Chapter 13 · Chapter 13

I kept the page in my sleeve for four days and did not read it, which in this city is a kind of reading.

The register stayed on the table in the small office off the majlis where I worked, and every afternoon between three and six it acquired a new complaint. A cousin's name that had been written in a lighter ink than the rest. A driver whose line had been struck through and re-entered by a hand that was not mine.

On the fourth day the complaints came into the majlis itself, carried in by men who had decided, all at once, that a register kept by a woman was a matter of general interest.

I sat where I always sat, which is to say not at the Sadr and not in the doorway either, and I poured from the Dallah with my right hand and did not fill a single Finjan past its middle, and I let them talk about my handwriting for the length of two rounds.

"The Al-Otaibi line," said the man nearest the corner, the one who always began his sentences with his own name in them. "It was higher last year.