House bath

Author's name: Saud Al-Sanousi

“Everyone who lives in the house becomes one of its people; the house’s dove never leaves and the house’s snake never betrays. This is what Basira told me two years before that day, my father’s grandmother, or perhaps his great-grandmother, I don’t know, for she is very old, timeless, residing in a corner of the old Arab house’s foyer, shrouded in her blackness at the bottom of the stairs. Why at the bottom of the stairs? I never asked myself about the places of things I had grown accustomed to since my birth, in an Arab house whose narrow rooms overlooked an open inner foyer, Basira’s foyer, whom I never saw open her eyes, as if her eyelids had been sewn shut with her eyelashes since eternity.”