Chapter 2 · Untitled Chapter

Nobody knocked. The housekeeper put her head around the door, said the majlis was sitting and that I was wanted in it, and was gone down the corridor before I could ask her who had decided that.

So I put the abaya back on, and the tarha, and I pinned it twice at the shoulder instead of once, and I went.

They had taken their shoes off at the edge of the carpet, all of them, and the shoes sat in a neat row with the heels turned to the wall, and the lamps were on although the afternoon outside was still doing its work. Ammi had the seat at the head of the room, the one he takes when my father is away, and the rest of them had arranged themselves down both sides of it the way they arrange themselves for a matter and not for a visit.

Nobody had poured yet. The dallah stood by the tray with its lid still on, and that told me more than the seating did.

Ammi lifted one hand, not high. I walked to the middle of the room and stood there on the carpet in my own house with my hands at my sides, and the whole majlis looked at me the way a room looks at a document it is about to read out.

"The paper," Ammi said.

Someone put it on the carpet in front of me, face up. The same paper. The crease down the middle had gone soft and pale and the corners had furred, and there at the bottom of it was the stamp of the registry, round and blue and slightly doubled where the rubber had slipped, and beneath the stamp, in ink, my name in my own hand.

My hand. The loops of it, the slight lean to the left, the way I close the last letter because a teacher once told me a name should be shut properly. I had not written it. I had never seen this paper until last night.

"You will read the seal," Ammi said.

"I can see the seal, Ammi."

"Then you will tell the room what it says."

"It says the registry received a claim in my name on the fourteenth. It says the claim is entered, and stamped, and paid for." I looked up from it. "Whoever paid the fee, I hope he kept the receipt."

One of the cousins on the left made a sound through his nose and stopped it.

"It is your signature," Ammi said.

"It is a very good signature." I turned my foot a little on the carpet so the sole of it was not pointed at anyone, and kept my voice where it was, low and flat, the way you keep a cup you have decided not to spill.

"Whoever did it has my hand better than I do. They have my father's house, too, and the run of the corridor, and the registry's stamp brought to the door of it. It is a very comfortable arrangement. I am only surprised nobody thought to ask me to come and admire it sooner."

The room did not laugh. Two of the elders looked at their hands instead, and the one beside the tray reached out, without being asked, and shook the finjan twice between his fingers. The dallah stopped.

"There is no name at the bottom," I said. "Whoever wrote it did not sign it. Which one of you is going to tell me why a thing with no man's name on it has mine?"

Ammi filled his cup and held it without drinking. "Inshallah," he said, cold as a wet stone, "you will say all of that in front of the family, when the family is in the room."

So it was already decided. The coffee had never been for me.

At the far end, past the last of the seated men, Faisal stood with his shoulder against the door frame and his cup in his right hand, and he did not say anything at all, and he did not look at the paper on the carpet. He looked at me, and he stayed where he was, and I understood that he had heard the word inshallah too, and that he had heard what it meant in my uncle's mouth.

The date on the seal was four days before anyone had thought to tell me my own name was in a registry.