Madras on Rainy Days: A Novel (21 page)

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Authors: Samina Ali

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She did not take her eyes from the plaques. “But it is your husband who must be convinced. They say, Beti, that for dawn prayer, the wife alone has the power to raise her husband from sleep, she the one lying
by his side. I fear the call has come for you to awaken him.” She closed her eyes, the lids shaped like Sameer’s, like rose petals. “I had an alarming dream that week I was sleeping in your bed, Beti. Now, whenever I shut my eyes, I see it again. It will not let me rest.”
So she had met my demon, after all.
“I dreamt you were pregnant, Beti, with a tiny little boy. He was fair and his eyes opened gray-blue; he looked like an American. He was crying. The fluid around him was not clear, it was red, like blood. He was dying.” She opened her eyes again, muttering, “
La hol bil’la quwat,
” to do away with evil and raised the Qur’an to her face and pressed her forehead against the prayers that had never changed.
“There is no future in America, Beti. Your grandfather was right: our home is here.”
 
 
THAT NIGHT IN bed, while he lay relaxed beside me, his breathing growing deep and even, I told him about my parents’ divorce.
I was lying sideways on the bed, my head resting on his stomach, feeling the gentle rise and fall of his belly. While I spoke, the creaking of the overhead fan, the sound of Zeba’s snoring, even my husband’s calm breath softened into the unbearable silence of my mother’s suburban house. Three levels, six bedrooms, four bathrooms, just she and I living in it together, after he left us.
“When he was gone, I took over,” I said, “trying to become her companion. I would take her to movies and restaurants, we would dress and go together to her friends’ dinner parties. I’d watch her when we were there. She would always sit by herself, not really talking to anyone. Later, she would tell me they had nothing important to say. But she was like that with me, too. I’d come home from school so we could have dinner together, but she’d flip on some Hindi movie, and we’d eat in front of the TV I think she was always looking for Sabana’s face. She’s all my mother ever talked about, and my own future wedding. She wanted to give me what she didn’t have herself, a home.”
He grunted, his hand smoothing back my hair. But he said nothing, not expressing surprise or disdain.
I said, “Sameer, she didn’t come out of her room for a month, not until he signed some damn agreement she’d drawn up. I was ten and they think I have no memory of this. They think … they’ve always thought of me as a ghost.”
I sat up and pressed my thumb into the center of my palm, where his initials had once been drawn red with henna. “Say something,” I said. “Tell me—
vow
to me—that you’ll give me a home. It’s not enough what you said on the wedding night, that I belong to you. You must belong to me, too.”
He raised himself on an elbow and finally looked at me with the surprise I’d been expecting all along. “Layla,” he whispered, as his hand pushed into my hair. His fingers pressed into the back of my neck and drew my face close to his. When he spoke, I took in his breath. “I thought you understood. When I came back home the other day, I came back to you. Nothing has the power to drag me away, not anymore. You live inside of me.” He brought my hand to his heart. “I swear to you, nothing—nobody—will ever take your place. Your home is with me, no matter where we are, your home is with me, safely, I swear.”
 
 
NAFIZA’S DAUGHTER CAME to visit.
I did not know where to seat her, not because she was like my aunt and uncle, both an old and new relation, but because, growing up, I had known her as a servant. As such, like Nafiza, she had always taken a place on the floor. But, then, at sixteen, Roshan had fallen in love and married a man who owned a corner cafe, elevating herself out of servitude. Now, rather than living in my uncle’s back quarters, she rented an apartment with her husband, one not much smaller, I guessed, than this place.
I gestured to the
divan
to show her she could sit anywhere. Let it be her decision, not mine, now that choices were open to her. She
took a chair near the bamboo table, but when I offered chai, she declined. Not comfortable being waited on by her mother, or not comfortable around me in her elevated role (it had already been seven years), I could not tell. I sat across from her and wondered what it was she had come to say. No doubt, she, too, had been summoned here by my nanny, her mother.
She was wearing a bright red sari that made her dark skin appear even darker, and a thick braid swung at her waist. Her prescription glasses looked to have been passed on to her by Ameera Auntie.
“Where is your daughter?” I asked.
“My husband will watch her until three thirty, when he must go open the cafe again. He comes home every day for lunch.” My aunt’s tutoring had trained Roshan not to speak like her mother, but she was still unaccustomed to a chair. Even now, she was resting at the edge, hands clasped between her knees so that the sari’s pleats dove between her thighs. An ungainly way to sit.
Nafiza carried in chai, holding a cup in either hand. For any other guest, she would have used a tray, as she had with my aunt and uncle. She set mine on the table before me, the cup clattering against the saucer. I noticed she handed Roshan a cup with a fine crack in it, the one she had reserved in this house for herself. It had no saucer. Roshan took the tea and nodded side to side at Nafiza, mother and daughter not addressing each other in any other way.
Without glancing at me, Nafiza left the room. Since my aunt’s visit yesterday, she had been brusque with me, as though I had been the one who had secretly gone to my relatives and somehow turned them against her.
Roshan cleared her throat, then rested the cup on her knees. “My mother is worried about you,” she said, her eyes flitting to the door behind Nafiza. After a moment, the two older women’s voices came from the kitchen, too deep within the house to overhear us. “Amme is worried that your husband is fooling you. My mother has raised you as much as she has raised me. When she looks at you, she sees … well,
she must see a girl like my own four-year-old. She wants to protect you.”
“Yes, I know, but what I don’t know is what she wants to protect me from, do you? Does she?”
She lowered her head and the glasses slid down her nose. “It was to see what he might be hiding from you that she asked my husband to follow him.”
“Follow Sameer?”
“
Hahn, bebe,
to see where he goes all day.”
Bebe.
She was reverting back to her old role, calling me ma’am, and so telling me that, whether or not I approved, they had gone out of their way for my benefit, such was their allegiance to me.
“He goes tutoring, I already know that.”
“In the afternoons, he tutors between eleven and four. His college is very far from here, in Banjara Hills, one hour by motorbike. My husband …”
“So where is he in the mornings?” I asked in spite of myself. “He leaves here close to six.”
“He goes to the park.”
“The park?”
“There is a park in the Old City, very close to your mother’s house. It is where he goes to exercise. He runs and lifts heavy equipment.”
“What else?”
“Nothing else. From the park, he goes to college.”
What was she saying then? Had she ridden a bus all this way to tell me Sameer’s schedule; that, in the end, her mother was wrong, he was doing nothing to fool me?
“Roshan, I’m not sure why you’ve come today. You made me anxious for no reason.”
She set her cup on the table between us, not having taken a sip, and pushed up her glasses. “Just as my mother is your mother, your mother is like my own. She has always shown me love and given me
money and clothes. She was the one who paid for Bisma’s delivery. Layla,” she said, then, “
bebe,
I know about the …
gora
man and your bleeding. There is a woman doctor by my house, the one who delivered Bisma. She is very good. Her clinic is open on Mondays and Wednesdays. I could go with you … while your husband is away. Layla …
bebe,
we have shared the same milk, there is nothing wrong with sharing secrets. We are like sisters.”
 
 
WHEN NAFIZA WAS preparing my room for sleep, I went in behind her and shut the door. She was hunched over beside the bed, poking the stick broom underneath it, and a dried up marigold rolled out.
She said, “Why you say no to me daughter, child? She take you to doctor. Doctor clean you inside. Better for when you go home.”
“Go home? Nafiza, after all you’ve done, you’re lucky I’m not sending you home! Please don’t make me remind you of who you are!”
“I no forget me-self, Layla-bebe. You husband, he forget. Look at he! Every day he dress in new
Umrikan
clothes, looking pretty-pretty. The woman across the street, she tell me today it look like you husband is
Umrikan
and you with
duppatta
around you, look like you from here. I tell she, ‘No, no, me no care what me child look like, me no forget who she is. She forget, he forget, but no me.’” She coughed into her shoulder and it sounded thicker.
“Did you only run around confessing my problems, or did you visit a doctor about your own health?” Anger and concern mixed to gether; I was sounding like Amme.
“Me no worry-worry about me-self, child. Me have full life. When me time come, Allah take me, no medicine, no doctor can stop him. Me worry-worry about you. You young girl. You pretty, more pretty than he. No reason you waste life with man like him.”
“Things have changed between us, Nafiza, that’s what I’ve come to tell you. There is no reason anymore for you to go to Zeba, as you have to everyone else …”
“No-thing change, Layla-bebe. I clean you bed each morning, I see me-self. No-thing change. You think because you put
duppatta
around face and pray with he mama that everything change. No-thing change between you and you husband. Still, he man who no real man. Still, you wife who no real wife. This home no real home for you, child!
Tho!
” she spat to show her disgust, then quickly swept it up with the rest of the waste.
 
 
THE IMAM WAS tapping the loudspeaker, ready to start the azan.
I bit Sameer’s ear. He stirred, eyes staying shut, though he was grinning, drawing me close. I passed a hand over his thighs, then squeezed between them, feeling him harden. Certainly not what Zeba had meant when she’d said that, in the morning, only a wife had the power to rouse her husband.
“Later,” I promised, “if you come now and pray.”
His eyes shot open. “What! Bloody hell, Layla, I knew this would happen.” He turned away the pillow once more bent over his head. I took his thumb into my mouth and sucked in the way he’d shown me, warm lips tugging and extracting the silver ring. He groaned, and an arm swept back and around my waist. He pulled me over him and flattened me against the wall, then rubbed himself against my buttocks.
“I’m doing this for you,” he said, “not her, not her god.”
So I got him to dress, and we joined the others in the prayer room. No one had knocked today in hope of waking us, and when Zeba saw Sameer by my side, her lips turned up in that small grin, the lines around her mouth, the corners of her eyes, deepening, lightening up her face. She handed me Sameer’s prayer cap with its delicate embroidery, and I set it on my husband’s head, and, in this way, she passed on to me what she had, till then, considered her responsibilities. She freed herself of her son.
We aligned ourselves in the small room, Sameer standing ahead of me as Ibrahim stood ahead of Zeba, Feroz by his father’s side. Islamic prayer is a personal ritual, no loud sermons, no priest standing between
God and devotee, telling you how to approach him, read him, how to be forgiven, redemption. There is only you, and all of what you have done, and God’s mercy.
I was looking to be pardoned for Nate, who had, from a man, taken the form of blood, then vomit from my husband’s body. From desire had come revulsion. Repelled, Sameer had said on the wedding night, he had been repelled by me, by my flesh, a baby floating in blood, draining out. Now, every night I put him into my mouth, it was to uncoil him, yes, but also to prevent him from pushing into me, fingers, tongue, penis, prevent him from becoming repelled by the very flesh aching to open for him. A month-long punishment for a single night.
So I stood repentant before Allah, behind my husband, bowing, prostrating simultaneously, whispering prayers, my words lapping over his, his over mine, gaining strength, not a sparring at all, but a great union.
Allah
raheem
.
 
 
AT BREAKFAST, IBRAHIM presented Sameer with our rail tickets to Madras. We were scheduled to leave the following Friday, the morning after his tutoring duties came to an end.
Sameer rose from his seat and, rounding his brother at the end of the table, embraced his father. Zeba glanced at me. It was my responsibility now to ensure that her son, the one who carried her handsome face, had a future. And there was no future there.

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