Madras on Rainy Days: A Novel (6 page)

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Authors: Samina Ali

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“He fooled me with those black boots,” I now said to my nanny through the thick mosquito netting. The bedroom’s door and windows were closed to keep anyone from glimpsing me, and it softened the
dol’s
beating so that it could have been the surging of my own pulse. “Don’t you remember, Nafiza-una, on each of those three dates you and I went on with him, he wore those thick-soled boots. They must be corrective.”
She didn’t look up from her sewing. She had spread a cloth underneath the pillow covers to protect them from soiling, but not underneath her own sari. She was barefoot, as she always was around the house, the pads of her feet thickly encrusted with dirt, as dark as her small eyes. Her hair was pulled up in its usual bun, and under the glare of the overhead light, I could see where she’d applied henna to her hair, asking the beauty shop women for a dab to cover her gray. Her hands were steady as she pushed and pulled the needle, though I had been the one with the sharp eye to thread it.
My nanny had come to work for my maternal grandfather when she was about four, a child who’d been born to villagers on Nana’s land in distant Miryalgurda. During Partition, when the servants and villagers had risen up against my
nana
, using the chaotic time to claim his
haveli
, his land, as their own, she had been one of three servants to remain loyal to the family, fleeing with them to Nana’s city cottage in Vijayanagar Colony She was a year or two older than Amme and remembered
no family of her own other than ours. After I’d been born, she had been the one to nurse me.
She now said, “You no married and already you sick of you husband. What happen, child? After you engagement, we go with him to Public Gardens and you let him hold you hand. I no stop you. I see you happy. Happy with him. He has pretty-pretty face, you tell me you-self. You ask me if he face more pretty than you, that maybe he no love you for this.” She paused before repeating, “Tell me, child, what turn you against him?”
“No one wears boots in this heat,” I said. “I should have known he was hiding something.”
She stared at me, the skin on her cheeks dry and hardened, the dark lips parted to expose teeth stained red from betel nut. It was the same look she gave me whenever my cousin Henna slept in my bed. It seemed to say she knew what I was up to even as she asked it. An assertion and retraction. For that was our relationship. After all, the woman who had breast-fed me, who continued to bathe and dress me, and would do so even after I was married, was also the one who, as a servant, could not question my behavior.
Outside now, I could hear Amme greeting my aunts, laughter, the hum of excited conversation.
Nafiza said, “I raise you as me own, child. I no see difference between you and me daughter, Roshan. I know you no worry about you husband. I know you worry about you-self. The boy no hiding leg. You know about he leg. He tell you uncle he-self. But what you tell you husband when he find you blood? Who you go to when he throw you out?”
I didn’t answer, for there was no answer to give. In all I had gone over in my mind, again and again, it was the one question I hadn’t been able to confront. If he threw me out, it would mean that he had found me unsuitable. And an unsuitable wife here, by Old City laws, was a whore, so by those same laws, her father had the right to kill her. The man who had begun beating me at two, how far would he be driven to punish me now?
Nafiza clucked, muttering how she had not meant to frighten me. She tore the thread between her brittle front teeth, then rose, a hand resting on the new dresser to help her up. One of her legs was always giving her trouble, and she began pounding on it as she walked stiffly over to me, unable to fully bend the knee. She was short, my nanny, not fully five feet, but there was something about her face, her stature, that made her seem formidable. She parted the heavy mosquito netting, dark eyes narrowing onto my face. An opening of her presence. “I protect you, child, as I do when you little girl, running from you daddy …”
Amme pulled back the golden door curtain, the coconut hanging from the top of the door frame trembling, a sign of fertility. The
dol’s
beat grew intense, taking on a different rhythm inside me. From laughter, my mother’s face had grown the deep red of the rubies she was wearing.
“Chalu,
” she said, extending an arm to me, rings on every finger. “It’s time for the bride to show herself.”
 
 
THE WOMEN CHEERED as I emerged and gathered about me, hands clasping my arms, resting steadily on my back, guiding me to the center of the salon. From under the brocade veil, my head lowered in modesty, I could only make out thin and dark bare feet, toes glinting with silver toe rings like my own. I was seated on a low stool, its wood painted the same crimson red as the canopy hanging above. The women giggled and whispered to each other as they sat cross-legged on the white sheets that had been spread across the tile floor. They encircled me. Their voices were carried away by the long notes of the
shenai.
We were all dressed in yellow. The Hyderabadi Muslim wedding lasts five days, each ceremony bearing its own ritual along with its own color. The first three days are the gold that promises fortune and fertility the wedding
nik’kah
is the blood red of union, and the
walima
dinner
that is given only upon a successful coupling is the green of Islam, of submission.
Silver trays were shuffled about and finally settled at my feet. They were loaded down with flowers strung into lush necklaces and bracelets, sweetmeats covered in thin sheets of edible silver, engraved bowls filled with turmeric and rosewater, a short flask of jasmine itar, almond oil, and even this, a bottle of hair removal cream.
My mother’s sister-in-law, the matriarch, crouched before me first, her thin midriff covered entirely by her
sari-pallow.
Slender hands made frail by diabetes thrust past my veil and inside the layers of my silk kurta and up the bottoms of my
chooridar
to rub my skin with oils and perfumes. She fed me sweet ladu, rolled the floral bracelets over the pink plastic covering my hands, draped me in a floral rope. Finally, she leaned over and whispered into my ear.
“I’ll tell you what I tell all my biology students,” she said, though her voice did not hold its usual authority. Along with teaching girls at the local high school, Ameera Auntie had taught me to read and write Urdu. “Help him out so he knows what to do. You know your body better than him. These Indian boys come to marriage as inexperienced as you.” Then she withdrew, kissing my cheek through the veil, her skin smelling of the mothballs she placed in the
almari
between her clothes. The
dol
took up a steady beat.
The women quibbled over who should go next, Amme or her younger sister, Asma Kala. Being the mother of the bride, by all rights, Amme should have blessed me now But she was busy putting on a show of her own, feigning fear and reluctance to let her little girl leave the protection of her home, to go and become a woman. Ameera Auntie finally took on her commanding tone and told her to hurry it up.
My mother sat on the floor beside my feet, her hunched form so familiar to me that I could not believe I would no longer be seeing it. When Sameer threw me out, I would not dare return here. And, yet, if I took that airline ticket Dad had given me and returned to the U.S.,
where would I go? No money of my own, no college degree, and, most of all, no experience-no life ever lived—outside my mother’s home, not even that night with Nate.
My mother stuffed my mouth with sweets, her touch rough and awkward; this a woman who had never fed me before. Just beyond her, against the far wall, I caught sight of Nafiza and Raga-be witnessing the rituals they could not be a part of. Both of the old servants were wearing yellow. Amme rose on her knees, laughing uncomfortably as she complained about the ancient customs. She was having the time of her life.
After she draped me in a floral rope, she opened a velvet box and took out a gold necklace. She clipped it on me. Then she opened another box and clipped a ruby one over the gold. Again and again, more and more jewelry until my neck was weighed down in flowers and gold, her own bangles clinking gently. When she was done, rather than whisper her advice to me, she turned to the women and announced, “My only daughter. My only child since …” she stopped herself from saying his name, the son she’d borne, the one who’d died soon after birth. His death, her unwillingness to have another child, were the reasons, Amme believed, Dad had taken a second wife.
She cleared her throat and said, “I’ve spent many years planning and preparing for this wedding. Nothing, absolutely nothing, shall go wrong!”
“Inshal’lah !
” they all shouted together, then they began clapping to the tune of the
dol.
Someone started singing in a high voice like Sabana’s, though I knew it was not her. Earlier, before the guests had arrived, she’d left the house with Dad and their two sons, not wanting or not being invited to take part.
Amme’s sister finally came forth, her body so full and soft that others had to shuffle aside to make room. She seemed to have swallowed up the vivacity Ameera Auntie so desperately needed. Again, the same ritual with oils and sweetmeats, yet another floral necklace, bracelets, followed by more advice.
In the revelry and singing, the servants’ children dancing in the
background, she leaned into me, the scent of her hair reminding me of her daughter, Henna, and whispered, “Let him make all the moves … or he might suspect you’ve had experience.” She edged back to stare intently at me through the brocade, and I knew what she was saying. His letters had arrived at her home, the address I’d given to Nate not only because Henna was my best friend, but because Asma Kala’s husband, Abu Uncle, was the holder of our secrets.
She set her hand on mine, over the veil, over the plastic bag, before pulling back into the group of women, a blur of yellow. Nafiza’s daughter, Roshan, sat before me, reading glasses too big for her thin face. She had been four when her mother began breast-feeding me. Later, she’d married a man who owned a chai shop, so she no longer was a servant and was welcome now to perform this ritual. To my nanny, we were like sisters, but it was her presence in this queue of women instead of Henna’s that told me my cousin-sister had not attended the ceremony. In fact, I’d not seen her since I’d arrived in Hyderabad. Asma Kala told me that Henna was having a difficult pregnancy and couldn’t get out of the house, but I believed that she was staying away because she knew about me. Knew what these women would still not see, even after the visit to the blind
alim
.
And that was when it occurred to me. Deny it, deny Nate, deny what we’d done. Indeed, in the Old City, where women were never alone with men outside of marriage, what I had done a floor beneath my mother’s bedroom in Minneapolis was the very thing that was not possible.
Roshan presented me with a sari as she whispered how my husband wouldn’t be able to resist me—two, three times a night he’d wake me—and I turned my face away Like that, one by one, each woman scooted up and blessed me, and when there was no one left, hands came together, gripping my arms and waist, standing me up. Someone shouted for the servants to hold a cloth before the musicians’ faces so the men wouldn’t see the bride as she was taken across the courtyard to the hammam, and though I thought I now knew what to do on the wedding night, the room still blurred yellow and my legs buckled. I fell
hard on the stool. The women gasped and there was a moment in which I could hear nothing but my own slow breathing, the soft swish of saris, the sound of
dol
pressing into my skin.
“She tripped on her
duppatta,
” someone finally muttered, yanking it from under my feet.
There were exclamations to Allah, thanking him that it wasn’t anything like a stomach parasite that I’d gotten in the past, making me swoon. Then the women rolled my veil around their wrists, raising it high behind me as they led me to the hamnam. Someone had brought along the wooden stool and I was again seated on it. Hands came down and undressed me, then peeled off the plastic bags from over the dried henna. Turmeric was rubbed into my skin until the brown glinted gold. Then all the hair on my body was removed, making me appear to be what they all still believed I was, and what my husband was expecting, a girl.
 
 
DAWN. THE SECOND day of my wedding.
Sanchak
, the ceremony in which the women of the groom’s family come to the bridal home, dressing her in the wedding clothes the groom’s mother has chosen. Then the women pull off the bride’s golden veil and throw on a crimson one of their own, and, in this way begin taking possession.
Outside my window, in the courtyard, the lamb was baying along with the azan. Last night had been the first the creature had passed in peace, the commencement of my wedding somehow providing it solace. I had passed yet another sleepless night. I now rose and went into the salon, finally viewing the decorations I’d not been able to the night before from under the veil, flowers and gold and modesty keeping my head bowed. As usual, only the servants were awake, the azan their call to work.
Amme’s old house was designed like most old homes in this part of the city: a central living space surrounded by bedrooms on three sides. The fourth side opened onto the verandah, which led into the courtyard, across from which stood the kitchen and hammam, and the servants’
quarters. Over the years, Dad had added two more floors in the exact design as the first, intending to banish Amme to one of the upper levels. But she had refused to give up the master bedroom and he had no rights left to order her. After all, twenty years before, it had been the room she had entered as a new bride, her sari and veil blazing red. At that time, newly graduated from medical school and possessing little money to lay down as
mahr
, Dad had vowed in the marriage contract to give Amme his father’s house if he ever divorced her. He probably never imagined it would come to that.

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