The Orphans

By Tina Rahimy

1941 Nusa kisses her father’s cheek and runs out to buy butter. 1959 Javed leaves his parents’ house with a suitcase in his hand. 1997 adolescent Ala stares angrily ahead of her in a taxi. 1998 David glimpses pieces of peace in his mother’s face. 2023 Sim, while hearing his mother’s voice, watches the subway carriages pass. This is their tale, the history of their fragile bond that breathes through the bricks of their home called the house of Orphans.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Apr 3, 2024
• ISBN: 9781446108314

Book preview

Prologue

Tightly gripping the doorknob, she slowly eases the key into the keyhole. Gently, she turns the latch inward and draws the door quietly toward her. She lets the latch slide back in so noiselessly, that even the street mice remain undisturbed. For a moment, she hesitates to double lock the door. She has already succeeded in closing it soundlessly. She does not want to jinx it. David often compliments her on her talent for sneaking away and sneaking in.

You could have become a legendary thief, but there was another forte waiting for you.

"Another forte" she thinks, "another forte is also defining you". Everything has been questioned, everything has changed in meaning, not only the story they had lived together but the sense of every sentence they had jointly created, has become unclear.

She glances around the street, taking in the predawn quiet. Her still beloved David is a night owl. His rhythm is harmonised with her intermittent insomnia. The silence in the street does not reassure her about her neglecting to double lock the door. Closing the door is a gesture, the small suitcase on the sidewalk a sign. She is still convincing herself that this is just a momentary departure, a simple pause to redirect her togetherness with those she loves. That was also the intent in the letter she left behind on the nightstand beside his phone. Always the first thing he looks at in the morning, in the hope for a new assignment for an article. Despite all her writing experience, each line felt like a battle of words with endless, unintended meanings.

"D,

It is not anger that nestles in me … it is puzzlement … 

I need to deal with the rupture … the rupture in the idea of who I thought we are … the doubt of who I am or rather cannot be in your beautiful minds. In the mind of those who I love. The pain … overwhelming ache, confusion, but more so the silence that is upon me when I am here is unbearable.

More than this, it is who I am in our bond that has paralysed my speech. Intellectually, understanding your endurance is not lessening the grief … Your confession is breaking through every bone of the body that I imagined we have shared and created together … leaving me behind with the question, whether unknowingly, I have been participating in a pretension. Have I, David?

I don't know, I really don’t know who I would have been if you had shared the truth – whatever that word means – with me. Just like you, I must retrospectively redefine the traits of a past, who I have been and could have been, to understand the reality of who I am now or who I want to be. Would I have been a fool or wise or both …? I am not … I am a not …

I have lost the sense of an I.

Now, only silence can give me a possible occasion to search for a sense of how to be … how to not be a non-mother, a non-daughter, and a non-wife … how can I just be in the story that I share with you? The collective I belong to …

I am not saying goodbye … not to you or any of you … this note is something else … something I am yet unable to name …

Love,

A"

Ala stares at the door, torn between agony and a deep sense of care for the one who is sleeping inside. She thinks of the lines in a Nina Simone song.

"Don't look for me,

I'll get ahead,

Remember darling,

Don’t smoke in bed …"

Ala had once used the song in a lecture to justify an ethical exposition on the complexities of anger and love, departure, and care. Now, she is experiencing once again that ambiguity through a keyhole. She double locks the door and gently pulls out the key.

She glances right and left, as if she needs to decide once more which way to go, which direction her life will take now, not knowing that everything will be decided for her in the next few minutes. She looks at the wall of the cemetery in front of her, wanting the dead to decide for her. But this time the ghost of Emla is silent. She turns right. For the first time in days her head is not racing. The mad battle of ethical questions in her head has come to an inconclusive truce. There is no more room for another inquiry or dilemma. Even Javed’s confession of his burdened soul must wait for a moment of peace in her mind. She walks toward the subway. It will not be running frequently at this hour. She imagines herself as the only passenger, calmly waiting on a bench in the station. Her first aesthetic portrait of true solitude without loneliness.

Passing Javed and Nusa’s door, for the first time she neglects to look inside to see a glimpse of them. She looks to the right, through the small ally in between their building and the tall office building. The image of Sim’s back sitting at the quayside behind their house, trying to hide from Emla. The memory makes her heart ache. She breathes deeply to remaster the lost nerve. The small suitcase, usually trundling on its noisy wheels during her travels, is now quietly lifted in her hand, her fingertips grip firmly around the leather strap. She doesn’t want anyone to wonder whether she is leaving for a little while or forever. A soft breeze brushes her cheek. She feels the pleasant silence in her mind settle in, her shoulders drop, despite the weight of the suitcase.

Until … A sudden ear-splitting boom assails Ala’s senses. Her body is lifted into the air. Seconds later, she is tossed like a rag doll onto the sidewalk across the street. The crash is bewildering. The silence is swallowed by an absolute darkness. Ala’s breath shakes. The suitcase lies, flung open, beside her body.

Sirens … pealing like a whisper at first, slowly turning into excruciating noise. She feels the need to open her eyes, the automatic movement, so spontaneous all her life, escapes her now. The sirens penetrate her mind like outlandish echoes. She feels a hand on her head, and she whispers amorously, David … David.

Her mind is slowly awakening.

The tender sound of this name is instantly traded with a horrendous voice in her head, repetitively calling louder and louder … finally her minds voice finds its way out … Ala screams. "Sim … Sim … Sim!"

Her eyes press wide open and meet the worried eyes of the paramedic:

Sim … I must go to them … I have to go … Nusa is asleep…

She is convinced that the caregiver understands what she means, while lifting her small body in denial of pain. The paramedic’s remarks and the hysteria of the screeching fire trucks pass her by like a distorted murmur. She is scarcely starting to discern the paramedic’s face and moving lips, the message in the voice eludes her. She tries to lift her injured body to walk toward home, just missing the grip of the paramedic. The subway, the bench of solitude, the open suitcase, they have all been forgotten.

Within minutes, her shock shifts to terror. She gazes as a ghost at their home, the house that had cherished not only her but all the souls she had ever loved all her life. The departure that she could not name has at last a final word …

Death.

Ala

"A bounty, a pleaser, a house N…."

The remark is loud and clear. The decision to not fully pronounce the N-word shows an intense self-assurance. Ala looks calmly at the woman in the lecture hall. She has been longing for this for years, the audacity, a certain kind of sharpness that springs out of life-experience, a knowing that surpasses simple book knowledge. This is what she has been missing for years with these well-behaved youth whose main priority is reduced to: Is this going to be on the test?

A new generation of university students with their extreme democratic parents no longer have a need for rebellion or any form of resistance. They just want to complete the task. Their non-authoritarian upbringing has made them answer authoritarian questions dutifully, exactly as the system demands it. Every round of exams and the collection of their answers resembles a broken record, repeating word for word the professors’ sentences during lectures. This is university, but Ala often thinks she would encounter more critical questioning in primary schools. Each year and each school year is making them more and more meek.

Within this ambiance of compliance, the accusation seems to wake her up from a long coma. Ala has already perceived the student as exceptional upon her arrival, not necessarily because she is a woman of colour like her, rather, due to the way the deep brown eyes force Ala to not simply pass her gaze but to pause, consciously looking at her in an unknown form of recognition of something beyond their appearances. She is not a girl, an adolescent who would become an adult in these halls as others do in her class. She is already a woman. Her posture contrasts with the obedient starting position of the rest of the students who tick her words rapidly, like zombies on their laptops without comprehending what she means. The online lessons turned them even more into androids of the learning regime. The accusation now makes the live gaze of the other students become scattered around the room, just as their online expressions did for the past two years. Except the accuser. She stares directly into Ala’s eyes.

A bounty, a pleaser, a house N…

The statement dawns on Ala. The other students may not fully understand the meaning of these words, or the thing that the accuser and the professor share with one another, but physically, they sense the tension in the room.

The comment is an answer to the question Ala asked at the start of her lecture. Her strategy is always to begin her first lecture without introducing herself. She starts with a ten-minute overview of what the lecture series is going to include. Then, she would write her full name on the chalkboard, turn slowly toward the class, and finally ask one of the students to assist her.

This time it is a strapping young man, over six feet tall with broad shoulders, and an appealing childish face. Ala gives him a piece of chalk as a gesture of greeting. Then she turns to the class. Her eyes skim the lecture hall, confirming what she already knows, that despite her petite posture, she can guarantee every eye is on her. Ala never settles for the zombie attitude of her students. Year after year, she forces them to unlearn their habits of disinterest and docility. She challenges them to share her love for critique and to dare to question her, while boldly looking at her. Ironically, in all these years her intention has been to train them to become the young woman who now accuses her.

She initiates the assignment with an opening statement:

There is a reason that I have not yet fully introduced myself. We are talking about philosophical anthropology here … the eternal question we cannot answer … what is a human being? We are not going to answer that question … certainly not today … She laughs at the audacity of the idea, but it is an esoteric joke. The students smile politely.

An impossible question to ever answer perhaps, so let us make it smaller…much much smaller… who is a person? Let us wonder… whether size in this case does matter…

She laughs again, and this time three out of fifty students affirm her witticism.

Some say that the question ‘Who is a person?’ is as difficult to answer as ‘What is a human?’ Others would argue that it takes them merely minutes to know a stranger, the other human, so to say. So let us start with testing both idea’s … I am that stranger … you have already been with me for a couple of minutes and in that time, you have already decided who I am … what type of a person I am. Most probably you have done it on an unconscious level … let us bring those hidden thoughts to the surface … we put them on the table … so to speak … you call out what you think you already know about me … and …

She looks at the tall young man with the innocent face. She has forgotten to ask his name. He already senses the question.

Louis. He says in a soft voice.

Nice to meet you, Louis. She smiles, which makes Louis blush in acknowledgement of their coming collaboration. Ala turns toward the class again. Louis will write down anything you say. And of course, Louis, please do not forget to write down your own thoughts too.

She winks at the young man; his uncertain smile is endearing. In the past five years that Ala has been starting her first lecture with this assignment, she has never seen students at the blackboard able to include their own judgments with those of the rest of the class. Each year, Ala invites the assistant at the end of the assignment to write something on the board, and without exception, each student would look at the full board, then at her, and conclude that all that is needed to be said is already written on the board. They would then timidly stare at her hoping that they could quickly get rid of the misery of standing in front of a lecture hall with all these strangers staring at the person with the chalk. She suspects that Louis will be no exception.

"First and foremost, rule number one, keep in mind, I am not looking for compliments here. It is not about politeness but openness, the true act of thinking … sincerity … guts. Reveal how you think. Unwrap how you judge, only then we can decipher the patterns of our thoughts … and I do not mean merely your personal patterns but political and social patterns. Second, do not be afraid, this exercise has no consequences for your exam or your grade."

Ala pauses to allow the reassurance to sink in. Louis is still not in a starting position.

"Let's get started. What or who do you think I am?"

Louis rolls the chalk hesitantly in his fingers, further whitening his pale skin. Ala glances around the room with a certain confidence. The beginning is always tense. It takes a while to collect the nerves to be open to a person responsible for your grades. Ala is aware that only now they are looking at her consciously. They are seeing her as living being instead of a teaching puppet. Who will be the first to talk this time? She can usually predict the responses, in that sense there is little surprise in the exercise. Nonetheless, the first word is not only unpredictable but decisive every time. The first comment sets the tone, allowing the class to create its ambience. The combination of remarks is always the flavour peculiar to that specific class. It gives the class an eccentricity allowing Ala to distinguish them as a separate collective. This class starts to her satisfaction with humour and functionality.

I hope you are at least a university teacher and philosopher … right!

Ala turns to the first voice. Cheeky blue greenish eyes, half-hidden behind long bleached locks in front of her face, are twinkling at her. The rest of her hair is greyish and shaved. The lock is demanding its own identity separate from the rest of the hair. These eyes with a lock of hair in front of them look around, with a youthful demeanour inaudibly calling out duhhhh. Ala looks at Louis. The tall boy is staring into the room, forgetful of his own role.

Write down, Louis. We have the first features. University teacher. Philosopher. She commands kindly.

"Professor. She is not just a university teacher but a professor! The sentence is emphasised by a curly brunette next to the only student Ala has been noticing consciously at the beginning. It’s on your webpage."

The brunette looks at Ala, not intending to confirm her words, but almost to point Ala on the reality of her situation. She appears as a woman that would never walk into a room unprepared. Ala discerns a grimace appearing on the brunette's neighbour’s face. There is something between the two, but Ala is not yet able to detect the connection. She looks at Louis. He is a little more at ease and has already picked up an eraser to delete the word teacher. Ala realises that she hasn't yet given enough instructions to the assistant.

Ah, Louis. Don't take anything away. All words are welcome and may stand next to each other.

The wiper already hit the R in teacher. Louis seems lost for a moment but recovers quickly. He restores the letter and writes Professor neatly underneath, as if he is summing up the possible answers in an exam. Ala smiles. They are slowly becoming a team now.

It doesn't have to be neat, Louis. You can write it as chaotically as you want on the board.

Louis’ shoulders loosen. Ala stares back at the class again. It is quiet for a while. The contradiction of the brunette has done something to them. The silence is always passing, slowly, comments start to flow, as the tension between what they imagine a professor must be and how the appearance of Ala contrasts with the image of such an occupation.

Smart.

— Smart woman.

Writer of books.

Workaholic.

Rich.

Intellectual.

Elitist.

Tough.

Strict.

Odd.

Strange.

Ala repeats the words each time to make sure Louis hears them. His whole body is focused on the task. He is in his element, chaotically writing on the board. Suddenly, as always out of nowhere, there it is again. A word that is always outspoken no matter the group or what kind of collective.

Mother.

A numb ache trembles through her body when she hears the word. She feels the scar on her belly brush along the fabric of her dress, silently whispering: I am here … as always.

The whispering mark has divided her upper body in two parts, and it has torn her between the lack of a choice to become a biological parent, and the bold fantasy to be one because of the boy living above her for the last twenty-two years. In all those years as Sim’s one and only Ala, despite all the sacrifices she had to make to keep him near, he has given her the ability to confidently dismiss that whisper as a residue of idiot demands of a cliché presumption on what motherhood should be. That confidence shattered three weeks ago, making motherhood once more an open wound, a leaking injury that she fears will bleed endlessly this time, demanding her to feel the intensity of ignoring it all these years. Mother. Simply uttered by an eighteen-year-old in front of her, unaware of the emotions it provokes. In their minds, as in the minds of most adults around them, Ala’s age and gender demands a given motherhood. Ala’s femininity is simple evidence to assume she is an owner of a uterus, even more so, a childbearing one.

Ala breathes silently and focuses her gaze on Louis as he slowly writes the letters on the board. The class begins to break away from the comments on her functionality or traits of her character.

Married.

And now it is Ala’s job to sharpen their comments with questions.

And I am married to a —

A man?

Certainly not a woman… This is resolutely declared by the blue greenish eyes behind the bleached lock of hair.

Mother…ok…how many children?

Three sons…

The class bursts with laughter. Everyone knows that those kinds of predictions are never accurate. The laughter relaxes them. A pale girl with red spotted cheeks finally finds the courage to moot the key remark everyone is waiting for. Her voice is panicky.

You were not born here.

The spots on her face multiply at a rapid pace. Ala looks back at Louis, narrowing his big blue eyes, trying to figure out how to write this, and three fellow students shout in an incoherent chorus.

Foreigner—

Immigrant—

Newcomer.

Louis looks at Ala indignantly. There is more to that innocent face than Ala initially wanted to see. She might as well have decided who Louis is in minutes: a good boy, or more so, a white boy. The great gentle giant refuses to write the words.

Foreigner. Immigrant. Newcomer. Not born here. Ala repeats the statements in a reassuring tone to make it clear that his writing of the words will cast no doubt on his intent. She turns to the class.

And where does this foreigner come from? She asks confidently, making clear that they haven’t yet said something out of the ordinary.

Ten countries and a continent are put forward. As always, European and North American countries remain unnamed, and as usual, Africa is just Africa, apart from the names of some North-African countries. Until then, she avoids the gaze of the only other person of colour. It is a common tactic. Don’t emphasise the exceptionality of each other, the world around you is already doing that enough. Still, she remains even now doubtful whether the tactic is performed out of fear, out of necessity of a strategy, or out of a sense of wanting to refuse to give in to an image. But now, instinctively, she looks at her. The woman is gazing downward. From experience, she can sense the deep irritability in the tension of her shoulders. She strategically looks away quickly, a passing glance. Louis remains obedient. With furrowed brows he writes all the names of the countries and The Continent, until the determined words bring him to a halt.

A bounty. A pleaser. A house N—

In the seconds that Ala had averted her gaze back to Louis, the woman had found a way to verbally express her irritation. In a racing speed, the words travelled from her toes toward her lips. She is not aiming at the class, but at the person who has created the context for this spouting nonsense. The Professor.

Silence cloaks the hall.

Louis looks at the board for a moment, contemplating the words, and turns back at the class. His mind has been made. He is not going to write these words down. He turns to the room, looking at Ala, lowering the chalk.

Ala looks at her. This time it is not a passing gaze. Her scrutinising eyes are rapidly capturing the many expressions of her face. She recognises the slight blush on her round, high cheeks, while her mouth is calm, poised without a sign of hesitation. Her neck looks to be more stretched than its natural state, accompanying the intensity of the spoken words. Her hands are hidden beneath the table, letting Ala only wonder what they utter. The shoulders behind the loose turquoise satin blouse are another story. They are neither stretched nor fallen. They are fully at ease, as if the utterance of the words has no consequence for their state of being.

Ala has heard the comment before, although not as explicitly as now. In her case, being a professor has its costs. Malcolm X's speech has been one of her anchor points to permanently ask herself the question, Am I not a…. A legacy of her mother. Philosophy has not made things any easier and the older she gets the more annoyed she becomes by the unavoidability of the reflective demand of the question. Still, she is taken aback for a while. She has not only never experienced the accusation explicitly, but more so never from a student. Until now, the comment is always hidden behind a compliment, mostly from colleagues making the same form of remark over and over.

You're not really a typical …

The empty space is always filled by a random country, ethnicity, or religion where someone assumes she belongs. None of those countries or ethnicities were in the continent where she was actually born, Europe. Oddly enough, the direct charge of treason in the remarks of the student, even though Ala has not a single clue on what she is betraying at this moment, is pleasing. She is a bounty, a traitor, and betrayal can never be just there without an inherent acknowledgment of belonging to something. Her European, African, South American, and Asian backgrounds have always made her feel earth-less, placeless, never belonging to anywhere. A homelessness that she experiences as a gift from her parents, mutually earth-less natives. The seldom occasions that Ala brought up the question of an origin, her mother’s simple response had been:

We are beyond these words.

Your mother means we are beyond nonsense, Ala. Her father always affectionately agreed.

Ala and her parents, without origin, lived together for seventeen years in an intellectual, unbounded cocoon where the nonsense was kept out. Somehow as a teenager, Ala longed for that world outside and was willing to take some clear form of nonsense for granted to connect with her peers with some form of origin. The student's so-called bawdry, now decades later, with the intent to exclude her as an unworthy member of a collective, also includes her in again, because it has now been uttered for the first time by a woman who clearly has an idea of what a skin colour means. Although in a hostile manner, she assumes Ala to be a member of her community.

Jesus, Shane…you are going too far. Already.

The loud voice of the prepared brunette brings Ala back to the consciousness of the room. Although she looks calm and present on the surface, Ala’s will to discern the whole scale of expression of the accuser’s body and words in detail has made her forget where she is. A classroom. She looks at the curly brunette. As she has already suspected before, Shane and the-always-prepared-lady are not casual neighbours. The two women know each other. The blond lock in the next row looks back and then smugly ahead, finally knowing which classmates are going to become companions from now on.

The professor … Shane states rebelliously, …asked for guts and honesty, how we look at her in the first ten minutes. I just answered the question like everyone else, Dea.

Shane turns her gaze from Dea toward Ala, like two boxers in a ring, they exchange glances to test if the opposing team is still ready to restart the fight.

Indeed, that is what I asked for. So, thank you.

Louis is still in affirmative refusal mode. Without any sign of hesitation, Ala walks over to Louis and kindly takes the chalk he is holding out to her and writes on the blackboard.

"A bounty,

a pleaser"

And finally, she decides on how to formulate the last remark without betraying her principle for never using the