Celestial Bodies Page 2

  Mayya opened her eyes to see her daughter cradled in her mother’s arms. She dropped off to sleep and when she opened her eyes again, the girl was sucking at her breast. When Merchant Sulayman’s son came to see the newborn, Mayya told him she’d named the baby girl London.

  She’s exhausted, of course, he thought. She must have no idea what she’s saying. The next day Mayya, the baby girl, and her mother left the hospital for his uncle’s home. The baby’s name was London, she told his relatives. The wife of her husband’s uncle made fresh chicken broth, baked her the special wafer-thin bread known to be good for new mothers, and made her drink fenugreek with honey to strengthen her body. She helped Mayya to wash her hands and then sat down next to her bed.

  Mayya, my dear girl . . .

  Yes?

  The woman patted her gently. Are you still set on giving the baby such an odd name? Does anyone name their daughter London? This is the name of a place, my dear, a place that is very far away, in the land of the Christians. We are all very, very surprised! But never mind, we know you are weak and fragile right now, you’ve just had the baby, of course you’re not yourself and you need more time. Do think again about a good name for the girl. Call her after your mother. Call her Salima.

  Mayya’s mother was in the room, and she wasn’t pleased. Laysh ya hibbat ayni! My dear woman, why would you want to name her for me when I’m still alive and now I’m blessed with a grandchild? I suppose you’re ready and waiting for me to die? That’s why you’d like the little girl to inherit my name? As God’s compensation. Oh dear me!

  Hastily, the uncle’s wife tried to repair her error. God forbid I would ever think that! she babbled. Lots of folks name their children after their parents, when their mother and father are still strong and healthy. May no evil touch you, Salima! So then. Let’s see . . . well, name her Maryam, or Zaynab, or Safiya. Any name but this London.

  Defiantly Mayya held the baby up in front of her. What’s wrong with London? There’s a woman in Jaalaan Town whose name is London.

  The uncle’s wife was running out of patience. You know very well that’s not really her name! It’s just a nickname, something people call her because her skin is so pale. And this girl, well, really now . . .

  Mayya lowered the baby to her lap. She may not have light skin like the merchant’s family does, but she’s still the daughter of this family. And her name is London.

  Salima took things into her own hands. It was time for her daughter and granddaughter to return to the family home in al-Awafi. After all, a mother must recover in her family’s embrace. Every new mother knew the importance of the forty days following childbirth. Mayya would spend it in her mother’s home, under her mother’s watchful care.

  Listen, son, Salima said to her daughter’s husband. Abdallah, listen – about your wife, here. She’s had her first child and it’s a girl. Girls are a blessing. A girl helps her mother and raises her younger brothers and sisters. What we need for this new mother are forty live chickens and a big jar of good pure mountain honey. Plus a pot of samna, the best country butter churned straight from a cow. When London is a week old I’ll shave her head and you will make an offering – as much silver as the little one’s hair weighs. It’ll be enough to buy a sheep, you’ll have it slaughtered and you’ll give out the meat to the poor.

  Salima pronounced every letter in the name London slowly and distinctly. Abdallah’s face changed expression but he nodded. He took his small new family and his mother-in-law back to al-Awafi, their hometown.

  Abdallah

  The airplane hurtled forward, pitching into heavy clouds. I could not get my eyes to close even though I knew it would be hours before we reached Frankfurt. When women were just starting to have their babies in Felicity Hospital in Muscat, those black Singer sewing machines – which everyone called Farrashas because of the butterfly design stamped on their sleek black sides – had not yet reached Oman. So how could it be that Mayya had already been sewing clothes on a Farrasha? Come to think of it, electricity was only available in a few areas. Maybe it wasn’t the Felicity, perhaps there were other hospitals already operating when London was born. Yes, of course there were other hospitals. There was Mercy Hospital in Matrah, there was at least that one, and perhaps also the Nahda Hospital in Ruwi. So, why did Mayya insist on giving birth in the missionary hospital? I don’t remember . . . I can’t tie it all together, all these things that happened. Her mother, saying to me, Slaughter a cow for the sake of London, and give the meat away. Bring us twenty live chickens for your wife – she has some recovering to do. She said precisely twenty, I remember, and she said the word twenty with emphasis – though I was going to bring her thirty chickens, and a ewe as well . . . Then there was my uncle’s wife, in the house in Wadi Aday, standing up in the courtyard to scold me at the top of her voice: London? And you agreed to that? Don’t you have anything to say about your own daughter’s name?

  That old house . . . I don’t know if they tore that house down or sold it. After my uncle died I only saw that aunt of mine once or twice. When London graduated from the Medical School at Sultan Qaboos University, she said, Papa, I want a BMW. And when we moved to our new house, Mayya moved the Farrasha into the storage room there. Why did she stop sewing? When did she stop? After Muhammad came along, surely. Right, he was born the same year I inherited Father’s business and we moved to Muscat. Mayya was very happy about the move. She didn’t want to remain under her mother’s control for the rest of her life, she said. And when she had Muhammad she stopped sewing.

  I remember Mayya putting on an enormous feast to celebrate our move to the new house in Muscat. She invited all of her friends and she had to spread out a very long tablecloth to hold all of the food. Salim was in elementary school then, and Muhammad seemed a perfectly ordinary nursing baby. Mayya was happy and sparkling that night. After the party she slipped on her dark blue night shirt.

  Do you love me, Mayya? I asked her, once everyone else was asleep. She was startled, I could see that. She said nothing and then she laughed. She laughed out loud, and the tone of it irritated me. Where did you pick up these TV-show words? she asked. Or maybe it’s the satellite dish out there. It’s the Egyptian films, have they eaten up your mind?

  Muhammad, trying to stand up on my knees, and then tugging hard at my beard. Mayya slapped him, and he cried. I never dared shave off my beard until after my father died. And when they started literacy classes, Mayya entered the sixth year straight away, since she already knew how to read and write as well as having some basic maths. Mayya, I said to her, Muhammad is still tiny. Go to school when he is older. I want to learn English, she said. That was before we got the dish at home. And surely, when I asked my question – Mayya wearing the dark blue night shirt – when I asked whether she loved me, that dish hadn’t appeared yet, and I wasn’t following any TV programmes or watching any Egyptian films . . .

  Then, my father, declining fast, in the Nahda Hospital. When I stuck my hand out to meet his, he knocked it away. When I marched in his funeral, my knees abandoned me. Muhammad was only a year old then.

  And when I asked Mayya, Do you love me? she laughed. She laughed! Loud enough to shatter every wall in the new house. Her laughter . . . the children fled from it.

  Mayya never watched TV serials. Salim loved the Mexican serials for a time but eventually they bored him and he threw himself into video games instead. Every time we went to Dubai he bought two or three games.

  Mayya’s mother saying to me, Mayya’s my darling daughter. Abdallah, my son, she’s in your care now, and you must take care of her. But don’t take her away, don’t take her from me, away to Maskad. No one is better at the sewing machine than she is. Mayya doesn’t like to eat much, or to talk much, you know, Abdallah . . .

  Earlier, much earlier: me, saying to my father, Please, Father! I want to go to Egypt or Iraq, I want to study at university there. He grabbed me by the neck and barked at me. By this beard of mine, I swear you are not leaving Oman. Do you want to sink so low? To come back from Egypt or Iraq with your beard shaven off? Smoking and drinking and I don’t know what? Is that who you want to be? So instead, immediately after finishing high school I went to work in his business.

  It wasn’t until after he died that I could move the family to Muscat. Little London was very cute and she had filled out by then. In the village, every afternoon Mayya bathed her in the falaj. Scampering along the canal with its running water always made her laugh. I bought her Heinz baby food and Milupa baby cereals and powdered formula. She was the only child in all of al-Awafi who got such things. I bought them at the canteen and Mayya boasted of having them. But my father still shouted at me, calling me boy. I was the father of three children, I was no boy . . . Going in to see him in there, and he would start at it again, stripping off his dishdasha and his vest. His sparse white chest hair caught the pale sunlight slinking around those heavy curtains closed over the only window. I went over to open them but he shook his finger at me: Iyyaaka, boy! Watch out you don’t! So I left them as they were. He went on shouting, in one of those bouts of raving that took over his mind for most of the two years before his death. Boy! Boy! Tie Sanjar up, tie him to the column on the east side of the courtyard, out there, out in front of the house. Anyone who gives that slave water or shade has to answer to me. I knelt down beside him. Father, the government freed the slaves a long time ago, and then Sanjar went to Kuwait. (Every summer London would say, Papa, let’s visit Kuwait! But Mayya always rejected the idea: So we’re going to get away from this heat by escaping to somewhere hotter?) An Omani married Sanjar’s daughter and she came back with him to live in Muscat. When she saw me in the Nahda Hospital, where she worked as a nurse, she recognised me. At the sight of my father, who was very ill by the
n, her lips contorted.

  My father calls out, weakly, his fever-black lips trembling. Tie up that slave, tie up that Sanjar so he won’t steal a sack of onions ever again. I remain silent and he waves his cane at me in fury. Boy, can’t you hear me? Listen to what I’m telling you – go and punish him, go, it’s the only way he won’t steal any more.

  London playing in the water, which she loved. London was six when Mayya chewed me out one time for leaving her to play in the muddy flow of water for two hours. London will get polio, she warned me. London will be paralyzed. I couldn’t sleep for several nights, and I couldn’t take my eyes off her tiny feet. But she didn’t come to any harm. She went on scampering around like a miniature gazelle.

  My father’s lips turned black, his eyebrows receded, and the spit flew in all directions from his mouth. Boy – have you tied that thieving slave Sanjar to the eastern column yet? I took his hand and kissed it but he pushed me away. Father, the government freed all of the slaves, and Sanjar . . . the government, Father. He growled under his breath as though he had finally heard me. What’s the government got to do with it? Sanjar is mine, he doesn’t belong to the government. The government can’t free my slaves. I bought his mama Zarifa for twenty silver thalers! I fed her, when a sack of rice cost a hundred pure good silver coins. Yes, that’s right, a hundred. One thaler knocking against the next! Aah, Zarruf, so pretty . . . soft and gentle, Zarruf, but then you got older. Aah, that one grew vain and cocky! I married her off to Habib and then she produced this thief. What does the government have to do with any of this? My slave, mine. How could he travel anyway, without getting permission from me? How, boy?

  When he began to shiver and quake again, the sweat running down his neck and oozing across his chest, I wiped it away with the blue towel which was always hanging on a nail on the door. After he died, that towel of his vanished. Going into his room, crying uncontrollably, knocking against the floor and writhing in my sweat, I would look for the towel but I could never find it. The Farrasha sewing machine vanished too. I never go into the storeroom but I know Mayya is hiding it somewhere in there.

  Mayya makes gorgeous meat sambusak. I only like sambusak shaped by her hands. When we moved to the new house she made a huge platter of it along with everything else. Mayya, I said to her, Let the maid help you cook. She was silent. A few months later, she insisted on sending the maid back to her home town, without any warning. But that night the room smelled of perfume, and I could half-see her body through her dark blue chemise, and I asked her, Do you love me, Mayya? And she was silent. And then she laughed.

  Laughed! She laughed.

  I was the tallest boy in the class. Zarifa tugged the hem of my dishdasha down as hard as she could. I guess she thought maybe it would last awhile longer if she kept pulling it down. Every time she yanked it hard in back, the neckline in front attacked and nearly choked me. How much do you have there, boy? the teacher asked me. I had carefully saved my gift from the holy day. All I had bought was a single sweet dried coconut bar. Half a riyal, I said. The teacher burst out laughing. Laughter looks so disgusting sometimes. When people laugh, they look like monkeys. Their bellies shake and their necks shudder, and worst of all, their yellow teeth display all the decay. How old are you? Ten, or maybe twelve. The teacher, Ustaz Mamduh, laughed again. You don’t even know your own age? You’re very big for the first grade! But what could I do about that, when the school didn’t even open until I was already halfway grown up? The pupils were all making noise. Their dishdashas did not press against their necks like mine did. Ustaz Mamduh, they whined, we don’t want Abbuuud to sit in front of us, he’s too tall! Abdallah, you’re toooo tall! Ustaz Mamduh took my hand and asked in a whisper, his Egyptian accent as broad as ever, Do you have any jelly-sweets for me? I shook my head. Tomorrow, bring some of those jelly-sweets you folks make here, tomorrow, he said. At home, Zarifa shouted at me. Jelly-sweets? Just like that? Not a pen, not a notebook, no, he said jelly-sweets? Habib had abandoned her by then, and Sanjar was always fleeing the house. She dedicated her time to cooking and to me.

  Mayya – she was always so busy, at first with sewing and the children, and then it was school and her friends, and then, sleep. When I was little I used to smell the fragrance of broth on Zarifa whenever I shoved my head into her chest, trying to go to sleep. Ustaz Mamduh said, Abdallah knows how to write his name and he will be moved to grade three. That’s how I came to be in third grade with four others, all of whom could write their names successfully on the blackboard. Or they had brought chunks of dark Omani jelly-sweets for the teacher. As Egyptian as he was, Ustaz Mamduh loved the Omani delicacy.

  The clouds fold up. Suddenly through the small airplane window the sky is clear. Abdallah, son of Merchant Sulayman, dozes off for a few moments. As he wakes up he is still half-talking in his sleep. Don’t hang me upside down in the well, don’t. Please, no! Don’t!

  London

  As the sun came up, Salima suddenly felt a warm sense of contentment, as though the sun were beaming its rays directly onto her heart. She was a grandmother. True, this reddish lump of flesh with the odd name had none of her beauty; but after all, the lump was her granddaughter, and one way or another it made her proud. She swept the courtyard and freshened it up with a sprinkling of water across the packed-dirt surface. She dragged the rolled-up red Persian carpet from the storeroom, shook it hard to expel the dust, and unrolled it along the length of the reception room. In the middle room, she took down the elegant china that always sat in the high dormer-like apertures punctuating the thick plaster wall, and rubbed each piece to a shine before carefully setting them back into their niches. She spread out new bedding on the floor for Mayya and the newborn. She didn’t summon clumsy Khawla to bake; she preferred to do it herself, for the bread a recovering new mother needed was very special. She mixed together the pure country butter and mountain honey to spread on the bread, and after all of these preparations, she made certain that Mayya ate every last bite on the plate and drank the milk boiled with fenugreek to the last drop. She made coffee laced with cardamom for the occasion and set out a platter of fresh fruit and dates. She arranged two bottles of rose water and a small cup of saffron on a gilt tray with the incense burner, and put the coffee, plates and tray of scents in the room ready for visits from her neighbours. She knew the women would soon come round. She bathed herself in water steeped in her special blend of herbs – since the day she was created soap had never touched her body. She put on her best robe and knelt down beside her silent daughter.

  Suddenly a loud, gruff voice filled the entire courtyard. Bismillahi . . . ma sha’ allah . . . allahumma salli ala n-nabi . . . allahumma salli ala l-habib . . . bismillahi . . . In the name of God, the One who is merciful and compassionate. May blindness strike the eye of the envious one! Ma sha’ allah, it’s God’s will, this is right! The first one’s a girl, and a girl comes to raise her little brothers. Ten boys will follow her, God willing. Bismillahi . . . allahuma salli ala n-nabi. Prayers be on the blessed Prophet!

  At this voice, Salima gave her daughter a little warning slap. Don’t even think about getting yourself up, not for just anyone, girl! Not for her. It’s only the old man’s sweetheart, that’s all.

  Zarifa strutted down the long room, pausing deliberately and methodically, the name of God streaming incessantly from her mouth. She dug her toes energetically into the Persian carpet to test its depth and softness. She shoved aside the thin, almost transparent cloth that protected the tray of fruit and dates, and sized it up with a swift glance. She jiggled the tiny silver spoon in the cup to assure herself that it really did hold thick, solid threads of saffron. Only then did she continue on her way towards the middle room.

  Welcome, Zarruuuuf, muttered Salima, with no attempt to keep the derision from her voice. My, my, you’ve come so early! If only you had waited awhile, say ten days or so. Now you’ll have to excuse me, my leg is giving me trouble, it’s painful enough that I can’t get up to greet you.