There was a lot of evil in people’s souls. The kind of evil that was even heavier than the souls themselves. And I hated how she bore it.
But my aunt got better one day when she reached a final decision: her mother should quit washing bedsheets for the nursing home and quit harvesting bunches of parsley and purslane. We lived through months of my aunt’s bickering with my grandmother and nagging her to quit her lowly work. It had gotten stuck in my aunt’s mind during her long hours of seclusion that this was the reason her fiancé had run off. My grandmother finally agreed to it under one condition. “Find yourself a job first and secure yourself in it, and then I’ll quit this work of mine which you don’t approve of.”
My aunt Fatima worked just a few months at the cookie factory—where her m
