Madras on Rainy Days: A Novel (35 page)

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Authors: Samina Ali

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“Yes, of course, Beta, that is a general rule of proper ethics, something I would never forget.” He flattened the newspaper onto the table and turned to me. “Tell me, what is wrong, Beta, what has happened?”
I hesitated, not knowing how to tell him. Finally, I said, “Do you know why Nafiza isn’t here anymore? Why Sameer and I came home early from Madras?”
“Because your ayah is sick, because she is now in hospital.” He squinted at me, his forehead creasing, and I realized the faint spots there had darkened. “Is there something more? What is it, Beta, what have you come to tell me? I am your father, please do not hesitate. I will do whatever I can to help you.”
My turn now to tap the table with my fingertips as I figured out how to say the unimaginable. “I think Sameer is coming to America seeking more than just employment. What I mean is, I think what he really wants is freedom, the kind he can’t get here.” He was still staring at me from above the lenses, his scalp looking so tender. Sameer’s hope to send home money so his father could retire. I sighed. “Papa, your son has tried to will himself to love me, but he can’t. He is …” gay, what did that word mean here, a different culture, a different context, words that did not translate, “ … he is not attracted to me not to any women at all.” The words were coming out slowly, each a beat in what felt like a dying heart. “I discovered this on the honeymoon. His friend
Naveed followed us. They love each other. It is why I came back. I did not know Nafiza was ill.”
So there it was, a confession like none I had made Before. I felt the weight of some dense form sliding out of me and spreading onto the floor by my feet, then rising to erect itself between us. A wall like the kind Sameer had described. For the second time in my life, I had lost my father.
“I want to go from here,” I said, stopping myself from calling him Papa. “If not for my sake, could you not help me in memory of your dead sister, the one I remind you of?”
He moved back into his chair, head tilted up, and blinked at the ceiling, hardly breathing, his slumped chest frail below the sheer kurta. After a long time, he shook his head, as though freeing himself from thoughts, images that did not belong—do not let what is happening outside sink into your flesh, he had advised me. He set his glasses down even as he picked up the paper, unable to see the announcement of doom.
“My son,” he whispered, his voice breaking, anguished. “My son,” he repeated, before clearing his throat. He turned away from me and said, “As his wife, you must warn my son of what I have just told you. No one leaves the house.”
 
 
JUST AS SAMEER had taken to sitting in the
divan,
preventing me from leaving the house, I now took to sleeping at the corner of the bed, turned away from him.
No words now between us, not during the day when I kept away from him, shut up inside the bedroom or prayer room, and not at night, when we were alone together, the door and window closed and bolted, his parents and brother right outside, the peacock’s face turned away from the spectacle.
He slept close behind me, his form stretched out a wrist’s-width from mine, the mattress dipping under his weight, making me feel like I was tumbling toward him, the heat of his flesh. I pretended he wasn’t there.
Then, one night, I woke to him pressing into me, his hardness against my soft thighs, my buttocks, only the sheer cloth of my
shalwar
between us, the demon who no longer appeared in my dreams now materializing into my husband, and I thought of how many times I had taken him into my mouth, the same part of him that dug into Naveed’s flesh.
I shoved aside the netting and stumbled into the bathroom, retching.
 
 
THE FOLLOWING MORNING, while he was bathing, I snuck out of the bedroom and slowly made my way into the
divan
. I thought Ibrahim and Feroz had already left for the day, though I could hear Zeba’s voice coming from the prayer room, where Feroz slept on the floor at night. Without a sound, I crossed the courtyard and slid open the metal lock on the front gates. It creaked, giving me away. Everything in this house against me.
Feroz’s face flattened against the iron bars of his window, then his slanted eyes turned up even farther in surprise. He began shouting, “Mummy, she’s leaving. Bhabhi is leaving the house!” There was scurrying inside.
But it was too late, I was already out, running down the ashokalined street I had strolled with my husband. On the road intersecting this one, an auto-rickshaw puttered past and I screamed for the driver to halt, but he didn’t hear me. Then my
duppatta
got caught in a neighbor’s gate and I thrust it off and raced past the lamppost Sameer had stood near, casting stones, and was reaching the end of the block when Feroz grabbed my arm from behind and yanked me. I stumbled and fell onto the stone sidewalk, and I picked up a handful of rocks and threw them at him. He blocked his face with his hands, twisting away his shoulders, but as soon as I was standing, he had me by the elbows and began tugging me back to the house.
“You are making a spectacle of yourself, Bhabhi,” he said, his voice calm, condescending in that way it was when he corrected my Arabic. “People are going to think my brother’s wife is mad.”
All down the street, women had gathered at the front gates, watching,
even those two young girls with their thick braids, the older one who wanted to marry Sameer. I called out for help. One by one, each slid inside again, vanishing. Zeba caught up to us, and she and Feroz dragged me back down the dead-end road and shoved me into the bedroom, then shut the door and locked it from outside.
Sameer was standing by his trunk, a towel wrapped around his waist, his clean chest still damp. He came over to me and slid his fingers around my neck, his thumb with my silver toe ring gliding across my lips. “You’re mine,” he said softly, a lover’s voice like I’d not heard from him before, “and I’m going to do everything I can to keep you.”
 
 
DAYS LEAKING INTO nights into days. Arbitrary time.
Then, one afternoon, Zeba did not sit at her usual place on the
takat,
against her hand-embroidered pillows, preparing the evening meal. Instead, she spread a silk sari across the colorful Pakistani rug and stood over it, ironing. It was the same red sari she’d worn on my wedding day, her head and chest covered by the black
duppatta.
The boy across the street was getting married tonight.
She did not ask me to dress, and that was how I knew I was not invited. She understood I’d make another scene, try once more to escape, adding to the chaos of this forced wedding, to the groom’s own agitation. It was better for all that I stay in the house with my husband, and I wondered what excuse she would make for my absence.
By nightfall, I could hear the clamor of guests, cars pulling into the dead-end road, parking in the abandoned lot. The
dol
began beating a tune familiar to me, from my own wedding days, the sound like a quickened heart, anticipation, fear and dread, the announcement of emerging life. I did not know who to pity more, the boy being forced to become a bridegroom or the bride who would never be loved.
Through the bedroom door, from where I lay on that fancy bed, Amme’s dreams for me—for herself—I could see Zeba sitting at the edge of her
takat,
now fully dressed, hands open in her lap as she stared up at the clock. Ibrahim was late.
“Just go, Mum,” Sameer said from the
divan
. The rattle and boom of the brass band suddenly sounded in the distance and sent up laughter and clapping at the wedding house. The band would lead the groom to the wedding hall, then guide him back with his wife.
“I won’t go without him,” Zeba said, adding, “The man is never late.
Inshal’lah,
nothing has happened to him.”
“I’ll send Papa over as soon as he gets here,” Sameer said, exasperated. “You’re just crossing the street!”
Feroz emerged from his room, dressed in a silver pajama-kurta, the collar falling open to expose his chest, a patch of skin darkened and rough from the razor blade he’d taken up in the past to mourn our martyred saints. His eyes were thickly lined with black
surma.
Zeba nodded her head side to side, approvingly, before she sighed and grasped his hand, standing. She would go without her husband, after all. As she was leaving, her gaze flitted to the bedroom and met mine. She hesitated before dropping Feroz’s arm and stepping forward; she kept herself just outside the door frame.
“I’m going to tell them you are too sick to come,” she said as she tightened the
duppatta
about her round face. “Let them believe you are pregnant. You two will be off to the U.S. soon; they’ll never know … anything.”
I closed the door on her.
Soon there was nothing but the sound of the brass band, that noise played over and over, a hundred times a day, different grooms, different brides, same wedding. I folded the pillow over my head. It was covered in the maroon velvet case Nafiza had sewn for me.
Then, just like that, the music stopped. A lone shriek sliced the silence, followed by a different kind of commotion. I went out to the front gates, where Sameer was standing with his arms spread across the small opening, his shoulder blades jutting out, and when I ducked under an arm, he slung it about me and kept me from moving farther. A woman was in the middle of the street, the groom’s mother, Zehra. She was unveiled, her sequined sari glittering in the night, against the house’s celebration lights. She had her hair clutched in two fists and
was looking this way and that, searching. Slowly, other women poured out from the gates and surrounded her, braids woven with jasmine, the scent filling the air. They tried to lead her back into the house.
She walked with them a few steps, then broke away, shrieking again, head pitched, clawing at her own face. Her legs buckled and she dropped onto her knees. “What have I borne? From my own womb, the
shai’tan
! Allah, why did you not kill me before showing me this day?” The women slowly gathered around her again and hid her shame. I did not see Zeba among them.
Lined on top of the squat house, on the flat roof, the men, silent, heads bowed, the blinking celebration lights casting festive hues across their silk pajamas. The band had broken up, the members huddled here and there along the sidewalk, mute instruments dangling from loose arms. The wedding car, a red Chevy Impala like the kind that had driven me here, sat empty at the end of the cul-de-sac, covered bumper-to-bumper in ropes of marigold.
The group of women helped Zehra to her feet and began guiding her to the house. At the front gates, she shrieked a last time, then swung away from the others and whacked her wrists against the stone boundary wall, shards of colorful glass from her bangles flying about. Then she tried to break her bones.
“I have done this with my own hands!” she cried. “I have brought this misery on my own house!” The women could not placate her.
Finally, her husband called down from the roof, his voice unwavering, strong. “Enough, Zehra. You have grieved enough. Now there is no more reason to grieve. We have no son.”
Zehra folded in half and fell onto her back, her head thudding on the cement sidewalk. The women hauled her inside. The gates closed. Slowly, the band members began drifting away. As they went up the street, under the light of the lamppost, I spotted Ibrahim quickly heading toward us, weaving his way through the red-uniformed crowd, not seeming to notice them.
He stopped before Sameer and me, both eyes red and irritated, a
hand passing over his face. Large circles of sweat had formed under his arms, glistened across his forehead and scalp.
“The groom ran away,” Sameer said, tightening his hold on me. “There is no wedding for you to attend. He ran off with that Hindu girl he loves.”
Ibrahim stared at him with that look Sameer used to give me, the one I now shot at him, his family. His son a stranger, not making any sense.
“I saw Taqi,” Ibrahim said, turning to me. “I was coming off the bus just now … Beta,” he said, placing a hand on my head in comfort, and I knew even before he said it what he had to tell me. Something so unimaginable that he had to call me daughter, an endearment he’d not used since the day I’d told him about his son. “Nafiza died, Beta. Nafiza …” he repeated, his hand passing over his face again, then rubbing his eyes. “Taqi and I used to run with her in the jungles. How can this be?”
I stared up past his anguished face to the celebration lights and up past those to the night sky, the diminishing moon. It had taken the shape of her nails, clumped with dirt. Soon her body would disappear into that very dirt as the moon would in the sky, reappearing not only to herald the Islamic month of Muhar’ram, but also the beginning of a new Islamic year. According to this calendar, I had been born on new year’s day, the first dawn of the month of mourning, the reason, Amme said, I was so ill-fated. It was Nafiza, not Dad, who had accompanied Amme to the hospital. And it was to Nafiza I had been passed on, cut from the umbilical cord. Nafiza, who had pressed my naked flesh to hers, unhooking her sari-blouse.
My first touch, my first sip of life.
WE OPEN EACH Islamic year in Muhar‘ram, so we commence each new year in
ghum,
mourning. Muhar’ram is the month when, fourteen hundred years ago, the Prophet’s grandson, Hussein, and his family were massacred on the plains of Kerbala. On camels and horses, they had been passing through the desert on their way to safety, when Caliph Yezid’s troops stopped them, demanding, once more, their oath of loyalty. But the Prophet’s family, the Imams, refused to be faithful to anyone but Allah.
So a battle ensued. The troops on horses, Imam Hussein’s family—men and women and children and sick—encamped in tents. Under the desert sun, water supplies diminished, parched tongues shriveled black. Weakened and outnumbered, the men still went out, one by one, to overcome the troops, and, one by one, were overcome themselves. A slaughtering. A martyrdom. Then, on the tenth day of Muhar’ram, the darkest day, Hussein himself was slain, his severed head carried on the point of a javelin by order of Yezid.
And all in his remaining camp fell silent. While in the distance, Yezid’s troops beat drums in victory.
We mourn the fate of our saints all month, dressing in no color but black, the women wiping off makeup, stowing away jewels, sometimes
even shoes, and the men not shaving. At daily gatherings called
manjalises,
we come together for unified grief, singing dirges and beating breasts. For to us, the believers, the disgrace, the torture, the martyrdom did not happen just once, lifetimes ago, but was happening again now, conjured up before our very eyes by the
mol’lana’s
oral history.
Like this, each new year, each new birthday, I was caught up in those lives grander than my own, reminded of all that had given me rise.
 
 
MANJALISES
WERE HELD in the Old City, and each afternoon at five, Zeba and I rode into the walled
sha-hare
by cycle-rickshaw, Sameer trailing behind on motorbike. What took ten minutes by car and motorcycle stretched into thirty, the poor rickshaw driver pumping vigorously out the dead-end road, then having to step off the bike and haul his rickety rickshaw and two grown women up the steep hill that led to the jail-
khanna,
and past that, to the great Dabir Pura Doors. Alongside that hill were the woods in which Sameer and I had taken shelter during the rainstorm, this main highway the road on which I’d peeled off his wet shirt, not confined, at last, to limits. It was that image I forced myself to see each day, each time the rickshaw slowed here, not my husband’s deception, not his lover waiting for us at home, but my own sense of freedom.
Nafiza had been buried on the first day of Muhar‘ram, on my birthday, and though my own relatives had been the ones to force me back to my husband’s house, and there was no fear they would help me out now, Zeba refused to let me attend, accusing my nanny of having incited the kind of trouble in this house as she had at my
nana
’s. Ibrahim went alone, then returned well before Zeba took me to the first
manjalis
to knock at my bedroom door. I was lying in bed and didn’t rise to answer it. He came in anyway and sat by my feet. Without a word, he began massaging them, a woman’s gesture, her service to men, husband, son, father. I didn’t stop him. Before long, he was weeping, first crying over Nafiza, then over his own son, who, he said,
could have no life here. Finally, he set his forehead on my ankles, as the grieving workers used to before a nawab, and begged me for mercy. Take his son to America.
That evening, at the gathering meant only for
zanana
, women, I searched about for Henna and my aunts, Asma and Ameera. For seven generations the two families had acted as one, moving in and out of each other’s
manjalises
as they had, as children, run in and out of each other’s homes, the bond of faith as thick as blood. But, to my surprise, I couldn’t find them, not at that first gathering, not at the next four. Was it Sameer, who sat outside each house, waiting for the dirges to end, who was sending them away, or had they decided themselves not to attend, perhaps not having anything left to say to me, perhaps following orders given by their own husbands?
Whatever it was, the union of marriage had revealed borders I had not known to exist.
 
 
THE WOMEN AT the gatherings, ones I recognized from my wedding, others I didn’t know, kept their distance from me. And on the second night, I noticed that upon my arrival, they quieted and began pointing as they whispered to each other, unabashed. Only when it was time to sing the first dirge did they turn away, a wall of black, and I was reminded of what Henna had said about the looks of pity and scorn that had kept her from venturing out. She, the pregnant daughter returned home. So what had Zeba gone and spread about me?
Then, on the fifth night of Muhar’ram, two of Sameer’s cousins came and sat beside me after the
manjalis.
They were young women my age, both attractive and unmarried, still attending college as I should have been myself. The last time I had seen them was on my wedding night, when the two had helped to arrange me enticingly on the marital bed, the red veil covering me head to foot. Then they had withdrawn into the living room with the other women and sung,
“One, two, three … this is how I tallied the days …”
Earlier tonight, at their mother’s house, the two had sat at the center of the gathering,
facing Mecca, chronicling the Imams’ plight,
“I have fallen on burning earth, my body maimed and shattered …
,” their thin faces not stained with powder and lipstick, as I had seen before, but with tears.
I told them their voices carried pathos, and the younger sister, Asma, looked about the gathering before whispering that her voice had trembled during her singing of the dirge because the words seemed to be foretelling what could happen again now, the abrupt and brutal end of our own lives.
This year, the tenth day of Muhar’ram, the pitch of Islam’s grief, was coinciding with the tenth day of Ganpati, the height of the Ganesh festivities.
For Ganpati. Hindu followers celebrated elephant-headed Ganesh by producing model images of him in all sizes. The smaller of these were kept in homes for one and a half, five, seven, or ten days. The largest images of him—those I had seen sprouting up in the colony and sitting on makeshift stages at the center of town, taller than me—were among those models saved for the tenth day. At that time, Ganesh would be ceremoniously taken out of homes and neighborhoods and paraded, a thousand times over from a thousand different points of the city, to Tank Bund, the bridge that connected Hyderabad to its twin city, Secunderabad (the place I’d had my first date with my husband), and from there, he would be cast into the waters of Hussain Sagar. Around him, people would sing and drink and dance:
“Ganpati, bappa morya, agle baras tu jaldi aa,”
Father Ganpati, next year come quickly. He was the god of learning and protection, the remover of obstacles.
Alongside the Ganesh parades would be our own solemn procession, weaving its way through the narrow Old City streets to the
Imambara,
the House of Saints, at its center. At times, the procession would halt and the men taking part in it, naked to the waist, would self flagellate with swords or razors or a bundle of sharp blades, blood rolling down fronts and backs, glistening under the noonday sun. Then they’d pick up and march on, trampling through each other’s blood. This in commemoration of Hussein and his kin, our saints of protection and mercy.
Grief and celebration. Laments and revelry. And underneath it, politics. For India itself was mere weeks from election. The names of the candidates and their parties had been painted on the massive boundary wall encompassing the Chow-Rasta Jail-
khanna
and shouted out to those traveling the crossroads. Next to each, a drawing. A scale. A growling tiger. A bull. Icons of the parties shaped for the illiterate masses.
All this had materialized in the small stretch of time between my return from Madras and my first Muhar’ram outing. Even the last time I had passed the boundary walls of the jail, the last time I had visited Nafiza in the hospital, the painted slogans were those announcing the latest Telugu or Hindi movies. And the drawings were the competing images of the newest, hottest stars.
 
 
“BUT YOU ARE safe here,” I told the sisters, repeating what I’d heard my parents often say. “Riots never happen in the Old City. The walls and doors will protect you.”
“That’s what I keep telling her,” Zenath said as she made a gesture of annoyance at her younger sister. “But she doesn’t listen.
Boli hai, na,”
she’s naive.
“Boli!”
Asma cried, and was quickly silenced by the women around us, stern looks reminding her not to forget the sad occasion. When they had turned away, Asma leaned into me and quietly said, “Maybe you do not know this, Bhabhi, but government and religion do not mix—these are the very things that lead to riots, killings! I’m telling you, for these first five days of Muhar’ram, I have prayed only for our safety.”
Zenath hid a smile behind a hand, even the slightest pleasure not to be worn among the mourners. She said, “You don’t understand the sacrifice she’s making, Bhabhi. Usually, Asma only prays for a good husband.”
“Hul!”
Asma hissed and slapped her sister’s thigh. “She makes jokes now, Bhabhi, because we’re surrounded by women. But when
everyone leaves and the house is quiet, then you should hear her. She cannot sleep because she hears a leaf falling in the courtyard or a bat flying in the guava branches and suddenly she starts screaming, ‘Baba, Baba, wake up, someone has jumped over the boundary wall, ready to kill us!’”
Zenath bowed her head in embarrassment.
“But you must have lived through these things before,” I said. “Even I have, two or three times. Riots happen, then curfews, the military goes out into the streets, and the people withdraw into their houses. It’s not much different from other times, except now, the men are confined, too.”
The sisters shrugged, unconvinced, and we turned and watched two women spread a red cloth down the center of the long room, dividing it in half. On it, they laid platters of
biriyani
and yogurt, and the mourners sidled up on both sides, sitting elbow to elbow, damp handkerchiefs crushed inside palms. The youngest of the three sisters, Shaheen, began moving about the circle of women, one step at a time, serving sweetened rosewater. She had a jug of it in one hand, a short glass in the other. When she came upon a woman, she poured a sip, and the two said, “Salaam,” peace, to one another, before the woman drank it up. Then Shaheen stepped sideways to the next woman and offered up the same glass.
 
 
THE COUSINS WENT and got plates of food, bringing one back for me. When we were all sitting again, steel plates balanced on open palms, I asked if Hanif had arrived yet from Saudi, and, in this way, moved the discussion to what was most grieving me, the whereabouts of my family.
The sisters exchanged a quick glance. In age, the two were fourteen months apart, but with their matching black
shalwar-kameezes
and waist-length braids, their thin faces, they appeared to be twins. They now turned to me together, but it was the older sister who spoke.
“Haven’t you heard, Bhabhi? All the women here are shocked. It’s
all they talk about, politics and Ganesh and …” she lowered her gaze, embarrassed, “ … and Henna.” And me, of course, though she wouldn’t say it. “Since her husband’s return,” she went on, “the two have not once left your uncle’s house. People are saying your uncle is letting them sleep in the same bed—at this holy time!”
“Hahn,
Bhabhi,” Asma broke in. “Hanif did not even tell his own mother he was returning, so for three days, she kept asking where her
bahu
was, and finally, someone told her, ‘Open your eyes, Kosar! Your
bahu
is not with you because she is with your son. What they are doing together in sin keeps her from attending a sacred gathering!’ His mother was so ashamed she left right then, and she’s not showed her face since.”
I set my plate down between us. “And what do you two think about what Henna’s doing?”
Asma covered her face with her
duppatta,
shoulders quaking in a silent giggle, this, the one who prayed for a good husband. “Who cares what the women say, Bhabhi! They come and sing dirges, they beat their breasts, they cry, then afterward, they all pretend we’re at some social function, every woman examining the young girls, choosing one for her son. You know, Bhabhi, this is when all marriages are arranged! Your cousin is doing the very thing these women have in mind, yet they blame her.”
Yes, her and not Hanif. But even Islam said man was the weaker sex, easily seduced, misled. A wife’s duties to keep him straight.
I stared at the two cousins, now wondering what they had come over to say when all others were keeping their distance. “And what do they blame me for?” I asked.
They both bowed their heads, though they did not appear surprised by the question. Their hands hung loosely above their plates, rice balls stuck between fingers.
I spoke to Asma, “What if the husband you pray for turns out to be like mine? What would you do then?” I turned to Zenath. “Would you not help your sister out?”

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