JOIN USHenna House
Nomi Eve
Simon & Schuster
2015, pp 187, Rs 399
There are thrilling stories of wars and revolutions or spine-chilling, gory ones of murder. Then there are stories of apparently ordinary lives and loves but with a movement of seismic proportion in them. Nomi Eve’s Henna House falls in this category.
It’s a story of love and betrayal, of childhood innocence and adult guilt. It is the growing up of little Adela Damaris in a fast-changing world. Love stories are a dime a dozen. But, an insight into the larger historical picture of Jews in Yemen makes it fascinating. Each culture seems to have perfected its own particular brand of cruelty to Jews. We read about absurd decrees like the House Decree or the Donkey Decree, but the Orphan Decree is terrifying, whereby an orphan is forcibly taken away from its rightful Jewish family and given to a Moslem one. Fear of the Confiscator hounds Adela’s childhood.
In a society where children are betrothed when they’re only months old, poor Adela is a spinster at the age of five. The boys betrothed to her, succumb to death one after another, and she’s stamped as a bringer of bad luck.
Growing up in a tyrannical society with a joyless, harsh mother, it is cousin Asaf’s arrival that brings love to her starved heart. She is betrothed to him, but he soon leaves her with a promise to return. When Hani, a girl-cousin, enters her life, all that was black and white now shimmers in colours. Hani is her window to the wider world. She teaches Adela Hebrew, and initiates her into the secrets and ceremonies of henna. Living as they do in a socially-oppressive community, the henna house gives women freedom to unwind and relax, sing, tell lewd stories and jokes and to treat each other lovingly to elaborate designs of henna. And we learn that henna is more than decoration, it can be a code.
The story moves from Quaraah to Aden as the Damaris start on a clandestine trek to escape the long arm of the Confiscator, for Adela is newly-orphaned, and to survive the drought that sweeps through Quaraah.
Aden is a cosmopolitan world. A hub through which ships pass on their way to far-off places carrying spices and scents. There are fewer restrictions on the Jewish community here. Hani gets married to David, a love-match, unimaginable in Quaraah. It’s here that Adela waits and waits for Asaf or for news of him when a chance encounter brings her eye-to-eye with Binyamin, a friend who had faithfully dogged her steps in those childish days. Binyamin is once again single, his wife dead in childbirth, and he confesses his true love for Adela. They spend some happy time courting when Asaf, Adela’s fiancé, cousin and childhood love, simply drops out of the blue. Handsome, charming and wise to the ways of the world, he has come to claim Adela for his own. Who can resist such charm? Binyamin pales beside him and fades away. Adela, now 16, is married to Asaf.
Barely is the first flush of sweetness over, then Adela starts to notice things that don’t quite match with her image of that boy Asaf. Hani, her dearest friend, is also not immune to Asaf’s charms. Like holding spun candy, Adela is left with sticky fingers and nothing more substantial of what her love had once been. Betrayed by the very people whom she dearly loves, life becomes a painful trudge. And so Adela lives out her life in spinsterhood.
Events in the external world once again conspire to shake her existence. The UN decides to partition Palestine, and the Israeli Operation Magic Carpet offers Yemenite Jews a home in Israel. This time, all they can take with them are memories and stories. And once again there’s the process of readjustment, of finding one’s feet in a new culture. Just as Adele is getting there, Binyamin appears again in her life in the tradition of a true love story and he and Adela are finally joined together.
Just as the love story is rounded off rather satisfactorily, events in the external world impinge on Adela’s existence yet again. It’s the Holocaust that brings the ghosts of old love. They are now united as they could have never been in life. The beginning of the henna line curls up into the end. The story has come a full circle.
Nomi Eve has a light touch and one moves swiftly through the book. It’s a compelling read on the traditions of henna, and of the life and woes of the Yemenite Jews. There are stories within stories here, nestling in each other like Babuschka dolls, entertaining in themselves but which add nothing to the content but sadly to the pages of the book.