It just so happened that there was a boy from our village who was at Hamdi’s house that evening. He also happened to be a big liar, and talked to his gossipy mother the next day on the phone and he told her something like: I am fine and I see Hamdi Salaama a fair amount, and his sister, of course. Yes, she’s studying. Well, she’s really not so good. If you’ll keep this to yourself, I’ll tell you. Promise, Yama? Well, she’s not so proper and last night she didn’t come home at all. Why indeed? She was spending the night at her boyfriend’s house.

Within hours the entire village knew what had happened. My grandmother was hysterical, tearing her clothes and weeping as if Huda had died. My grandfather was more upset because he was furious too. He ordered his son to send her home or she would not have a home to return to. Huda got back from the library that next evening and found Hamdi sitting quietly. He handed her a plane ticket, which she had to use in the next two days, or be disowned by her parents, even though I told them it was a lie and I swore on the Quran and on the lives of our mother and her mother before her.

She came back, and eventually the whole thing straightened itself out and her parents came to know that she was telling the truth, and the liar boy denied he had ever said anything, but by then it was too late and Huda was back here. It was no surprise that shortly after her return she was married to an older Jordanian man and left Nawara forever. Somewhere inside me I wished so badly that the boy from Jerusalem had followed her back from America and asked her to marry him. What a disappointment when she practically proved her guilt by marrying an old man and leaving her country to live with him.

Big-mouth village. Sad love-story girl.

But mostly everyone else is like rice without enough salt, who you only remember because you see them everyday, and not like the hot pepper ones, who you remember because of the burn they leave.

Summers and weddings are the best things, especially the weddings that are built on foreign money. For all the difficulties we are having, people still like to show off how much money they have. When my cousin Jalal, Huda’s eldest son, came from Jordan to marry Jawahir Sulayman, they had a traditional wedding that lasted three days—he even carried her off on a horse—and my mother complained that the cost of the wedding would have paved a street, built a mosque—though we certainly don’t need another one—even created a school, and that it was shameful to spend it all on a wedding.