Is Your Dead Grandmother Still Alive?

It is allowed for a wife to wash the body of her husband, but only women can wash the body of a woman.

 I’m on my back, covered in a white sheet, and the women stand around me, three on each side. One holds my head in her hands, another holds my feet. I know them, but their faces are strange and puffy, their under-eyes purple, their skin grey, covered, I think, in talcum powder or ash. The air is coloured by a faint green light and in the shadows above and around me, I see creatures with pale horns and forked tongues. Some of them have long tails between their legs and they touch them as they watch me. A blue feeling rises in my chest, like pain or laughter, their faces are so angry! But I can’t breathe, or cry, I stay still.

 “Now… we will wash you,” my mother whispers in my ear.

The women standing at the corners of the large wooden table I’m on, shift, pick up the sheet covering me, and raise it a few inches above my body to protect my modesty. One of them sniffs, stopping a streak of liquid from running into her mouth. I realise my ankles have been bound together with a strip of white cotton when the woman at my feet unties it. I feel my legs flop apart though I do not move them.

“O Lord! Forgive her!” the women say in wavering voices that make the sheet dance. Then they begin to wash me.

The water is warm. They pour it over me carefully, shyly, not sure at first which body part they are washing, water cascades over my limbs, hidden beneath the white sheet. Then they grow bold. First my right hand and arm are washed three times, then my left, according to the law. Then my right leg, now my left. Now my middle, now my chest. I can see what they are doing, even though they can’t. Beneath the sheet I feel their hands slip and slide over the ridges of my hips, the stiffness of my thighs, the mound of my stomach. 

“O Lord! Forgive her!”

They gasp, and I feel the fear and revulsion they feel. For an instant, in a glimpse, I feel through the feeling of their hands, the quick beats of their hearts, their sweat, the dampness under their arms, the stinging of their eyes, the stickiness of their flesh. I feel it all, my body and theirs, my blood in their veins. They are my sisters, my daughters, and somehow I am them. I feel the wet sleeves of their dresses, the taste in their mouths, salty, creamy, grainy. I see the interiors of their houses. A verse hung in a gilt frame above a dark doorway, dull red carpet on the stairs, the banister skeletal, glossy; a kitchen with a long, silver draining board, and the smell of something sour, like burnt bread, or spoiled milk in the cold air; then, the touch of a metal garden gate, and beyond it, a boy shooting a jet of water out of a toy gun, its stain spreading slowly over a grey paving slab. Somehow, that’s my garden, and that’s my brother, I want to say. I feel the feeling of their lives as my own ebbs away. The soap they use on me smells faintly of roses, but it’s not strong enough to disguise the smell that emanates from my green body, my yellow mouth that hangs open slightly, my eyes that can’t be closed. I am covered from my neck to my ankles by the white sheet, meant to protect me from the creatures that hover above me, to hide me from their black eyes. 

But Mother, it cannot save me from them! 

The angels are horned, their pale skin glows in the dark spaces beyond the dull light, they lick their lips and their hands grip between their legs as they tug their tails violently, they watch the women bathe me and they groan, they howl, their lidless eyes stare, bore into me, “What have you done?” they want to know. I feel so ashamed, I want to laugh, but then the terror rises and I don’t dare, I don’t dare to move. I think about what I did. But I can’t remember. Did I ever do anything? I didn’t do anything! I think, and I can’t remember a single day, how I spent it, who I spent it with. What did I do? Then I remember a bed, the room I was in before I came here. The room had pale yellow walls, squares of foam on the ceiling, and somewhere a light flashed green. I could not breathe. I feel the bruise around my neck still, its blue blackness bleeding down to my chest, covering my lungs. I think of a face, but I can’t see it clearly. Is it my face, or is it the face of another woman, who is also me? It doesn’t matter. I feel my mother’s hands touch it now. She covers my cheeks in soap, and in a single fluid motion, pours water over it from a small plastic jug. She runs her other hand down my face, pinching my nose and wiping my mouth. Tears pour from my eyes, “There, there” she says, and again “There, there” when the tears don’t stop. And I’m small in her hands again, and she is big. I feel her cradle my neck, the back of my head and my torso all in one strong palm, and with her other hand ladle water onto my tiny body. Her kameez is grey and patterned with tiny green squares, her gold necklace shines on her brown skin, her nose ring glitters when it catches the light. And at the sight of her, the evidence of her separateness from me, her body a strange, other place that I’ve been exiled from, I cry out, all of me screaming. I want to be warm, in the darkness, within the tight embrace of her womb, that time before thought, when my body was hers, I want to go back there, curl up, hide from the angels with the horny heads, their violence and shrieking laughs, I long to be away from the green light of the sun, the sharpness of the air, I want the wetness of the earth, I want to be in the pit, away from these women, their bodies and their smells and their breaths as they chant “O Lord! Forgive her!” 

They stop what they’re doing now, and one of them, my sister, I think, joins my mother at the head of the table and together, they lift my shoulders, raise me to a seated position and now I really do want to laugh, because the sheet barely covers me, my chest spills out, and the angels above me clamour together, they point, their pale skin shines, they’re sweating, their tails grow thicker and harder as I shrink, become smaller. My mother rubs my back and pressure builds in my middle, it is gas, acid, my body mimics the process of digestion. “There, there,” mother says, her ashy hand grazing the pale green flesh of my back until my last meal presents itself on the table. It’s quickly bagged, binned, and the site of the eruption is washed down. That’s what mother does, cleans up, washes me, forms soap suds in my hair and rinses them out, carefully guarding my eyes, carefully guarding my ears, she handles the things I can’t do on my own. She whispers in my ear, says things I don’t understand, calls my name, I think, gently, gently she’s asking me something “What have you done?” she wants to know. I haven’t done anything I want to tell her. What do you want me to do? I want to ask her. Under the sheet they are drying my body now, alternately whispering:

“There, there!” 

and 

“Oh Lord, forgive her!”

And they don’t know it, but I whisper with them, with my sister’s mouth and my mother’s mouth and the mouth of my daughter, who was never born, I wash myself with their hands, I add camphor to the water and I guide their ashy fingers over my limbs, beneath the sheet, delicately, carefully. I say with their mouths O Lord! Forgive Her! and tell myself, There, there! There, there! as the terror rises, as the angels who want to take me close in. We towel me down, dust me in talcum powder, rub crushed camphor on my forehead, hands, knees and feet, lift me and place me onto a long white sheet, begin to wind it around me, and with every turn of the fabric, I am disappearing, and they are replacing me, I am becoming them, and they are escaping me. Someone is calling my name, asking me a question, they are waiting for me to answer. But what is it I have done? I don’t remember.

I am a sister and a daughter, I don’t remember being a mother, but maybe I am. I wear blazers over my dresses, and a triangular scarf on my head that I pin beneath my rough chin. The pin catches on my skin, makes it grey and flakey, all day I push it forward, away from the groove of the wound it’s created. Today it is my funeral and I am wearing just a sheet. I am on my back now, I am on the ceiling, I can see the floor. It is covered in a thick fabric printed with oranges, lemons, limes. I can hear whispers, I can hear the soft click of stones falling, already, out of one bag, and into the other. They’re counting something. The time I have left. No. The days that have passed, the days I have already lived. These are prayer beads, they are fruit stones, small pebbles, and dark purple kidney beans. Beads and bead-like things, things to be counted, seeds I sucked and washed and set aside on a saucer in front of the kitchen window during the holy month, when we ate dates and drank milk at every grey dawn. We had prayed on these beads on The Night of Power, at my grandmother’s funeral, and years later, at my sister’s funeral. She died in her sleep. I can’t remember her name. My funeral is the same as the funeral of my sister, and the funeral of my grandmother. It is the same room, and the same people, and this box is the same box. I can smell their bodies as my own. We have the same sour smell, we are the same green fruit. The same women pray on the same beads, on the same rough fabric covered with lemons and limes and oranges. I am sitting with the women. I am cross-legged and wearing my favourite red dress, it has a high white collar and white polka dots, but this strange light makes the collar look green and the fabric look brown. I am sitting with the women and I am threading my fingers through theirs as they take handfuls of prayer beads from the sacks placed in front of them. The beads are of different shapes and sizes. I like to feel the roughness of the peach stone, and the slipperiness of the purple kidney bean, to run my finger along the slit of white that splits it. I like to take the plastic pearls, their paint flaking, between my palms and roll them there, in fast, tight little circles. My hands are small now, they are covered in something white and powdery. Women rock as they pray, recite the verses they don’t understand. Two women squat next to me, their knees jut out at angles away from their torsos and they are skinny and hunched. I notice them because they seem to loom over the women who sit with their legs pressed to the floor. I stop counting the beads I am holding when I hear one of them say “The gourds this season are too bitter.” I’m terrified when I hear these words, a dull pain like a bruise spreads across my chest. I stare at them. The women are neither young nor old, and there’s something odd about the way they sit, the way they lean in toward each other, heads jutting forward. The scarves covering their heads cover most of their faces too, but I can see the tips of their noses protruding out of the thin grey fabric. These noses look like beaks, they are white and cruel. I stand up and begin to look for my mother. The room is long, and the walls are pale green, red-brown plastic chairs line the walls. Some of the older women sit on the chairs, but most women are huddled on the floor in groups of three or four, rocking gently as they whisper “O Lord! Forgive her!” At the center of the room is a coffin coated in plastic wood. I approach it, I want to see the body, but stop when I hear my mother’s voice. She’s sitting at the head of the coffin, and my sister is with her. I can’t see her face because her head is down, she is staring at her prayer book, her body rocking back and forth, over and over, a little too fast. She pulls her scarf forward, slides her hand beneath it and sweeps the little hairs falling onto her brow back onto her head without breaking the rhythm of her rocking, back and forth, over and over. I want to tell my mother about the women, and what they have said, but when I bend to whisper in her ear I ask instead, “Who’s that in the box?” She counts the remaining beads in her hand, four, five, six beads and puts them in the almost full sack next to her before turning to me. Then she says “It’s your grandmother,” tears form in my eyes immediately and she whispers, “There, there.” I remember I want to tell her about the women, but now I feel I can’t. I look at my sister, but she looks at the book in her lap. Soft sighs and the clicking of beads are the only sounds I can hear. I turn to where the women are sitting and see them hunched forward, talking in quiet voices, their noses thrust out, their bodies inclined towards one another. Above them fly the angels with long tails between their legs, their horned heads are shaved, their skin is a dull white, and they laugh as they thrust the tails between their legs at me, I laugh too though I am scared, and a few women turn to stare at me. “What have you done?” shout the angels, their forked tongues cut the air. I cling to my mother’s arm and she repeats again, in a firmer voice now “There, there,” I try to tell her what’s happening but she won’t listen. “Go and see if my slippers are still outside, make sure no one has taken them” she says, and I think this is a good idea, I want to get away from the women, and the angels, I want to hide. I walk towards a brown door set within the pale green walls towards the back of the room, and when I push it, my hands leave a dusty print on the wood. I enter a cool, dark hallway lit by a single green bulb. The whispers and the sighs are quieter now, instead I hear the clanging of pots, I smell spices, and browned meat and fresh bread and socks and sweat. I see a small mountain of shoes and slippers, and I pick through sandals, trainers and high heels covered in ash, looking for the familiar shape of my mother’s slippers. There are plastic sliders in blue and white and grey, and court shoes with cushioned linings, there are sandals belonging to younger girls that have bows on the buckles and diamantés studded into shiny patent leather. I bend down to pick these up and underneath I find my mother’s slippers, they are wet and they are black, they are made of leather and smell like an animal. I place them against the wall next to a pretty pair belonging to a girl my own age. Then I see a few of the slippers are face down, I kick them over so they stand upright, so they aren’t showing their dirty bottoms to God. I look around at the doors that lead off from the hallway. One leads to the pale green room where the women sit and pray. Another door leads to the room where they washed and powdered my grandmother. The door next to it is where the women sit and eat. I know this because I’ve been here before I think. But there’s another door.

 I stand outside it, and I listen. I think I hear a voice, a soft whisper, or a gasp, or someone crying from behind the door. I open it, and I’m in a room with pale yellow walls, and there is a bed, and on it is a woman with a dark swollen neck and I am her. The rest of her, her face and her hands, are powdery, covered in ash or baby powder, it looks like layers of dry skin have collected on my body. It feels itchy, but I can’t scratch it, still the desire to itch spreads across me like a hum. Her lips are moving, but I can’t hear what I’m saying. “What have you done?” I ask her. It’s the first question that comes to my mind. I take a few steps closer, I lean in. She mutters softly. On the table next to her I see a bowl of pale green grapes, a sour, metallic smell wafts up from them, a jug covered with a white napkin, and a dark, rotting flower in a shallow tumbler. Above these looms a monitor, its flashing light gives my skin a dull glow. A beep sounds from it like a warning. “There, there” I say, because I know that’s what I need to hear, I can see I’m in pain, I can see how my eyes stare, fixed to the ceiling. I look up, and see the men, the angels who want to rape me, their glistening skin and angry faces crowded in the shadows above. I take hold of the woman’s shoulders, try to lift myself off the bed, I want to carry her away from here, help her leave with me, but I’m too heavy. The angels laugh, their bodies rub against one another and now I see it, they have wings, pale almost transparent wings, they make a noise like something being struck, over and over again as they beat, faster and faster. I place a hand on the woman’s cold forehead and try to force my eyelids shut. But it’s no use. The darkness can’t hide me, even when I can’t see them, the angels can see me. I turn to run back to the door, but the angels are too quick. Two stand in front of me now, while the others crowd together in a mob above, watching, jeering, the tails between their legs are erect, sweat drips from their ends and they are angry, they are so angry. Up close their flesh is grey and puckered, the texture of tongue. Steam rises from their naked bodies, it smells like rubber, like something burning. “What have you done?” they demand. I cannot speak. Under their fiery gaze I am full of shame, I know I am guilty, I know now that whatever I’ve done, I shouldn’t have done it. Without needing to be told, I take off my clothes and the angels are upon me, they handle me roughly, where their hands touch me, my skin burns, my hair is pulled and I’m covered in something like saliva, it’s sticky and hot and still they ask me “What have you done?” “What have you done?” As they crush my ribs, drive me into the ground, break me. My back hurts. I am slippery and wet. I smell the earth in my nose and feel the mud under my nails, and the sounds of their wings beating, the sound of the monitor beeping, their rough laughs and grunts and jeering fill me. I cannot breathe, I cannot move. And then they leave me, leaping back into the air, disappearing into the mass of shadows in the ceiling. “There, there” I say as I gather myself, and slowly, after some time. I dress myself, and without turning around to look at the woman in the bed, or the angels on the ceiling, I drag myself through the door.  

 I’m now in the room in which women sit eating. A white roll of paper is spread across the floor, like a tablecloth, and on it are arranged the same flatbreads, oily bowls of spicy chicken curry, and polystyrene cups we used at my sister’s funeral. I slip in quietly beside two girls I recognise, they are standing near the door. I’ve seen them work in the post office, arranging envelopes and exercise books and greetings cards on the shelves next to the till. I take a cup, and begin to chew it silently between pursed lips. They are talking about the burial, “It won’t happen before nightfall” says one. I can’t see her face clearly, but I know there’s a brown mole on her chin. I remember wanting to touch it whenever she smiled. “It will just have to happen at night then” says the other. They wipe the insides of their bowls with their flatbreads. “We’ve been here for so long already” the first girl says, and they look around. They see me and they smile. “Oh. Hi” the one with the mole says. I don’t say anything. “Is my dead grandmother still alive?” she asks. I think about this, then I say “Yes my darling, my kidney, I am still here” and I am her dead grandmother. I feel what it is to make the same gestures with my hands as the girl does, my hips jut out in the same places, my skin is her skin, her body is made from mine, and I say “I have a question for you daughter.” “What is it granny?” She’s so happy to see me, she moves closer to me, though she does not try to touch me. “My gold bangles, I gave my gold bangles to you. Where are they now?” She laughs and replies, “They’re in my bed, under my pillow! I take them off when I sleep at night and then you wear them.” I smile, pucker my lips together and swallow the ball of spit in my toothless mouth “Waking is dreaming.” The girl nods solemnly, she turns to her friend and both girls stand up, they tiptoe over the dishes at their feet. “O Lord! Forgive Her!” they say at the door and the women in the room respond “O Lord! Forgive Her!” and as they turn and disappear from the room I can feel the soft fabric that the other girl, the one with prominent lips and a pockmarked face is wearing, on my own legs. I can smell the smells of the post office, paper, ink, the pens she slips into her pocket and the texture of the carpet on her bedroom floor. There’s a mirror in her bedroom and she’s looking into it, and I am her, looking at myself, combing my hair and pulling the loose strands out of the brush, and placing them in my pocket. I take some bread from the girls’ abandoned plates and dip it into the serving bowl at the centre of the white sheet. It’s the same food I ate at my sister’s funeral I think, and the same food we had at my grandmother’s funeral: flatbreads, an oily chicken curry. My hands when I touch the bread become dusty with their flour. My hands are white and ashy. Around me sit the same women. Women with scarves pulled forward, they sit close together, they whisper to each other, I do not know what they say. But somehow, looking at them sitting around me like this, leaning forward, eating the same food I am eating, I feel that I am them, they weave their fingers in mine, we whisper each other's names. And there’s pain in that feeling, I feel it in my back, like we’ve been sat here, bent over our plates, supporting our own body weight, always. The pain is dull, like a blue-black bruise, but it’s in our bones, it’s a weariness we cannot shake. We are the same, we have the same ashy skin, the same purple under eyes. But no, we are not all the same. I see the women with the beaked noses are here too. They are squatting instead of crossing their legs, and their bodies bend toward one another. From the movement of their noses I can see they are chewing bread, thank god they cannot speak. There’s something terrible about the way that they eat, the way they sit. I want to get up and leave, but I’m scared, I’m embarrassed too, I don’t want them to look at me, these women disgust me. A sweet smell, something like yeast, fans out from where they hunch over their plates, they tower over the rest of us like vultures, watching, waiting. I fill my mouth with bread, automatically, without knowing that I am. Just then, one of them swallows, raises her head slightly and says to the other “The gourds this season are too bitter.” And then I know these women are here to bury me. Without chewing, I swallow the bread in my mouth and I begin to choke. The women and girls sitting around me rise, they are rubbing my back, slapping it gently. Someone is saying “There there, there there” over and over again and wiping the tears from my eyes. I can’t speak, I’m so embarrassed, I’m terrified, but I want to laugh, I want to move but I am still. And through my tears and the clamour of the women’s hands, and the sighing breaths and prayers all crowding around me I hear a loud cry from the main hall. The beads have been counted. Now more women step forward, hands lift me into the air and the angels, they are ready once more to rape me, they meet me there, where I am suspended between the earth and the sky, they are on top of me, they press their bodies into mine and their sweat stains my skin. A smell like rubber, like something burning, singes my nostrils. “What have you done?” they ask, laughing at me, laughing to one another as their bodies plough into mine, devour me, and I cannot move, I cannot breathe, the women with the beaked noses are holding my arms and legs and they crush the bowls at their feet as they take me, carry me towards the hall, someone wraps a white roll of paper around my naked body, and the spill of curry on the sheet looks like blood. “Pray!” they shout, “O Lord! Forgive her!” they cry, as they carry me to my grave.