The Weight of Our Sky(14)
The little white house sits slightly apart from those around it, its gleaming stone surface a stark contrast to their weathered wooden flanks, marking those who dwelled within as atas: upper-class, affluent, well-off.
We slip off our shoes and enter through dark wood doors set with colorful stained glass, and Auntie Bee pauses to kiss her fingers and touch them lightly to a simple wooden cross that hangs beside the entrance, bowing her head in prayer and gratitude. I am both mesmerized by this little gesture of faith and jealous of her intimate relationship with God. It always bothers me that I can’t seem to connect with Him the way people like Auntie Bee and Mama can. The way I used to.
? ? ?
My first memory of God is watching my parents pray together. I loved their sejadahs, the prayer mats Mama set out each time the call to prayer came drifting through the air. Mama’s was a deep green, Abah’s a soft blue gray, and each was woven in gold thread with pictures of a mosque, intricate flowers and vines intertwining all along the edges. I’d run my fingers along the pattern, playing with the fringe on the end of each, as they bent and straightened and bowed and kneeled toward Mecca. Abah would recite the verses aloud, his voice turning the unfamiliar words into a song, and I remember sitting close and letting the words wash over me and feeling . . . safe.
Mama taught me the letters of the Arabic alphabet one by one—alif, baa, taa—and I used to sit with her each night after the evening prayer, concentrating hard as I tried to decipher the pretty swirls and curls in the pages of the Quran until I, too, could recite them all on my own.
The day I could recite the Al-Fatihah all by myself—the very first surah of the holy book, the surah that asks God to guide us to the straight path—I got my very first sejadah, its rich blue green set off with a golden-domed mosque.
Prayer meant asking God for his blessing and his forgiveness. Prayer meant thanking Him for everything he’d given us. And even I knew He’d given us so much.
But then Abah died. And I began to wonder what it was that I was supposed to be thankful for. And I haven’t prayed since.
After the failed trip to the doctor, Mama read the Quran to me each night, determined to chase away the mischievous spirits wreaking havoc on my brain. No longer was she the scientific-minded nurse, once so skeptical of djinn and the supernatural; with no other options, my increasingly worrying symptoms had turned her firmly into a desperate, faithful believer. I didn’t mind her doing it—I’d always found the verses beautiful, after all, and soothing—but I knew it wouldn’t work. He had forsaken me.
God and I weren’t currently on speaking terms.
“Don’t say that, Melati,” Mama would say. “God has a plan for all of us.”
“Why is God’s plan to make me this way?” I’d counter, and she’d purse her lips at my impertinence. But I went along with it anyway because it made her happy, and I’d do a lot worse to make my mother happy.
So we knocked on the door of every religious teacher and healer she could find, asking for their guidance, their wisdom to defeat the invisible enemy who held me so firmly in his grasp.
The first time, we had to take the bus out to Seremban, a two-hour journey on bumpy, winding roads. Our appointment was for two p.m.; we arrived nearly a half hour late, hot and tired, bones aching from the rattling of the bus. I was pale and queasy, having spent the ride fighting off both the Djinn and motion sickness; my mother was wound as tightly as a spring, tense from the stress of worrying about me and the bus and whether either of us would fall apart before we get there. “We’re late,” she said in clipped tones, clutching me by the arm, the better to both prop me up and hurry me along. “Come on, quickly, come on.”
Our destination was one of a cluster of nondescript wooden houses on the outskirts of Seremban town. As my mother knocked hesitantly on the peeling blue door, a stray dog napping in the cool of the house’s shadow peeled open one eye to glare balefully at us, and I found myself muttering, “Sorry,” in its direction.
A young woman wearing a bored expression answered the door and ushered us wordlessly past a row of men and women waiting for their turn with the healer, into a dim, musty room lit only by two flickering oil lamps in the center of the room. The Djinn immediately reached up to clasp his cold hands around my throat, and I was suddenly, suffocatingly claustrophobic.
“Can’t we crack open a window?” I asked Mama in a strangled voice.
“Shhhhh,” she hissed back, staring expectantly at the door.
Soon enough, the healer swept in—Mama called him Ustaz, a title I’d only ever heard used for religious teachers and scholars before this. His floor-length robe was snow white and pristine, his straggly beard streaked with gray. “Sit, sit,” he said, and we sat cross-legged on the woven straw mat across from him. “Now tell me your troubles,” he said, and listened patiently as my mother poured out my whole story—the counting, the tapping, the pacing, the insomnia, the constant thoughts of her death—with the clinical precision of the nurse that she is.
Throughout it all, the ustaz nodded, regarding me over the top of his glasses, his gaze never wavering, while my cheeks burned and I looked down at the ground, trying to pretend none of this was about me. It all sounded so much worse when I was forced to listen to someone else list each one of my surreal maladies, each item to be handled and ticked off in turn.
“I see, I see,” he said, once Mama was done. “Not to worry, madam; you’ve come to the right place.” He turned to me. “Lie down, girl.”