The Bride, and the Baby Repelled

My grandmother went home with her relative Salman and his wife, Athurayya, and she stayed for forty years.

When her brother died and Salman first invited her to live under his protection and care, she had already heard talk that his circumstances were in disarray. The dates he cultivated on his land were his main source of income. Sultan Sa‘id bin Taymur’s government in Muscat had increased taxes fourfold on all dates exported through the port of Sur. And so Bint Aamir stayed where she was, determined not to accept his offer. But the constant exertion of turning wood into charcoal was depleting her strength. And anyway, people were saying that the British had surely intervened to lower the taxes on dates, fearing that the imam and his supporters in the country’s interior would harness popular discontent over taxes to foment a rebellion against the sultan, London’s ally.

Salman and Athurayya’s only daughter, Hasina, was ten years old at the time. Her eyes blazed with an energy and a readiness that did not shrink from the unknown world of her future. Her body was developing rapidly, and the still-hidden contours of womanhood would soon appear. She showed no emotion toward the new guest in their home, so Bint Aamir mostly ignored her, occupying herself with the household’s daily tasks. Only a few years remained before the girl-child grew enough that she could become a bride, before she would leave the household behind.

My grandmother watched closely as Hasina was transformed into a bride, overseeing the details. Hasina bundled up the new silk gowns and packed the fine china and the worked silver anklets, the silver pendants and the gold earrings, and the incense chest. Not yet fifteen, Hasina went away with her husband, first to Algeciras and then to Burundi, where before much time had passed, all news of her ceased abruptly. She sent two or three letters to her parents, assuring them that she and her new husband had settled in well, and that her husband had bought a farm, and then that she had given birth to twins. And then, silence. No one heard anything at all of Hasina until the mid-1980s when her grandsons returned, to seek Omani citizenship. Their request was rejected.

In Salman’s house, the years passed peacefully. He engrossed himself in his shop and his farmland. Meanwhile, the camaraderie grew between his wife, Athurayyaa, and his guest, Bint Aamir. Just as it seemed to all of them that nothing would ever disturb the world again, the terrible impact of the Second World War seemed to create an impasse before them that would never be overcome. Life in Zanzibar had taught Salman what he had to do, had given him the key that alone might unlock some income. Take a risk; try something new. He ventured to Bombay, seeking to expand his commercial ties. He came back with only meager profits but he found something more profound in its consequences. In Bombay, he encountered Sulaiman al-Baruni, the sultan of Muscat’s advisor for religious affairs. Al-Baruni’s illness—which would be fatal—did not prevent him from urging Salman to explore India’s flourishing trade in Arabic publishing, and to do so with gusto. This turned out to be Salman’s most valuable booty from the voyage, and it would change Athurayyaa’s life forever.

Now Salman made use of his leisure time at the shop to read al-Azhar al-riyadiyya fi a’imma wa-muluk al-ibadiyya, the copy that al-Baruni had dedicated to him, with a signature in his own hand. As he immersed himself in this classic work on the history of his Ibadi Muslim faith’s imams and rulers, Athurayyaa—who had learned to read as a little girl at her local mosque school—devoted her time to other books that had been issued by the presses of Calcutta and Hyderabad. She all but memorized Stories of the Prophets and The Correct Word on the Prophet’s Companions. What particularly moved her were the lives of the prophets and the pious, and her reading dislodged the sure contentment that had always governed her quiet, peaceful, earthly life. With tears running down her face, she recounted to Bint Aamir the story of the Prophet Muhammad’s Companion whose foot was amputated as he was praying, and he did not even feel it. She grieved for the fact that she would never attain such a rarefied pitch of pious observance and devout humility. But a mysterious light had been lit inside of her. Following its steady guidance extinguished her worldly concerns, which now appeared so inconsequential in the glow of that inner flame. All through her thirties, she immersed herself in attempts to reach this new and compelling goal—to arrive at the wellsprings of this holy light.

And then, as Athurayyaa approached forty years of age and her husband turned fifty and was preparing himself to make the sacred pilgrimage to Mecca—a crowning touch to the life of a prosperous merchant, which would seal the goodness by which he had tried to live with a pious act—she woke up one morning to discover that she was pregnant. She, a grandmother whose grandsons were already old enough to be working in a farm somewhere in Burundi! Athurayyaa was dismayed. She was embarrassed. Mortified. But Salman saw her pregnancy as a good omen. His world still looked vast and full of promise. He postponed his intended pilgrimage, and joyously prepared to receive his new child.

Athurayyaa had a difficult labor. Salman all but destroyed the midwife’s door, trying to get her to come back with him just after midnight to save his wife and the unborn baby. Two days went by before the baby emerged, feet first. The midwife brought the newborn close to Athurayyaa’s perspiring face. She found him an ugly sight, and she turned her head away. She refused to open her arms to him. She would not pick him up, would not nurse him. The neighbor women said among themselves, “Athurayyaa can’t stand the sight of her baby boy, she’s rejected him completely.”

Her husband bought one ewe after another. They squeezed the milk from those thin teats into large conch shells that had horns slender enough for the baby to take into his mouth. But the milk wasn’t enough for him, and he cried day and night.

My grandmother—ten years younger than Athurayyaa—surmised that her friend was in the grip of the madness that strikes some women as they sweat through the terrors of childbirth. She gathered the baby into her own embrace. And so then the women were whispering among themselves the news that Bint Aamir—who had never married, had never once given birth—had found milk gushing from her own breasts for Athurayyaa’s newborn. In fact, they murmured, her milk was so abundant that she had to release the excess flow into the packed dirt of the courtyard once the baby had his fill. Soon, they were telling each other that Salman was no longer buying nursing ewes for his son, not since Bint Aamir held the infant to her own body and wouldn’t let go of him. As for my grandmother, she said nothing. In her embrace the baby flourished. He grew pink with health, and the spells of fever and crying stopped. Salman named the boy Salih, but my grandmother protested that this was a heavy name for a baby. His stars and this name were not in harmony, she declared. It must be changed. Still astonished at how fully the baby had taken to her, Salman tried to negotiate. She named him Mansour. “Helped by God.”

About eight months later, Athurayyaa came out of the state she’d been in since the baby’s birth. My grandmother just laughed when she heard us say solemnly that what our real grandmother had suffered from was postpartum depression. Our real grandmother, whom we never saw and never knew, since she died in her early fifties, grief-stricken at her husband’s death less than a year before.

At the word depression, the woman I call my grandmother, Bint Aamir, simply laughed. Again she told us the story of Athurayyaa’s madness and how she could not stand the sight of her son.

Even after she recovered and accepted her son, Mansour, Athurayyaa did not intervene to alter the course of events. My father grew up believing he had two mothers and one father, exactly as we grew up later on, believing we had two mothers: my mother, who was always submerged in her sorrows and the pain of her many miscarriages, and my grandmother, always submerged in the little details of our lives and our upbringing.