‘Let my father die, so I can wrap myself in his rug’ [Archives:2002/38/Last Page]

Written by Abdulrahman Mutahhar
Translated by Janet Watson
M – Mus’ida, what on earth got into you to chase your son around the house and chuck potatoes at him! Have you gone totally mad, or are you on a training course?
Ma – Wo betide him! If I’d been able to catch him, I’d have skinned him alive with my own teeth! But no matter, let him come back and then I’ll show him what’s what!
M – What on earth has he done?
Ma – I don’t know what’s got into him, but rather than do the dawn prayer at the right time, he got up and came over to me, and rather than saying, ‘Good morning, Mum’, he said, ‘Mum, I wish your dad would drop dead this week!’
M – That’s not like him. You don’t think he’s apprenticed himself to a grave digger, do you?
Ma – That’s enough bad taste, Mus’id. I have never, in my whole life, come across anyone apart from my son who wished his own mother’s father dead. I’ve absolutely no idea why he wants him to die.
M – It could be just a joke on his part, and don’t forget that life and death are in God’s hands alone.
Ma – God be praised, but if my father ever heard him say what he said, he would think that it’s me wanting to get hold of his inheritance, Mus’id.
M – God alone knows whose hour will come first, in any case, and our son must have something in mind, Mus’ida.
Ma – Something in mind that he wants my father dead! He must be possessed, Mus’id!
M – It’s not that, Mus’ida. Our son has just added up two and two and worked out that he won’t be able to get married unless he finds some money or inherits some. You know how the Yemeni proverb goes, ‘Let my father die, so I can wrap myself in his rug!’1
Ma – How does that figure, ‘Let my father die, so I can wrap myself in his rug!’ Mus’id.
M – I’m not totally sure, but what I think is that our son reckons he can only get married when your father dies and leaves his money.
Ma – As long as he wishes my father to stop dead, there’s absolutely no question of him getting married!
M – It’s not entirely his fault, though. It was you who put the idea into his head in the first place.
Ma – Are you trying to say that I said I would let him get married with my father’s inheritance!
M – No, but after I took my share of my father’s inheritance, 1 million riyals, I told you that I would put it in the bank until I managed to get the same again, and then I would marry the two boys off.
Ma – And I said that if you did that we would just end up spending it. I told you to marry the older boy off with the million we had, and then when we got another lot of inheritance money we could marry off the younger boy. ‘It’s better to have one house built than a wrecked village!’2
M – Peace be upon the Prophet!
Ma – Peace of God be upon him!
M – Then it dawned on our younger son that you would marry him off with the money from your father’s inheritance, just as I married off the older boy with money from my father.
Ma – What on earth made him cook that one up?
M – Nothing really. Your son is actually thinking fairly logically, Mus’ida, taking into account the reality of the situation and his troubles.
Ma – I don’t know what you mean by his troubles and what you call the reality of the situation, and I don’t think I ever will!
M – In that case, I’ll tell you. The reality of the situation is that your son is without a job and is worried that he’ll get lines on his forehead before he gets married. We can’t get him married as it is because we haven’t got the means, and there’s no one left from my family to leave me an inheritance so I could marry him off in the same way that I married his brother. In his mind, the only hope he’s got is your father’s inheritance. As the proverb goes, ‘Let my father die, so I can wrap myself in his rug!’
1 Al-Akwa’, p. 1636.
2 Al-Akwa’, p. 479.
 

——
[archive-e:38-v:2002-y:2002-d:2002-09-16-p:./2002/iss38/lastpage.htm]