SARDA

On the ground by the lips of the Red Sea, under the sky over the Suez Canal, shrapnel chips of a 1992 missile rolled on their side, carried by the wind. She felt them move inside her as she let out a deep moan, slowly opening the doors, gripping Marwan’s ribs as he drew his breath. White sea foam grews curling in waves after waves at their toes until the last drop evaporated. The droplets making their way to the sky as the stone dry sheets whipped the wind, hitting it with the thud of a thousand sails falling into the concrete centre of the patio. Sarda had never seen a boat until that day, some three years earlier, as she climbed onto Julio’s back, on their way to Havana. With full teethed smiles they waved at people they didn’t know, their wrists greased into two infinite waves, until disappearing to the pepper specks on the beach.

“Sex is just to making the babies!”

(Her) father would say over and over again, from the instant Sarda’s breasts had begun to sprout like two shy pears until the appearance of her first white hair. She had managed to prove him wrong, with every man she had ever been wedded to. Of these, not one of them had had enough steam to blow up her belly, but none ever managed to forget the way she made love. Had she been a Westerner that believed in diamonds, she would now have enough rings to dress every single one of her fingers twice.

“If you’re shy, you’ll never have babies!”

(Her) uncle would roar over and over again at family gatherings during his rare visits from London, lavishly showing off his front teeth like two filthy chimney pipes. He said this while punching her shoulder playfully, this one bent under his hands like a thick wet stack of lecture notes. That shoulder that so many men and women had grabbed, pushed, jabbed, pinned, caressed, nudged. Within it, penned in blue ball point Arabic, were all the notes and instructions on how to pass every one of the military school tests. Her body had become a fortress to grabbing hands, hands that could barely write their name but had always fought their way across the mud towards what they wanted. That’s what she imagined her little brothers Haleem and Rasheed had been doing now for over 51 weeks. They had gone away with soft bones, mapped with childhood fracture scars and would probably return men.

“It’s just a greenstick fracture, we’ll wrap it up, khalas! it should be fine!”

Doctors had said as they went out the revolving doors, picking up their cheques on the other side.

“How does this girl’s body put up with it?”

(Her) mother whispered in third person behind screens of domestic air still lingering with maklouba and molokiya. God had blessed her with only one mother, but this one had various tongues and a thousand iterations. None of the men that had sipped tea with them, curtsying with their folded paper upper lips, had ever appealed to her mother. They sat there, grinning at the old lady and all the while their eyes hungering over the prize that was topping up their glasses with sweet tea. She served it with a wink in her eye, pouring it from high above to create foam and theatre, flexing her knees, flexing her hips.

“This is how you get a man! No! Shu benti! Like this! No mother will ever teach you this!”

(Auntie) Khadija is saying how lucky she is that she is teaching her. Her thick black hair is free falling to one side as her caterpillar eyebrows rise and fall in tune with the music. Luckily, Khadija cares about her and her prospects. So she follows every step and every hip thrust to an 80’s mixtape that makes her cringe and want to cut off her boobs. One of Cairo’s finest dancers. That was a long time ago.

“A way to a husband’s heart is his belly!”

Sarda ponders over this as the steam opens the pores that dotted her nose. She’ll feed the contents of the pot to Marwan at 10:08 pm when he returned home and sit neatly, folding his body at the dinner table over the sand floor. Her eyes darts over to the cupboard where the little bag of ushuub al-hooria*, with its soft fabric belly is sitting up against the other spices. It would only take one boil of that little bag into the soup, but nobody would die tonight.

She decides that Marwan should live long enough to see a river of children between his arms.

Her parents would live and die, continuing to speak broken English and never know if they were right or wrong, just enough of what parents deserve to know.

*Usub al-hooria: ‘Herbs of freedom’ is the popular name of herbs designed to kill instantly by food poisoning, black magic practices popular amongst housewives in the North of Africa