Celestial Bodies

Abdallah remembers when his son Muhammad was young. The boy developed a habit of “opening and shutting the door” (92) all day; Abdallah would leave and return home to find his son in the same position, opening and closing the door while his mother stood by until, exhausted, he fell asleep. The sound drives Abdallah to wish that his son would “fly out the window like the birds and never come back” (92).

When Azzan tells Salima that he has accepted Asma’s engagement and rejected Khawla’s engagement, she flashes him “an angry look” (93). She does not believe that Khawla is still betrothed to her cousin Nasir. When Azzan goes out for the evening, Salima goes to her baby granddaughter, London. She sheds a tear, remembering Muhammad who had died as a baby, and tries not to think about Hamad, her other son who also died young. The baby also reminds her of her uncle’s house, where slaves argued and children shouted, where “no one ever spoke to [Salima]” (94). She remembers the feeling of hunger. As the baby cries, Mayya wakes. When the baby is again asleep, Salima heats a stone and lays it across Mayya’s belly so that it will not “collapse into flabby post-birth wrinkles” (95). Asma enters, and Salima talks to her about the upcoming wedding. Asma smiles, thinking about motherhood and what her books have not taught her.

Azzan and Najiya meet again in the desert, now accustomed to one another’s company. Azzan confides in her about the death of his son Hamad, a very painful memory. Hassan had been “a weak and wan-looking baby” (96). Their first son, Muhammad, had died before he was two months old, and they expected Hamad to experience a similar fate. Hamad survived into childhood, and Azzan “began to let himself hope” (96). Aged eight, Hamad caught a fever. Salima and Azzan had walked to her uncle’s home, pleading with him to help, but he refused to allow his Range Rover (the only car in al-Awafi). They begged for two days. Azzan resolved to buy a car, “even if he had to sell his farm—his whole inheritance—to do it” (98), but Hamad died before he could.

As Najiya cries, Azzan tells her that this is the first time he has talked about his son’s death. Meanwhile, in al-Awafi, Salima slips out of a dark house, having attended a “very important appointment” (98).

Abdallah takes Mayya home after 40 days spent at her parents’ home postpartum. People are “whispering about a relationship between [Mayya’s] father and an enticing Bedouin woman” (99). Abdallah is undertaking long commutes between Muscat and al-Awafi, during which time he ponders his own happiness and whether he deserves it. Even though he is happy, he is “a little afraid of what he held in his hands” (99). Somehow, he knows that he is “not worthy of all this joy” (99).

Zarifa and Sanjar argue. She is convinced that her son’s wife—“who was so rebellious and so disrespectful to her mother” (100)—is not entirely to blame for Sanjar wanting to leave; the seed of Habib is also to blame. She cannot believe that Sanjar has turned against Merchant Sulayman, without whom they would be “begging in the streets” (100), but Sanjar insists that they are free. Zarifa blames herself for encouraging Sanjar’s marriage and cannot grasp why he would want to leave al-Awafi. She knows that it is useless to tell her son that she was “born a slave because [her] mother was a slave and that’s the way life is” (101). Habib never believed such notions; he could still remember being stolen from his family by slavers. Habib would scream during the zar exorcisms, lamenting that he and the other slaves had been stolen. No one ever thought that slaves could return home.

Azzan holds Najiya’s face and repeats “the lines that Majun had said to his Layla” (103). Her beauty is “so strong that it hurt him” (103) and all he can do is recite poetry to her. Najiya struggles to warm to the poetry. Azzan, at the same time, struggles to reconcile his faith with his relationship with Najiya. Gradually, Najiya begins to recoil from “Azzan’s nervous poetic intensity” (104).

Abdallah thinks about his “enormously tall” (105) aunt. She is taller even that Zarifa but “couldn’t compete with Zarifa in overall bulk” (105). The aunt is scornful of everyone and belittles them mercilessly. She “despised children more than she did anything or anyone else” (105) and is the only one who does not recognize Zarifa’s status as more than a slave (Zarifa is head of the household and Abdallah’s father’s mistress). Aside from “an elaborate ritual of mutual respect” (106), she never talks with Abdallah’s father. Later, Abdallah understands this as a demonstration of their mutual loathing. For all her big words, Zarifa is never entirely able to “conceal her fear of [Abdallah’s] aunt” (106). Abdallah wonders whether this is why she left the household to join her son in Kuwait so soon after the death of Abdallah’s father.

Salima shops before Asma’s wedding but is not “overjoyed with her purchases” (107). Azzan has refused to set a dowry payment for Asma, as his daughter is not “a piece of merchandise” (107). The women gather around to examine the purchases. Salima regrets not buying more perfume; she’s irritated with the older women comparing everything to previous times. One bracelet reminds Asma of a story told to her by Judge Yusuf’s wife: she was surprised to be married at 14 years old; her mother advised her to hit her new husband with her bracelets so as not to appear “too ready” (108) on the wedding night; the woman “went for a whole month pounding him every night with those bracelets” (109) before eventually consummating the marriage. The Judge dies young and, though people tell her to remarry, she refuses to consider any other man.

Asma and the women perform a ceremony with hot coals and examine the hand-worked cushion covers. Salima hands each woman a head wrap, one of the many that she has bought for the women of al-Awafi.

When Abdallah hits his son, Salim, he is “assailed by a terrible and overwhelming sense that [he has] just become [his] father’s twin” (111). Two days later, someone tells him that Salim had “not been drunk at all” (111). Salim had been at a café with his friends. A young man dressed in black with fingernails “painted a glittery silver” (111) approached Salim and then followed him home. Salim managed to lose the young man in a side street but was shaken up; Abdallah had confused shock for drunkenness. He beat Salim for no reason.

In 1926, Ankabuta roams “the sparse expanse outside of town” (112) gathering branches when her labor begins. She gives birth there and then, cutting the umbilical cord with “a rusty knife” (112) at the moment “the men gathered in Geneva signed an accord” (112), abolishing slavery on Ankabuta’s 15th birthday. Ankabuta is not aware as she walks back to al-Awafi with her newborn in an improvised sling. At her master Shaykh Said’s house, the other women welcome her in and perform a “date-feeding ritual” (112) with the baby. A week later, the shaykh announces that the baby’s name is Zarifa. After 16 years, the shaykh sells Zarifa to Merchant Sulayman, where she would become “a slave worker and a concubine” (112). Zarifa would see Sulayman as a liberator and a lover; eventually, he would return “to her embrace to die” (112).