Before our meeting ended, I told her about myself. How could I not tell her about myself after she had told me about herself? Am I a judge who listens but doesn’t share? I had to tell her. So I told her my name, and what I did for a living. I told her that I was thirty-two, and she said, “may you live longer” in a voice that told me I still had a long way to go in life, after I had thought that I had already walked a long way on that road. I laughed at my young age and at my obsession with it. She told me that when she was my age, she was the queen of the world. She said that life is not just money; it’s the joy of living, and the ability to recognize that joy.
I smiled at her unrealistic but pleasing philosophy, and she smiled in turn at her unrealistic but comforting philosophy. An unspoken agreement between us confirmed that an emotional bond connected us both, and that her past is better than her present, and that my future is still ahead of me.
Feeling like a child, I said goodbye, and we went our own ways. Pain choked my heart then too. It choked it harder that time, but I knew why. Nadia had a story, and I knew it, and I was going to tell it:
She loves him. She adores her husband. She wants him to be comfortable and never blames him for anything. She blames the government and bad luck and the world and exhaustion, and bar owners at times and restaurant staffs other times, and she blames the Cuban blockade and Lebanon’s chaos. She blames the situation, the past, the present, the future, and war. She always finds someone or something to blame but him. And he, he loves to steer clear of blame. For he’s her Cuban husband with whom she spent years of happiness in Havana.
Komodo had mentioned, as we talked about her brother, that her husband in Sri Lanka didn’t live near her mother. She had married her current husband, Prasanna, a month ago. Before him, she had been married to Mohammed, a Sri Lankan Muslim living in Lebanon. She herself is a Buddhist. She hadn’t told Prasanna that she had been Mohammed’s wife here. She told me that Sri Lankan women who marry in Lebanon gain a “no-good reputation.” It also didn’t help that she had married a Muslim. She told Prasanna that she had lost her virginity in a fling. I asked her: “So a fling is more socially acceptable in Sri Lanka than getting married in Lebanon?” “Of course,” she replied. “It’s like nature made that union legitimate.”
She had her first date with Prasanna over the phone. They had one long talk and fell in love, especially after they exchanged pictures. She went to Sri Lanka and they got married. Then she left him there and came back to continue working here cleaning houses. She still sends him new pictures every now and then. The first batch she sent was of their marriage day and of the day before, which she had developed in Lebanon. I saw those pictures. In them, Koko was wearing magical dresses. Colorful saris, tight cloths wrapped around her belly, a stern look that rarely relaxed into a smile, and an expressive pose. One picture remained fixed in my mind—Koko with her girlfriends the day before her wedding. She was sitting slightly higher than the rest of them, her legs rigidly fixed on the ground, and her friends were sitting on the floor around her, all looking at the camera, including her with her arms draped around them as though she were their mother or guardian. She was looking defiantly at the camera, like a protective goddess. She doesn’t smile in photographs. Photographs are supposed to be formal.
In one of the non-formal photographs that Koko had taken of herself in a photography studio in Lebanon, she is wearing green contact lenses. Her eyes pierce through the photo, alien-like. I laugh every time I see it, and she laughs at my laugh and asks me what I think of her sex appeal, and I say: “A queen!” Then we laugh together.
When I asked her how far her husband lived from her family in Sri Lanka, she told me very far, which I found to be strange. I asked her: “Aren’t you worried he might cheat on you?” She waved her hands around anxiously and her voice rose as if trying to jump out of her throat, then she threw words around until she finally put a useful sentence together: “Listen to me, a man will step out on woman if she is there, and he will step out on her if she’s not. He wants to step out? Let him do it! Correct?”
A result of economic independence, I suppose.
Her ability to provide and put a roof over the heads of the men and women in her family, young and old, made her independent. “If he wants to come live with me here, welcome. If not, then I going to live my life.” I was a little hurt to find out that in Sri Lanka her first husband took a second wife without telling her, a Muslim, to please his family. She divorced him. She lived with him in the same house after the divorce for about a year, because the occupants
