Celestial Bodies

Azzan, Salima’s husband, returns from an evening at the nomads’ settlement with his Bedouin friends. He has decided to walk home to his village, al-Awafi. Such evenings with the Bedouins lift Azzan “out of his gloom and depression” (41); they help him forget about his two dead sons, Muhammad and Hamad. He thinks about his newborn granddaughter and is suddenly eager to get home. A mysterious and beautiful woman stops him in the desert: she says “I am Najiya. I am Qamar, the Moon” (42). She tells Azzan that she wants him. He runs.

Najiya visits her friend Khazina; they go to Najiya’s home, and Khazina laughs about Azzan fleeing. Najiya reiterates her desire to have Azzan. Her only love in the world is her little brother; her mother was never present, and her father had been “oblivious to anything but his raucous sessions” (44). Najiya had run the household in his stead, to great success. Her great beauty had given her the nickname “Qamar for she was as radiant as the moon” (45) but she rejected all suitors. Her brother caught Polio; she travelled foreign lands with him, searching for a cure. When she found none, she brought him home and shut the doors to her home. Eventually, her homemade cures result in her brother “walking on his own two feet” (45).

Abdallah remembers his courtship of Mayya. His father helps to arrange a meeting between the two. He finds Mayya at her sewing machine, not expecting his arrival. As soon as he sees her face, he is smitten. Salima laughs at him and leads him out. For years, he has been uninterested and confused about sex, even when Zarifa encouraged him to have sex with “one or another daughter of the slave families that had long inhabited [his] father’s household” (47). Indeed, Zarifa is the only one who understands his fascination with Mayya. He begins to understand that the “gentle fierce light” (48) that he feels is love. His father says that he is obsessed with the wrong daughter: Mayya is older than Abdullah, and Khawla is the prettiest of the sisters. Nevertheless, he asks his father for permission to marry Mayya. His father agrees, sets a dowry, and says that they will live in the big house which they share with his father’s slaves. Anxious and happy, he wanders the house. Then, he gets married, though Mayya does not “laugh on her wedding day. She [does]n’t even smile” (50). After their marriage, Abdallah splits his time between Muscat and al-Awafi, certain that his family home should always be occupied but keen to do business in the big city.

After London’s birth, Mayya sits up before dawn, studying the baby in her lap. Every day, Asma asks Mayya “what does it feel like, motherhood?” (51). Mayya does not answer. She only feels exhausted. Mayya considers “silence to be the greatest of human acts, the sum of perfection” (51). As long as she stays quiet, she can say nothing wrong. Later, she discovers that sleeping prevents her from hearing anything or doing anything which might harm her. Sleep becomes “her ultimate weapon against the pounding anxiety of her existence” (52). She wakes to the sound of her father taking hold of the baby. Azzan swears that the tiny baby reminds him of her brother, Hamad. Mayya still remembers her younger brother, who died when he was still young. In the future, London will grow tall and will become scared of her grandmother, who will threaten to slit her throat if she marries “the peasant’s son” (54).

Zarifa makes “an enormous tray” (59) of food for the still-recovering Mayya. She crosses from Salima’s house into the village, where the “new-fangled heretical air-conditioning” (59) of the 1980s means that people can now stay inside during the day. She balances the tray of food expertly on her head and walks toward the farms. Sitting beside a rock, she leaves an offering of food for the jinni Baqiia to ward her away from the new mother. Zarifa returns home. She recently performed the same ceremony for her daughter-in-law. It is “always successful” (59). Zarifa thinks about her mother, Ankabuta, a slave woman known as Spider-Girl who’s master imprisoned her for refusing to marry a man. Her husband raped her each night until her grew tired of her struggles. She became pregnant with Zarifa and became a midwife. Once a month, she performs the zar exorcisms out beyond the village limits.

London waited a year to tell Abdallah that her fiancé, Ahmad, beat her. Abdallah imagines his wife’s reaction to learning that “the peasant’s son beats my girl” (58). London’s fiancé leaves her. Abdallah reassures her that it was “just a bad experience” (58). He drives home, thanking God that the actual wedding had yet to take place.

Abdallah considers the clouds from inside his plane. He and London shared a dream of clouds which could hold their weight. She suggests that they visit the recently renovated Sib, where Abdallah and his father had tried (and failed) to invest in shorefront property. Arriving in Sib, London “bursts into sobs” (56). She is crying because she used to visit Sib with Ahmad. Abdallah feels helpless, unable to comfort his daughter. Later, he learns that Zarifa has died “long after the event” (57). He worries that his father will punish him for allowing her to die so far away.

Eating on the plane, Abdallah recalls the food he ate when his “father’s large house was filled with guests” (62). Only when he was lucky would he be able to eat “beautifully greasey dark hilwa” (62), though he always made sure to share (as well as leave half as an offering). He would split some food with Maneen, an unemployed man who was the father of his friend, Zayid. They would sit and talk, Maneen repeating the same stories. Later, Zayid would join the army and build his father a home. Despite his son’s success, Maneen still sat outside his house and asked passers-by for food. Father and son argued furiously, and one night, Maneen was found murdered. No one in the town ever saw Zayid again.

Masouda lives in a small, dirty house in al-Awafi. She lives only in a small part of the house and neighbors occasionally visit. When they enter, the iron door groans and “the smell that had been imprisoned inside burst[s] out” (67). Masouda has stayed in her tiny room ever since “her daughter had announced that Masouda was mad” (67). Her room has little besides a column, to which her daughter ties her when she screams and hurls her body against the door. Her daughter brings her food twice a day but rarely talks to her mother. On breezy days, when the wind moves the door, Masouda calls out to no one, thinking that she has a visitor.

Abdallah is worried about his son Salim, who has struggled to secure a place at college. London assures him that Salim is simply getting over “her bad love affair” (69). He remembers his father’s slave, Habib, who was the father of Sanjar. Habib would shove Abdallah when Abdallah’s father was not around, and Zarifa would tell no one. One day, Habib escaped. Rumors persist about where Habib has gone and whether he is still alive. Zarifa does not shed a single tear. Though Abdallah attends many funerals, he does not attend Zarifa’s funeral. He simply did not know she had died. He still dreams of his angry father.

Abdallah remembers moving into his new house. On that day, he dreamed of his mother. He remembers the day London asked for a divorce from Ahmad; once again, Abdallah saw his mother in a dream. When Zarifa dies, he sees his father in a dream. In the first years of marriage between Mayya and Abdallah, Mayya woke early and rarely napped. In the ensuring years, it was possible “to measure her sleep” (74) with Muhammad’s years. Often, Abdallah found them laying together, both asleep.

Back with Mayya after London’s birth, the visitors gather and talk while Zarifa provides coffee. Salima smiles “to show that she shared their good cheer” (71). After Azzan gifted her a gold ring, she is uneasy about her husband’s behavior. People discuss London’s odd name and how it reflects on her parents’ relationship. Mayya eats dates alone in bed, considering her baby carefully. She worries about Khawla: a sweet girl whom their mother mistreats. She is unable to read on the baby’s brow “the evenings of sleeplessness that would come as she reached her early twenties” (72). Early in the morning, Abdallah visits and brings baby food. This slightly offends Mayya though she says nothing. Mayya will cook and sew for her daughter, making her as unique as her name.