In the Language of Miracles Read Online Free Page A

image of her heavy grandmother dodging a broomstick. “Besides,” Ehsan added, “he’s the man of the house; he has the right to do whatever he thinks is for the best of his family.”
    â€œ
Thinks
is the key word, here,” Khaled mumbled.
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œNothing,
Setto
.”
    Ehsan sighed. “Such bad luck,” she said. “Such bad luck has befallen this family. It’s all because of the evil eye, of course.
Hasad.
People back home, they think of you here, living in this big house, driving expensive cars, and all they imagine is money growing on trees. They covet all that Allah has given you, and then look what happens. This!” She held both arms up in a gesture that encompassed their entire lives. Khaled looked at the console, at the picture of his brother’s smiling face, slightly angled, so that he could not see his expression, only the sharp silver edge of the frame.
    Sighing, Ehsan got up, headed into the kitchen, and opened the cabinet where she kept her incense kit. She pulled out the brass globe with its decorative perforations, the small box holding the dry incense leaves, and the bag with the pliers and the pieces of coal. In a moment, she would be resting the coal on the burning flame, letting it glow red and hot before she placed it on the layer of sand sitting in the bottom half of the incense burner. On top of it, she would sprinkle leaves of incense, let the fragrant smoke rise through the holes of the globe as she held it up by its three chains, swinging it in circles as she wandered the rooms of the house, chanting prayers.
    Fatima picked up the abandoned tumblers still filled with tea andplaced them back on the tray that she carried into the kitchen. Washing the glasses by hand, one by one, she occasionally looked out the window at Samir, still sitting on the deck. When she was finished, she walked out of the kitchen and up the stairs, where Khaled could hear her knocking on Nagla’s door. He headed toward the stairs, too. He would go to his room, to his laptop, away from all this. He climbed only a step or two before he stopped to look once more at his brother’s framed picture. In the kitchen, he could hear Ehsan’s incantations. The smell of the incense, sweet and tangy like a mixture of cloves and rosebuds, slowly filled the air, and Khaled, turning around, started up the stairs again. Of course it was all bogus, he thought. No amount of burning leaves could have possibly made a difference. No incantations, regardless of how sincerely and incessantly uttered, could ever prevent disaster.

2
    ENGLISH : Home is where the hearth is.
    ARABIC : Whoever leaves his house loses prominence.
    S amir and Nagla arrived in New York on a sunny morning in April 1985. Sitting in the station wagon, Samir thought how perfect it was that this car now zoomed through the Big Apple while Egyptian music drifted from the dashboard. His cousin, Loula, was driving, and he, sitting next to her, exhausted after the ten-hour flight, slid down in the seat, looked out the window, and listened to Om Kalthoum’s voice mingle with car horns and jackhammers. The singer’s voice, low, chagrined, and so deep he felt it came from the bottom of the earth, was rumored to have been so powerful that she had to stand six feet from the microphones to insure they would not break. The recording dated back to the fifties, and Om Kalthoum tenderly reprimanded a lover for his long-endured cruelty. Samir listened and knew the answer to his own destiny was as simple as an American car playing Egyptian music in New York: he could, he was certain, build a life for himself and his family here, while preserving their Egyptian roots. Om Kalthoum sounded better contrasted with the New York skyline and its pure blue backdrop of a sky than she did in Cairo with its dusty roads and overcrowded streets. The contrast between her familiar voice and his new surroundings highlighted the beauty