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To Mom and Baba

And to Andrew

“We do tell you the best of stories … When Joseph said to his father, ‘O father, I have dreamt eleven stars and the sun and the moon; I saw them prostrating to me’ / [His father] said, ‘O my son, do not tell the story of your dream to your brothers …’”

—The Qur’an, SURAT YUSUF (JOSEPH)

BASMALAH

2018

Hannah dreams the family buries her mother, a woman they haven’t seen in more than forty years. Hannah herself hasn’t seen her mom in twenty years. The family buries Sadie in view of the Red Sea, a few miles from Jidda, where she was born. The water is a perfect, unending slab of turquoise.

Hannah focuses on the horizon. The Arabian Peninsula and everything on it disappear—the land behind her, beneath her, beside her. Hannah stands on firm ground. Ahead of her: miles and miles and miles of sea.

Before the burial and the sea, Hannah is in a small room with low cushions. Her mother’s body lies in the middle of the floor on a sheet spread over a silk rug. Women in mourning white hunch over the body, the sleeves of their long dresses rolled to the elbows. Though she can’t see their faces, Hannah knows—the way you sometimes know in dreams—who is touching her mother’s lifeless skin. Hannah’s grandmother, Aunties Randah and Riham, a handful of female cousins.

They wash the hands and face three times, the arms, the feet, as though preparing the body for prayer. As though the dead could pray. They slide the washcloth down the body’s right side and its left side, press the stomach with their flat palms to force a bowel movement. After they wash the body, they expertly swaddle it in white cotton, as though readying a baby for sleep. All that shows is a pale face, cheeks like crumpled sheets of unbleached paper.

The women burn sandalwood incense. In real life, someone would be howling with grief, calling her mother’s given name: “Saeedah!” They would call Hannah’s name, too, her other name: “Oh, Hanadi! God have mercy on your mother! God forgive her and protect her!”

In this dream: watery silence, as though they are at the bottom of the sea. Her mother looks harmless. Quiet and still. An object.

The sea becomes a great, brown, expansive lake. A sea again. A lake. Hannah turns from the water. Men in white thawbs, brown mishlahs, and white headdresses carry the body, the bundle that is her mother, down a beach that shines like a coin.

The body is veiled, disguised. It could be anyone. Maybe it is not her mother. Maybe bodies have been switched.