As the plane took off, Ma felt a lump in her chest. An interval of labored breathing followed as she was set to fly far away from home—one she had known closely all her life, a family she had only grown to love, and a country that she hadn’t known much past. Carrying dreams of a newlywed, she ventured into the tales of the Promised Land her husband’s eyes spoke fondly of. Her husband.
As an unrestrained tear rolled down her cheek and grazed the silken fabric of her headscarf, dampening the corner of her eyes, he squeezed her hand in his and vowed to be back one day to the land that had given them in heaps, but much more than anything, it had given them the other.
As hours passed by and her mind scurried over scenarios of their home uninhabited, and how much of it would correspond to wishful thinking, the air hostess approached them with a trolley and a warm smile, chiming in, ‘Welcome to Saudi Arabian Airlines!’ She placed before her a small cup with six black olives dancing with the faint turbulence of the plane. Ma took one between her fingers and looked over at it – she had never before tasted an olive.
*
Third of their three, I had grown to spend my waking days in the hospital where my parents worked. It changed every two years on the whims of a contractual obligation. In the August high noon of their lives, the two rushed for their careers, the only thing Abba had known since his father died in a car crash at a delicate age, and Ma having snatched hers from the claws of her disenfranchised people. But along came a mirroring responsibility of raising a family in their thirties.
Working in tandem, the children would be woken up by the crack of dawn, yawning and irritable from their sleep cut to size by hours, washed up, dressed, and escorted along, to nowhere but the hospital that awaited. We made friends with the staff on duty, and the nurses got us cakes for birthdays. Then even, the friends we were truly intimate with were ourselves, the three of us. To run the show seamlessly, a nanny was hired.
*
Far across civilizations, tales of the ancient tree were told, that bore the fruit for a craving of salt, not sweet, that had made its way to the window of the hospital room in the green gold desert of the Kingdom. Olive trees have their roots in the cradle of civilization. Of the plant that existed long before words did, that evolved over centuries for poor, stony soils, and conditions otherwise not as conducive. Archaeologists have found the olive tree existed 20 to 40 million years ago in the geologic epoch of the Paleogene period owing to drought tolerant and domesticated conditions to thrive. It then came to man’s rescue when he cut olive branches to kindle a fire or make a weapon. With time it was revealed that the cut branches left partially covered on the ground germinated into wild olive trees. A gift to the ancient Greeks from the Gods, who prized it so, they crowned the champions of the Olympic games with a headband made from a wild olive tree branch and rewarded with richly decorated oil ampoules. The people of the Mediterranean documented their emergence from barbarism when they learned to cultivate olive trees and vines.
*
Safiya Bibi was from Indian Hyderabad, a runaway mother of six, who had come this far looking for sustenance from a husband who cost her peace. He asked of her bones to churn out money with which he would buy an elixir in exchange for his inhibitions. In return, Bibi Jan would be rewarded with a passing moment with her children, given he could tame his wicked temper. As she set foot in our house, draped in a sari that hugged her body thin as a rake, it seemed as if the cloth wrapped sloppily around her would fall to the ground if she so much as breathed. That her cluster of bones would disintegrate upon a mere touch of the hand. Bibi Jan was brought in, whose tiresome journey migrating borders was visible despite best efforts to smile wearily. She had worked houses before, but this arrangement was new for everyone involved. We had very calculated expectations of it.
*
For a brief while, the hospital corridors were distinguishable for us. The instructions were clear as the day outside – to not get in the way of the urgent matters of life. Our confines were restricted to Ma’s office. It was as ordinary as can be expected of a hospital room which was otherwise equipped with a reservoir of critical resources and knowledge. The four walls surrounding were imprinted with medical diagrams and instructions of ways around the hospital. A framed picture of the heart hung on one, that detailed ways of its functions, of how intricately it was held in place, the veins and vessels, and most of all, the strokes of colors. Then, it did not make much sense to me, let alone the words labeled incomprehensible at best. Yet having to look at it every day came to beguile me to the very core that this fist-size orb claimed our senses combined; that our hearts beat in ways bigger than our being.
*
About 2500 years ago, the olive migrated to the Ancient Romans through the Mediterranean in the bags of merchants, before trade began moving between Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Egypt, and the Arab lands, and by 1300 BC olive branches embellished the tombs of the pharaohs. The myth has it that Romulus and Remus, the twin protagonists of the Roman mythological tradition, opened their eyes for the very first time right under an olive tree. The ancient Egyptians believed instead that it was the goddess Isis who revealed the properties of the olive tree to man and taught him the art of cultivating and producing oil.
*
Of the errands Bibi Jan would run, the ones we would mutually look forward to were her fingers dripping with olive oil, massaging our dried scalps back to life. Braiding our hair with colored ribbons, she would choreograph the ritualistic baths as we stood lined up for our turn. Of the three, she would pick me to go first. It was very well around the same time that she first touched my bare skin, stripped of its cover. Her warm brown hands rubbed foaming soap through the stretch of my arms as she met my flustered glance and smiled faintly, ‘Like you, I have a daughter. I could tell what she was thinking from the look in her eyes, and that she liked her blanket warm at night, but nothing to show for it. But she and I, we’re intertwined. In my head, I braid her dangling hair every morning.’ Her words stroked my mind to make sense of the present, processing reams of disjointed data on the fly, fixing everything down to an instantaneous now. I never knew of the life she had lived until I peeked into her eyes glistening with a love she longed for. She became many things in the same sentence.
*
My sister would carry with her a book at all times, which would require her to pick only a corner and forage for ways the walls could not contain. Brother would indulge his mind, wired to unwire what might his grasp touch, and give them a structure he would be the master of. And then was I with the imagination unfettered by the laws of logic, fixated on the only outlet in the room. The window panes enclosed by a white frame were usually blotched with the occasional pattering of rain, or the frequent gush of wind that would catch the fresh raindrops and cement for itself a blob on the glass. The dappled light of the crescent sun would gleam its way through the spaces between the branches of a tree outside the window allowing sparse sunlight to gently filter through the leaves. They would ruffle with the wind and reflect the blue sky above. The cloud breaks would emanate shafts of light squishing the eye close, which would be roused by the olive tree.
*
The olive found its way to the folklore commonly known across Abrahamic religions, of the Great Flood and Noah’s voyage. In the company of a raven and a dove sent on three missions amidst the all-encompassing predicament, Noah led his people. The dove alone returned with a freshly plucked olive branch caught between the beak. For is not that what hope is? Evidence of dry land after a flood, that mayhaps a life existed beyond that which was not consumed by water, consisting of low trees, which the bird’s return indicated? What more do we love, perhaps the dove that brings them? Not returning the third time meant it had made a home of the olive tree’s twigs and branches. The flood was over, and Noah arrived at the Promised Land.
*
‘What was your home like?’ I asked her one day.
She told me of her penurious years spent on the arbitrary measure of land where her ancestors had grown up, subject to periods of slavery, and bound by needs of an unspeakable providence of sorts. Only, no God would hold the Divine light but herself. She would cover the distance with her blistered feet walking the stretched-out muddy roads to the houses of leisure where she was employed to clean, till the last speck of dust was wiped and she was freed of her obligation, albeit momentarily.
Her mind was as active as my own, whose range of feelings was as vast, who preferred the night to the day for its ability to wash over the labors of yesterday and in place restore a sense of calm all over. She enjoyed sitting by a stream of water that accentuated the transience of it all. Loved her mother in her own complicated way, and thought her family was always loud. Had a favorite dress, a favorite season, excelled at knitting, and knew, inside herself, that she was as intelligent and capable as anyone else. The love that surged through her veins exalted the struggle of her existence which had hardened the soft lines of her youthful face. Recounting, the backdrop of azan filled up the lapses of silence between us. Ours was a Holy union.
*
It needed the force of the three of us to handle the window, pulling it open. And as we did, the wind would rush in to play with our hair and bend upwards the corners of our mouth in an ear-to-ear smile, as we stood hoisted on a plastic stool hanging bare by the balance, picking fresh olives off the branch of a juvenile tree outside.
*
The Holy Quran makes the mention of figs and olives as Divine fruit, saying, ‘By the fig and the olive, and by Mount Sinai, and by this secure city, surely, We have made man in the finest order.’ Revealed at the time of Prophet Muhammad’s onslaught by the pagans, on the same ground where we sat thousands of years later, the olive tree emerged as a column of the universe, a symbol of resistance and endurance, of peace and fertility, of force and victory, and thereafter reward.
*
As the chores quadrupled, and my mother’s shifts became as many times volatile to change, an instinct of a warranted struggle swept in between the two women, who were wary of all that it took. Our hospital visits grew shorter, and sparse by the day.
The growing family meant room for one was room of another, and so Bibi Jan took me to her own bed in the facing room. It was carpet-laden from wall to wall with not much furniture, but we did not need much. Perhaps it was her appeals to remedy her solitary nights, were it for Faryal bibi to be handed over to her for the night.
*
Atop the mount, my arm would dance a wave through the slender branches, to pick the one that was just about unripe to be bitter and savory enough, and ready to stroke the creases of my palm. Like a diamond between my two fingers, it was heavy with dew and not a dent on its surface. While it camouflaged the earth so delicately, its taste was in stark contrast. A palate with pine-sharpness, salty and tangy to the tongue as I packed a fistful of olives in my pockets. It felt secret. The sky was clearly overhead. I felt secret too. It felt tremendous.
*
It is narrated in the Arab traditions that it is regarded as a holy tree named after one of Allah’s, with holy words written on the leaves, associated with light, that which lit up the lamp, whose oil would almost glow even if untouched by fire. That upon setting foot in heaven, they would thereupon find bowing before them the shadow of an olive tree.
*
As a child having a penchant for the night, I demanded of Bibi Jan her body and consciousness. Sat on the floor by the bedside in the dimly lit room as I played atop, she kept to looking on with a longing smile, sinking her eyes deep into her peaking cheekbones. It appeared as if the sub-adequate room changed in physically impossible ways. I saw in her warm brown eyes an unfettered conviction. Far away in a foreign land, we were one.
*
We would stay up all night, thinking of this moment. Terms would be decided of who would go first to pick the good ones and stuff in as many while one of us kept the time, and the other the watch – we were strictly prohibited by our father to perform these ‘gymnastics’, he would say. ‘One of you is going to fall and hit their head in ten possibly different ways, and you do not want to hear the end of it,’ he had it. He proved to be the most concerned father the world had witnessed, whose fears were as many as he knew. Most of all, he feared our curiosity.
*
Olives have been cultivated for thousands of years and the large fleshy fruit eaten today, whether green (unripe), black and preserved in oil, or the strains used in the production of olive oil, bear little resemblance to the pea-sized wild varieties. In Saudi Arabia, wild olives grow high in the mountains of the Hijaz and the Asir, close to the Yemen border. Northern Saudi Arabia is home to the largest modern olive farm in the world and Asia’s largest olive mill. Close to the Jordanian border, the Al-Jouf region – the ‘food basket of the Kingdom’ – houses thirteen million olive trees grown on a large scale. It was reported that the Saudi kingdom consumes more than 30,000 tons of olive oil, while the company produces around 15,000 tons only. The region celebrates the olive as a staple every year in a festival for weeks. Many exhibitors come from the larger Arab Gulf region to display their olive products.
*
*
Soon enough, the visits to the hospital drew to an end altogether. Ma was pregnant again. We lived in a ten-storey apartment building that came with grilled windows that opened up to taller buildings. Not alone were the laws restricting us from living a life of ownership in a world of substance, our ingenuity was thwarted. It kept us from growing a garden in the backyard of our own house. The olive tree was gone.
*
The olive tree rose to prominence as a symbol of peace in the modern Arab world. Alongside, it also warranted economic power to the agriculture sector in the Arab countries. The olive tree has been met with violence from illegal Israeli settlers and the military, preventing Palestinians from harvesting their olives. Around 100,000 Palestinian families are estimated to rely on these trees as a source of income. Nearly half of all cultivated land in the occupied West Bank and Gaza is planted with more than 10 million olive trees of mostly native, drought-resistant varieties. However, Palestinian farmers are prevented from reaching their ancestral lands by Israeli security forces, who steal their produce and agricultural equipment and destroy their olive trees. It isn’t sustenance alone. The olive tree is tied to the root of the Palestinian people as their jugular vein. ‘Even if we are at home, our heart is out there beating on the hills and plains where the olive trees are rooted,’ their resilience echoes.
*
It was periodically so that we would frequent Pakistan in the summers, and be back. The first it happened within the grasp of my consciousness, my world shook in a necessary, incessant manner, that which was beyond irreconcilable logic. Bibi vowed to come back for me, and I layered the membranes of my heart with her words. Our union was promised. Until one day we left to never return. That summer went in perpetuity. One unknowing day she was relieved of her duties, paperwork filed, and off she went to govern her own destiny, I was later told. We never kept in touch.
The wind of the East had slammed the window shut. She was and then wasn’t, who loved and was then buried in the memory of oblivion.
*
An olive tree lives for over 2,000 summers.
Mandir Gali | مندر گلی 