When she made her trip to see Dr. Thoms, Bint Aamir stayed in a roofed-over shelter erected close to the walls of Mercy Hospital. Many women crowded into that place, coming from all over, each paying a small fee to stay there and bringing her own food. Every midday, smoke rose from the single-burner gas cookers, and soon after sundown, the women were all falling asleep.
The men were jammed into an adjacent shelter. The woman who shared a bed with Bint Aamir tossed and turned and moaned, keeping Bint Aamir from sleeping. Bint Aamir gave her a little prod with her elbow. “Ya bint in-nas! What’s wrong with you, girl? Let’s try to get some sleep.” The young woman started crying. “I want my husband. We came here a month ago for treatment and he’s in the men’s shelter and I’m in the women’s. We only see each other at the hospital during the day.”
Did my grandmother get any sleep that night?
Was her head full of thoughts, too? Maybe about the remote and unknown fiancé of whom she knew nothing, not even his name, this man whom her father had rejected without even sending for her, without even letting her know?
If the fiancé had become a husband and with him she had known the pleasures of the body, would she, too, have been restless with longing, as this young woman was?
Rayyaa and Raayah left her a pair of clogs as a gift before they left for their decrepit home and their dead orchard. But my grandmother did not touch them. She left the clogs at the threshold where the twins had set them down, and she went on wearing her worn-thin slippers. She preferred binding palm fibers to the soles of her feet to touching those clogs.
She ignored the clogs, but she kept thinking about the eyeglasses for months. She even thought about putting herself out to fast for hire, so that she could put together enough money to buy a pair of eyeglasses. Surely, any of their acquaintances who were traveling to the city would be able to pick them up for her. She didn’t have the slightest idea about ordering eyeglasses, no sense that you had to have your sight examined. But in any case, her body could not endure long fasts: it could barely carry itself through the obligatory fasts the length of the month of Ramadan and on the two holy days of Arafah and Ashura. She found it so hard that she took pity on Mansour when his father first ordered him to fast. That year, she spent the first day of Mansour’s first Ramadan fast pouring water over his head and body, trying to keep the heat away and hoping to lessen his thirst. But on his own, Mansour came up with a handy trick. It was just a little ruse dappled with innocence, which Mansour discovered by lying down at midday directly beneath the date palm where there hung a small jahla.
Throughout the entire month, promptly at midday, Mansour was there, staring up at the drops of water collecting on the surface of the clay jahla. He watched as the little drops gradually came together as one large drop rolling down the side of the clay pitcher. That’s when he opened his mouth, still lying there perfectly positioned below, until that rich, perfect drop plopped into his mouth. He would continue his vigil, reckoning the exact timing, until the second drop fell into his open mouth. When his father grew suspicious about Mansour’s sudden love of lying beneath the jahla through the hottest moments of the day, the boy managed to escape the paternal whip by insisting that he had not broken the fast. A drop fell into his insides by accident! It must have been a boon from God, and so God meant him to have this blessed sustenance!
My grandmother knew that she would not have the strength to fast for pay. But she wanted those eyeglasses.
I press my cheek into the pillow. Snowflakes are flying into the windowpane. I press my cheek down harder, until the pillow forces my right eye closed. My left eye stays open. I form the word awraa on my lips and it circles and circles through my head. One-eyed. I move the letters around and try other combinations. I try to imagine how someone could live for eighty years with only one eye. The tears run from my eyes, from both my eyes, from my two sound eyes. My tears spill over her one eye, which is damaged; over the herbal concoctions that were prescribed by ignorance; over the violence and harshness of childhood; over children orphaned by their mothers’ deaths and thrown out by their fathers, and over their brothers’ tragic ends; over a field she did not possess; over a companion she was never fortunate enough to have; over a son who is not hers; over the grandchildren of a friend who died before she did.