Celestial Bodies

by Johka Alharthi

  Asma found her mother sitting on the worn steps leading into the kitchen. Salima’s distracted air startled her daughter. She never allowed herself to lose composure, even momentarily; Asma had often wondered how she could do it. Wishing her good morning, her mother’s voice came faintly. In the kitchen the coffee was already bubbling on the flame, the cardamom ready next to it.

  Something was wrong but Asma couldn’t figure out what it was. Her father drank his usual two cups of coffee and glanced at her as he gnawed on the dates that invariably began his day. Asma didn’t feel uncomfortable or embarrassed, as perhaps was expected of her on such a day, but she did sense some kind of silent rebuke in his eyes. It set off a vague feeling of remorse, or perhaps of guilt, but again, she couldn’t identify what the problem was.

  On her mother’s orders she shut herself in her room. No one must see the bride before her wedding. Mayya had been in seclusion for an entire week and not a single woman from the neighbourhood had gotten a glimpse of her before the evening of her wedding. Asma breathed out a long sigh. Praise be to God that her mother hadn’t insisted on isolating her for a whole week! All Salima had done was to forbid Asma to leave the house, but that was more or less in effect all the time, anyway, so it seemed a bit of a joke as a maternal ruling for the week preceding the wedding. Did she want Asma to know the value of the freedom that marriage would give her? She’d be one of the women now, and finally she would have the right to come and go, to mix freely with the older women and listen to their talk, to attend weddings, all of them, near and far, and funerals too. Now she would be one of the women who sat around their coffee in the late mornings and then again at the end of the day. She would be invited to lunch and dinner, and she would issue her own invitations, since she was no longer merely a girl. Marriage was her identity document, her passport to a world wider than home.

  When younger, she had always eagerly welcomed the date harvest as an opportunity to go out and enjoy herself with the other girls. Early in the morning they would walk outside al-Awafi to the farms, moving from one to the next, inspecting the ripening dates as they were separated, cleaned and sorted. The girls could play with the unripe red ones and splash around in the moving water that the canal system sent from one field to the next, according to a fixed water distribution schedule which guaranteed strict fairness. But the greatest fun awaited them at the end of the day, in the open space amidst the farms where the faaghuur was made. She had always found it a captivating sight, Asma remembered: the stream of unripe dates pouring into the enormous cauldrons of boiling water. She and her friends competed to guess which one would be ready first. At that point, the men removed the hot mass with palm-fibre ladles, spreading it out in the sun so that it would dry, whereupon it would be packed and shipped to Muscat where government buyers purchased it for export to India. Asma didn’t like its taste, preferring dates that were fresh. People in al-Awafi bit into faaghuur only to test that they’d gotten it right and certainly not for any other reason. Not when they could eat ripe dates. Asma and her friends spent the entire harvest day running around in play, shimmying up the smaller palm trees and swinging from palm-fibre ropes tied between two trunks. They delighted in annoying the women working in the fields, picking through the dates they would carry back at the end of the day in large bundles on their heads, or collecting the rotting dates left behind, filling large sacks that they would drag away to feed to their sheep or to sell to others who owned sheep. Asma could remember how she had ripped a hole in Fattum’s sackcloth without Fattum knowing it. As she walked, the rotten dates falling from her sack traced a long line behind her. For days afterward, Asma’s friends laughed at the image of it. But Asma had grown up. She no longer went to the harvest games. Now she didn’t even go out for the first day of the month of Dhu al-Hijja to sing with her friends.

  Muhammad has come down to the wadi

  without any water or food

  Muhammad has come to paradise now

  And the houris’ daughters are after him.

  My greetings and prayers I’ve given the Prophet

  My greetings and prayers to the Messenger

  On this morning it wasn’t long before the house was echoing with the voices of the women who had come to carry her trousseau to the groom’s home. They filled the pickup that Emigrant Issa had rented from a Bedouin. Asma’s two cases and her mandus went in, along with the embroidered pillows and two Persian carpets. The first case carried her new clothes. The second one hardly held anything but the bottle of French perfume, the aloes-wood oil and the varieties of incense her mother had selected. But her mother insisted on the two cases anyway, as a sign to all that her daughter’s trousseau was generous and worthy.

  Mayya went along with the women to arrange her sister’s belongings in her new home, which Asma had not yet seen. The bride remained behind her firmly closed door with Khawla and a neighbour woman who was in charge of the crucial matter of henna. Thoughts of motherhood, her new clothes, the women dancing, and what it would be like to leave her childhood home had all wandered through Asma’s mind, but she hadn’t given a thought to Khalid, her long-awaited bridegroom. A few weeks before, when her mother had informed her of the engagement, she had considered the matter calmly and given her consent.

  When she and her father quoted poetry at each other, each one trying to outdo the other, Asma sometimes repeated lines of love poetry, or if she didn’t, her father did. She always read to him in the winter evenings, especially from the collection of poetry by the great word artist al-Mutanabbi. They would smile together at the opening lines of his odes, on the lover’s grief at his beloved’s absence, and his longing. But she was not as attached to the Arabic tradition of love poetry, with its flights of coy fancy, as her father was. Nor was she particularly drawn to the love scenes in the few novels she had read. A friend of hers found these at a small bookstore in Muscat but when Asma tried to read them she found them too unrealistic and foreign to interest her. The last novel she had read was something called Secrets of the Palace which took place in eighteenth-century France. It was all about royal passions – pleasure, betrayal, mirth. Asma didn’t find it convincing. She preferred what she considered more realistic books. But the one text she had found truly memorable and compelling was the passage she had memorised without even really understanding what it meant. Something about spirits or souls that were perfectly round once upon a time but had been split apart. For as long as they were separated they would search out their other half until they found it. That is how she imagined love: a meeting of spirit-twins. She certainly never imagined experiencing a love so fierce that her nights would stretch as long as the nights of the lovers in al-Mutanabbi’s poems, or nights filled with worries and cares like Imru’ l-qays’s nights. She wanted to marry someone who stood out from others, a different order of being, but who would also give her a sense of security and ordinariness. She would love him, of course, and she could have the motherhood she wanted so much.

  Her heart was vacant enough, so why would it not open up for Khalid? She did confess to herself that she’d noticed Marwan, the cousin of her sister Mayya’s husband. She had seen him on a few occasions, and each time, she was taken with the sense of tranquil purity that this figure in white radiated, a silhouette who hardly spoke a word. In fact it was his mysteriousness that ignited her dreams. She was aware that her glimpses of him had been few. Anyway, on the last feast day when he had come to pay his respects to the family, she’d been a bit frightened by the expression in his eyes. She didn’t understand her feelings but she knew his gaze scared her. There was something odd beneath the surface of his silence. She stopped thinking about him.

  Khalid . . . Khalid, the horse artist. He was certainly someone out of the ordinary, as she had fancied. His father, Issa, had acquired his nickname of ‘Emigrant’ by leaving Oman for Egypt in 1959 after the defeat of Imam Ghalib al-Hina’i in the war of the Jabal al-Akhdar. Like nearly two thousand other Omani families who fled, fearing the
English and their ruthless manipulations of power, Issa hoisted the burden of his little family onto his shoulders and settled them and himself in Cairo. His sons Khalid and Ali finished their educations there, and his daughter Ghaliya was born there. When Oman’s new government offered an amnesty in the 1970s, asking the fugitives to return and share in constructing a new awakening for a united Oman, Issa the Emigrant refused the offer outright, his head high in exile.

  But when Ghaliya grew sick, and then when she died, her mother insisted that they must bury her in her ancestral town. Khalid had just graduated from the Fine Arts Academy so he returned with his parents to the place he had left as a boy. Ali stayed in Cairo to finish his degree and to see out some family obligations. Then he too returned to a town he barely remembered from childhood. Now here they were seeking marriages with hometown girls, these sisters, Asma and Khawla.

  A long genealogy connected the two families but what mattered were the few holiday encounters. Asma and Khalid had spoken occasionally. Once she even saw his paintings, on the one family visit to their home that her mother allowed her to join. She was astonished to see such an overwhelming number of paintings all on the same theme, all of the same image. Horses.

  Ali’s paintings were precise and detailed, capturing every nuance of a horse’s build. His steeds barely skimmed the ground, as if they were taking off in flight. Studying these horse-forms, Asma was increasingly certain that the paintings contained within them some kind of disquiet. The images made her anxious; she wished these horse-figures were more firmly planted on the ground. No wonder, years later, she felt drawn to paintings of barefoot women with sturdy legs and feet, images that redressed the unease that had collected inside of her as she gazed at the horses – so light, fragile, transitory – in her husband’s paintings. Solid chunky bare legs; she found them reassuring.

  Issa the Emigrant was straightforward with her father. We want Asma and Khawla for Khalid and Ali. They’ll live with us in Muscat. Anyone who has lived for a long period in a city like Cairo can’t endure life in a tiny backwater like al-Awafi.

  For Asma, moving to Muscat meant she could continue her studies and get a degree. She would enrol in one of the city’s secondary schools and maybe after that she could even get admitted to the university that people said was under construction, or one of the colleges that already existed. She could go on learning. She recalled her mother’s story about her grandfather Shaykh Masoud, the one with the library. A smart, quick boy with a love of knowledge, he wanted to go to the Saidiyya School in Muscat. But his father decided that life in Muscat posed too much of a danger for a future head of the tribe. So the boy learned what he learned from shaykhs and imams in mosques, moving between the centres of learning that existed then in Nazwa and al-Rustaq, though he never forgot his dream of going to modern schools. Later on, he worked with some others on founding a modern school. They wanted to locate it in an open city on the coast, and they chose Sur. After a flurry of planning they laid the foundations but then orders were issued from on high: they were to do no more. In the 1940s the mere idea of educating Omanis terrified the rulers. Masoud and his friends learned of one senior bureaucrat’s reaction, expressed in an exchange with an English confidante, which said it all: Are we going to educate Omanis like you educated the Indians, and so they revolted against you, and soon they’ll oust you entirely?

  So the school project in Sur came to an early and rapid close. Masoud returned to his books, procured from India, Egypt and the Arab capitals at the eastern end of the Mediterranean. Salima, telling Asma about her grandfather, didn’t really know how to explain her father’s determination when it came to studies. But Asma thought she knew what he must have felt. She said quietly to her mother: The longing to know things consumes people sometimes. It was a desire that consumed her as it had her grandfather, despite the many years that separated them.

  Salima

  When the truck took Asma’s wedding things away her mother collapsed, alone in the big front room. She felt pangs of hunger, that most familiar of sensations from her childhood, all the time she was growing older, crouched at the foot of the kitchen wall in her uncle’s fortress-like compound, denied the bounties of its kitchen. True, she had not spent her childhood stirring big pots or sweeping or carrying water or wood on her head. True, she was not a slave or a servant. But nor had she ever had the satisfaction of a full stomach or the pleasures of wearing pretty clothes or learning embroidery, since Shaykh Said was not her father but only her father’s brother. She couldn’t leave the confines of the walled compound or play with the girls who lived nearby. She didn’t have a part in the shared laughter and play when women and girls were bathing in the falaj, nor in the dancing at weddings like the girls from slave families did. She couldn’t be given remnants of old clothes out of which she could make gowns for wooden dolls. But equally, she didn’t have gold chains or bracelets to put on, nor could she enjoy the delicacies of the table like the daughters of shaykhs did. She grew up at the foot of the kitchen wall, always hungry, always observing slave women’s freedom to live and dance, and mistress women’s freedom to command others, adorn themselves as they liked, and make visits to their likes in other well-off families.

  She could certainly remember the visits her mother made to her and Muaadh, every one surreptitious, their mama cowed. When Mama came to see them her eyes were always puffy. She held them and mumbled words they couldn’t really hear. They knew how she begged Shaykh Said time after time to let them live with her, in her brother’s home. But he always said the same thing. He would not abandon his brother’s children, allowing them to be raised by virtual strangers, outsiders to their father’s big and important family.

  Salima particularly remembered a visit when she had just turned ten years old. Instead of sitting with her in the courtyard, half-hidden under the kitchen wall, her mother led her to a room inside her uncle’s forbidding home. She unrolled her head wrap which had been knotted into a bundle. Undoing the knot she took out several pairs of silver earrings and a needle. She smiled at her daughter, telling her that after a lot of difficulty and toil she’d come up with the money to buy these earrings, just for her. From this day on, declared her mother, Salima would be every bit as grand as her uncle’s daughters. Pulling Salima onto her lap, she poked the needle into a pounded clove of garlic to purify it and then plunged it repeatedly into Salima’s ear, making at least ten holes from the top of her ear lobe all the way down. The little girl’s tears soaked her mother’s lap as she submitted herself to the pain. Her mother strung black threads through every hole. Two days later, after the swelling had gone down, her mother came back. She took out the threads and put in the silver earrings, a set of graduated rings, increasing in size and heaviness the lower they were on her ear. Her mother was very proud, and Salima could see that. She endured the terrible pains that wearing these heavy earrings caused. Her ears swelled and festered to the point that she couldn’t sleep on her side, not on either side. She spent countless nights awake, trying to fall asleep on her stomach with her chin against the hard floor. By the time she felt better, some weeks later, and got used to the heaviness of the silver earrings, she’d come to hate any sort of jewellery, indeed any and all of the ways women prettied themselves up.

  Abdallah

  Zarifa squats on the ground and her enormous breasts spill onto her lap as her plump fingers, heavy with silver rings, undo the taping around the little cartons of finest-quality Omani jelly-sweet. She taps the almond garnish and dark brown surface lightly, and it quivers. Just have a look at that sweet sight! All this goodness, then they say to me, Don’t eat it, remember your diabetes, it’s all sugar, leave it. Well, sugar or no sugar, sorry, Zarruuf doesn’t leave sweets alone. All sugar, they’ll grumble, well, hah! Zarifa picks up a large chunk and crams it into her mouth with all her fingers, and makes a point of licking them, as if now, at this moment, she’s getting her sweet revenge for those many years of hunger she knew in the household of Sha
ykh Said, before my father bought her.

  Hide me away in your soft warm chest, Zarifa – I am frightened. Hold my head, rest it somewhere between your lap and your breasts. Let me breathe in your sweat and the smell of broth you always carry, and then, let me sleep. I am afraid, Zarifa. My father won’t forgive me for your death. My father will never relent, and I am afraid of what he will do. He’s come out of his grave, again and again, to question me about you. He tied me up with that palm-fibre rope, do you remember, and he threw me upside down into the well.

  From the bottom of the well, I shouted. She died a peaceful death, the Lord took her away, long after your time. You’d already been dead for years.

  But he did not raise me out of the well.

  He left me there, head down in the pitch-black well shaft.

  As God is great, Father, I did not even know! I’d moved to Muscat by then and the business consumed every moment. I only went back to al-Awafi for feast days. I heard she’d come back from Kuwait. They said she couldn’t stand living with Shanna. Somebody said Shanna threw her out of the house, and somebody else claimed she tried to get Zarifa locked up as a madwoman, so Zarifa fled. Still others said that Zarifa just missed al-Awafi too much and couldn’t endure being away. That she saw her mother Ankabuta in a dream, calling her, so she came back. She moved in with relatives.

  Father, I was so busy. It was just after the stock market collapsed, and Abu Salih and I were trying desperately to build up our business. Father, I was so busy, all of the time. I was in Muscat, and I was in al-Khuwayr, al-Ghubra, I was in al-Hayl, Sib, I was in every single town and area anywhere near Muscat, I was searching for a bit of land, a house, a villa, contractors, a clinic that could help us with Muhammad’s autism, English-language institutes, accounting classes, a car bigger than your old white Mercedes, any good deals, a decent travel agent, reliable domestic servants – Philippinas, Indonesians – schools for the children, tutors, a driver, places to spend the evening, friends . . .