3 ideas
Abdallah, son of the merchant Sulayman, grows up without his mother and is raised by Zarifa, a woman Sulayman had bought and who was enslaved in his household. Flying to Frankfurt as an adult, Abdallah recalls Zarifa's care alongside his father's cruelty, so his memory of tenderness is bound up with a woman his father owned.
Oman formally abolished slavery in 1970, yet formerly enslaved people and their children remain attached to the same households. They are still identified by descent, and some leave only by emigrating. The law changes ownership, but kinship, marriageability and status keep sorting people by who was once owned, long after the legal category is gone.
Mayya names her daughter London, a name the village finds strange, and the choice runs against local naming custom. The name is also tied to her unfulfilled love for Ali bin Khallaf, who studied in London, so it reads as both a private longing and an opening toward a wider world.