My Sister

– 1 –

I didn’t hear him shouting my name because I had earphones in. I didn’t even know he was home. I only realized he was there when the door slammed open and he strode in, pretty much like he kicked peoples’ doors in when he was on duty.
He stood in the doorway wearing white pajama trousers and a tank top covered with patches of sweat, thick chest hair protruding out the top. Thank God I hadn’t inherited that from him. I pulled my earphones out and tried to preempt the stream of insults I knew was coming.
“Sorry, were you calling me?” I said quickly. “I didn’t hear you, I was studying.”
To my surprise, his voice was quiet and his face stolid.
“Get dressed,” he said. “We’re going to your sister’s.” Then he left without explaining. 
I looked at my phone; it was one-thirty a.m. What were we going to do at my sister’s place at this time of night?
My sister had got married the previous year, so now it was just me, my little brother, and my mom at home most of the time. Her departure left a gap, a silence. She was the main object of our father’s attention, commanding affectionate indulgence and exasperation alike; he adored her and worried about her, said yes to everything she asked for, but lost his temper when he caught sight of her walking down the street in a short blouse that showed off her denim-clad ass. He would fly into a rage if she talked back, and tell her it wasn’t up for debate: The daughters of men of his profession and rank didn’t go around dressing like that. And if she insisted on doing so, he’d lose the respect of everyone in town. My sister always pointed out that everyone else’s daughters wore exactly the same thing as her, and he’d yell back that we weren’t “everyone else!”
“Well, we’re no better and no worse,” she’d pout, and for that she’d get a slap across the face.
Later, he’d come home armed with kofta sandwiches and chocolate. He’d spend the evening with her and make sure not to go anywhere until she was smiling and giggling again.
At some point pretty early on, I expressed some resentment that he treated the two of us so differently. “You’re a man,” he snapped. “You need to toughen up and get used to it. Ready for police academy.” Obviously I didn’t end up going to the police academy. I screwed up the physical on purpose. I also didn’t cave in when he insisted I study law instead. I didn’t know what I wanted, but I definitely didn’t want to turn out like him.
As we were walking down the dark, empty street, I asked him what was going on. Why were we visiting my sister in the middle of the night? He said she wasn’t doing well. Her husband was scared and didn’t know what to do, so he had called to ask for help and wanted us to go over there straight away.  
My sister lived with her husband in a building owned by his family. There were four floors: her mother-in-law lived on the ground floor; on the first floor was a sister-in-law and her husband; on the second lived another sister-in-law, divorced, with her kids; my sister and her husband were on the third floor; and on the fourth floor was an empty apartment being saved for the family’s youngest son, who lived in Saudi Arabia with his wife.
My sister’s husband met us downstairs in his mother’s flat, which smelled like she’d been cooking stuffed cabbage. The elderly woman was seated with an enormous, large-print Qur’an in her lap, rocking soundlessly back and forth while a radio on top of the fridge also blared Qur’an. She didn’t look up to welcome us when we entered, just muttered a response to our greeting and continued reading.
My sister’s husband addressed my father. He said he’d tried to be patient and follow his advice, because he loved and cared about her so much, but he just didn’t know what to do. 
“It’s really not normal, the way she’s behaving,” he finished.
After dinner, the couple had sat down to watch an American film on television. He asked her for a glass of water, but she didn’t answer. He called her name, and it didn’t register; she just kept staring blankly at the screen, even when he came closer and looked her in the face. Not even her eyelashes flickered. When he shook her by the shoulder to rouse her, her eyes rolled back in her head so only the whites were visible, and she howled like a wolf and muttered something in a strange, foreign language, froth spraying from her mouth, then leapt to her feet and began to tear up the apartment, smashing mirrors and glass and picking up everything within her reach and flinging it to the ground.
My father didn’t wait for the end of the story. He got up and made straight for the stairwell, dragging me behind him as he hurried up the three flights. He knocked on the door. “Open up, Iman,” he said loudly. “It’s me, Baba.”
“She can’t open it,” called my sister’s husband from the stairwell behind us. “I locked her in.”
My father moved aside, and my brother-in-law turned the key in the lock and pushed the door open, taking a good step back as he did so. My father went in first, and I followed while her husband waited outside.
Back when they were decorating the apartment, her husband had insisted on patterned wallpaper and a lot of mirrors. He’d said the tropical scenes and the reflected light would make the apartment seem spacious and airy, but my sister thought the wallpaper was tacky and only let him put it in the living room. It was a sizable apartment, and somehow he’d still managed to fill it with mirrors; there was one on every door, and a huge one took up an entire wall in the living room. Now there was broken glass everywhere, and the mirrors were cracked, huge shards scattered across the floor.
We could hear the sound of the TV coming from the bedroom. I followed my father and went in. We found my sister sitting in front of the TV in a trance, her eyes fixed unmovingly on the screen, which was showing commercials for happy meals and hot’n’spicy chicken combos. Her hands and feet were dripping blood.

– 2 –

We took her to a whole bunch of doctors. We did scans and tests, an ECG, an EEG. Three months of needles, urine, and blood. Some of the doctors murmured tactfully about electrical activity in the brain, others went so far as to say the wordepilepsy, but we couldn’t get a straight answer. It wasn’t a word people liked hearing.
In those three months, she only had one other seizure. She was at ours, drinking tea on the balcony with Mom. Without any warning, she hurled the cup of tea onto the street below, then stood up, but her legs buckled underneath her, and she fell to the floor, shaking. Mom screamed at me to help, but I just stood in the doorway watching as she lay on the ground, shaking violently, her eyes rolling back in her head. Why were they all taken in? It was so obvious she was faking it.
Mom placed my sister’s head in her lap, wiped the drool from around her mouth with the corner of her gown, and muttered incantations and prayers until she calmed down.

– 3 –

After the one on the balcony, she didn’t have any more fits for a long time, and we almost forgot about the whole thing. But she became increasingly tearful and argued more and more often with her husband. She’d get mad, storm out, and come to stay with us.
Dad got assigned to some job in another province and was away even more often than before, so she regularly stayed until he got back and persuaded the two of them to make up. He called me one time and swore at me down the phone for being a useless faggot who didn’t stand up for his sister. Why had I let three days go by without calling her husband to smooth things out between them?
What was I meant to do? Her husband wanted to start a family, and although they’d been married over a year, my sister still hadn’t gotten pregnant. She’d gone to the doctor and done the relevant tests, and the results came back fine. But her husband refused to see a doctor or do any tests. He seemed to want to impregnate her and give his mom a grandchild through sheer willpower or something.
Whenever my sister passed the downstairs apartment, her mother-in-law would nag and make comments, till finally my sister lost it and confronted her with the test results that showed she didn’t have any problems. When her husband got home from work, he picked up the argument where they’d left off, taking his mom’s side instead of hers, so she left the house and came to ours.
This time, I called her husband, and he asked if we could meet for coffee, just the two of us. He was seven years older than me, and he was always extra friendly with me for reasons that weren’t obvious. He would tell me little stories about himself like he was revealing some interesting secret, which he wasn’t, because he didn’t have any: He was a spoilt little mommy’s boy who grew up in her lap, and when he graduated she called up her siblings, who were all judges, and got him a job in the tax authority, and now all he did was go to work and come home again. Now and then, he might go to a café with his colleagues or some old friends. He asked me, though, to meet him at a café well away from the neighborhood where we both lived.
He stammered for a while, then told me he adored my sister, and that she was the most important thing in his life. He confessed, without me asking, that he’d been in love with her since he was thirteen, and that there was no way he was going to lose her. The problem was he was under pressure from his mom, and he really couldn’t upset her; but my sister, he said, kept being provocative and causing arguments.
He went around and around, avoiding the main issue, until I asked him directly. “Why don’t you just do some tests? Then you can stop arguing about it and get on with your lives.”
He went quiet and hung his head in despair. A lone tear trickled down one cheek. I was embarrassed and tried to rephrase the question, but all I got were tears and sniffles. 
“I can’t,” he mumbled finally. “What if it turns out the problem is me? Then you’ll make her leave me.”
I gazed down at the toes poking out of my sliders. It was early October, and the weather was sublime. The wind rustled the dry branches of the trees in the plaza in front of us, and the warm smell of smoke from farmers burning their rice husks at the end of the growing season hung in the air.
“Trust in the Almighty,” I said. “There’s no need for anybody to go leaving anybody. Whatever the problem is, there’ll be some way to fix it. Let the Lord be your guide, and come and take your wife home.”

– 4 –

She went home with him after we all agreed the best thing would be for her to take some space from her mother-in-law. She stopped visiting the downstairs apartment, and her husband’s mom couldn’t make it up the stairs anyhow. Everyone breathed a sigh of relief, their relationship improved, and my brother-in-law and I became quite good friends.
That Ramadan, the two of them were invited to ours for iftar, and at one point when it was just my father, my brother, and me in the room, my brother-in-law confided that he was thinking of asking a shaykh to visit their home, because something wasn’t right. He said my sister was refusing to listen to any Qur’an, even on Fridays; before, she used to light incense for him before he went out to the mosque, and now she always said she was too tired and needed to sleep. She’d started spending hours alone in the bathroom, too, and he said he could hear her talking to someone under her breath. Whenever they were sitting in front of the television together, and the call to prayer was broadcast, interrupting whatever series they were watching, she’d flip to the music channel. “The call to prayer is everywhere,” she’d complain. “We get the message.”
Just then, my sister came in with a tray of tea for us all. My father confronted her immediately. 
“What’s going on, Iman?” he asked. “Your husband says you’ve been talking to demons in the bathroom.”
She smiled at him. As the seconds passed, the smile went wooden, and she froze to the spot. Her face began to flush like all her blood was trapped in her head; her body began to tremble and her eyes rolled backwards, and she thrust the tray of hot tea in our father’s direction with a shriek. Then she began picking things up and throwing them at us. My brother and I jumped up and pinned her arms to her sides so she couldn’t move. Then suddenly, my sister roared, in a husky male voice that couldn’t possibly have been her own, and began viciously cursing our father. “I’m not letting go of her, pig!” it shouted. “Filthy cop scum! Haven’t you done enough to her already?”
My father leapt to his feet and landed a hard, heavy policeman’s blow on the side of her face. Usually a slap was enough to shut her up, but this time the voice kept raving, spit flying wildly from her mouth, so my father hit her again and again and again until she lost consciousness.

– 5 –

After that, we made sure never to leave her alone. When her husband left for work in the mornings, she’d come over to ours, or Mom or I would go spend the day there. My brother’s high school leaving exams were coming up, so he had to study. My sister and I grew a lot closer during that period; we managed to leave behind the brother and sister we’d once been, constantly squabbling and competing in the shadow of a father who beat us more often than he spoke to us. We watched TV together and kept up a commentary on everything that happened; it turned out we liked the same actresses, though not the actors. She visited often enough that for the first time in our lives there were pop songs we both liked, and TV shows we were both following.
One night, I was at her place. We were watching The Voice Kids, a talent contest where show-pony kids sang and danced and giggled and bawled while their proud parents looked on adoringly. During the commercial break, she asked if I was hungry and offered to make some home fries and a pastrami omelet. She’d always been crazy about pastrami. I said we should wait till the end of the show, and just then, the doorbell rang.
My sister went to open the door, and I grabbed the remote and turned the sound down. I heard her husband telling her in a hushed voice to go into the bedroom. Then he came into the flat, ushering in my father and two other people. I got up to say hello, but when he saw I was watching TV, he jumped for the remote and switched it off, visibly embarrassed at the sight of a child in full makeup singing in the spotlight.
My father sat down on the other side of the room without meeting my eye. He was focused on the two visitors: a shaykh and his assistant. My brother-in-law offered them tea, but the shaykh declined politely. It wasn’t advisable, he said, to drink anything before the house was purified.
Then my brother-in-law went into the bedroom, taking my father with him and leaving me to sit with the shaykh and his helper. The helper abruptly began chanting invocations and verses from the Qur’an, seemingly at random, while the shaykh closed his eyes and stroked his dark, white-flecked beard. Finally, they came back with my sister, who was wearing a baggy black abaya. The shaykh asked if she had performed her ritual ablutions. “Thanks be to God,” she replied with a nod. What was she talking about? She’d gone to the bathroom to pee right before they showed up, and she sure hadn’t done them since then.
The shaykh asked for a glass of water and a Qur’an. He opened it to Surat Ghafir and asked her to read out loud. She recited well, articulating clearly. She’d got halfway through memorizing the Qur’an when we were kids, and she had good grammar and pronunciation.
The shaykh didn’t stop her until she’d reached the end of the Surah. “Mashallah!” he said, beaming at her in approval. Then he requested another Qur’an, and asked her husband to sit to his left on the couch, and me to his right on another chair; the three of us were opposite my sister, who had a look in her eyes I thought at the time was bewilderment but later realized was utter contempt for each and every one of us.
The shaykh asked her to read Surat al-Rahman. Her voice sounded more confident this time; out of the corner of my eye, I could see the shaykh following with one finger in his copy of the Qur’an, like he was instructing her husband to listen closely and pay attention.
When she got to verse 31, she read, “We shall settle your accounts, O jinn and man,” then jumped to verse 34 and continued reading. Her husband and the shaykh both noticed the mistake, and the shaykh jabbed his finger at the part she’d skipped, pointing to verse 33: O company of jinn and of man, if you are able to pass beyond the realms of the heavens and the earth, then pass. You shall not pass save with God’s sanction.
This time, he didn’t wait for her to finish the Surah. “Well done, my daughter,” he said, “well done.”
He placed his hand over the glass of water and recited the Fatihah and Ayat al-Kursi. Then he instructed her to drink the water, bid us goodbye, and left with his assistant in tow.

– 6 –

The shaykh and his assistant visited again. My father was away on some job in another province, so he didn’t come this time. I noticed that the helper was carrying a long, thin cane. Instead of the large open living room, the shaykh asked for a room with a door that could be closed. So we all trooped into the second bedroom, which had been decorated in preparation for the children that still hadn’t arrived.
The shaykh instructed her to sit opposite him and placed a Qur’an, closed, between them. He recited the Fatihah and the two Surahs of Refuge. Then he asked her to repeat after him, and began.
First he read from the beginning of Surat Ghafir, then he moved on to Surat al-Jinn. Her voice was faint as she recited after him, and she swallowed some of her words, and occasionally came out with the wrong ones.
I saw the shaykh gesture to his helper, who handed him the cane, then in a flash he brought the cane down hard on my sister’s shoulder. My brother and her husband and I all jumped, but my sister didn’t even flinch. The shaykh continued to the next section, ready for her to repeat after him.
Suddenly, my sister chirped, “Tell me baby, who’s my lover?” The shaykh muttered a prayer to ward off evil then repeated the verses he’d just read, but she kept singing. Tell me baby, who’s my lover? Tell me baby, who’s my lover?
The cane cleft the air in two, striking her on the shoulder and thigh. He was taking care not to come near her face. She took the first four or five blows without pausing for breath, then leapt to her feet, and the deep, savage voice thundered out of her once again as she began to caper wildly around the room. I stood up quickly, placing myself between the shaykh and my sister, but the helper pulled me away and out of the path of the cane, which whistled through the air and landed with a crack on my sister’s body, and then again and again and again. I looked speechlessly at my brother-in-law, willing him to do something.
“It’s for her own good,” he said uncertainly. “We have to get that son of a bitch out!”
I wrenched my arm out of the assistant’s grasp and shoved him away, then grabbed hold of the shaykh’s arm to stop him from beating my sister. He looked straight at me, and as I gazed back, I saw that his eyes were red, blazing flames of hellfire that feasted on people, on women, who he would gladly see burned and tormented for the most insignificant of reasons.
The helper hustled my brother-in-law and me out of the room. I tried to slip past him and get back to my sister, but my brother-in-law clutched me firmly by the arm.
“That’s enough!” he yelled. “Your father agreed to it. And I’m her husband. This is my house, and my word goes!”
The assistant told us that the next part was critical, and that we’d have to harden our hearts. He went back into the bedroom, then emerged again and asked for a sheet. My sister’s husband dashed to the other bedroom and fetched a sheet, then went to the stereo and put on a cassette of Shaykh al-Minshawi’s Qur’an recitation.
He sat down in front of me. From the bedroom, we could hear my sister screaming in agony as the cane whipped her body. The rough male voice was gone, and now it was just her. She was begging the shaykh to stop and shouting for her husband, but he spoke over her, commanding her to repeat the verses as he continued to thrash her with the cane. She cried and screamed louder and louder, then suddenly went quiet. The shaykh’s voice became hushed, too, and my brother-in-law turned up the stereo. I listened, waiting for Iman to call out to me for help, but she didn’t.
I stood up, saying nothing to her husband, and left.

– 7 –

Despite everything, I still went back the next time. The shaykh and his lowlife assistant showed up and went straight into the bedroom where my sister was. This time the assistant asked me to play a Qur’an reading on the stereo. He wanted it turned up loud. I strained my ears, but I couldn’t hear what they were saying inside.
My sister never said anything afterwards about what went on with the shaykh inside the room, and she answered my questions tersely. “We just read Qur’an,” she’d say; or: “I faint, so I can never remember anything.”
She started wearing a long black abaya and keeping her hair covered—even in front of me, and I was her brother. At one point, I asked her if everything was okay. “Alhamdulillah,” she said. “I’m just black and blue from this goddamn demon.”
She stopped leaving the house—she didn’t even come to visit us any more—and refused to turn on the TV, draping a piece of cloth over the TV screen, because it let devils in, she said. She kept the radio tuned to the Qur’an channel. She covered all the mirrors and took down the pictures on the walls, and her husband gave in to her demand that they strip the wallpaper and paint the whole apartment a pale pistachio green. Our relationship worsened again; there was no TV to watch, and no new songs to listen to together, and we grew more distant by the day. The hostility and mistrust of childhood didn’t return; instead, we’d entered some kind of third space of indifference and disregard, each of us in our own world, bearing our sufferings alone.
The shaykh kept up his visits. Once every week or two, he’d turn up with his cane and they’d repeat the ritual. This went on for three months till one day she told Mom that she’d been to the gynaecologist, who’d given her the joyful news that she was pregnant. After that, her husband announced that she was cured, and the shaykh, his assistant, and the cane stopped coming to visit.

– 8 –

At some point after that I graduated and got a job in Cairo. I made the trip home less often. My dad retired, though he was appointed to some kind of position within the municipality, the nature of which was hazy to me.
The last time I visited my sister, she opened the door wearing a niqab, only lifting it away from her face once I was inside. She thought it was the “delivery guy” at the door, apparently. She had three kids now, and they were racing around the house while she tried to get them under control and into bed because it was a school night.
The TV was still covered with a cloth, and the radio was permanently tuned to the Qur’an channel.
I said goodnight to the kids, then chatted with my sister for a while. I suggested we eat dinner since her husband was going to be home late, well after midnight. I asked if she could make us a pastrami omelet, but to my amazement, she said she didn’t buy pastrami any more because they put dead mice in it. She offered to make a cheese omelet and some home fries instead. Then she grinned. “Or maybe we should skip the fries,” she said, “because of that belly of yours.”
She gave me a playful punch in the stomach. “Don’t you want to get a gastric band?”
She got up to fix the food, and I stayed where I was. I didn’t know what to do without a TV, so I put my feet up on the couch and stretched out. That was when I saw it, wedged between the back of the couch and the wall: a thin cane, the shaykh’s cane.