Chapter 6 · Chapter 6

The elders did not ask for the majlis. They told my attendant they would attend it, which is a different paper altogether, and I let the difference stand until four in the afternoon and then had the doors opened.

I dressed in my own room with the shutters down: Abaya, Tarha, the plain black that says nothing and hides nothing either. In the mirror I looked like a woman going to a meeting she had called. That was the truth, and truths of that kind are worth wearing properly.

The majlis smelled of Oud and of the dust that comes in when the doors stand wide. The attendant had put the Mabkhara in the corner and the tray at my right hand, and the room filled along both walls the way it always fills — the eldest near the sadr, the ones who had come to watch at the far end, the ones who had come to be seen in the middle.

I sat at the head of it. The men kept to their benches; I kept to my chair; the carpet between us held the distance it is supposed to hold. That distance is not coldness. It is grammar.