Reign of Smoke / حكم الدخان

Chapter 1- The heat

Modern Day

The heat smothered me. It enveloped me in its wet, sticky clutches and squeezed. I tried to breathe, but the thick air stung my throat on the way down. My skin prickled, then moistened from top to bottom.

How the hell could a place be so hot? This couldn't be more like hell if the devil himself was waiting for me at the bottom of those stairs. This wasn't normal. Mind you, nothing about the last few days had been normal. In fact, they had been the most abnormal few days of my entire life. Not to mention the worst.

I continued to make my way down the airplane stairs, jostling my way through the passengers as I went. They all looked hot; moist upper lips and foreheads glistened in the furnace of the sun. I glanced down at my watch, the face was covered in beads of wet condensation, I wiped it. I'd  set it to local time. 5:55 am. And it was already this hot! The man next to me stank. The rank, foul stench of his body almost made me gag and I pushed past him as quickly as I could.

My feet finally touched the Tarmac and an instant bolt of heat shot through my body. I ran to the bus that was waiting for us in the hot sun and pushed my way inside. The cool aircon hit me like a slamming door through the face and turned the sweat on my skin icy. I found a seat at the back of the bus and slid in, pulling my bag onto my lap. I took my phone out and turned it on and it connected to an unfamiliar network...

Welcome to Catara.

Five days ago I'd never heard of this place. I'd had to look it up on a map, and even then, it had been hard to find. Tiny. A speck on the surface of the planet jutting out into the Persian Gulf like some insignificant rock. But it wasn't insignificant. Because whether I liked it or not, which I didn't by the way, this was my new home. I was moving half way across the world to live in a place I'd never heard of, with a grandfather I hadn't even known existed. 

I bit my lip. Hard. It was all I could do to stop the tears from coming again. I looked down at the bracelet on my wrist that my mother had given me for my sixteenth birthday. I ran my fingertips over it and the old engraving that had been blackened over time. I squeezed the thin bracelet between my fingers as if by some miracle it would bring me closer to her. As if it retained the memory of her, an echo, a whisper of the person who had once worn it before me. Only it didn't.She was gone, and I had nothing to show for her other than the bracelet on my arm and the small urn of ashes in my bag.

Have you ever cremated someone? It's enough to make you sick. The way the coffin slowly rolls on the conveyor belt up to the little red curtains that keep the flames just out of view. Perhaps it's because they're trying to hide the sickening truth of it all. The red curtain is merely as an illusion; it helps you pretend you're not about to burn the body of the one person you love most in the entire world. But there is no pretending when you step outside and see the gray smoke billowing out of the chimney. Then you know the truth. One fundamental truth. We are nothing more than a pile of meat and bones that can be destroyed in a matter of minutes. Disintegrated and reduced to a mere handful of ash.

It's a depressing thought, one I'd been struggling with for the last 48 hours since my mother's entire life had evaporated into the ether. The sky had been so blue that day, and it had made the column of rising smoke even more visible. I watched as my mother, my everything, the only parent I'd ever known, my best friend,  twisted and danced in the breeze as she disappeared into the bright blue sky. I hated that blue sky. How dare it be so dazzling and blue on a day like this?

I was so lost in thought that I hadn't even noticed the bus start moving and then stop again. I stood up and got swept up in the tangle of passengers once more. There was another sudden burst of heat, like a million camera flashes going off at once, and then the artificial cold again as I walked into the airport.

The airport was huge. Polished. Intimidating steel and glass and glistening, shiny tiles spread out in all directions and I felt lost. I looked up at the signs. One of them said 'arrivals' with an arrow pointing to my left. I'd just arrived, so arrivals it was. I slung my rug sack onto my back. It was large and heavy, but not so large and heavy enough that if you saw it, you would say it contained the sum total of a persons entire life. But it did.

We weren't rich. Far from it. We'd eeked out an existence in a crummy, one-bedroom rat-trap on top the Laundromat where my mother had slaved away for fifteen years. It's probably what killed her in the end, well, that's what I needed to believe anyway. I needed to pin the rage and pain on something big and tangible, not just the scourge of rapidly dividing cancer cells. That wasn't enough. My only consolation was that it had taken her quickly.

She knew she was dying that night. She'd pulled me as close as possible, her breathing jagged and the sounds of the oxygen mask almost drowned out her feeble last whispers...

"You are going to find out things about yourself that I should have told you long ago."

When I'd asked her what she meant through the veil of tears streaming down my face, she'd said something I still don't understand. I didn't even know if she was speaking English anymore.

"al-alam wara' aljidar"

And then she'd coughed more violently than I'd ever heard anyone cough before. Lights flashed, alarms sounded and nurses ran to her side.  Chaos broke out around her small white bed and one of the nurses held me back.

"Mom, mom! What does that mean? MOM!" I screamed and reached for her. I managed to grab hold of her hand. She gripped it tightly and then raised her head off the pillow- it looked like it took all the energy in the entire universe- she locked eyes with me, as if she was connecting for the very last time.

"I'm sorry. I love you, Pearl." Her head fell back onto the pillow and then, silence. No coughing. No wheezing. No beeping. No more pain. Nothing.

The silence made me ache. It made my heart feel like it was being ripped from my chest.  Her fingers went limp in my hand and her blue lips fell open. Her eyes stopped focusing and glazed over, as if they were looking at something unseen that was far, far away. I hoped she was looking at heaven.

In my dreams that night my mother was still alive and I could see her as she was; bright, like a ray of sunshine pushing its way through the crack of a curtain. I could smell her skin, sweet Jasmine and Vanilla. I could wrap my arms around her and she could stroke my hair like she'd always done when I was sick. Her voice like bird songs in the morning, her beauty so startling and her touch so warm and comforting.

But the next day, all dreams were gone and I woke up into a nightmare. The woman in the black suit with the shoes that made a clinking noise when she walked, knocked on my door. She carried around a big brown clipboard, as if it was somehow attached to her, some strange extension of her arm. Her voice was strangely calm and compassionate, and yet, I didn't quite believe her when she said 'she cared about me'. 

Then she started to ask all the questions. The questions that had eventually lead me to this moment in time; did I have a father? Siblings? Did I have anyone to live with? How old was I? Do I have any relatives?

She'd knocked on my door the next day too, and that was when I'd learned about my grandfather. The one I had never heard about. The one I didn't even know existed.

I slid my unstamped passport across to the customs officer in the airport. She riffled through the pages and must have wondered how someone my age had never been anywhere in the world. She stamped the empty page and passed it back to me.

"On vacation?" she asked in an exotic sounding accent. Her eyes were round and pretty, as they peered at me through the black veil that covered her face. 

"No." I shook my head. "This is my new home."