Madras on Rainy Days: A Novel (14 page)

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Authors: Samina Ali

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As guests finished their meals, they came up to congratulate us in colorful clumps, and Sameer rose and shook hands with the men, accepting their good wishes, while I lowered my head even farther in modesty, accepting clumsy pats on my head, fingers brushing against my cheek, further smudging the makeup the heat had already creased across my face. After a while, though, the salutations began to be accompanied by the rumor that had been seeping through the gathering, whispered from guest to guest, and now boldly raised by the men to the new groom: the evening seemed hastily put together, they complained, not enough tables, not enough chairs, perhaps not even enough food to go around. Most of the guests had been invited that very day by Feroz, who had rushed to various houses in the Old City and Vijayanagar Colony on his bicycle to announce the
walima
would indeed be hosted, the bride had been accepted. The men asked my husband if he and his family had assumed there would not be a successful union, the bride being American.
If Sameer had seemed impatient before with this ceremony, tapping the silver ring against the chair’s arm, hurriedly greeting and getting each guest off the stage, now, having to defend my honor again and again to the hundreds who came up in small knots of color and curiosity, titillation, appeared to have defeated him. By the time the last of the guests bounded onto the dais to greet us before leaving, he
didn’t stand to greet them. He simply nodded, the hand with the silver toe ring massaging his forehead, the three deep lines that had emerged across it. And when the wedding photographer tried to take a final photo, he turned his face away. We didn’t speak.
When the guests had gone, two long tables were pushed next to each other, the tall fans shifted to surround us. The high-backed chairs were moved to the center of one table, the women of Sameer’s family sitting to my right, the men to Sameer’s left. The man who had danced to the brass wedding band, the one Sameer had explained to me late last night was one of his closest friends, Naveed, was not among them.
At the other table, my family. Sabana was busy fussing over her boys, loading up their plates with
biriyani
and chicken
tikka,
lamb kabobs, and yogurt, while Dad was laughing, his head thrown back at some remark. Over the head of his younger son, his light-colored eyes were fixed on Ameera Auntie, and she was smiling shyly at him, her mouth partly covered by her sari
-pallow.
Her thin cheeks were flushed in a way I’d never seen before, Dad’s presence the cause of the healthy glow the disease had taken away. My two uncles were bent over their plates, eating rapidly—it was now close to midnight. Just beyond them, my mother was embracing her sister, Asma Kala, both their faces flushed with joy, the matching green of their saris seeming to roll the two women into one, and I glimpsed how they must have looked as children, and then imagined how Henna and I would appear years from now, when the child she was now carrying was getting married. My cousin was fanning herself with a napkin, a hand resting on her expanding belly. She caught my eye and smiled.
How was it possible that I was not among my family and the dramas I had grown to know and accept? This, my physical separation, more than if Sameer had actually consummated the marriage, made my union with my husband ever more believable. It was true, I now belonged to him.
I touched his thigh under the table. “Where’s your friend Naveed?” I asked, hoping to take his mind off the evening’s lies, the
walima’
s grand announcement of a chaste coupling, then his own repeated one to the late-invited wedding guests—“Of course my wife is virtuous,” he had said again and again, a mantra I knew he himself wanted to believe. “My mother’s caution is not a sign that we ever doubted Layla.”
He now shrugged, sweat running in lines down his temples, glistening on his neck. He had taken the jacket off and rolled up the sleeves of his shirt, exposing wide wrists and tanned arms. I could not imagine how hot his feet must have been inside the leather boots.
“Maybe he came and went,” he said. “It’s hard to remember with so many people.” Then he gave me that look from last night, the one that said I’d made him into a fool, and rather than seeing him on that high-backed chair, I saw him on the round stool, my light-colored kurta stretched taut between his fists. He squeezed my hand against his weaker thigh, speaking as he had to the scandalized guests, through tight lips, “Once more, Mum’s prudence has shamed me.”
Amme came over just then and, standing behind Sameer and me, twirled a few hundred rupees over our heads, once, twice, seven times, the gesture Raga-be had made with the rooster’s blood. She was doing away with evil spirits and the envious eye. When she was done, she handed the notes to me, saying to give the money to those who were less fortunate than us, the homeless.
Despite my new husband’s anguished face, as I watched my mother take her seat at my family’s table, I knew I could never go back to that.
 
 
DAWN IN VIJAYANAGAR Colony broke much quieter than dawn in the Old City. There, loudspeakers mounted on each corner mosque ushered in the new day, one azan starting seconds before or after another, sometimes even minutes later, when
fajr namaz
at a different
masjid
might have already concluded. Hearing so many calls to prayer, each wave of adulation lapping over the other, was discomfiting, a cacophony, a chaos overhead that matched the chaos of life below. It seemed
as though the imams were sparring in the skies, one raising his voice, the other matching then raising his own, inviting followers to worship in that particular mosque.
That first Friday in Vijayanagar Colony, I woke just before dawn, my body grown accustomed to these morning arousals as it had grown accustomed to the new clock and calendar, morning in America, night in India, July there, Ze’qad here. We had gotten married on the fourth of July, and it had not occurred to me until weeks later, when we were at the American Consulate in Madras, that the fireworks flaring over the wedding hall could have been an echo of the displays erupting across the U.S.
Overhead, three taps on a loudspeaker, a gentle clearing of the throat, then the gradual ascent of a single voice, unfamiliar to me from the Old City ones I’d come to recognize. From start to finish, his voice alone, so that I could follow the cadence in the Arabic and feel the words delicately beckoning the faithful out of bed, “Allah is great.” “There is no god but God,” “Time has come for good deeds,” “Time has come for prayer.”
When it ended, there was a soft rap at the bedroom door. Sameer was still sleeping, his back to me, so far at the edge of the bed that his face was pressed into the thick mosquito netting. I rose, wrapping a
duppatta
around my head as I had learned from Zeba to do even in the house, and opened it. It was the younger brother, Feroz, dressed in the loose pajama-
kameez
he wore to bed. The
kameez
had three tiny gold buttons, which were undone, the fabric flapping back to expose the edge of a scar on his chest, knotted and darker than the rest of him, a familiar sight in the Old City. Men had scars that ran the length of their backs or across their shoulders or were centered, like this, just above a breast. They had been inflicted by self-flagellation during the month of mourning to express deep love for Allah and our saints. It was a bravery I respected, though couldn’t fathom. From Feroz’s scar, I knew he’d sliced his flesh with a razor blade.
“Mummy wants Sameer Bhai to come and pray,” he said in his
high, nasal voice. His eyes slanted up at the corners like his mother’s, lined with the black
surma
some men wore here to pray.
I stepped aside so he could wake Sameer himself. He hesitated, then rushed in past me. As soon as he moved, I saw Ibrahim, Sameer’s father, on the takat behind him. He was sitting with his legs thrown over the edge, running a flat palm round and round his bald head, his face and clothes crumpled from sleep. Cast about him were pillows and sheets. Zeba was already in the prayer room, the black cloth wrapped about her, lighting incense. I hadn’t realized that the two slept in the main room, right outside our bedroom. I salaamed him and moved back inside, giving him privacy.
Feroz was gripping Sameer’s foot through the netting and shaking it. “Hurry and come,” he said. “Mummy says it’s the first Friday of your marriage. On this day at least you should offer up prayers.”
Sameer snatched his foot away bending his long legs to his chest, and folded the pillow over his head. His voice came out muffled. “Tell her what the mullah said at the
nik’kah.
Simply by marrying, I’ve done half my duties to Allah. That is all I am willing to do to appease her
.. or her God.”
Feroz called to him again, but Sameer squeezed the pillow over his ears, elbows jutting out, and his brother grunted and headed for the door.
“Bhabhi, it would please Mummy if he prayed,” he said, using the formal title for sister-in-law, though I’d been surprised to learn we were the same age. With the way Feroz rushed to dress each morning for college while Zeba hand-fed him, I had thought there were at least four years between us, he being younger.
“Does she want me to come?” I asked.
He shot me a wry smile, almost condescending, and said, “As your husband has shown, it is up to you. Allah has given us free will.”
After he left, Sameer reached through the netting door and grabbed my hand. It was the first time he’d touched me since the wedding night, three nights before. I knew Nafiza was tallying up the days.
“Don’t leave me,” he pleaded, bringing my hand to his mouth, his own bearing the silver toe ring. He licked the metal.
 
 
HIS FATHER. STAYED home Friday mornings, not going into work until after the noon prayers. This one morning along with Sunday was his only time off. Evenings, when he finally arrived back by eight, having endured the four bus changes it took to get from Vijayanagar Colony to the edge of Hyderabad, then over the bridge to its twin city, Secunderabad, he was tired and quiet, and Zeba would send her sons and me away as she tended to him, heating up his bath water, laying out his clothes, setting up his dinner. She made sure the rest of us ate at seven so she could be ready for him when he walked through the door. As he ate, slumped over the plate, she would stand over him and fan him with the day’s newspaper. He always dined alone, politely asking her about her day, their sons, and now, even me. It was Ibrahim, not Sameer, who nightly brought back bottled water for me to drink.
In the mornings, by the time I sat down for breakfast, he was already up and gone. The bus rides took well over an hour, and exhaustion showed on him as clearly as the loose skin on his hands and face from advancing age and the brown spots on his bald head from the biting sun. He was a rail engineer, and Sameer told me he would be up for retirement in four years but was hoping to cut it down to two.
That first Friday morning in my new house, it was his voice that drew me out of bed, after I’d gotten back in again with Sameer. My husband had pulled me to him merely to fall back asleep, on this, the first morning he’d not disappeared. I shed his heavy, slumbering grip and, wrapping the
duppatta
once more about me, went out. I found Ibrahim sitting alone at the dining table, dressed in a pressed cotton pajama-
kameez
, the newspaper opened before him. Zeba and Nafiza, were in the kitchen, fussing over the morning meal. I could smell the
kitcherie
they were making and hear the sizzle of frying eggs. Before me, the four windows in the main room were flung wide, opening onto the vacant lot, the high weeds yellowed and bowed, surrendered
to the heat. The
takat
was cleared of all the blankets and pillows, and the thick Pakistani rug was once more spread on top, the bright knots of color faded by the sun’s harsh glare.
Ibrahim folded the newspaper and set it on the table. He looked over his shoulder at me, his reading glasses low on the bridge of his nose, the lenses a large oval. He smiled and pulled back the chair next to him, its legs scraping the stone floor.
“I was hoping you would come, Beta,” he said, taking off the glasses. He tried to slide them into his shirt pocket, as he did in the button-downs he wore to work, then remembering he was wearing a
kameez,
set them on the table.
I went and sat beside him. It was the closest I had been to him, and I could see he had tiny brown spots speckling his broad forehead and hairline, on the backs of his hands. Liver spots, perhaps, not from the sun at all.
Beyond him, I could see the whole of the house. No one had bothered or thought to give me a tour, and, in truth, there was not much to show. It was a boxy structure with a flat roof, a more modern construction than Amme’s house in the Old City The square shape had been cut down the center, one side being the
divan
and master bedroom (my bedroom), and the other, the main area and dining room. The living area, where Zeba and Ibrahim slept, opened onto a smaller room that they had set up as the prayer space, which converted, at night, into Feroz’s bedroom, and the dining room led to the kitchen and bathroom behind me.
“Why don’t you and Zeba Auntie take my room?” I suggested to Ibrahim. It seemed obvious to me now that there was no extra room for the couple, but coming from houses that were always more empty than occupied, it hadn’t occurred to me before.

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