The moment Mistress Saniya left the room, Hamida entered it. She was combing her hair, which gave off a smell of kerosene. Umm Hamida looked at the lustrous coal-black flowing locks that fell almost to the girl's knees, and asked sorrowfully, "Dear, oh dear! How can you let nits get into such lovely hair?"
Two black eyes ringed with kohl flashed beneath the thick lashes...............
and a sharp, implacable look appeared in them. "Nits?" said the girl sharply. "I swear the comb didn't pick up more than two."
“Are you forgetting I squashed twenty when I combed your hair two weeks ago?"
Indifferently the girl replied, "I hadn't washed my hair for two months."
She sat down next to her mother, her forearm combing hard. She was twenty, of medium height, with a prettily turned figure and a bronze complexion. Her slightly oval face was pure and fresh, its most distinctive feature being the beautiful black eyes, in which the whites contrasted brilliantly and bewitchingly with the blackness of the irises. When, however, she pressed her delicate lips together and narrowed her gaze, she took on an appearance of strength and severity foreign to womankind; her anger was not something to be treated lightly, even in Midaq Alley itself, and her mother, for all her celebrated toughness, avoided offending her as much as she could. One day when they were calling one another names, she'd said to her, "You'll never find a man to make an honest woman of you. Who would want to take a burn ing ember to his bosom?" On other occasions, she'd say that there was no doubt about it, her daughter went mad when she got angry, and she'd named her "the Fifty-Day Storm" after the well-known winds. Despite it all, she still loved her greatly, even though she was in fact her adoptive mother; her real mother had been in business with her selling fattening preparations for women and, having fallen on hard times, had come to live with her in her apartment in the alley and in the end had died, leaving behind hera little girl, as yet unweaned. Umm Hamida had adopted the child and entrusted her to the wife of Boss Kersha, the owner of the cafe, who had nursed her along with her own son, Hussein Kersha, making her his sister in the eyes of religion.
***
Hamida didn't turn around but waggled her bottom at her as she said, "What a catch! They say he's spent a hundred thousand pounds on Sayyida Zeinab out of love, so ten thousand would be nothing to him."
Suddenly she pulled back as though bored and went back to the mirror, throwing it a searching glance and sighing as she repeated, "Poor old Hamida, what a waste!"