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  Secret Connections

  I had a secret, when I was a child, that I did not share with anyone else, and for a good reason. I had discovered, through close observation, a connection between the events that I heard about on the news, and my mother’s choice of hairdo. I believed that whenever she changed her hairdresser or opted for a different look altogether, some event of magnificent proportion would surely follow. I subjected the theory to as rigorous a string of empirical tests as an eight-year-old could muster.

  In fact, once the idea had occurred to me, I found evidence everywhere. The Lebanese government signed the famous Cairo agreement with Yasser Arafat, giving a free hand to the Palestinian guerrillas in refugee camps around Lebanon, a day after my mother spurned her long-time hairdresser Joseph and went for a radical French plait. My father had been listening to the news about the election of Suleiman Franjieh as president of the Lebanese republic—by a difference of one vote and a few armed supporters gathered outside parliament—when I overheard her telling my sister, as they hauled big carpets onto the balcony, that she had tried a lighter shade of henna and was having a bad feeling about it. But I only became aware of the cosmic scale of the connection when I realised that an American man walked on the moon on the TV in our lounge on the day she had switched from Chignon to Bouffant and proclaimed that this was new territory for her.

  Four hairdos of my mother.

  I did not think that her hair caused these events. But I believed that the same providence that made the news also determined her choice of hairstyle and performed both tasks according to some principle that I had no hope of ever understanding. I don’t remember when I finally gave up on the idea. My interest must have lasted a few months. I must have realised how ridiculous the theory was or I may simply have lost interest. I might have been suddenly struck by the utter uselessness of the observation.

  I had totally forgotten about my hair fixation when, in my thirties and back for a brief visit to Lebanon, my mother, now in her sixties, observed in response to a query I had made earlier that she rarely went to hairdressers nowadays and that my sister helped her dye her hair instead. I nodded with little interest and returned to my newspaper when the memory came back to me in one big instalment.

  If I needed a starting point, a reference against which I could judge all subsequent hairdos of my mother, it was readily available in a photo of her which hung, for as long as I could remember, from the top right-hand corner of her dressing table’s mirror, with its curved edges and ornate dark-wood frame. My mother’s hair was parted on one side, a lock swept back along her forehead, and little curls covering her ears. The hairdo must have followed the day’s fashion, back in the late forties—a rather rural incarnation of Egyptian movie stars such as Asmahan and Laila Murad. The soft floral dress with frills round the collar covered up my mother’s bosom but left a triangular patch of skin at the top of her chest surprisingly bare. The painted lips added to the wistfully virginal expression on her face, a common effect in photos from that era.

  The daguerreotype could not have been around for long when my mother turned fourteen, at least not in south Lebanon where she lived until her early twenties. The photo was the earliest I had seen of her. One day, spurred by some conversation we had had, she pulled the photo off the mirror, careful not to damage it, showed me how its back had been painted in black and told me that there was a story behind it.

  My mother at the age of thirteen or fourteen, 1948 or 1949.

  ·

  My mother’s family belonged to a line of religious nobility—Sayeds, descendants of the prophet—near the city of Tyre and would only marry men and women of equal standing. Women in the family had to carefully cover themselves in public, because village folk expected them to be more pious than everyone else. From the age of ten, they were not to seen by strange men, without a male protector. The family name was a heavy burden to carry, even by the standards of Islamic priesthood.

  Male cousins enjoyed privileged access to their female relatives and, self-evidently, a spotless family name. A high degree of intra-family marriages was hence inevitable. Given that men could marry more than one woman and often did back then, the family tree sometimes read like a festival of copulation between cousins.

  When my mother turned fourteen, suitors began flocking in. Four men, including two relatives, would lay claim to her over a period of six months and it would be the last suitor who would win the day and save the unsuspecting teenager from the endogamous mess that threatened her.

  One of her uncles had intimated that she and his son ought to tie the knot. They were, after all, cousins and she used to visit them for days on end at their house in Beirut. But my mother had no affection for the aspirant and would not even consider the offer. Another relative, a married man in this case, took his turn in wooing her and approached my grandfather, who turned him down.

  Then came the emigrant, a man who had made it good in Africa and was looking for a bride from a ‘respectable’ family for his son. His first overture, made to one of my mother’s uncles whom he knew, was dismissed by my mother’s cousins as inappropriate because of the man’s ‘modest’ origins and, I suspect, some conflict of interest among the adjudicators. One of the more zealous cousins accosted him in the street and warned him, in no uncertain terms, against persisting with his proposition. But the emigrant was not easily intimidated. He went to see my grandfather Sayed Mohammad instead. Sayed Mohammad had lived in Africa for a number of years and must have experienced another world where family ‘origins’ counted for much less, and the strict social hierarchies of his birthplace did not hold sway.

  The suitor asked my grandfather for a photo of my mother that he could take back to his son in Africa. Sayed Mohammad thought it was a good idea. A few days later, he took his daughter to a Palestinian photographer in Tyre—this was 1948 or 1949, shortly after the Palestinian Nakba, the creation of Israel and the big exodus from south of the border—and had her photo taken. But a relative who held a grudge against Sayed Mohammad found out about the photo, rushed to the family patriarch who was none other than Sayed Mohammad’s senior brother, my mother’s uncle, and revealed to him that, lo and behold, his own niece had been photographed with her hair uncovered. A meeting was urgently convened. Sayed Mohammad was summoned by his powerful brother and told that, in this family, women without a veil do not have their photos taken, let alone have such a photo sent to other continents for strangers to stare at. The negative was requested from the photographer, the photo confiscated and its back painted black in mourning as if, according to my mother, part of her had died when her image was printed on paper.

  A relative of my mother who was present at the meeting was entrusted with the task of destroying the picture. But the man had sympathy for my mother and hid the photo instead. Some decades later, well after he died, his daughter would return the photo to my mother. Both women had left the village long ago, were now living in Beirut, went regularly to hairdressers and could hardly remember the time when they had had to wear headscarves. My mother—with undisguised nostalgia for her youth—hung the photo in her bedroom.

  My father arrived on the scene a few months after the emigrant. He must have been a good proposition. He was an educated man who had trained as a teacher. His parents having divorced when he was a small child, he had moved out of his father’s house as a teenager and had become quite independent from an early age. Although he had no wealth to speak of, he was not only from a ‘good family’ of respectable landowners but a religious one too, and the two families had wedded their sons and daughters on other occasions. Almost everybody was likely to approve. Besides, the timing of my father’s arrival could not have been more propitious: the deluge of proposals that my mother’s puberty had triggered and the increasing meddling by the crowd of cousins must have taken their toll on my grandfather. The deal was quickly closed and soon the newlyweds rode away from my mother’s village towards my father’s, thirty kilometres away. Girls were m
arried off at a young age in those days and Sayed Mohammad must have slept soundly on the night his daughter left, for the first time in months.

  It was my father’s own mother, Um Hassan, who had helped him approach his future in-laws. An only child, he had lived with his mother until the age of six before returning to his father’s house, as was the divorce custom in those days. And it was Um Abdul Amir, my maternal grandmother, who had originally welcomed Um Hassan into her house, hearing her out and giving her blessing to the union.

  Already in her late thirties, Um Abdul Amir had had her share of suffering in life. Her husband had sought his fortune in Africa, living there for almost a decade, leaving her to look after the children. One day she was rocking the cot of her newborn son with one hand while stirring the stew in a large cooking pot with the other, when she accidentally spilled the boiling sauce over her baby, giving him first-degree burns. The baby would survive in agony for only a few weeks. A doctor, summoned from a nearby village, would apply alcohol to the burns, believing it to be the right way of preventing infection, horribly exacerbating the injury instead. Um Abdul Amir would remain traumatised for years to come and, according to my mother, guilt-ridden forever after.

  My mother rode out of her parents’ house behind the man she hardly knew and never quite recovered from the dislocation. She crossed the valleys between the towns of Tyre and Nabatieh, her horse led across the knee-deep streams by a stable boy who went by the rough name of Nimr and who made the whole trip on foot. She finally arrived in the village of Jibsheet and slowly settled into her new life, the kindness and humour of my grandfather Sheikh Ali gradually winning her over.

  My father in his twenties (late 1940s or early 1950s).

  ·

  I would not have recognised my mother had I come across the photo in some relative’s album. But the round face and the little valley at the base of her neck, between a protruded tendon to the right-hand side and the knuckle-shaped bone to the left, were unmistakably hers—something I was well placed to know since she used to tease me by saying that this part of her body had been formed by my own ear when, as a child, I used to doze off in her lap, my head firmly against her chest, resisting the slightest attempt to displace it. She did not allow herself a smile in the picture, looking soberly at the camera. A photo shoot was a special event in those days and her inhibition may have had something to do with it. She was aware that the print was going to travel all the way to Africa and that her image, as captured at that particular moment, was to become ‘her’ for a while.

  On the face of it, the story which ended with my mother’s betrothal to my father and, by extension, my own arrival into the world, could not have had a better ending. But two details around the story compromised this happy conclusion. The first was its inevitability, since no other conclusion was possible. Any tale told by one’s mother about her marriage was going to lead to one’s father at some stage. The second dent in the story was the unmistakable longing that my mother betrayed, as she told me the story, for the life she might have had, had her photo made it to Africa and, rather against my instinct for self-preservation, the deep sympathy I felt for her unfulfilled desire.

  The Making of Family Trees

  Across the street running along the edge of my ancestral house in the village of Jibsheet was a tiny parcel of land about four metres long and three metres wide. Two solitary fig trees covered most of the plot and provided ample shade in an otherwise sun-drenched spot. Their branches were intermingled and everyone referred to them as ‘the fig tree’, as if there was only one. When I was a child, the large, crisp leaves—some were five-pronged like a giant human hand—hung over the low fence surrounding the piece of land. The fence was made of irregular stones that must have been hastily put together, with little craftsmanship, given the many small gaps where cobwebs and tiny plants grew. In spring, some stones became covered with moss. Others sprung long shoots of grass.

  My father’s aunt, Sakeena, once told me that Adham Khanjar—the patriotic gang leader of the 1930s whose rebellion the French could only quell by air bombing Jebel Druze in Syria—had expressed his admiration for the tree as he rode past it. He had once been given refuge in this house, my aunt was proud to say, sleeping in the musty attic that we children now avoided because of the snakes occasionally found hanging from the ceiling, waiting for my grandfather to beat them to death with his staff.

  When we visited the village, usually in summer, and I found myself with no one to play with, I ran in and out of the house and hung around the fig tree’s fence. The flat stones turned into minuscule gardens in my mind, while the rounder ones were faceless skulls covered with short green hair. The fence, the gaps between the stones and the little animals which crawled through them became my world for an hour or so, one I could cover with the palm of my hand and choose, like a whimsical tyrant, whether to crush its tiny creatures or leave them in peace.

  On one side of the fig tree was the small mosque and the village gathering hall, the Hussaynya. On the other side was the alleyway snaking down westward, where hens and sprightly cocks acted as if they owned the place. Even without leaving the house, the sound of donkeys clopping away, and the smell of farmers and animals—that pungent mix of hay and cow dung that made the village a village—always seemed to be coming from this side. Rowdy kids ran past our house before disappearing into the lane. Some pushed a concocted monocycle, a metal string attached to the circular tin top of a powdered milk container. Others propelled themselves on a wooden plate on rollers, or brandished a piece of wood in the shape of a gun. The village kids were rougher than my peers in Beirut, spoke with a distinctly Southern accent and ran gleefully after a car as soon as it drove into the village, because cars were such a rarity around there.

  The fig tree and the parcel of land in which it stood were nestled between our house and the house of our faithful neighbour Hajji Hamdi at the sharp bend where the main asphalt road narrowed down and turned into a pedestrian path. Although small tractors occasionally squeezed through the lane, motorcars could reach no further and, even today, drivers have to park their cars next to the fig tree, if the space is vacant, and continue the trip on foot. It was there that the crowds milling around near the Hussaynya on special occasions—death, prayer and other bleak ceremonies—became dispersed. It was there that, when I was barely ten years old, on the way back from my uncle’s funeral—my father’s half-brother had been stabbed to death by a thug in Beirut—I saw one of the women collapse over the fence, grief-stricken, as grey-coloured as the shrivelled branches of the bare tree, and watched the men carry her into the house and sprinkle her with so much rosewater they might have resuscitated her and made her faint twice over. And it was there that the last electricity pole in the village could be found for a long time, and a sheep would be tethered on the eve of Adha eid—the festivity celebrating the aborted sacrifice of Isaac and the pilgrimage to Mecca—before being slaughtered the next day.

  It was as if our house, and more so the fig tree, lay at a crossroads between old and new, on the edge of the modern world which had run out of steam and had stopped advancing, preserving a quality of brutal honesty about life—that meat came from slaughtered sheep, that land was endlessly fought over, that snakes were beaten to death, that corpses were devoured by earthworms—some facts of life that we city-dwellers mostly chose to forget.

  My father’s aunt loved the fig tree and worried about it because it lay outside the house and could not be properly protected from trespassers. She knew that teenagers occasionally jumped over the fence and stole the fruit. In summer, she would hire a labourer to pick the figs and bring them in. At times, she would put on her black cloak, walk out of the house and inspect the tree. Her concern was infectious and we children would peep through a hole in the fence wall at the back of our garden, keeping watch over the tree. Occasionally, we caught the trespassers in the act and scared them away.

  My father’s aunt—we called her ‘aunt’, tout court, withou
t ambiguity since my father had no sisters and Arabic had different words for maternal and paternal aunts—would die of leukaemia in 1993. She spent most of her life looking after her brother, who suffered from the aftermath of tuberculosis. They were infinitely fond of each other and as capable of domestic bickering as any couple. Although I rarely experienced her temper and had only sweet memories of her, I never forgot the time when we walked into the house, just in from Beirut on a winter’s day, to find cucumbers, tomatoes and aubergines scattered over the floor of the courtyard. My aunt, angry at something her brother had done, had hurled at him the shopping bags he had brought into the house.

  Their father, Sheikh Abdul Kareem, had been the village Shia spiritual guide, a hereditary position which had carried privilege and power. But the two decades preceding the civil war in 1975 had seen the middle classes rise, subverting the traditional social hierarchies. Traders who had made good in Beirut and migrants to the Arabian Gulf and Africa, whose country had held out few prospects for them, returned with financial clout and a will to power, and challenged the traditional leaders in parliamentary elections. School teachers, lawyers and government employees saw no reason for the old power system to persist.

  The old age of my aunt and grandfather had forced them to rely on other farmers in the district in the management of their land, far more than before. The farmers would harvest the olives and press out the olive oil in return for a portion of the produce. My aunt would sometimes complain that they took more than they were admitting and would bemoan the good old days when the villagers knew their place and showed more respect and gratitude. Her sharp tongue was notorious in the village.