Meanwhile, I am here buying chicken for the street dog nosing through cucumber peel in the trash, all the men laughing at me.
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Why did I come here? What masochistic impulse causes me to leave a place the moment I am needed and go where I am stared at, cheated by every fruit-seller? My mother is sobbing in all her spinning classes halfway across the world, while my father, a holistic dentist – how to say this in Arabic? – divorces her from our summer home in the Poconos. Leaves a pan of butter on the stove for your breakfast and steals your bras, breaks all the zippers of your suitcase while you’re sleeping. Dirty woman, wife of the doorman you never see. There are some cities that give you air – most cities give you at least air – and space for your body to move. Since I arrived from New York two months ago, the city has simultaneously reverted me to my sad, striving girlhood, and also aged me irreversibly. It should have been easy, but it has not been. She’d arranged everything: a car to pick me up from the airport, an apartment rented in my name downtown. When I arrived, I realized my mother had gone through my suitcase and removed all my sweatpants and hoodies and slides, added a few dragging dresses still minty with the tag, and many shawls. What roots? My parents left Cairo in the eighties and never looked back. Two-finger air quotes around the word roots. Let me guess, let me guess, she began to say every few hours, apropos of nothing, You want to connect with your roots. You’re leaving me? My youngest daughter, how could you leave me? A week later she became cruel. The next morning at breakfast she began to cry. You really don’t know what you’re saying, she snapped. I’ve decided to go to Cairo after graduation, I told her from the other end of the tuxedo couch in our living room. Venus is in retrograde, he said, I can’t make that decision for you. He swallowed as though fatherhood were a worm being brandished in a sweaty, furry fist at his moustache. A few days later I called him at the office in Tribeca because he so rarely came home anymore.
You live in America? Have American passport? Do you know what people here would give for an American passport? Do you know we are all trying to leave and you, you have the option to be there and instead you – why are you here? Why am I here? When I first told my father I was going to Cairo, he changed the subject, pretended not to have heard me. Why did you come here? It is the first question they ask when they meet me, and it is more indignant than inquisitive.
Question: if the men make animal sounds in your direction, which of you should get the bone? The distance from Shobrakheit to Cairo is 140km. Three days later, her collection of miniature paper cranes they placed into the ground with her, so I left. Swinging her elbows like a racewalker, grandmother busied into the kitchen and climbed into the stove. Such greed, said mother, sucking the hollow seed. My grandmother, whose perfect teeth were singly stolen by a dentist working from his one-room across the river and sitting patients on the bed he slept in, took all the peach quarters and squished them into her ears. With a carving knife, divided it in four. Question: if you don’t have anything nice to say, should your mother be punished?Īnd then mother placed a single peach on a saucer at the center of the table. Noor Naga’s ‘American Girl and Boy from Shobrakheit’ is the 2019 winner. In partnership with DISQUIET, Granta publishes the fiction winner of the DISQUIET Literary Prize.