Teta
Noor Nasir
The cold breeze of the summer air brushed across my skin like needles. Early morning traffic mixed with the sounds of my little cousins playing and throwing paper airplanes off the 8×5 foot terrace of my grandparents Cairo home. The glaring orange of the sun seeped through my half shut lids, keeping me awake. And I was so tired. Heavy blinking and sleepy head rolls of an all nighter curated by a group of 7-10 year olds is a battle with seemingly no reward. And as a seven year old, I always found the result to be underwhelming. Sitting, leaned back, body curled in a ball on a terrace chair, still fighting that battle, I remember thinking… never again.
The well-rested adults were engulfed in conversation, gathered in and around the terrace, uncles, aunts and my mom, having their 9am shay. They laughed sleepily and talked mostly in Arabic, so I could only catch a few things they would say at a time. Gidu withdrew to his art studio soon after. My three year old sister was on my mom’s lap, and my older sister, cousins and I began to count the airplanes passing by. Teta and Gidu lived near the Cairo International Airport, and though it was at times loud, it did make for many games of counting planes to pass the time during our weekly all-nighters.
“I see one! I see one!” My older sister, Leila, yelped, causing a chorus of disappointed grunts from my cousins and me. The first person to spot the first plane in the morning got 1 pound. As an unemployed first grader, I felt robbed of a goldmine. I crossed my arms and tried not to roll my eyes; I’ve always been a sore loser. We continued to play as the sun made its slow but grand appearance.
…2, 3, 4
The adults got up for their second rounds of shay, and my little sister began to cry in the absence of our mother.
5, 6…
“Sabah Alkhayr!” my Teta’s voice sounded, circulating through the house from the kitchen. My cousins and I stopped in our tracks, frozen in time. We all knew what this meant. Quick glances were exchanged between siblings and cousins. And then, a stampede followed; we were running, giggling and tripping over each other’s feet as we raced to the kitchen. There, the aroma of batter, eggs, breakfast meat and shay danced through the room like a quartet of ballerinas. We all ardently reached for the pancakes stacked up on a platter in the middle of the kitchen table, our little fingers tangling with each other, resulting in inevitable bickering. Our Teta made the best pancakes. They were thin and fluffy and crispy. Looking back, I think they were actually crepes.
***
I sat there staring at the plate in front of me, messily decorated with fruit, breakfast potatoes, and a pancake. I twirled my fork between my fingers, stabbing at the lone cake, the zigzag of honey drizzle now faint. It was thick and fluffy; it had all the characteristics of a well executed, textbook pancake.
“Are you gonna eat that?” Nate asked, interrupting my thoughts as he pointed at my plate with his fork. I shook my head and pushed it towards him. He accepted my gesture as he looked down at the cake in skepticism.
“Did you put honey on this?” I nodded slowly as our other friends, Julie and Diana, leaned over to look.
“It just tastes better…. It reminds me of my grandmother.” Nate grabbed a bottle of maple syrup as my friends’ judgments subsided at my response.
When I got back to my dorm room, it was only 10am. My friends insisted that we wake up early on Saturday mornings to catch breakfast at the dining hall before they switched over to lunch. Although the food was great, I’m not quite sure it was worth the tiring mornings. I decided to nap.
I found it hard to fall asleep as Teta was now in my mind. I realized I had not thought of her in a long time. Stultified and distracted, I looked through my mom’s Facebook photos, scrolling through hundreds of pictures of our times in Egypt. I scrolled until I landed on a picture of me in 2007, posing next to my Teta. We were sitting next to each other, our chins resting on our palms, our elbows propped up on the armrest of a couch. I was wearing a green tank top, my hair in its usual frizzy bob, smirking at the camera. I had not seen this picture in years. The corner of my mouth twitched into a smile as I saved the photo onto my phone. I napped peacefully that morning.
***
“Calm down… Sit!” Teta demanded sternly, pushing away our eager, hungry hands. My cousins passed around a bottle of maple syrup, but I grabbed the honey, impatiently flipping the bear upside down. I preferred honey even then. I drizzled the honey and rolled up the pancake, eating it like a 7/11 taquito. Leila lined hers next to each other, rolling them up with care, refusing to eat until all five of them had secured a spot on her plate. Our Teta grabbed her cup of shay and made her way to the terrace, joining the rest of the adults. After a moment, we sneakily followed behind, plates in hand so that we could watch the planes while we ate our breakfast.
Teta gave us a look of dismay, her lips pursed in a straight line, her light brown eyes tired, bordered by black kajal. She hated it when we ate on the terrace. But she didn’t say anything. She leaned back in her rocking chair that my cousins and I had dragged into the terrace for her. She was in her nightdress from the night before, black and detailed with white patterns, her head still wrapped in a pink floral scarf from her morning prayer. She seemed dispirited yet pensive, and nobody said a word to her as she gravitated her attention to the sky with her cigarette pressed between her fingers, rocking gently back and forth in her chair. We didn’t see any more planes that day.
***
It seemed like my cousins and my favorite pastime was to outrun each other whenever we got an opportunity. We were making our way to our local Sherry (this is what we called the convenience store near my grandparents house) and our Teta was walking behind us with my mom and my aunt.
“Which one are you getting?” My cousin inquired about the ice creams available at the store. I analyzed the mountain of sticks, cones, tiny tubs, all thrown over each other behind the glass doors of a freezer. I slid the door open and reached my hand in the pool and picked one out. The wrapper had a picture of a blue bear on it and upon unwrapping it, the ice cream itself was a fruity popsicle with jelly inside it. (I have desperately tried to find the brand through various internet searches, but Google has consistently left me feeling as if the experience was some display of a fever dream).
“I was gonna get that one!” my little sister Nina cried, whining from below me. I rolled my eyes as my mother went to grab her a different flavor of the same brand.
“You guys can have the same one,” she said to calm her down. She picked her up, propping her on her hip. Ugh, she’s three, she can stand.
Teta offered to pay for our sweets, eyeing my older cousin’s arms as he clutched at not just his ice cream but a collection of Cadbury Dairy Milk’s and Snickers. She pulled out her money pouch, the ensemble of coins jangling against each other in perfect pitch as she handed the balance over to the store clerk.
“Shukran!”
“Salam!”
***
The rest of the day was spent slurping on ice creams and stealing pieces of chocolate from my cousin, who would scream any time he caught us doing so. An array of Arabic music flowed through the house and we danced in a circle in the living room of our grandparents’ home. Then we would watch Teta as she cooked in the kitchen, our little legs swinging in excitement and our mouths salivating as we watched her put in ingredient after ingredient. It is in this way that I like to remember her; with an austere but affable aura and a plumpness that made for the warmest cuddles. Her devotion to us was evident in the way she spoke, scolded, cooked and even observed us. To us, she was the bravest woman alive. Though our Gidu was the man of the house, warm and strong in his own ways, our Teta’s strength was eclipsed in all she did and in the way she carried herself. Maybe it was the way my Gidu refused to smoke, yet Teta was always perched in her rocking chair, having her daily smokes, a habit I, through my naïve eyes, found to be masculine. She oozed tranquility and grit. We believed that she feared nothing. We were scared of her when she was angry and were in love with her when she was jovial. Her emotions were never fabricated. She gave it to us like it was; she was the definition of tough love. But nonetheless, we all idolized her.
***
I remember the day we found out. Because I don’t remember much from when I was eight years old, that afternoon almost feels fictitious. It was only a few months since we had come home from Egypt. Earlier that day, we had heard the ice cream truck driving down our neighborhood, prompting us to get up from the couch and beg our mom for whatever cash she could spare. My sisters and I sprinted outside, toppling over each other in an effort to be the first one to make it to the cart. I asked for one of those Magnum ice cream sticks with nuts. It was my mom’s favorite, and when I was eight years old, I liked everything she did.
Back sprawled out on the couches, we ate our ice creams in silence as we watched reruns of sitcoms on Disney Channel.
“Hey, go give some to mama. That’s her favorite,” Leila ordered, focused on eating her cone. Usually, I would get annoyed at a suggestion like this and ask her why she couldn’t give our mom a bite of her ice cream instead. But that day, I just got up and made my way towards my parents’ room. Before I could make it past the door, my mom came out of her room, phone in hand, her face a pale red. It was the first time I had seen her cry.
***
Death is a strange thing to experience at any age. It rips you out of your bubble of comfort and the automatic human response seems to be to repudiate it. And at eight years old, it surpassed any level of comprehension I possessed. I felt like I was stuck at a crossroads, standing at a blurred line where I was too young to fully comprehend the situation but old enough to feel all the feelings, ones that I hadn’t yet discovered. All I understood was that I wanted to cry, and so I did.
***
My grandmother’s presence was potent and mighty and condoling. Her death felt as if our family’s vessel of consolation had broken. But soon we found solace in each other. We rarely talk about her death now, and even stranger is that I have never visited her grave. Though I have gone to Egypt many times since her passing, the idea of visiting it has never come up. We believe death to be inevitable and an impending part of life in our culture, though it is never really talked about. And grief is something I have never been taught how to deal with. Today, I try to see grief as love that remains unexpressed. Death always seems too soon.
***
“Malesh, Malesh… It’s okay,” my Teta breathed into my hair, her voice raspy through gentle whispers. She was rubbing my back as I cried, propped on her lap. I was curled up in a ball, her rotund body swallowing my small frame in its cushioned hold. My head was positioned right above her left shoulder, and I remember thinking her skin was smooth and soft, like clouds. I don’t recall why I was crying. She sang me a lullaby in Arabic, rocking us back and forth in her rocking chair. I took deep puffs of frustration, breathing in her scent. She smelled of cigarette smoke and Chanel No.5.
***
As I discovered additional details surrounding my grandmother’s cancer, I began to see her more as a human rather than a figure to be idolized; a figure my sisters and cousins had created. I remember learning that she was too afraid to undergo major surgery on her breasts, one that could have potentially been life saving, and soon her condition worsened and became incurable. Recently, I was also made aware of her previous diagnosis in 1991. She wanted to ignore it, hoping that it would just go away. Hearing this for the first time left me frustrated and annoyed even, but soon after I realized that she was scared. And then I imagined my grandmother as a baby in her mother’s arms, fearful of the unknown, not knowing that one day she would be an embodiment of everything strong and beautiful to her family. She knew that everyone disagreed with her, that everyone was agitated and dejected, but she refused to undergo the procedure anyway. I even remember listening to a phone call between my parents and her. My father would beg her to go through with it while my mother gently encouraged her beside him, exchanges that I did not fully grasp at the time. No matter what anyone would say to her, my Teta was a stubborn woman. Nobody could change her mind when it was made up.
Noor Nasir is a junior double-majoring in Psychology and HR. She is involved with WRSU’s (Rutgers radio) music department and is a research assistant at Rutgers Psychology Department’s RAMP Lab. Her current favorite TV show is “Cowboy Bebop.”