From Omar Khalifah’s ‘Sand-Catcher’: Mutarjima’s Maqlouba

It was agreed that they would catch up with me at home at precisely nine o’clock; I promised them that the food would be ready by ten. I made a hasty departure from the coffee shop where we’d met, and headed for one of Dubai’s enormous malls to buy what I needed. On the way there, I kept trying to call my mother, but she wasn’t picking up—this was before the era of smartphones and social media apps. I called my older sister, who didn’t answer the phone either. I was getting increasingly anxious. Was eggplant the only option? Potatoes might be easier. I remembered that I had no rice at all at home, as I’d done scarcely any cooking since coming to Dubai. Did I even have cooking oil? Salt and pepper? There was no time for me to go home and see what supplies I had on hand, so I decided to buy everything. I opened my bag, only to discover that I didn’t have enough money with me. When I got to the mall, I found an ATM and withdrew two thousand dirhams. I tried again to call my mother, but it was no use. I called my aunt on my father’s side, my aunt on my mother’s side, the wife of a paternal uncle, the wife of a maternal uncle, a cousin—nothing. I started to cry. I called my father and was overjoyed when he answered. I asked him to pass the phone to my mother immediately. He said they were at a wedding, and that she wouldn’t be able to talk to me because the music was too loud. I asked him if he knew the exact recipe for maqlouba.

“That’s what this is about?” he asked. “If that’s all you wanted, I’m going to hang up now.”

“Papa!” Surely he could hear that I was crying! “Please, Papa—it’s an emergency! Maqlouba, Papa—please. Maqlouba. Let me talk to Mama. Maqlouba. I’m begging you.”

My father said nothing—perhaps he was trying to work out whether these tears of mine could really be on account of maqlouba—and a moment later my mother came on the line. I asked her to send me a message with a detailed recipe for maqlouba. She told me her phone couldn’t send messages outside Jordan. I asked her what time she’d be going home, but then I realized that the wedding celebration had only just begun. My mother told me that my grandmother hadn’t come along to the wedding, so I could call and talk to her if I wanted to.

After the conversation with my mother, I hesitated over whether to call my grandmother, with whom I hadn’t spoken in more than six months. I decided to buy all the groceries I needed first. Wracking my brain to remember everything, I made my way along all the food aisles. Rice, cooking oil, butter, salt, pepper, spices, eggplant, cauliflower, chicken, tomatoes, cucumber, lemon, yogurt, olive oil. I filled my shopping cart, proceeded to the cashier, and paid. I got home at about eight o’clock and called my grandmother. She refused to give me any information if I didn’t explain to her why all of a sudden, at eight o’clock on a Thursday evening, I was asking how to make maqlouba. I told her I had invited some friends over, and that they wanted to taste a Palestinian dish. She asked me whether any of them were men. I lied. “No,” I said, “no men.” She didn’t believe me. If all of them had been women, she said, then I wouldn’t have felt the need to be so careful about preparing the dish to perfection. I was ready to throw the phone at the wall, turn off all the lights, and go to bed—just go to sleep and forget about this whole fiasco. My grandmother wanted the truth, and all I wanted from her was a few words about maqlouba. I swore by how fervently I missed her that the guests were all women. She said if I missed her so much then why hadn’t I called her for so long? In my head, I asked of God that maqlouba be lost to the Palestinians, just as Palestine was lost to us.

After vigorous apologies on my part and promises to be constantly in touch with her from now on, my grandmother revealed to me the secrets of how to prepare maqlouba.

Everyone arrived at around twenty past nine. They sat in the living room, laughing and enjoying themselves, while I struggled to conceal my anxiety about how my maqlouba was going to turn out. The wretched Egyptian asked me about the history of maqlouba, and I answered him coldly that I didn’t know and I didn’t want to know. He acted surprised that I, a Palestinian, wouldn’t want to learn about the history of her country, in light of Palestine’s special circumstances. I restrained myself from asking him about the “special circumstances” that had turned him into such a crashing bore, not to mention a boor, meddling in what did not concern him. Some of the others offered to give me a hand, but I told them everything was under control. That was when an evil smell began seeping into the living room. The Egyptian shook his head and laughed, while the Syrian gestured to me to follow her into the kitchen. There the odor was even stronger. She suggested I check the pot. I asked her whether this smell indicated that the food had burned. She said that was the most likely explanation. She checked the heat setting and asked me how long the pot had been on the burner. When I answered her, she was unable to contain her laughter, despite her obvious sympathy with me. I asked her if there was any way to salvage whatever might be salvaged. We took the lid off the pot, each of us tasted a spoonful of the con- tents, and then we stood there looking at each other. Now my concern was all about muffling my own sobs, so that the guests—especially that Egyptian prick—wouldn’t hear me. The Syrian woman indicated that the only solution was to tell everyone the honest truth about what had happened. I picked up the pot, just as it was; as I set it on the table before my assembled guests, I must have looked like someone condemned to death who’d just entered the courtroom for the last time. I gave them all three minutes to get out of my house. The Egyptian approached me, and I shrieked. The rest of them dragged him by the arm, while he tried to tell me that he only wanted to know what had gone wrong. What I wanted was the lot of them out of my house before I discarded the maqlouba. My phone rang moments after they were all gone—it was my grandmother. She asked how the maqlouba was.

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This excerpt of Omar Khalifah’s debut novel, Sand-Catcher, translated by Barbara Romaine, appears with permission from Coffee House Press.

Omar Khalifah is a novelist and short story writer in Arabic. His book, Nasser in the Egyptian Imaginary, was published in English by Edinburgh University Press in 2017. His collection Ka’annani Ana (As If I Were Myself) was published in Amman, Jordan in 2010, and his novel Qabid al-Raml (Sand-Catcher) was published in 2020. His articles have appeared in Middle East Critique and Journal of World Literature. A Fulbright scholar, Khalifah is assistant professor of Arabic Literature and Culture at Georgetown School of Foreign Service in Qatar.

Barbara Romaine is an academic and literary translator. She has published translations of five novels, most recently Waiting for the Past (Syracuse University Press, 2022), by the Iraqi novelist Hadiya Hussein. She has held two NEA fellowships in translation, one of which was for her work on Radwa Ashour’s Spectres (Interlink Books, 2011). Spectres went on to place second in the 2011 Saif Ghobash-Banipal international translation competition. Romaine’s translations of essays, short stories, and classical poetry have appeared in a variety of literary periodicals.