“So the Lebanese are all prostitutes?”
“What kind of talk is that, my girl? Is that how we talk now?”
“Well, all the Lebanese are immigrants. The ones who didn’t migrate overseas migrated from their villages to Beirut.”
“I didn’t say it was so,” said Salma. “I said it was possible.”
“Take yourself, my dear Madam Salma. You ran away from the village with a man who wasn’t your husband, so you can be sure that everyone says about you what you’re saying about others.”
“What sort of person talks to their mother like this?”
“And that’s not all. I know and everyone else knows, so we’d better not say anything and let sleeping dogs lie.”
Hend hadn’t told her husband how her view of the world had changed because of Meena. She’d joined the Association for the Defense of Human Rights, which brought together activists, male and female, in defense of female foreign domestic workers in Lebanon. They’d put together an amazing amount of information on the ill treatment of Sri Lankan, Ethiopian, and Filipino women in Lebanon.
Still, Hend felt that she’d been at fault and it was too late because she’d been unable to do anything about it.
“It’s idiocy,” said Nasim as he looked at the picture of a child with a white complexion that Hend had taken out of her pocketbook.
Hend was ready to admit that she’d been an idiot but she could never forgive George or his father, Dr. Said Haddad.
The friendship between Hend and Meena had developed in the normal way. The Sri Lankan girl came each day carrying the doctor’s meal, and when he finished she’d pick up the empty tiffin box and go back. The friendship grew in waiting and silence. The girl spoke little and when she did, tried to pronounce the English and Arabic words properly, not the way people here in Lebanon think Sri Lankans speak.
Hend asked her which city she was from and she said Colombo.
She asked why she was working as a maid in Lebanon and the girl smiled and didn’t know how to reply.
With Meena’s daily visits to the clinic, though, Hend came to understand that the girl had been unable to complete her studies at teachers’ college because of her father, who suffered from partial paralysis. This had forced him to stop working in his small fabric shop and she’d had to come to Lebanon because her mother, brothers, and sisters had found themselves with no one to provide for them.
“I decided to study Arabic, madam.”
“My name is Hend. Don’t call me madam.”
“Yes-madam,” said Meena, and burst out laughing.
In Meena, Hend discovered the mystery of the east. Listening to her story of the mountain on whose summit Adam had left his footprints, she’d said to her, “The real East is there. We’re not in the East, we’re in the middle, which is why we live in a state of confusion over our identity. You’re the real east.” And she said she’d like to visit India and Ceylon.
“We’re not East either, madam. Whole world become West, all of us imitating all of us, which is why sun sets and you don’t know where it’s going to rise.”
Through Meena, Hend discovered a world fenced about with secrets and bitter experiences. She began to notice the theater of balcony friendships and how the maids who lived at the backs of buildings with closed doors went out onto balconies where they communicated in sign language for fear that their mistresses might notice, because they were forbidden to speak.
“What about you?”
“I’m different. Mr. George not let madam take passport and close door and he say this not humane. Meena’s a human being. If she wants to leave work, she can go but of course Meena not leave. When it was war with Israel we stayed in the apartment. The doctor not able to leave work. Then suicides begin. Mr. George say to the doctor we must go. We went to Brummana. Brummana very nice. I wished we stayed.”
In 1982 people left Beirut to escape the Israeli invasion and left the maids behind in locked apartments, thinking they wouldn’t be away long. However, the siege and shelling of Beirut lasted three whole months, resulting in a tragedy when five maids killed themselves by throwing themselves off balconies before the fighters could force the doors to the apartments.
Meena spent a large part of the war in Brummana because Mr. George said life in Beirut had become intolerable.
“Who’s this Mr. George?” Hend asked.
Meena’s long neck swayed and a smile sketched itself on her lips before she answered that he was the doctor’s only son: he had studied law and was a gentleman.
When Meena phoned Hend and asked her to meet her outside the clinic, Hend invited her to meet her at Chez Jean in Ashrafieh. Hend arrived at eight p.m. to find Meena standing on the sidewalk outside the café, waiting for her. Meena said she’d arrived early but the waiter had thrown her out. “This is a respectable establishment,” he’d said. “We don’t let your kind in.”
“Don’t be upset,” Hend had said. “Walk home with me.”
At home Meena had told her story. She said she’d come to say goodbye because she was going back to her country and wanted to ask her about that ten thousand dollars that the doctor had offered her, and to tell her that she was at a loss and didn’t know what to do.
“We have to take them to court. Are you certain that George is the baby’s father?”
“Yes-madam.”
“Don’t keep saying madam and stop talking in Sri Lankan, please!”
Meena smiled and said that the Sri Lankan women called that way of talking “Lebanese,” and the way their mistresses talked to them made them laugh.
Meena told her story. Hend listened and could scarcely believe her ears. She said it was an old story and it would be better to get rid of the baby. She looked at Meena, saw the small fetus curled up inside her belly, and told the girl she was a donkey. “Why did you let him make a fool of you and sleep with you?”
In the summer of 1982, as Beirut writhed beneath the Israeli shelling moaning with thirst and flowing with blood, Meena discovered the virtues of pomegranates and lived in a sort of coma until a pomegranate seed turned into a fetus in the guts of the girl from Colombo.
The story didn’t resemble those of the maids who are raped in Egyptian films. Meena insisted she hadn’t been raped and that now she was paying the price but that she felt humiliated because George hadn’t just abandoned her, he’d run away. The mistress said he’d gone to America to pursue his studies at Harvard University.
“I left the apartment yesterday and went to live with my friend Mali in Sadd el-Bushriyeh.”
“We’ll bring a case and force them to acknowledge the child,” said Hend.
Hend had only convinced Meena with difficulty of the necessity of staying in Beirut and bringing a court case against George because the girl didn’t want anything, or didn’t know what she wanted.
“The bastard left you and ran off. He has to pay the price.”
Hend didn’t know how Meena had found out that George hadn’t run away, that he’d wanted her up to the last moment but could do nothing because he was afraid his father might die. They’d quarreled, George saying he didn’t know what he was supposed to do and the father yelling that the maid must be forced to get an abortion. Suddenly Dr. Said had fainted and fallen to the floor. He was taken to the hospital, where the doctor diagnosed a stroke and said Dr. Said would have to take care of his health.
The doctor in charge of the case looked at George and said, “Your father’s an old man and you have to keep an eye on him. The worst thing for someone with a heart problem is getting upset. Be careful no one lets that happen.”
Meena said love had taken her by surprise. The Sri Lankan girl who had found herself compelled to work as a maid in Lebanon had arrived in Beirut without any idea of what it meant to live in a city torn apart by war.