Madras on Rainy Days: A Novel (18 page)

Read Madras on Rainy Days: A Novel Online

Authors: Samina Ali

BOOK: Madras on Rainy Days: A Novel
11.93Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
The woman beside her clucked. She was frail and tall, her eyelids covered with moles. She said, “In times like these, I feel blessed Allah did not grant me children.”
“My daughters will marry whomever I tell them to,” the mother said, staring sternly at the two girls. The two kept their heads lowered, one sliding her sandal back and forth in the dirt. Her nails were painted purple. The mother said, “They are virtuous girls. No one can say anything against them.”
Zehra turned to her. “The truth is, Lubna, it would have been my great kismet to accept one of your daughters, but you see …” her voice faltered. She tried to take another sip of chai, but her hand was trembling too much. She set the cup heavily onto the table, the tea splashing out. Nafiza labored off the steps and wiped it with a rag.
Lubna leaned over the tall neighbor and clutched Zehra’s hand. A
leaf from the ashoka tree fluttered into my lap. I pressed it against my palm. Lubna said, “Allah
raheem
, what is the matter, Zehra?”
Zehra crumpled forward, a hand across her face, hiding it, her back shaking with sobs. The three women exchanged glances. The two girls smiled at each other, an adult’s loss of control always a show for the young. I was as invisible to the group as Nafiza, my role in this drama undefined, no longer a girl, not yet among the women.
Zehra jerked away from Lubna and looked up at Zeba, her face moist. It was to my mother-in-law she spoke. “He wanted to marry a girl from college.” She licked her lips before saying, “A Hindu! He has fallen in love.”
Lubna immediately shifted back into her chair. Her eyes landed on her daughters with a solemn but flat expression.
Zeba nodded, showing no surprise.
The frail one slowly said, “They get these ideas from Hindi films. How many of our Muslim heroes play Hindus? They are never cast as Muslim and all their heroines are Hindu themselves. Then, if that is not enough, they go marry them in real life, forgetting who they are. confused by the parts they play. What kind of role models are they? How can we blame our children?”
There was silence, and in it, Nafiza’s throaty cough, the breeze shaking the slim branches and passing a warm hand down my neck. I began tearing the leaf into small pieces.
Zeba said, “Have you met the girl? Maybe she is willing to convert.”
“These Hindus never convert! There is no reason for me to meet her.”
Zeba selected a biscuit and, dusting the bits of leaf from my palm. pushed it into my hand. I hadn’t been able to eat breakfast after he’d left. “Islam runs through the man’s blood,” she said. “If he is Muslim. their children will be Muslim. That is what is important, that
he
is Muslim …”
“Their children! Zeba, I have tied his match to someone else. A distant cousin to him. He’s a boy, what does he know? The other day,
he even told me that he is the one who has to live with her, not me.
Ar’re
, we all have to live with her, with each other, the girl’s family and ours, how would that be possible?”
The frail one nodded in agreement. “You did right, Zehra. We are all Indian, that is true, but their culture, their way of life, is very different from ours. We cannot be joined. It is enough that we share the same neighborhood. You must wave and nod when you see them, but that is all, it cannot go any farther than this … friendship.”
Zehra looked beyond her to Lubna. “It is possible he might hurt the girl, and I didn’t want … you and I, we are friends and neighbors …”
“No, no, no,” Lubna said, shaking a plump hand in the air. “There is no need … I fully understand.” She was relieved for her daughters and, gathering them together, rose to leave.
At the gates, the older one turned back, a finger winding nervously through her hair. “Zeba Auntie,” she said, smiling shyly, and I noticed her lips were gleaming with clear gloss. “I didn’t see Sameer Bhai today. I thought Friday was his day off.”
 
 
HE DIDN’T COME home until two in the morning.
Zeba was still sleeping in my bed. When I’d told her my menses had stopped, I saw the suspicion in her slanted eyes even before she told me she wanted to make sure and wait the full seven days. It was over her snoring that I heard his motorcycle turn the corner of our street, the only noise outside but for a lazily barking dog. He switched the engine off before he reached the house, coasting in the rest of the way. The gate creaked open, then the front door. Zeba had left it unlatched for him, not fearing, as we generally did, the threat of intruders.
I was rising from the bed to greet him when he dropped onto the
takat.
All four windows in that room were open, and in the frail night light, I could just make him out. He was sitting with his face in his hands, slumped forward, his back swaying to and fro, the rhythm Zeba
and Feroz fell into while reciting the Qur’an. I stopped. It was hard to tell whether he was praying or crying, the sound of any groans washed away by his mother’s snores. His head fell lower, all ten fingers scratching at it, then clutching his hair. He sat curled into himself a moment before he suddenly straightened and turned my way. I was sitting up in bed, but the room was dark and the netting heavy, so it was likely he did not see me. He pulled off his boots and T-shirt and slid onto the pillow next to his father.
In the morning, before the call to prayer, he was gone again.
 
 
I WAS SITTING under the shade of the ashoka tree, in the circle of chairs that remained in the front courtyard, when Nafiza came and squatted on the ground by my feet. She had been wearing the same sari for almost a week, the deep green of the ashoka leaves set against a maroon border, a print of mangoes. Just as I hadn’t considered where Zeba and Ibrahim might sleep in the house, I hadn’t thought, until now, where Nafiza would bathe. There were only two bathrooms here, one attached to my bedroom, one in the main area, which Sameer’s parents and brother used. A modern structure, with bathrooms inside the house, unlike traditional houses with an inner courtyard, where, set against the back boundary wall, cement one-room structures with roofs of corrugated steel served as the servants’ quarters, and where, next to the place they ate and slept, was their own hammam. Here, Nafiza slept in the kitchen.
“Why don’t you go bathe in my bathroom, Nafiza? I’m going to be sitting out here for a while. I’m enjoying the peace. I think it’s the first time I’ve been alone since I’ve come to Hyderabad.”
She kept her face lowered, one knee pulled up to her chin, bare toes squashing an ant. Her high bun, coarse and thickly oiled, was almost fully gray, the henna she had applied during my wedding having faded.
“Even if boy here, child, he mama no let him by you side, not in night, not in day. She think boy
must-must
. No-thing stop him from
claiming you.”
Must
was the word used here to describe animals in heat.
“I’m not in the mood to go around that topic again. You yourself got him pushed out of my bed. Then you saw what happened when he tried to approach me.”
“I no come about that, child. I come to ask other thing. Tomorrow Sunday. I go visit me daughter. After I help you
saas
with food, I take bus to me child’s house. I miss she, miss me
na’wasi,”
granddaughter. “Monday morning, clinic by Roshan’s apartment open. I see doctor about me cough. Too many days go on. No-thing help.”
“What have you been taking?”
“Herbs.”
Herbs, no doubt the kind Raga-be provided. It was like those women who had brought the baby to the blind
alim
, hoping for a miracle when medicine would do. But if it was like them, it was also like me. All of us turned away from doctors, turned away from what we thought it better not to know.
I rose and went to my bedroom and unlocked the
almari
. I took out fifty rupees, then thought better and took out fifty more. A generous allowance, too generous, in fact, perhaps in it a bribe to keep her on my side. Keep my nanny on my side. Her affections for me, her loyalties, bought and paid for. If we were going on pretending nothing had altered between us, then it was simply because we were acting out what we had learned by heart.
I went to the courtyard and took up my chair again. She was sitting where I had left her, chin resting on a weakened knee.
“Get a toy for your
na’wasi,”
I said, handing her the money. If she was surprised by the amount, she didn’t show it. She simply counted the bills then tucked them into her blouse, against one of her heavy breasts.
 
 
THAT NIGHT, IBRAHIM rapped softly at my door and asked me to join him for dinner. Though he didn’t say, I knew Zeba must have mentioned
that I hadn’t been eating well since Sameer’s departure. How could I? A week ago, on Saturday night, I had been out with my husband, feeling like I was on a first date, exhilarated. Tonight, after dinner, I would sleep beside his mother, as I had next to my own for years. What kind of virtue was this?
At the table, I sat across from Ibrahim, in the seat I usually took during family meals, Friday mornings, Sundays. There was a plate set out for me and a bottle of the purified water Ibrahim had brought back. Zeba stood over her husband, fanning him with the newspaper, the creases on her face seeming to have deepened overnight. The light in the prayer room was on, Feroz studying inside. Nafiza was already gone.
Ibrahim looked tired, this, the end of his work week. His full cheeks were sunken, his jowls hanging low, his work shirt stained with some sort of grease. Beside his plate, two bottles of medicine to control his ulcer.
He picked up a wooden spoon and began to fill my plate, his own still empty. When I tried to stop him, he snatched the spoon out of my reach.
“There is no shame in first attending to my daughter, only joy. I will think back on this day for many months and, God forbid, maybe even years to come, when you and your husband are in the States. Please, grant me this pleasure.” He smiled, and I saw it was Sameer’s smile, the same sensuous curve of the lips. As he poured curry over the rice, Zeba quietly instructed him to add more meat, saying it would give me strength. When he was done, he sat back, and she attended to him, serving him food and water.
He raised his glass to mine, brows arched, the loose skin along his forehead crumpling into itself, folding the skin spots. One of his eyes was red and irritated. “To health,” he said, taking a sip.
We ate in silence, the refuge of our minds not a threat to the other, and it felt as though I had known no other father. When I was finishing, he nodded his approval, then shook his medicine at me, the pills clattering like a child’s rattle.
“Whatever is happening outside, Beta, you must not let it sink into your flesh. Do not punish your body for what it cannot control.”
 
 
WITH NAFIZA GONE, I decided to help Zeba in the kitchen as she prepared the elaborate breakfast she made on Sundays, one of the two mornings her family was together. She was standing at the stove, too hesitant to let me near the kerosene, knowing I was used to electric burners.
I stood with my back to her, against the black counter, cutting onions with a dull knife. The kitchen had only one window for ventilation, and the cooking fumes and spices, the onions, quickly made me tear.
As I was dabbing my face with my
duppatta,
I said, “He comes in the middle of the night, close to two. He hasn’t completely disappeared.”
For a moment she was silent and I wondered if she had heard me over the sizzling oil. At last she said, “That boy is always looking for a reason to run out. A week, two weeks, one time he disappeared for a month. I thought he had died. Imagine a mother’s heart! When he goes with you to the U.S., I know he will not return.”
Not return, I could not imagine that. Six months out of every year spent here. Had my migrations finally come to an end? Of course they had, without my having even realized, the back and forth motions having accomplished exactly what my parents had hoped: launching me into this marriage, into this, my one and only true home, my husband’s.
I said, “Where does he go all those days? Have you asked?”
She came over and gathered the sliced onions into a hand then slid them into the oil. It splattered, and she stepped back, covering her face with the black veil.
When I pressed her again, she said, “Beti, I have done my duties as his mother. The rest is between you two. As his wife, you have more power over him than I ever did. Do not forget that. Islam places the
woman’s role among the highest. It gives you rights to make demands of Sameer, in any capacity you find him failing as a husband and provider.”
In the next room, Feroz began cheering and clapping as he had on the wedding night when we’d watched Naveed’s strange dance. Zeba and I glanced at each other and went out. Father and son were sitting at the table, the newspaper they had been sharing set aside. They were turned in their chairs, toward the front door. Sameer was here, standing slumped just inside the entrance, his return his victory or surrender, I could not tell. His clothes were crumpled, his face as tired as Ibrahim’s had looked last night, dark from stubble. Over his father’s head, his eyes met mine, and there was a quick flash, the moment he had pulled me close. The memory sprang up between us, its actuality replacing, at last, what he had only imagined from Nate’s letters.

Other books

El rey de hierro by Maurice Druon
Bionic Agent by Rose, Malcolm
La Historia de las Cosas by Annie Leonard
03 - Murder at Sedgwick Court by Margaret Addison
Bite The Wax Tadpole by Sanders, Phil