Waiting on Aunt Fato — Serialised Short Story (Pt I)
This is the first part of a short story entitled, “Waiting on Aunt Fato”, which I plan to serialise every fortnight.
Synopsis: Moving in with his uncle and aunt, an eight-year-old Arab boy learns to navigate identity in this new country.
It was Sunday afternoon and the sun was sailing overhead. I thought it a dreadful clock stealing freedom’s glory away while I sat on the threshold of the front door. In the distance, a rusty overhead fan dully whirred on behind me, anticipating a quiet day.
The house opened to a narrow garden of futile soil. There was an exciting patch in the middle, whose colours of green and brown illuminated the surrounding like a bulb in a bare grey room. Plants lined up from east to west, obediently upright. I had been watching the locked house gate all this while; a set of four crookedly-spaced rods that was once varnished in black.
Aunt Fato had been growing a few plants for some time now. Some had grown so tall — as tall as I had been — that she’d rooted them up from their pots and directly into the ground. She’d burrowed a ditch into the yard with her own hands and had filled it with good soil. The landlord’s head nearly fell off when he found out. She felt obliged to give him the herbs for free after that.
It was a month or two after I had moved in when Aunt Fato took up this hobby. She and Uncle Saeed didn’t have kids of their own so they didn’t know what exactly to do with one. They didn’t own any toys or have a football and the shelves were replete with English books with no pictures. Every space was occupied; thin books, thick books, piles of assorted papers, pocket-sized dictionaries and volumes of unpronounceable titles.
On occasion, Aunt Fato would take me along on her errands. I joined her on one of her earliest trips to the local supermarket, when she was seeking out for the right plants. She told me that in pursuit of a warm arrival, she had not wanted to welcome me with weed, wild grass and coughed up debris from neglected endeavours. Not so much in those words but I understood. She was far too kind to her garden but I could see its state. In the end, circumstances had swung her priorities so she never got around to it until much later.
Whichever aisle I explored of the store my senses were heavy. I would get a breath of honeysuckle, discarded orange peels near the baskets of its produce or other babies of the kingdom I never knew. Customers’ voices merged with one another and cartons were dragged against the floor.
Just ahead, there were a few women standing against the backdrop of boxes laden with hibiscuses. These were our markets’ fastest selling plants whenever the annual garden contest was held towards the year end. There was something visually pleasing about the candour of it all, about them in front of the magnum opus of our local produce and parade. My eyes glided across the seamless picture and found Aunt Fato. She hovered and seemed much smaller than the rest.
Despite the many traits I struggled accepting, I took pride in my observant nature. I sensed when quietude meant simple stillness and when it meant mulling. Or, in general, when one’s meandering eye was moping over past events long before it was common knowledge. It wasn’t in any specificity — it was a pattern I never stopped following. I hung onto everything. But nobody would ever support its existence for I never acted upon it.
There was a lot I learnt of people this way. Aunt Fato never escaped me. She was my uncle’s wife; she was a woman who cared and loved but never gave in. I learnt this early on, when I sometimes wanted to skip a meal. My own mother would have tried to fix something different. Aunt Fato, on the other hand, having made a hearty dinner, would rather starve me. Not out of spite, or an air of authority. It was in her nature, whether she knew or didn’t, to not concede this way. Oh, okay, she’d kindly resign, and would leave me to figure out what I wanted. But every now and then, a person’s body could be so disloyal to them.
There was plenty of space between the women for Aunt Fato to have a look at the hibiscuses. Yet she remained on the fringes, and only freed herself when the women left. I watched her jilbab, a moss green of shades, sway wherever she turned, drawing around her like a conical lampshade. It reminded me of a vast garden someone would take refuge in, basking over its expansiveness. Earlier that morning, she had trimmed the bottom loose threads. She was always particular about her appearance.
Aunt Fato had been waiting for a turn, not to be alone for she was not the withdrawn type, but to be away from eyes of such close range that could linger at length. Eyes from the seamless picture she felt no place to encroach upon.
Our day ended when we bought seeds an employee suggested, along with new clay and tin pots and a plastic sack of soil that weighed nearly ten kilos. We paid for our items and left. The sack was only tied with a delicate piece of rubber band and snapped by the time we reached the car. With the weight pressing down on Aunt Fato’s arms, she struggled to hold it upright. Soil dropped like cow dung on the road and a fresh earthly smell hung in the air. She loaded the open sack into the boot.
I surveyed the parking lot under the shade of my palm, seeking out for a kind hand. There was a young man in uniform across, carrying a load of groceries onto the back of a truck. Dumping the pregnant paper bags from the trolley to the cargo bed, he put in the last one that exposed the head of a long, French bread. He stepped aside and let the truck reverse, waving at the driver as he drove off.
I had been watching him when all of a sudden, he halted. My palm wasn’t useful enough to get the sun out of my face but it was enough shade to know that he was looking my way. He was staring at me, or us. Or her, I wasn’t sure.
Originally published at http://monazwritings.wordpress.com on November 11, 2020.
