Jasmine and Fire (20 page)

Back at home, I water the wheat-seed plant I’m growing in my window before I climb into bed. My plant is looking healthy now. It’s three inches tall, a miniature meadow of wheatgrass blades, sturdy and still growing. This kind of plant actually has a name, Adonis, after an ancient Greek tradition of planting wheat seeds to celebrate the festival of Adonis.

As I sprinkle water on my little Adonis, I realize that I know nothing about Saint Barbara, who inspired the December holiday in Lebanon for which this homegrown shrub is also a symbol. I wonder, is the California city of Santa Barbara named after the same saint? I do a little online research before bed and learn that the California city is indeed named after her, and that Saint Barbara is the patron saint of military engineers, artillerymen, and miners—in other words, according to a Wikipedia entry, “those who work with explosives.”

Big surprise Saint Barbara has her own holiday in Lebanon. Growing this little wheat-seed plant is, it turns out, a symbolic two-for-one: the artillery god Saint Barbara and the debauchery god Adonis rolled into one. The quintessential Beirut shrub.

In the
two weeks of December before Christmas, the social plans keep whirling. One Saturday night I go to my cousin Shireen’s birthday party, which starts with a dinner of grilled
steaks and Malbec wine at a dark, noisy Argentinean restaurant in Gemmayzeh, and ends with hours of dancing to a hip-hop deejay at a bar. Another night Karim and Hala invite me over for
kibbeh bi’sayniye
, a dish I love, a labor-intensive Lebanese classic. It’s like a giant savory pie: the crust is made from ground lamb and bulgur shaped into a big circle, instead of the meatball shapes of the hors-d’oeuvre-style kibbeh, and stuffed with a layer of spiced ground beef, fried pine nuts, and strips of caramelized onion. Then it’s baked until crunchy on top and served with mint-spiked yogurt to spoon over the slices, cut in triangles just like pie. The dinner gathering is small and relaxed, and the other guests there are Karim’s friend Parag, an author who’s in Beirut this week to give a talk at a conference; and Nicholas, a Beirut expat writer from New York who owns a bar in the Mar Mikhael neighborhood near Gemmayzeh. After dinner, we sit in the living room over more glasses of wine, and the subject turns to whether Lebanon is likely to have another war soon—Beirut’s version of cocktail party small talk. The feeling is, probably not right now, but eventually yes.

The postdinner lounging session ends on a lighter note, as we talk about holiday plans, and I leave with a little more optimism that bombs will stay at bay for now. But as I walk outside, I notice the skies look ominous. After a long drought, it’s raining like mad here tonight, and the wet weather is making the high-forties temperature feel colder. On my five-minute walk home from Karim and Hala’s, I’m drenched waist to toe, my umbrella twisted and wrecked within seconds. But I’m glad to see this rain. Lebanon is parched and needs it. An epidemic of forest fires has ravaged parts of Lebanon and Israel over the past weeks. The thunder tonight is explosive and relentless, some of the loudest I’ve heard in my life.

When Mona and Jia-Ching land in Beirut later in the week to get ready for their wedding, their plane touches down in the middle of another deafening thunderstorm. I take them out to dinner the night after, for a quiet catch-up session. The last time I saw Mona was in California more than a year ago, and I’ve been missing her vivaciousness and sunny warmth. We go to an Armenian restaurant near Gemmazyeh and proceed to overorder like crazy—my weakness, always—feasting on small kibbehs stuffed with eggplant, and kebabs with a sour cherry sauce, and the tiny Armenian dumplings called
manti
, twisty-shaped, filled with minced beef, and topped with yogurt sauce. For dessert we sample delicate morsels of the restaurant’s sweet-and-savory confections: candied eggplant, sugary walnuts, glazed chickpeas, and dollops of rose jam. Over dinner, we talk about plans for the coming week: a bachelorette party for Mona, a prewedding luncheon for relatives and family friends at a swank hotel, then a small vows ceremony for immediate family, followed by a huge party. Three days’ worth of festivities, and lots to plan still. As we eat, Mona’s cell phone lights up every few seconds.

Ilham, a cousin who lives in Boston, has also just arrived in Beirut. We grew up almost like sisters during the war; she and her brother, Kamal, lived directly upstairs, on the fifth floor of this building, with their mother, Nouhad, after their dad, my maternal uncle, died young of a heart attack. Ilham and I have continued our close friendship through the years with long-distance phone calls and e-mails. When we’re both on the East Coast, we jump on the bus to visit each other a few times a year.

During her holiday break in Beirut this week, she’s staying upstairs, in the fifth-floor apartment with Nouhad. Having Ilham in the building again is a joyous flashback, and when I
stop by to welcome her back the morning after she arrives, I’m instantly comforted to see her face, her creamy complexion and honey-brown hair glowing as always. Ilham is an accomplished, well-spoken academic in her professional life, but when we’re together, we quickly get silly, giggling and making funny faces at each other. We reminisce about the
Disney Disco
record we used to dance to in my bedroom—despite the pleas of our disco-hating older cousins—and about all the storage rooms and nooks we discovered in the building during our hide-and-seek games, before our families fled the war.

Today is a weekday, but Ilham and I are headed to brunch together at Umayma’s: since it’s the Muslim holiday of Ashura, it’s a day off in Lebanon. Umayma has invited Nouhad—they’re old friends from the neighborhood—along with Ilham, me, and a few other guests. The holiday honors the death of the Prophet Muhammad’s grandson Ali and is mostly commemorated by Shiites, but Lebanese Sunnis often consider it either an optional fasting day or a time to get together with family and friends. Bushra and Ziad are there when we arrive, and also my great-uncle Cecil, who is visiting from London and has known Umayma for decades, since she’s a childhood friend of my mom’s. It’s a typically laid-back and festive Ras Beirut reunion, old friends and family across generations and sects. Umayma and Nasser have put together a beautiful meze and set out a pot of
ful mudammas
—broad beans stewed in garlic, cilantro, and olive oil—which they serve with a tomatoey hot sauce on the side. We all relax and nurse cups of Arabic coffee for a couple of hours after lunch, lounging in the toasty living room, the temperature outside wintry and wet again, store awnings flapping in the wind.

The following Friday is Mona’s bachelorette party, and I’m
one of the crew in charge of organizing the event. Mona insisted she didn’t want a debauched night at a raucous Gemmayzeh club. She’d prefer something more original and ideally involving food. Since Mona loves to cook, I suggest doing a group cooking class followed by dinner at Tawlet, the Lebanese restaurant. I call to book the party, and with the help of a few of Mona’s friends, we choose in advance a menu of dishes we want to make. A group of fifteen of us convene in front of the restaurant’s open kitchen on the evening of the party, and a cooking instructor named Ahlam leads us into a fast-paced, hands-on class covering ten dishes, including
makanek
—spicy finger-size lamb sausages—and
sayyadiyeh
, fried fish resting on rice that’s been cooked in a rich sauce of fish-head stock and meltingly sweet onions.

During the entire two-hour class, everyone is rushing around, trying to watch Ahlam and chat with each other at the same time, laughing, distracted, doing more socializing than cooking. Mona’s friends have traveled from the States, Europe, and Dubai to be here, and they’re dying to catch up. To cook, too, and to eat, but it’s been months or years since some of them have seen one another. I’m excited to see Mona so happy, her bright blue eyes sparkling, and to feel so much energy in the room. I do manage to concentrate long enough to come away with a few techniques for making better baba ghanoush, and I also learn how to make
shish barak
, small doughy pockets stuffed with lamb and floating in warm garlic-and-mint-spiked yogurt.

Afterward we sit down to eat, and thankfully Ahlam has finished the dishes that we all only partly contributed to in our frenzied talking and socializing. The sayyadiyeh in particular is one of the best I’ve had, and though Ahlam has pulled together a
gorgeous platter of it out of our not-terribly-helpful contributions, we destroy it in minutes, going back for multiple servings.

The Sunday night right before I leave for Christmas is the main event: Mona’s wedding and the big party afterward. Earlier that day was the
katb al kitab
, the Muslim ceremony where a couple exchanges vows in front of their immediate family. Jia-Ching’s parents flew in from Taiwan to be here for it. After the lavish prewedding luncheon I’d attended the day before for relatives and family friends, tonight I’m looking forward to the blowout party, planned mostly for the younger set, the cousins and friends of the couple. I spend the day doing my last bits of Christmas shopping and deciding what to wear to the party, a chic affair at the family home of Beirut chef Hussein Hadid, a nephew of the Iraqi-born architect Zaha Hadid, in the hilly Moussaitbeh neighborhood. I decide to do it up: I wear a sleeveless blue silk dress, gold heels, and a dark-gold layered necklace I found, long neglected, in my mother’s closet in Houston on my last visit and “borrowed” with her blessing.

Ilham and I take a taxi together and still manage to get lost on the way, and at last we walk into the party to find Karim and Hala and a few other cousins mingling in the candlelit living room, decorated with antiques and contemporary art from all over Lebanon and the Middle East. In the back of the house, in the open kitchen and dining room, Hadid has spread out an eye-boggling feast of meats, including platters piled high with delicately arranged skewers of shish taouk and spiced-lamb
kafta
, along with bowls filled with all kinds of salads, artfully plated meze classics, and inventive crostinis, the best topped with goat-cheese labneh and sliced figs. For dessert there are shot glasses filled with
various sweets, like the cinnamon-spiked rice custard called
mighli
, capped with a shower of walnuts, pine nuts, and shredded coconut. We all fill our plates at the buffet and our glasses with drinks, then eventually make our way to the living room to listen to the toasts. Mona’s dad gives a touching, emotional speech thanking his daughter for following in her grandmother’s footsteps and bringing yet another culture into our family: Taiwanese this time.

I go to bed late after the night of feasting, toasting, and dancing, and I fly to New York the next morning to spend a few days with Richard before heading to Houston for Christmas. I land at JFK in the early evening and take a taxi through the snowy Queens and Brooklyn streets. Back at his apartment, Richard is waiting for me and making us dinner. I find the door to his building open and let myself in without buzzing up, leave my bags in the lobby, and walk up the stairs to knock on his door. He lets out a “Whaaaat?!” when he sees me standing there, surprised because he’d been listening for the buzzer. He rushes up and hugs me. The
bucatini
are boiling, and he’s finishing up the tomato sauce he’s making, thickened with minced anchovy—one of my favorite pasta sauces. We pour red wine, hug some more, and kiss as the pasta pot nearly boils over.

Brooklyn feels cozy tonight in the snow. I always hear myself telling people I hate snow in the city; mostly I hate knowing we’re still deep in winter. It rarely snows in Beirut, which is phenomenally great if I’m going to be there long-term; there’s lots of snow up in the Lebanese mountains, but in the city it falls about once a decade. Tonight the white blanket outside is comforting somehow. Maybe it’s just being back in New York, listening to the sounds of Flatbush Avenue, booming and relentless, the Brooklynese and
the Dominican Spanish and the Haitian Creole and the Arabic on the sidewalk below as evening sinks down. New York is rolling over me in waves again, and being with Richard feels … right. My skin is tingling, a feeling I try to memorize in my cells, record forever, whenever it happens.

On Christmas
Day in Houston, my parents, my brother, Samir, my sister-in-law Laila, and I go for dinner at my uncle Kamal and aunt Diane’s house. My cousin Edward is in town from London with his wife, Mariah, and their kids. I’m the godmother to all three of them, and I rush up to interrupt them with kisses and hugs as soon as I spot them busily playing with their newly acquired Christmas loot with my cousin Rich and his wife Erin’s two toddlers.

After Christmas dinner, when we’re all sitting around the living room, Edward asks me where I’m staying in New York when I visit, since my Manhattan apartment is sublet. I think for a half-second then decide—here we go—and answer, straight up: “With my boyfriend.”

A moment of silence. Edward gets an intrigued, twinkly look in his eyes. “Anything else you want to tell us?” Uncle Kamal looks over with a half-smile, a hint of paternal anxiety in his face, and asks: “So, this is serious?”

My aunt Diane jumps in. “The girl is happy. Leave her alone!”

Thank you, Auntie Diane. Thank you
.

Uncle Kamal, an increasingly worried expression creeping over him, can’t help himself: “I mean, have you two talked about a timetable or anything?”

I try to smile confidently, shake off this question somehow without any words, but an answer stumbles out: “Er, we’re seeing
how it goes. Um, I guess we don’t have a timetable or anything.” I pause awkwardly, then call out to my goddaughter, “Hey, Gigi, bring that doll over and let’s braid her hair!”

Later that night as I’m trying to fall asleep, my uncle’s question, a predictable nudge from one of my lovingly nosy older relatives, is running through my head. I start thinking, would it be wise or dumb to bring up the big questions to Richard now:
Do you think we have a future? Can you imagine us staying together? Maybe even having kids eventually?