Apparently she was even abandoned by her family, and she kept to herself all the time. One thing we came to know about her was her excellent cooking. It was sad though how her life of isolation was ended. Apparently her youngest brother, who was a soldier on leave then, visited her, asked for money, she refused, they argued, and he stabbed her with kebab skewers. It was only after days that the murder was discovered, when the smell in the street that time was not of food but of a decaying body. For a long time after that the sight of kebab skewers freaked us out, and we lost appetite for all skewered foods. But life went on, although it took us a while until we resumed our street games routine.

Three or four doors down from where we lived, there lived a nice quiet Jewish family. The father was a physician and the mother, Um Naseem, was a housewife. They didn't have children our age. On Saturdays she used to ask us kids to light the stove for her, and we didn't understand the reason behind this, neither was she ready to explain it to us. But she would, on occasions, send our families a delicious dish that she called tibeet. It was chicken with rice that comes with an exquisite crunchy crust due to the prolonged time of simmering. Our Armenian neighbor was, without dispute, the best pastry maker. The simple sponge cakes with jelly and custard she made on her daughter's birthday were very tasty. She volunteered once to teach my eldest sisters how to make her famous jam pies. During Christmas time our Athuri neighbors (Christians who claim descent from the Assyrians) would send slices of delicious aromatic fruitcake. When their daughter divulged the secret that they soaked the dried fruits in brandy, we started to act like drunk whenever we ate of the cake. My grandma (bibi), who was staying with us at the time, also liked that cake, but when she heard about the brandy part, she hurried to the water tap, and amidst our laughter, started washing her mouth frantically asking for God's forgiveness.