Sweetness in the Belly Read Online Free PDF Page A

love? I could think of no way of representing this relationship on paper. I left Aziz hanging in the middle of the page, as if he were a lone cloud hovering somewhere over the desert.
    “Wait!” Amina exclaimed, picking up the pencil as soon as I threw it down.
    I watched as she added her own name somewhere in the blank middle.
    “Your co-wife,” she declared. “And your co-wife’s children.” She added Sitta’s and Ahmed’s names.
    “But there’s not an ounce of blood shared between me and anyone,” I said.
    Amina sighed. “Sometimes you are exhausting, Lilly, honestly. Okay, so yours is not a map of blood. But can’t you see? This is a map of love.”

    A mina and I copy the names from each new family tree into binders arranged alphabetically by first name. Perhaps one day we will have a computer, but for now, our resources are limited; most of what we do we do by hand and we’re grateful for the things we have. This office, for instance. It’s an old pantry, complete with shelves lined with paper in the 1920s and a hidden stash of tinned war rations. Beyond a battered and bolted wooden door, Amina grows onions and garlic in a tiny garden she has planted between crumbling bricks.
    The building belongs to Mr. Jahangir, who did so well operating a grocery out of the front that he was able to buy the entire building. He and his wife moved off the estate and into the first-floor flat. They offer us this room at the back of the building, behind the grocery, without condition. This is in part because, Mr. Jahangir says (and only half jokingly), that it is thanks to the crisis in Ethiopia that he has become a rich man.
    When Mrs. Jahangir first introduced Amina to her husband’s grocery, she filled Amina’s hands with garlic, ginger and chili peppers and put fenugreek on her tongue. Amina, taste buds deadened by plain pasta and potatoes, was overjoyed at the revival in her mouth, but when Mr. J presented her with a mango, her face froze as if her entire life were flashing before her eyes. Inhaling the skin, she broke down.
    Every Ethiopian who has arrived on the estate since has undergone a variation of this ritual.
    For the most part, this stretch of road is good to us. Mr. J sells halal meat, and two doors down there is the Mecca Hair Salon, with its special enclosed room at the back where hijab-wearing women can reveal themselves without shame. Volunteers offer Qur’anic classes at the back of the church on Saturdays, and while the Brixton Mosque, which draws us to Friday prayers, is only a bus ride away, the Refugee Referral Service just down the road offers a place in the neighborhood for daily worship, clearing out its reception room at dusk every day to receive the knees, foreheads, palms and prayers of men and women of all colors.
    This is where we are reassured of our place in the world. Our place in the eyes of God. The sound of communal prayer—its growling honesty, its rhythm as relentless and essential as heartbeats—moves me with its direction and makes me believe that distance can be overcome. It is the only thing that offers me hope that where borders and wars and revolutions divide and scatter us, something singular and true unites us. It tames this English soil.
    There are rooms being similarly transformed, senses being reoriented, everywhere on earth. I know from experience that you can remap a city like this, orient yourself to its strange geography, strew your own trail of breadcrumbs between salient markers—mosques, restaurants, markets and grocers—and diminish the alien power of the spaces in between. You can find your way. You grapple with language, navigate your way on the underground, stretch your meager allowance, adapt unfamiliar provisions to make familiar food and find people from back home in queues at government offices, which at once invests you with a new sense of possibility and devastates you with the reminder of all the people you have left.
    Ten years ago, Ethiopians