Hiding in Plain Sight by Nuruddin Farah Page B

before her ninth month.
    Yet Hurdo was aware that life couldn’t go on like this forever, with the three of them continually in one another’s hair, and she knew she would have to put a stop to some of Aar’s boyish mischief. In self-admonishment, she repeated to herself the Somali proverb that a parent must refrain from showing her smiling teeth to her children lest her children start showing their naked bums. Gradually, she began to introduce some order into their lives.
    Bella continued to thrive. The world is at my daughter’s service and everyone in it is at her feet, Hurdo would say. Other children seemed to be infatuated with her. They threw tantrums when their parents arrived to fetch them home, crying their hearts out and insisting on staying longer and speaking of their wish to sleep in Bella’s room. Yet the moment Aar came home from school, Bella lost interest in them. Sometimes she would shoo them away disdainfully so that she could follow Aar around, going where he went and sitting where he sat, endlessly telling him things. At five or six, she threatened to kill any girls she imagined as rivals for Aar’s affection. In his absence, she often complained of feeling hunger. Asked what she craved, she would say that she longed for his return. Yet no amount of his indulgence seemed to satisfy her; Hurdo said he had the patience of a saint.
    Hurdo spoke of her daughter’s attachment as a form of infatuation, comparing it to an infatuation she remembered from her own childhood. “When I was three,” Hurdo recounted to Marcella, “I felt drawn to a boy my age. My parents and the boy’s parents were amused at first. Then came the time when my parents and the boy’s parents quipped that the boy and I would marry.”
    Marcella said, “Still, to experience love as hunger is a brilliant way of dealing with a complicated emotion. How apt! Your daughter is very smart.”
    â€œAmong Somalis,” Hurdo explained, “love is looked upon as an affliction, a sickness for which there is no cure. We believe that love is unattainable because true desire is impossible.”
    Marcella thought that Bella’s childhood crush on her brother might make her the kind of woman men fell for and women were wary of, even hated by them. And Hurdo too worried that the intensity of Bella’s feelings for her brother were such that she might never allow herself to fall in love with anyone else.
    But what was there to do? They would just have to see what would happen. And the bond between Bella and Aar stayed unbroken until Aar fell in love with a girl in Rome, and Bella went ballistic. Hurdo’s every attempt to explain things only made matters worse. Always a bad eater, Bella became anorexic, in the terrifying grip of a hunger that to her was synonymous with pining.
    Eventually, her despair abated, when, thanks to a photograph of her that appeared in a fancy Sunday supplement published in Rome, she became a celebrity and began to earn a lot of money as a teen model. Bella had the uncanny ability to make her eyes flame a metallic green, and what with her exceptional looks and captivating smile, several agencies vied to represent her. After consulting Hurdo, Fiori negotiated a very favorable agreement with her with one of the best-known of them. Hurdo was not surprised when Digaaleh rang them from Mogadiscio, raising his objections, disconsolately comparing Bella’s work and the exploitation of her image to prostitution. Hurdo let him fume, seeing his reaction as that of a typical Somali father and knowing he could do nothing to stop Bella from pursuing her heart’s pleasure, while earning good money to boot.
    Digaaleh, however, insisted she had misunderstood his intentions. “Essentially, it depends whether one sees Bella as Somali and therefore Muslim—and Muslims don’t go into modeling or exploit their image in exchange for cash—or Italian and