"Now I am free," Fatima Sayyid said, and the tall, curvy, Hijab-wearing Arab Canadian Muslim woman smiled as she stood before her late husband Salman Sayyid's grave. Smiling victoriously, Fatima barely stopped herself from tap dancing. At last she was finally free of the man who had been abusing her and crushing her spirit across two continents for the past three decades.
"Fatima, you're a useless cunt, I should have left you in Baalbek and married a Canadian woman instead," Salman Sayyid said to his wife Fatima, on the morning of his last day on earth. He'd been sitting in the living room of their townhouse in Vanier, in the east end of Ottawa, and waited for his wife to serve him his morning tea. Fatima, a klutz from the get-go, managed to bungle even that, and she spilled the tea on Salman's shoe...
"I am so sorry," Fatima said, and when Salman glared at her, she flinched in anticipation of a hit. Salman smiled smugly and sipped his tea. He resumed reading his copy of the Ottawa Sun newspaper. A few moments later, the old Arab gasped in shock and clutched his chest. Feeling woozy, he asked his wife to call an ambulance. Fatima stood there, watching as her husband fell from his chair, and crawled on the floor. Salman lay on his back, drool on his lips. He looked at his wife Fatima who stood over him, a triumphant smile on her face.
"You whore," Salman Sayyid said, and then he closed his eyes and stopped moving. Fatima calmly grabbed the phone and called 9/11, and the ambulance came ten minutes later. Frantically she greeted the EMT people, and led them to her husband. Salman Sayyid was put on a cart and brought to the back of the ambulance. They sped toward Montfort Hospital, with Fatima riding on the back of the ambulance.
A couple of hours later, the doctors informed the tearful Hijabi that her husband did not make it. Fatima Sayyid wept and wailed, and had to be escorted out of the hospital room by staff. Her daughter Amina who lived in Montreal, Quebec, was notified. A few days later, Salman Sayyid was laid to rest at a local cemetery. Amina stayed in town for a few days to look after her mother, and then returned to Montreal where her husband Ali awaited.
"I can do whatever I want," Fatima said to herself, a few weeks after her husband's untimely passing. In the Muslim world, women are forever the property of men. At first a woman belongs to her father, and then she belongs to her husband. In her later years, she falls under her son's care. She can never be her own person. Well, in North America, things were indeed changing. For the first time in her fifty seven years, Fatima Sayyid could do whatever she wanted, and answered to no man.
