After Saddam invaded Kuwait, my father bought such huge quantities of basic foodstuffs, even though he did not have enough space for all of it in the storeroom. He put the sacks of rice in my grandmother’s room. Seeing her bumping into the sacks and stumbling, we could guess that only a tiny amount of light remained in her one working eye. By the time the war was over and the sacks had disappeared, and my father went back to his long commercial excursions, my grandmother was so lame that she could no longer get around. Once, between trips, my father saw her dragging her body from her room to the shade of the bitter orange tree. He said only one word. “Maah.”
My grandmother smiled. “Mansour.”
That was when my father bought the wheelchair. My grandmother never used it. He hired someone to come and help. My grandmother would not allow the woman to help with bathing. Not even once. Then those years of strangeness dissolved into something else.
My suitcase was packed for travel, ready to depart for my life as a student overseas.
Sumayya’s cases were packed for the wedding, ready to escort her as she embraced her new bliss and the move to her husband’s home.
Sufyan had barely said goodbye to his childhood, but he was packing it away and entering the perils of adolescence.
My grandmother died.
The people around me were sympathetic, but no one was prepared to understand me. Sympathy isn’t understanding. Mostly, I think, it takes an opposite road. “Aah, she was over eighty, after all.” “Aah, now she is at rest from the pain.” “Now, you know, she no longer has to crawl from her room to the courtyard. She’s somewhere much better.” “Aah, you all took such good care of her.”
Isn’t old age a good-enough excuse for dying? Or, more important, a good-enough excuse for accepting the death of someone we love? That’s what people think, I suppose. Just as my grandmother was fortunate enough to receive a lot of sympathy in her life, or at least some, I was fortunate enough to receive it when she died. But neither of us was fortunate enough to have true understanding come our way. And I wasn’t allowed to have, or supposed to have, such powerful feelings of regret pulsing through me.
Sumayya the Dynamo got married, and then she lost her title and became just Sumayya. And then I went away. And then all those hours passed, all those years, which we managed to fling away, conveniently forgetting what had opened our wounds in the first place; forgetting how to diagnose the causes. But we did sometimes remind ourselves that those wounds had not gone away. Because after all, at some point in time—even before the passage of those hours and years—we had already been broken into pieces.
The fragile bird of life took us along. We clung to its wings so hard that they dissolved in our grip; and so we tried to put those feathers on ourselves. We dressed ourselves in those feathers, and we drank the blood of that bird we had destroyed, and we told ourselves, “We will go on.” We kept saying that, even as the bird fell apart, ripped to pieces in our fingers, and as we had to endure the acrid taste of its blood beneath our tongues. “We will go on,” we said. And then we waited expectantly for the bird of life to soar again into the sky, taking us with it. We waited and waited.
We clothed ourselves in affliction, in the vulnerable nakedness of our love. We opened our mouths to receive those drops of honey but what ran down our throats tasted bitter. We clung so fiercely to the beloved body that our fingernails tore the garments upon it to shreds, and that body, worn to tatters, weakened until it could no longer wrap our nakedness protectively in its own. The affliction was ours; our fingers, trying to pluck that love apart, sapped the beloved energies. The cries, ever louder, simply deafened us. Our attempts to run away left us lame. Our despair brought us low. And we asked, with Job: Why, O Lord, Most Merciful of the merciful, why in our affliction do you not see us, cleansed and drenched?