Madras on Rainy Days: A Novel (7 page)

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Authors: Samina Ali

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Now the house looked the same as it had when Amme had stepped into it as a young bride, and then, ten years later, when Sabana had entered it as a bride herself. She and Dad consummated their marriage on a bed facing the one he had once lain on with Amme. For my wedding, the cotton door curtains to all five bedrooms had been replaced with ones made of golden raw silk. As a symbol of fertility, small coconuts wrapped in gold and red tissue paper hung from the center of every doorway—the one that led into the bridal room, into the room the two boys shared, into the master bedroom where Amme slept alone, and, finally, into the small room across from mine, next to the one used for prayer, in which Dad and Sabana now slept, shutting the door on everyone, on Amme. During the day, their room became the
divan
, the place where guests were seated.
In the inner courtyard, the circular staircase leading up to the empty floors blinked colorful lights against the purple dawn. Above the
takat,
the black tarp that covered the Fiat each time we returned to the U.S. was suspended from the branches to shield the musicians who would soon arrive from the glare of the rising sun.
The furniture had been cleared from the large main area, and the servants had laid down long white sheets, covering the tiles from edge to edge. In the place where Dad and I had sat early yesterday morning, there was now that low stool I’d again be seated on for tonight’s ceremony, this time surrounded by Sameer’s family
Raga-be came up the verandah steps, a stick broom in her wrinkled arm. She was thin and fit, her eyes thickly lined with
kajal,
and it
was only her slightly hunched back that gave away her age to be older than my nanny’s. It was her task to sweep the house each morning,.
“Why you up so early, Bitea?” she asked me. One side of her mouth bulged from where she’d tucked tobacco. She placed the low stool against the wall and began sweeping the sheets of the rose petals.
She was the reason I was up before anyone else, and I quickly approached the old woman. “Raga-be,” I began.
At once, she glanced into the courtyard and turned away from me, bending over the broom even more, one arm slung across her lower back. The palm was painted red with henna. She didn’t stop sweeping.
I stared across the courtyard. Only the cook, Munir, was stirring about in the kitchen. “I know how you’ve helped women on the farm,” I whispered to her back. “I know what you learned … to do when you were growing up on my grandfather’s land.” I was talking about the very thing Sabana feared,
jadu,
black magic.
“Me no know what you say, Bitea,” she cried, louder than I wanted. The lamb jerked its head and bayed a final time as it nervously eyed us. “I no can help you!”
I looked at Amme’s bedroom door. “You must know about the bleeding,” I persisted. “You’ve got to make it stop. I know you can. I’ve heard about the things you can do …”
She turned and shook the stick broom at me and her eyes squinted into two lines of kohl. The inside of her mouth was filled with the red juice from the tobacco
paan,
and this forced her to tilt her head up as she spoke. “You no Indian,” she said. “Chance me
jadu
go backwards. Then you mama throw me out.” She stared at me awhile, willing me to go away, it seemed, but I stayed where I was, fighting an urge I’d never felt before. I wanted to grab that broom and shake it at her, maybe even whack her humped back until she understood my predicament, until she did what she was told.
I kept my voice steady “I can deny everything,” I said, “but I cannot deny the bleeding. Raga-be, if he throws
me
out, where will I go? Amme’s right. I’ve got to make his home my home, it’s the only way …”
“Shhaa, Bitea!” she cried as she gazed across the courtyard once more. Then her eyes locked onto mine before sliding back across the courtyard, and this time I followed her gaze. Just outside the kitchen door, almost hidden around the cement railing of the circular staircase, was my nanny, crouched on the ground, scrutinizing us with that same look she’d given me last night, suspicion, retraction. So this was what held the old woman’s tongue. Indeed, in trying to protect me, Nafiza would certainly tattle to Amme, just as she’d done in the past.
“Me say again, Bitea. You no Indian. Me
jadu
no good for you.” She stretched her eyes wide, the brown irises capturing my full form, then the lids clamped down on it.
I sighed and turned to go back to my room. Just then, I heard her whisper in what sounded like a strange hum, “No worry-worry Bitea. I come when it time. I come me-self.”
 
 
LATER THAT MORNING, I woke to silence.
I thought there must have been a fight between Amme and Dad, something so bad it had even stopped the musicians from taking up their instruments. I rose and rushed to the salon, only to find everyone eating, including the two old musicians on the
takat
facing away from the salon, tea cups and glasses of water set next to their instruments. It was already noon. How was it possible that I had slept seven hours, right through the morning pounding and screaming of the
dol
and
shenai,
that damn bleating of the lamb?
Amme looked up from her plate and nodded at me without saying a word. One of the deep bamboo chairs had been brought out for her and set near the verandah. A plate of rice rested on her lap. Her small feet didn’t reach the floor. She pushed stray hair back from her dark-circled eyes as she called across the courtyard to Nafiza to bring me food. She appeared relieved that I was finally up.
On the other side of the salon, a rectangular red cloth had been spread over the white sheets, a
dastar-khan.
Dad and his family sat around it to eat. Dad had his back resting against the wall, and every
now and then, Sabana lifted a spoon and he leaned forward, extending his plate, and she served him. One time, as she was holding up the spoon, Dad and his eldest son, Farzad, brought their plates forward at the same time. Immediately Dad snatched back his plate and when Sabana insisted on attending to him first, he took the spoon from her hand and filled his son’s plate himself. The boy was ten, around the age I was when Dad remarried.
“So the
dul’han
is awake!” Dad called, then chuckled as his light eyes flitted beyond me to Amme. Since the wedding began, he’d been having fun calling me the bride to tease my mother, not me, because he knew my wedding was a fulfillment of
her
dreams.
Sabana glanced up at me and slowly took in the golden kurta-
chooridar
from last night’s ceremony After the women had bathed me by massaging my scalp and body with turmeric and oils, they had redressed me in my first wedding outfit and told me to wear it to sleep. Now that the wedding had started, there was never to be a moment when I was not to look like the bride.
Sabana herself was dressed in a yellow
shalwar-kameez,
though she had not attended the ceremony. Her lipstick had stained her teeth red and was also smudged on her chin. The kurta creased across her growing stomach. Her pregnancy was two months behind Henna’s, five months ahead of my own. She now lifted a spoon and served Dad as she said, “All morning, your father has been stopping Nafiza from waking you, saying the bride needs her sleep. A father can spoil his children, but a husband will never spoil his wives. Look how I attend to your father, even in my pregnancy.”
Was she telling me to emulate her actions, this woman who was sitting in my mother’s house? I held my tongue, for speaking aloud such things was what led to trouble, beatings.
Dad pushed back against the wall while sucking the marrow from a bone. His lips and mustache glistened with the cooking oils as much as my own skin and hair glistened with the almond oil and perfumes. I had already become invisible to him, receding once more with Amme into his past life. His younger son, Ziad, curly haired like his mother.
and with the same thin face, asked to be excused. He said he was tired of eating rice and curry. He wanted cereal. He wanted to go home. Sabana reminded him that they had come for my wedding. Ziad was four years younger than his brother. If my own brother had been alive, he would have been three years younger than me.
Nafiza hobbled up the verandah steps with my plate of food. Just beyond her, in the courtyard, Ahmed was waving to get my attention. He was holding one of the floral ropes from last night’s ceremony. With exaggerated steps, he tiptoed over to the sleeping lamb and hung it around the creature’s neck. The animal didn’t start, as I thought it would. It simply opened one eye, and its moist nostrils curled back as it sniffed. It began eating the dried-up flowers. Ahmed roared and clapped his hands. I turned away
Nafiza was glancing from the
dastar-khan
to Amme, wanting to know if she should seat me with Dad’s family. Amme shook her head and told her to take me to the kitchen, to feed me there as she used to when I was a little girl.
 
 
HENNA FINALLY ARRIVED, two hours before the evening’s ceremony. While my aunts and uncles were being seated on the verandah, Amme ordering the servants to serve chai and cold
sharbat,
I grabbed her hand, bloated with pregnancy, unrecognizable to me, and rushed her to the roof. On the climb up the three flights, she had to halt several times and grip her belly with both hands, out of breath. The last time we’d come up here, soon after my engagement, we’d raced each other, winding around and around the circular staircase, she winning. She had always been more courageous than me, not cautious, as I was, about where she placed her step, of how she might fall. Though a year younger, she’d done everything first, walking, riding a bike, starting her menses, and now this, getting married, having a child. It was to Henna I went for advice, as Amme went to Abu Uncle. Like her father, Henna’s eyes were dark and deep-set, expressing the same mixture of kindness and understanding. The eyes promised redemption. So
why was it that now, when I was finally alone with Henna, I could tell her nothing?
We were standing next to the cement railing that encircled the flat roof, staring west across the Old City, toward Mecca. Perhaps it was the view that kept my mouth closed. For before us was an image no postcard would show, yet the one I carried with me, defining my experience of India. A tangle of white structures crammed one next to the other, the monotony broken only by a sudden shooting green of tall ashoka and coconut trees. And the green, too, of those small flags with the crescent moon strung one next to the other on twine to hang up and down the streets, like clothes drying in the wind.
Surrounding the Old City was a six-mile-long stone wall. The last of its thirteen massive gates stood close behind Amme’s house, its top now visible to us over the trees. It was through this Dabir Pura Gate the Fiat thrust each time I went to and from the airport, each time Ahmed drove me to Henna’s house in Vijayanagar Colony, and, in two days, through which I would be taken to usher me to my husband’s home.
I could not imagine a life in India that occurred outside these uneven stone walls and impressive double doors, where everything, including the day sliced neatly into five parts by the muezzin’s call, did not hold distinction:
who you are, what you could amount
to. There was no defying limits here. This was a Muslim neighborhood, where women did not leave the house unveiled, not even girls as young as six, their bodies yet indistinguishable from boys’; and where the center of men’s foreheads held a dark patch from the repeated bowing and resting of the face against the pressed dirt of the prayer
sujda-ga.
The largest mosque in India, Mecca Masjid, stood at the center of the Old City, its granite dome, in the distance, shimmering like glass in the setting sun, and near it, the four slender minarets of the Char Minar pointed to the four corners of the sky. These monuments had been built in the sixteenth century by the Muslim founders of Hyderabad, the Qutb Shahi kings, who had ruled the area for 170 years from Golconda Fort, ten kilometers west of the Old City The fort’s walls were
so mighty that even when the great Mughal armies attacked, they found it impregnable. So, they besieged Golconda for eight months … until, finally, late one night, a traitor opened a door from inside, quietly, easily. And die enemy invaded.
I turned to Henna and, as though anticipating my confession, she held up Nate’s letters. Four of them had arrived, spread before the globe of her belly like a fan. I didn’t take them. Instead, I pushed aside the fabric of her golden sari and traced a dark, vertical line down her stomach that hadn’t been there before.

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