Shukria

Om Hawra and the Jaboris’ house always smelled like Seven Spices. That night, it was the large ilish fish sat on the kitchen counter, split in half, inside-up, smothered in yellow powder. My mother had sent me to deliver some fresh mint from our garden. The kitchen door was always open, but I waited patiently for someone to find me. I wondered what it would look like closed. A fan whirred in the window and I stretched my neck into its soft breeze. I peered through the rips in the screen while I stood. No one sat at the kitchen table, but that wasn’t strange. No one ever did. Except for guests. Most of the time, the kitchen table was a stepstool we used to climb atop the fridge, or a place to put down the groceries, the arms of Stop & Shop bags sprouting from the wood like onion stalks. We plated dinner but never ate it there, always setting our dishes on a plastic tarp over the brown and black carpet in the living room. When she is gone, they will throw away the table. I will stand on the stoop under the orange glow of streetlight, and I will feel like that fish, inside-out in the heat.  

*    *    * 

She had a green dot between her eyebrows. Bedouin women wore tattoos like this to accentuate their beauty, choosing the spot strategically to draw attention to the most beautiful parts of themselves. It was easy to think she was plain. Om Hawra had eyes like black olives. She was tall and sturdy and knotted her square hijab at the back of her neck like she needed it out of the way. Her hands were not delicate. She had short nails and rough palms and calloused fingertips. But when she touched your face, when she held your chin in place to fix your hair or wipe your nose, and made you look, you could tell she was beautiful.  

I saw her decorate herself with jewelry only once, on the day of her daughter’s wedding. She draped gold chains around her neck and donned a large blue rock on her ring finger to ward off the evil eye. I wondered if she was ever young and without children, if she ever wore pants, if she thought her eyes were dazzling when she tattooed the green dot between them, if she ever stood in the mirror and danced with her finger curled like a Bedouin princess.  

*    *    * 

Om Hawra had six kids. Hawra and Zahra were the oldest, then came Ali, Esraa, Fatima, and Ibrahim. On Saturdays, we journeyed together to the mosque in Roslindale, a converted second-floor club that sat atop a fish market. My mother, brother, and I rode with the Jaboris in their creaking bronze Sienna. Nine of us would climb in through the front passenger side. The back doors were handle-less, having come off in Ali’s gloved hand one freezing morning. We tripped over one another, limbs crashing. I did my best to avoid Ibrahim, who was small and hot-tempered, and bared his teeth when he laughed. We were driving through Mattapan when he let loose a loud whine, cut off by a screech when Fatima pinched his thigh with a meaty finger.  

“What? What’s wrong with you??” Om Hawra clipped.  

“I need to peeeeeeee,” he howled, “I can’t hold it. I’m gonna pee on Fatima.” Our mothers’ eyes widened in alarm, and the car swung to the side of the road in front of a McDonalds. Ibrahim hurled himself out of the car towards the glowing yellow arches. 

By the time we parallel parked in Roslindale Square, night had arrived and our voices were too loud for it. Om Hawra went to pull the keys from the ignition and startled when her fingers fell through empty air. “Isssssssssssshhhh,” she hissed, turning to look back at us, a crease pulling her brows together, “The keys are missing. Help me look for them.” Ruffling filled the van. We reached under our butts and between the seats, patting the floor mats and each other’s pockets.  

“I found them!” Ibrahim twisted them around his thumb, and raised them for us to see, “They were under my seat.” He handed them to his mother, who closed her fist around them and twisted her head to scrutinize us.  

Fatima asked a question and we let it hang in the air, “How was the car was running without keys in the ignition?” We stilled and quieted, the traffic lights bathing our faces in green. We breathed in the smell of fish. We sat in the moment and stretched it into a while.  

Then Om Hawra chuckled; the spell was broken, and we spent the rest of the night being loud, telling everyone in the mosque about our McDonald’s miracle.  

*    *    * 

Every Summer, on what felt like the hottest day of the year, Om Hawra dragged two of the kitchen chairs onto the stoop, setting them and a salad bowl of Henna on the pavement under the rusted metal structure where the clotheslines used to hang. Me and Esraa, who were close enough in age to be friends, found our fathers’ oldest t-shirts, turned them inside out, and pulled them over our heads before sitting side by side and throwing our thick hair over the backs of the chairs. Om Hawra put everything in Henna, black seed, lemon juice, yogurt, olive oil, cinnamon, tea. She worked the concoction into the strands, rubbing in circles, the paste cool against our scalp, the sun hot against the rest of our skin, before making two braids at either side of our heads. We sat on the stoop for a few hours, top heavy, playing hand games and watching our siblings ride their bikes in the parking lot. She washed our hair with a watering can in the bathtub as we watched the water turn dark orange and brown through squinted eyes. Sometimes it stained our skin. Always, it stained her hands.  

Afterwards, if you watched for it, our hair caught fire in the light, burning orange and gold. For the next two weeks, every time I showered, I picked black seeds from my head, weeding them out before they could clog the drain.  

*    *    * 

Om Hawra died suddenly of a heart attack in the back of a taxi cab in Babylon. She had traveled alone to finalize her retirement paperwork, with the hopes of collecting what she’d earned after decades of teaching in Iraq. I’m not sure if I ever knew her name before she died. Arab women are like this, we call them mother, Om, like it is a title, like we want them to be remembered for their children. Two years after she died, the Jaboris moved out of Germantown into a big house with a backyard large enough to raise chickens, decorated with a front door they kept closed. When her husband remarried, his new wife threw away everything that remained of Om Hawra in the kitchen cabinets: the spice rack, scorched pots, wooden salad bowl, and the serving spoon she used to jokingly feed me when she suspected I had not yet had my fill. Only when I read the Fatiha at her funeral, sitting with her children around the kitchen table, did I try her name in my mouth. I was smothered in it. The syllables tasted like Turmeric. The sound clogged my throat. Shukria. Thankful. And I was.  

Noor Al-Saad 

Noor Al-Saad is a M.S. in Narrative Medicine student at Columbia University. With a background in Pre-Med and English, she is interested in storytelling as an intervention which advances justice for people of marginalized identities within the healthcare structure.