A God Who Hates Read Free Page A

to the new bride my grandfather’s virtues as a man of distinction and she returned home with the family’s consent.
    It was the custom for the bride to ride to the bridegroom’s home on a horse led by a member of her family. She would be met by a woman from the bridegroom’s family who would welcome the bridal procession by dancing before it with a bowl of incense on her head. The bride would reward the woman by throwing a few coins into the bowl. My grandfather, without a thought for my grandmother’s feelings, insisted that she carry the bowl and perform the dance before the bridal procession. He forced the woman who bore five of his children to denigrate herself before others in the village for the simple and selfish reason than that he didn’t want the few coins his new bride would toss into the bowl to go to anyone outside the family.
    My grandmother swallowed her pride and hid her sadness away to perform the dance. At the end of the wedding ceremony she felt that, although she might have lost her husband, she had at least gained a golden Ottoman pound. Her happiness about even that small triumph was short-lived. At dawn that first day, she awoke to the sound of a gentle knocking at the door of her room. When she spied my grandfather through a crack in the door she was thunderstruck. In a low voice he whispered in her ear, “My bride is still asleep, and I’m here to borrow the golden pound. I promise I’ll give it back to you when we bring in the harvest at the end of the season.”
    My grandmother gave him the coin and went back to bed empty-handed, deprived of everything except her sadness. After the wedding, my grandmother was reduced to the status of a servant in her own home. She served my grandfather, his wife, and the ten boys that wife would bear for him. My grandmother accepted this humiliation, swallowed the insult, and worked from dawn till dusk in the house and the fields, all for the sake of her daughters. Some fifty years later my grandfather died without having given my grandmother back her pound. My grandmother died about fifteen years after that, still insisting—as a loyal Muslim wife must—that her husband had been a man of distinction, just as she had when he forced her to solicit a young woman to become his new bride.
    A Muslim woman does not usually have the right to choose anything about her life; but in the rare circumstance that she does, that woman does not hesitate for a moment in choosing what suits her, even if she has to pay a price for that choice. When my mother married, my grandmother decided to escape the hell of life with my grandfather and moved in with her brother and his family. Although her life with her brother was little better, she felt that by leaving home she had taken a stand against her husband. After my mother’s marriage, she began to fuss over the children like a broody hen. My father’s five children from his first wife lived with us. I was the fourth of my mother’s eight offspring. When I came into the world I had to compete for a foothold in a house that swarmed with children. Several years after my mother’s marriage, my father asked my grandmother to come and live with us so that she could help my mother with the housework and the children. In the Arab world it is not usual for a woman to live in her son-in-law’s home and my grandmother agreed to my father’s request so as to make a point with her brother just as she had with my grandfather: She could make a choice. Life in our house was different for my grandmother. My father treated my grandmother with respect and seized every opportunity to praise her hard work and her role in raising the children. In his house, my grandmother breathed the fresh air of freedom and showered us with love and tenderness.
    My mother was different. She did not share my grandmother’s ability to cast off the effects of her past, and was always a sad, angry, and stubborn woman. My father was dazzled by her youthful