Madras on Rainy Days: A Novel (19 page)

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Authors: Samina Ali

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Feroz welcomed his brother home and Sameer blinked, heading for the bedroom. He ducked under the doorway, not fully closing the door behind him. I moved to follow, but Zeba clutched my arm and stopped me.
“He has come back for you, that is enough for now. Let him sleep.”
 
 
MONDAY NIGHT, SHE let him back into my bed.
Before he came into the room, I dressed in the silky silver nightdress Amme had bought for me, and which I hadn’t thought I would ever wear, preparing myself for him in much the way he had, over the last year, prepared himself for me, giving shape to his form. Then I arranged myself on the bed, the netting’s heavy curtain about me, a nervousness inside I had not even experienced on the wedding night or the night Nate had slipped in.
He entered without a word and dimmed the lights. I watched him move to the window and bolt its heavy shutter, the hot air going still and flat. He pulled off his shirt and cast it across his clothes chest. The bed creaked as he set a knee on it, crawling inside. For a moment, we
did nothing—could do nothing—but stare at one another, the flesh that had been forbidden for a week somehow grown more attractive.
We sat facing each other, as Henna and I had two nights before my wedding, and I suddenly understood I did not know what to do. Those few hours, almost two months ago, had taught me little about men, how it was they liked to be—should be—touched. Nate had not expected anything from me, the virgin, except my full surrender. Sameer, he expected me to provide,
razzaq.
I reached out and pressed my palm against his, and his thick brows twitched, confused. Clumsy move, one belonging to a different life, to Henna and me, not suitable here, with him. I untied the knot of his loose pajamas and the fabric fell open, exposing his bare hips. Still, he did not stir, and I rose to my knees and maneuvered onto his thighs, squeezing myself against him. His face was smothered in my neck. He laughed and, in one quick motion, had me flat on my belly, his body gliding up the back of mine, weighing me down.
He whispered into my ear, “You did not read the letters I sent.”
We were lying horizontally on the bed, his feet hanging out the netting’s door, dangling over the edge. With his nose, he rolled the strap off my shoulder.
“Of course I read them.” And I had, but none of what he had described he would do, none of that filth, felt like this.
“Do you remember what I want, what I have asked of you, my wife?” He was pulling up my dress, gripping my legs, easing them open. He guided my toes into a curve of the peacock’s wings. These were not the awkward moves of a guileless lover. Indeed, if I had been expected to be innocent, so, too, had he.
He pushed himself against my buttocks, the first time I was feeling him, his flesh sticking to mine in the heat. I stiffened. He relaxed, slipping down to lick my lower back, cool saliva made cooler by the overhead fan. He tugged off the pajamas from around his ankles. I rolled over, hiding myself.
“Teach me how to touch you.”
He gazed up at me, the tip of his tongue slicing through his front
teeth. He brought his thumb to his mouth and wrapped his lips around the toe ring before sliding the entire thing inside. He sucked at it, releasing it slowly, the sound like a kiss as it glided out.
 
 
ZEBA BEGAN TEACHING me Arabic the next afternoon. The book she pulled out had once belonged to Sameer, his name written in a childish scrawl across the cover. Inside, all the spaces where he was to copy the Arabic letters were filled in. The alphabet was similar to the Urdu I had grown up learning, though shorter and having vowel accents, so it was as if I had always carried it inside, an echo of my own first language. Zeba was pleased, and within an hour, we were sitting on the ground in the prayer room, both enveloped in heavy
duppattas
, the Qur’an open before us. I felt guilty reading it with the bleeding not fully gone, but, of course, I’d acted out worse sins than this.
Incense was burning and the small room filled with gray smoke, reminding me of the bridal fumes that had risen up inside me on the wedding day, giving my old body new form. From a ghost I had materialized into this life.
“Alif, lam, ra.”
The Arabic letters merged and cut each other short so that it was hard for me to tell where one ended and another began, or which letter it was I was reading—trying to read. In English, individual letters remained full and complete, unto themselves, recognizable even in cursive. If culture was language, this was how it would appear.
“These are the verses of the Glorious Book. We have revealed the Qur’an in the Arabic tongue so you may understand it.”
Each page of the Qur’an was beautifully crafted, cream with a green border, the calligraphy etched in gold. On top, a design of leaves strung together, a vine running to the edge and continuing on the following page. Down the right side, a translation in Urdu to what we had just recited. The chapter on Joseph.
“In revealing this Qur’an We will recount to you the best of histories, though before We revealed it you were heedless of Our signs.”
When the incense burned down, Zeba lit another, and when it, too, had burned away, a small pile of ash on the copper holder, she closed the book. We stood together and prayed the late afternoon salat.
When we were done, she turned to me and said, “My grandmother spoke and understood Arabic, now I read Arabic but need an Urdu translation. Tomorrow, your children will need an English translation. Every day we grow farther from our roots.”
 
 
HE WAS LYING on his back, arms under his head as he stared up at the spinning ceiling fan. He had closed the shutters again, the canopy of the netting bowed under the pressure of the revolving air, none of it reaching us. I was on my side, head propped up on a hand, studying the body I was still not used to. His skin was various tones of brown, his stomach, his chest, the round muscles of his arms almost the color Nate had been, while his forearms, his neck, his face—those parts of him exposed to the sun—took on the deepness of the honey his mother fed Ibrahim, two pills for the ulcer, one spoon of honey, the elixir, according to Islam, against illness.
I had determined to ask him what was between him and his mother, though I had to ease my way into it, knowing he could draw himself closed, draw away.
I said, “Your mother began tutoring me in the Qur’an today. We used one of your old lesson books.”
He took in a deep breath, hard ribs pushing out against his flesh. I followed the curve of one with a finger.
“Do you disapprove?”
He turned down his lips to show he didn’t, but when he spoke, I could hear his voice growing rigid with tension. “Why should I disapprove? We each have our own beliefs. What is important is not to push your beliefs onto others.”
“She hasn’t pushed anything onto me. She’s teaching me because she says it’s her maternal duty, as she once taught you … and still tries.”
“Still tries,” he said, now fully stiffening with anger. “Yet, I’m no longer the boy who scribbled into that
Arabi
book, am I? I’m twenty-four. I have a college degree. Bloody hell, I have a wife! Her duties to me are complete, Layla. Even her Islam says parents must teach the tenets to their children, but if a child chooses differently, the sins belong to the child alone. If the Allah she worships provides me free will and personal responsibility, why can’t she! Ask her that when she tutors you next!” He began to shift away and I pulled him back, resting my head on his shoulder to keep him in place. He closed his eyes, hands stiffly by his side, refusing to touch me. He must have thought I had joined up with his mother, against him. “Don’t make the burden of your religion my burden, Layla. Don’t become … intolerant.”
Intolerant. Yet Zeba had been the one to advise the neighbor to let her son marry the Hindu girl.
“This is more than religion, isn’t it, Sameer? What did she do that was so intolerant?”
He was silent and a muscle in his shoulder twitched against my cheek. Overhead, the fan creaked as it rotated, and, in the next room, his mother’s abrasive snoring. Finally, he took my hand and guided it down to his pajamas, untying them. “See for yourself what she has done to me. The light is on. You can take a good look at your husband.” His voice pitched with pain, an embarrassment I had not heard even the night he had confronted me about Nate.
I rose and sat by his waist. He continued to stare up at the overhead fan, jaw rigid, arms once more behind his head. When I tugged at the fabric, he raised his hips, letting me slide it down, and I realized I had not seen him fully naked before. Even last night, the room was so dim, we were but shadows of ourselves.
When I had taken the pajamas off, I understood even before he tapped his right leg that he was showing me his injury. There were no scars that I could see, no protrusions of any sort. Still, the entire thigh was weakened and frail, almost half the size of the other. Where there was a hard line of muscle nervously flexing in the left, there was nothing in the injured leg but soft flesh.
His eyes were on me, and I tried not to show any alarm.
“I don’t understand. How could she …”
“How much do you know about the accident?”
“A bike injury when you were eighteen, nothing more.”
He looked up at the ceiling again. “I was heading for the Dabir Pura Doors to get home, and there was this ox cart in front of me, moving so bloody slow I thought I would pass it on the left. I didn’t see the Ambassador coming from the other direction. I faltered,” he paused and licked his lips. “No, I lost control.
I
lost control,” he repeated, as though that had been the true accident. Then he pointed up at the fan and his arm slowly imitated its rotation. “There’s a big bolt at the center of the cart’s wheel. It pierced into my thigh, then kept turning. It dragged me to the other side of the door, where I fell into a garbage heap. There’s a
paan
stall there and the
paan-wala
got me into an auto-rickshaw and to Osmania Hospital. My muscle was chewed up, the femur cracked, but it could have been corrected, except Mum … except she …” His lips curled into themselves, the words refusing to come out. At last, he spat, “She refused to pay for anything. It’s a bloody government hospital, it wouldn’t have been much …” his words simply halted.
“I don’t understand.”
He smirked. “Faith, baby. Her faith. She said I’d become an infidel, and God punished infidels. The leg would always remind me of what I’d become.”
“Those whom you serve besides Him are names which you and your fathers have invented and for which Allah has revealed no sanction. Judgment rests with Allah only … That is the true faith: yet most men do not know it.”
That was what Zeba and I had read just that afternoon. Punishment and judgment are Allah’s rights alone. How could a woman who, in every other way, had shown herself to me to be a true believer, have erred with her own child? It did not make sense, a follower turned into a god, a servant with the power to arbitrate. Yet here it was, as clearly as Amme had stayed on with Dad after he’d divorced her. Sins in any language.
I began kissing Sameer’s thigh, and though at first he moaned in shame, trying to pull me away, at last, he drew my mouth to him, sighing, giving in.
 
 
ON WEDNESDAY, NAFIZA finally showed up, two days later than she’d vowed.
She returned wearing a fresh sari, her gray hair tight in a high bun and no longer slick with coconut oil. Zeba and I had just finished breakfast, and I thought my nanny had come in time to help with the afternoon meal. Then I heard a car pull up at the gates, the engine’s groan deeper than Amme’s Fiat, and just as familiar. A big Ambassador, the kind that had caused Sameer’s accident. Taqi Mamu and his wife were here.
“I bring chai for guests,” Nafiza said, avoiding my eye as she hurried to the kitchen, a flair of triumph about her. So she had gone and invited them, no doubt to confront me about Sameer. Now there was no way out of this.
Zeba took my arm and led me to the front gates to greet them. Ameera Auntie was still in the driver’s seat, her head wrapped with the edge of the sari-
pallow
, the end gripped between her teeth. Taqi Mamu had wandered out and down to the dead end, where he stood smoking and staring into the empty field. Early this morning, as the imam was tapping the loudspeaker, there had also been the pattering of rain, though not enough to rescue the bowed grasses. He turned, sucking at the cigarette, and saw Zeba and me.
“Ar’re!”
he said, his large eyes growing wider in surprise, his hands spreading open. He quickly put out the cigarette and headed over, fingers passing through his thick hair. “We haven’t even knocked, and you knew we were here!
Kamal ki baat hai.
”
Ameera Auntie emerged from the car, her back wet with sweat. “I told the school my sugar was acting up,” she said, “freeing myself to visit my favorite niece.” She embraced me and I smelled the mothballs that she put in her
almari
on her skin and clothes. “Married for three
weeks and not one visit. Have you forgotten about us?” she scolded, though I could tell she understood why I hadn’t come. She pulled away to embrace Zeba, but her eyes still scrutinized me, at last landing on the
duppatta
I was now so used to wearing. “So married life has tamed you,” she said as she winked and tugged at her own
pallow
.

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