‘The Interpreter’ is the English version of Arabic novel ‘Al Tarjuman’, authored by Ashraf Aboul Yazid, an eminent writer and poet of Egypt

“I burned my youth, just as you used to burn incense in the translation room.”

You’ve exposed us, may God expose you, in this world and the next, “Mohsen,” without a single good deed. How will your daughter live now with the shame you’ve brought upon her?

It’s true that I escaped with a divorce from you, but you are the father of my only daughter. So what should I say to those who come asking about her, when someone proposes to marry her? Don’t expect a suitor for your daughter from now on. Maybe you’ve searched with your prostitute friends in the Philippines for a suitor for her, someone who doesn’t read what I read:

“In a major blow to vice houses in Kuwait, a prostitution ring led by a Filipino woman, with other Asian nationalities involved, has been dismantled. They operated out of an Egyptian expatriate’s apartment who works in a government ministry. The expatriate (M.H.), a translator, has not been arrested yet, but he had prepared the place before disappearing, to facilitate the sinful activities.”

A translator, his name is M.H., working in a ministry in Kuwait. There’s no one else but you, “Mohsen.” And now, in addition to your blundering, you’ve gained another title: fugitive from the law.

This is how you are. Not only did you ruin your future alone, but you deliberately ruined my daughter’s future with you. Your plan began when you abducted her and traveled with her to Kuwait against my will. Now “Najma” is in Canada, and the last time she called me from there, I learned that you don’t respond to her messages. And when I read this shocking news, it became clear what preoccupies you.

When you ran off with my daughter to Kuwait, I didn’t know how to stop you, and I couldn’t reach her. Months passed in darkness, barren, I only remember them as a series of helplessness and pain, until your colleague “Mustafa Sanad” called me, may God bless him, and directed me to your workplace and its address. That’s how I began to receive news of my only daughter from this stranger, after her father blinded her eyes with stories of traveling and studying abroad.

Today, “Mustafa Sanad” called me again and sent me a copy of the news article, saying that you, the one who has harmed humanity, are the subject of the story. So, will you now seek help from the Egyptian embassy officials as you did the first time?

When “Mustafa Sanad” advised me to file a kidnapping case through the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, you, like a chameleon, managed to convince Najma to side with you.

Then he sent me a surprise when he obtained, through his own means, a salary slip from your institution’s administrative affairs. With it, I was able to obtain an initial ruling for alimony of five thousand pounds. But your damned lawyer in Cairo submitted documents for your expenses, certified by the embassy—starting with receipts for “Najma’s” studies, a housing lease contract, photos of utility bills for water, electricity, telephone, and internet as well as travel ticket stubs—to prove that you live frugally!

You wretch!

I know that this money rightfully belonged to “Najma” after you wasted my rights in the early years, but she would have willingly given it to me, as long as she was with you. Surely, prostitution income doesn’t come with a breakdown of salary slips!

Thank God I am far from your filthy money.

I wasted my life with you. I burned my youth, just as you used to burn incense in the translation room. They see you as a devout worshipper in the temple of literature, but you’re just a miserable person fleeing from real life to a fake prison made of papers and ink, unable to face people, you heavy-tongued, heavy-hearted soul.

I remember when a mutual friend of my father recommended you as a husband, but my father rejected the idea outright and told both of us that you were like a seasonal laborer—without a stable job, without a respectable income, and without a future.

At that time, I looked at the white hairs that attacked my head, I feared the cave of spinsterhood my mother warned me about, and I accepted you. Only months after our marriage did the house become a hotel. You considered it as such when you decided to live in it as a guest, not speaking to me as a wife, but as a servant. And when I confronted you, you abandoned me and told me that you could wash your clothes, cook your meals, and live as you did in your father’s house.

How did you not understand me?

How could you say to me one day—accusing me of cold feelings—that I married you to escape my father’s house and the fate of spinsterhood? That it didn’t matter to me whether you were the groom or someone else. Even if that was the truth, how could you expect me to live with that truth and with you after that confrontation?

After the divorce, the girls in the family started pitying me, thinking I had lost an ideal man. They didn’t see what I saw. You, in front of them, wear the mask of wisdom, parroting sentences you’ve borrowed from here and there. I kept asking myself, over and over again, what was missing?

I never found an answer!

Now, after “Mustafa Sanad” told me about your love story and your intention to marry an old, ugly Kuwaiti woman, I understood what was missing in my life: money. You were searching for money, and when you didn’t find it with me, you turned your back on me, seizing the moment of my anger and my request for divorce in a moment of despair, to rid yourself of me and the household expenses.

The small amount of money the court ordered for alimony barely covered two days’ expenses. Therefore, you had to pay for your daughter’s expenses. You opportunist, you’ve now run away from all your responsibilities, both moral and financial, but it had to be that God would take revenge on you for what you did to me. And I don’t think the bubbly widow is ready to tie herself to your name that has been tainted. Perhaps she is now seeking to kill you, just as I once wished I could have the chance to do it with my own hands.

Ah, if only I could deliver that news to your mother, so she wouldn’t leave her life proud of you, as she always used to say to me: “What mother wouldn’t be proud of a son like ‘Mohsen’?” Perhaps I told her myself, as I asked her if she was still proud of you!

In Egypt, where a divorced woman is treated like a discarded rag by her family, and every step she takes among her neighbors is scrutinized with suspicion, many women endure a false marriage. How many couples exist on paper and in front of others, while they are divorced behind closed walls?

We always disagreed, to the point where I’ve forgotten the reasons for our disagreements now. The truth is, we disagreed on everything. You married on the recommendation of a mutual friend of my father, and I married to please my mother. The end was a divorce that harmed you not at all, for you are always the biggest runaway, both in the house and out of it. Even when a crime occurred in Kuwait, they found you fleeing. (Continues)

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Published under International Cooperation with "Sindh Courier"