When my grandmother told me the tale of the lion who gently offered his back to carry the load of firewood for the man with the mean wife, she said, “If the Lord brings a catastrophe down on His servant, the Lord compensates His servant for it with something else.” When I got older and she was no longer braiding my hair, no longer strong enough to walk, and no longer able to make out anything but vague shapes with her one good eye, she told me and Sumayya another story. This one was about her father, in the year that Sa‘id bin Taymur became ruler of Muscat. Clan Hammuda of Jaalaan sent word secretly to her father. They hoped to tempt him to join them in seceding and proclaiming independence. They craved his heroic persona and his singular courage. He craved the money funneled to them by the House of Saud. His brothers were furious, because Clan Hammuda followed a different religious line. He didn’t pay them any attention. Sharifa, his mother—who was known as Sharifa al-Aziza, Sharifa the Noble, because her family had famously accrued such sharaf and ‘izz, honor and glory—cut off all communication with him. He shrugged that off, and entered a losing battle against the sultan and the British. He came back suffering from a shrapnel wound in the shoulder and the death of white Dahim, his favorite mare. He lost everything he had, because he had pawned it all off to buy weapons. The shame of it kept him away from the men’s gatherings. He sat at home, kicking at the walls in frustration and punching anyone who came near. On the day he realized that he must sell the last of his horses to feed his children, his wife observed sharply that his son was now old enough to support himself and his one-eyed sister.
I didn’t really listen to the story. At the time, my exams were looming and I had my eyes on a scholarship to study in Europe. Sumayya wasn’t interested either. The handsome young man who had just gotten his degree in Australia had presented himself, and she was longing for the promised bliss. We left my grandmother’s room quietly. She didn’t say, “Don’t go.” My mother asked us, “Does Maah need a bath?” We nodded. She called the servant.
That was the last story I heard my grandmother tell.
I was dreaming, and flocks of swooping birds woke me up. What I felt against my cheek was the rough weave of my grandmother’s garments. Not for the first time, I recollected that I had not really said goodbye to her before I traveled. I got out of bed to go over to the telephone. How could I have forgotten to say goodbye? Halfway between my bed and the telephone I remembered, suddenly, that she had died. And I remembered the sheets.
The sheets were collected quickly. Green, brown, cream, striped, worked, plain, new, old; some with tassels on their edges and others with hastily done lines of stitching along the hems. They were all lifted, held together or singly, by this crowd of women who formed a square of fluttering sheets around the bier. The women knotted the corners, and their hands, keeping the sheet-curtains high, came together at the knots to form a tent with no gaps. But something was not quite as tightly joined as it should have been. What was taking place under the protective veil of this square, improvised tent formed by sheets was not curtained at all. The heavy, musty-smelling cloth with the tassels along the edge was meant to open only enough so that one of the women assigned to wash the corpse could fetch another bucket of water, or the perfumer could stick her head just far enough out to ask where the aloe was, or to request a bit more camphor. But instead, it opened to every little puff of wind—and to curious glances, now and then, from the women who were holding up the improvised square tent. Some of them were relaxing their grip, lowering their arms, stealing little glances at the unclothed body of the dead woman. Since the deceased was not a young person whose face had been smashed up in a car accident, nor an invalid whose body carried the raw scars of a recent operation, there was not much to look at that could furnish later conversations, in whispered moments when the women were sitting together, or during louder moments at family gatherings not yet muted by the presence of a body in a shroud.
The corpse washers and the perfumers announced that their work was done. The women who had been holding the sheets aloft now rested their arms. As tired as they might be, none of them seemed too fatigued to display the strain to their backs or rub their hands together vigorously, ridding themselves of the numbness. Someone gathered up the pile of sheets and took them all away.
And so Bint Aamir came into that time in which there is no air, no light, no end. The time against which every life appears unbelievably short, and swiftly gone, even the life of my grandmother.