Madras on Rainy Days: A Novel (10 page)

Read Madras on Rainy Days: A Novel Online

Authors: Samina Ali

BOOK: Madras on Rainy Days: A Novel
7.69Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
“There are better ways to seduce a woman,” I said, turning over. She spread her long hair over the velvet pillow, the rich strands glistening in the moonlight. She was beautiful, Henna, having the sort of beauty I didn’t possess. She was fair with glinting black eyes, lips that were the bruised red of a pomegranate. Growing up, I had always longed to be like her, and eventually it became a longing to be her, or, at least, be one with her. How could her husband have given her up? But that was territory I knew better than to explore, having never
asked it even of my own mother. The only life left to us now, to dream about, as we used to when we were children, was my own. And, soon, even that might be over.
I rested my head on her chest. Above the rise of her breasts, her baby, now seven months along. I wrapped an arm over it, secretly claiming it as my own. She was carrying our child, the one I must not bear.
“Tell me about him,” she said, referring to Nate. “In what way was he better?”
Better? I did not know Sameer well enough to say one man was better. It had been his gaze, steady and gentle, that stirred something awake inside—not a different self, as Zeba had done, but a feeling. I had to try on love, just once with the man I chose, before …
But that life
was
already over. In two nights, when the moon was full, on the fifteenth day of the Islamic month of Shaw’wal, the day the Qur’an and the astrologer had determined would be auspicious, I would begin a different phase of my life.
“You tell me about Sameer,” I said. “Remind me how I felt for him,” but even as I spoke, the image of my fiance fluttered before my eyes. His dark gaze, piercing and unsettling, calling up that dull tug of attraction. He had a gap between his front two teeth and his tongue wiggled in and out of it, teasing. “Oh dear God,” I cried, hiding my face in Henna’s soft shoulder. “I pray I haven’t made a mistake.”
Henna stroked my hair before raising my face to her own. And there they were, those eyes, offering me redemption. Yet what could I confess, which life of mine, which choice, was in error?
“Layla,” she whispered, her voice scared in a way I’d never heard. What stray thought had caused her courage to seep out? “Did you go too far with him, Layla? This bleeding … will your husband …”
“No,” I said, staring at the shadows under her eyes. If, like Amme, she had carried her burden alone, so, too, could I. Perhaps this was part of becoming a woman.
She pressed her palm against mine, the mehndi lines telling a
different tale than the ones that foretold our lives. She wanted the truth.
“No,” I said again. “No.”
 
 
AFTER HENNA HAD fallen asleep, I slowly pulled away from her and wrapped the long
duppatta
around me to hide my exposed back, the hooks undone.
I was going out in search of Raga-be. It was past midnight and I thought the house was asleep, but when I opened the bedroom door, the wood creaking, the coconuts swaying over my head, I saw Acme standing by the courtyard faucet. She was barefoot, her sari hitched up to her calves, her body lit bright in the moonlight. She was performing
wazu
. Her prayers for me were never recited during the day or in public, as Zeba’s had been tonight, but in a private audience with God. Night salat was so appreciated by Allah, it was said, that he rewarded one night prayer as equal to praying a thousand years. The five prayers that punctuated each day could be uttered in five minutes. Night salat was so extensive, she would be reciting till dawn.
I hid behind the door curtain and watched as she passed her small hands under the sink, splashing the moonlight. Right hand. Left hand. God’s hand, the devil’s hand, they said. But in reality, just fragile, wrinkled hands that had, at one time, carried me. Now she passed water over her face, the part down the center of her head, and finally up her bare feet, each gesture, each motion cleansing her spirit of the waste of this world so she could stand pure before Allah. There was something about watching my mother like this, when she felt alone and unobserved except by God, that made her seem like an angel to me, and me like the real earthly waste she had to shed in order to return to her ethereal splendor.
 
 
DUSK. THE THIRD day of my wedding, mehndi.
I was lying alone in my wedding bed, the wooden shutters pulled
open, the widening moon suspended in the window frame. Time was running out.
The women of my family had already left for Sameer’s house, Ameera Auntie stuffing the musicians and their instruments into her Ambassador. This was the groom’s ceremony And just as the women from his family had come to Amme’s house the previous night, bearing my wedding clothes, adorning me, so, tonight, did the women of my family journey to his home with silver trays displaying our gifts: jeans and corduroys, polo T-shirts and button-downs, an electric shaver and three cans of Gillette shaving cream, a leather wallet and a bottle of Ralph Lauren cologne, and finally, the gold wedding band, which Henna, representing me, would slip onto his finger.
Earlier, my aunts and cousins had once more gathered here to straighten each other’s sari pleats, weave flowers through each other’s braids, and come up with ideas on how to tease the groom. Unlike the ceremony his family had conducted, quiet and sober, my family intended to perform with full gaiety The women had dug up old memories of his family and spun them into jokes, even as they invented clever ways to exaggerate my virtues. Henna was advised again and again to resist sliding on the wedding ring too quickly All this was customary, a tussle, a play, meant to prove to the groom that his bride was worthy of him. Tomorrow night, games aside, he would find out for himself.
Dad’s figure now crossed over the ripening moon, so dark against its luminescence that he could have been the demon risen from my dreams, the form without a face, mute. He called out to Munir to feed the lamb, not to fatten it up even more, but in hopes of quieting the creature. Munir was already gone. Dinner tonight would be served at Sameer’s house, and our cook had seized the opportunity to take an early leave. Dad threw the animal three guavas that Ahmed had picked from the tree as he crossed the courtyard and slipped out the front gate, whistling. He was taking the motorcycle to his mother-in-law’s house, and I thought how unfair it was that I had acted no differently from
him, yet I would be the one punished. Arranged in marriage to one person, choosing another to love. What he did, by Old City laws, was natural for a man, even expected. Islam itself sanctioned four wives, just as it had sanctioned divorce. So easy for a man to release himself:
talak, talak, talak,
the one word pronounced thrice to undo an entire existence.
It was local custom that prevented Dad from fully abandoning us, and whatever deed Amme had made
him
sign after their divorce. A girl here went from her father’s house to her husband’s, from the protection of one man to the protection of another. A girl raised without a father, without a man’s name shielding her reputation, might as well be illegitimate, might as well be a whore—the very thing I had become, according to those local customs, by sleeping with Nate. And the very thing Amme had tried to prevent by staying on with Dad even after their divorce.
Talak, talak
,
talak,
each word punched out, as distinct as the heart’s beating on an EKG. That year, he had returned from his two-week vacation to Hyderabad with two deeds: one he enacted to end Amme’s life, one he signed to give her this house. Her tomb. She locked herself into the bedroom of her suburban house, one floor above mine, and mourned for a month. Ten days short of the forty Islam designates to grieve a death. For she hadn’t fully died, nor had he fully died to her. Instead, a different arrangement had been made, one never pronounced aloud, never revealed to me, the daughter, as the divorce itself was never disclosed. This deed was written up by Amme and slid under the locked door, and only when he signed it did the door open.
Amme had emerged silent and dried up, yet it was the high-pitched wail I’d heard for a month, drifting down the vents, seeping through the walls and ceiling, that went on echoing inside me, becoming the loam of my loam, bone and flesh. The noise of a dying woman. Though it had been ten years, the sound was still as familiar to me as my own voice, and, like my voice, I heard that
howl both within and without. The crying lamb, the long notes of the
shenai
, the breeze now tussling the guava leaves all sprang from the residue of that shriek.
Nafiza hobbled into the room, humming a song she had invented long ago about a girl who would one day find her way home. She sat at the edge of my bed, behind me, caressing my hair. A fruit bat flew across the surface of the moon, as black as my name.
“Henna’s at Sameer’s house right now,” I said. “She even gets to see my future home before I do.”
“You love she too much, child,” Nafiza said, and I knew what she meant. My nanny didn’t like Henna and me sleeping in the same bed, touching. A few years ago, Nafiza had gone to Amme and complained, asking my mother to keep us separated. Amme had simply laughed and accused the old woman of having a dirty mind, then referred to something my nanny had done on the farm when the two had been young women, and my nanny never brought it up again. Still, I could see the disapproval like a shadow across her face, her small eyes drawing closed, pulling in her presence.
“You said you would protect me, Nafiza, as you used to when I was a little girl. What will you do if he doesn’t want me as his wife?” But even as I asked it, I knew there was nothing she could do. A woman, a servant, what power had she?
“When you mama come home tonight, we tell she about the
gora
boy She no understand the bleeding. You mama only see Sameer. She only see you wedding.”
Yes, tell my mother about Nate, just as Nafiza had told her about Henna. The dirty mind, the polluted body, and she, my mother, the angel splashing moonlight, what could even she do? When my father beat me, she stayed in the other room, attentive to the sound of wounded flesh. When I was four, hiding in the laundry basket, his heavy leather shoes shaking the ground beneath me, she had simply told him that if he continued searching, he would be late for his shift at the hospital. It was only because of work that he’d left, the one time I’d gotten away from him.
In truth, Amme couldn’t stop him. She was not even allowed to utter his name, so how could she dare utter a word against his?
Prayer, it was the only power available, prayer to God, prayer to all invisible forces.
 
 
TWO HOURS BEFORE the call to prayer heralding my wedding day, Raga-be woke me.
Without warning, she stuffed a gold knife into my hand as she whispered, “You no safe at this hour. Time heavy with
djinns
and things that no sleep no more. Demon you dream of no real demon so even he no match for this.” Then she turned and headed out of the room, the coconut swaying above her hunched form.
I slid out of the netting, the knife gripped tightly against my swollen belly. Nafiza was sleeping on the floor beside my bed, a sheet pulled over her entire body even her head. It was how she protected herself from mosquitos. I carefully stepped over her and slipped out the door.
Raga-be was already in the courtyard, crouched in the moon shadows of the guava tree. With a short twig, she was writing on the dirt. The lamb jumped up and, though I was afraid it would begin calling, it simply wound its way around the trunk, hiding itself on the other side, and lay back down.
The doors to every room but one were open. Dad and his family were sleeping at his mother-in-law’s. Henna had gone home with my aunts after the groom’s ceremony, their houses so close to his in Vijayanagar Colony Amme had returned alone, Ahmed carrying in the empty silver trays as he followed her steps into the house. My mother’s face was as full as the moon’s. Her daughter was finally getting married. Nothing, as she had announced at the
mun-jay,
nothing could now go wrong. Yet there she was, at it again, sequestered to the prayer room, a slender light visible from the crack beneath the door, incense fumes billowing out. What was she losing sleep over, what did she really know?
I joined Raga-be in the courtyard, the air cooler than I had expected, and I wrapped the
duppatta
around me as a scarf, still pressing the knife against my abdomen. On the dry earth, close to her bare toes, a script like none I had ever seen.
Alims
, from the Arabic word for all-knowing, claimed to derive their power from Allah, their remedies his
rehmat,
grace. Raga-be channeled her knowledge from
djinns
, beings that coexisted with us, hidden from the human eye. As humans were molded from clay,
djinns
were created from fire; as our bodies were inalterable, they could shift shapes; as our eyes were limited, they saw all that had come before, all that was yet to come, all time inhabiting one moment. Raga-be was now chanting softly—or was she communicating with a
djinn
in a language I didn’t understand? She wiped the dirt clean with a quick swipe of the hand, the red of the henna creating an illusion of fire.
She stood without any effort, so unlike my weakened nanny and headed toward the circular stairs. There she stopped, and the moonlight cast a shadow of her bowed frame that crept up the stairs before we did. Without showing me her face, she said, “Bitea, you tie hair?”

Other books

The Holiday Nanny by Lois Richer
A History of China by Morris Rossabi
Labyrinth by Kate Mosse
Quest for the Sun Orb by Laura Jo Phillips
Skeleton-in-Waiting by Peter Dickinson
Just Jack by Meredith Russell