the same. Maybe that’s the only way, she thought. The only way to survive.
A day passed, then another, then another. Every morning Isra would wake up to the sound of her daughters calling her name, jumping into bed, and a sickness would fill her. She wondered if it was the jinn. Just leave me alone! she wanted to scream. Just let me breathe! Eventually she would force herself to get up, gather her daughters, dress them, comb their hair—all that hair, how they moaned as she untangled it!—sucking on her teeth as she yanked a brush through their curls. Then she’d walk Deya and Nora to the corner, waiting for the yellow school bus to take them away, and she’d think, filled with shame and disgust at her weakness, If only the bus would take the rest of her daughters, too.
In the kitchen now, Isra could hear Fareeda’s voice in the sala. Lately Fareeda spent her days weaving a story of Sarah’s marriage to tell the world, only to cry silently into her hands when she was done. Sometimes, like now, Isra felt a duty to comfort her. She brewed a kettle of chai, adding an extra twig of maramiya, hoping the smell would soothe her. But Fareeda would never drink it. All she did was pound her palms against her face, like Isra’s mama had often done after Yacob hit her. The sight made Isra sick with guilt. She had known that Sarah was leaving and had done nothing to stop her. She should’ve told Fareeda, should’ve told Khaled. Only she hadn’t, and now Sarah was gone, and it felt as though she had slipped into a pocket of sadness and would never emerge from it.
When she’d finished preparing dinner that night, Isra crept downstairs. Deya, Nora, and Layla were watching cartoons; Amal slept in her crib. Isra tiptoed across the basement quietly so as not to wake her. From the back of their closet, she pulled out A Thousand and One Nights, her heart quickening at the touch of the brown spine. Then she turned to the last page, where she kept a stash of paper. She grabbed a blank sheet and began to write another letter she would never send.
“Dear Mama,” Isra wrote,
I don’t understand what’s happening to me. I don’t know why I feel this way. Do you know, Mama? What have I done to deserve this? I must have done something. Haven’t you always said that God gives everyone what they deserve in life? That we must endure our naseeb because it’s written in the stars just for us? But I don’t understand, Mama. Is this punishment for the days I rebelled as a young girl? The days I read those books behind your back? The days I questioned your judgment? Is that why God is taunting me now, giving me a life that is the opposite of everything I wanted? A life without love, a life of loneliness. I’ve stopped praying, Mama. I know it’s kofr, sacrilege, to say this, but I’m so angry. And the worst part is, I don’t know who I am angry with—God, or Adam, or the woman I’ve become.
No. Not God. Not Adam. I am to blame. I am the one who can’t pull myself together, who can’t smile at my children, who can’t be happy. It’s me. There’s something wrong with me, Mama. Something dark lurking in me. I feel it from the moment I wake up until the moment I sleep, something sluggish dragging me under, suffocating me. Why do I feel this way? Do you think I am possessed? A jinn inside me. It must be.
Tell me, Mama. Did you know this would happen to me? Did you know? Is this why you never looked at me as a child? Is this why I always felt like you were drifting far, far away? Is this what I saw when you finally met my eyes? Anger? Resentment? Shame? Am I becoming like you, Mama? I’m so scared, and nobody understands me. Do you even understand me? I don’t think so.
Why am I even writing this now? Even if I mailed this off to you, what good would it do? Would you help me, Mama? Tell me, what would you do? Only I know what you would do. You’d tell me, Be patient, endure. You’d tell me that women everywhere are suffering, and that no pain is worse than being divorced, a world of shame on my shoulders.