Sara
I open my eyes to a bloodred sky. I submitted my grades a few days ago; now I have three months to think and write. Karl comes in July. I visit Karim in August. But today, under the indifferent rust of a desert storm, it’s just Maria and me.
Still in my pajamas, I skip down the stairs to the kitchen. Its walnut cabinets and Formica counters are worn, nearly thirty-six years in use, but the ochre fridge and stove gleam under Maria’s care. Maria stands guard over the warming milk, daring it to froth over. She cracks three cardamom pods with her teeth, as she always does, and tosses them into the pan.
“Gross, Maria!” I tease, as I always do.
She spins around and cackles at me, reaches out as if to pull my hair. I wrap my arms around the back of her shoulders and kiss her on the cheek. I may be forty-one, but my days in the Surra house with Maria make me feel ten.
After breakfast, Maria chats on the phone with one of her daughters, and I go up to my parents’ bedroom. I sit at my father’s desk, which faces the long window looking out on a garden wall pink with bougainvillea. At this desk my father wrote articles for prestigious medical journals, keeping himself current with the literature. I’ve changed nothing here. Not the enormous four-poster bed that never quite fit the seventies vibe of the house. Not the avocado-green walls that remind me of hospitals. Not the shelves stuffed with decades of The New England Journal of Medicine and my mother’s copies of Fanon and Arendt. I write at my father’s desk late into evening, but I spend every night in my childhood bed.
Around noon I smell cumin and coriander. Maria is making something special. This will upset Aasif, who will ask whether his food isn’t good enough that Maria must cook also? I’ll reassure him, as usual: “Your food is famous all over Kuwait. One little plate of bhajia won’t change that. It makes Maria feel useful. You can understand, no?” Aasif will snort, but the swollen vein on his forehead will deflate. Maria will cross her eyes at me behind his back, and calm will return to the kitchen.
I head downstairs for lunch, and Lola the cat follows. She’s more Maria’s than mine, but she enjoys the warmth of my lap. As soon as she sees me, Maria announces, “Josie’s getting a raise!”
“At last!”
“She had to wait. Kuwaitis first.”
“I know. It’s not fair. I’m so happy for Josie. You’re a good mother, Maria.”
She smiles, but I catch the fleeting wince. I hold my breath, and it passes.
I finish off her samosas. We drink our tea with extra sugar, then Maria heads to her room to nap. I go back up to my father’s desk, this time with an idea to write an essay on what teaching philosophy at the primary level in Kuwaiti public schools might achieve. In the thirteen years prior to their arrival at university, the capacity of young people to think is liquidated. They take everything literally. Supplementing the religious curriculum with an early introduction to philosophy could, I will argue, change that.
About an hour into my work, the doorbell rings. I’m surprised. We aren’t used to afternoon intrusions.
Aasif, groggy from his nap, knocks on my open door a few minutes later. “Two police outside, Sara.”
I slip on my flip-flops and grab a shirt to wear over my tank top. The public municipality probably needs me to move my car so that it can dig up the sidewalk for new water or sewage pipes.
Outside, the sky is still red. Two men stand a few steps below the front gate. “Duktora Sara Tarek Al-Ameed?” one of them asks.
I nod and smile reflexively. “That’s me.”
“You’re under arrest for blasphemy. Please go inside and get what you need for a few nights in jail. We’ll wait.” My face must convey a total lack of comprehension because he repeats what he’s said more slowly: “You are under arrest for blasphemy by order of the recent amendment to Article 111 of the Penal Code of the State of Kuwait. Please put a few things into a clear plastic bag and come with us.”
I consider anyone I might know with some connection to the police, someone who would pull a stunt like this. “You must be kidding!” I say after a minute or two. “Who put you up to this?” I can think of no one.
“Duktora, this is no joke. Go inside, please, prepare your belongings, and come back out.” He sounds impatient this time.
Suddenly I feel detached, floating upward. My pulse is not racing. My breathing remains steady. Aasif fidgets behind me, slamming me back to earth. “Aasif, say nothing to Maria. Tell her I had to go to Bahrain to meet someone for work, that I’ll be back tomorrow or in a few days.”
“I will.” His eyes reflect the fear I cannot feel.
“Please make sure she eats. And change Lola’s litter? Maria can’t manage.”
He nods.
“Don’t forget Bebe Mitu.”
“I won’t. Don’t worry, Sara.”
I rush to my room, stuff a few things into a Ziploc, and call a colleague whose father is a civil rights lawyer.
“Hanan, there are two policemen outside saying I’m being arrested for blasphemy. I don’t understand what they’re talking about.”
She groans. “It’s the new law.”
“What law?” I haven’t paid attention to any laws, new or old. Unlike my mother, I’m not politically inclined. My palms start to sweat. “What do I do? Do I go with them?”
“Go with them, but don’t say anything. Take your phone with you, and text your location when you get there. If you can’t, it’s okay. We’ll find you.”
Muhannad Al-Baatin, Hanan’s father, my new lawyer, is standing in front of the building—a black-brick monstrosity in the middle of Kuwait City—when the police pull up. He is tall and wide as an elephant. Mine is not the first blasphemy case, it seems, so he knows where to find me. I’m in the habit of flipping through the daily papers, so how I missed this development, I’m not sure. But if I’m honest, I’ve kept myself removed for so long, my ignorance is no great mystery.
Mr. Al-Baatin booms instructions at me as the gray officers, diminished in the face of my lawyer’s presence, lead me up the stairs and through the glass doors. “Don’t answer any questions! A student recorded one of your lectures. A member of parliament has raised a case. Sara, pay attention to what I’m saying! Not a word, do you hear me?” I have a hard time following any of it, but I hold on to his last words: “You’ll be out tomorrow morning.”
The small, filthy cell in the women’s section of the building is beautiful in its way, covered with words in many languages. Arabic, Urdu, Tagalog, Malayalam, French, Hindi, English. The three walls, the low ceiling, the floor, even the toilet—every inch of space etched with words. Messages from one woman to another or to someone far away.
I try to recollect the faces of all the students I taught during the spring semester. Three all-girls classes, twenty students per class, sixty students total. I think of them sitting in the circle I make them arrange themselves into so that we can discuss things more equally. It doesn’t quite work the way it did at Berkeley, but I persist, hoping the circle will make them brave. My accuser had to be in my eight-o’clock Intro to Phil class. A freshman offended to learn not everyone believes the same truth. I go around the circle in my mind, trying to pinpoint faces, to remember names. The girls in their hijab and niqab blend together. It’s bigoted of me to think so, but they’re hard to tell apart. I can’t single anyone out.
I give up on my class and turn to the walls of the cell. Poems, laments, prayers to God, cries for mothers. Please, Ma, save me. I feel cradled by thousands of writing hands, their fear blending with mine, outsiders in a closed country. They were here before me. How many were deported home? I have nowhere to be deported to. And yet, their words of longing lull me, allowing me to drift into pockets of sleep.
Mr. Al-Baatin comes to collect me the next morning. I sign some sort of pledge and am released on my own recognizance. He drives me home and stays for tea. The dainty love seat gives off dust the instant he sits on it; the formal sala has been neglected for months.
“A recording was made by one of your students,” Mr. Al-Baatin tells me. “On the recording you were heard stating that God is dead. The student handed the recording to the most conservative member of parliament. The Salafi MP, on behalf of the student, has lodged a complaint against you. The public prosecution has filed a case. You are being accused of blasphemy under the new law designating it a capital crime.” He pauses. “Thankfully the law has provisions. You may be allowed to retract before the trial even begins. But if you are found guilty—and I assure you, that would be a highly improbable outcome—execution is not guaranteed.” My blood freezes. “Even if all appeals are overturned, you should be allowed to retract your ‘blasphemous statement’ before the final judge and that could influence the punishment.” He makes little curly signs in the air with his forefingers for scare quotes. Derrida made the sign for scare quotes exactly the same way in a lecture he gave at Berkeley. Derrida and Berkeley are deserts apart from Mr. Al-Baatin and Kuwait, but unexpectedly in this gesture they aren’t.
I focus on Mr. Al-Baatin’s statements. I don’t like the sound of the words should and could.
“In that case, the sentence would likely be commuted to five years in prison and a ten-thousand-dinar fine.”
I don’t like the sound of the word likely.
He pauses again, an elephant with its eyes shut. “In the meantime, as the case proceeds—and these cases can go on for years—you are not permitted to leave the country. You are free to work, and you will be paid. Apart from travel, you can do whatever you please.” Mr. Al-Baatin winks at me incongruously. I stare back in shock as he continues. “Within the bounds of the law.”
I have been living with this accusation for seven days. A week like a lifetime.
Maria doesn’t know. It’ll kill her, with her heart of stents and scars. I tell Aasif and beg him not to share the news. Aasif, a man of integrity, will remain chup chaap. He closes his eyes and tilts his chin upward, hides the newspapers from Maria, my face plastered on the front pages.
Unable to sleep, I’ve been holding vigil with Bebe Mitu beside his cage on the landing of the stairs. Bebe Mitu—Mama Lulwa’s African gray parrot—keeps a trace of my grandmother alive. She brought Bebe Mitu back from India almost sixty years ago. Mama Lulwa never wanted to return to Kuwait, but she didn’t have a choice. Nobody made me come back, and now I couldn’t leave if I wanted to. So here I am—unlikely caretaker of an ancient parrot, accidental collector of fading traces—stuck in place.
Lulwa
One August morning in 1924, Lulwa woke to the chirps of thirsty sparrows and warblers lined along the low parapet surrounding the sateh. Lulwa, her brother, and two sisters, like most of the townsfolk of old Kuwait, slept on the flat roof of their mudbrick home during the summer months to catch the sea breeze.
Lulwa rolled her bedding, tied it with a pink ribbon that had slipped out of the basket of a visiting seamstress. She tiptoed over her brother and sisters. The heat would wake them soon enough. She hoisted the bedroll on her hipbone and hauled it down the narrow stairs leading to the central courtyard.
Her mother, Sheikha, had completed her fajer prayers but remained seated on her threadbare mat in a corner of the liwan. She often sat this way after morning prayers, still as sea stone. Lulwa wrapped her thin arms around her mother’s waist, inhaling yesterday’s trace of dihin ‘oud.
Sheikha stiffened. “You’re too old for all this, Lulwa.”
Lulwa tightened her grip. She was a few weeks into fifteen, slender but strong.
Sheikha felt like she was being punished for the news she was about to break. At thirteen, she herself had been forced to marry a twenty-seven-year-old stranger. Sheikha’s father accepted the proposal because he had mistaken the pompous, bisht-wearing Qais Qais Al-Talib for a successful merchant. The man was not known in Kuwait Town, but Sheikha’s father could not afford to reject the generous dowry he offered. The amount promised to buy him and his sons out of debt. Neither Sheikha nor her father ever saw a paisa of that promised dowry.
Growing up, Sheikha rarely saw her father and brothers. Nine months of the year, they were out at sea, on the boums and baghlas of wealthy merchants, trading along the eastern coast of Africa or the western coast of India. Even during the three months of monsoon, when Sheikha’s father and brothers were back in Kuwait, they were out pearling. At the end of a summer combing oyster beds, the divers would return to shore, legs scored with cuts, ribs visible for wives and children to count. Like most of the divers and sailors of Kuwait, Sheikha’s father was poor, in debt all his life, relying on advances from his nokhada to sustain his family.
Sheikha was the youngest of four. Her eldest brother, Abdullah, was her favorite. In the few days he was back from sea, he whittled small dhows out of wood for his little sister to play with. He carved intricate figures of boys and girls, Salukis and hamour. She watched his fingers as he worked, captivated by his descriptions of the leopards of Zanzibar, the monkeys of India, and how the color of the sea could switch from the palest streak of blue to swathes of black in an instant. He described the great bellied sail, a swan swooping through silvered water. Sheikha would close her eyes and imagine the fantastical colors and animals her brother described, the sounds of chattering monkeys and whittling wood one and the same.
Abdullah’s body looked like the teakwood of the ships he sailed from the bustling port of Kuwait Town, prized timber collected along the Malabar Coast. He was sleek and golden brown, every inch of him taut and strong as a wire. His skin showed early signs of the leather it would have become after a decade more of sun and sea.
It was a foolish accident, the kind that made even seasoned sailors shake their heads. Like his father and so many men of Kuwait, Abdullah was a diver. He could stay underwater longer than most, a full two minutes, and he had a special knack for bringing up more oysters than the other divers every time. He was a favorite among the crew, his rich baritone leading them as they sang the bahri together. His water-soaked eyes would twinkle as he teased the younger divers, urging them on with promises of wealth.
Everyone believed he was setting another record. Abdullah’s hauler did not feel the weak tug or notice the ropes dancing like yellow snakes in azure blue. The rope of the net basket had looped around his neck, and the weight of the oysters, thumping against his spine, choked him to death.
The delicate purple rings around her brother’s neck were the first thing Sheikha noticed as the sailors carried his body over the threshold and placed it in the middle of the courtyard. She would always remember how careful they had been with Abdullah. Her mother’s long wail filled the lanes of the fireej and brought the neighborhood women to their door to help ease in another the pain known to them all. Sheikha forgot most of what happened after that, but she never forgot what it felt like to love a man and lose him.
Abdullah drowned in 1899, when Sheikha was ten and he was twenty-seven, her husband’s age when they married. She had hoped there would be some magic in the coincidence of numbers. There wasn’t. Sheikha’s husband, Qais, had the eccentric proclivities of the wealthy minus the wealth. He kept an owl in the house and spoke to it in undecipherable code. He placed a circle of stones around their mattress every night before sleep and refused to let Sheikha off once the stones were in position, not to comfort her bawling babies, not to relieve herself. Qais stopped speaking to anyone but the owl after five o’clock in the evening. Twice a week, he would shake his adolescent wife awake at precisely three in the morning, hold down her head so she could scarcely breathe, and rip from her what he believed was owed him.
By the time she was twenty, Sheikha had given birth to her fourth and final baby. A few months later, early one dawn after Qais had rolled off her torn body, something inside her had bled out in garnet clots. She thought she might die, but she didn’t, and afterward she could no longer become pregnant. That, at least, was a relief. Qais and his ways had come between Sheikha and her babies. She could feel nothing for them, despair over her own fate smothering any shred of tenderness. The three eldest had absorbed her rejection and kept to themselves, like wounded foxes in the desert. But Lulwa was different. No matter how hard Sheikha pushed the child away, Lulwa came back, trying to force her into the shape of a mother she could never be.
Sheikha’s heart did not budge in response to her daughter’s arms around her that morning. She was going to sell Lulwa off to the son of a rich merchant, a merchant who, unlike Qais Qais Al-Talib, was known throughout Kuwait and far beyond. Qais had no interest in the children, so Sheikha could do as she pleased. The merchant’s wife had come to ask for her daughter’s hand a few days ago. Sheikha couldn’t understand why this family that could choose any of the suitable daughters of rich merchant families like their own would choose Lulwa. But the woman was adamant, and her insistence had made Sheikha bold.
“I will accept your proposal on one condition. Your family must pay me one thousand rupees. This amount will be in addition to any muqaddam you choose to pay the girl.”
The woman frowned.
“And neither my husband nor my daughter can know of this,” Sheikha added.
The woman sniffed the air around her in what Sheikha believed to be scorn, but she did not refuse.
“Go prepare our tea and bring it here, Lulwa. I have something to tell you.” Lulwa was used to her mother’s stern commands, her father’s frosty indifference.
Lulwa drew water from the cistern at the center of the courtyard. During the dry summer months, the cistern was filled with fresh water purchased from the local kandari. Lulwa heated the water along with a few teaspoons of tea leaves in a tin kettle on a charcoal duwah kept in a room off the courtyard. Once the tea had boiled for five minutes, she poured the brew into two istikans and sat at her mother’s feet.
“In one week’s time, you will marry the youngest son of Khalifa Al-Mustafa. You are a lucky young woman. Who knows why they’ve chosen you, but they have, and we’re in no position to question. They don’t want a big fuss. A small ceremony with the mullah and you’re off.”
Sheikha’s voice was a jagged shell, but Lulwa let out a shriek of delight. She knew exactly who Khalifa Al-Mustafa’s youngest son was. His name was Mubarak. He was the boy who would linger in the dhow yard at the water’s edge with boys much less wealthy than himself. Lulwa had seen her brother, Ahmed, talking to him as she and her sisters washed their calico dresses on the nig‘a, the stone breakwaters. Ahmed had waved at them, and they had waved back, giggling because it was not entirely proper. They were astonished to see the boy with their brother lift his hand to wave at them too, and this time they turned away. It was one thing for their brother to wave at them in public, quite another for a stranger to follow suit. But the unknown boy could not have missed them pinching each other under their thobes or the small smiles curling the edges of their heart-shaped mouths.
That night on the sateh, the sisters probed Ahmed for details.
“What’s his name?” Sumaiyya, the oldest, asked.
“What does he do?” Hussa, the middle one, cut in.
“Is he married?” Lulwa added before Ahmed had had a chance to answer the other two.
“Mubarak Khalifa Al-Mustafa. He lives in India. And no, he’s not married.” Mubarak and his parents were in town for the month of August to visit family. His father’s trade was based in India, and that was where they spent most of the year. He was studying something called English literature at Aligarh Muslim University. Lulwa repeated the word in her head. Aligarh . . . Aligarh. It sounded like a prayer for rain.
After Mubarak’s first wave, every time the girls went down to the beach to wash soiled clothes, he would be there, and he would wave at them even if their brother was not around. Lulwa began to wave back. A small flick of the wrist at first, her arm at her side, an almost imperceptible flap of a moth’s wing. Then, with her elbow at a right angle, a stiff back and forth. And finally, one auspicious morning, her arm raised above her head, a wave for all to see.
In the hours after midnight, the day after Lulwa’s open wave, Mubarak wrote on his father’s newly whitewashed wall:
THE THREE DAUGHTERS OF QAIS QAIS AL-TALIB ARE MADAMAAT!
He chose that word, an Arabicization of madam, because he thought no one would understand it. He was not likening the Al-Talib sisters to port town bebes. Madams were lively creatures full of light. A madam was what he wanted to marry, not a girl covered in black, incapable of embracing the world beyond her sheltered fort.
Mubarak was too young to consider how his words might tarnish the girls’ reputations. Luckily, his father, Khalifa, stepping out for a walk in the hours before the August sun took over, saw the defacement of his otherwise pristine wall before anyone else in town had the chance. Khalifa marched straight to Mubarak’s room, knowing this reckless whimsy could only be his youngest son’s, like his insistence on English literature, his wandering through jungles, his frequent commingling with those beneath his class. Mubarak was fast asleep when his father burst through his bedroom door, shouting, “It must have been you who wrote it!”
Mubarak sat straight up and was instantly alert, ready to declare what he had been rehearsing for days. “Yes, Yuba, I wrote it. And I mean to marry the youngest one. Lulwa will be my madam.”
His father put his hands on his son’s shoulders and shook him. “These girls are not the daughters of merchants, ya Mubarak! Their family has no connection to India. How do you know she will leave her family?” Khalifa Al-Mustafa was one of the most successful merchants in Kuwait. He owned a fleet of ships ranging from a massive old baghla, one of the last to sail from Kuwait, to more boums, sambouks, and jalbouts than anyone could count. Like most wealthy Kuwaiti merchants, he owned vast date plantations in Basra, which supplied the primary cargo that enabled the rest of his trade down the east and west coasts of the Indian Ocean. Also, like his father before him, Khalifa had been exceptionally lucky at pearling. The Al-Mustafa oyster harvests always brought in the most coveted pearls. One of the reasons the family had settled in India was to expand their already formidable trade interests to include jewels.
Mubarak thought about Lulwa’s wave and said, “She’ll come.”
And she did.
Everyone in town could see it was that rare thing. The two of them, fifteen and seventeen, held hands as they walked along the twilit shore. Sumaiyya, Hussa, and Ahmed formed a ring around their sister and her young man. They were making plans, conspiring to move to India with them, away from their parents. When they were younger, the neighbors would remark over the happy band of siblings, so unlike their dour parents. To survive their mother and father, the four of them had had to stick tight. Letting Lulwa go was tolerable only because they knew Mubarak could be trusted. “I have three older brothers and one younger sister,” Mubarak proclaimed. “Once they set eyes on Lulu, they’ll all want their share of the lovely Al-Talib madamaat and”—he turned to give Ahmed a sharp salute—“our fair sir!”
Mubarak’s mother, Zaineb, visited their home every day before the milcheh with bolts of hand-printed silks and seamstresses in her wake. She draped Lulwa’s neck with an intricate pearl necklace, loaded her wrists with heavy gold bracelets studded with rubies. When she learned that Lulwa’s ears hadn’t been pierced, she paid the neighborhood kandari to deliver a small block of ice, numbed the girl’s lobes, and expertly pushed through a needle she had sterilized with the flame of a candle. She fitted Lulwa’s ears with tiny gold hoops decorated with turquoise beads, promising that as soon as her ears healed, she would have dangling earrings to match the ornaments around her neck and wrists.
Zaineb’s ease with Lulwa—her hands on parts of Lulwa’s body, her wiping of bloody earlobes, her tight embrace of the girl upon entering or leaving the house—unnerved Sheikha. She could not comprehend how this woman, a stranger to her daughter, could touch her, chirp with her over some shared observation, gather her into her arms like she belonged to her. Zaineb strode into Sheikha’s humble home like she owned it, brought with her the optimism Sheikha’s children had always suspected existed. Sheikha watched her daughter wrap her skinny arms around Zaineb’s waist as she had done to her only days earlier. Unlike Sheikha, Zaineb did not stiffen. Zaineb hugged the girl back.
Sheikha had felt jealousy before. She remembered at eight seeing her mother rub her brother Abdullah’s sore legs and feeling her own legs turn to ice. The jealousy she felt now was similar. It was directed not toward Zaineb, but toward her own daughter. Her legs froze as she watched her girl laughing with the woman. Her jealousy thickened as she thought about Lulwa in the boy’s arms, his young body carved and lithe. She pictured Lulwa’s hands on Mubarak’s chest and abdomen. She imagined them on their first night, fumbling for that novel fulfillment. Lulwa laughed with glee in the middle of the courtyard, surrounded by a pouf of gold-threaded silks and pearls like the ones Abdullah had died in the process of collecting. Sheikha resented her daughter, and she hated Mubarak, this boy with a starred future.
The siblings were convinced they would be together again soon, so seeing Lulwa off to India on the Al-Mustafa family’s baghla did not feel like goodbye, more like the start of an adventure. They presented their sister with small gifts, ...
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