Nasiiba said, “I’ve shut the outside door and we’re as private as we are likely to be. What I want you to do is to step out of your puritanical robe so I can take a good look at what you’ve got by way of a body. We haven’t much time, so please hurry.”
Staggered, Duniya said, “You can’t be serious?”
“I am,” Nasiiba assured her.
“I am your mother,” Duniya reminded her.
Nasiiba looked in the general direction of the door to the room they shared. “I’m your daughter, need I remind you, and in any case, I’ve seen you naked or part-naked many times. So what’s the fuss? Let’s get on with it.”
Duniya’s memory was haunted by the thought that Nasiiba had seen her totally naked and making love to Taariq, as she had learned a couple of nights before. Her voice laced with pauses of self-doubt, she inquired, “What’s that on the back of the chair?”
“The dress I want you to try on.”
If she knew how, Duniya would have brought the whole charade to an end. Did Nasiiba think that because she had presented her with a dress or because Duniya had accepted to be dressed up, the young woman could request that her mother undress?
“You’re no shrine,” said Duniya, “and I’m not making an offering of my body.” So saying, she turned her back on Nasiiba but she failed to take one single step away, as though incapable of understanding the significance of her decision. She was weighed down by a sadness of heart because all loving thoughts were for the instant absent from her. She was close to making an appeal to let her be when Nasiiba suggested anew that she undress.
Somehow Duniya came to realise there was no turning back and what had to be done had to be done, reminding herself that the twin’s father, being blind, had never set eyes on her body, and that it was ironic now that his daughter was undressing her. She also drew strength from the memory that she, as a midwife, had seen many a woman naked, women whose bodies she had handled, whose most private parts she touched with panache. Her gaze worried, her body trembling, she flung aside the robe with which she had been covered, saying, “There you are,” speaking the words with flamboyance.
Nasiiba’s judgement came quickly: “Not bad at all.”
Duniya, for her part, was too tongue-tied to say anything. The one good thing this humiliation was achieving for her was that she was becoming heavy like a club-foot, no fear of flying away from weightlessness. This caused a kind of acrimony to grow within her, but she was certain the feeling would vanish and she and Bosaaso would once again be united — and in love.
Meanwhile, Nasiiba was formidably excited, her speeches a mixture of half-understood and fully-comprehended ideas, throwing freely into the air a wonderous set of words meaning nothing to her. There was a sub-pattern in her language, something earnest and humourless too, like a mother readying her daughter for a children’s party given in the house of an in-law with whom the woman is uncomfortable. It was an effort for Duniya to stand naked and still.
Nasiiba was saying, “You will wear your hair up, in a crown of a bun. But first well comb it, and before doing so, well apply some sort of brilliantine-conditioner. A very upright bun will suit you fine. And no head-dress.”
“May I put on something in the meantime?”
“In a moment, no need to panic.”
Duniya reached for a headscarf, with which she covered her embarrassment in the attitude of an Eve hiding herself with Freudian fig-leaves. Her face was undeniably that of a humiliated person, but she remained silent, although not still.
“Here is an underbodice, a pair of underpants and a brassiere,” Nasiiba said to her mother. “Now put these on and no fuss pleased.” The young woman might have been a mother giving two stop-gap mouthfuls to a child crying for food.
“I should never have asked you to help me dress,” regretted Duniya.
To this Nasiiba retorted, “Parents seldom remember the million embarrassing moments their children live through, being dressed in clothes they would rather not wear, being fed on food they would rather not eat, being washed when they would be all too delighted to remain dirty, their private parts being fingered, mutilated, massaged. Not only have you done these and worse to me, but do you realize, Mother dear, that as a Somali mother and a Muslim one at that, you have the legal, parental right to check if I am virgin.”
Having put on the underpants, the brassiere and the underbodice Duniya asked, “What would you like me to do now?”
Nasiiba grabbed a straight-backed chair and placed it in such a way Duniya would face east, where the light was better. Then she walked back and took a good hold of her mother’s hand, and her mother followed her, timid like a bride entering her new home. “Sit and stay still and don’t say a word,” Nasiiba commanded.
Duniya did not like it when someone else held sway over her, she hated the feeling of powerlessness, of not knowing what was being done to her. “The reason why I rebel against the authority of men,” she once said to a friend, “is that they tend to make decisions affecting women’s lives at meetings at which women are not present.” Was Duniya now seeing Nasiiba as “male”? Had she not stripped her, as men had, had she not rendered her powerless as men had? “What are you doing to me, Nasiiba?” she asked.
“Have faith in me,” was all Nasiiba was willing to say.
She began twisting and turning plaits of hair on Duniya’s crown. Both were relaxed enough; Nasiiba was the more pleased with the outcome of her artistic effort, though Duniya was less tense, her body less rigid. As if this displeased her, she went out of her way to say, “Incidentally, Nasiiba, did I see wads of money tacked and hidden away in an Iranian Islamic women’s magazine called Mahjouba?”
Duniya might have been a pet cat, well-fed and pampered, which had brought into one’s living-room the corpse of a dead lizard when one had guests. “I won’t stand for this nonsense,” Nasiiba raged, having in anger thrown the comb which, in somersaults of fury hit the furthest wall in the courtyard. “What were you doing rummaging in my drawers, through my private things?” All combing, plaiting and bun-shaping came to a sudden stop. Nasiiba was livid.
“I believed I had misplaced something.”
“I hate you sometimes,” said Nasiiba.
“No, you don’t,” Duniya said.
Like someone appreciating an artwork, Nasiiba took a couple of steps backwards. She placed her hands on her hips in a defiant gesture and said, her voice mimicking her mother’s, “By any chance, did I see Fariida at the clinic today? Or: in aid of what did you donate blood, Nasiiba? And now what?” And then, in her normal voice, “What were you doing rummaging in my things?”
“At times I wonder if it’s your place or mine to lose tempers? Now come,” Duniya said, “don’t let’s waste more time, for the truth is I suspect I know where the money came from. Come and finish what you’ve started, and be quick.” Duniya was very firm.
Before long, and without so much as a word, Nasiiba resumed building a castle of a bun. And neither talked until Nasiiba said she was done. And when she saw discomfort on her mother’s face, the young woman brought out a mirror for Duniya to take a look.
Duniya said, “I’ve never worn my hair uncovered, since my seventeenth year, Nasiiba.”
“You’re modern-looking when it is uncovered,” suggested her daughter.
“And it sticks out like the red of a semaphore in an otherwise darkened street and the whole world can see it from a mile away.”
“You will get used to it, and Bosaaso will love you all the more for it,” ventured Nasiiba.