Chapter 8 · Untitled Chapter

The majlis was opened before the courtyard's shadow had left the wall, which in that house means someone did not sleep.

They sent the coffee ahead of me. I heard the dallah before I saw the room — the long pour, the pause, the second pour — and by the time I reached the arcade the smell had come out to meet me: cardamom, a thread of saffron, and under it the bakhoor they only light when a room expects to be remembered.

I stopped where the marble met the carpet and stepped out of my sandals, and I did not go past the pillar. Abaya closed. Shaila down over the shoulders. Hands where anyone could see them. There is a way of standing in a doorway of my family's house that is neither entering nor leaving, and I had learned it the way girls learn to swim, because the other choice was to drown.

The carpet was fuller than it had been yesterday.

Not the whole family. Enough of it.