The Writing on My Forehead (11 page)

“Suit yourself.” Mehnaz sounded unsurprised and still remarkably cheerful.

“I will. Suiting you, too, obviously.”

“’Ey, I ’ave nothing to ’ide! Come or don’t come. I don’t bloody fucking care one way or another.” She looked into the rearview mirror, catching my eyes. “Sorry, Sai. ’Ope you don’t mind?”

I had no idea what she was pretending to be sorry for. So I didn’t answer. A few minutes of daredevil driving later, Mehnaz dropped us off at the station.

Before descending underground, Mohsin paused to take a picture of an old, homeless woman who sat on the sidewalk across the street, outside of a McDonald’s restaurant. She was dressed, unseasonably, in a coat and hat, the holey gloves on her hands as dirty as the skin that showed through. In her winter layers, she looked big, a wide triangle shape of fabric propped up against the brick wall behind her. She was muttering to herself, the look in her eyes manic. Many people walked by her without seeming to see her there at all—the way I would have if Mohsin hadn’t stopped to take a photograph. I understood, suddenly, what Mohsin may have meant. Bearing witness. I looked up to see that he had taken his picture already and was waiting for me.

“Do you recognize her?”

I frowned.

“There are a few pictures of her in my room. She sits there every day. Same exact spot. Rain or shine.”

I stared at the woman for a moment and then turned away. We descended the station stairs and boarded the tube into the city. Having expected some kind of explanation about our split from Mehnaz, I was disappointed when Mohsin slumped down in his seat, put his head back, and conked off for a noisy nap.

When we got into the West End and switched lines to get to Leicester Square, I took advantage of his wakefulness to ask him, “What was all that about? With Mehnaz?”

“As if you didn’t know. Mehnaz has a boyfriend. An
English
boyfriend.” He was genuinely amused by my question.

“But I didn’t. I didn’t know. How could I know?” I was earnest, now, not wanting him to think I had been feigning my innocence.

“Then you must be one helluva deep sleeper.” I must have given him a blank enough look to make him reconsider. “Okay, so you’re one helluva deep sleeper. She has a boyfriend. Our father doesn’t approve. They fight about it every night. He threatens to disown her. She threatens to run away. And so on and so forth. Typical East-meets-West sob story.”

“We could have gone with her. I wouldn’t have told anyone.” I knew that I sounded sulky, but I couldn’t help it—the resentment, one I was used to, of being younger than and therefore not privy to, welled up inside of me. “I would have liked to meet her boyfriend.”

“I told you that my father doesn’t approve.”

“Yeah. So?”

“Well, neither do I. Not of the fact that she has a boyfriend. But of who he is.” His tone was edged with controlled anger that I somehow knew was not directed at me. “And I didn’t fancy spending an evening in their combined company.”

“Oh.” There was nothing more that I could say.

The set of his mouth softened a little as he looked down at me. “Besides, bad as Mehnaz can be, her boyfriend is even less wholesome. I don’t think your parents would approve of you hanging around with the likes of him.” He smiled, suddenly, a wry expression with which I was becoming familiar. “Plus—this way—I get to bully you into watching the movie I want to see and I don’t have to worry about some bloody wanker telling me to watch some ninja movie instead.”

A thought occurred to me and I couldn’t help but ask, “And you?”

“What?”

“Do you have a girlfriend?”

He laughed. “No. No, I definitely don’t have a girlfriend.”

When we arrived at Leicester Square, it occurred to me to ask, “What movie are we going to see anyway?”

“A new one by Attenborough.”

“Attenborough?”

“Sir Richard. The guy who made
Gandhi
.”

“Oh.” I thought of the poster in his room.

“It’s called
Cry Freedom
. You’ll like it, I think. It’s about South Africa. About Steven Biko, one of the heroes of the antiapartheid movement. I’ve been waiting for it to come out. Do you mind? I suppose we could go see something else, if you’d rather.”

“No. That sounds good.”

It was the first political movie that I had ever seen. And it affected me deeply. I was still sniffling a bit as we exited the cinema.

Looking politely away as I wiped my nose on my sleeve in a gesture I tried and failed to make delicate, Mohsin asked, “I gather you liked the film?”

“I loved it. Didn’t you?”

He shrugged. “The movie was supposed to be about Biko. Attenborough marginalized him. Made the white guy the hero. The journalist.”

“I didn’t think of that.”

“So? What do you feel like eating?”

I shook my head, looking around at all the little shops—which were closed now—and restaurants, which weren’t.

“There are some nice little restaurants here. Or we could just get some takeaway and eat and walk around.”

“That sounds good.”

He walked us to a little stand that sold savory crêpes, folded into paper cones designed specifically for what Mohsin had proposed. As we waited for the man to serve us, Mohsin caught me by surprise, asking, “What were you looking for at Hyde Park?”

I took my eyes away from the batter the man at the stand had spread into a circle on the griddle and met Mohsin’s eyes. I stammered out an answer, trying to buy myself time to think about how much I should say to this very perceptive cousin of mine, “Umm. I wasn’t looking for anything. I just wanted to see what it looked like. I’d heard so much about it.”

He frowned. I watched him try to scan in between my words for a moment. The crêpe man handed me my cone, overflowing with cheese and mushrooms.

Mohsin wouldn’t let it go. “What had you heard about it?”

For some reason, the urge to talk about my grandfather with Mohsin was suddenly overwhelming. “Well, I was thinking about my grandfather. My mom’s dad—” I hesitated.

But Mohsin was already nodding his head. “Ah yes, randy old Kasim Saeed.”

“You know about him?” I shouldn’t have been surprised.

“Of course I know about him. He’s legendary, isn’t he? People still talk about how he fell for that woman. And left your poor old grandmother at the side of the road. But I still don’t see the connection.”

I had lost him.

“Hyde Park?”

“Oh! That’s where he met her.”

“Aha! I should have known. A fourteen-year-old girl wouldn’t be interested in political rhetoric, would she? No, it was romance. Much more in character.” The crêpe man handed Mohsin his food and we turned and walked away, blowing on our crêpes before each of us ventured a bite.

My mouth was still half-full when I said, in my own defense, “I really did want to see Speakers’ Corner. I wanted to hear them talking. And see where—how—it could have happened.”

More polite than I, Mohsin chewed his food and swallowed before saying, “Well, that’s a good question, isn’t it? He had courage, your grandfather, you’ve got to give him that. Takes some balls to go against your culture and take a stand for your own happiness.”

I nodded my head, taking another bite and agreeing with the words that Mohsin put to my own feeling.

“But then, it was basically a selfish kind of courage, wasn’t it?” He pointed his crêpe at me to emphasize his words.

I bristled at them, as offended at the accusation as if he had made it against me.

But he continued before I could express my offense, “What do you know about your other grandfather? Our grandfather, I mean. Roshan Qader?”

“About Dada?” He nodded, taking another bite out of his crêpe. “I don’t know. He died after Ameena was born. He had two sons. Ahmed Chacha and Daddy. And—that’s all, I guess.”

“That’s a shame. There’s a lot more, you know. A lot more you should know. Like, he had three wives. And the last two were sisters.”

“What?!”

He laughed to see my eyebrows shoot up to somewhere in the vicinity of my scalp. “Relax. None of them at the same time.”

My brows came back down in a frown.

“The first wife died giving birth to their second child, a girl, called Gulshan. The daughter died a few years later. But they had a son, too. Dawood. Dawood Chacha. The second wife, my grandmother, died of typhoid when my father was only six months old.”

“
Your
grandmother? Dadi wasn’t your grandmother? So Daddy and Ahmed Chacha are only half brothers? I didn’t know that!”

“Yeah.” Mohsin was grinning. “Your grandmother was his last wife,
my
grandmother’s elder sister. My grandmother was half his age, younger than Dawood Chacha—her stepson. Yours was only a few years older. Dawood Chacha died during Partition. No wife or kids.” Mohsin paused, thoughtfully, for a moment. “But Dada never saw us either. Mehnaz and me. Even though we were born before he died.”

I nodded my head, urging him to go on.

“He had courage, too, you know. Real courage, different from your other grandfather’s. The unselfish kind.”

“What do you mean?”

Mohsin cocked his head to one side. “How could you not know any of this? Doesn’t Nadeem Chacha—your dad—ever talk about him?”

I shook my head.

“Well, I guess that’s not so surprising. Neither does mine.”

“Then how do you know anything about him?”

“I know because I’ve made it my business to know.” Mohsin leaned in closer to me as we walked around the Square. His face was more animated, less cool than I had yet seen it, excited by the news he was about to share.

“Did you know that he worked with Gandhi?”

“Gandhi?” I thought, again, of the poster in Mohsin’s room. “What—how—?” I gave up, not even knowing where to begin with my questions. “No. I didn’t know.”

“Yup. Dada was very involved in the Independence movement. He did everything. Went on strike. Civil disobedience. Went to jail even. He got beaten by a
lathi
once. Nearly died. But he just went right on fighting—for justice, for freedom. That kind of commitment takes courage.”

“Just like Biko.” There was awe in my voice.

“Yes. Just like Biko.”

“Tell me more.”

“I can do better than that. I can show you.”

“Huh?”

Mohsin pointed at the paper cone in my hand, the contents of which I had devoured without even being aware of it. “You finished? Let’s throw these in that rubbish bin over there and go then. I’ll show you what I’m talking about when we get home.”

W
E DIDN’T TALK
at all on the way back to my uncle’s house, because jet lag caught up with me and it was my turn to fall asleep to the gentle rock and roll of the underground. I glanced across the street, at the McDonald’s, as we emerged from the station and found the old homeless woman was still there.

“Does she sleep there? On the sidewalk?”

Mohsin frowned and glanced at his watch. “No. She’s usually gone by this time.”

“Where does she go?”

Mohsin shrugged.

“Have you ever spoken to her?”

“Not really. I bought food for her once or twice.”

“So—you don’t know anything about her?”

Mohsin shook his head.

Struck by an impulse, spontaneously and without thinking, I started to cross the street, but looked the wrong way before I did. The bus that came from the right—from the wrong direction, in my American head—would have flattened me if Mohsin hadn’t pulled me back out of the street in time. The bus driver—a
desi,
I saw, from too close as the bus slid past, blowing the bangs off my forehead—honked angrily. I paused, my heart thudding, but only for a moment. I looked right before attempting to cross again. Mohsin followed, his lifesaving hand still gripping my arm tightly for fear of what had almost happened. Safely over, I stood in front of the woman awkwardly, my actions uninformed by any specific plan or thought. Slowly, the old woman looked up, muttering to herself, her neck craned at an uncomfortable angle that made me kneel down beside her.

I heard her words—directed at me, I was surprised to realize, and not herself as I had supposed. “Dat vas wery dangerous. Seely girl.”

She had a thick accent that ruled English out as her native language—Eastern European, I would have guessed—and bad breath, one among other malodors that I was beginning to detect.

“I looked the wrong way.”

“Seely girl. You veel be hurt. Looking the wrong vay.”

I nodded, surprised to see how focused her gaze was on my face.

“Do you have a home?” I asked.

“Home.” Her eyes brightened, as if the word had reminded her of something she had forgotten. “Eet ees time to go home.” Suddenly, the mountain of the woman’s form began to move upward. She was muttering to herself again, as far as I could tell, speaking words—harsh, guttural sounds—of a language I didn’t recognize. When she stood, she lost some of the stature that her seated form had afforded, and I was surprised to find her height to be less than mine. Muttering to herself a little more, she gathered the belongings which she had hidden under the spread of her coat—grocery bags filled with mysterious treasures. Then, she looked beyond me and pointed, with a gloved finger, at Mohsin.

“Dat boy. He take peektures of Magda.”

“Yes. Is that your name? Magda?”

“I vant. Peektures of Magda.”

Mohsin, who had remained silent thus far, cleared his throat. “I’ll bring you pictures.”

“Yays. Dat veel be nice. Peektures of Magda. Like moowie star. Wery glamorous.” She smiled, revealing gaps where some of her teeth used to be.

She turned and left us, shuffling away slowly as Mohsin and I stared after her for a few moments before turning, ourselves, to leave.

The house was quiet when we got home. I looked at the clock on the mantel in the living room and saw that it was just past midnight. The hour, I remember, made me feel terribly grown up.

“Do you think Mehnaz is home yet?” I whispered, worriedly.

“Nah. Her car’s not in the drive. She won’t be home for hours.” Mohsin sounded unconcerned.

“Won’t your parents be mad?”

“They would be if they were awake. But they’re not. They won’t wait up tonight. They think she’s with us.” Mohsin stood with his hands in his pockets for a moment, before asking, “Do you want some juice or something? I’m getting some for myself.”

“Yes, please.” He turned to go to the kitchen. But I stopped him. “Mohsin? You don’t have to stick to juice because of me. I mean, I don’t care if you want a beer or something,” I said, as nonchalantly as I could.

He laughed and shook his head. And I was vaguely relieved when he came back with two glasses of orange juice. He beckoned me upstairs and into his room. He put his glass down on the desk in the corner and waved me over to the bed as he seated himself at its foot, in front of the shipping trunk I had noted with passing interest the day before. He swept its surface clear of books before opening it to remove, with some solemnity, another book of some kind, well-worn and leather-bound, with papers sticking out of it, like bookmarks.

“What’s that?”

“This.” Mohsin put his palm over the cover of what he held, caressing it a bit. “This is Roshan Qader’s journal.”

My eyes widened. “Dada’s journal?”

Mohsin nodded.

“Where’d you get it?”

“I found it in the trunk. Hidden away in a corner of the attic.”

“Inside the trunk?”

“Along with a bunch of papers—letters and newspaper clippings that he collected.” Mohsin sat down next to me and opened the book to the first page to show me the date. January 21, 1921.

“He started it right after he got out of jail. The first time. He was at Amritsar in April of 1919, at Jallianwalla Bagh, defying British orders that banned public meetings.” Mohsin was tracing a finger down the first page of the journal, but my eyes were on his face. “The general in charge ordered the troops to fire on the crowd, peaceably assembled, without giving them any warning to disperse. Hundreds were killed. More than a thousand wounded. And our grandfather was arrested. He was only nineteen. But he was already married. To Fauzia. Who was pregnant with their first child, Dawood, our dads’ half brother.”

“We had another uncle.” It finally dawned on me, what Mohsin had told me at Leicester Square, what he was telling me now.

“Yes. Dawood Chacha. He was born while Dada was in jail. They beat him up pretty badly and then kept him there for a long time. When he got out, Dawood Chacha was already two years old. And Dada—the rest of his life had begun. A life of service. His own family always came second to it. The same choice that all great men—and women—have to make.” Mohsin stroked that first page. “This journal reflects that commitment. It’s mostly about his work. With only a few references to personal things along the way. Dry stuff really, a bit over
your
head, I should think. No sex and romance. Not like your
other
grandfather’s story.”

The superior grin on Mohsin’s face prompted me to punch him in the arm. “I care about other stuff, too. Keep going.”

Mohsin shrugged. “You can read it yourself, if you like.” His casual tone didn’t match the white-knuckled grip with which he was suddenly holding the journal, and I noticed his hand had retreated, possessively, rather than extending to match the offer of his words.

I had to hide a superior smile of my own. “I will.” I thought of my mother’s stories. Of Big Nanima’s and Belle’s. Their voices echoed in my head, along with Razia Nani’s. Here were more family secrets that no one had ever bothered to share. That my father had a brother and sister I had never heard of. That my grandfather had been beaten and jailed by the British. “I’ll read it later. But—you tell me the story first.” The next smile, a little sheepish, I couldn’t hide, feeling like a little girl begging for a bedtime tale. “I like the way you’re telling it. Makes it more alive.”

Mohsin smiled at me and punched me back, gently. But I could tell he was happy to oblige. He cleared his throat ceremoniously and started talking again. “I don’t know why, but our grandfather and his first wife, Fauzia, didn’t have any other children for a very long time. But—a little over ten years later—she was pregnant again when Dada decided to join the Salt March. The British government had a monopoly on the manufacture of salt. So Gandhi decided to march to a coastal village called Dandi, to take salt from the sea. To thumb his nose at British rule—though he probably wouldn’t have put it quite that way. To show that Indians refused to recognize the authority of the Raj. Civil disobedience. Peaceful resistance.
Satyagraha.
” Mohsin turned a few pages of the book he still held in a slightly more relaxed hand and pointed out the date. March 4, 1930. “Dada mentions—in passing—that Fauzia was very upset about him leaving her to go on the march. ‘Regretfully, I took my leave of her amid a torrent of tears. Despite all of my efforts to persuade her of the rightness of my decision, Fauzia could not understand why this march with Gandhiji was so important. She remembered Jallianwalla Bagh. So did I, but with a very different effect.’ By the end of the march, Dada was in jail again. This time, for less than a year. He received this telegram in prison.” Mohsin handed me a fragile piece of yellowed paper, addressed to Roshan Qader in April of 1930.

REGRET TO INFORM YOU FAUZIA DIED IN CHILDBIRTH STOP YOU HAVE A HEALTHY DAUGHTER STOP

 

My hand shook a little as I handed the telegram back to Mohsin. I watched him tuck the piece of paper carefully back into the page where he had taken it out from and looked up to find him watching me with a face I couldn’t read.

I felt compelled to say something. “That’s—that’s so sad.” The words were inadequate, I knew. “So—he—he wasn’t really there for her, was he? In jail when she gave birth the first time. In jail again when she died.”

Mohsin shrugged. “He did what he had to do.”

“He shouldn’t have gone on that march.” I said what I was thinking out loud without meaning to.

“He
had
to go.”

“No he didn’t. He
chose
to go. There’s a difference.”

“Sometimes there is.”

I stared at Mohsin. I knew what he was thinking. “
That’s
—not—the same.”

“No. It’s not. Dada left
his
wife—”

“His
pregnant
wife!”

“Yes. She was pregnant. But he left her—only temporarily, mind you—for something important. Something bigger than himself. Your other grandfather—Kasim Saeed—he left
his
wife, threw her away like trash, for nothing but his own selfish—” Mohsin broke off. Now, it was his turn to look a little sheepish. “Sorry, Saira. He’s your granddad. And it’s none of my business after all.”

I shook my head and blew out a noisy breath of exasperation as I said, “I’m not defending him! I just—oh, just get on with the story!” I heard my own tone and added, meekly, “Please.”

Mohsin laughed. “All right. Well—” He broke off to look back down at the little book for inspiration. He thumbed through quite a few more pages. “Dada got back home almost a year later. Dawood Chacha and the baby—her name was Gulshan—were with Dada’s mother, our great-grandmother. Dada writes that Dawood Chacha took his mum’s death hard.”

“How old was he?”

“Just eleven. Dada sent him off to school when he got back from jail.”

I felt my forehead crease with judgment.

Mohsin shrugged. “It’s the way things were back then.”

“What about the baby?”

“She didn’t know her dad. And, well, the way things worked in those days, Dada’s mum was pretty much in charge of her care. In the beginning, anyway. Until one night, soon after Dada returned from prison. He wrote about it.” Mohsin was holding the journal out to me, a finger running under a couple of lines of close, old-fashioned handwriting. “The baby—Gulshan—approached him, toddled her way over to his knee as he sat and worked on an article he was writing. It was the first time she ever looked at him as someone familiar. Not a stranger. She called him ‘Papa’—here’s the bit, here.”

I scanned the words quickly.

“It’s only a few words, I know. But when you read the whole thing—and you see how little there is of anything sentimental—you realize how much that moment and the next one he wrote about must have meant to him. That night, Dada heard Gulshan, who slept with her grandmother, crying and fussing. He knocked at his mother’s door and asked if everything was all right. She was teething. And his mother was tired. She handed Gulshan over. The baby looked up at her father. Said ‘Papa’ again. He took her to his room, put her down beside him in his bed, and she fell asleep in seconds. From that moment on, Gulshan became Dada’s constant companion—climbing up on his lap when he wrote or read letters, received and reciprocated social and business calls, traveling with him by train or horse and carriage as he crisscrossed the subcontinent, busy with so many projects that it would make your head spin. I know that because so many of the letters that he received later—after—made reference to little Gulshan as her father’s ‘sweet little shadow’—that was how one of Dada’s friends put it.

“Two years later, when Dada was about to leave, with Gulshan, on another trip, she came down with the measles.” Mohsin rifled through the journal again. “‘Dr. Khan having reassured me of the routine nature of her malady, I have reluctantly decided to leave Gulshan behind with Majee while I engage on this journey. I have explained the importance of our mission to Gulshan, whose understanding I have noted as being that of a child well beyond her years. Still, seeing her so weak with fever, my heart is unsettled at the thought of parting from Gulshan, who grows more like her mother every day.’” Mohsin paused.

I knew what would come next, but had to brace myself in order to bear it.

“A few weeks later, Dada had reached Wardha, on his way to Segaon, when this telegram caught up with him, two weeks too late.” Mohsin handed me another yellowed piece of tissue-thin paper.

GULSHAN GRAVELY ILL STOP

RETURN HOME IMMEDIATELY STOP

NOT MUCH TIME STOP

 

I stared at the words for a long time before handing the paper that captured them back to Mohsin.