Honor (9781101606148) Read Online Free Page B

heavy, listless. The flies . . . if only the flies could be made to disappear.
    Naze did not survive. Nor did the baby for long – the baby whose gender she had been wrong about the whole time. Her ninth infant, the child who killed her and then quietly passed away in her cot, was another girl.
    So on that day in November 1962, as she lay awake in her maternity bed late into the wee hours, it was the thought that God could be so arbitrary that distressed Pembe. Here she was, only seventeen and already breastfeeding a son. She couldn’t help suspecting that from somewhere in the heavens, under a watery light, her mother was watching her with envy.
Eight births, five miscarriages, one dead baby, and not one was a son . . . And here You are already giving a healthy boy to my hare-brained daughter. Why, Allah? Why?
    Naze’s voice echoed in Pembe’s ears until it became a ball of fury that rolled down to her chest and nestled in her stomach. Hard as she tried to fend off her anxieties, she ended up only building new ones. They drew circles in her mind, spinning like a pegtop, and suddenly there was nowhere to hide from the evil eye that was her late mother’s gaze. Once she started paying attention to it, she noticed that gaze everywhere. It was in the grain and cashew nuts that she pounded in a stone mortar, turned into a paste and then consumed to enrich her milk. It was in the rivulets of rain that streamed down the windowpanes, in the almond oil that she applied to her hair at every bath, and in the thick, bubbly yoghurt soup that simmered on the stove.
    â€˜
Allah the Merciful, please make my mother shut her eyes in her grave and make my son grow up strong and healthy
,’ Pembe prayed, rocking herself back and forth, as if it were she who needed to be put to sleep, not the baby.
    *
    The night Iskender was born, Pembe had a nightmare – as she had had many other times during her pregnancy. But this one felt so real that a part of her would never recover from it, never return from the liquid land of dreams.
    She saw herself lying supine on an ornamental carpet, her eyes wide open, her belly swollen. Above her a few clouds slithered across the sky. It was hot, too hot. Then she realized the carpet was stretched over water, a rowdy river swirling under her weight.
How is it that I’m not sinking
, she thought to herself. Instead of an answer, the sky opened up and a pair of hands descended. Were they the hands of God? Or the hands of her late mother? She couldn’t tell. They cut open her belly. There was no pain, only the horror of being aware of what was happening. Then the hands pulled out the baby. It was a plump little boy with eyes the colour of dark pebbles. Before Pembe could touch him, let alone cuddle him, the hands dropped the baby into the water. He floated away on a piece of driftwood, like the prophet Moses in his basket.
    Pembe shared the nightmare with only one person, her eyes bright and burning as she spoke, as if she had a fever. Jamila listened, and, either because she truly believed in it or because she wanted to free her twin of the terror of Naze’s ghost, she came up with an explanation.
    â€˜You must have been jinxed. Probably by a
djinni
.’
    â€˜A
djinni
,’ Pembe echoed.
    â€˜Yes, sweetheart. The
djinn
love to take a nap on chairs and sofas, don’t you know? Adult
djinn
can make a dash for it when they see a human coming, but infants are not so fast. And pregnant women are heavy, clumsy. You must have sat on a baby
djinni
and crushed it.’
    â€˜Oh, my God.’
    Jamila twitched her nose as if she had caught a foul smell. ‘My guess is the mother must have come for revenge and put a spell on you.’
    â€˜But what am I going to do?’
    â€˜Don’t worry, there’s always a way to appease a
djinni
, no matter how enraged,’ said Jamila authoritatively.
    And so, while Pembe was nursing her