Madras on Rainy Days: A Novel (11 page)

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Authors: Samina Ali

BOOK: Madras on Rainy Days: A Novel
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“Yes,” I said, feeling my braid through the
duppatta.
Even as I had resisted Sameer’s letters and this marriage, I had grown my hair to the perfect length so that bridal flowers could be easily pinned through its plaits.
“Keep tie,” Raga-be advised. “No want no evil to nest in hair.”
We crept up to the second floor, quietly passing the balcony Henna and I had stood on together, arms slung around each other’s waists, peeking down at the men, her father, my father, men who never seemed to see us … until we stepped outside our limits. What I was doing tonight, up here with Raga-be, reaching into the folds of darkness, into the unseen, was well within a woman’s limits, not a regressive act, but one of two ways she could maneuver outside a man’s grasp, regaining control of her body. If prayers to Allah ascended the stone walls of this neighborhood, prayers to
djinns
dug beneath like tunnels.
At the center of the flat roof was an earthenware jug, fire shooting
out of its tight lips. Before it lay an empty burlap rice sack she must have spread for us to sit on. Off to the side, a flat, round bowl with a raised edge that, at first, I thought was empty. But when I sat and peered inside, I saw a dark liquid reflecting the nearly perfect moon. The image wrinkled and straightened, and that was how I knew the liquid moved.
Rather than sit next to me, Raga-be squatted on the opposite side of the flames.
“Give me you knife,” she said, holding open a red palm.
I pulled it out from under the
duppatta
and handed it to her. She set the knife over the round mouth of the jug and the flames curved around the blade, leaping red and blue. She picked up the flat bowl and smelled the liquid, her kohl-lined eyes closing, before she passed the wide bottom over the flames, heating it. After she had made the eleventh pass, she swirled the liquid, which crackled and spit like hot oil. She spoke in her language again and blew, and once it had settled, she set the bowl before me.
“You dip twenty nails. First hands. Second feet. First left. Second right. Then I cut them away Important you do as I say.”
I looked into the bowl again. “What is it?”
She stared at me awhile, the flames captured in her black eyes, trying to extend beyond them. “Blood of rooster. Fresh.” Then she added, “I cut me-self.” She gestured to the gold knife between us.
I turned away. Our roof was still the highest in the alley and the entire city’s lights surrounded us. Where they came to an abrupt end and folded into darkness, there stood the stone walls, like the edges of a sky hemming in stars. And as with the stars, I knew if I stared at the lights long enough, I could make the shape of the knife appear in them, just as we make shapes appear in constellations—trying to give meaning to what we can’t understand.
“I know what you think, Bitea. I know you no like up here. But you ask me you-self, you come to me, Bitea, I no come to you.” She laughed, the meat of her tongue red from betel nut. “You more like you ayah than you think. When Nafiza you age, she come to me, too.
Right before she marry!” She leaned toward the fire, and her face lit up. Her eyes were spread wide, and behind the trapped flames, I saw a dark form I took to be me. I grunted.
“You no believe, ask she!”
She retreated into the darkness and her voice came out deeper than before, as though some
djinn
had already lodged inside. “You decide in hurry-hurry, Bitea. This no work if you no believe.” Then she said, “You always like this, Bitea, always with a split tongue, saying two things, believing two things. When you stitch it together?”
Stitch my tongue together, stitch my body together, the two women jostling inside the one frame no longer tearing the skin by its seams—could she not see, this woman who, with the
djinn’
s help, could now see all, it was the very thing I wanted?
She flipped the knife over on the flames, and though I wondered what she was planning to do with it, I pushed the thought out of my mind, just as I’d been pushing away memories of Nate, my body’s cramping and spitting blood. She was chanting again, the
kajal
across the lids of her closed eyes resembling the lines she’d drawn in the earth. Her body was rocking, the fire growing, and somewhere in it all, I thought I heard her say the name Nate.
Inside the flat bowl, the moon was widening and disappearing. Nate and Sameer, the one who had come to me in the darkness of the new moon, the one who would appear when it was at its brightest, the one who didn’t exist, the only one who did.
I, too, closed my eyes, and the moon became the illuminated dome of Mecca Masjid, the flames the glowing minarets of the Char Minar. The blood was the passage below the earth, unseen. In the distance, a door opened, in the heart of night, and the invader was invited in. The enemies’ guns had already broken a hole through a wall, but a paper facade had been painted and hung over the damage, fooling the conquerors into thinking the fort had remained untouched.
I sunk my fingers into the warm blood, staring at the old woman. “Make him believe I’m still a girl.”
She snatched the knife from the fire and dropped it into the bowl. The blood hissed as it swallowed the blade.
 
 
DAD RAISED THE machete into the air, raindrops dripping off the steel blade, and swung it down, heaving. A practice strike.
What did it matter what time it was? It was my wedding day.
The first time the butcher had shown up at the house that morning, he’d arrived just as the last of the morning azans were ending, his tall, thick figure filling up the gate’s door as he ducked to enter, his T-shirt a startling white against the gray dawn. Munir had let him in, walking sleepily across the courtyard, pushing up his thick glasses. Raga-be and I were making our way down the stairs, and when we heard the butcher calling his arrival, we stopped, hidden behind the cement railing, my legs feeling heavy. I had to sit on a step. The man was sent away Dad wasn’t home yet from his in-laws’.
When Munir had made his way back into the kitchen, Raga-be helped me up and, tightly gripping my arm, fingers pinching my skin, she guided me to my room. Nafiza was pulling off the bedsheets, the velvet blanket and pillows stacked on the maroon stool before the tall mirror. When she saw me with Raga-be, she straightened and her small eyes became smaller, her dark lips pursing. She wouldn’t allow herself to say what she wanted. She took my other arm and shooed away the old servant. Then she looked about the room, unsure, as always, of where to seat me. The movers were scheduled to arrive to take the furniture. Finally, she brought me into the salon and shifted a bamboo chair under a ceiling fan. Then she went back to my room, back to what she’d been doing: preparing for my move to Sameer’s.
I must have fallen asleep on that chair, for when I awoke again, it was to the sound of men’s voices. They were calling to each other in Telugu as they carried the furniture down the verandah steps, past the lamb. A lorry had been backed into the courtyard, two skinny planks lowered, and the wood curved under each of the men’s loads. Amme
was standing at the edge of the salon, yelling at them to be more careful, then yelling because the headboard had slipped, dropping on the stairs. It was raining, the tiles slick, the men’s hair pushed flat against their scalps, water dripping from their lashes, nose tips, earlobes. One met my gaze. I stretched and massaged a leg, then turned over in the deep chair.
When my eyes opened again, the day was still dark, as though it refused to begin. The men had vanished with my dowry. The lamb was pressed against the tree trunk to duck the rain, which fell so hard it made the sound that a leather sole makes when it slaps flesh. Nafiza was standing over me.
“Sleep, child,” she said, not touching me. “Only sleep wears this off.”
“You know, don’t you?” I said.
She moved away.
Then, in her place, were the two boys, Dad’s sons, small hands gripping the chair’s arm, rising and falling from tiptoes.
“You don’t look like a bride,” the younger one, Ziad, said. He was dressed in a silky silver kurta-pajama. Farzad was wearing the same design in gold. Both had thick lashes that curled back to graze the eyelid.
The older one smiled at me, his lips as full as Dad’s, as my own. He said, “My mother says it’s raining on your wedding day because you licked pots when you were young.”
I blinked at him, straightening in the chair. What had she done to me, what had she mixed into that rooster’s blood to make me feel like this? I began pounding on a leg as I’d so often seen Nafiza do. “What does that mean?” I asked.
He lost his smile for a moment, then shot me an even wider one. He was missing two teeth. “It’s just some stupid Indian saying,” he said. “But I thought it was funny.”
Sabana called them away to watch the slaughter, and the two boys scampered to either side of her. She flung a thick arm around each, nestling them against the sides of her expanding belly. They were standing at the edge of the verandah, where Amme had been that same
morning, monitoring the movers, protected from the rain. Dad was in the courtyard, raising and lowering the machete. The butcher had returned.
I sat up in the chair. Behind me, I could hear Amme in her bedroom, telling Nafiza to accompany me to Sameer’s house, where she would attend to me until I returned with my husband to the U.S. She was advising my nanny to pack her clothes as she gave her a month’s salary in advance.
The butcher’s white T-shirt was now spotted brownish-red from his morning slaughterings. He was lining up knives on the
takat
the musicians had been sitting on for the past three days. For a second, he ducked under the black tarp and wiped his face clean of the rain, then dived back out. His wet T-shirt was pressed to him, his shoulder blades jutting out. He nodded at Dad.
Dad called something out toward the kitchen. The legs of his dark trousers were flapping against his calves. He had taken a wide stance, the machete gripped in both his graceful hands, leather shoes digging into the mud. Over his thick, wavy hair, he’d slipped on the baseball cap that belonged to his older son. It was to keep the rain from his eyes. Water dripped in streams off the bill.
Munir and Ahmed rushed out of the kitchen, pant legs folded up, exposing bony ankles. Ahmed untied the lamb and dragged it out by the rope from where it had taken shelter. It bellowed and kicked and ran back under the branches, flattening its broad belly against the trunk. Ahmed grabbed the rope again, and this time, the butcher went behind the lamb and kicked it forward. This was work for him. Later, he’d have to attend to another slaughter.
Munir’s glasses had steamed up and he took them off and slid them into his shirt pocket. The butcher wrapped the front paws with the rope, running the length of it down the center of the animal, where it got lost in the wool, then reappeared at the other end. He tied together the back legs before handing them to Munir. The cook and driver hauled the lamb out to the center of the courtyard, clear of branches and other obstructions. Dad kept raising and lowering the
machete as he smiled up at his sons from under the baseball cap. Did he even notice me here, the bride for whom he was making this offering?
When the lamb was positioned, the two servants still gripping its legs, trying to hold it still, Dad stepped forward. Ziad hid his face in Sabana’s belly, but she pinched his chin and straightened it.
“Watch your father,” she ordered. “Learn from him.”
So they were being taught, as I had been, how to survive here.
Dad raised the machete a final time, then heaved it toward the earth, slicing the lamb’s neck. At once, the head fell forward, kicking legs going slack. Blood poured out the severed neck, creating a pool under the poor creature that washed away along with the rain, a gentle red stream flowing into the roots of the guava tree.
I rose unsteadily and made my way out to the courtyard and into the rain. I stumbled to the faucet where I’d watched Amme performing
wazu
and vomited.
His letters, the ones wrapped in my first wedding dress, slipped into the dresser drawer by Henna’s agile hand, had gone with the rest of my wedding dowry, to my husband’s house.
 
 
THE RAIN THRASHING the earth.
I was standing at the center of Amme’s bedroom, her dowry bed and dresser, her
almari
on one side of me, Sabana’s on the other. Dad was sitting with his family in the salon, around the red
dastar-khan,
enjoying fresh liver fried in garlic and ginger. His sons were hesitant to taste what they called the family pet, and Dad and Sabana were teasing them in order to get them to eat. Beyond the family, hanging from a clothesline in the courtyard, was the shorn wool. Despite the rain, flies were buzzing about the slaughter, the house stinking of blood and death.
I spread the golden curtain more fully across the door. Amme was laying out the sari and jewels she planned to wear to my
nik’kah,
the sari a brighter red than my own wedding dress, the tone matching my henna designs. As she moved about, her
pallow
kept falling, and she
twisted it and draped it tightly across her chest, exposing the loose flesh of her belly, the long cesarean scar she’d gotten from my brother.

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