The lights come on again. The TV flickers then screams with sound. Mama sighs and shakes her head. I press mute. She gets up and comes back with a tray. I have the same dinner every night. Every night Mama tells me to chew slowly. I count. Twenty, twenty-one, twenty-two. Sometimes I reach thirty. Baba didn’t mind how I ate. He liked food more than Mama. Once, after Baba left, Aunty came to the house and told Mama she had to make an effort with her food. That day Mama was crying. I gave her a tissue and stood next to her. She patted my head. She didn’t seem to make an effort after that. Mama was thin. Nobody else we knew was thin like Mama. Except on TV, but only in American films. I take a bite of my grilled cheese sandwich.
After a while Dallas comes on Channel Two. It runs six nights a week and everyone watches. I go to the kitchen balcony and watch people watching in the building next door. Everything is dark except the screens. I imagine myself in the flat with the three sisters. I wish I had sisters. I go inside. Mama asks me to turn up the volume. Her dinner tray is on her lap. I watch Mama chew. She chews slowly, like Nesma did. Mama said that Nesma dying was like losing a child. She was my aunt, but they said she was like my sister. She had Down syndrome. It was also about hormones, but not Baba’s kind. That kind was only for men, to make them big. People told Mama they admired her. One lady said that anyone else would have hidden Nesma away. I imagined her in a cupboard. How would she eat? Some days after school I would sit in my cupboard imagining I was hidden away. I waited for them to find me. Baba did, but after he left nobody took notice. Mama did everything for Nesma. I heard her crying on the phone once because someone had made fun of Nesma at a restaurant. She said people think Nesma doesn’t understand. I knew she understood. I wished I had known last summer would be our last holiday together. I came home from school one day and at the gate I heard my name. I looked up. It was Nana, Mama’s friend, in the building across the street. She was on her balcony, waving. Come. Her building had an old glass elevator that rattled as it went up. You could see all the wires. They were black and greasy. I took the steps. I never remembered what floor they were on, but Abu Ali their neighbor had Quran written on his door. Mama and Nana said this was terrible. Sometimes when I saw Abu Ali he would tell me Al Salam Alaykum. Mama told me I should never respond. Only nod your head. Since when do we say Al Salam Alaykum. If you answer, say Sabah El Kheir. Grandmama was always reading Quran and saying Al Salam Alaykum. I told Mama. She said I was too young to understand. I reached Nana’s floor. The door was open. She told me to come inside, then hugged me. Nana never hugged. Bad news. Nesma had died and I would be staying the night. I screamed. I screamed so hard my voice stopped, like in the dream. I wanted to go home. She made me sit at the dining table and put a plate with rice and okra and escalope panée in front of me. She told me I had cried enough. Mama didn’t let me eat escalope panée. I ate it quickly. I fell asleep that afternoon and woke up again after eighteen hours. Nana said she had never seen anyone sleep so long.
When Nana let me go home, there were many people in the house dressed in black. Mama had on a white scarf. A man was sitting cross-legged on Granny’s armchair reading Quran. Mama never let anyone put feet on the furniture. Our house was Granny’s house. Mama was born in it. It was two floors and like a castle. The garden was filled with trees. We had mangoes, figs, tangerines, sweet lemons. There was also a tree that grew from the seeds Mama threw out of the window when she was a little girl. Custard apple. We even had a coffee tree that Mama’s friend brought us from Ethiopia. Under it was a wishing spot. Any wish you made would come true. Baba had built me a playhouse in the corner. It was wooden and painted red. The Nile was across the street. We could see it from the upstairs balcony. Mama said our house was plain but unique. Baba called it modern. People would take pictures. There were little windows at the top, near the roof, tiny, in threes, like secret rooms. There was a round window on one side, and a triangular window on the other. There was a secret box of treasures that Granny hid in the staircase when the house was being built. Granny lived downstairs with Nesma and I would come home from school and find their floor full. People I knew. People I didn’t know. We would have lunch in Granny’s dining room and Mama and Baba would come down too. Granny would sit at the end of the long table. She would ring her silver bell and Abdou would come in from the kitchen. Abdou was dark and from Sudan. He would go on holiday every summer and bring us back peanuts. Sometimes I would sit in the kitchen as he cooked. Abdou was always making maashi. He lined green peppers and zucchini on the counter and went through them, one by one. He held each vegetable like a tennis ball and with a knife made a circle on the top. With his special sharp-edged spoon he would scoop, bringing out the insides. He taught me. It’s all in the wrist. Making dessert was the best. We picked mangoes from the garden that Abdou cut into pieces and put in the freezer. I licked the skins that were left. Abdou would tell me stories about Sudan. Once, Egypt and Sudan were like one country. It was because of the English. They made some countries theirs. They divided other countries. Abdou didn’t like the English or the Americans. He told me they were trouble. If there weren’t any English or Americans the world would be a different place. He said they should mind their own business. When I asked Mama, she said I had to be careful what I said about the English and the Americans. Mama said that Abdou was the one who should mind his own business.
After Granny died, Abdou left. Mama closed downstairs and Nesma moved upstairs with us. Everyone stopped coming for lunch. I missed Abdou, but sometimes he came to visit. I would look out of the window after school and see him coming down the street. I would run down and wait for him in the garden. He brought me things. Once he had a bag of ‘asalia. It was like sugar but yellow and healthy. Another time he had roasted watermelon seeds. He even bought me long stalks of sugarcane from the cart that passed through the streets. We ate them in the garden. I waited to see what he would bring next. Then one day he stopped coming. I waited day after day at the window but never saw him again. No one went downstairs anymore. Mama said it depressed her. It was dark and smelled of Granny. I remember Granny’s smell. Mama said her smell was musky amber. It was an ancient smell. She said Granny’s smell and spirit were trapped downstairs. This meant ghosts. Or maybe the devil, who was also a ghost. Mama was always talking about the devil. They also told us about the devil on TV. If we were naughty the devil would become one with us. I was terrified of the devil and became scared of downstairs. When Nana took me home, we went in from the back door of the house. That was the door to Granny’s floor. I hadn’t been downstairs since she died. Mama was waiting for me. She told me to kiss everyone and go upstairs to my room. When the people left I could come out again. It wasn’t healthy for a little girl to be around so much black. I stayed there for three days. Ever since that day, whenever I come home from school I am frightened to look up. I don’t want to find Nana on her balcony. I am also scared to look at people in black because it might make me sick, but then I peek.