Voice Recording 04

Recorded: 24th July Wednesday

Merhaba, Hana!

Relating is easier than always praising; maybe this is why Nashwa and I get along so well. Your life looks easy, Hana, from my eyes and Nashwa's eyes, it looks easy. You study all night, you get an A. You work out all month, you lose weight. You mix ingredients in a bowl and put it to bake, from the oven comes out a Tres Leches milk cake. You smile at people around you, they smile right back at you, you're easy to love, and easily love too.

Nashwa and I aren't like that.

We'd rather egg people who are too happy, we burn up the kitchen if we light up a match stick, we put up too many conditions when giving out love because loving us isn't easy in the first place.

And you're probably wondering, really, Hanaan? You're always laughing and smiling and cracking lame jokes yourself, why be so depressed on here but, Hana, let me tell you, the pain I hide behind these laughters and smiles it stares back at me in the mirror and what I see in my mirror, it kills me every day.

FYI, I'm not so stable as I sound on these recordings, I recorded my entire breakdown yesterday, full of crying and sobbing and wailing and bawling and sniffles and just me calling out your name in the darkness. I deleted it of course because it will only pain you, it will put a burden on you of forgiving me because I'm suffering but I won't do this to you anymore, I will not take away your right for being angry on me, I deserve your anger, your wrath, your mercy denied.

I deserve your worst, Hana.

Or maybe, I don't even deserve that anymore.

Because see, it's hard to meet your eyes these days when Waheed has sent me heart eyes and fire emojis on the pictures I have sent to him. Something in my chest stirs when he sends such emojis and messages saying ooooh so pretty and other ones like sooo gorg baby girl. Of course I knew instantly when it started, a friend, a guy friend isn't supposed to message you like that and that thing that stirred in me gave me the signal to fricking stop already, unfollow him, block him, end this whole stupid thing but I don't stop. A part of me likes it.

But even before this, Hana, it was hard to meet your eyes some mornings, when I'd wake you in the middle of the night, skipping on my feet, shaking you by the shoulders in urgency, begging you to take me to the washroom because I was finding it difficult to turn the door knob by myself. If not the door knob then some other issue, often I have wet my clothes and in shame woken you up and you, already tired and exhausted from late night study regimes would still clean up the mess, wash up for me and never utter a single word to anyone in the family, even me. And something like this happens at least a month.

I'm fourteen. Could anything be more humiliating?

I love dining out with the family, Hana, visiting fancy restaurants where you're supposed to eat with a fork and knife and chopsticks, where the ambience is all about dim lights, fragrant air, sweet violin music soothing the heart and romance all about but the nasty stares we get there when I spill rice all about taking my spoon to my mouth or splatter sauce all over my face when the fork holding steak hits my cheek instead, it makes you all go uneasy and though you don't show it, I can feel it in the way you all stiffen, keep your eyes to your plates and make small talk in that instance.

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.

They had their limits though, the teachers. They found their ways of getting back at me. One day a teacher called me up in the middle of the lecture when I had interrupted her and told me to write the alphabets on the board. Of course I can't write, I make weird symbols, my wrist just does not cooperate and I'd long given up on writing anyways. So when I stood there unmoving and she insisted and I made a joke of myself unable to write even the letter 'a' and the same back bencher boys sniggered at me, the teacher said to me : you can't even write abcd, Hanaan, the basics that kindergarten kids can. If you're still in my class, don't think it's because you're deserving of it, just my tolerance instead.

It made me think that day, am I deserving of anything at all?

Is everyone just tolerating me?

Do you know what I did, in the next few months, Hana, when I was promoted to grade seven in the same 'tolerance'? Of course you don't, absolutely no one knows.

But it's fricking time people know what poison swirls in my own heart too.

Hana, grade seven is the upgrade to grade six, not just intellectually but emotionally too, all up and coming teenagers discovering the attractions of their hearts and Allah put a bit of prettiness in me too, I like to think, I have soft cheeks like you, my eyes are slightly bigger and they twinkle too much and my eyebrows are more bushier than yours and I make comical expressions that make me look happy, light and also pretty. Perhaps that's what attracted some boys to me so when we'd confess out of our classmates in Truth and Dare, who liked who, a guy told me there's another guy in another section that wants to tell me something today in lunch break near the old abandoned rest rooms and knowing it would be a confession of love only, I waited there alone.

He was awkward, he tried flattery but it didn't work. He groped me, Hana, he did, asking me was I really a girl because I had a boy's name and made good friends with boys too. He confirmed for himself by his hand, I was indeed a girl.

I came home that day, crying, I buried myself in my pillows and my duvet, I didn't eat or talk, I just cried and crying did not help me because I didn't have Anna Sofia to hold onto, I could hold her and cry and forget all my pains, somehow my tears never streaked her white fur with their darkness the way they do to everyone else. But Anna Sofia was not there.

I went to school anyhow, next day, I wouldn't be Handicapped Hanaan remember and I waited again by the old restrooms knowing he would come again and this time I had planned to give him a good kicking where I knew it would hurt.

But guess what, Hana?

He brought some friends with him.

It was messy, they looked me up and down and questioned the same thing, was I a girl really or had I been born a boy who grew up into a girl, you know what they meant and for grade seven Hanaan it was so humiliating when they guffawed at that, matching my clumsiness to the overacting of the fake intersex people that beg for money with disturbing movements of their hands at every cross roads in our city. I thank God to this day my tongue functions well because I screamed in that moment, I thrashed my lungs out and a peon nearby came over, the boys ran away.

So did I, Hana. So did I.

I ran away because I didn't want this matter to reach the principal, didn't want it to spread in school like wildfire because you and Nashwa were seniors there too, didn't want our parents to hear of it and look at me in the wrong way. It was my fault from the beginning, wasn't it? I should never have gone there.

Of course I refused to go to school after that day, never told Mama and Baba why.

I have been stuck at home ever since and when they tried transferring me to an all-girls school instead, I'd come back home, glum and dumb because the girls there are even more vicious. They'd bully me, tell me as part of a joke I could only marry a handicapped man, they weren't wrong either.

Do you think I'll even ever get married, Hana?

I'd probably drop or accidentally kill my kids if it ever reached till there. How would I cook for my husband, would he not be repulsed by my messy eating? Would he be cooperative of me dirtying my clothes and bed some nights? Would he cheat on me then, tired of putting up with me?

Why would someone choose me in the first place anyways?

So tell me, Hana, when I still smile for the sake of our Mama who thinks it's her fault I am the way I am, when I still joke back with Baba who works endlessly so he can afford the best medical treatments for me that just don't work and when I try to be happy with Dadi, do you really think I'm happy and content, and full of love for myself on the inside?

Because I'm not, Hana.

Do you think it's easy for me to always look at you, so successful, so easily attaining what you want, so pretty and painless for those around and not sometimes, just feel a twinge of envy for you? Especially with all that failure running through my own veins?

Again, just as Nashwa's story is understandable but that doesn't make her behaviour acceptable, it applies to me too but what do we do with ourselves then?

We team up of course, we like to watch movies together of course, we relate to one another and we don't understand your casual life pains because truly, they're not like ours.

But, Hana, I do try. I do try to be good and positive.

And I'll gladly take the pain all over again, of bruising all four fingers of my hand in the door like I did when I was two years old. The pain of scraping my knees, palms and cheek on the road, skin peeled off, blood trickling and then screaming to the burn of antiseptic on it. The pain of fracturing my elbow when I was four, that wasn't so bad because you decorated the cast with small flowers with your markers and stickers, making it not look so bland anymore. The pain of breaking my front tooth at the age of five, when I hit my mouth at the corner of Mama's dressing table. I'll take the pain of pulling out my entire toe nail when I tried cutting it by myself at the age of six. I'll take the pain of twisting my ankle and having it swollen as big an apple when I was seven.

I'll take all the pain, Hana, I'll take it gladly if I can take away the pain I bring to those around me. The pain to Mama of giving birth to a defected child, for putting up with my tantrums when the insecurities breach the walls of my heart, for putting up with my mood swings when she home schools me. The pain to Baba for the endless medical trips and bills, him trying out new expensive neurologists for a possible cure to me, the pain to Dadi of humiliation in public, for trampling the flowers in her garden, for getting my feet stuck in her yarn and undoing the almost complete sweater she has woven.

But most of all the pain to you. How do I take it away?

For making you think your perfectness makes me feel imperfect and yes it does but you're not to blame because when you try being imperfect for my sake, it makes me feel even more worse and wasn't this the reason we fought two years ago?

I think back to all the distress I keep causing you, taking your time for when you spoon feed me, when I call you in the bathroom to help rinse the shampoo off me, when I tell you I've wet my clothes all over again or stained my bed sheet because I wasn't careful in preparing myself for the stains. I know it must be beyond humiliating for you to clean up after me, wash my soiled clothes for me, it must be tiring, exhausting and incredibly disturbing too but you do it anyhow, Hana.

Who does this as part of routine when they're seventeen, turning eighteen soon?

Even Nashwa never had to change the twins' diaper when they were born, but you have to do work like that even though I'm now fourteen.

And then there's the emotional baggage on you that comes with me. Not once have you invited over your college friends to our place probably because you're ashamed of me. You must want to be their host too but you must be scared I'll do something embarrassing or reveal all that you do for me and they'd distance themselves from you.

And then all the times, Hana, that you have to hold in your rage for me, the time when I dropped a book on your three dimensional working model of a ferris wheel that you built with Ahmad Mamu over three days of relentless effort and on the day before submission too. You couldn't say anything to me other than telling me, I should have been careful because I didn't have control over my own hands and feet, mostly you just took out your frustration on Mama for insisting you didn't submit until the deadline and Baano for keeping the model where she had.

You cried that day and many such days.

When Dadi took us to the salon when you were ten and I was seven and had my long hair chopped to a short bob and I cried because I loved my long hair but this had to be done because I couldn't take care of it, it was a tangled mess, got infected with lice too, you couldn't bear my grief and had yours cut short too, just hardly reaching your chest. And you discovered then, your hair doesn't grow back fast, to this day, it just stays till your chest.

And then the stunt that you pulled with your grades that caused the Fight, urgh, my entire existence pricks with fury on reminiscing that day because it was the day I discovered Anna Sofia, my beloved cat, my emotional therapy, my lonely times' friend, my mind's distraction, my pain's remedy had not run away when I was eight.

She had died. Underneath me.

And for five years you all kept it a secret from me.

Tell me now, Hana, how do I live with myself?

two more and we return to Hana again. i can't hope you're enjoying this but i do hope you're feeling the pain. 

can Hanaan have a happy ending with this condition of hers? what do you think?

𝓂𝒶𝓃𝒶𝒽𝒾𝓁.