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30 rials for salma
The people who love only once in their lives are really the shallow people. What they call their loyalty, and their fidelity, I call either the lethargy of custom or their lack of imagination. Faithfulness is to the emotional life what consistency is to the life of the intellect — simply a confession of failures. Faithfulness! I must analyse it some day. The passion for property is in it. There are many things that we would throw away if we were not afraid that others might pick them up.
Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
Salma bint Marhoum al Abri is so old she's lost count of exactly how many years she has lived between the sheer rock face that rises hundreds of metres up to the radar station and the windblown, dust-ridden slopes of Wadi Sahtan.
Hob is the last village up the road, and so deeply is it recessed into the mountain that its residents have nowhere to go but down, and away. Such dead-end outlook means that the young ones migrate to cities like Rustaq and Muscat, or larger villages like Amq on the wadi floor, leaving behind the oldest generations. It is here, in its abandoned, ancient quarter, that you will find Salma, among empty houses.
I found her sitting by a stack of firewood all by herself, her fingers covered with silver rings, her arms with bangles. She lives alone in a two-room stone hut and has no neighbours, just locked doors and stone steps leading to the communal gardens below. A brother, living in the newer quarter of concrete houses, feeds her, for she can't walk very far and has to survive on RO30 of monthly social allowance.