***

For a long time Nafisa had been silent.

The telephone beside her bed had been taken off the hook and was wilting away like a decaying jasmin branch.

It was in one of those nights that she had decided to assume the cover name of Jasmin. In those days everyone needed a cover name to survive, a name that would allow a person to dissolve into smoke on a moment's notice, enabling them to dissolve into another existence, and when the possibilities of that existence had been exhausted, another existence became necessary again.

Nafisa's new existence was the night.

She had covered all mirrors in her little room with black cloth, on which, in red letters, she wrote notes to herself.

These notes were obscure enough for no possible visitor to decipher their meaning, for no intercepting agency to find any relevance in them, and she had long ceased to receive visitors anyway.

They read like: "5 o'clock in the afternoon", "When the snake meets the nightingale", "I greet you without knowing you" or "Not even you, oh Shaghab". Obscure, I told you, esteemed reader, completely obscure.

There was a time when Nafisa had been translating early 19th century Canadian writers, or some such thing, but she had given up on that too because she would get lost in the trail of their stories and by the time she reached page 30, she had forgotten what page 3 was about.

Unbeknown to her, the same thing had happened to the writers but that is a fact of little relevance here.

At other times, she had been asked to teach grammar at one High School or other. But her students irritated her by turning grammar rules into answers to questions she had never asked, and at the end of it all she woke up one bright morning to find that she herself had forgotten the rules. 

From that moment onward, her lessons became increasingly absurd games of hide and seek, with the questions and answers all mixed up and the students, each exceeding the other in sly brilliance, pretending to learn what she was pretending to teach. Eventually, when one night she woke up from an unsettling dream about lizards, only to find one of them in her bed, all covered in a long black veil and speaking thus: "Mine is a long, sad tale, but who knows the story - ah, none knows my heart but this dark, flowing veil" - well, it was then that she decided to stop leaving the house.

It must be said to her credit that in the immediate aftermath of the event she had sought to find out the meaning of this unusual encounter by consulting a renowned professor from the Department of Psychology. But when the professor, instead of analysing the deeper meaning of veiled lizards, insinuated that some vacuous spaces in her love life needed to be filled and suggested in all earnest that his sessions with her were to be paid for with kisses, she was quick to call the whole thing off. Perhaps she might have reported the incident, launching a formal complaint with the Department of Sexual Integrity, for it did occur, did it not, to some extent, to represent a professional misdemeanour on the part of the renowned professor - but then, who would believe a woman who had forgotten the rules of grammar and was encountering veiled lizards in her bed?

The professor, of course, would have denied everything, and who knows? perhaps he was the lizard himself. But let me assure my dear reader who by now will have proceeded to adjust the cute little jewel that graces her nose, that the lizard wasn't him at all.

Now here was dear Nafisa, alone in her room. No telephone. No lizard. Nothing. Only those obscure messages. 

Now, outside of her room, in the neighbours' courtyard, there was a cock that crowed at night. But Nafisa had got tired of paying heed to things like that.

Suddenly, oh reader! oh horror! the phone, off the hook though it was, began to ring. What a nightmare! Oh fearful reader, allow me to hold your hand (but do remember to pull a piece of your hijab over it so as to ward off indecency). I'm here to comfort you. No matter how bad it gets. I am here.

What happened then? Do you really want to know? There was a voice. It spoke to her, through the receiver, making it all seem almost ordinary, except for the fact that the receiver was off the hook. It said: "Nafisa". Not Jasmin or anything, mind you, "Nafisa". Nafisa was what it said, and that was quite all. It brought tears to her eyes. It is always a shock, under such circumstances, to hear one's name spoken. But there was more to it. Yes, there was something else. The voice, you see, resembled a voice she had known, that of a kitten she had nourished and which later had escaped her care, or that of a forgotten love. Not love again! But yes, love. Love. Semantically, love denotes the unsettling feeling of being intensely drawn towards another person without knowing why. And exactly that is what makes love such a problem. It is a feeling of helplessness. It is a feeling of feeling. Even if, syntactically, putting it this way, defies the rules of grammar. 

Defiance, yes, Nafisa was defiant. But she couldn't remember against what. So far removed was that one time existence from her now; and so she was defiant mainly against love. In the Ministry for Sexual Integrity love was usually likened to sugar, put out for the purpose of attracting flies in order to keep them stuck, and so love, whenever it had to be mentioned, was to be pronounced with inverted commas, and the mention of sugar was outlawed altogether. Unfortunately, Nafisa was not without a fondness for sugar, which was another reason why she was afraid.

Now, what do you do if someone calls out your name on the phone? As for Nafisa, she decided to close her eyes. That way she could pretend that the world wasn't there, and hence neither could there be a voice.

The voice, however, became an eye, and its gaze reached into her in a way that couldn't be ignored. It was the eye of a horse that had fallen. It was the eye of a teenage girl whose family had disowned her on account of her having dared, in a rebellious mood, to mention the word "sugar". They had thrown her out onto the streets, where she was now condemned to eke out a living as an illegal sugar vendor, despised by one and all. But her eyes, however much defiance she put into them, were the eyes of a lamb led to the slaughter. And that indeed was her ultimate fate. And so, thought Nafisa, is mine if I dare to look. But how to escape? Even shutting her lids, even pressing palms or fists against them didn't help. Well, what would you do?

She decided to respond to the voice in order to kill it. For it is in such ways that the female mind works. True, she would have to report an incident of such proportions to the Committee for the Killing of Unwanted Voices and her challenge would be how to convince the committee that that voice was truly unwanted, that no secret perverse joy was derived from its presence, that this was no perfidious ploy conceived with the intention to cause embarrassment to the committee (the head of which was that renowned kissing professor) - but there was no choice, after all.

So, esteemed reader (are you still there?), Nafisa said: "Hello?"

It was quite a shock to hear her own voice. It made her cough. One might even say that the sound of her voice embarrassed her, as it were. It sounded like? Sugar? Oh, reader, let's not mention the word! 

What happened then?

Well, nothing.

See?

"Hello?", said Nafisa.

Silence.

I must be dreaming, she thought.

She began to feel a lump - in her throat? No, in her left breast. But let's not mention that either.

It was like in one of those maths lessons where they ask you: "What's the root of this and what's the square of that?" But the mentioning of roots and squares had recently been outlawed as well, for reasons not exactly remembered: something to do with the upcoming elections.

Nafisa lashed out at the phone, that is at its receiver that glittered in the moonlight, off the hook, silent and stark.

"No beatings, please", said the voice.

"Hello?", said Nafisa.

Silence.

It's hard to communicate like this.

"Who are you?", she asked, scolding herself for engaging in this impossible dialogue.

"Who am I?", echoed the voice, changing the pronoun. "Am I not...Nafisa?"

"That is a nonsensical answer", Nafisa remarked.

"Is it not perhaps a nonsensical question too?", mused the voice.

"There is no such thing as Nafisa", mused Nafisa in turn.

"Can there then be such a thing as a voice", asked the voice.

"Leave me alone", replied Nafisa.

"All right", said the voice and retreated back into the silence whence it had come.

And days and nights passed, and the lump Nafisa felt within her seemed to grow. It would give her pain sometimes.

At the worst of her pain, she would even miss the voice. 

But there was nothing one could do, was there? Pain is a part of life. We all must survive. We all must vote for the right candidate. We must report to the committees and renew our permits of existence in due time.

We all are strangers in this world, and this is the story of one such stranger called Nafisa.