It all began when Isha Om Sitta, “six-fingered” Isha, died on everybody. Not even the supernumerary finger on her right hand was of any help to extract the chunk of juicy mutton that lodged itself into her wretched throat. Who could have believed this? She choked and sputtered with, as a unique witness, her mentally retarded daughter who gawked uncomprehendingly as her mother turned puce in a matching colour to the damson dress she always favoured. It was only when the idiot ran out into the street, screeching like a terrified ape, that Isha was discovered, bug-eyed, her supernumerary hand clutching her bloated throat, with an obscene smirk twisting her ugly face.

The news spread like wildfire that swept the neighbourhood with an aftershock wave of hysteria and panic. Mind you! It was not out of any sentiment of grief for the old hag’s soul – may it roast in hell! – but out of a pure, unadulterated self-pity, out of a righteous anger at the cheek and selfishness of such an inopportune death. For Isha took with her to her final abode the key to dozens of local young girls’ most cherished sanctuary, for worms to feast upon. I was one of those girls. There were fainting fits and my mother pounded her chest in a rhythmic tattoo the moment we were apprised of Isha’s demise: “Oh my poor daughter! My poor Meriem! What’s to become of us now?” I was to get married to my twenty-three-year-old cousin, the son of my father’s sister, in two weeks’ time. But with Isha pushing up daisies, my soon-to-be husband would not be able to consummate the marriage by deflowering my *sba*, my hymen. He would be confronted with an obstacle as solid as if it were an impenetrable wall. No, I am not raving. This was the truth, or what people in our neighbourhood believed to be the truth, in a world where magic and the power of the dead had more currency than the dictates of reason or the free will of the quick. I was *m’safha*, my chastity sealed and made into an impregnable citadel by the magic ritual Isha had been paid to perform, as it had also been the case of most young girls in the neighbourhood. Any man who tried to storm this citadel would see his member wilt and stoop, like a mourner’s head at a funeral, dangling hopelessly in a crestfallen, brooding impotence. My *sba* would remain, then, intact and my family’s honour would be safe.

There was a gaping space at the front of Isha’s mouth where the upper row of her front teeth had been knocked out. Nobody knew for sure, but some spiteful tongues alleged that she had done it herself. On purpose. It was murmured that, in her youth, Isha’s mouth with its toothless front row, had made many a man happy as nothing stood between him and his pleasure. No risk of getting bitten there! This attraction of hers lost its appeal as Isha became older and uglier if that was ever possible. The ingenious crone found herself another niche to fill. She exploited another peculiarity of hers, the sixth finger on her right hand, to become the hierophant and exclusive executant of a ceremonial that was intended, in our part of the world, as a rite of ‘protection’ for young girls: the *tasfih*. It consisted of two complementary ceremonials with the first, known as “the closing,” occurring obligatorily before the *sbia*, the young girl, got her periods. The second, dubbed “the opening,” was required to take place on the eve of the girl’s wedding day: it was meant to neutralize the effects of the magic wrought in the first ceremony.

The first step in the ritual of *tasfih*, which literally means ‘plating’ or ‘armouring,’ would make a girl’s hymen immune. It was similar to the act of fitting locks and hinges to a door or shoeing a mare. The ceremonial spawned the baffling paradox consisting in the fact that the *m’safha* would remain a virgin irrespective of what might befall her. Rumours were rife about the dark omnipotence of this ritual evoked in a hushed reverence and an awe-struck fascination. One constantly heard surreptitious echoes about some girl who was raped by an uncle or, even in some cases, fell victim to a collective rape, but whose *sba* remained sealed thanks to *tasfih.* Another one was even said to be with child while still a virgin.

In my case, the first ceremony took place when I was eleven years old. Before it was allowed to start, all men, even little boys, had been driven out of the house. No masculine emanations could be brooked to interfere with the sound unfolding of this milestone in my life. It was an exclusively female rite that came to pass in a room located in the eastern side of the house, in the general direction of Mecca . This was paradoxical, since I would learn, many years later, that Islam condemned all magical practices as evil and blasphemous and that tasfih had nothing to do with religion, whose interpolation into the ritual was an effort to legitimize, by all possible means, a forbidden practice.

Incense was hanging in thick sheets; a lurid, acrid haze of burnt myrrh that stung my eyes. Familiar objects became endued with fuzzy contours. Only sickly, wavering pools of light, emanating from guttering tallow candles that spangled the room, could slightly dispel or somewhat dilute the ambient darkness. The flickering, moribund flames illumined an airborne current of dust motes and particles of indefinite nature. In my feverish imagination, the smoke and the shadows copulated to spawn jinns and specters whose silhouettes took over erratic shapes, mocking at my silent, frantic efforts to puzzle them out of the innocuous billows of incense. 

Isha’s gummy grin was what I remember most from the whole ceremony. Her toothless rictus was meant to placate my fears. It only served to stoke them up. I funnelled all my concentration on the hairy mole at the right corner of her mouth, which resembled the aperture of a drawstring purse, all the more so for those vertical incisions that etched themselves, accordion-like, above her upper lip. It was the drawstring kind of purse where you could shove and cram all manner of bric-à-brac. I grew mesmerized by the mole. It was my way of taking my mind off the weird ritual that was unfolding itself, immuring me within a spell more formidable than if I were to wear a chastity belt whose unique key lay on the sludgy bottom of treacherous quick-sands. In my little girl’s eyes, Isha’s being became abstracted into that predatory-looking mole. It was jet black with a smooth, almost polished exterior. It bristled with twitching short hairs that bore a striking resemblance to the spindly, brittle legs on a gloating spider or the voracious tentacles of an unnameable night crawler reaching out to swaddle me in a nightmarish cocoon.

Isha uttered the mandatory *Bismillah* (“in the name of God”) before she measured four fingers’ breadth just above my right knee, the choice of which was propelled by the marked intent to set me on the *right* path of virtue. The grin sanctioned the exertion of her freak finger as it traced the exact spot in that soft, secret, ticklish place near my knee, which used to send shivers up my spine whenever it was grazed with the rough grain of a fabric or the soft caress of a bathing sponge. She, then, took out of her bag a brand new blade and performed seven incisions. She pressed the notches to draw blood in which she rolled, using her supernumerary finger, each of seven raisins as dried up as her wretched self. The raisins were symbols of fertility and prosperity. As to the blood, it was meant to evoke future menstruations, emblem of my ‘fertilizability.’ Next, I was asked to intone a ritual incantation. Seven times. I became just like that legendary book which was said to be sealed with seven seals. Words were intended to superimpose themselves upon actions and create an invisible protective carapace where my virtue would be shelled over.

“*Ana heet, weeld ennass khit* … I’m a wall and other people’s son is a thread, … *dam rkibti sakir n’kibti* … Blood of my knee, seal my little hole …” My tongue had to twist itself seven times to enunciate each formula. And with each painful contortion, words felt like clinging, small balls of agglutinated hairs I had to spit out before they slinked into my trachea and strangled me. I stuttered and lisped and tripped up on each discrete syllable, which formed intricate lingual aggregates whose significance reached beyond the pale of my understanding. I teetered on the brink of implications that remained, for the most part, tantalizingly amorphous. Each time I recited what were to me abstruse formulae, Isha put a blood-stained raisin into my mouth and I had to fight back the urge to retch and wash away the salty metallic taste that flooded my mouth. Wriggling eels of nausea, reminiscent of the ones my mother used to bludgeon enthusiastically before cooking them, squirmed and writhed in my stomach. I could not suffer my eyes to wander to the blood seeping out of those ritual gashes. I did not know whether its texture and progress reminded me of the treacly, languorous juice trickling out of an overripe fruit or the thick, sluggish pus oozing out of a weeping wound. I was, then, enjoined to bring my knobbly knee to collude with the wall in order to appropriate its major characteristic: incontrovertible impenetrability. For at the hub of the ceremonial was the necessity to proceed to a sort of vital isomorphism between words and body, where the latter becomes mystically infused with the potency of the former. Isha subsequently rubbed into each incision some lampblack and swathed the whole with a strip I had to keep until the following day when the notches would morph into greenish-gray tattoos.

I bore a grudge against Isha and against my mother who allowed the old bat to brand me, for I felt branded all right, irrevocably marked for eternity. Or like merchandise sealed and tightly wrapped up in cellophane until the right customer came along and claimed it as his own. Because merchandise, which had been tampered with, was destined to be shunned and eventually dumped in a world like ours where virginity, for a girl, was both a religious and social ordinance nobody could banter with. For not only the young girl’s honour, but that of the whole family, and even community, was at stake. From puberty to my wedding day, I had to subside in a state of latency, a chrysalis ensconced within the layered seclusion of a cocoon until D-day dawned in all its awesome splendour: its culmination would be an act of procreation whose suitable imagery could, by no means, be the dove within a beam of light touching the virgin girl’s ear, as some other cultures elected to believe. It was, rather, a rod-like beam to be rammed within a dove-like virgin vessel.

Soon after the ceremonial, my childhood insouciance dwindled to vanishing point. I started to envy my two younger brothers the freedom they jauntily enjoyed, with my mother’s beaming blessing. They were not called upon to justify their comings and goings. They did as they pleased. As to myself, I was impaled like a butterfly within a glass case. I had to preserve my *hishma*, an artful combination of modesty, reserve and shame. I was continuously warned, my fears relentlessly fuelled and entertained. My body was the reason. I was let in on the fact that, unbeknownst to myself, I was carrying the seeds of my own undoing if I did not pay enough attention. Mother’s warnings were like barbed wire she erected to stave off the depredations of men. She never failed to remind me that there used to be a time, in the bygone past, when a girl, who had not been found a virgin on her wedding night – who was *m’kasra* or *m’fasda* (literally ‘broken’ or ‘damaged’) whether with her consent or as the result of an aggression – was forced by her unfortunate husband into a sackcloth, naked as on the day of her birth, and brought back to her poor father’s house on the back of a donkey. It was a vision of horror, an incubus that used to make a point of pride to foist its nightmarish images as a maddening filigree that threaded the texture of my dreamscape. I was, for instance, troubled by a recurrent dream where my hair rippled with a life of its own, throbbing with demented bats trying to screech their way out of the tangled strands.

The countless, sleepless nights I endured after gym class when I had to do the splits or when induced by the bully that was our Bulgarian gym teacher into some perilous contortion. Such foreign fads as riding a bike were out of the question. Nothing should be suffered to imperil the fragile, pristine existence of that swath of skin that spanned the space at the core of my female body. Not only did it seal my body, it also sealed my fate. Whenever I thought about that mysterious membrane, uncanny, surrealistic visions of some animals’ webbed feet flitted through my mind.

Now that Isha was dead and my wedding an imminent perspective, the question that posed itself was: how to counteract the magic ritual performed by Isha? What about the ‘opening’ ceremonial I had to go through on the eve of my wedding day? Some female neighbours, whose daughters were in the same bind as myself, thought they could disentangle the snarled strands of this predicament by trussing up Mabrooka, Isha’s soft-brained daughter, into her mother’s damson dress to perform the second ceremonial meant to undo the workings of the first one. They entertained the certitude that the dress must have soaked up the deceased woman’s aura which, upon wearing the same dress, would devolve onto the daughter. My mother fumed with frustration at their inane, futile reasoning.  “No one else could undo Isha’s work but Isha’s hand …” she halted in mid sentence, her eyes suddenly alight with a feverish scintilla of certainty that she would finally solve the mother of all conundrums. A council of war was soon held. My mother’s two younger sisters and their daughters, who were staying with us to help with the wedding’s preparations, were let on the details of my mother’s plan. My aunt Khedija gasped and was almost hyperventilating by the time my mother finished talking. “You’re out of your mind Kmar! You know that’s against all laws, human and divine! You must be joking!” But my mother, with her unwavering will and supple tongue, won the day. The others were led to reluctantly admit that it was the only feasible course of action. My mother ticked off on her fingers the likely candidates that could qualify for the bizarre task. She went through the whole gallery of the neighbourhood’s colourful desperadoes: there was Bû Tarrara, the thieving pervert, who roamed the streets with his hand always jammed deep into his pocket, “playing marbles” as most people whispered mockingly in his back. No, too unpredictable. There was then Zagrooba, the snitch; Weeld Anza, the smuggler; F’tiss, the snub-nosed fag; H’sine, nine and a half, etc … But mother found objections to each one of them, until she decided it had to be Amara Bû Adhma and nobody else.

Amara Bû Adhma, literally “one-egged” Amara, was an itinerary vendor of prickly pears, which he carried around in plastic pails. He was married to Sallooha Ellabba, whose waspish tongue could reduce any man, however pugnacious he might have been, to a puddle of liquidised pulp. And poor Amara was no exception. He took refuge in an alcohol-induced stupor that anaesthetized him to the systematic lashing bouts Sallooha administered with methodical gusto. He was found, one morning, sprawled in the neighbourhood’s dump in a pool of his own blood. After having guzzled a few bottles of *Bookha*, the cheap local beer, he lay on a mound of garbage in a comatose, alcoholic sleep. He did not even come to when what must have been a stray dog tore at the font of his pants and gobbled one of his testicles as if it were a pickled egg. He was discovered macerating in alcohol and blood, miraculously alive when he should have bled to death. From that day, he came into his nickname “Bû Adhma” that would become like a second skin until his death. Sometimes, people would jeer at him saying that he could substitute one prickly pear for the one he had lost to the dog. In the three years that followed the incident, he sired three boys in a row, proving his virility and making up for his lost ‘egg.’ After my mother made up her mind, she beckoned to him with the excuse of buying some prickly pears. He loped up to our house’s threshold, his body having perhaps lost its equilibrium with the loss of his testicle. He was sober enough to take in the import of my mother’s request. His face did not register surprise or shock at her words. He only asked for the price she was willing to pay for such a risky undertaking. After much dithering, they came to an agreement and he promised to deliver the next day in the morning. We could not sleep that night because of the raw edge of anxiety and febrile trepidation that took hold of us as we envisioned the consequences that might arise should Amara fail. My mother’s plan was that, since we needed Isha’s right hand, we had to retrieve it from where it was. It had to be unearthed and with this goal in mind, someone had to go to the cemetery by night and open Isha’s fresh grave. After the second ceremonial of *tasfih* took place, the person was supposed to return the hand to Isha. My mother was a god-fearing woman after all. She chose Amara because he could be depended upon to carry out this task without the risk of divulging the secret; he was a lush, who would have believed him anyway?  Amara delivered, in the early morning of the day that preceded my wedding, a black plastic bag that was cold to the touch. My mother glimpsed at the inside and announced that there were a few empty beer bottles, some ice cubes and a severed hand. My aunt Nefissa had to spray my aunt Khedija’s face with some Z’har, essence of orange flowers, to lessen the impact of the shock. My mother held the bag at arms’ length as we hurried to that same room where the first ceremony was held a few years back. I was enjoined to position myself in the direction of Mecca . I had to intone the same formulae, but making sure to substitute the word ‘wall for ‘thread in the first sentence: “*Ana khit, weeld ennas heet* … I am a thread and other people’s son is a wall.” The wall, at this junction, was a reference to the desired potency of the male member on the wedding night. I was given a charred thread and asked, in reverent tones, to swallow it whole, allowing it to slide down my throat so as to appropriate its limpness and integrate the prerequisite submissiveness I had to evince with my would-be husband, in a crude process of isomorphism. Then, the moment came when my mother had to take Isha’s hand out of the plastic bag to rub at the scars of the incisions made a long time ago by that same hand. She used a piece of material to ease carefully the putrescent limb out of its plastic shroud, when she gasped and let it drop to her feet. “There are only five fingers on this hand! Where is the sixth finger? This isn’t Isha’s hand!” We were rooted to the spot, appalled by the implications of her words. A few seconds elapsed and felt like hours. Then something totally unpredictable happened and I completely lost it, the tension of the past weeks evacuated by my helpless shrieks of laughter and warm pee as I wet my pants. Ifreet, our enormous, roguish cat, had snatched the hand lying at my mother’s feet and sped off with the grisly entity.

The dishevelled cavalcade that ensued to catch Ifreet had a cast to it that would qualify it to rank with any epic worth the appellation. My mother headed the melee like a feisty Amazon after a monstrous foe had been inadvertently let loose out of some mythological hell. My aunts and their three daughters resembled the legendary harpies I read about for a literature class. Poor Ifreet was suddenly cast in the role of a desperate Hercules trying to get away with the apple from the Garden of Hesperides . Except that the apple in question was a human hand. Its sight by any neighbours or, worse, passers-by, should Ifreet make it out of the house, might have unforeseen, and even dire, consequences for Amara Bû Adhma and my mother as his partner in the crime he had committed.

Ifreet was finally caught before he made his fateful exit. He lived up to the meaning of his name as he mewled and scratched away in a demon-like frenzy. Soon after that, Amara was summoned to our house and my mother almost flew at his face and gouged out his eyes. It transpired that he had knocked back a few beers before going into the graveyard so as to pluck enough courage for what he had been commissioned to do. Alcohol had fogged his mind and he had consequently opened the wrong grave and God only knew whose hand he had cut off. My mother ordered him to return the hand to its owner and bring Isha’s hand in its stead. He had to do it by night and we had to endure the throes of expectation. By two in the morning, he brought another plastic bag. This time, my mother made sure the hand had six fingers on it. The ‘opening’ ceremonial was meticulously re-enacted and I gagged and almost vomited when Isha’s hand rubbed at the blood from the incisions above my knee, which my mother re-opened while reciting verses from the Qu’ran. The hand was returned and we were lucky nobody discovered Amara’s deeds or my mother’s role in the whole tragi-comic scheme.

The wedding day went by in a blur. Then the moment came when I had to prove my chasteness. I suddenly found myself ushered into the bedroom in my husband’s company. I sat at the edge of the nuptial bed anxiously waiting for him to go through the motions. My eyes were downcast and I was fumbling with the beads embroidered on the front of my bridal dress. My cousin’s hand was on my knee, it went up my thigh and then it was cupping my breast through the fabric. So this is what it is like! I wondered praying God the Almighty for it to be over with a minimum of pain. After some groping and rootling and heavy petting that bruised the soft flesh on the inside of my thighs, I was still bracing myself for the final moment that would somehow deliver me out my bondage. But the minutes passed and nothing more substantial than a perfunctory fondling occurred. And there he was, a dead weight, gone all slack and heavy. Without warning, he started sobbing and hiccupping. He said that too much pressure, as the one he had gone through, always made it impossible for him to ‘perform.’ He promised that, the next day, he would be up to it. His organ lay limp and indifferent on his thigh. I averted my gaze. He nestled his head in my breast and I rocked him to sleep. He was soon snoring. My gaze drifted to the discarded finery lying near the foot of the bed. Laughter and tears fought for domination. I felt like both.