The Hidden Light of Objects Read Online Free PDF Page B

people, and objects they had never heard of, in pages left at the foot of their mattress once a week. They didn’t ask their mother how the stacks of ripped and crinkled pages got there. There was no one other than Mama Hayat; it had to be her. Still, they liked to keep open a crack of mystery, a flicker of someone (their father?) or something (the roots of their tree?) sneaking up into their room at night, leaving piles of mysterious paper clues for them to pore over. One thing years of isolation had produced in the twins was a leaping imagination. This, as they would learn once they left the protective walls of their little kout , or fortress, was rare in Kuwait and gave the townsfolk yet another reason to mistrust Hayat’s unusual offspring.
    Mish‘al and Mishari learned instinctively, as children do, never to question their mother about their father. They tried to solve the riddle of their conception through traces they felt were everywhere to be found – in their mother’s post-siesta murmurs, in her poems and stories, even the funny ones, in her food, in the pages left at the foot of their bed, in every corner of their safe home. They had not asked to creep out into the world because they had always figured it was the world inside that held the answers. Mama Hayat made them feel that way, and for the longest time they hadn’t even realized a world outside their walls existed. When they were four or five, they began to notice that late in the evenings their mother would fold her layers of sleep dress around her body and steal down the stairs. They would hear the unfamiliar cluck of the heavy padlock, the creak of the lazy front door, and the sound of their mother whispering urgently to someone whispering back. They did not, at this juncture, begin to prod Mama Hayat about letting them out. But they did begin to ask indirect questions about the padlock, the voices of neighbors, the steady arrival of supplies. They knew about fathers from their mother’s stories and their own reading, and they would wonder about the invisibility of their own.
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    Hayat’s story was not a complicated one. It had to do with an illicit relationship and the crossing of unmarked but widely recognized lines in the sand. The blond hair that covered the round heads of her boys was not a result of albinism. Their hair was fair because somewhere in their genetic tangle, blond was strong. In 1937, the year Hayat met the father of her boys, Kuwait was overrun with oil diggers, many of them blond and British. Though they would set up camp in the desert and stay mainly out there, sometimes they would come down to the water’s edge to coax the dust from underneath their nails, from between their knotted strands of hair. They would saunter into town, into the souk s, to remind themselves of chatter and bustle, to purchase coveted tobacco and kerosene, black ointment for boils, pomade to keep their hair in place. Kuwait was a port, a fishing and pearling town. The menfolk were regularly at sea, gone for months at a time, so the womenfolk often found themselves without male guardians. They took advantage of their autonomy by going out to select on their own the freshest flapping fish on the market, the longest grains of rice, the prettiest patterned cloth. Some of the women – widows, grandmothers, those with insistent mouths to feed – even started to sell everyday essentials themselves, displaying their wares on small square mats on the ground of what would come to be known as Souk al-Hareem , the women’s souk . Kuwaiti women were used to dealing with traders arriving from Oman and India, and they were not shy about negotiating bargains. White men in search of scissors, thread, nails, locks, or matches would come to Souk al-Hareem to pick up what they needed and to stare curiously at the women covered in black selling to them, searching out their heavily kohled eyes. They were startled when these women stared back, when girlish giggles