When life in the village began stifling Salman, and he felt he couldn’t make a living there, he traveled to Zanzibar. He was not yet twenty. He borrowed money and bought a little farm and planted trees: banana, mango, coconut, clove. Soon he was able to begin marketing the harvest. In only a few years, he had amassed savings enough that not only could he pay off his loan, but he could return to Oman, buy and furnish a house, and think about getting married. But he preferred to stay in Zanzibar, moving among his slave mistresses, his farm, and his commerce. It was a family tragedy that forced him to return to Oman to care for his mother and sisters. And so he was in his late twenties when he became engaged to his paternal cousin Athurayyaa, widowed by her second husband at the age of sixteen.
Athurayyaa had been a little girl, barely completing her fifth year of life, when her cousin Salman left for Zanzibar. She didn’t have any memory of him, didn’t recognize him when he returned, even if his name was a familiar one in her father’s house. As a two-time widow, she had gotten a reputation for being ill-omened. People whispered that anyone who married her would surely die. And so Athurayyaa did not expect to marry a third time. Her first husband had betrothed her when she was nine and had consummated the marriage when she was eleven. He was in his late sixties. At the time, she was still in braids and going out to play in the alleyways with other girls. They gathered sticks and string and remnants of fabric to make dolls. They drew lines and squares for playing hopscotch and took turns hopping from one space to the next. Her mother-in-law had to drag her in before sunset, hide her wood-and-fabric dolls, and bathe her, transforming her into a woman for nightfall. Athurayyaa was afraid of her husband. She didn’t understand at all why he did what he did to her every night, and why she couldn’t play with her friends when he was around. When he grew ill and died she was delighted because that meant her mother-in-law would no longer hide her dolls and scold her for getting her clothes dirty. But the joy was short-lived. Her mother-in-law pulled off her bright-colored gown and dressed her in white mourning clothes. The woman draped her long braids in a black tarha just as she draped all the mirrors in the house in black. The woman told her she had to stay inside, exactly like this, in these clothes, and that she would not leave the house for four months and ten days. Athurayyaa wailed and writhed on the floor, and the women who came to mourn with them bent over her in concern. “Ma sha Allah! So young, but she knows her duty and weeps for her man.” Two years later, another man secured her hand in marriage. He wasn’t so elderly but he was crude and rough and had no sense of how things ought to be. He was a hunter and he couldn’t be tamed. He would go off alone on his hunting expeditions. She was sixteen and pregnant for the first time when a group of Bedouin showed up carrying her husband, torn to pieces by wolves in the desert. She put on mourning white again and gave birth to a baby who had died in her womb.
When Salman saw her, he was smitten with the look in her eyes. It was the expression of someone who had experienced everything, who knew everything, and therefore no longer took any interest in the world. It was a look both careworn and uncaring. The self-sufficiency and superiority in that look could make you dizzy. It was the look of a little girl who had already become a mother—and of a mother whose dolls had been hidden from her and whose newborn baby had been buried. Salman liked Athurayyaa’s nose, too. Trying to persuade his mother to betroth him to her, he described her nose as being as fine as a sharp sword. He loved her almond mouth, her long hands that looked as free and innocent as a child’s, untouched by hard work; hands that had the appearance of never having rubbed the rough skin of her geriatric first husband or held the torn flesh that had once been her hunter husband. Hands that surely never held a baby except to lower it into its grave. It was as though those hands had been created for his hands alone: to enclose his fingers, and muss his hair. He would eat out of her hand all his life and he would never feel that he had enough. This hand would hold him and shade him and guide him and protect him. Her hand, the hand of his cousin Athurayyaa. So what if she was a widow. So what if she had borne a baby that had died. He didn’t want anyone else. No substitute would ever satisfy him.
At the wedding, Athurayyaa felt uncomfortable and embarrassed. She felt shame. Marriage was beyond her now, she thought; suddenly, she felt so very old. Even if Salman was ten years her senior, to her he seemed a callow youth. All through the festivities, as they went on and on, she felt awkward and confused. But she did sense from the start that Salman was enraptured by her, and for the first time in her life she did come to know a man’s love. And because of that, she knew that any child she had with him would live, and that is exactly what happened.
Ten months later, Athurayyaa gave birth to a beautiful baby girl, healthy and strong. Salman named her Hasina, and she held all those around her in perfect thrall. She lived in the bliss of her playful days until, years later, the journey of life gave her a new script to follow.