Two Women in One by Nawal El Saadawi Page B

was entirely different. She felt defeated, and when she saw her house in the distance her heart sank, as though she were a lifer being led to prison, driven by an irresistible force as strong as steel. She felt chains around her hands, feet, wrists, ankles and neck, pulling her mercilessly towards that small red house.
    Her home, her room and her bed were now no longer her own. Objects, like people, change not only in form but in meaning too. We never know the reality of things: we see only what we are aware of. It is our consciousness that determines the shape of the world around us — its size, motion and meaning.
    She had thought of her home as a safe refuge from the crowds on the tram and at college, from the sun’s heat and the winter cold, a place where her father would give her her daily pocket money, her mother would feed her, where her brothers’ features mirrored her own. Everything around her evoked serenity. But now the house had become a prison, her father a guard, sitting on his bamboo chair watching her every movement, and trying to detect her secrets from her expression. Her personal papers in the drawers of her desk and under her pillow were covered with the prints of her mother’s fingers, searching for her secrets, looking for love letters or her boyfriend’s photograph. Her sisters’ eyes besieged her with questions. Even worse were the almost daily visits of her uncle, his wife and their son — the business school graduate who since childhood had been picked as a potential suitor, with his silly smile and his murderous idiotic happiness.
    Now she was sure that she did not belong to this family. The blood in her veins was not theirs. If blood was all that connected her to them, then she had to question that bond. She had to question the very blood that ran in her veins and theirs. Her mother had not given birth to her. Maybe she was a foundling, discovered outside the mosque. Even if her mother had conceived her — and whether or not her father had played a part in this — it did not mean that she belonged to them. Blood ties, she felt, were no bond at all, since they were no one’s choice. It was pure chance that she was her mother and father’s daughter; neither she nor they had chosen.
    She did not know how she had arrived at this point of view, but she was sure of this one conclusion, that only human choice gives this bond any meaning. And from this she concluded something else: she wanted to establish some kind of bond with Saleem, something that would make him stop and come towards her when he saw her among thousands of others, something that would make her, alone among thousands, stop and come towards him. This deliberate movement towards him was the only thing that would give meaning to that bond, the only thing that would give her life meaning — otherwise what sense did it have?
    She had had no clear purpose. She had never known exactly what she wanted from life. All she knew was that she did not want to be Bahiah Shaheen, nor be her mother and father’s daughter; she did not want to go home or to college, and she did not want to be a doctor. She was not interested in money, nor did she long for a respectable husband, children, a house, a palace or anything like that. What did she want then?
    Bahiah Shaheen’s mind was not her own. But she had another mind. She could feel it in her head, a swelling thing that filled her skull, impishly and secretly telling her that all these things were worthless and that she wanted something else, something different, unknown but definite, specific yet undefined, something she could draw with the tip of her pen on the blank sheet of paper like an individual black line. But when she looked at it, it became a long line stretching as far and wide as the horizon, with no beginning and no end.
    She wandered the streets like a lost soul. Like a particle of air lost among millions of others floating in a void, she surrendered herself to the wind and was