Chapter 1 · Untitled Chapter

From the gallery I see the whole majlis, and none of it sees me. The screen is old. The lattice is wide as a woman's eye. I keep my Abaya folded close at the knee and my Shaila where it belongs, though nobody climbs up here to check.

I have given them names. The house does not know it. The man at the Sadr who turns a Misbaha between two fingers is the Quiet One. The young one who laughs before the joke lands is the Cousin. The old one who refuses the second cup is the Uncle, and he has never once taken the back stair, which is the only thing about him I approve of.

Oud and Gahwa share the air. A steward pours from the Dallah high and the Finjan fills halfway. The Quiet One takes his with the right hand and holds it until the old man drinks. Seat by seat, the room settles the way I wrote it.

Eleven months I have watched this house. I know the arrivals. I know which chair, which silence, which man leaves first. I know that the Cousin will laugh twice more before the room stands, and that the second laugh will be the one nobody joins.

I keep no paper. Paper is a witness. I have a memory and a screen and nothing else, and eleven months is not yet long enough for the memory to lie to me.

Careful is not the same as invisible. I know that. I have known it for eleven months, and every night I set it down at the top of the stair the way a woman sets down a tray she means to lift again in the morning.

Below me the cups go round, the steward lifts the Dallah, the Sadr turns its head the way the Sadr always turns, and I write it down where I keep everything, which is nowhere.

Nothing has gone wrong. That is the sentence I hold at the end of each night, and lately I have begun to hold it the way a woman holds a cup with a hairline in it—carefully, and not because it is heavy.

The majlis empties by rank, not by clock. The Uncle goes before the Cousin, and the Cousin before the men who have nothing left to stay for. Oud and Gahwa keep the air a while after the last of them is gone, and I stand where I have stood for eleven months, with my hands still on the rail.