The Frightened Ones by Dima Wannous

Author:Dima Wannous [Wannous, Dima]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2020-08-25T00:00:00+00:00

What would happen if she ended her life? I began to hope that she would. But soon I realised that if she did end her life, we likely wouldn’t know. I sat reading the manuscript late into the evening and began to wonder, if the young woman committed suicide, whether that would prevent Naseem from doing the same, whether her death could cure his own fixation. Naseem’s eyes were trained on death: he gazed into it; it walked alongside him everywhere. A few years before it actually happened, he told me how his mother and sister would die. I was shocked by his detailed description, and I believed him. There wasn’t anyone in his family he didn’t kill with words, describe their funeral and come to terms with losing, again and again and again.

Why did the girl in his novel choose to delay her grief at her father’s passing? How did she become someone who could stand on the other bank of life? While she delayed her mourning, Naseem was running laps around her. I remember one time when we spent the night at his house and he told me all these stories about death. How his mother had been on her way back from visiting a friend who had lost her only son and was starting to go senile. His mother couldn’t comprehend that her best friend was losing her memory—even though the friend asked her how Naseem’s grandmother was doing, when she had died many years earlier. Then the friend got confused and didn’t recognise her any more. She thought Naseem’s mother was her own sister, who had also passed away years earlier. “How are you, Sis? How’re the kids?” She spoke like this for a whole hour. Naseem’s mother left her oldest friend’s house feeling flustered and upset. She was so agitated that she didn’t notice a massive lorry hurtling down the road as she crossed. She didn’t even hear its horn blare. The lorry driver couldn’t slow down fast enough and he hit her.

I asked Naseem how he knew all these details. How did he know she’d been at her friend’s house, and what she had been feeling when she left? How did he know that his mother’s friend had thought she was her sister? He said his mother’s friend had told him. But when I pressed him further, asking how a woman who had lost her memory remembered what they had spoken about, Naseem gave in and admitted that the part about his mother leaving her friend’s house flustered was made up. Later I discovered the whole story was a fiction: his mother was still alive. He also killed his sister and mourned her death. He killed his father and grieved, and then came to terms with his own death. That’s where things ended.

He died too.

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