The Sweetness of Tears (24 page)

Abbas Uncle said nothing. In a week, he had arranged for the trip. They would go—Abbas Uncle and Sajida Auntie and Akram—on pilgrimage to Karbala and Najaf in Iraq. Because I was pregnant, I was not allowed to go. Instead of going on the honeymoon that Akram had planned, I went home to Ma.

Ma asked me what was wrong. Again and again. I said nothing. Merely the facts, with none of the details. “They’ve gone for pilgrimage to Karbala. I couldn’t go. I’m pregnant.” Finally, frustrated, she sent Macee to visit her brother, Sharif Muhammad. To find out the details I wouldn’t share. After that, Ma left me alone.

W
hen my husband came home from pilgrimage to Karbala, nothing had changed. More electroshock treatments. So many that his memory was broken. He didn’t recognize me when I put my hand on his cheek, didn’t even know who I was. Finally, Abbas Uncle sent him away. To the clinic in Switzerland, where he’d been treated before. Uncomfortable in my in-laws’ home, I went back to stay with my mother while he was gone, heedless of the gossip that this must surely have caused.

What people were saying didn’t matter to me. I didn’t go anywhere. I didn’t see anyone. Except Asma, who came to visit me a few times. She was pregnant, too. We should have had much to talk about. But we didn’t.

The day I first felt my baby—Sadiq—move inside of me, as soft as the flutter of a bird’s wings inside my belly, was the first time in a long time that I was happy. I wasn’t alone. In that instant, I knew I would never be alone, no matter what else happened.

Akram came back to Pakistan when I was only weeks away from delivering Sadiq. I went back to be with him. He seemed better, able to smile again. But not at me. Toward me, his eyes were those of a stranger. I slept alone, in the room where Akram had danced with me less than a year earlier. He slept in the room that had been his as a boy, the room that was to be our child’s room when he was born.

When my birth pains began, I went back to Ma. It was tradition—for me to go home to give birth, to stay in my parents’ house for forty days after. It was a relief, too, to be away from Akram and his stranger’s eyes.

Sadiq was born, filling the hole in my life with a purpose that I clasped close to my heart, making everything else fade in importance. Abbas Uncle and Sajida Auntie came to visit. Asma was at their home, having given birth to Jaffer a few weeks before. Her new home, a brand-new house that her father had built for her and her husband, across the street from her parents, so that she would never have to live under the rule of her in-laws, was ready for her when her forty days was up, a few weeks before Muharram was to start.

When Muharram was about to begin, Sharif Muhammad Chacha came to fetch me and Sadiq. I had spent more days of my marriage in my parents’ home than in my husband’s. It was strange to go back there. But I had no choice. Sajida Auntie’s Muharram gatherings were to begin. And she was worried about what people would say if her daughter-in-law was not present. About what more they would say than they must have already.

Sajida Auntie hired an
ayah
to take care of Sadiq. “Let
her
take care of the baby. You must try to make Akram remember. That will be easier without Sadiq always in your arms.” This was not something I could do. Sadiq was mine. He knew it, too—crying in everyone else’s arms, soothed and sated only in mine.

Akram had begun to interact with his parents. Around me, he was still quiet. And Sadiq was of no interest to him. Sajida Auntie tried to convince him, to remind him, of who we were. Abbas Uncle said that the doctors in Switzerland had reassured him—it was an unusually long-lasting effect of all the shock treatment, this loss of memory. That in time, he would remember. But it wasn’t in time.

On the second day of Muharram, just as I recited the last words of my favorite
noha
at the gathering of ladies in Sajida Auntie’s grand hall, bereft of furniture for those ten days, Akram came into the room, a man trespassing on the space of women. He was agitated, looking for something. His eyes caught mine. He marched up to me and shouted, “Your brat is squalling!” In that second, I saw Akram’s mother step forward. She hesitated, the calculation of her thoughts clearly visible on her face. How to rescue the situation? How to stop Akram without giving him away? But Akram wasn’t finished and that hesitation of hers was enough to let him go on, too far, too late. “Go and shut that child up! And then take him and go back where you came from! Take your brat—that son of who-knows-what and get out of my house!”

I put my hand up to my mouth and sank to my knees. My mother was there to see the whole thing. All the women of the community were there to hear what my husband said. Ma came to my side and lifted me up.

“Enough, Deena. It has been enough. Go and get your son. I’m taking you home. This time for good.”

I
was not alone. I had Sadiq with me. Two weeks later, a few days after Ashura, Sharif Muhammad Chacha came to tell me that Akram was dead. That he’d hung himself in the beautiful bathroom of our wedding suite.

I went to my dead husband’s house, a widow at nineteen, where people were gathered to give condolence, some of them the same women who had witnessed my humiliation two weeks before. Sajida Auntie, driven by grief, I know, shrieked at me to get out of her house. The same way her son had. I understand. Now, at least. What grief can do. How hungry it becomes—when combined with bitter anger and denial—how blind, looking for a target at which to cast blame. I was merely that—a convenient target—chosen without regard for fact or reason.

And I was not alone. I had Sadiq with me.

When Ma died, Sadiq was eight months old.

But I was not alone. I had Sadiq with me.

Abbas Uncle came often, urging me to return to live under his roof. But I told him what Ma had said before she died. That Abu would have wanted me to stand for myself. That my life was my own and no one else’s. God’s gift to me. Not to be squandered.

It never occurred to me. That Abbas Uncle would later use the name of that same God against me. That he had consulted with lawyers and mullahs—all of them men. That they had told him that Sadiq belonged to him. That after he was weaned, I had no right to my own son.

He didn’t say any of this out loud. To me, he said, “I cannot force you, Deena. To come and live with us. Even though that is the way it should be. You have suffered enough. But we have suffered, too. Your mother-in-law was bitter. And wrong to blame you. Time is what is needed. For all of us to heal.”

Time was what he promised. And time was what he gave. More than five years. He must have planned and plotted for all that time, mercilessly torn between his guilt and his grief. Between what he owed me and what he wanted. To take back his grandson, who was mine, no matter what his mullahs told him.

In those years, amazingly enough, I was happy. I lived with Sadiq, alone in the house where I grew up, with only Macee for company. Every week, dutifully, I took Sadiq with me to visit his grandparents. I never begrudged them that right, no matter how painful it was for me. No matter how much I would have preferred not to go there.

I put up with Sajida Auntie’s barely veiled dislike and resentment—something she swallowed at the end of the first year of her grief, coming to see me. Urging me to attend her
majlis
es when Muharram came again. It was an act of atonement for what had happened in the weeks before Akram’s death—carried out not for me but for her grandson, whose legitimacy her son had put in question, repudiating him in front of the busiest body of witnesses to be found. She made a great show of walking me into that first gathering, her arm around my shoulders. Perhaps it made a difference in the way some of those women perceived me. I wouldn’t know. I shunned them before they could shun me, interacting with them with only my voice, in the
noha
s I recited. Those were for the love of the Imam. Those were not subject to their approval. And the grief we shared, together, made those gatherings neutral ground. There was room for me there.

I miss that—the special power in those congregations of women. I have been unable to find a replacement for it over the years in this country, where women have to enter the mosques from back doors and sit in the less favored spaces of worship because the space and time for worship is shared and women often get the shorter end of the stick as a result. In Pakistan, we were so separate from the men, our gatherings held at different times and in different spaces, that we didn’t have to share anything with them. Space, time, power. The spirit of Bibi Zainab was there when we gathered, the sister of Imam Husain—you know the story? All of it? Of Karbala? Sadiq told you that, too? It was Zainab that everyone turned to after that day of tragedy—Ashura. She led the captive women and children, gave them comfort, and spoke for them in the court of the tyrant, her feminine voice bold and strong for the cause of justice.

But in all those five years, when I attended
majlis
es at the home of my in-laws and visited them with Sadiq, there were signs I should have seen and been prepared for. How often Abbas Uncle and Sajida Auntie would complain—about how much Sadiq depended on me, how much he needed me. How unhealthy it was, that he should be afraid of them and everyone else. I remember how upset Abbas Uncle was when Sadiq cried inconsolably on his first outing without me. It was Muharram again. And Sadiq couldn’t bear to be with the men in the Muharram procession, afraid of what he saw there. Abbas Uncle said that he was too sheltered in my feminine shadow. That children, especially boys, had to exit the womb, after all, in order to survive in this world. But I didn’t understand what he was getting at. How could I?

I was there the day that Umar came home, on the terrace with Sadiq. I had no idea. That what went on in my neighbor’s house, in the home of my old friend, would have such an impact on the life I was living and which I thought, with no complaints, would never change. From Macee, who heard it from the washerwoman who worked for Umar’s mother—that
Wahabbi
woman, Ma had called her, always with an angry shake of her head—I learned that Umar was home for six months. Done with his studies in America, with a job as a professor waiting for him when he went back. A great success, by all measures. That he was still unmarried, his mother anxious to change that, the reason he’d come home.

I had no interaction with him. None whatsoever. In fact, unconsciously, I avoided the terrace altogether, drinking tea in the lounge, letting Macee hang the laundry to dry—normally one of my favorite chores, as the line was there, on the terrace, where I’d spent so many happy hours of my childhood. So, I was shocked by what Abbas Uncle came to say one morning, while Sadiq was in school.

“Your neighbor—the woman next door, Mrs. Yusuf—has come to see me, Deena.”

“My neighbor?”

“She’s very angry. An emotion, it seems, that she is on very familiar terms with.”

“Angry? With me? What on earth for?”

“She’s worried that her son will do something impulsive. You know him?”

I didn’t say anything for a moment. Then, “I used to. When we were children. I don’t anymore.”

Abbas Uncle’s eyes were slit-sharp in their study of my face. I had nothing to hide, meeting them with my own.

“She says that he’s in love with you. That he always has been. Did you know this?”

“He—?” Suddenly, I found it difficult to find enough air to fill my lungs. “She—but—that’s nonsense! I haven’t even spoken to him. And what reason did she have to come and see
you
?”

“She seemed to think that I could stop her son. From making a mistake. That he was at risk of doing something about how he feels. She wants me to keep you away from him. And assumes that I will agree with her. That a marriage between my son’s widow and her son, a Shia and a Sunni, is something I would wish to avoid at all costs.”

“You should have told her, Abbas Uncle. That there’s no risk of such a thing happening.”

“Why not? Maybe she’s right, Deena. How do you know that she’s not right? That the boy loves you and wishes to marry you. And this Sunni-Shia thing.” Abbas Uncle waved his hand dismissively. “I knew your father well enough to know that it would not have mattered to him. Especially now. When your options are—more limited than— before. How do you know what the boy’s intentions are?”

“It doesn’t matter what I know. That is not going to happen, Abbas Uncle. I told you, I don’t even know him. Not anymore.”

There was a long silence. Then Abbas Uncle said, “Nevertheless.” Another long silence. “What she said is worth considering.”

I let the confusion I felt make its way to my face.

“If not this boy. Then another. Don’t you think, Deena, that it’s time for you to think of yourself? That you’ve given up enough of your life already? For the mistakes of others?”

I remained quiet. Something about Abbas Uncle’s tone made me wary.

“It’s time for you to be married again, Deena. It’s time to move on. For all of us to get out of this state of limbo and get on with life as it should be.”

“As it should be?”

“Yes. Marry this man. If he wants you. If not, I’ll find you another.”

“You want me to marry? I don’t see how this is any concern of yours.”

“Everything you do is my concern, Deena. You’re the mother of my grandson.”

“If you’re worried, Abbas Uncle, then you shouldn’t be. My life is centered on Sadiq. I would never do anything against his interests. His life is mine.”

“No, Deena. His life is not yours. What happened with you was not right. I made a promise to your mother. Before you agreed to marry my son. That for as long as you lived under my roof, I would protect you as if you were my own daughter. As it happened, the time you spent in my home was insignificant in amount. Regardless, I broke my promise—had already broken it, in fact, when I made it. What happened with you is not something I would have wished for Asma. And now, if she were in your place, I would want Asma to move on. Not to live in this prison of your past—unable to escape it and powerless to take the steps forward to be free. Not a day goes by that I don’t think of you, Deena, with regret. Regret and shame for the position I placed you in. Regret and remorse for how you live now. In seclusion. The life of an old woman. Instead of the young, vibrant one I knew when your father was alive, the young, laughing woman who came into my home as a bride—blooming and brimming with the joy of a future that I cheated you out of before it even began. You’re still young, Deena.”