An Excerpt from Jokha Alharthi’s Latest, ‘Silken Gazelles’

The sign at the entrance to the narrow dirt lane leading into Sharaat Bat, the armpit village tucked away inside the hills—the sign saying sharaat bat in white letters on a blue background—was taken down the year Asiya and Ghazaala started school. Work began on an asphalt road that was to replace the village’s packed-dirt street, and soon a new sign was there, its blue deeper and the white thicker and brighter than the old. But what was written on it was something entirely new. al-waha. The Oasis.

       It was the calamitous event of going to school that occupied the girls rather than the new presence of construction workers or the new sign. Now, instead of scampering behind Saada on the elevations near the village to gather plants, or rolling down the shorter slopes, or forcing the cat, Shaybub, to take a bath with them in the falaj, or teasing the donkey, Naazi’, “Mr. Troublesome,” and pelting him with pebbles, or racing the boys, or hunting sparrows with bows and arrows, or stealing ripe mangoes from the fields, or looking for the chocolate that Aunt Maliha had hidden somewhere in her room, suddenly here they were. Here, sitting in a crowded little room in a pale yellowish building at the village limits. They could hear the bulldozers’ roar—paving the new road—all the while that Abla Iffat (who was terribly tall and big and carried a whip and had a strange way of speaking because she was not from around here) made them sit still and stay quiet.

        Almost instantaneously Miss Iffat got very cross with the two of them. Asiya should have started school the year before, but she had waited for Ghazaala so that they could start together. Then, this teacher from Egypt—this woman they had to call Abla Iffat—lost her self-control altogether and began screaming at them. “Ya ghagar! You gypsy children, you are mad!” That was because the teacher had been caught unawares as she found herself under attack from sharp fingernails and teeth. Asiya’s assault was accompanied by a loud and steady screech issuing from Ghazaala. Abla Iffat had tried to separate them. Her intention was to put Ghazaala in the first row because she was so small and Asiya in the back row since she was tall for her age. Her action led instead to a pitched battle, as most of the other pupils jumped in. The authorities were summoned—the mothers, since the fathers were always at a distant workplace. The two little girls were made to apologize to Abla Iffat. And then they were seated together in the middle row.

       What made school even more terrifying was the trip home in the afternoon, when one of the Indian road-construction workers was lying in wait for the girls. He appeared suddenly in a deserted spot and made strange movements that they didn’t understand. Then he peed in front of them and vanished. They fled, Ghazaala squeezing Asiya’s hand in fright as she asked, over and over, “Why does his pee look different? Why does he make us watch him? Is he going to hit us next time?” Asiya didn’t have any answers to give. The mystifying performance occurred several times and then Asiya filled her pinafore pockets with sharp stones, reluctant to leave the school building until she felt confident that she had a heavy enough load of them. But she had to wait a week before the man appeared again. She shivered at the sight of his red-squared kerchief. But calmly she shoved Ghazaala behind her and began pitching stones at him. Then she ran off, towing Ghazaala behind her, the two of them moving as fast as they could. After that day the construction worker with the odd-looking pee did not appear again.

       Asiya and Ghazaala headed straight to Suhayb’s shop, making a great deal of racket as they did so. They had in mind a bag of Chips Oman. Once they were at home, they would dip the potato chips into buttermilk and wolf them down.

Excerpted from Silken Gazelles, copyright © 2024 by Jokha Alharthi, translated by Marilyn Booth. Reprinted by permission of Catapult.