Hana & Hanaan | ✓

Chapter 10

We do make short talk, you ask me which shirt looks better, I say that one. I ask you if you can make me chocolate pancakes for breakfast next morning, you say you have to head out early for your community service, you'll make them on Sunday and that's just all it is.

Of course, we're sisters, we couldn't just be silent to each other for all our lives, we have to communicate because we live in the same room and if we didn't, the elders would make us sit down, talk briefly about what's bothering us and we wouldn't bother telling them what's in our heart because they don't even speak our language, they'd just make us shake our hands, hug each other, thinking to themselves, they're just kids, what do they know of life's troubles? And see, that wasn't so difficult to sort out was it?

Little do they know every person's affliction is an absolute torment on them no matter if it's just a little prick on the finger or a heartbreak over a lost sister.

And things don't sort out just like that, if only we could talk for real, meet each other's eyes, stop pretending we're okay with everything when we're not.

Allah, I can still taste burnt eggs and the bitterest taste of the cocoa we added so generously to the batter, what were we even thinking! That's right. Nashwa said: zaiqa dill khol ke! Add flavours with an open heart.

Let me snort at that!

Honestly, I miss your bakings with my tummy, tongue, heart and soul. Even though you do bake now, once in two months sometimes, it tastes heavenly but it just doesn't taste the same as it did before the Fight. I don't know if it's because it lacks your love or there's a bitterness of my own in my resentful soul that tinges my taste buds too. We're all to blame equally after all. Or at least that's what I keep telling myself whenever I think I should step forward and initiate the talk we need to talk.

Lo and behold!

Here we go again, Hanaan's memory curse activates, I remember the day you baked your first chocolate cake all by yourself, Mama just guided you from afar. You turned seven that day, I was yet to turn four in January but Allah! You have been a professional baker since you were born.

Perhaps it was genetics? From Mama to you?

What did I get? A lot of clown genes from Baba's side I think.

Which reminds me, Nashwa and I tried playing basketball today as the twins came over with her. While playing, I was wondering why the ball was getting bigger and bigger. Then it hit me.

You can roll your eyes at that but let me laugh.

So, your big day, your seventh birthday, what a tragic day it was!

You had all your ingredients laid out on the countertop, allowing the eggs and refrigerated flour to come to room temperature before you started. Mama put an apron on you and a hair net too because professionalism automatically increases quality of food. I don't think Nashwa and I even bothered washing our hands today before making the batter and stuffed our licked fingers into it multiple times too to taste if the sugar was right. Well, that's just how we roll!

So while you were setting out all the ingredients, I came into the kitchen on the agreement with Mama that I would not interfere and just watch from afar. That flew right out of my three-almost-four year old head when I saw the eggs on the counter and reached for one. Surprisingly, I did grasp onto it and for my love of eggs, I bit right into it! Let us both gag at that as we imagine it in our heads. Little Hanaan, in a tiny shirt and a diaper weighed down by gravity and its own contents, biting with her front two teeth into a raw egg and then yellow slime dripping down her front.