Um Buraq beamed and raised her eyebrows approvingly. “So it is! Almas. A fitting name for a gem like you.”

Now I had three names—four, if you count Nanu, which my brother sometimes called me.

Um Buraq’s house was a modest but elegant home in the Rumaithiya district. A South Asian woman in her fifties opened the door. Deepa was one of two servants in the home. The other was Ajay, the woman’s husband, our driver. People in Kuwait were often harsh and unkind to their servants, but Um Buraq, though demanding, seemed to relate to her housekeeper as family. I was surprised to hear her speak a few words in their language.

“Do you speak Hindi?” I asked.

“No! Malayalam,” Um Buraq snapped, perturbed that I didn’t know the difference.

Deepa had come to Kuwait for work some twenty years before when Um Buraq was first married, and had seen her through the heartbreak of miscarriages, then abandonment. Deepa herself had been childless and escaped the shame of it to work in Kuwait. Only later, after her husband tried to conceive with another wife, was it revealed that he had been infertile, not her. Ajay begged Deepa to take him back, and Deepa begged Um Buraq to bring him to Kuwait. But since Um Buraq could not afford another servant, she brought him on the condition that she could hire him out and take a portion of his earnings. He agreed and abandoned his second wife to escape his impotence, and the three of them lived together in childlessness and the unspoken shame of it. They were all around the same age, but both Deepa and Ajay called Um Buraq “Mama.”

“The dress you brought will not do,” Um Buraq said, and she gave me a few skimpy things to try on. One little red dress she chose clung to me, accentuating my curves. I ran my hands over my body, watching in the mirror how it slid from my breasts to my waist and glided over the arches of my hips. I felt glamorous. It was probably the most expensive clothing I had ever worn. In this dress, I could be someone other than a twenty-year-old failure, who’d only learned to read well enough in her teens, fallen in love with and married the first man who came along, then wound up little more than gossip fodder. I could be Almas, a diamond, in this dress.

“Take this too.” Um Buraq handed me a sparkly little purse to match my dress.

I applied heavy makeup for Almas, creating an alluring and sophisticated version of myself. I liked this woman in thick kohl, mascara, and red lipstick staring back at me in the mirror.

“Do you prefer Red Label or Black Label?” Susu asked.

I thought she was talking about my dress, wondering why she’d say the words in English. “I don’t know. No one can see the tag,” I said, twisting to see the dress label in the mirror. They all laughed. Susu almost spit out her soda.