Suroor and I were in the library. I was helping her read a manuscript in Arabic. She was telling me how much she wanted to improve her Urdu, too—her “second language,” as it was considered suitably and properly to be by the petite bourgeoisie of Pakistan. She was trying to concentrate on the text, although in reality she couldn’t focus her thoughts on anything but her sister, Kuhl. But was this person truly her sister? Suroor felt like she hardly knew her anymore. Kuhl’s emotions were always fraught and her mind was elsewhere. She was walking through life on a frothy cloud, she was caught in a waiting game, she was only passing by, or crossing through. Not really living. She would tell Suroor that her soul was suspended on the ripply little folds between the buttons on her beloved’s shirt. That her spirit hung helplessly there, bumping against the pleats and creases and wrinkles of his shirt. This passion—everything about this consuming love!—Suroor simply could not understand or accept it. How could the spirit of any creature be pledged like this, to the creases of a shirt and its buttons? How could anyone mortgage their soul away? She didn’t understand the story of the shirt at all. How could those ordinary wrinkles that form on any shirt when one sits down be—on the shirt of one particular person—a snare that caught the soul in its creases?
Suddenly she stopped reading. “But you didn’t tell me,” she said. “You never told me you had a grandmother.”
“Everyone has grandmothers,” I said.
She laughed. She was so innocent. “Of course, everyone has grandmothers. But your family—they are well off, aren’t they? So why. . . why would your grandmother wish she could be a peasant farmer?”
“Maybe she was like the wife of Mu‘tamid bin Abbad,” I replied. “The wife could see the peasant women from the balcony of her palace, and she longed to walk barefoot on the soil as they did. So her husband, the emir, thought the only thing to do was to bedeck the courtyard of the palace with perfume, saffron, musk, and camphor, and he ordered that it all be anointed with water until it was as damp as the soil in the fields. His wife went out to stroll with her daughters and her attendants, plunging her feet into the perfumed soil just as the peasant women did in the real soil.” Just then Suroor’s phone rang and she was immediately plunged into conversation with her sister. I left the library.
It was just a funny story. I had no wish to scratch up Suroor’s pure innocence. Suroor seemed to me like a porcelain figurine, while my grandmother was a mountain. After my grandmother’s brother died, she found herself alone in the half-ruined shack where they lived with two minute coffee cups, a small platter, a cooking pot, two bedsheets, some worn-out clothes, and a new head wrap imprinted with brown rings. She learned from women in the neighborhood that some man had presented himself as a marriage prospect but her father had refused to allow her to wed. She went back to working with the charcoal women. Many, many years ago, Mu‘tamid bin Abbad said, “They will be walking in the soil, their feet bare, as if what their feet touch is not musk and camphor.” As for my grandmother and her charcoal-making friends, all they knew of camphor and musk were the words.
One day she fainted while they were on their way back to the village. The charcoal she was carrying on her back scattered across the ground. The women gathered it up, but they had a much harder time trying to rouse her. The sun had already come up; at home, their waking husbands and children found no one baking their bread. The women dragged her, half-conscious, all the way to her shack. She would follow her brother before long, they whispered to each other. But in fact, she would live to see eighty.
It was on that day, late in the afternoon, that Salman and his wife, Athurayyaa, came to visit. Salman was a relative on her mother’s side. After her brother’s death, he had invited her to live in his household but she had refused. Two years passed, and her health was deteriorating. This time, he came with his wife to take her away. He helped her pack the pitcher, the two tiny cups, the cooking pot, the platter, and the two sheets. She wound her new masarr about her head and neck, put on her silver anklet, and went away with them.
My grandmother never did own her own little plot of land to till. She lived for eighty years, or perhaps it was longer, and she died before she came to own anything on the face of this earth. She had a green thumb: it was she who planted all the lemon and bitter orange trees in the courtyard of our house. One bitter orange tree was her favorite, but no tree that she planted and tended had ever withered. But still, it was our house, our courtyard, our trees. She lived with us, that’s all. She didn’t own the building, or the land, or even us. I think of her as my grandmother, but we weren’t really her grandchildren.
She would lean her back against the bitter orange tree, and stretch her legs out in front of her, and cuddle my infant brother and sing to him.
Ya hooba hooba hooba, ya hooba wana uhibbuh,
wahibb illi yuhibbuh,
wa-‘asr ana mrawwahat buh an al-ghashshun tihib-bu,
willi yibba habibi yibii’ ummuh wabuuh,
wiybii’ khiyaar maluh min il-mabsali wakhuuh,
ya hooba hooba hooba. . . until my brother went to sleep. On and on it went, over and over.
Hooba hooba I love this little one,
I love anyone who loves this baby son
In the late afternoon I hold him oh so tight
sheltered from the wind gusts mighty or slight
Anyone who wants him, will they sell their ma and pop
Anyone who wants him, will they sell their fine date crop. . .
She always made a little bed for him in the shade of the narinjah tree, smoothing out his hair as he slept. That’s where she would work the dried lemons, taking out the darkened inner flesh, which she used to make broth, and then boiling the hardened brown peel to make the infusion that calmed my mother’s spells of nausea during her frequent pregnancies. In the clear, peaceful late afternoons, she sat with her old neighbor Shaykha, before the dementia got to her. They drank coffee and ate dates and talked. What did they talk about? There’s no doubt that the only subject Shaykha talked about was her son, whom I never saw. Even when I first met Shaykha—she was already an old woman then—her son had grown up and gone very far away. He was very far away; he was very emigrant. I don’t remember what my grandmother ever talked about. My little brother Sufyan’s crying, or perhaps his irritation at having to drink baby formula? The new fruit growing on the narinjah tree? The only trip she ever made with us, when we went to the Emirates? An accursed hump on the back of a woman named Rayya? Or did she ever talk about the one man who had offered his hand in marriage, and was refused by her father?