She’d gathered that it was better to go to Lebanon than to the Gulf States. The domestic workers’ contractor in Colombo had said Lebanon was better even with the war, and when she asked about the war she was told it was like the war of the Tamil Tigers in her own country. From this she understood that Beirut was like Colombo — the war affected only its most far-flung splinters. But they’d lied to her: the war was in the heart of Beirut, and the Lebanese may well treat their maids worse.
Meena arrived at Beirut airport to find that maids were treated like cattle. No sooner had she got off the plane than the Sri Lankan women were told to gather and were put in a closed room. A soldier came, took everyone’s passports, and told them not to talk. She found herself in a small room like a prison cell where she remained for about two hours. Then an officer carrying a cane in his hand came and started reading out names. When a young woman heard her name she followed the motion of the officer’s cane and went to stand in front of the door to the room. Eventually the officer had read out the names of all the women in the room and led them outside, where they found three contractors waiting for them, two men and a woman, waving their passports. Meena stood there not knowing what to do. She looked at the officer and asked him about her passport; his answer was a blow with his cane on the back of her neck and a loud laugh. She stopped in her tracks and he gave her another blow with the stick and said something in Arabic. Meena looked at him as though stunned and burst into tears. She saw a man waving a passport and running toward her. He grabbed her hand and took her out to the baggage area. She took her suitcase and found herself stuffed with other maids into a pickup, which took them to an office.
She spent her first night in a closed room resembling the one at the airport and in the morning the white-haired man opened the door and she heard her name. She went out of the room, which had filled with the smell of sweat, and breathed air for the first time. And her mistress was waiting for her.
The man had asked for her passport and pointed to her mistress, who nodded her head and said, Yalla, yalla! It was the first Arabic word she learned. The mistress spoke to her in a strange kind of English that had no trace of verbs, so that she’d say passport with me and gesture with her hand toward her chest. Meena answered that she wanted to keep her passport but the mistress insisted on speaking to her in that strange language, saying the conditions of the contract stipulated that the passport stay with her; she would give it back to Meena when the contract was over and she wanted to go back to her country. She made a gesture like a bird beating its wings to clarify the idea.
The bizarre world that Meena had entered quickly started to fall into place. The mistress continued to treat her with arrogance, but the doctor was kind and so was his son. She discovered that things weren’t as bad as they seemed because she was lucky compared to the friends from whom she learned the language of the balconies.
Meena learned Arabic from the television and began leaving the apartment daily to take food to the doctor, and she built herself a world out of waiting. She made a hundred dollars a month, seventy of which she sent to her family and the rest of which she saved, spending nothing on herself. She supposed that after five years, when she’d be twenty-four, she’d return to her country with about fifteen hundred dollars. She’d join the teachers’ college again, study for three years, graduate as a teacher of English, and get married.
In five years her brother would be twenty and he’d have to find work and take over responsibility for the family. She’d decided therefore to go on studying English in Beirut and to learn Arabic, too.
She told Hend her situation was different and she meant it.
The difference she was referring to wasn’t attributable simply to the doctor’s kindness and sympathy but because she’d been able to impose her presence on the family. She became the household’s “little mistress,” as George called her. She cooked all the Lebanese dishes, cleaned the apartment, and took care of everyone. Even the mistress came to like her, though she insisted on continuing to talk Sri Lankan English with her while holding her nose, which had shrunk following unsuccessful cosmetic surgery, up high, as though she smelled something bad.
Meena couldn’t recall George being present in her life at all. The young man would leave the apartment in the morning and not get back until night. Meena rarely saw him in the apartment. Dr. Said joked with her about how beautiful she was and would say she’d arrived ten years too late. “If you’d come ten years ago, I would have been in trouble, but now no. The engine’s kaput and gone rusty, my dear, and it’s all down to age and the madam.”
Meena had imposed her presence and felt as though her loneliness in this strange city and her dealings with the Lebanese, who behaved as though they were the most refined nation in the world even though they spent all their time cutting each other’s throats, were the desert she must cross in order to discover herself, as her blind grandmother had taught her.
She met other girls from her country only on Sunday, when she went to the church of Saint Francis. Meena wasn’t a Christian but church was her only way of meeting colleagues. She was convinced that prayer meant contemplation of the self, that the Buddha was manifest everywhere, and that she would find repose in the burning candles fragrant with incense.
Each Sunday she returned to the apartment feeling sad after having listened to stories of oppression, torment, and even rape. She felt she’d fallen into a trap and there was nothing she could do about it. At church she also met a group of young Lebanese men and women who would come from time to time and ask how the maids were, promising them help. Meena realized there was a barrier inside every Lebanese person that prevented all empathy and recognition of the other. Hatred exists everywhere and she remembered the terror she’d felt in Colombo. The same terror, the same war.
Meena knew all this and felt it deep inside her, so what had happened to put her in this quandary?
Hend said Dr. Said had put on a show for his son. “You think you can tell me anything about him? I know him inside out, he’s the biggest play actor in the world. All the time he’s putting on an act for his patients and pretending to be sicker than they are when actually he’s as healthy as a monkey.”
“No-madam, I know him. I just don’t know why he did that.”
“What I want to know,” said Hend, “is why you did that.”
The sun was setting behind the pine trees and Meena was standing on the balcony of the Brummana house alone. She could see a bo tree in the midst of the forest. She could hear the tree speak in the wind that blew through its branches. She felt like going down from the balcony to the tree and asking it to rid her ears of the sound of lamentation that filled the skies of Beirut. She saw her grandmother sitting beneath the holy tree looking at her and speaking sounds that Meena couldn’t hear. Her grandmother had said that the sound of the wind in the bo tree leaves was the voice of the dead. “The dead never leave us. They talk to us through the sounds of the branches, they care about us, and they teach us what to do.”
Meena heard the voices of the dead and saw the water. She didn’t understand what had happened to her in Lebanon. She felt lonely, as though she’d gone deaf. Arabic, which she had tried to learn, was intractable and closed, and the English she used to know had begun to fade away into that strange linguistic mix her mistress used in her dealings with her. So she sought refuge in water. She spent so much time washing and scrubbing the house that she made the mistress angry. It was true that the building where Dr. Said lived had an electric generator and an artesian well but the mistress lived in a state of constant terror at the idea of the city running out of water. Meena therefore exploited the times when the mistress was out of the house to shower and play with water, especially on the large, wide balcony.