Madras on Rainy Days: A Novel (13 page)

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Authors: Samina Ali

BOOK: Madras on Rainy Days: A Novel
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“No!”
“Yes, a fool. While I was writing to you, telling you how much I wanted to touch you, be with you, you were there … with him. Letting
him into your room, letting him …
fuck
you. You, my fiancée, my wife! Jesus Christ, it is all I see, what
he
has done to you. After reading those letters, I tried to do what he … I didn’t know I would feel so
repelled
!
”
He let out a long breath and fell back onto the stool.
“Do you want me to leave? If you want to … send me away, just call Nafiza—” my voice buckled.
He was silent, slowly unwinding the kurta. I folded the white cloth as tidily as the women had folded my wedding clothes. My hands were trembling. The rain was beating the wood. He came over to the mosquito netting and drew back the slit that served as the entrance. He sat beside me and took my hand, his thumb winding around the henna designs until he found his initials at the center. He crushed the painted leaf.
“You belong to me now,” he said, eyes averted from my face. “How many times did I write that I would do anything to make you mine? I have, and now I will do anything to keep you.” He threw the cloth on the floor. “My mother placed that in here. Such traditions are important to her. I’ve told you before, I’m not that kind of man, I don’t believe as they do here. They’re stuck in some past that no longer exists. And that is what we must remember, baby.” His fingers curved up into my hair and he pulled me close, his forehead pressing into mine. His breath became the air I breathed. “What has happened in the past no longer matters. We must never raise it again. I make a promise on our first night together, to forgive you and not ask any more questions. But you must do the same. You must not ask about my past. What matters is the man before you. I swear to you, baby, I will do my best to be the man you want—that
I
want to be. Just give me time to get over …
this.
My God!” he said, tugging at my blouse’s gold thread, my silver toe ring glinting on his thumb. “How can I make you understand? I want nothing more than to be able to touch you.”
 
 
THAT NIGHT, OUR wedding night, he slept with his arms crossed over his chest. In the morning, by the time Nafiza awakened me to dress, he
was already gone. I hadn’t expected that he’d leave me alone on the first day of our marriage, but, of course, I’d done things he hadn’t expected either. The shutters were pushed open, revealing the gray boundary wall, the smell of wet dirt mingling with the scent of dying flowers.
Nafiza bathed me as before, singing that song she had long ago invented about a girl who would one day find her way home. It was about me, of course, recounting how, at nearly a year old, I had walked out of the family compound and gotten lost. My mother, who had been packing suitcases for our move to the U.S.—tropical clothes, rice and ghee, betel nut leaves, what do you bring to a country you’ve never been to?—hadn’t noticed or, if she had, had thought Nafiza was attending to me. My nanny assumed I was with my mother. By the time the family went out to search, I was nowhere in the neighborhood. It wasn’t until the next day that someone brought me to the police station. Amme said Dad was so relieved to have me back, he threw a party for four hundred people—as large as my wedding. I have no memory of any of it.
Now I said, “But Nafiza-una, haven’t I found my way home?”
She raised her voice over mine, singing even louder, the exertion causing her to cough so deeply that she had to stoop behind me, a hand resting heavily on my back for support. I reached over my shoulder and patted it, but she drew away, still angry I was sure, about what I’d done with Raga-be. I finished bathing myself while she fetched a towel.
When I came into the bedroom with it around me, I was surprised to find my mother-in-law She was standing at the foot of the bed, and the sunlight falling through the open window revealed the deep lines across her forehead and under her eyes, around her lips. Tears were running down her wide cheekbones, which she didn’t wipe away. The black veil was still wrapped about her, making me feel exposed.
“Islam says that heaven lies at the mother’s feet,” Zeba said. “To please her is to enter heaven. Today, Layla … Beti … you have earned your place in heaven.” She stepped forward and wrapped me in
her arms, the black cloth swooping about like ravens’ wings. She smelled of sweat and cooking spices, the jasmine oil she must have applied to her hair. When she pulled back and saw my confused face, her lips curved into a tight smile, three crescents on either side of her mouth. It was the strongest expression of happiness I had seen on her. “This morning, Sameer gave me the cloth. You are a virtuous wife, Layla. Your steps into this house have blessed us all.” She kissed my forehead, as she had at the
sanchak
ceremony, and this time, I was left with the softness of her lips and not the scratchy feel of the brocade. “Dress her in green,” she ordered Nafiza, not taking her eyes off me. “I want to see my daughter in green all day, not only at the
walima
. Allah
ka shukar
, this is not just a show.”
After she had gone, I dressed as she’d asked, choosing a green of raw henna, then sat on the stool before the mirror. Nafiza stood behind me, plaiting my hair.
She said, “You papa, he once believe you feet bless him.”
I gazed at her through the tall mirror, but she kept her focus on my hair. She had it parted into three sections and was winding each tightly around the other as she blended in the strand of white jasmine Zeba had sent Sameer’s brother, Feroz, to get. My husband had still not returned from wherever he’d gone.
I said, “My going to Raga-be for help is no different from Amme taking me to all those
alims.
Nafiza, there’s no reason for you …”
“The boy, he touch you?” she asked, speaking over me.
I took in the face that was as familiar to me as my mother’s, the hardened skin across the cheeks and forehead, the thin lips as dark as the rest of her. No matter that she had helped raise me here, how much could the old servant really understand about me and my life?
“Throw out the marigolds,” I said. “I’m getting a headache. Maybe there’s a maid who can help you.” There was no maid, I knew, this was a modest household.
“Throw out flowers. Throw out bloody rags. Everything stink,” she said, slowly adding, “Stink, too, the white cloth the boy give his mama. Same stink as rags.”
I ignored her.
“Boy who touch he wife no leave house in hurry-hurry,” she went on. “Sun still meeting ground, not in sky yet, and he gone. Why he keep wife he running from? She what use to him?” She shook her head. “Bloody cloth is
jadu
he use to fool people. Make them believe what no there. Child, you tell he mama …”
“Tell his mother, tell my mother—Nafiza, you tell
me,
what good will it do?” Before she could answer, I added, “You yourself went to Raga-be before you got married, tucking away some secret. So you know there are times when not everything should be revealed.”
She yanked a section of hair, tearing the thread stringing together the flowers. White petals fell into my lap and on the floor. She pulled a bobby pin from her gray bun and, squeezing a few stems onto it, pushed it through my braid. Her eyes, small pinholes in her face, closed even more. A drawing in of her presence.
“Better you tell he mama the truth,” she repeated.
“One night means nothing, Nafiza. I won’t tell anyone. Giving him away is giving myself away. Don’t you see that?”
“You no tell she what no concern her. Only tell she about she child. He no do what he say he do.” She sighed, and I could feel the heavy weight of her breasts against me. “No telling what the boy up to. Better you protect you-self.”
Protect myself from Sameer? He was the one protecting me. And hadn’t she, my nanny, offered the same thing only three days before?
“Nafiza, if you really want to protect me, don’t tell his mother, don’t make me return to that house. There is no home there for me, there is only my father. He will kill me, if not for this, then for something else; one day he will end up killing me.”
She pursed her lips, hands going still. Then she suddenly looked up at me, yellow teeth revealing themselves through a smile, a thought having crossed her mind. “This Allah’s work, no
jadu,
” she said. “You no see, child, if you go home now, he no kill you. The boy say he touch you, but he no touch you. You return now, you save you-self. Only when boy touch you and return you he-self will you papa …”
she stopped, unable to utter what we both knew he would do to me, Nafiza’s second daughter.
Finally she said, “Me old woman, Layla-bebe. Me no know how to read and write, me no go to foreign schools like you. All life, I spend in you mama’s house. I grow up there, I marry there, and, one day, I die there, like me husband die there. Me girl, Roshan, I give her same-same milk I give you. No difference in milk. No difference in love. Now me girl giving milk to her girl. But you no making milk, you making blood. What you think become of me when I see this?”
I bowed my head in shame. I hadn’t thought about her.
She pulled on my braid, forcing me to raise my head again. She said, “But I still standing beside you,” and pinched my kurta. “Take this off. I get different clothes. Me girl return home in honor.”
“No, Nafiza, I can’t. You see …” I slid my fingertips across the drawer in which he’d found those letters. “It’s too late. Sameer already knows about me. And by
jadu
or by God, he’s keeping me on as his wife. Just like you, he still accepts me. But he’s my husband, Nafiza, he needs some time to get over this. It’s why he couldn’t touch me last night.”
She turned down her dark lips and grunted. She hadn’t been expecting that. But nor had I when it happened. Some hidden powers at work, indeed.
Then Nafiza said, “Maybe he fooling you? Using what you do to hide he-self.” But she no longer seemed as sure of what she knew
I plucked the jasmine from my lap and slid them into my braid. My hand was turned sideways, and in the mirror, I could see the reflection of my palm, the leaf drawn red, already beginning to fade.
“I have to go greet my new family,” I said, rising, and though I wanted to call Zeba “Mother,” I couldn’t, and instead said, “Zeba Auntie must be waiting.”
She lumbered to the bed, pounding on the leg that gave her pain, and began snapping off the floral ropes. As usual, she was dressed in one of Amme’s old saris, the ghost of my mother hovering about. She spoke through a sigh, “One night he no touch you, you say you no
care so I no care. One night, maybe it mean no-thing. But Layla-bebe,” she said, looking up at me, her face fully open and drawing me in as palpably as a caress, so I knew what she said was not a threat but a gesture of maternal love, “if one night become two and three and four and five, if one night go on like this, I speak to he mama me-self. I tell she the truth.” Her hand closed on a marigold, crushing it.
“That’s fine, Nafiza,” I said, not believing it would come to that.
 
 
THE LAST OF the five wedding days,
walima.
Over a thousand guests were invited to the dinner Sameer’s parents hosted to proudly announce he had consummated the marriage. The wedding hall, which had sweltered with four hundred people the previous night of the
nik’kah
—forcing the manager to set up standing fans as tall as a man every ten or so feet—now became unbearable, the air stinking of sweat and skin, betel nut and spices, flowers and bad breath. All the fans were turned on high but did little to stir the dead air.
Sameer and I sat on a square-shaped dais, ropes of white jasmine and red roses hanging down three sides of a maroon canopy Through the side free of flowers, we gazed out at the wedding guests, perched on those high-backed chairs his family had ordered for the wedding. It was true, he could not properly fold his broken-and-not-properly-healed right leg to sit cross-legged on a velvet
masnat
, as was tradition.
But not much was traditional about this night, nor, I was learning, about my husband. Rather than wear the heavy silver
sherwani
with the Nehru-cut collar, he had chosen a blue Armani suit Amme had sent over on one of those gift trays. And below, in place of the colorful silk sandals, he had on the thick-soled black boots I had seen him in the first time we’d met, then each of the three times we went out with Nafiza-una, the ones with the corrective heels. Beside him, I was the glorious image of the virtuous wife: wrapped in the six-foot-long silver threaded green sari, my ears and fingers and neck gleaming with emeralds, bangles clinking up to my elbows, ankles heavy with gold chains, only the silver ring missing from my one toe. Despite the heat,
I still wore the floral garland his mother had draped each of us in to commence the event, though he had immediately removed his and cast it by his feet.
Before us, the brightly lit wedding hall was jammed from end to end with tables of assorted sizes. In the courtyard, a large tent had been hitched and more tables arranged. Still, some guests ate standing up. His family, my family, went about greeting people, giving up their tables for other guests. It had been decided, upon gauging the crowd, that the immediate family members would eat after the event, including the bride and groom. After all, the celebratory feeding of others was the only ritual of the
walima
, no application of oils and turmeric, sweetening of the mouth. Our marriage was now official.

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