Born on 27th ramadan, a holy night. Under a month old, she nearly died. She was without oxygen for 15 minutes. Maybe 5, 15 seems unlikely. Her mother was holding her in the emergency room waiting room in the shitty but expensive third world private hospital. A world where money doesn't buy quality. where life is cheap. Blue. Unbreathing. while her mother screamed, nurses ran around trying to find the doctor in the middle of night - he was probably sleeping somewhere they didn't know where - her father with his flight aviation job on the other side of the country. They may have listened to a man when if he had been there, but let's not dwell on that. it was a time when women reared children, and men went away to work, and all were ok with the arrangement.
the resident was about to do a trichotomy when the emergency room doctor finally showed up. he stopped them as the scalpel was raised, and told them to administer oxygen. how had they forgotten such a basic thing. maybe her mother didn't remember it as clearly. maybe she didn't remember the story as clearly. with a combination of some drug and the oxygen, she came back. there must have been a worry about cognitive deficits. her mother never told her.
She survived. but she was different. touched by the light. before she could count, when playing card games with her grandparents and parents and older sisters, she used to often notice the King. she couldn't look at his face, it was too bright. Too much light. Just like God. She didn't know it was blasphemous, she was too little, she just knew that that kindly old man on the cards struck a chord in her soul she couldn't understand.
Then the night terrors came. she wet the bed, almost every night for seven long years. the horrors in the dark. she initially slept with her parents and that kept some of it at bay. cuddled up in the middle of her two favorite people, a valley of peace among two mountains. but then once at the breakfast table she asked them why they didn't wear clothes the night before and her father sprayed the orange juice in his mouth across the table and her mother choked on her toast, she was moved to her sisters room, her parents door locked. the terrors worsened, she tried banging on her parents room some nights, when she could make her way from the vast empty black chasm of horrors from her bed to the door and make it to the next room. she was sometimes allowed entry, sometimes not and had to often make her way back running through the black to leap on the mattress.
When she was six she learned the ayat ul qursi, and that helped with the night terrors. it allowed her to put up a wall of light around her bed. the relief. the dreams still came through, but it allowed her to rest. that's when she noticed baba. or kaka. can't believe I've forgotten his name. her jinn friend, the little one. her age, shadowing her life in a parallel existence for a little while. he was a friend. he especially liked playing with her brothers dinky cars. he disappeared eventually, probably around 12 years old. that was as far into the future she could see. something happened after that. the line on her hand was short, so she just assumed she would die. She was right in her own way. it was the death of her childhood. the echoes of that power stayed behind in little memories, deja vu, dreams of the future coming true, like way points in the darkness. but she never saw the future as clearly again then when she was a child.
she could see light in some people also. shining blindingly out of their faces, like the King of Spades at that time in the past. like that stranger at the airport luggage counter. or the boy she eventually married. their features would disappear, and a beacon of light blinded her instead of their face.
but eventually it all faded, and the only thing left was the dreams others had through her. memories of a past lived. the one she had made a dua that she wanted to see, only to see again and again humans living the same stories again and again, the cycle of life.
