The Hidden Light of Objects Read Online Free PDF

with the sound of her boys’ voices harmonized inside her head. But when the boys left the vacuum of their small home, venturing beyond the mud brick paradise of their first eight years, the world outside was less oblivious. Pearl divers peering over the sides of their great, hand-built dhows, fishermen with shrimp-kissed baskets, gold-faced women selling henna from Oman and matches from Sweden in the covered souk , men sipping tea and gossiping together after maghreb prayer on the benches along the outside walls of the numerous diwaniya s along the shore – all were awestruck by what they heard, flummoxed by the flying trapeze act in language the twins performed without effort, without even, it seemed, awareness.
    Uncanny repetitions generate discomfort. On seeing the boys striding through the streets in their clean, white dish­dasha s, men and women alike would blink hard or rub their eyes with their knuckles to remind themselves that they weren’t, in fact, seeing double but that Hayat’s boys were just out again. It could be that because nobody in town had seen the twins until the boys were eight, they simply had not had the time to grow accustomed to their doppelgänger effect gradually. Or, perhaps, the first shock of seeing little yellow-haired, fair-skinned doubles walking down the narrow, shaded lane one unusually cool October day in 1946 had simply been too much for the town to get over, so that even ten long years later, at eighteen, the boys still left behind them a wake of shaky bismillah s and a‘uthubillah s wherever they went. It was also possible that the real reason behind the perpetual unease felt by the townspeople whenever they caught glimpses of the twins was that it forced them to remember something cutting and nasty about themselves, something they collectively felt would be best forgotten. And on top of it all, when the people heard the twins’ strangely echoing speech, it took everything in their power not to reach immediately for a leather strap or slipper to knock two forcibly back into one, to pound to dust the jarring effect of having to face their own shame, not once but twice.
    *  *  *
    Mama Hayat had sworn to herself she would cloister her boys only until they asked to see the world beyond their walls. She was grateful for the eight years. She had expected five, six at most. Some may judge cruel the decision to keep children locked up, preventing them from playing with kids their own age, from exploring the edges of their town and discovering their own versions of adventure. But Mama Hayat knew from experience that cruelty lurked outside her walls, not within them and not within her. She worked hard to transform their home into a place where enchantment was possible for her sons. She embroidered a world of words for Mish‘al and Mishari. Her stories were threads of gold around their necks, her poems pearls tightly tucked in their closed fists. She sang old sea shanties to put them to sleep, her voice lilting through the house with the wind. Even her recipes transformed the bland, repetitive ingredients available to her into lush, intricate meals it often took the boys days to figure out. Guessing ingredients was one of the games they would play with their mother while she sipped istikan s of tea, filling the time after lunch and before siesta.
    “Fish, rice, and cardamom?”
    “ice and cardamom?”
    “ardamom?”
    “mom?”
    “Not fish. Not rice. Not cardamom.”
    “Wheat, chicken, cumin, and coffee?”
    “cumin and coffee?”
    “and coffee?”
    “offee?”
    “ee?”
    “Coffee, yes. Wheat, chicken, and cumin, no.”
    Until their mother’s lids would begin to droop, slow as melted sugar, the boys would shoot out as many combinations as they could, hoping to hit the mark.
    In this way, Mama Hayat kept her sons curious and smart. She taught them to read, and they spent hours every day poring over the Qur’an. They also read chunks of novels, poems, and articles about places,