Sadiq’s twin sister, Hawraa, caught me off guard when she opened the door. It was the first time I saw her wearing a hijab and an abaya, shrouding her from head to toe. I was sorry I would never see her thick brown hair again. How can a child become a woman by simply donning a hijab? I consoled myself with her rosy cheeks and kohl eyes—all that were left of the girl I once knew. I almost asked her about her hijab or congratulated her or said something about her new look, but my mom’s list of what-not-to-dos thrummed in my head. I wondered if Fahd already knew about this whole hijab development. He’d get wound up whenever I brought up Hawraa. He thought I was alluding to whatever his khala Fawzia went on about whenever she’d speak about Hawraa. One day Mama Hissa had sent him to Sadiq’s house with some food, and from then on he’d insist on always delivering food to Sadiq’s house. Whenever Fawzia saw him lingering in front of the window facing Hawraa’s house, she would start teasing him, singing “Return the Visit,” his favorite artist’s song. Fahd’s face would flush beet-red.
“Come in. Sadiq’s around,” Hawraa said, interrupting my extended silence. I found Sadiq in the living room, clasping an Atari joystick with a red button, dodging fighter jets on the screen. He was completely obsessed with fighter jets. Under the stairs ’Am Abbas sat cross-legged in front of a woven basket, his glasses on the tip of his nose, untangling fishing lines and recoiling them around wooden spools. A melodious Nazem Al Ghazali song came wafting from one of the rooms. No doubt it was Mama Zaynab’s room. It was my first time in Sadiq’s house. With its prayer rugs, furniture, and chandeliers hanging from elaborately engraved plaster ceilings, the house wasn’t any different from the Al Bin Ya’qub house or ours. What did stand out, though, were some of the paintings on the wall behind the TV: highly detailed images of horses, lions, swords, and handsome men with finely crafted features who were more attractive than the man I’d seen crucified in the picture hanging in Tina’s small bedroom. I remembered what Fahd said that morning about how ’Am Abbas, Khala Fadhila, and Mama Zaynab worshipped the Prophet’s family. That evening, my tightly wound mind was released, new understandings blossoming: the paintings, the images of tearful eyes drawn by Sadiq, and a photograph on one of the shelves in the TV console. The photo was nestled between two early childhood pictures of Sadiq and Hawraa: a man in a black turban with a thick white beard; written below it, in florid script, was RUHOLLAH MUSAVI KHOMEINI. Neither the name nor the photo was new to me. I’d known each of them before, but as separate entities.
What was new for me that evening was the two together, matching the name to the face. He was the leader of the opposing side in the war, and I barely knew anything about him. My head was bursting with questions, the kind that could leave me with swollen lips, given Mom’s perpetual threats to slap me for asking such things. I swallowed my questions and gave the standard greeting, “Assalamu alaikum.”
’Am Abbas responded accordingly, then asked, “Is it just you?”
I nodded.
“Where’s that son of the devil, Fahd? Or did the devil himself forbid him from entering my house?” demanded ’Am Abbas when he finally pulled himself away from the fishing lines. I was used to hearing Fahd likened to a cat, bazzun in Mama Zaynab’s tongue and qatu in Mama Hissa’s, but “son of the devil” was a new one. For a few months already I had had the sense that ’Am Abbas’s household was no different from ’Am Saleh’s, that each one was a reflection of the other. It had dawned on me the night I’d gone with Sadiq and his dad for al qumbar at low tide. ’Am Saleh wouldn’t let Fahd join the fishing expedition. His ban on his son entering his neighbor’s house also extended to the neighbor’s car, and even being in his company. We walked barefoot in the darkness. With the tide as low as it was, we were able to make our way farther from shore than we normally could. Flashlights in hand, Sadiq and his dad combed the salty seabed below, leaning on two spears they’d use to collect the fish trapped in misplaced taroof nets or shallow depressions covered by just enough water. I stood to the side, carrying the zabeel, placing the fish they collected inside the woven basket. Their disinterest in the crabs, there by the dozens, surprised me, but that didn’t stop me from yelling and pointing at one of them whenever I saw them scuttle, leaving in their wake a dotted line in the wet sand. “’Am Abbas, look! Look! A crab!” He was indifferent; they didn’t eat crabs because such creatures consumed sea refuse, making them haram. When I told him that we did eat them, he responded offhandedly, “As if you all really know what haram means.” “You all” was what he spat out as a response to the “them” that ’Am Saleh was always going on about. He didn’t appreciate my pensive silence, it seemed. “You let good ol’ Saleh know that I don’t eat such dirty things like you all,” he sneered.
That night when I first entered ’Am Abbas’s house, I didn’t say anything in response to his question about the absent “son of the devil.” And before that, I didn’t inform ’Am Saleh of what Sadiq’s dad had said about his neighbor the night we went on our al qumbar expedition. I twisted my body to face Sadiq in front of the TV screen. He turned toward me, holding out the joystick. “C’mon, play.” As soon as I sat down beside him on the ground, Khala Fadhila appeared, clad in her abaya and with Hawraa in tow, carrying something wrapped up that looked like a gift. Al Ghazali’s song fell silent. Mama Zaynab emerged from her room. They were all on their way out.
“Where to?” ’Am Abbas asked.
Clutching her abaya under her chin, Khala Fadhila turned to him. “To Abu Sami’s house. Florence converted to Islam.”
His hands, busy again with fishing wire, relaxed. ’Am Abbas adjusted his glasses. “Which sect?” he asked her, intrigued.
“Her husband’s sect, of course,” Mama Zaynab chirruped, smiling.
’Am Abbas swatted the air in front of his face in a gesture of disappointment. “She would have been better off if she had just stayed whatever she was before.”
3:50 p.m.
Present Day
“Allahu akbar . . . God is great . . . death to the enemy!” shouts the Shia mob crowded around the hussainiya. It’s not going to be easy for me to limp to the crime scene, despite its close proximity to our headquarters. I drive my car instead and park it nearby. Policemen have cordoned off the explosion site. In front of the building, there’s a deep crater stretching over four yards. Ayub’s shirt is my ticket past the ring of security.
Fires are burning in different places. Ash covers everything. Among gray pieces of masonry are corpses, most of them right outside the hussainiya building, which was empty after midday. The injured, now gray, appear as living, breathing ashen statues. Some of them moan and others crawl away from the rubble, signaling their existence with their hands. A filthy black dog scampers away, its jaws clamped around an amputated arm. While emergency personnel run around, I can smell burning flesh and hear crackling fires, women wailing, and others cursing, insulting, and praising God all at once. The firefighters yell out to one another. The policemen conduct searches of the scattered bodies, yelling for ambulances. “Stretcher . . . Here, here . . . He’s breathing . . . He’s moving . . . We’ve got a live one!” They open fire on the wildly excited corpse-catcher that has landed beside an armless, now-lifeless man, blood freely spurting out from the shoulder to which his now-lost arm had been attached. We used to think a corpse-catcher wouldn’t approach a dead body until it started to decompose. Today, it’s less patient and more bloodthirsty than we’d imagined. I hobble on the now-slippery ground, dragging my injured leg. Water from the firemen’s hoses transforms the soil into a mixture of blood, dirt, ash, and rubble. The scenes and sounds of death I’ve gotten used to seeing on TV from other countries in the region are now live in front of our eyes, without a remote control beside me and no special button like the one on Sadiq’s desk to make it all disappear. The targeted building belonged to one sect. The victims around it are from both. Your nerves of steel put me to shame, Ayub. If you were here, you’d be snapping photos. I know you’d do what I ca
n’t. I can’t even take a single picture. I hate what I see. I fail to steady my trembling fingers. What’s the point of preserving an image that I can’t bear to look at? I imagine a similar fate for Fahd and Sadiq. My tears choke me. I call Ayub.
“Hi, is there any news?”
“You’re where it’s all at. You tell me,” he says.
Turning around to examine my surroundings, I’m left dumbfounded by the unfamiliarity of it all. “Nothing new except the number of dead bodies” is all I can muster as I fail to hold back my tears.
“Listen to what I have to say. The shit’s hit the fan.”
I don’t breathe a word, ready for his bad news.
“A fatwa, or something that looks like it, more extreme than anything before, prohibiting people from listening to Fuada’s Kids on the radio, visiting our website, or following any of our accounts on social media. ‘Fuada’s Kids are misguided’ is what it says.”
A lump in my throat turns to bitterness under my tongue. My eyes settle on the crater in front of the hussainiya building.
“Who issued it?”
He lets out a sigh laced with the ghost of a laugh. “Both of them. Can you believe it? It was first issued by the Lions of Truth and then backed by the religious elders in the other sect. It then spread like wildfire on social media and by text.”
Both of them! Both of them, who can never agree on which day the new moon appears to mark the beginning of Ramadan so that fasting can commence. Both of them, who never wish the other a happy first day of Eid because they each have different first days of Eid. Neither of them can agree on prayer timings, or the percentage of zakat, or burying their dead in one cemetery. Both of them can’t agree on anything except shunning the other. In a bid to shut us down—us, whose throats have grown hoarse from continually calling for equality and peace—both of them have now agreed on something for the first time.
Ayub then makes things worse, making me feel like I’m drowning in quicksand. “Some of the extremists on both sides consider killing us as halal.”
I focus on the dog that had scampered off with the amputated arm; it is now returning, without the arm. It sniffs the ground. Given my silence, Ayub simply charges on.
“I don’t want to scare you even more, but one of the religious elders issued a fatwa calling for government intervention to stop you after what happened today on the What’s New Today segment. Apparently if we don’t stop, hell is where Fuada’s Kids is headed. Burned to a crisp will be our fate.”
“What government?” My sarcastic question is out of place, aimless.
“That’s what the religious elder said.”
“I see that you’re calling them elders now. Ayub, it’s been less than an hour since the show aired. How can a fatwa be issued that quickly?”
“Fine, it’s not an official one per se. It’s not a literal fatwa as much as it’s an immediate response in the face of the Atheist Network’s declaration.”
At the sound of their name, my insides shrivel up. An ambulance siren goes off, as the vehicle makes it way from the bomb site. “And what do we have to do with them?”
Ayub waits for the siren to die down. “On their website, the Atheist Network praised the What’s New Today segment and the ‘Glory to Darkness’ poem. They say that it’s a call to wake up from the blindness of religion.”
“But we—”
“They’re just using the poem to advance their own interests. You know how it goes. Since they came into being, they twist everything for their own benefit.” Ayub tells me that the fundamentalists claim that Fuada’s Kids or the Atheist Network is the spawn of the other. In a voice tinged with regret, Ayub’s final words are about the poem I defiantly broadcast earlier on: “Didn’t I tell you now wasn’t the time?”
THE FIRST MOUSE: SPARK THE INHERITANCE OF FIRE
THE NOVEL
Chapter 9
As if nothing had changed, the three of us were back together, whiling away the time in the courtyard of the Al Bin Ya’qub household. With Sadiq back in the fold, I was walking on air. It was the tenth day of Ramadan, or the ninth if you went by ’Am Abbas’s calendar. Mom only let me out after I had promised her that I wouldn’t leave the neighbor’s courtyard or go anywhere with the family if they invited me along. Charged was how I would describe the atmosphere in the country. The eight-year war was coming to an end: the first Gulf War, or the Iran-Iraq War, or Saddam’s Qadisiya, as it was known in ’Am Saleh’s house—harkening back to the seventh-century Arab conquest of the Persians—or the Holy Defense as it was dubbed in ’Am Abbas’s house. Just the day before, a bomb had exploded at the Saudi Arabian Airlines office, less than twenty-four hours after the Saudi government had announced the severing of diplomatic ties with the Islamic Republic of Iran.
Every single time my dad and I hoped that Mom would return to her normal self, news of another bombing pulled her deeper into her vortex of distress. She would fall straight back into her state of trepidation, as if we were still in July 1985. Transfixed by the television screen, calling up her brothers and all our relatives, making sure they were safe and sound. Three years since the café bombings and Mom was still unable to get the better of her nerves. With every new bombing, she grieved anew the murder of our elderly neighbor, ’Am Saleh’s dad. She remembered Abu Saleh for doing what he did best: watering the three palm trees outside his house every morning, without fail. Like my mother, my dad was also consumed with worry, but it was a different, fluctuating kind of anxiety: he followed the stock markets after every bomb blast, fearful of a collapse like the Souk Al Manakh crash in 1982. He had high hopes for stocks he bought during that economic crisis at dirt-cheap prices. As for Khala Aisha and Fadhila, they lived in a suspended state of fear, whereas Mama Hissa was unique in that, despite the great loss that rendered her a widow (“He’s in heaven now”) and despite her daughter’s disease brought on by the shock of her father’s death (“God is the mighty healer”), the old lady never seemed worried, fortifying her faith with the mantra that “God is the almighty protector.”
There we were under the sidra, on a mild day in the middle of spring 1988. Everyone was caught up in a flood of joy after the hostages on the hijacked plane were released, despite the bomb blast days before, which had roused waves of worry once more.
After the muezzin’s call to the afternoon prayer, we set off in search of unripe lotus fruit. Once found, we collected our harvest in a basket that Mama Hissa had commissioned us to fill. She used the lotus fruit to prepare achar, which was wildly popular on our street. Mama Hissa’s achar, which only she could bring to perfection, and which Fahd the stray cat confirmed the mutabbaq samak was no good without. She would pickle everything and anything to make achar: Assyrian plums, mangoes, lemons, garlic, cucumbers, tomatoes, eggplants, cauliflower. That year she wanted to try her hand at something new: lotus fruit.
“Mama Hissa! How will you make achar from kinar?” Fahd asked, his nose crinkled in disgust.
As if she had anticipated his question before he even posed it, she quipped back with the popular saying, “Eat what pleases you, and wear what pleases others.”
“But—”
She cut him off, shooing him away to quietly collect more lotus fruit; otherwise, she’d make achar out of him. “Your mother’s achar doesn’t stand a chance!” she declared. Mama Hissa said, as she pointed to her chest with a tremulous finger, that the secret to her delicious achar—what really set it apart from that of others—was using her homemade vinegar instead of the bottled kind from the market.
“Does Ms. Principal know how to make vinegar?” she’d tease me. The mystical ambience surrounding Mama Hissa never ceased to enthrall me whenever I found her seated on her braided palm frond mat, courtesy of the Kayfan girls, a mat that might as well have been a magic carpet from a faraway time that bore no resemblance to our present. Cross-legged, she would sit in front of ceramic vessels full of vinegar, preparing them in the corner of the courtyard behind the kitchen, her
head bobbing side to side, eyes closed, breathing bismillah and Quranic verses over them.
“Mama Hissa! Why are you reciting Quranic verses to the vinegar?” I once asked.
She stopped bobbing her head and, with her eyes still closed, responded, full of devotion, “So that the vinegar doesn’t turn into wine.”
The sidra branches were bowed with ripe lotus fruit and others still unripe, green and yellow. Fruit was strewn all over the ground and there was undoubtedly more on the roof of the palm tree shed. Mama Hissa ordered me to climb the tree to pick some of the fruit suitable for her achar. “Get the green kinar; they aren’t fully ripe.” I countered that Fahd was better at climbing than me. Her eyebrows danced. “Fahd is just a cat, but you’re a monkey!” How I hated the day I’d asked her where the zoo was! Hesitant, I removed my flip-flops at the base of the tree, looking up at its branches through the large gap in the ceiling.
She read my mind and reassured me. “God locks up the jinn and demons during Ramadan . . . Get up there, you chicken!” I clung to the tree trunk, inching upward as she sat on her stool on the marble courtyard floor. “Fahd!” she suddenly yelled.
She gestured to my footwear on the ground. I looked down through the gap in the shed roof at my flip-flops. One of them was overturned. Fahd chortled as he flipped it right side up while I fearfully chanted to myself, “Astaghfurillah.”
Mama Hissa looked up at me. “May He forgive you.”
Mama Hissa's Mice Page 9
