Madras on Rainy Days: A Novel (25 page)

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Authors: Samina Ali

BOOK: Madras on Rainy Days: A Novel
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I tried to lead her to another corner when, from above, Sameer began calling my name. I found him standing at the edge of the Darbar’s first floor, framed by an arch, waving. Naveed was nowhere in sight.
“I love you!” he suddenly called, surprising me, and his voice echoed through the walls. Those beside him stopped and stared down at me. A tour guide behind him was clapping to show the visitors how the sound carried all the way to the front of the fort, by the Grand Portico, though it could be heard nowhere else. So brilliantly had the acoustics been designed for signaling. When I said nothing, he shouted it again, words we had not yet uttered to each other, “I love you!” Once more, the echo, seeming to raise up all the ruins about me so that I could see what it had been like here before, the stables, the palaces, the gardens, the life. Not just survival, but a way of existence, it was possible here.
A group of young men yanked Sameer away from the arch, and I laughed and dragged Henna far from the view of tombs. I felt guilty being happy when she felt so sad, but these fears she was describing, this premonition, were nothing more than disguised excitement. I told her as much, her turn to confess, my turn to give courage.
“When you’ve wanted one thing for so long, Henna, and it finally is happening, it feels … it feels like this baby. A gift you don’t want to lose. It feels fragile, but it’s not, it has a force of its own, beyond us. I swear, we’re all going to remain safe and happy. Nothing is going to go wrong. Henna, our lives are just beginning!”
“There you are!” Sameer called, bounding toward me. Naveed strolled behind him, hands thrust deep in his jean pockets as he whistled the song from
Chandni.
I passed my fingers through my husband’s hand as I released Henna’s, letting him know that I would be walking back with him. Related or not, Naveed could accompany my cousin.
When we had climbed down the winding steps and were nearing the imposing Balahisar Gate, twenty-five feet tall and covered in spikes to keep elephants from charging, I heard Naveed’s voice from behind. “
Wa wa
, Henna Apa, that’s a great idea!
Ar’re, yaar,”
he called, and
Sameer and I shuffled to the side to let others pass as the two came up. In his dark glasses, our reflection, smiling and content, the image of a newly married couple. “Henna Apa is right,” he said. “With elections so soon, it is not safe for you two to travel alone to Madras. It is better if I come along.”
 
 
THAT NIGHT IN bed, I told him I loved him, too. The words came out easily, even with some relief, the first time I had said them to anyone. And I knew, the instant I heard them aloud, just how long I’d been waiting for this moment, this sensation to take over me, as strong as any demon, though, I prayed, not as fickle. Let it forever possess me.
I was lying with my head on his chest, a hand flat on his belly feeling the steady pulse within, against my fingers, against my temple. matching my own rhythm. Around us, the maroon walls of the mosquito netting, the whir of the ceiling fan above, Zeba’s distant snoring. I couldn’t imagine my life in any other way. How to make him understand? Perhaps in increments.
“I wasn’t able to attend Henna’s wedding,” I began, “but I’d like to be here for the delivery. She told me today that Hanif is returning. He’s going to live with her. They’re so close to our house, Sameer, just like that, we’re already part of a small community. And you have Naveed. He cares so much for you. Renting that car must have cost him so much. For you, he did it for you.”
He sucked in air then blew it out of his mouth, and my hair tickled my face. “Did you ask your cousin to invite Naveed to Madras?”
“On our honeymoon! Of course not. She’s just scared, like your mother. I think it must be because she’s so close to delivering. Besides, he took it well, he understands, he’s not coming.”
He was silent, still brooding over what had become, for him, an awkward situation. Turning away a close friend in what would be considered here, where honeymoons did not really exist—another import from the West—a generous offer.
“Listen, Sameer,” I said as I slid a hand under his pajama bottoms,
“by the time we get the visa and arrive in Minneapolis, it’ll be November, right when it’s getting cold. With wind chill, it can drop to seventy below; you can’t know what that feels like. Then, it just keeps getting colder. If we waited six months—I’m used to being here, remember—we could go in spring. If we go back now, there’s nothing, no job for you, and my semester will already be under way. My dad says you’ll even have to take your engineering classes over again. Until you have an income, we’ll be stuck inside my mother’s house.” Right back where I’ve always been. No future there, Zeba was right.
He shoved my hand aside and turned away to face the wall. I latched onto his back. Draw away, draw closed, but I would say it this time.
“It can’t all be about getting ahead and building your career, Sameer. You keep talking about my father, but what good did making all that money do for my family? What you and your family have here is so much better. Your father may not have given your mother a house, but he did give her a life. If you could only have known me there, you would see how different I am with you, in India, in your home. Sameer, you’ve given me what you promised, please don’t take it away so soon …”
“You cannot know what you’re asking …”
“I do know, Sameer, I’m not as ignorant of India as you think. I’ve spent half my life here. It’s where I’ve always felt more comfortable. I’m part of something here, I’m not just gazing out.” I fell onto my back and stared up at the mosquito canopy, the fan’s wind hardly reaching us. I could taste the salt of my own sweat on my lips. “What do you know about the U.S., Sameer? I mean other than what you’ve read or seen in film. What do you really know about what
you’re
asking?”
He rose and fumbled out of the mosquito netting, then threw on a shirt. From a dresser drawer, he grabbed his pack of cigarettes and stuffed them into his pocket. He wouldn’t look at me. “I promised to give you a home, Layla, and I will,
there
. I’ll find a job, any job, and we’ll move out of your mother’s house. Two weeks, three weeks, that’s
all. We’ll start our lives over, new lives, both of us, away from your past, away from my past.” He stopped and hung his head, as though hating what he was about to say, the right he possessed to exert his power over me, his wife. “On Friday, we’re going to Madras … alone! As soon as I get my visa, we’re off to the U.S. That’s it. Don’t talk to me about this anymore.”
 
 
SHE WOULD HAVE known by her own sense of intuition, the slightest stir in the air, that her son had disappeared again, but she didn’t ask, nor did she provide me comfort, as I had been hoping she would. She was done with her duties to her son. The rest was between us, husband and wife.
After breakfast, when I took my usual spot on the
takat,
against one of her embroidered pillows, and tried to assist with the preparations for the evening meal, she stopped me, her voice sharp in a way I’d not heard before. Her son’s prohibition, not hers, the one who wanted me to have a place in her home as much as I wanted it myself. I knew better than to try to press her: no matter that Sameer did not follow her mandates, she had to follow his, for her son was, before all else, a man like any other.
As I was scooting off the
takat
, there came a woman’s voice from the front door, calling to see if anyone was home. She spoke a halting Urdu, so I knew it was not her first language.
“The
tho-bun
is here,” Zeba said, then set aside the ginger she’d been peeling and adjusted the
duppatta
around her heavy chest. “Can you ask her inside?”
The laundry woman was a
lambarni
from the woods off the main highway—the place where Sameer and I had gotten caught in the rain—the lonesome dirt road I had seen probably leading to her hut, her village. She was wearing a wide skirt and a tight top that stopped just below her breasts to expose her tight belly and full back; the reds and maroons and purples of the skirt fabric were covered in tiny mirrors that sent shimmering circles dancing across the walls. The laundered
clothes were in a large bundle balanced on her head, wrapped inside the fabric of an old plaid lungi. She plopped onto the floor next to the
takat,
her bottom wide and arched, as though having been molded by these habitual seatings.
Zeba got out a notebook from her
almari
and, as the woman presented each shirt and trouser, each sari and blouse, each bra and underwear, ticked it off in her ledger. Her writing was small and meticulous. Nothing miscalculated, nothing missing. When they were done, Zeba began loading her with this week’s laundry counting it up again, carefully jotting it down, and without telling her, I took Sameer’s clean clothes and brought them to the bedroom and shut the door behind me.
Where does he go when he flees from here? It was to answer that question that I began to dig around in his trunk, pushing past clothes, sliding a hand into corners, while the pile of clean shirts and trousers sat neatly on the floor beside me. Whatever I was hoping to find—a photograph, a letter, what were those things Amme had overlooked before Dad had abandoned her ?—I did not think I would discover what I actually did.
A plastic bag, crisp and crinkly, cool, against my fingertips when everything else was soft cloth. It was hidden between clothes he didn’t wear anymore, the polyester-cotton blend shirts and trousers cut and stitched to fit him snugly, in the style often worn here, and what he himself had dressed in when he had come to propose. It was the image of his slim body in those unbecoming clothes that had caused Amme to buy him as many outfits as she’d done, her attempt, as the one who had arranged this marriage, to make him at least appear to be the kind of man she thought I would be amenable to marrying.
Inside the bag, I found articles ripped out of magazines, each one stapled, stacked one inch thick. Though I had never seen these condensed pages, I had already read the words, disguised as his to me in the letters he’d written, over and over, those sexual fantasies that were really pornography. In copying them down, he had changed nothing but the names, the generic American ones—Jeff, John, Sylvia, Jen—
becoming our own, Sameer, Layla. Why had he thought his fiancée, a woman largely unknown to him, would have appreciated such vulgar language and description, coming from her future husband? How could he not have guessed it would degrade me and push me away, making me feel like a whore?
A whore. And there they were, the letters he had told me he’d thrown away, Nate’s to me, bundled up with the articles, as though, to Sameer, there was no difference, both describing the same thing. And, at first, because I had pushed that distant night so deep within, regretting it, ashamed of it, repenting, I, too, saw no difference. But then the words fell away, becoming images, and the images sound and feeling. The moonless night, the scent of jasmine, the bitter scent of his skin. No, he had not taken it lightly, he wrote, my having given up my virginity to him; he had understood what he was doing, what it would mean for me, before he had agreed to slip through the door, slip inside. If, in this way, he was proclaiming his love, the understanding of it for me had come too late.
The door opened and the boots came into view, tied up under his white pajamas; most likely he’d returned to change before tutoring. There was no reason to look up at his face when I could feel the heavy weight of his gaze. His trunk was open, the pile of newly pressed clothes was by now toppled onto the floor, and, scattered about, Nate’s letters to me, the articles that had inspired his own letters.
 
 
THERE WAS NO show of anger, no cursing, no yelling, no accusations, just a complete withdrawal. The silence I had grown up knowing with Dad.
He simply chose fresh trousers from the pile on the floor and put them on, leaving for his afternoon tutoring. At dinner that night, he sat across the table from me, in the chair his father occupied on Friday and Sunday mornings, when the family ate together. Feroz and Zeba glanced at each other but said nothing. At eight, when Zeba ushered us all away so she could reheat the dinner for her exhausted husband
and take up the newspaper to fan him, Sameer did not leave as I thought he would. He instead followed me into the bedroom and lay on the bed, squeezed onto the far side, flattened against the wall, his back to me. The way this had all begun.
If he expected me to provide something, an explanation, an apology, I did not. Could not. My head was overcrowded with words, English and Urdu, the letters running into each other, from right and left.
When Nafiza came in to sweep for the night, Sameer did not rise, and, unable to go to her and confess what I had found, I crumpled onto the velvet stool, my head falling into my hands. She gave a heavy sigh before sweeping the floor about me.
Far into the night, his words came through the darkness. “You’re an American woman, I didn’t know what to say to you, what to write, you must understand. Your freedoms, what you have been exposed to,
there …
it was only to impress you, make you mine.”
Yes, the man who had done everything he could to win over his own fiancée.
“Your words didn’t create intimacy,” I whispered. “I was repelled.” The way he had been by my blood.

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