Silken Gazelles by Jokha Alharthi

Author:Jokha Alharthi
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Catapult
Published: 2024-07-24T00:00:00+00:00

10 January 2012

One morning, after we returned from Thailand and my mother began her slow and uncertain recovery, we found her grandmother here in our house on the seashore. She is very old but not so old that she has forgotten how to care for her granddaughter. True, she let go of this role for twenty-five years, but she has taken it up again as fiercely as can be.

Najib makes special meals for her: no salt or sugar or cholesterol. She summons us loudly—me, my mother, and my brothers—because anyone who eats alone is eating with the devil. We eat with her and listen to her tell us the same old stories about her husband, the pearl merchant who had one palace built for him in Abu Dhabi and another in Sohar.

People swore over and over that the man never slept unless a casket of luminous natural pearls was lying in the spacious hollow he had carved out beneath his bed, directly below his head. My mother’s grandmother always made light of the tales that had spread about slaves dying from the terrible weight of the legendary casket that they had to carry on their backs from Abu Dhabi to Sohar. “So then—where is this treasure chest now?” she would ask. “No, there weren’t any treasures. He lost his trade just like others, and he abandoned the mansion in Abu Dhabi, turned it over to the forces of nature after our son died there along with his wife and left this little girl to us.” She would touch my mother’s hair, which had begun to grow back, though it was coarser than before.

I give her my arm and we walk out to the area in front of the house, and around the stables, which are empty now. We slow down as we reach the patch where tomatoes, peppers, parsley, and mint are coming up. Chef Najib has been growing them himself ever since his brother the gardener fled. She stops suddenly. “Is there something stuck in my dentures?” She opens her mouth. “No, Gramma,” I assure her, “you hardly ate anything anyway.” “Take me to the water,” she says. I hesitate, even though it won’t take us more than a few minutes to walk the path to the beach. She knows exactly what is in my mind, and she turns toward me with her usual cunning. “I’m still young, you know—I haven’t gotten to eighty yet. I can walk.”

So we go to the beach. We sit on the sand. “Nasir lived on the seashore all his life,” she says. “But he steered the diving boats only now and then—maybe more when he was a young fellow. He never let me go out in one. Not once.”

“Is it true that he was forty years older than you?” I ask. She laughs. “Forty-two. I was fourteen when he married me. When I had my darling, may he rest in peace, I was fifteen and his father was fifty-seven.”

She never mentions her son,

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.