Grief's Tender Arms

Prologue

I feel unreasonably nervous posting this - but here it is, the prologue. Will try to post chapter one this week, too, insha Allah but since I have a lot of work, no promises. Probably next week. 

"Ya Allah" means "Oh God"

PROLOGUE

The washing machine was vibrating under Haniya's elbows. She had lost track of how long she had been standing there - something she blamed on her tendency to lose herself in her thoughts. Today, though, it felt different somehow. It wasn't like she didn't want to move. She knew she could move, she knew she had to move, but something was stopping her, telling her to keep standing until her knees buckled. 

All around her, the washing area was covered in beige tiles, courtesy of Mustafa. Before they had moved in this house, Mustafa had spent an unreasonably long time designing the house, taking care of every single detail. At that time, Haniya hadn't minded; she loved visiting home décor stores and moving things around until they looked pleasing to the eyes. The idea of it, just the thought of those long trips now exhausted her. How did I ever do it? Why did I do it? In hindsight, the beige tiles were horrific and did nothing to uplift her spirits. In fact, they seemed to make her want to stay glued there, their plainness mocking her. 

Her head throbbed. It was probably the tiles - hadn't she loved them when they had first come here? She had loved the entire house, its decent and classy design, but now everything was giving her a headache. Or maybe, it was the washing machine, which had developed a tremor over the years. It shook violently against her elbows, knocking her bones together. The machine seemed frightened, even desperate to escape and she was almost envious of it; it had more emotion than she could gather inside herself. There was the world-weary thud of her heart, there was the slight breathing difficulty that was so subtle a doctor wouldn't be able to detect it and then, there was her swollen and fatigued body. Even her bones had started aching, as if like her, they too had been shrinking and turning into a shell of themselves. And her blood - the blood was as slow as her days, melting leisurely into one another, an hourglass that went on for eternity.

Finally, her body allowed her a small movement, a sign of life: she rested her head on the washing machine too. It didn't help with the headache, of course, but it felt better to stare at the lid of the machine than the tiles, better to constrict her vision to this small white space than to see the rest of the house in her peripheral vision. The sight of her house sometimes made her heart clench despairingly. It wasn't that huge, by worldly standards, it was medium-sized but the world had already been so large these days, it was hard to imagine herself in it.

The machine beeped against her head and stopped shaking. This was enough to shock her out of her trance-like sate and she stood upright, staring at the little box where the remaining minutes were shown. The box sported a bright red "zero" that looked brighter and more vibrant than ever before.

Ya Allah, I have been standing here for thirty-five minutes.

Hurriedly, she opened the washing machine and with dismay, was met with a mixture of red and slightly pink clothes. I mixed the dark and light clothes together. She dug in for the clothes and held each one up to inspect it, a dread forming a pit in her stomach. Uttering prayers under her breath, she pulled each one out with much effort, but sure enough, when she held up the last one - it was Mustafa's favourite office shirt. The unmatchable office shirt, the shirt that he had driven all over Karachi to find a copy of. Its fabric was soft - some shopkeepers seemed to think it was lawn, some thought it was a different kind of cotton, some thought it was linen. It was hard to place, that's what it was, and therefore, impossible to find. The shirt wasn't entirely pink, but there were traces of it and oh, God help her - how would Mustafa wear it to office? The thudding of her heart was no longer dull as a lazy Sunday afternoon. It was as violent as a crazy Monday morning. 

Her first thought was to hide the t-shirt but it didn't make sense to do so, especially since Mustafa was unreasonably good at finding lost (or hidden) things. Her second thought was to confess, but not having the courage for confrontation, she settled on laying the shirt out on the living room sofa for him to see. In her mind, already, the pink shirt was the end of it all. The marriage-breaker. The thing that came in between, the soft, comfortable fabric that would set everything on fire. 

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