A gift judged by the table

Mother's Day here is on Friday, and this year it lands inside the last third of Ramadan, which moves the whole transaction into the dark.

It is not left on a kitchen counter before work. It is handed over at the iftar table, after the plates have been cleared, in front of the sisters, the brother in law, the aunt who came in from Alexandria, and a cousin holding up a phone.

So it gets bought late. The flower stalls, the perfume counters and the cake shops do their business somewhere between ten at night and one in the morning, because the person buying was fasting all day and only started thinking about it after.

And it gets chosen for a room rather than for a person.

Almost every gift I have watched a category build was designed for two people. Quiet packaging, a message meant for one reader, a doorstep. Then it gets opened in company, and nine other people read the bag it arrived in, the shop name printed on the bag, the ribbon, and whether the whole thing looks like it was decided in the last hour before maghrib.

Which makes the wrapping part of the product instead of a cost line underneath it. It makes the shop name part of the price. And it makes anything that arrives as a code in a message a strange thing to give, because there is nothing to hand across a table.

The mother is the recipient. The table is the audience, and what the table grades is the son.