by Nadine Sinno
Kiki wanted nothing to do with the noisy lapdog that her son Meedo brought home that day. Decades of being told that the drool of dogs was considered impure in Islam had ingrained in her a repulsion toward the entire species. It did not help that shortly after the civil war ended, a bunch of wild dogs who had been feasting on corpses in abandoned downtown Beirut had found their way out and were roaming the city every night in search of human flesh. One of them mauled our own neighborhood tabbal, the volunteer drummer who beat his drum in the middle of the night so folks could wake up and eat a suhoor snack before dawn, in preparation for fasting the next day. News of the drummer had unsettled residents, who stopped leaving the house at night, thinking if God was fine with the dogs eating his most faithful of disciples, then they were all fair game. It was also personal for Kiki. As a child, she watched my mama get bitten by a dog. Both Mama and the dog were rushed to the hospital because they worried the dog might have had rabies.
Kiki adored Meedo, the light of her eyes, and she never said no to him. She had stayed in a painful marriage, putting up with years of abuse at the hands of her ex-husband so Meedo could have a “stable” home growing up. When Meedo turned eighteen, she divorced her abuser and promised to never share her bed with another “son of a bitch.” And now, after all the sacrifices, her beloved Meedo had brought home a drooling bitch that shattered her sakina, her spirit of tranquility, and threatened to desecrate her cherished space.
“Mama, you have to give her a chance,” Meedo said. “Haram, poor thing, look at her.”
“Habibi Meedo, I would give you my soul, but I won’t go to hell for this dog. Haram Ana… I am the poor thing. You know I cannot live with najaseh—impurity.”
“Come on, Mama. Who still thinks like that?”
“The Quran still thinks like that.”
“Are you sure about that? That it’s written in the Quran?”
“No, I’m not sure. Maybe it’s not in the Quran. Maybe one of the prophets said it. I’m not a sheikh. How the hell do I know?”
“Let’s assume the drool of the dog is truly impure, Mama,” Meedo reasoned. “You don’t have to rub your face all over hers. Isn’t she adorable? Just look at her for a second.”
Meedo knew Kiki’s heart was big enough for all of us, including his stinky little dog.
“I named her Coco,” he said mischievously. “Now we have Kiki and Coco.”
“Meedo, I can’t even look at her. I’m going to have a stroke. Habibi, I don’t have anything in the bank if that’s what you’re after. Every penny that my father left me was spent on you. I even talked to my lawyer about writing the apartment in your name. You don’t have to kill me to inherit this place. Do you want me to leave? Just say it.”
“Khalas, that’s enough,” Meedo said. “Tomorrow I’ll take Coco back. You never have to see her again.”
“Thank you. I’m sorry, Habibi. You’ll have to forgive me.”
But Coco never left Kiki’s house after that day. They say that Kiki made the mistake of looking into Coco’s eyes, and that once she looked into those brown eyes, she was bewitched. The unwanted guest slept in Kiki’s bed, ate at her table, and received a thousand and one kisses every day—her impure drool soon rationalized as not something that the Quran, or the Prophet, ever meant literally.
When my uncle fretted about the dog contaminating his ablutions and threatened never to set foot in her house again, Kiki wasn’t fazed.
“I understand,” she explained. “If you don’t come to me, I will come to you. But you will grow to love Coco. You will love her because God created her just like the rest of us. She has eyes, ears, a mouth, hands, and feet. And she has a big heart, just like me. The only animal we are not supposed to love is the pig because he disobeyed God. But Coco would never do that.”
Still, Kiki made an exception for my mother.
“Munia is excused,” Kiki told folks who accused her of playing favorites whenever she put Coco in another room during Mama’s visits. “I watched Munia almost bleed to death when that dog bit her. And Munia’s nerves are fragile. But one day, Munia will fall in love with Coco, and Coco will cure Munia. Munia won’t even need those damn pills anymore.”
Kiki’s heart did have room for all of us.
“They all think I’m crazy,” she once told me over the phone. Earlier that day, she had texted me a picture of Coco sitting lazily on my mother’s lap. In the picture, Mama is smiling peacefully—a rare sight since 2005, the year Mama had her first manic episode—as she caresses Coco’s shaggy hair. For a moment, I couldn’t help but wonder if Mama was truly cured.
“But that’s the last of my concerns,” Kiki continued after taking a puff of her cigarette. “This dog cares about me more than my own family. She knows when I’m sad. She knows when I’m happy. She never leaves my side. God brought her into my life for a reason. He knew I needed a friend. She’s my best friend, and she loves me the way I am. Crazy Kiki. She doesn’t tell me to stop doing this and that, that I look like a whore in my tight tops. No, Coco doesn’t judge.”
“Well, we don’t know that for sure,” I teased. “Coco can’t talk, so you don’t really know what she thinks of your tight tops.”
“One day, she’s going to talk,” Kiki retaliated. “You will see. This dog will talk.”
Nadine Sinno is a Professor of Arabic at Virginia Tech. Her creative work has appeared in Mizna and Sukoon. Her scholarly articles have been published in journals including MELUS, the Journal of Arabic Literature, and ASAP/Journal. Her literary translations include Nazik Saba Yared’s Canceled Memories; Huda Hamed’s I Saw Her in My Dreams; Jabbour Douaihy’s Firefly; and Rashid al-Daif’s Who’s Afraid of Meryl Streep? Her monograph, A War of Colors, explores graffiti in postwar Beirut.