“She’s going to make me do her feet now too, isn’t she?” I whispered to Mama.

“You may as well get it all ready or else we won’t hear the end of how terrible her feet look and feel,” Mama said.

As I got up to carry the dirty water away, Mama remembered to ask me, “Oh, by the way, have you heard from Um Buraq?”

“No. She called me last week, but I haven’t been able to get an answer on the phone since. Why?”

“It must be true, then,” Mama said. “I heard she’s in jail.”

“What?” I almost dropped the tub of dirty water.

“I don’t know the details. I heard that someone, maybe her driver, turned her in to the authorities for collaborating with the Iraqis.” Then Mama whispered, “Actually, they apparently said that she was having an affair with an Iraqi officer. It’s hard to believe, though. A woman of her age …”

“Are you talking about Ajay? He went back to India, him and Deepa, his wife, when we were still in Kuwait. This doesn’t make sense.”

“Nothing in the world makes sense. I’m just telling you what I heard. It’s in the newspaper, but I didn’t read it yet. I could never figure out that woman. She was too crass for my taste, but she was always so kind and generous. Regardless, she doesn’t deserve to be in prison,” Mama said, adding, “You never know who you can really trust in this world. Look what her driver did to her after she kept them in her house all those years.”

Buried in the Arab World section of the newspaper, below an article about new word processors with Arabic script, I found an article about an electronic web called “the Internet,” which would soon connect the world through machines and television-like monitors. It sounded like science fiction to me, so I thought the article next to it, about a Kuwaiti woman collaborator, might also be some kind of fiction, particularly because it didn’t mention her name.

I called around to our old crew, some mutual friends in Kuwait, and some of the ladies from our makeshift salon during Iraq’s occupation. The story that emerged was that Um Buraq had indeed been arrested and put in jail, along with another woman, on charges of treason.

Sometime after Deepa and Ajay left for India, Um Buraq’s neighbor demanded payment from her, claiming Ajay had gotten her housekeeper pregnant. The neighbor insisted that, as Ajay’s employer, Um Buraq was responsible for the financial loss incurred from having to send the housekeeper back to Sri Lanka. Of course, Um Buraq did not pay. She made it known that Ajay was impotent. An argument ensued, and Um Buraq didn’t hold back. “Do a blood test. You might find out your husband is the father,” she told her neighbor.