She was a child who wore twenty braids oiled lovingly with myrtle. Her cheeks were daubed with saffron and her eyes were little stars. She had a house, and that house sat amid small fields. Behind it was a stable for the horses. She had a father who was a renowned man of the horse, and a mother who was all gentleness, and a loving brother, and a name.
The mother had not yet died, the father had not yet married another woman, and there were not yet so many hungry mouths clustered around him. The father had not yet lost all of his stallions, and the cost of a sack of rice had not shot up to a hundred qirsh. She had not yet lost her eye, and would not have heard her father mutter, “I will never marry off this girl and hear her husband’s family calling her the One-Eyed.”
She was a playful child, her twenty braids flying behind her as her father took her riding behind him on his favorite horse, sparkling white Dahim. Her brother fixed a covered saddle on his gray donkey and pushed them both up the little hill ahead of him. She laughed until tears wet her cheeks and the saffron ran down her face, painting stripes on her neck.
She would call together the little girls in the neighborhood and give them their orders. One girl was to scrape and smooth and polish the little sticks of wood with a knife. Another would forage scraps of cloth from their mothers’ sewing baskets. A third would gather the eggs deposited by the tiny fish in the falaj. Yet another would look for stray strands of wool. When they had all brought their precious finds, setting everything on the ground for her inspection, the little factory could go into action. It was not over until a row of wooden dolls displayed their bewilderingly colorful frocks, earrings made of fish roe, woolen hair, and finally the eyes that were kohl-penciled in.
She and her friends sang to the dolls and the dolls sang back to them. They danced, and the dolls danced around them. They stuffed the bottom halves of their dishdashas into their sirwals and clambered onto the fallen date-palm trunks, which immediately turned into the backs of horses beneath their warm bodies, taking off into the air. She was the fastest, and behind her the girls all sang. Buniyya ya buniyya. . .
Little lass, O little lass, her father’s the hero gallant
Master of his tall white steed, in goodness never errant
She came home spent and covered in dust. Her mother bathed her in the falaj and draped a necklace of jasmine flowers around her neck. When her father came in, she took a deep breath of happiness. He would pat her on the head, and she would tell him, “You smell bad.” Though he rarely smiled, his smile for her was genuine as he said, “Perfume is for women. Men have the sweat of horses, and the smell of gunpowder.”
His hair was long and seldom washed. His beard was sparse. She dreamed he would let her touch his hair. She could make it like she made the wool into the hair on her dolls’ heads. But she was too much in awe of him. And the furthest he ever went to show his approval was when he patted her on the head and gave her that special rare smile.
The women had all composed poems praising his courage and his grace. She had memorized a few of them, secretly, to escape the mother’s jealousy. Flying into the air on the date-palm trunk turned stallion, sailing on the palm-fiber-rope swing out into the field, she always repeated the words to herself.
To see his figure as dusk fell
So tall and strong, the valiant one!
May God protect and guard him well:
Noblest Aamir, Sh’rifa’s son