There’s no Koko at my doorstep, and no Koko at the front gate of my building. Where’s Koko?
I dial her number on my beautiful yet empty cell phone. I’m seething because I’m using up my emergency minute. I’ve saved it in case I needed to call a friend to rescue me in a moment of semi-consciousness after an armed gang has driven by me, cursed me for something they think I stand for, and shot me. (No, I decide this daydream won’t kill me, nor will I be permanently injured, or permanently dispossessed. I will emerge from my short coma—a coma to make the audience fear for my life and the media take my assassination attempt seriously. But it will be short so people won’t get bored and give up on me. Only my parents and loved ones will wait for me, but waiting would be more tolerable if the world were sharing it with them. And they won’t be too worried because the doctors will tell them that my prognosis is very good. I will awake from my coma in a moment of media climax and will announce that I’ve become more mature after the assault and pain I endured. I will remain calm and won’t curse anyone or shout at the camera. No, never. I will ask the camera to be calm, and I will ask it to be patient. We all are, after all, against this fitnah, and I will refuse to be considered any better than the others who are also against the fitnah.)
I dial Koko’s number. She picks up yelling, unleashing a store of Arabic vocabulary, like a Bekaa wedding conquering my eardrum. “Koko! Lower your voice, please, I’ll let you in, come up, but for heaven’s sake, shut up!”
Her Sri Lankan voice is loud—I have to talk to her about that. My friend Zumurrud is always telling me to lower my voice. She’s a believer in low volume. Sensitive, light as a feather, classy, civilized. When she tells me to lower my voice, my happiness in telling a story snuffs out. Her sudden comment smothers it. Like a hand placing a cup over my candle. My flame flickers and I fade. I get ashamed of my enthusiasm because it’s loud, or maybe it’s my enthusiasm that becomes ashamed of me because I haven’t stood up for it, so it abandons me. Then my story flickers and drools off the side of my tongue, and I turn into a rabid dog, fuzzy-eyed and overly emotional, hugging myself on the floor in a corner, howling with a broken voice: “Ouuuuuuuuu.” I’m sensitive, by the way.
So Koko comes into the room talking in her loud voice. “For God’s sake, lower your voice!” She laughs in my face. No flickering like a candle? No “ouuuuuuu”? Not her, she laughs and says in her Arabic that would be perfect if it weren’t for that accent that unites Sri Lankans in Lebanon: “You donkey!”
I shut up. She keeps laughing. I get angry. She finds it hilarious. I run through the door of the house where we are still standing, into the living room and sit down. She follows me, silent this time.
She sits quietly next to me for barely a few seconds before she picks up the conversation in the lowest tone of voice she can muster. What a low morning voice is to me is a whisper to her. So, out of consideration for my feelings, she whispers. She continues with her story of her brother the “beast”—her word, not mine—whom she used to love very much until he succumbed to his wife’s nagging and threw their mother out of the house Koko had bought her in Sri Lanka with the money she earned slaving away in Lebanon for ten years. Why did he take the house? Because it was rightfully his as the only male heir after his father’s death. But the house wasn’t given to him. Since Koko had paid for it, she’s the one who chooses who gets the house.
He stirred up a lot of trouble before taking the house by force and leaving his mother on the street. His actions tore the family apart, and Koko was torn in Lebanon too and had to borrow a thousand dollars: five hundred to build a new house and another five to raise its ceiling. And that wasn’t the end of the expenses. She kept sending hundreds and hundreds of dollars until, before she knew it, her debt had doubled. And by the way, that brother of hers owns a house of his own. Years ago, Koko had given him the money for it. He really is a donkey. Koko adds, “His wife is fat cow. A vermin. Shame on her! Money not everything!”
Today, she tells me of a new development to her story; it seems that her brother has gone crazy.
“How, Koko?”
“Crazy, crazy, he crazy now, insane! No brain, brain gone, flew away, bye.”
“Okay Koko, but repeating the word and giving me its synonyms don’t really add any information to the story. Why do you think your brother has gone crazy?”
“Because he crazy! No brain, brain gone means it no work, and he cut down all them flowers, all of them, enormous flowers. I planted them myself when Prasanna was coming to the house to propose to me. Yeah, enormous, very pretty. All gone now, he cut them down, the crazy donkey!”
It appears that his (evil) wife went to his mother (Koko’s mother) and begged her to move back in with them, to the house they kicked her out of. But Koko told her mother, all the way from Beirut, not to move back in with them. She has a new house now, and besides, that old house is jinxed. Her brother must
