest expand with air—the chest of a girl who had barely said goodbye to childhood as she stepped into adolescence. She had never paid any notice to that chest, the slight swellings on her front, but the shop owner noticed. He gave the wood door panel a little push and suddenly the windowless shop was dark. “Come over here,” the shop owner said. “You can look at the masarrs and pick one out. You’re not below any of those women who have them.” She came closer to him, scarcely believing he was ready to let her buy one. Both hands gripped the soft fabric, while the shop owner’s gaze fixed on her chest. He was very close to her now and he gasped out, “I can show you something sweeter than that masarr.” With a quick movement of his hand, there facing her, he opened the izar wrapped around his waist. She had no mother. She was poor. She had been thrown out of her father’s care and protection. But she was still his daughter. She was the girl who belonged to the proud horseman whose courage the women chanted in their melodic poem-songs. For just a moment the shock of it froze her. She didn’t understand what it was she was being shown. But she understood that he wanted something unacceptable from her. Something despicable. That some kind of bargain was on offer. She found some strength, retrieved some pride, as the daughter of the father who had thrown her out. “I am Bint Aamir!” she shrieked, over and over, as she threw the masarrs in his face and fled the shop.

Two days later, the shopkeeper’s sister came to her door clutching a masarr that was patterned in interlacing brown rings. She entered the dilapidated room that was their home, the half-collapsed structure to which she and her brother had come seeking some kind of shelter. She unfolded the new masarr in front of Bint Aamir. “Pretty?” she asked. Her listener swallowed. The shop owner’s sister went on. “Here, take it, on credit,” she said. “But you have to pay back the two qirsh before the feast day.”

For the first time since her mother’s death, Bint Aamir felt a glimmer of joy in her life. She promised she would repay the debt before the feast day. After their goodbyes, she laid the masarr out on the mat. Her fingers traced the brown rings, around and around, one after another. She would have preferred one imprinted with red roses, but this masarr was now hers. And it was new, and the fabric was soft, even if it was covered in dullish brown rings. She was walking on clouds. Her eyes were wet as she hugged the soft fabric of her own new masarr to her face and fell asleep.

That was when she began to spend her time with the musakhkhammat—the coal-faced women, they were called, because they made and sold charcoal. Provisioning herself with dates and water, she went out with them, walking far from the village, beyond the fields, and out to the desert. They gathered dead wood all day long. At sundown, they set fire to the wood and then buried it in the sand. As the embers smoldered, they formed a circle around the hole they had dug. They waited for the wood to die, eating their dates. They spent the whole night waiting for the embers to turn to charcoal. In the predawn light, they brushed away the layer of sand, dug out the black sukhkhaam, and divided it up. Each woman tied her share in a bundle that she then hoisted onto her back and carried home before the sun was up. In the suq, a load of coal would fetch a half-qirsh. She had to go out every day for a week to amass as much as a wiqr of charcoal, enough to sell. The loads of wood frayed her thin, tattered her clothes even further. But before the feast day she had managed to acquire two silver qirsh coins.

She went out once again, though, with the charcoal women to help them and to say goodbye. She told them she would come back from time to time to make charcoal. Doing so would help her brother, even if only a little. But that night she couldn’t leave them, because Umayra suddenly went into labor. The other charcoal women had to tend to her instead of their embers. Bint Aamir was left to attend to the embers as they turned into charcoal, and she was the one who gathered it all up. Just before dawn, Umayra gave birth. She wrapped her tiny, puckered baby boy in a rag and tied him over her share of the coal. She began to walk, carrying both bundles, her charcoal and her baby boy, back to the village, arriving home before the sun came up.