Bitter Orange Tree Read online

  Mud and Charcoal

  Suroor and I were in the library. I was helping her read a manuscript in Arabic. She was telling me how much she wanted to improve her Urdu, too—her “second language,” as it was considered suitably and properly to be by the petite bourgeoisie of Pakistan. She was trying to concentrate on the text, although in reality she couldn’t focus her thoughts on anything but her sister, Kuhl. But was this person truly her sister? Suroor felt like she hardly knew her anymore. Kuhl’s emotions were always fraught and her mind was elsewhere. She was walking through life on a frothy cloud, she was caught in a waiting game, she was only passing by, or crossing through. Not really living. She would tell Suroor that her soul was suspended on the ripply little folds between the buttons on her beloved’s shirt. That her spirit hung helplessly there, bumping against the pleats and creases and wrinkles of his shirt. This passion—everything about this consuming love!—Suroor simply could not understand or accept it. How could the spirit of any creature be pledged like this, to the creases of a shirt and its buttons? How could anyone mortgage their soul away? She didn’t understand the story of the shirt at all. How could those ordinary wrinkles that form on any shirt when one sits down be—on the shirt of one particular person—a snare that caught the soul in its creases?

  Suddenly she stopped reading. “But you didn’t tell me,” she said. “You never told me you had a grandmother.”

  “Everyone has grandmothers,” I said.

  She laughed. She was so innocent. “Of course, everyone has grandmothers. But your family—they are well off, aren’t they? So why. . . why would your grandmother wish she could be a peasant farmer?”

  “Maybe she was like the wife of Mu‘tamid bin Abbad,” I replied. “The wife could see the peasant women from the balcony of her palace, and she longed to walk barefoot on the soil as they did. So her husband, the emir, thought the only thing to do was to bedeck the courtyard of the palace with perfume, saffron, musk, and camphor, and he ordered that it all be anointed with water until it was as damp as the soil in the fields. His wife went out to stroll with her daughters and her attendants, plunging her feet into the perfumed soil just as the peasant women did in the real soil.” Just then Suroor’s phone rang and she was immediately plunged into conversation with her sister. I left the library.

  It was just a funny story. I had no wish to scratch up Suroor’s pure innocence. Suroor seemed to me like a porcelain figurine, while my grandmother was a mountain. After my grandmother’s brother died, she found herself alone in the half-ruined shack where they lived with two minute coffee cups, a small platter, a cooking pot, two bedsheets, some worn-out clothes, and a new head wrap imprinted with brown rings. She learned from women in the neighborhood that some man had presented himself as a marriage prospect but her father had refused to allow her to wed. She went back to working with the charcoal women. Many, many years ago, Mu‘tamid bin Abbad said, “They will be walking in the soil, their feet bare, as if what their feet touch is not musk and camphor.” As for my grandmother and her charcoal-making friends, all they knew of camphor and musk were the words.

  One day she fainted while they were on their way back to the village. The charcoal she was carrying on her back scattered across the ground. The women gathered it up, but they had a much harder time trying to rouse her. The sun had already come up; at home, their waking husbands and children found no one baking their bread. The women dragged her, half-conscious, all the way to her shack. She would follow her brother before long, they whispered to each other. But in fact, she would live to see eighty.

  It was on that day, late in the afternoon, that Salman and his wife, Athurayyaa, came to visit. Salman was a relative on her mother’s side. After her brother’s death, he had invited her to live in his household but she had refused. Two years passed, and her health was deteriorating. This time, he came with his wife to take her away. He helped her pack the pitcher, the two tiny cups, the cooking pot, the platter, and the two sheets. She wound her new masarr about her head and neck, put on her silver anklet, and went away with them.

  My grandmother never did own her own little plot of land to till. She lived for eighty years, or perhaps it was longer, and she died before she came to own anything on the face of this earth. She had a green thumb: it was she who planted all the lemon and bitter orange trees in the courtyard of our house. One bitter orange tree was her favorite, but no tree that she planted and tended had ever withered. But still, it was our house, our courtyard, our trees. She lived with us, that’s all. She didn’t own the building, or the land, or even us. I think of her as my grandmother, but we weren’t really her grandchildren.

  She would lean her back against the bitter orange tree, and stretch her legs out in front of her, and cuddle my infant brother and sing to him.

  Ya hooba hooba hooba, ya hooba wana uhibbuh,

  wahibb illi yuhibbuh,

  wa-‘asr ana mrawwahat buh an al-ghashshun tihib-bu,

  willi yibba habibi yibii’ ummuh wabuuh,

  wiybii’ khiyaar maluh min il-mabsali wakhuuh,

  ya hooba hooba hooba. . . until my brother went to sleep. On and on it went, over and over.

  Hooba hooba I love this little one,

  I love anyone who loves this baby son

  In the late afternoon I hold him oh so tight

  sheltered from the wind gusts mighty or slight

  Anyone who wants him, will they sell their ma and pop

  Anyone who wants him, will they sell their fine date crop. . .

  She always made a little bed for him in the shade of the narinjah tree, smoothing out his hair as he slept. That’s where she would work the dried lemons, taking out the darkened inner flesh, which she used to make broth, and then boiling the hardened brown peel to make the infusion that calmed my mother’s spells of nausea during her frequent pregnancies. In the clear, peaceful late afternoons, she sat with her old neighbor Shaykha, before the dementia got to her. They drank coffee and ate dates and talked. What did they talk about? There’s no doubt that the only subject Shaykha talked about was her son, whom I never saw. Even when I first met Shaykha—she was already an old woman then—her son had grown up and gone very far away. He was very far away; he was very emigrant. I don’t remember what my grandmother ever talked about. My little brother Sufyan’s crying, or perhaps his irritation at having to drink baby formula? The new fruit growing on the narinjah tree? The only trip she ever made with us, when we went to the Emirates? An accursed hump on the back of a woman named Rayya? Or did she ever talk about the one man who had offered his hand in marriage, and was refused by her father?

  The Widow Marries

  When life in the village began stifling Salman, and he felt he couldn’t make a living there, he traveled to Zanzibar. He was not yet twenty. He borrowed money and bought a little farm and planted trees: banana, mango, coconut, clove. Soon he was able to begin marketing the harvest. In only a few years, he had amassed savings enough that not only could he pay off his loan, but he could return to Oman, buy and furnish a house, and think about getting married. But he preferred to stay in Zanzibar, moving among his slave mistresses, his farm, and his commerce. It was a family tragedy that forced him to return to Oman to care for his mother and sisters. And so he was in his late twenties when he became engaged to his paternal cousin Athurayyaa, widowed by her second husband at the age of sixteen.

  Athurayyaa had been a little girl, barely completing her fifth year of life, when her cousin Salman left for Zanzibar. She didn’t have any memory of him, didn’t recognize him when he returned, even if his name was a familiar one in her father’s house. As a two-time widow, she had gotten a reputation for being ill-omened. People whispered that anyone who married her would surely die. And so Athurayyaa did not expect to marry a third time. Her first husband had betrothed her when she was nine and had consummated the marriage when she was eleven. He was in his late sixties. At the time, she was still in braids and going out to play in the alleyways with other girls. They gathered sticks and string and remnants of fabric to make dolls. They drew lines and squares for playing hopscotch and took turns hopping from one space to the next. Her mother-in-law had to drag her in before sunset, hide her wood-and-fabric dolls, and bathe her, transforming her into a woman for nightfall. Athurayyaa was afraid of her husband. She didn’t understand at all why he did what he did to her every night, and why she couldn’t play with her friends when he was around. When he grew ill and died she was delighted because that meant her mother-in-law would no longer hide her dolls and scold her for getting her clothes dirty. But the joy was short-lived. Her mother-in-law pulled off her bright-colored gown and dressed her in white mourning clothes. The woman draped her long braids in a black tarha just as she draped all the mirrors in the house in black. The woman told her she had to stay inside, exactly like this, in these clothes, and that she would not leave the house for four months and ten days. Athurayyaa wailed and writhed on the floor, and the women who came to mourn with them bent over her in concern. “Ma sha Allah! So young, but she knows her duty and weeps for her man.” Two years later, another man secured her hand in marriage. He wasn’t so elderly but he was crude and rough and had no sense of how things ought to be. He was a hunter and he couldn’t be tamed. He would go off alone on his hunting expeditions. She was sixteen and pregnant for the first time when a group of Bedouin showed up carrying her husband, torn to pieces by wolves in the desert. She put on mourning white again and gave birth to a baby who had died in her womb.

  When Salman saw her, he was smitten with the look in her eyes. It was the expression of someone who had experienced everything, who knew everything, and therefore no longer took any interest in the world. It was a look both careworn and uncaring. The self-sufficiency and superiority
in that look could make you dizzy. It was the look of a little girl who had already become a mother—and of a mother whose dolls had been hidden from her and whose newborn baby had been buried. Salman liked Athurayyaa’s nose, too. Trying to persuade his mother to betroth him to her, he described her nose as being as fine as a sharp sword. He loved her almond mouth, her long hands that looked as free and innocent as a child’s, untouched by hard work; hands that had the appearance of never having rubbed the rough skin of her geriatric first husband or held the torn flesh that had once been her hunter husband. Hands that surely never held a baby except to lower it into its grave. It was as though those hands had been created for his hands alone: to enclose his fingers, and muss his hair. He would eat out of her hand all his life and he would never feel that he had enough. This hand would hold him and shade him and guide him and protect him. Her hand, the hand of his cousin Athurayyaa. So what if she was a widow. So what if she had borne a baby that had died. He didn’t want anyone else. No substitute would ever satisfy him.

  At the wedding, Athurayyaa felt uncomfortable and embarrassed. She felt shame. Marriage was beyond her now, she thought; suddenly, she felt so very old. Even if Salman was ten years her senior, to her he seemed a callow youth. All through the festivities, as they went on and on, she felt awkward and confused. But she did sense from the start that Salman was enraptured by her, and for the first time in her life she did come to know a man’s love. And because of that, she knew that any child she had with him would live, and that is exactly what happened.

  Ten months later, Athurayyaa gave birth to a beautiful baby girl, healthy and strong. Salman named her Hasina, and she held all those around her in perfect thrall. She lived in the bliss of her playful days until, years later, the journey of life gave her a new script to follow.

  An Austere Party for the Passionately Ascetic

  Christine invited us to a party at her house. It turned out to be a disappointment, because Christine—the unbending vegan—did not allow any animal products, no milk, no eggs, into her home. And so there was nothing to eat but potato chips, and a strange kind of cake that didn’t contain any milk or egg. Some of the guests—we were all students—perched on high metal stools without cushions or backs in the crowded kitchen and began talking to one another about their studies and what they had to read next and their professors. More guests were standing in the hall or the sitting room, exchanging similar conversations, the endlessly repeated chatter of students. I said to Suroor, “We are going to die of boredom even before we die of hunger.”

  There was nothing really to look at in Christine’s simple apartment; her home seemed a reflection of Christine’s own unadorned self. She was constantly on the move. Today she wore a green T-shirt on which was printed FRIENDS OF THE EARTH, and jeans and running shoes. She was unusually tall, so tall that people had to tip their faces upward to address her. Her hands always seemed to be darting about, her fingers going up unconsciously to toy with the tiny silver ring in her nose. It was impossible to avoid noticing the tattooed cross on her wrist that she had gotten when she was sixteen years old. Her very pale blond hair was always gathered in a ponytail, and if she wasn’t wearing the green T-shirt, then she would certainly be wearing a blue one that was otherwise identical. Her cup of decaf coffee with soy milk was tall and skinny: it looked just like her. Here at this party, she was an exact scan of the figure I always saw at the university: T-shirt jeans running shoes ponytail nose ring tattoo long skinny cup. The only difference was that, at home, she didn’t have her gray Adidas backpack over her shoulders.

  My Arab colleagues were applying themselves energetically to the whiskey bottles that these young men had brought with them. Kuhl had gone into the apartment’s one bedroom to be by herself with her phone. Christine shared this apartment with a classmate from China. In the narrow corridor stood Suroor, her slender fingers clutching a glass of juice, the perfectly manicured nails visible. She was having an intense discussion with two male students, one Norwegian and the other Korean, about hijab. Standing around like this didn’t appeal to me, and I was beginning to feel tired as well as bored. I swooped down on Kuhl in the bedroom. My timing was lucky: she was no longer on her phone.

  She was wiping her eyes on a tissue. I felt embarrassed, and I am sure it showed. But she made room for me on the bed where she was already sitting.

  “Suroor has told you everything, right?” she asked me after a moment.

  I was hesitant; I didn’t know what to say. She went on. “Suroor doesn’t understand anything. She thinks she does, but in fact she doesn’t understand anything at all.”

  I couldn’t find any words. So I occupied myself by staring at each wall in turn. There was nothing to look at except a photograph of Christine’s father, who was a professor of mathematics at Columbia University, and a small map of New York. “Christine’s from New York,” I said. My voice came out flat and dull.

  “That’s what she always says,” replied Kuhl. Something in the tone of her voice made me instantly aware that she was older than Suroor. Maybe more mature, as well. Her eyes were close to my face. They weren’t focusing on anything around her, and I felt her nearness, as I noticed the determination those eyes seemed to hold. She began scraping her fingers across the pillow; her nails were a rose color. She was definitely a bit fuller than Suroor, her features less well defined. Suddenly I had an inkling: her family must have always been fixated on this difference in appearance—in attractiveness—between the two sisters, and this preoccupation must have conveyed to Kuhl unconsciously that she did not deserve the best. It was a disturbing thought. I began staring at the walls again. There was nothing up there to suggest the presence of Christine’s Chinese flatmate.

  Kuhl spoke suddenly. “I cherish my parents,” she said. “I really do hold them in very high esteem, believe me. I respect the family name, I respect— Suroor doesn’t understand. She thinks that by marrying Imran I am betraying my family. But she doesn’t underst—”

  “Don’t apologize, Kuhl.”

  “Was I apologizing?” She sounded startled. “Yes, all right, you have a point, I’m always apologizing. Suroor—”

  I interrupted her again. “This attachment you have, this kind of feeling—what greater justification could there be, anyway?”

  The tears glistened in her eyes. “It isn’t just that Imran is right for me. And suitable. He completes me. I was only half a person before I found him. Our comfort together, how good we feel, the strength of our love—it can’t be put into words.”

  Suddenly she started crying, her whole body trembling. I put my arm around her shoulder. “Don’t cry, Kuhl. It’s your choice, and you are perfectly capable of making good choices.”

  Her voice came unevenly, broken up by her sobs. “But I didn’t choose anything. This was not about making a choice. Suroor simply does not understand. I don’t want to wrong anyone, and I don’t want to reduce Suroor’s chances of finding an appropriate husband from a distinguished family, but. . . but, Imran . . .”

  She wiped her tears dry on a tissue and suddenly her face was radiant and her voice was sure. “Imran—when I wake up early in the morning and find that I’m not in his arms, I feel like my existence has no meaning at all.”

  Suddenly, Christine appeared in the doorway. Seeing us, she raised her thin eyebrows. “Were you investigating my clothes closet?” she asked lightly.

  Kuhl laughed. “And what would we find there, besides blue and green Friends of the Earth T-shirts?”