Women of Sand and Myrrh (16 page)

With my aunt I visited the market, rode in the car, went into the desert and slept in a tent, and with my aunt looking on, I stood while our Indian neighbour fitted material on me for a dress. Running my hands over the gold and silver threads, I asked my mother curiously if a feast day was approaching. It was my aunt who answered: ‘No, Tamr, this is for the daughter of one of my relations in Iran.’ I didn’t ask which one as she had many relatives over there. Not a month went by without her inviting a family from Iran or Bahrain to stay; I used to think that every woman wearing an abaya and a veil was a relation, and I would stop in the street and refuse to go on until my mother had said hallo to the moving abayas.

But the nice clothes were for me: they hennaed my hands and feet one morning and dressed me in one of the dresses that same afternoon. They took me to my father’s house where Jauhar and Najeeya and my father’s fourth wife were
waiting, and for a moment I thought of the bucket and the rope and the servant. My mother and my aunt were there to accompany me, and I suddenly wondered if this could be my own wedding. The neighbour’s daughter once told me that she’d known about her father’s second marriage because there had been so many baskets and metal containers around, full of cooked rice and meat, and here I was confronted with bags and boxes of provisions, and my mother tasting a bit of rice and saying, ‘They’re obviously mean. God help us! You can count the cardamon pods and cumin seeds with the naked eye. God help my precious Tamr!’ Then I heard drumming and women trilling. ‘Mother, mother!’ I cried. ‘Are you marrying me off? I’m not even a woman yet!’ I knew about puberty from the Qur’an, although it was the teacher who had described monthly periods as ‘dirty’. ‘Are you marrying me off when you know it’s wrong?’ I asked again. ‘It doesn’t make any difference whether it’s to a boy or a grown man.’ ‘Hush, Tamr,’ replied my aunt. ‘Don’t be ungrateful. A man is an adornment, a crown for your head, a staff to strengthen your heart.’ I wept, without knowing why. ‘Mother, mother, will you be staying with me?’ I asked her, and when she nodded I felt reassured.

The women beat the drums and trilled and sang. Women I didn’t know entered the gathering. The chanting and songs rose higher, and I saw the professional entertainer whom I’d seen singing at other weddings. I’d always wondered why money was showered upon her and watched her hiding it in her breast, as she was doing now. When I saw the neighbours and their daughters kissing my mother and looking at me, I thought, ‘Perhaps I’m already married,’ but I pushed the thought away. I’d heard that the bride was wrapped up in a carpet or rug. Before my father came in my aunt shouted, ‘Anyone who’s unveiled should cover herself!’ The women gasped and if they saw my father picking me up it was only by sneaking a glance, but when I screamed ‘Mother! Mother!’ they couldn’t resist throwing back the covers from
their faces.

He carried me to his room at the centre of the house and I saw a young man sitting on a mountain of mattresses with a white cover draped over them. I screamed. When my father had gone, the young man stood up. I screamed again and took a few steps backwards. He didn’t move or speak, and I retreated to the door. I stood there for about an hour and whatever he did, whether he took a step in my direction, climbed up on the bed, or said something, I screamed. I wanted to open the door but I could hear the tambourines and drums and the women’s trilling. I kept my face to the door and when the noise died down and the drums fell silent, I opened it and closed it again. I stood for perhaps another hour before I opened it and this time went out and ran from room to room searching for my mother. I found her in her bed and squeezed up next to her, and put my arms around her, sobbing. She put out an arm to hold me and I wished she’d recite the story of the Little Fish to me until I was calmer. I couldn’t sleep because of the long gold ear-rings and chain and belt that I was wearing. I took them off and put them down on the floor. When I heard the dawn call to prayer, I started up in fright and found that my mother was no longer beside me in bed. She was doing her ritual ablutions. Kissing me, she said, ‘Good morning on this blessed morning, Tamr.’ I didn’t answer: I wanted to cry, but I didn’t.

My father’s fourth wife made the breakfast, and my mother arranged the dishes on the mat. I sat by my aunt who hugged me and quoted some expression about the musk from deer. I didn’t know what she meant but the phrase stayed with me until I was grown up, and one day I asked her what it meant. She didn’t remember saying anything about musk on my wedding morning but told me that it was the most precious of all scents, and they gathered it from sacs under the bellies of certain male deer. She had some which she’d acquired from a woman whom she met on the pilgrimage, in
exchange for a sheep. Then I remembered that distinctive smell which had dominated every detail of the wedding and stayed in my sensory memory, so that whenever I smelt it the wedding came back to me.

That morning they put me in another dress and replaced all my gold jewellery and sat me on mats piled high in the heart of the gathering. The tambourines began to play and the dancing and singing started up again and went on till nightfall. Everyone enjoyed themselves enormously. I saw the boys and girls I used to play with, and even the younger ones were peeping round the door, sticking out their tongues and rolling their eyes, making me laugh. Amidst all this excitement I forgot the coming night, although I hadn’t thought about what was going to happen and why I was afraid. This time my mother took me to the room, and before my eyes had adjusted she left abruptly, and the confused young man took her place. I screamed and shrank against the wall. He took no notice and said nothing. Now it was his turn to stand for ages with his face to the wall. When I stopped shouting, I stood where I was and only moved my eyes when a sound came from the bed and I looked to see him stretched out there facing the wall.

I undid the bolt and pushed the door but it didn’t open, so I lay down on the floor far from the bed with my face touching the wood of the door and my arms hugging my chest. I don’t know whether I slept at all: I remember staring into the darkness in the direction of the bed and feeling reassured. The gold chain and belt were in my way but I didn’t want to take them off; they were protecting me. When I heard the dawn call to prayer I pushed the door with all my might and found out that I was also pushing a table wedged against the other side of it. Once I was through, I ran off to my mother’s room.

After that, a pattern of events developed which repeated itself every night: when the door wouldn’t open, I screamed and screamed and bit his hand and my hand and any flesh I
could reach with my teeth. At this the youth lost patience and opened the door and let me escape.

When I’d escaped, I ran straight into another trap: all the doors were locked from the inside, including the kitchen and the bathroom, and the only one that opened was the outside door. I opened it and stepped out into the street, then went back in again, closing it behind me.

It was my aunt who made me change my mind; she sprinkled cold water on my face, heated up some milk for me and fed me with sweets and chewing gum while she sat with me in the kitchen. She asked me if I remembered the girl who’d been tied up to the palm tree. I remembered her without hesitation, as I remembered in detail anything which happened to interrupt the daily routine: weddings, funerals, births, swarms of locusts, riding in a car, riding a camel, my gold dress, my mother’s quarrel with Najeeya and Jauhar, and the story of the Little Fish. I remembered the girl tied to the palm tree; she was there till she and the tree looked like Siamese twins. My aunt and my mother had taken me and Awatef in the car to visit one of my aunt’s relations. There were women and children standing between the houses and on one side of a big open piece of ground, and there were men on the other side of it. My mother didn’t like the idea of stopping to watch with the women, in spite of my aunt’s entreaties, and she forced the relation to come into her house with us. Inside the house, the women began to take turns at the window, while Awatef and I tried to squeeze our heads between the grown-ups’ bodies. My aunt’s relation said, ‘The girl’s been without food and drink for three days.’ Then she pointed out the girl’s mother; she was with the other women, circling around the girl, shouting and singing, weeping and laughing. The women were touching her and striking her, wiping the sand off her forehead then throwing it at her. Her mother replaited her hair and struck her face with her plait again, held her dress together where it had been torn and then started to tear it again. The women swarmed around the girl
like hungry locusts.

‘What’s the girl done?’ I asked excitedly.

‘She hasn’t bled this month,’ replied my aunt, ‘and her stomach’s grown. Listen to me, Tamr and Awatef. When you become women, you have to bleed every month; if you don’t, dig yourself into the sand like cats do. Lie down and stay quiet and never get up again. That girl didn’t find any blood and yet she didn’t dig herself into the sand and lie low.’

Awatef, who had sometimes seen spots of blood on her mother’s dress, said, ‘Why didn’t the girl bleed?’ The women laughed loudly and my aunt answered, ‘Someone who was playing with her must have left his stick behind in her.’ Before Awatef could ask her what she meant, the relation addressed my aunt and my mother: ‘The slut. She swore on the Qur’an that she and another girl were playing around and what had happened was a miracle. Her mother and all the rest of the women told her not to tell lies.’ But an old woman called Watfa couldn’t stand it and shouted, ‘A girl with another girl is like two hands.’ And she pressed her palms together with all the fingers touching, and the thumbs, so that the two hands became one, and gasped, ‘Is that possible?’

We all moved away from the window to eat. In the morning of the next day when we left the place we saw the girl still tied tightly to the tree. She was dozing with her eyes closed and her black hair was touching the ground. Two days later her cries rent the air. The knife had descended on her lower abdomen. There was a woman called Aleeya Tattoo, because she’d punctured the hands and faces of so many young girls with her needles to draw black tattoos on their flesh. When they screamed she swore that she would stick needles in them and leave them there if she heard another sound. She was the first to meet newborn children, the first to see the dead and bury them or help bury them. This woman was muttering there, almost raving to herself, the knife in her hand along with a small piece of the flesh which had been in direct contact with the other forbidden flesh. She screamed as she
tried to force open the mouth of the girl tied to the palm tree: ‘Open your mouth and eat this. Chew it up.’ She brought the knife down again rapidly as she did when she was slaughtering a young lamb on a feast night. She shouted as she tried to feed the girl with the piece of flesh; and the girl, as if finding relief from her pain, bit Aleeya Tattoo’s fingers, which were as dry as a billy goat’s horns. Perhaps sinking her teeth into something helped her bear the wound which must have been oozing blood by then. It extended up to her stomach and the pain around there grew, and the girl screamed and screamed. The sand seemed to be joined up to the sky, and it was as if little grains of salt were covering her wound. ‘Eat this. Open your mouth. Chew it up.’ This time it came forcefully, for Aleeya Tattoo felt the teeth digging into her fingers. The girl moved her head away, to the left, to the right; the palm tree hurt her face. When she tasted the blood and the flesh she closed her eyes and vomited, and was no longer aware of anything.

I was twelve years old and I was jumping around on the roof of my husband’s family house with the neighbours’ daughters. I rushed down into the house to see the white dust come rumbling from the ceiling, then went back up to the roof. This was the only time when I forgot that I was married and playing in a strange house. I played only for two days, in the time after lunch when my husband’s family were sound asleep. The noise I made woke them up and they found out what I was doing. My husband’s mother, Reehan, disapproved of my game and frowned into the faces of the little neighbours who had been delighted with the young bride. They no longer came to amuse her because of that, and because their mothers told them the bride had begun to know about other things and might unsettle their minds. The days began to grow interminably long in the new house. The burning heat of the sun made its way inside in spite of the fans constantly revolving. The only things I liked about it were the designs carved on the ceiling and the wooden doors,
because they were more beautiful than the carvings in my aunt’s house, and their colours were not the same, but after a few days they no longer interested me. Silence hung over this house. There was no laughter and noise in it as there had been in my aunt’s house. Reehan and her daughter wore stiff expressions and I didn’t once see them laughing. Even seeds and chewing gum were in short supply, and when I asked about this one day, Reehan replied, ‘We don’t have small children in the house.’ I wanted to tell her that even my aunt and my mother like seeds and gum, and I used to stock up with them whenever I visited my family or my mother and my aunt came to see me. I hid them in the bottom of the chest in my jewel box between the nose ring and the other rings, just as I had earlier hidden two photographs, one of me dressed up for a feast day, and the other of me and my mother holding palm leaves. As the days went by I became certain that Reehan didn’t like me or my mother or my aunt. She shouted at me when I fidgeted as the dressmaker fitted me for a dress: ‘Stand absolutely still or you won’t have any dresses to wear.’ Stubbornly I replied, ‘I’ve got some other dresses. My mother and my aunt’ll bring them for me.’ ‘Do you mean those rags?’ she asked sarcastically.

I started to cry, defending my aunt and my mother. I decided that I would tell them as soon as I saw them. I realized too that I didn’t like Reehan and that I was bored: I wanted to play and run and learn about the fish and the animals which I’d seen in my cousins’ books, and I longed to be with my mother and my aunt all the time, not just for the one day in the week when I regularly visited them to share in the hustle and bustle of the house and listen to songs all day long. Going back to Reehan’s house was always hard. Just before it was time for the servant Khaizuran to collect me I used to pray ‘O God, please don’t let me see Khaizuran,’ but her tall thin shape would always loom into view. I would fly to her inviting her to have a cup of tea, some sweets, to delay her for as long as possible, but Khaizuran would remain – like
her name which means bamboo – as dry and unyielding as a bamboo cane.