It’s been wrapped In a plastic bag and buried in a drawer ever since I brought it here from the old house along with all my other so-called valuables. The tin is crammed full of old poems—in blue, red, and green ballpoint on thick glossy paper—that I’d written when I was twelve or thir- teen and had been saving so that I’d have something to laugh at when I got very old. Every time I opened the tin, the words seemed fainter, but the paper remained thick and glossy all over, except for the grooves left by the pen. It didn’t make much difference. Those poems—or what was left of them—hadn’t made me laugh in a very long time. For many years, they brought a smile to my face, but over time, I stopped caring. I wasn’t planning to re-read my childhood poems; they could fade away for all I cared. With the distance of age, childhood appears strange and tiresome, a constant reminder of how much time has passed.
I have no idea why I felt like getting the tin out tonight. The old plastic bag that I kept it in was looking dirty and scuffed, so I got rid of it and picked out a new one. There were some old papers and photographs in there that I wanted to take a closer look at, but I wasn’t in the mood for it just then, so I set them aside. It was then that I realized the tin no longer closed flush. The rim was bent so the two pins that held the lid in place at the back weren’t lining up. They were so far from the notches they were meant to slot into that no matter how hard I squeezed the rim, I couldn’t get it to shut. Every adjustment I made caused another part to bend out of shape. After I finally managed to get the tin half shut, I took the two pins out for safekeeping, fully intending to get them fixed one day.
The tin lay there on the table in front of me. I don’t think I’d ever looked at it very closely before tonight.
*
“Cadbury’s Milk Tray Chocolates” ran elegantly from one corner to the other in an embossed purple band. The rest of the tin was decorated with illustrations of the various types of chocolates that it had once contained, and in the bottom right-hand corner, it read:
1 lb. net
including foils
454 grammes
٤٥٤ غرام
It struck me as funny that Cadbury’s was so precise that they’d gone to the trouble of noting how much the foil wrappers weighed, but had decided that Arabic readers didn’t need to know that information. The tin must have come from abroad—probably Beirut, seeing that they’d spelled the word “gram” with a gh-. I examined the tin for other clues, but the silvery bottom had rusted.
*
There was something beautiful about the variety of chocolates decorating the lid. Rectangular, round, smooth, lumpy—bits of pistachio was my guess. The colors had faded a bit, but the brown was chocolatey enough that they still seemed real. I must have been sad when I ate the last one because it wasn’t a very big tin to begin with. I like to picture myself curled up with the tin and my cat Meesho under a heavy blanket in the little sleeping nook in our living room on a winter night. That was where I slept when I was very young, before I had a bedroom of my own. I’d probably eaten most of it by myself. Meesho wasn’t a fan of chocolate, and I can only assume that my father, mother, and two older brothers each took one chocolate and left me the rest. They used to let me have all the treats when I was that age. Even today, the tin overflows with joy, and I assume that’s why we kept it for all those years. It might even outlast me.
*
I was never going to repair the tin. Never going to get those pins back into their little slots so that the lid would shut as snugly as it once had. It would be like stifling it. Every time I tried, I worried that if I actually did get it to shut, I’d never be able to open it again. I’ll leave it as it is— half-shut; I’ll just be careful not to let everything fall out.
I tried to remember how it got here, but I couldn’t. So it goes. My memory is full of holes, but it’s not for fixing either. The tin had been a gift—that’s for cer- tain—but not one of the gifts that people brought when they came to visit my mother during her final bout of ill- ness. For one, it looked expensive and it felt like a part of my childhood. The fact that we’d kept the tin indicated as much. Kept the tin as in kept it empty, I mean. Unlike all the other chocolate tins in the house, Mama hadn’t stuffed this one with spools of colored thread, thimbles, needles stabbed through black card and tinfoil. Nor had I stored her dentures in it. I’d kept them of course, wrapped up in a plastic bag along with a pair of her glasses with one arm missing. Nor had I used it to store any of the other things I’d inherited from her, like a lock of my grandmother Fatma’s hair. Fatma, the namesake whom I never got to meet.
*
The joy inside the tin wasn’t the only reason we’d held on to it. Think of how often joy disappears without a trace. Pride had to have played a part as well. I can still remember the moment the flashy car turned down our street and all the neighbors came out to gawk at it and at the two young, expensively perfumed women who got out. My father sat with the women, legs crossed, laugh- ing, dressed in pajamas and a thick terry robe that I continued to wear for years after his death as though it had been my own undisputed inheritance. It’s one of the few times I can remember my father laughing. I think the visit took place in 1969 and that was when the imported tin of chocolates entered the house. The young women laughed along with him and patted him affectionately.
I don’t remember my mother being there, but she was hardly the jealous type. My father liked to brag about his Saudi students who came to visit him when he was unwell. I can’t be entirely sure whether they’d been his students at the Lycée—his post-retirement teaching job—or if he’d given them private lessons, which was uncommon and expensive back in those days.
It must have been them who brought us the choc- olates. The joyful tin, glamorous visitors, neighbors watching from balconies—these were all reasons to feel special. Special in the way that only an eleven-year-old girl can feel, and even now as a woman in her sixties, she still remembers the murky living room lit only by the light filtering in from the kitchen, her head buried under a blanket, feasting on chocolate, cuddling her cat, Meesho, grabbing him whenever he tried to escape.
*
A long time ago—a long, long time ago—Ramzi woke me up in the middle of the night. He was carrying something wrapped up in a tattered sheet, and I could tell from the look on his face that it wasn’t a tin of chocolates. “Wake up. We have to go bury Meesho,” he said through tears.
Meesho had been very ill in the days before his death. He’d been bitten by a snake while roaming in the desert around our house, and the treatment had failed to cure him. Ramzi dug a grave in the back garden directly under the window of the bedroom where we’d each take turns living in the years to come, and then, together, he and I laid Meesho’s heavy body down and covered it with soil. Standing before a wooden grave-marker bearing the name of our cat, we recited the opening chapter of the Quran with utmost solemnity. A few days later, the grave-marker flew away in the wind, but none of us bothered to go looking for it.
Years later, long after my brothers had moved out, a little poppy plant sprouted in that exact spot beneath the bedroom window. When the neighbor, a young police officer, warned my mother that we could get in trou- ble for growing poppies, she cut the plant down in a panic, but it came back the following year. I taunted my mother when I saw the gorgeous flowers had returned: “Allah gives blessings to whomever he wishes without limit!” That same morning, she poured an entire bottle of kerosene onto the plant and set it on fire. It didn’t grow back after that. As with anything, if you stab it in the heart, it’s done for.
*
But was the plant dead? It lived on in the funny story that I told all my friends, especially my stoner friends. Later, many years after I stopped telling that story—after my mother’s death, to be precise—I had to deal with her bandage and the galabiyya she’d been wearing when she died, both of which were just lying in the bathtub. The bandage was the last thing left of her, so one morning I summoned the courage to bury it outside where the poppy had sprouted and where we’d buried Meesho. As if that spot in the garden had been designated a grave back when I was a child. As I carried the bandage with the care and dignity I felt it deserved, I saw some little white things moving on it, and then when I looked closer, I realized that they were maggots feeding on what remained of my mother’s flesh. It felt like I’d been electrocuted. I screamed hysterically for a while, but eventually managed to collect myself enough to dig a hole. I threw the bandage inside and quickly covered it up with soil before reciting the opening chapter, this time on my own.
__________________________________
From Empty Cages by Fatma Qandil (trans. Adam Talibv) published by Hoopoe, an imprint of The American University in Cairo Press. Copyright © 2025 by Fatma Qandil. English translation copyright © 2025 by Adam Talib. Reproduced by permission.
