Inshallah

by Kathryn Silver-Hajo

In proper Arabic it means, literally, If God Wills, though it has many variations. It’s often tacked onto declarative statements, meaning that if God doesn’t will it, it won’t happen, but even secular Arabs use it to mean simply, hopefully. It may be straightforward, as in, “We’re coming to Lebanon in June, inshallah.” Or evasive, as when you ask your mechanic, “Can I pick up my car tomorrow?” and he replies cagily, “Inshallah.” It may even have a sarcastic edge, as in “Inshallah Uncle Joe will behave himself at Thanksgiving this year.”

***

When my mother turned sixty-six, I invited her out for lunch. There was an Italian restaurant she said made a mean eggplant parm, but I proposed a different place and she accepted. It was a brilliant October day, the kind where the sky is almost too blue to bear and the air smells of wood smoke and crumbling, curling leaves of yellow, auburn, ruddy brown. She arrived straight-backed and smiling, thrilled to have recently learned her breast cancer was in remission. Her brown hair, with its elegant white stripe, brushed her shoulders as she walked. She was exuberant with life and hope, happy to skip work, meet up with her daughter in the middle of the day. How could I know the next time I saw her, ten days later, she’d be lying colorless, lifeless, limp in her bed?

 

Inshallah, she enjoyed the lunch. Inshallah, she wasn’t too disappointed. Inshallah, I won’t feel guilty for the rest of my life.

***

There’s often a deeper layer of meaning embedded in the word, an acknowledgement that none of us knows when our last moment will come, or if the world will behave the way we expect it to. There’s a beauty in surrendering to this limitation—in humbly accepting the fact that we never really know what will come next, despite our most earnest attempts at control.

***

When I left my father for the night in his hospice room where he lay in morphine-induced bewilderment, I kissed his wide, wise forehead, the crinkles and lines that hinted at both his intelligence and irreverent sense of humor. When I said I’ll see you in the morning, Dad, how could I have known that would be the morning the call would come?

***

Now, whenever I leave my own house, step into the petrichor-scented air to join the jabbing, jangling, joy-filled world, I press my lips to my husband’s and when he says, “See you soon,” I say “Yup,” but inside myself where only I can hear I whisper, Inshallah.

Kathryn Silver-Hajo is a 2023 Pushcart Prize, Best Small Fictions, and Best American Food Writing nominee. Her work appears in many lovely journals. Kathryn’s flash collection Wolfsong was published by ELJ Editions in spring 2023. Her novel Roots of The Banyan Tree is now available.

More at: kathrynsilverhajo.com; facebook.com/kathryn.silverhajo; twitter.com/KSilverHajo; instagram.com/kathrynsilverhajo