The Ukrainian waitress at the Three Monkeys Café was gone. A woman from Poland had taken her place.
I told Imran that my grandmother had a green thumb, and he laughed—that slightly painful laugh of his. He himself, he said, who had grown up a peasant, did not have a green thumb. His father always had to replant the seedlings his son put in the ground.
What was in his mind when he said that? What was in Kuhl’s mind as she lifted her head from her notebook upon hearing him say these things? Probably she was remembering the pastures and fields she had seen in animations when she was little, of Heidi and Sandybell. Probably Imran was remembering his father’s slaps and kicks. Kuhl could not see the traces the whip and the iron spike had left on his spirit; she had only followed the marks left on his body, tracing them with her lips and then considering them healed. They had already known each other for many months when Imran first told her about his father. She was the one who brought up the subject. She saw the scars on his body, and so she asked. Before she ever saw his body, she had tossed with him on the bed of her imagination, the flames of longing illuminating his form in her mind like a vivid divination. When she saw the reality, she put her arms around him and cried. She cried until her tears had drowned all the Punjabi kurtas whose tailoring she had had no part in selecting, and the somber Mary Jane flats that were the only shoes her mother thought appropriate for girls who were so plain. All these things that she had taken for granted, had thought were deeply ingrained parts of her—this tsunami of tears swept them away, altering her landscape once and forever.
And me? What was in my head? My grandmother’s image.
In his crushing solitude and pain, after the scorpion stung him, Mansour was suddenly conscious of the quiet, steady tenderness of his mother Bint Aamir, as he never had been before. It was almost a shock to truly recognize that she had only one working eye. The idea of eyeglasses suddenly came to him. He bought a pair, with whorly, knotted red frames. They were small for her head size, pressing in on both sides when she put them on. But they were eyeglasses. And they were Mansour’s gift, and she had never loved anything or anyone in her life as much as she loved Mansour. He had brought them to her without being asked, and she wore them without voicing any complaint. Whatever traces of resentful envy she had against Rayyaa and Raayah—the humpbacked and the nearsighted—melted from her heart.
After his divorce from Kaaffa, Mansour remained alone and broken, despite his return to the shop. My grandmother tried to persuade him to expand the orchard. She wanted him to reclaim more land, and she would teach him the secrets of growing things: that perfect dark shade of green to look for, how much to water. She would show him how living plants longed for company and interaction. It wasn’t the usual that she had in mind—ordinary groves like those he had inherited from his father, all date palms with hardly even one lemon or mango tree among them. She dreamed of row after row of medicinal plants, aloe and rank-smelling mkhisa alongside basil and jasmine, orchids, wild lavender, and small ornamental trees. Tens and tens of fruit trees, she thought, surrounded by patches of onions, potatoes, tomatoes, and sweet peppers. In her dreams she heard the gurgling of the canal as it sent water into the sinews of every single plant, renewing the living vigor there.
But Mansour chose trade instead. He strengthened his ties to the merchants in Sur. He learned the secrets, the techniques, the art of it all. He was well-positioned to benefit from the opening of the economy. His trade flourished and after only a few years he engaged himself to the daughter of one of Sur’s big merchants. My mother.
Her father set a condition: his daughter was not to be removed from the city of Sur. That suited my father’s inclinations—or his dreams—at the time. He’d grown bored and weary of the torpor of his hometown, and he had got it into his head that he wanted to build a house on the coast. Bint Aamir refused to move out of the old house. “I’m not leaving the House of Salman,” she declared. When Mansour’s bride came to her, she kissed Bint Aamir’s brow and said, “Come with us, Maah. Mansour can’t live without you.” So it was that our grandmother left her hometown for the second time in her life, having left the first time as a young woman heading toward Muscat in a goods truck to meet Dr. Thoms.
The fields she dreamed of were never planted. Mansour sold the orchards he had inherited and devoted himself to commerce. My grandmother emptied her dreams into the garden at the Sur home, where the soil lacked richness.
“The worst that can happen to a peasant is no longer owning the land,” observed Imran.
Neither Imran nor his father ever truly owned the land they farmed. It had been mortgaged and the debt was never cleared. When Imran got the Aga Khan scholarship to study medicine, his father began to dream that Imran would come back a doctor and would pay off the money that was owed. But his father died while Imran was overseas.
Tall, lean, and hard, humiliated constantly by his father, as he received the news of his success at getting the scholarship, spattered with the soil of the land they did not own, Imran vowed silently that he would never return to this village where he had grown up. Even in those nights when the snow and ice were at their worst, and he longed for home the most—those nights when his mother’s tears kept him from sleeping, as he remembered her trying to treat the wounds left by the father’s whip and his hot iron skewer on the body of the youth he had been then—Imran swore he would never go back. But destiny had made a different vow.