Olive Witch by Abeer Y. Hoque

Author:Abeer Y. Hoque
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: null
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers India
Published: 2015-04-10T04:00:00+00:00

I want to stop everything, because despite agonizing thought, I don’t know what else to do. Music, engineering, French, business, athletics, teaching, English. Nothing seems right, but I cannot quit without a plan. Even with one, it’s going to be hard to face my parents. Simi had her next step all mapped out, and still, furor.

‘Drawing!’ she bursts out over the phone when she calls me. ‘That’s how Abbu described my career of choice: drawing.’

Simi has just dropped out of an engineering PhD programme at Carnegie Mellon so she can become an architect. I can hear my father’s voice, accented and accusing.

‘Well, Abbu always did know how to bullet point.’

‘It would be nice to get some support.’

‘Yeah, well good luck with that,’ I say amused, knowing she’ll hear the sympathy in my voice. ‘Anyway, he should have known from the beginning you were going to be an architect. Remember when you used to steal his blue print paper and draw houses on it? You were like five. If that isn’t a calling, then I don’t know what is.’

‘What?’ she says astounded. ‘I did that?’

‘Yes. And your drawings were pretty good too.’

‘Why didn’t you tell me this before? I could have saved myself six years of cut-throat engineering education, two degrees, and two more years of shitty work experience.’

‘Sorry, baby sister. I thought you needed to learn things the hard way, like every other middle child.’

‘Thanks a lot,’ she says, hanging up, laughing.

If I can’t even tell my sister, what could I possibly say to my parents that would make up for yet another child quitting a PhD programme? To boot, I’m almost four years in. My last conversation with them was like every other one before it.

‘I’m not sure if this is the right programme for me, Abbu.’

‘How is your research going? Is your advisor helping you?’

‘It’s fine. Both my advisors are great. I just don’t know if I can do this.’

‘Of course, you can. You can do anything you set your mind to. Can’t you, my first-born, my daughter?’

The force of all my parents have done, every luxury and advantage I have been gifted, pushes me to speak.

‘I can.’

I need to think more clearly, with more courage. Or I need to stop thinking, finish this doctorate, and then take a break and figure out Plan B. The opening prayer of the Quran comes to me, the one that asks for direction, a guide to the straight path, the one of favour, not of wrath, nor of those who go astray.

I remember the notebooks Simi and I had when we were children, in which we copied down surahs, supervised by my mother. We penciled the Arabic transliteration on the right, the English translation on the left, and memorized both. My favourite surah was Surah Al-Lahab, The Flame, which started with the word ‘Perish!’ and dealt a series of terrible curses on an evil man and his wife. The last line, ‘a twisted rope of palm leaf fibre round her own neck’, was one I found frightening and fascinating.

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