Barakah

- A Sister With Time

Barakah

People tended to dislike the mundanity that sourced from the consistency of day to day life. The need to live life colliding with the need to be alive. But what Barakah lived in, she could only unravel—make intelligible—by the feeling inspired in rhapsodies. Her life had no fixed structure, most times it felt like nothing was happening until everything would happen all at once and then her heart would feel more than it was allowed too. The depth of her feeling almost like an abyss, where she sometimes felt like she would feel forever and then she would be suddenly pulled out of it like a misplaced foot on a rug about to be pulled.

Then there was time. Sometimes she felt she had enough of it. Other times she felt she could crawl to have more. Just that in the business of life, everyone lived on borrowed time. Time couldn't be earned, not for all the gold or magic in the world. The very first inhale of breath—the one an infant would take into the lung sacs and their components of the bronchial tree—was an understanding of a contract in place. That our first debt in life was owed to time. And no one could cheat time.

And time couldn't cheat death.

Barakah cherished her own mundanity. There was a subtle joy to it. Almost like a secret life couldn't contain from her. She woke up in the mornings with her hand over her smiling lips at the first glance of Jalal and slept the night knowing the next morning would be like the one from the day. And the day before that. And so on.

Moments of surrealism pressed against her mind and heart occasionally. Like the day Farouk circled around her excitedly. He'd grabbed at her skirts. Pulled at her arms. When it felt like he would bite off her ear from talking so much. When he would exhaust all his attention on her calling her his mother because he had learnt what a mother was in school and no woman that had held him in steed of his birth mother had kindled that comfort in him more than her. Even if she had scored extra points by being married to his father.

When the little boy told her, "A father and mother live together." That day, her tears slid backwards and she tasted them against her throat. Because it dawned on her that Farouk had been nurtured by so many women, he did not exactly know what a mother was until then.

There were also those days when she would press her cheek against that of a niece or a nephew and feel their life and think: I was once like this. And a giddiness would overwhelm her. As though it were her own life thinking about their future and all that she had to offer them in life. The more base level things, like the character of rain and incense when she would read with an awareness of Jalal because he would be somewhere nearby in the house, doing something too.

There were things that still plagued her life. The deep thinking was something she surrendered too without any consideration because even happy and content people remained at the whims of life. She still did not know what to do with herself. During Asma'u's wedding, Maimuna had commended her wedding planning and suddenly—the very next day— Barakah was an event planner. At first, Barakah played with the idea, she loved this new script. And everyone supported it. Ameenah was in charge of the bookings and the social media accounts while Barakah and the assistant she had promptly hired did the real work.

It didn't feel right. Still. And she despised Jalal a little, that he did not care if she remained the way she was. Not that she was inadequate as a person. She lacked drive and she had no real plan of action. And he did not care. He smiled at her silly most of the time. He often told her she was perfect—perfect for him. And then he would embrace her like she was everything.

Why didn't he care?

Then she would tug on her entire length of hair until she appeared haggard, "It's not about him. It's about me." She would tell herself. Sometimes delicately, other times with frustration.