I had three grandparents. My dad’s mom was named Zudeikhah,
and she lived in a two-bedroom apartment in Dokki with a tiny kitchen, a tinier
bathroom, and a giant dining table that dominated the main room so that almost
nothing else fit into the place.
I used to cringe at the glasses of fresh milk placed on the
plastic blue tablecloth that my mother tried in vain to get me to consume
there every morning, and I did everything I could to avoid making contact
with the disgusting layer of cream, which apparently indicated extreme
freshness, which never failed to appear - floating on top of the liquid - and clung
to the rim when I tried to drink the stuff from the other side of the glass.
Not only that, but this mysterious, primitive beverage came not, as the Almighty
intended, from a white carton with the image of contented cows in silhouette on the
tops of grassy hills, but was poured from the spout of a giant metal jug,
strapped to the hunched back of a street vendor that arrived at sunrise, and
thus avoided my scrupulous slumbering inspection.
When you stepped out onto the narrow street below, the smell
of fresh garbage and produce invaded your nostrils before the sounds of the
open-air market down the way echoed between the buildings and rang in your
ears. Motorists, who were clearly unfamiliar with the cluttered old neighborhood,
tried to make their way down both sides of the single, somewhat paved path,
navigating between donkey-drawn carts laden with refuse and the gangs of almost
teenage boys in tattered Adidas sportswear who kicked deflated sacks of worn leather between
parked cars in pick-up soccer games that never seemed to end. Roosters made their
presence known at all hours of the day, perched atop the countless chicken
coops on the roofs of beige buildings that clawed towards the blue sky and poked
each other with television antennas.
Up the street, a butcher shared the corner with the barber
shop where I split my palm open the day I decided to test the efficacy of a
straight edge razor after getting a bad haircut that, for some inexplicable
reason, had extended to the back of my inflamed neck. Beef carcasses were
strung from metal hooks around the windows of the small shop that always made
the animals look significantly smaller than the images on the side of my white
milk cartons ever made them appear. There was always enough blood in the air to
attract giant flies that you learned to wave off rather than try to swat, and
those same flies migrated back and forth between the butcher’s and the little
juice shop on the other side of the street where I imbibed enough sugar cane
juice to ensure a sizeable contribution to the longevity of many a future dental
practice.
We lived with my grandmother Zudeikhah, far too many of us between my uncle's entire family and my own,
in far too small a space with far too little indoor plumbing for some time,
though the frequency with which we moved back and forth to Abu Dhabi made the
experience feel more like an extended, slightly uncomfortable slumber party
that would years later seem more like some exotic rugged adventure than anything
else.
My father’s mother was ninety-five years old when she died.
She’d always insisted on living in her own home, and she was in it when, during
the first days of the last week of her life, a cold set in and forced her from the apartment and into a hospital bed, where her doctor explained that her body had begun
shutting itself down, one delicate, aged component at a time, and that there
was nothing he could do to keep her alive.
I was six, and my own mother delivered the news on a
strangely somber elevator ride up the eight floors to my uncle’s new place for what
I thought was a routine lunchtime visit that was, in fact, a hastily arranged
funeral. I always hated taking that elevator. It was undergoing perpetual repairs
and the overhead lights, when they worked at all, had an unnatural green hue
that never failed to induce a certain nausea that combined with my pre-existing
fear that the power would cut out halfway up the side of the building and we’d
all plunge in darkness to a horrible screaming death.
I’d always been allowed to take the stairs, and I often
raced the car up to prove that mine was the more efficient, though sweatier,
method of ascent. On this day, however, I was forced to stand in the corner,
counting the floors up while rehearsing my last words and wondering why my mother
was avoiding eye contact and looking so utterly trapped.
“Teta El Hagga died,” she finally said.
Until that moment, I had never personally known anyone who’d died, and it was strangely exciting, for about 3 seconds before the confusion set in. I’d watched countless hours of Anime by then, all dubbed in Arabic, all
horribly violent orgies of imported carnage and decapitation. Whenever someone
died in one of those, they always screamed as their bodies were vaporized or
impaled or set ablaze, and I just couldn’t imagine any of those things
happening to my poor old grandmother. Besides, to the best of my knowledge, she’d
never done battle with alien robots or outer-space, katana wielding ninjas.
“How did she die?”
“She died of old age,” offered my mother, as kindly as one can
attempt to explain death to a first grader on an elevator ride.
It was strange, walking into my uncle’s apartment that
afternoon. My aunt dressed in
black, clutching tattered bits of Kleenex in her clenched fist, glimpses of my
cousin bawling on the edge of her
bed when I walked by her room to wash my hands. The whole thing was a little more
surreal than most days, and it took a couple of hours and a full belly before
my little brain began to comprehend the idea that I’d never see my grandmother
again.
We never called my grandmother Zudeikhah by her first name.
She was Teta El Hagga, which simply meant that she was a grandma who’d made the
Pilgrimage to Mecca sometime before I came bouncing along, and if she had any
name or identity prior to becoming my private candy receptacle, I couldn’t be
bothered to find out about it.
After we moved out, my brother and I would accompany my
father on the midday trips to deliver lunch to my grandmother at her apartment.
She always wore a sheer white scarf over her hair and a blue dress that draped her entire body so that she seemed to float when she walked across the room. Her skin was
pale, and her lips were cold as she greeted us at the front door and
enthusiastically took our heads in her hands and kissed us one cheek at a time.
Her favorite thing to sneak into my brother’s and my hands when our father wasn’t
looking was Jordan Almonds. I hated the things beyond their delicious pink and
lavender candy coating, and unlike my brother, who inhaled the things like they
were going out of style, I sucked on them one at a time while longing for
chocolate, and couldn’t wait to spit out the nutritiously annoying nut center
when I reached it, to make room for the next sugary piece. My grandmother would then
pull chilled bottles of Coca Cola for each of us, usually while my father’s
loud protests that she was ruining our appetites escalated into a full-blown
argument about things that seemed far more serious than whether or not I was
well prepared to join the ranks of the clean plates club.
There, at the dining room table where my mother had tried to
serve me unnatural fresh milk years before, I sat and poured myself short
glasses of Coke and pretended they were shots of whiskey, then pounded them back like J.R. on "Dallas"
while my father and grandmother talked, and yelled, and sometimes made up
before we left to join the rest of the family at my uncle's place for lunch. That we didn’t
actually sit down to share the meal we came to deliver usually set off
another argument before we were kissed on the cheek, and sent off with pockets
full of candied contraband.
I was sitting on my uncle’s balcony late that afternoon, and it
suddenly dawned on me that we’d never drop off lunch at my grandmother Zudeikhah’s
again. I’d never see the apartment with the too big dining room table on the
street that reeked of garbage and fresh produce, nor feel those cold lips
kissing my cheeks while pale hands stuffed my own with candy carefully selected
and set aside especially for me. My grandmother loved me, and I was never going
to see her again.
Later that night, I sat with the rest of my uncle’s family
and watched my mother deliver the news to my father over the phone. He was
overseas on business and the last conversation I remembered him having with
my grandmother was an angry one in that now cold, empty apartment.
My mother spoke in the same tone that she’d later use whenever
she informed me that someone close to me had passed away – not some distant
cousin that I’d have to think hard to remember, but someone that she knew I
would miss. She’d begin the same way on my thirteenth birthday when she’d tell
me that my uncle, whose home we were now huddled in, had died of the cancer he
kept secret until days before it took his life.
My mother’s voice was steady, strong enough to force the
listener to cease all other thought or activity, yet gentle enough to indicate
that she understood that the words she was about to utter were going to cause
immeasurable pain.
I don’t know what my father said when the words filtered
through the receiver he held in another country, or what his first thought was
upon hearing that he would never again fight with the only parent he had left. He
was the youngest of my grandmother’s children, and the last to share that place
with the too big dining room table after all the others had grown up and out to
their own lives with their own new families.
I remember my mother asking my father if he was still on the
phone, and then telling him to let someone else drive him wherever he needed to
get that night. And when she put the phone down I didn’t have three
grandparents anymore, and one of the first places I ever called home was gone.
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