Sometimes your day begins at three in the morning, to fragments of a dream whose details you can scarcely recall. You stare at the ceiling of the dim room; not a single thought settles in your mind. With your imagination alone, you try to carve time into precise minutes; you think about nothing and summon everything you have held back from doing out of cowardice, caution, or reason. You snatch an extra hour of sleep; you barely doze, then wake up with an even stronger craving for rest.
Today is the fifth of December, pandemic year. It’s six in the morning. This is what you tell yourself, to lend some particularity to a day that is part of a year whose days have grown so alike they could be identical. On waking, you imagine you have recovered your identity in full. Outside, Covid-19 claims thousands of lives around the world, leaving others exhausted, unable to breathe. And you are a woman in your forties, suspended between sleep and wakefulness.
You chase away the last traces of drowsiness with cold water; it jolts every atom in your body. You dress and go out, just like that. Something is calling you to be outside. Something is urging you to leave the house. Today is Saturday; the road is all but empty. From the distant suburb, where you live on the east side of the city, you reach its western edge in record time: under forty minutes.
You don’t know what brought you here; perhaps it is a longing for a past when this neighbourhood was your familiar place. Another fifteen minutes and you find yourself downtown to the sound of Hoda Sultan’s Abayn Zain drifting from the car radio, a song you haven’t heard in many years. You think of the song ya Darbeen al Wada’, and you ask yourself: why was your mother’s favourite singer so obsessed with reading cowrie shells and telling fortunes? Then you busy yourself with something else so as not to revive what hurts.
In your usual coffee shop from the days before the pandemic, the waitress greets you with the expected welcome. She looks at you questioningly, and you nod in confirmation. After a short while, she returns with your breakfast and coffee, just as you like it: with milk, no sugar. She doesn’t ask you why you are returning to this place on a day off after months of absence; you don’t ask her why her eyes are red as if she has been crying for hours. Thus, nothing clouds the clear coolness of your relationship except a smile that escapes one of you from time to time. She stands at a measured distance, her eyes on the sanitizers that are placed at the entrance to make sure no one enters without disinfecting their hands. In any case, there are few customers: you and two others.
An hour later, outside the door of a nearby jewelry shop, a cowrie-shell reader stops you, offering to read your fortune. You politely decline, but she follows you into the shop. You give her ten pounds, the price of the reading, on condition that she leaves you alone, but she insists, pulling your hand; the jeweller intervenes to rescue you, and she is forced to leave. You explain to the jeweller what you’re looking for, and he apologizes politely for not having it. You leave, disappointed, only to find her waiting at the corner.
“I have good news for you.”
“No, thank you.”
She continues to follow you with a persistence that surprises you, considering you have already paid her.
“I have good news for you.”
For a moment you weaken before her insistence but suppress your curiosity. You do so because you know that, deep down, you won’t treat this as mere amusement. Your stubborn refusal does not stem from a disbelief in superstitions or the unseen, but from the knowledge that what she will say will take hold of you, no matter how hard you resist it.
On Talaat Harb Street, you head for another jeweller, your eyes searching the items on display for what you are looking for. The jeweller tells you he specializes exclusively in modern designs, so you thank him and leave, only to find the cowrie-shell reader watching you from her place in the opposite corner. You move away, then steal a last glance at her to notice that her expression is one of hope mixed with regret that reaches you and almost urges you to return to her, but you continue walking, concerned with nothing but reaching your goal.
Recently, you have been seized by the overwhelming desire to buy a necklace like the one your mother sold thirty years ago. At the time, you were a child who could not understand how someone could give up something precious to them. To you, life was simple and moved forward in a straight line, and to love something or someone meant holding on to them.
You recall the eager look in her eyes as she looked at the necklace: it was like a delicate mesh of crisscrossing chains that held together tiny golden chickpea-sized beads. In a burst of fervour to secure her children’s future, the resolute widow decided to add another plot of land to what they had inherited from their father. So she sold this gold mesh necklace, adding some savings to the price, and bought ten qirats next to the land they already owned, lamenting her beloved necklace from time to time, promising to buy herself a similar one one day. The mother lived for twenty years after that and never bought herself another necklace.
As you wander the streets of downtown thinking about this, you ask yourself: did she not have enough money, or did she fail to find what she was looking for? Or simply—as is often the case—did she forget the matter as the years went by?
You did not revisit such a memory until a few days ago when you saw a similar necklace in silver in an advertisement announcing a new collection by a well-known jewelry designer. In that moment, you felt an intense longing for your late mother and decided to search for her gold necklace. You didn’t want the silver one where the designer claimed uniqueness and artistry, when in fact she had just appropriated a design that had once been popular in the past, adding to it touches that distorted it.
You regard this quest to find the necklace as a way of honouring your mother and an apology for a sin you were struggling to forget.
You began with jewelry shops close to your home, taking pleasure in explaining to the owners what you were looking for. Some recognized the design but did not have it. Others simply said they did not know what you meant, and the third group showed you photos of similar designs that lacked the delicacy and refinement that distinguished the original as you remembered it. You don’t want something similar—you want an exact replica, but you have never admitted to yourself the real reason your mother’s presence has been accompanying you so persistently these past few months.
It had been many years since her passing. Her memory had become a hidden scar in a dark corner of the heart, marking both an old wound and its healing. But recently her spirit rebelled against its place of shadow and insisted on occupying the center of light in your burdened memory. And her presence became a conscience that stared at you whenever you looked in the mirror or closed your eyes, trying to sleep through nights defined above all by insomnia.
You began to ask yourself what your mother would say about your relationship with that man you had come to spend long hours talking to, seizing every opportunity to meet him, at least once a week. Your feelings for him swept you along to an extent that was not diminished by your chance discovery that he was married and had two daughters. He concealed this from you for reasons that were obvious to you. You cut him off for two months, then resumed contact with him after he bombarded you with messages and mournful pleas that softened your heart and made you uneasy at the influence he had over you.
The more attached you become to this stranger, the more you find yourself confronting the chain of your grandmothers: women, most of whom you know only by name, yet who represent your maternal lineage. They stand before you, their eyes full of reproach, as you look only at your mother, who turns her face away from you. You believe this relationship estranges you from them and casts you as the one at fault. Sometimes their supposed condemnation fills you with a strange delight tinged with a faint sense of guilt. At other times you want to cry like a child pressing herself into the clothes of a mother who barely notices her. You don’t care about anyone’s opinion in your world. And yet you cannot stop thinking about how this love has distanced you from grandmothers who did not concern you much before, but whose names you had always liked to link your own to, as if this chain were all that mattered: Elham daughter of Aisha daughter of Fatima daughter of Salimeen daughter of Nawal daughter of Amina daughter of Khadijah.
As you walk absentmindedly along Talaat Harb Street wondering about the nature of the good news that the shell-reader wished to convey to you, you suddenly remember a story you heard as a child about one of your grandmothers—was it Nawal or Salimeen? You cannot be sure. That woman, a widow left to support five children, fell into the sin of loving her eldest daughter’s fiancé. The girl noticed things between her mother and her fiancé that aroused her suspicions, then caught them red-handed when the other siblings were away. She bargained with the lovers: she would break off her engagement, and they would end what lay between them in exchange for keeping the matter concealed. A few days later she was free, and whenever anyone asked the reason for the breakup each of the three would respond: it was fate.
After that, the girl grew accustomed to her mother’s sobbing in the night, when she imagined everyone else was asleep. The young woman would listen to her mother’s hushed weeping and murmurs without knowing whether they stemmed from regret or from longing. In both cases she was filled with sympathy for her, though she never dared to console her. Her intuition told her that what happened must be buried in a bottomless well and that they must silently agree to forget it.
But your knowledge of this relationship means that the daughter must have confided the secret to her own daughter, and so on from one generation to the next until it reached you. As you gaze through a shop window at a clothing display, you think the embers of that old romance were rekindled just to comfort you, like time itself patting you fleetingly on the shoulder, to remind you that you are not alone. And that among the chain of grandmothers standing before you like a solid wall, whose only purpose is to condemn you, there was another woman who understood what you’ve been through, and singled you out with a conspiratorial, sympathetic glance.
This does nothing to reassure you or improve your foul mood. Ever since you woke up with a tightness in the chest and an exhausted body, your intuition told you that the day would be decisive in some way, though you did not know how. You continue walking towards Talaat Harb Square, pass Café Riche, then think of going back there and sitting a while. You don’t go in immediately; instead, as usual, you sneak a look through the dusty window at the regulars inside. In the corner at the far end of the café, you see your ex-husband sitting with a woman you know well. You have never seen him this happy before. How different the neutral way they used to treat each other in your presence is from the harmony that now envelops them.
You move away quickly, even though you are certain that they are floating on a cloud that prevents them from seeing you. You decide to return to where you left your car, intending to drive as far as possible. This is your favourite way of escaping what weighs you down, but the moment you leave downtown behind you and settle into a steady, moderate speed, you make up your mind to go home. What you need is some rest.
At home, you switch off your mobile and cut the power to the landline. You are not angry at your ex-husband’s relationship with another woman. In fact, it relieves you. You had often suspected something between them in the past, despite his repeated insistence that she was just a colleague at work. What surprises you is that seeing them together prompted you to break off your own ambiguous love affair. You take out an old photo album, leafing through it until you reach a black and white photograph of your mother in her youth. Her hair falls to her shoulders with striking elegance, and an innocent smile rests on her lips. You study her light-coloured dress and wonder—was it rose or was it purple—her two favourite colours? The rounded neckline allows for her gold necklace to appear in all its brilliance. You place the photograph in your handbag, remove your outdoor clothes and lie down in your bed.
The next morning you show the photograph to a goldsmith in the jewellery market and ask him to make an exact replica. He asks to keep the portrait until he finishes the piece. After a moment’s hesitance, you agree. In a few weeks you will have what you want, and you will wear the necklace all the time. Whenever you grow anxious or are seized by a panic attack, you will touch it, the way you had always seen your mother do, hoping it will offer you some reassurance.
You close your eyes and say your name linked to the chain of your grandmothers, only to discover that your voice now sounds like another voice—a voice that had remained hidden for years in the darkness of your memory.
Shirin Abedinirad, Reflective Portal, 2024. Public art, Nanhai District, Foshan, China. Presented at Art Field Nanhai 2024, the work draws on the mirrored architecture of Persepolis and the spiritual imagery of Rumi to create an endless passage of reflection, where light, landscape, and self are held in a continuous loop of beauty, possibility, and becoming. Photography by Tian Fangfang. Artwork courtesy of featured artist Shirin Abedinirad.
