Celestial Bodies by Jokha al-Harthi

Author:Jokha al-Harthi [al-Harthi, Jokha]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Literature
ISBN: 9781912240166
Publisher: Sandstone Press
Published: 2018-06-13T04:00:00+00:00

Abdallah

When Mayya had got through her forty days, I brought her home, back to our living quarters, a small wing attached to my father’s house. She stayed there, secluded, closing her ears to the words that had spread through al-Awafi like fire across dry wood. People were whispering about a relationship between her father and an enticing Bedouin woman.

At that time I was driving my father’s white Mercedes between Muscat and al-Awafi several times every week. I spent my long commutes musing that the peaceful happiness I enjoyed was almost too much for me. Was it too much, this feeling that I had it all? It made me nervous.

Did I deserve such happiness, or didn’t I? A happy man driving his father’s car to his own home, where the wife he loves holds their child, and where his father presides, still alive and even healthy.

That’s what I was, a happy man. Simply that. A young man, barely past his first twenty years, whose dreams reached no further than what he had in his hands. But he was a little afraid of what he held in his hands. The dark interior of the Mercedes, the glancing light reflected in the shiny buttons on tiny London’s clothes, the drops of water falling from Mayya’s hair at dawn, the flash of the needle in her hand as she sewed fabric flowers onto Baby London’s gowns, my father’s rare smiles. In all of it I saw – me, the so-very-lucky man – that this happiness was a lot for me to bear. It was too much for me. Somehow I knew that – whatever the reason, and I had no idea what it might be – I was not worthy of all this joy.

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