Page 37 - The Muse 2019-20 Issue

not back to my life and house in D.C. Come on, grow up a little.”
Noor responded, “Well any minute in this house without you is like an eternity.”
With that, Rinko rolled into the kitchen and exclaimed, “Good morning ladies! Breakfast is
already waiting for you two in the dining room.”
Aunt Jehan gave Rinko a tap on his shoulder and said, “Thank you butler!” Rinko rolled his eyes
in an artificial human gesture that caused both aunt and niece to laugh.
In the dining room, Noor and Jehan began to devour the meal that Rinko had prepared. The food
was a blend of both a traditional American breakfast and some of their favorite Indo-Caribbean delicacies such as the fluffy and buttery bread that looked like a mini pita called Roti as well as a golden liquid lentil soup called Dal. As Noor was eating some of her roti, her Aunt Jehan looked up at her and said, “I’ve been down here a few weeks, and it is about time for me to head back up to D.C. My Boss has been super understanding, but I know it is time for me to go home. Ummm, how do I put this? I was thinking that the best thing for you is to come back with me to D.C. and move in with me.”
Noor blinked and was both speechless and paralyzed, and slowly mustered up the strength to respond. “Aunty Jehan. I don’t know what to say. I would Love to move up to D.C. with you. I was beginning to get worried that I was going to be stuck here in this house alone with just Rinko and an army of cats!”
Rinko popped in quickly and in his quirky way said, “I am allergic to cats!”
Jehan looked at Noor and said, “Okay then, well the plan is for us to leave in two days, and so the best thing for you to do is to start getting your stuff packed up and also putting into storage your parents’ personal belongings. Honestly, Rinko can handle most of that. I am going to start looking into the best schools for you and finishing up the conversations with your parents’ estate lawyer. The investigation has definitively concluded that the car accident was caused by a drunk truck driver and that there was no foul play involved.” The rest of the day following breakfast was a massive exercise in Rinko overseeing a small army of packing robots who began to methodically pack up all of Noor’s stuff in her bedroom and her parents’ personal items in their room and other spaces of the house, except their home office. Noor had told Rinko that the home office would be the one room that she would tackle alone.
The walls of the home office were lined with prestigious award after award that Dr. Hasan and Aliyah Khan had amassed after a lengthy career as research scientists specializing in genetics. Hasan and his wife Aliyah had met as teenagers on their home island of Trinidad before heading off to University in Oxford and Cambridge and ultimately finishing their studies together at Harvard. The lengthy careers of the two geneticists had meant that much of their lives was spent in the lab or lecture hall away from their only daughter. Their careers had taken them to almost every major research institution on planet Earth from Singapore to Berlin to Silicon Valley and even to Mumbai.
Noor had viewed both of her parents as having an almost Dumbledore like quality from the now ancient Harry Potter films. As a small child around the age of seven, fictional wonders like Harry Potter and Percy Jackson were a large part of her childhood. Her father had a shock white beard and a complexion that was darker than her mother, and his lean body was a function of decades as a runner. Dr. Aliyah Khan had a beautiful smile and look that seemed reminiscent of a nerdy Bollywood actress playing a school teacher. Aliyah had won a number of beauty pageants in Trinidad as a young woman.
The affection of her two parents was real, but the hard part of the connection piece was that her parents had her when they were in their early fifties via In Vitro Fertilization and a surrogate. That meant as a 16-year-old she had parents who were in their seventies. Noor rumbled around the office until she came to an oddly shaped half of a wooden statue on the desk that her dad used. She picked up the statue and noticed that it had been sitting on top of a red file named Project Ibeji. The files stood out because of the color, but also because the date of the file was from the very same day her parents had died. Noor found this odd because her parents were meticulous (to a point where it was almost annoying) about their research and paperwork and rarely left any of their documents strewn about.
When Noor opened this file called Project Ibeji, she found an assembly of different pages of blood work readings, genetic screenings and a few pictures of a young girl that looked exactly like her. The picture quality was poor and must clearly have been taken on an old film camera. Noor noticed that on the back of the picture was a name, Noura. The name stood out to Noor because it so closely matched her own name and seemed a bit odd that the picture of this young girl looked like a carbon copy of her
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