It was during one of those Friday meetings in the white room with the rain smattering down the window. Perhaps it was the second or third Friday? All I remember is that it was the same Friday on which Kuhl introduced me, after my session, to Imran. To her husband.
On that particular Friday, I told the counselor about my sister, Sumayya. I told him the nickname she had in our family: the Dynamo. From the moment she had sprung out of my mother’s body, she had never stopped moving. When we were little, if she wasn’t jumping rope or chasing after cats, or hunting lizards or setting traps for birds, or scurrying up the little hill behind the house, or trying to scale the walls or climbing the bitter orange tree or shimmying up the young date palms, she would be talking rapid-fire and laughing loud enough that everyone around could hear.
Sumayya was older than I was. When she began middle school, my father relented and agreed she was old enough to have a Sony cassette deck with big speakers. When we went to the Emirates that summer, she spent all the money she had saved on cassettes by Samira Sa‘id and Amr Diab.
The counselor raised his blond eyebrows.
“No, you wouldn’t know them,” I said. “It’s okay. They’re Arab singers.” Sumayya was obsessed with them, listening to them day and night and dancing to them in her little room.
He responded in that voice, so well trained to sound smoothly understanding and sympathetic. “And what was your relationship like?”
My laugh must have sounded abrupt. “Sumayya and me? Let me explain something to you. First came Sumayya, and then a miscarriage, and then me. And then two more miscarriages, and Sufyan, and another miscarriage. There’s three years between Sumayya and me, and six or seven between me and Sufyan. Six years you can’t dismiss. But Sumayya and I, we didn’t pay much attention to the three years between us. We fought sometimes, but we were always laughing. I went to primary school in the afternoons, while she went to middle school in the mornings. When I came home around sunset, she would be waiting for me on the bench in front of the house. We told each other everything that had happened at school that day. I couldn’t keep up with her when it came to jumping and climbing and sliding, nor in dancing later on, but I was just as good as she was when it came to making up funny names for the teachers. The science teacher, who always wore a green dress, was Kermit the Frog from Sesame Street. The math teacher, who was massive, we called the Mandus, because she was like one of our mother’s big wooden chests. The skinny art teacher was Tweety Bird. We used to replace these names with others, now and then.”
He interrupted me for the first time. “You’re talking about her in the past tense. What happened?”
I smiled weakly. “She stopped moving. The Dynamo came to an end.”
Actually I did not say to him that Sumayya “came to an end” or that she “stopped moving.” That’s what I meant, but the language trap disabled me. Trying to use this other language, I could not say what I truly wanted to say. I probably said something like “She lost energy” or “She went into a decline.” But what I heard inside myself was “she stopped moving.” Sumayya the Dynamo had become still and silent.
I wanted to run through the rain, to catch up with Kuhl and Imran in the little café, the Three Monkeys, that would eventually become our favorite. I wanted to tell them that Sumayya the Dynamo had come to an end, and that my grandmother had died, and that she never owned a plot of land, not even a single tree.