2Ghassan told me he was supposed to take me straight from the airport to Grandmother’s house, but the country was in mourning, people were upset and, most importantly, it wasn’t clear how Grandmother felt about me coming back. What would she think about me arriving just as the Emir had died? Hadn’t my mother and I caused enough trouble in the past? My mother had arrived at the time of the attack on the Emir’s motorcade in the mid-1980s, I was born at the time of the plane hijacking, and we left Kuwait when the passengers were released. The fact that I had arrived at just that moment confirmed my grandmother’s belief in the curse of Josephine, Ghassan said. So my meeting with Grandmother had been postponed for a month.
Just because I took a liking to Ghassan and trusted him didn’t mean I t
