Muntaha al-Rayyeh
In those days, my mother was suffering from a nightmare called the spinsterhood of her daughter who had reached the age of thirty without getting married. She would rest her chin on her hand and gaze silently at me; I knew she was thinking about me.
As far as I was concerned, it really was not such a big deal. I had refused marriage proposals that started coming my way the moment I turned twenty. That was due to the fact that the men who came to propose weren’t what I had hoped for. One was uneducated, another was repulsive with a face that, I’ll just say, didn’t bring one comfort, and he had fidgety eyes, too. A third didn’t have the money to marry me and was planning to take out a loan, a fourth was shorter than me and fat, and number five was forty-five years old at
