Madras on Rainy Days: A Novel (40 page)

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Authors: Samina Ali

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The mother let out a grunt and shuffled in her chair.
“All her dowry gone. Sold! The car. The refrigerator. The water heater. The dishes. Even the
almari
in which she stored her clothes. Everything is gone. What these nawabs did not tell us, these
purana jageer-dars,”
old landowners, “was that this man here, the one who is sitting now with his head lowered in shame, but only when it is too
late and my daughter is already dead—gone with the rest of her possessions—is that he has a problem with his eyes. He is unable to see himself. He is still living as his forefathers used to live. Betting on horses. Going hunting. Playing cards. He entertains. He drinks alcohol. He is part of clubs. And because no one in his family has needed to work, he himself refuses.
Ar’re,
the ancestral house was put up on mortgage and was about to be taken away, and still he would not take a job. Instead, they think up a plan to get their son married. Rather than use some of Henna’s dowry to pay for the
walima
dinner, they paid off the house. By now, any man would bow and thank Allah for saving him from public shame. But, still, he does not stop. And this shameless woman, she keeps giving him my daughter’s things to sell. The furniture. The pots and pans made of copper. Things that were passed down to your
kala,
then to Henna. And when there was nothing left, she began asking for my daughter’s gold bracelets, her anklets, her necklaces, all her jewels taken. One by one.”
“Aji, say something to him! Why must I listen to this?”
“And my daughter! Without protest, giving up her rights to this man. Her father-in-law! Not even her husband.
Ar’re,
the day we arrive, we find her cleaning the floors and cooking because they have no money to hire a servant. And she’s looking like one herself! No clean sari. No jewels. And these two sitting around her like the landowners they once were, when they no longer possess a thing! Not even the house! It all belonged to Henna. Paid for with her inheritance. Still she is wordless. When she sees your
kala
and me, she does not complain. It is only when she runs to throw up, and I ask if she is sick that I am told by these two that my daughter is pregnant.” He clucked. “It is seeing her like this …” he stopped and thumped his chest. “The strain of seeing her gave me a heart attack. I have always been weak when it comes to that child. I brought her back. Yes, this father brought his daughter home. She did not come herself. She was not thrown out! These two were enjoying their comfort, believing I had given them my daughter to be a servant.” He sighed and looked at the calendar again. “I do not blame him for leaving her to find help. The boy had no choice. Even
when she was hurting at his own home, he called for my help.” He paused, then his lips began moving as he said more, but nothing came out.
I turned to Asma Kala and found her staring at her feet again, one foot roughly rubbing the other as though trying to wipe something away. She looked up at me and shot me another smile.
I shouldn’t have said it, but I did. “I don’t agree with you. If he had loved her, he would have stayed. He must have known there would not be enough time to get help. He fled. He let her die alone.”
“We shouldn’t have come here,” the mother cried, rising. She glared at Abu Uncle. “We have enough grief of our own. Why must we listen like criminals to crimes they think we’ve committed.” She turned and spoke down at her husband’s head. “We’ve done nothing wrong, I tell you, nothing!”
Her husband sat hunched, hands in his lap, head bowed.
She swiveled about and tried to meet Asma Kala’s eyes, fists on her thick waist. “What daughter does not suffer, huh, what daughter! The girl was merely performing her duties, doing nothing more than what I did myself, nothing more than what you do even with all your servants. A wife, a daughter, must obey, it is all she can do, all that is open to her. If you do not believe this, why did you allow your husband to take Layla back to her in-laws? Why is she still there with that … that
man
?”
Asma Kala looked up at me, and the long stretch of light spread across her face. She had been crying for some time and her eyes were swollen and dark, her cheeks sunken, the body shrinking in on itself. The pause between life and death. The landscape of Amme’s existence.
When tears began running down my aunt’s face, I stood, not wanting to give her any more grief, and walked out into the remaining dregs of light.
 
 
IN THE SHADOWS of the neem tree, I found Roshan and Raga-be standing face to face, so engrossed in conversation that they did not see
me until I was upon them. Then they turned in unison and stared at me with such surprise it could have been me who had died, then returned. When I joined them, Raga-be passed a hand over my cheeks and kissed the fingers that had touched me.
Then she opened her mouth to speak, but Roshan quickly said, “They buried her in the same cemetery as your grandfather. He took her in when she was three or four. This was the only family she knew.”
So the divisions we drew in life finally erased themselves in death. I stepped forward to embrace her, but she moved back, her body going stiff.
“They wouldn’t let me come to the funeral, Roshan. I would have been there.”
She stared at something just beyond me, saying, “She came to me last night in a dream. It was at the same hour Henna was dying.” Her lower lip curled up and slid into her mouth. She breathed slowly for a moment before she could go on. “She sat at the edge of my bed, crying. Just by my feet. She wouldn’t say anything. I kept calling to her. ‘Amma Amma.’ Finally, she got up and left.”
 
 
VOICES SPRANG FROM the side yard, and we receded farther into the shadows to stand next to the hefty trunk. When our bodies had changed, confining Henna and me to this house, we would climb up this tree and stare out over the boundary wall, dreaming.
Asma Kala now appeared around the bend of the house. She was walking Hanif’s parents to the front gate. Her sari had been wrapped in a clumsy manner so that, in front, the bottom edge rose above her ankles, while, in back, the fabric fell so low it dragged behind her on the dirt, wiping away her footprints.
Hanif’s mother was nodding to something Asma Kala was saying, but when she caught sight of me, she jerked back as though I’d struck her. Her husband followed her gaze and stared at me with flat eyes. Then he took his wife’s arm and led her outside. Not even a car or moped waiting to take them home.
“I have to see Asma
memsa’ab,”
Roshan whispered, using the title from when she was still a servant, as though wishing to push back time. She broke free of us and walked in a steady line across the courtyard, her hands splayed before her to catch her if she collapsed.
My aunt was shutting the gate and did not see her coming. When she had locked it, she stepped toward Henna’s room then stopped. I thought it was for Roshan, but then she leaned over the coconut tree and placed a hand high on the trunk, her skin the color of bark. Her legs gave out from under her. Just as she buckled, Roshan held her up from behind. She dug her face into Asma Kala’s neck, sobbing. My aunt reached back with her free hand and patted Roshan’s head as she used to Henna’s. Like that, with Roshan still leaning on her, my
kala
bent forward and vomited clear liquid into the base of the tree. When she straightened, Roshan straightened with her, a child on piggyback, then my aunt bent forward once more. Finally, she spit and kicked dirt over her waste.
 
 
AFTER THEY HAD disappeared, a motorcycle’s moan filled the air, and I headed toward the front gate, ready to go.
Raga-be stopped me. “The boy come already. I send he away. I say the child stay here tonight, the child must be with she family. He say he come tomorrow to burial. He get you there.”
“I don’t think they want me to stay, Raga. I’m only causing them more strain.” Then I said, “Poor Nafiza, I had her thrown out, did you know? That’s the memory of me she died with.”
Her hunched form bent even more, and she startled me by letting out a loud laugh. “Me
jadu
work for you,
hahn!
You come to me, you tell me make so others believe you no touch before. Only touch by you husband. The world believe this. This power of me
jadu.”
She shifted closer to me, her hot breath on my face. “This time, I bring you husband to you. Make him proper husband. I come to you tonight,
hahn,
Bitea?”
So, this was the real reason she had arranged for me to stay.
“No, thank you, Raga-be,” I said, and she stepped back in surprise, her kohl-lined eyes like small circles on her face.
“What you say, Bitea! You trap-trap! What else help you? Nothing but magic!”
“I don’t think your
jadu
will work on me,” I said, then repeated what she had first told me when I’d asked her to perform the
jadu.
“I’m not fully Indian.”
“No Indian! What you is if you no Indian, child! This grief talking, no me girl!”
Perhaps it was the grief. But at the moment it seemed that the only way to do away with borders was to start with the ones that had been etched in skin, splitting me.
 
 
ON THE NINTH of Muhar’ram, we buried Henna.
Taqi Mamu and Abu Uncle were among the men who carried her body on a wooden litter. Without a pause in their step, the men passed an end from one shoulder to the next. But when the cemetery came into view, Taqi Mamu handed his corner to someone else and stepped aside, and the small procession went on without him. After a ways, I turned to see him stick his arms out as he fell to the ground. Without picking himself up, he crawled to the edge of the road and sat staring ahead, his jaw moving as though chewing on something. People passed on foot or cycle or car and did not seem to notice him. Abu Uncle never once gave up his end of the litter.
She was shrouded in a white sheet. Her body had been cleansed for the final time, washing away the sins of this world. The women had cleansed Henna’s daughter as well, washing her of her mother’s waters as they would have done to commence her life. Then they enclosed her in Henna’s arms. The one burial sheet was wound around the two of them, so that they were flesh to flesh. Pressed into one. The shroud, a new skin. Why was there no comfort in their joint departure?
When the procession entered the cemetery, the men went ahead to the burial site, while the women stayed back by the entrance. A tall,
wrought-iron gate was the only thing separating the life rumbling by outside from the silence of the dead within. For now, we were enveloped in this silence, grateful for it. And grateful, too, that the entire Old City was in black. As we were in black. It was as though the whole of India was mourning these deaths.
Near the grave site, a police officer uncuffed Hanif’s hands and he stepped forward. He was tall with wavy hair, and that was all, from this distance, that I could make of him. Abu Uncle handed him a shovel. For a moment, Hanif set his forehead on its handle, unable to raise dirt. But then the police officer elbowed him, and Hanif lifted his head and went forward. He dug the shovel into the ground, then placed a foot on it and dug even deeper. He pushed the earth aside. Only then did Abu Uncle step forward himself, and one by one, other men joined in, including Hanif’s father. I had been told that once they were done, Hanif’s soiled hands would be cuffed once more and he’d be taken away. His mother had not come.
The women had to stand apart while the body was being buried, and from where I was with Ameera Auntie and Asma Kala, Roshan and her daughter, we could only make out the dim figures of the men, their arms rising and falling as they dug at the earth, then pitched it aside. As the sun rose to the center of the sky, they deepened into the ground, losing ankles, calves, knees, thighs. Then they threw out the shovels, and hands from above grasped hands from below, helping them out.
The men surrounded Henna’s body and lowered it into the hole, and I tried not to blink, tried not to miss anything of this final sight of my sister. This white angel of sorrow among us black shrouded souls. Then she was gone. The rise of her belly, the rise that was the child buried with her, the last thing to glimpse this wretched earth.
Once more, the men picked up their tools and created a mound I knew would flatten over time, becoming like all the others. The new dead joining the old. Somewhere next to her lay Nafiza’s body, the cold dirt not yet warmed about it.
At last, the men set aside their shovels, and we stood, the men over
her grave, the women by the gates, and, together, we uttered a final prayer.
There was nothing left to do for her.
 
 
ASMA KALA ASKED that I join her in visiting Henna’s grave. From there, she wanted me to go to the
durga
and say our private prayers. I had gotten my period that morning, almost a month after the D & C, my body leaking blood as a rite of ancient cleansing, and though this made me impure in the eyes of Allah to be near the fresh grave, to enter any holy shrine, how could I refuse?
So I took my kala’s small hand in mine, the skin dry, the nails bitten short, the lifelines intersecting my own, and we walked together, leaving the others behind. Roshan thought it wise to keep her young daughter from sorrow that was not yet her own. And Ameera Auntie, who in grieving had worsened her diabetes, was now too weak to tra verse this stretch of land, this path from the living to the dead.

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