Hana & Hanaan | ✓

Chapter 12

It makes me feel uncivilized, uncultured, uneducated.

Tell me, do my smiles really look so happy now? It must take a lot for me to put up such a show.

So we stick to home deliveries but do I not flip through the magazines, do I not let my heart imagine myself in the open sky barbecue restaurants and sea side food places where all the high elite class come to dine out, dressed to impress, as I scroll through their pictures on Facebook?

The way you go through websites and campus pictures of Harvard, Yale, Brown and other Ivy League universities abroad but know you can never get in because you're tied here to me and they're all just a dream too far out of reach?

It kills the heart, so very slowly, a blunt knife, slicing through the thick muscle, it bleeds then but it doesn't heal, it chokes me up but you're there looking okay, dressing up every morning and going out with your friends, to an orphanage someday or an old home or a street school or a mall or cinema on the occasional weekend, dining out too in the places I wish to be.

How am I supposed to live with it? My disability?

And forever too? No cure, no remedy for it.

Tell me, Hana. All the basic functions you can do with your hands, I can't do those either, it's hard to study without practicing, I cannot do math all in my head, it takes me so long to just write down my name and that too with so many scrawls all over it, I can't eat properly, I call out for you some days to help me put my arm through my shirt sleeve and I don't wear jeans because dear God, how would I button and unbutton me?

I can't cook, I can't clean up after me, I can't press the buttons on the remote in the first time only, and typing on a phone or keyboard is a total disaster for me. I trip in public places and have to act cool and casual and funny to cover it up. Flash a charming smile and mutter something like, oh dear, so clumsy of me. I can't do my own hair, tie shoelaces, I can't drink water in glass cups because sometimes they slip from my hands and break on my feet.

Let's not even mention social gatherings.

The way you feel people judging you for your weight, it's worse with me. They judge all my movements, they judge the way I eat, they judged me at school and when in grade one I didn't have to write down lectures or submit homework or give exams, my classmates bullied me for being rich and paying the principal money. By grade three they had some sense but boys took this as a chance to pull my ponytail, hide my books and pencils and girls talked behind my back, calling me disgraceful, unlike a ballerina. Then they began to make friends with me, sweet talked me, told me I was pretty and had a charming personality, they helped me when I fell, sometimes they insisted they would do a worksheet for me even though I didn't have to submit one and they forcefully fed me my lunch by their hand. And later, when I wasn't there, they'd group up and show off who helped Handicapped Hanaan the most, my class teacher would give that particular girl a prize.

It was humiliating for me, Hana.

To be Handicapped Hanaan.

By sixth grade I was done with people's pity. I didn't want to be Handicapped Hanaan, I wanted to be the cool Hanaan, I wanted to be Humorous Hanaan and so I became it but often, humour comes at the price of someone else's embarrassment. Sixth grade is often the grade girls and boys become 'knowledgeable' about things they shouldn't know, the age when they begin to harbour feelings, begin to mature physically.

I took it upon myself to be the centre of attention, to be the class clown, Hanaan with hair that reached till her shoulders only, rocked on her chair. I interrupted the teacher between the lecture and asked questions that intended double meanings. I answered back to teachers and asked stupid questions that made everyone laugh around me. When the teacher scolded the backbencher boys — my BFFs those days — for not doing their homework, I defended them in the most hilarious ways which just angered and embarrassed my teachers more. I was rude and I was crude but hey, I was everyone's favourite too.