Madras on Rainy Days: A Novel (30 page)

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Authors: Samina Ali

BOOK: Madras on Rainy Days: A Novel
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Sadia hung her head.
I edged back into the alley. It was as though I had entered my own past.
She grabbed my hand and pulled me in, saying, “Amma, should I let her inside?”
“Now that you’ve opened the door, Sadia, she must be let in. mustn’t she? Tell her to wait in the
angan
while your
bhabha
finishes his prayers. Don’t invite her inside the house, Sadia. Tell her I can hear her footsteps so I’ll know if she tries to sneak in where she’s not invited. Remember that, Sadia, never invite them into the house or they’ll become real.”
The girl released my hand and walked to the center of the foyer. Sameer closed the door behind us and came to stand by my side. Beyond Sadia were two more doors, both covered in green curtains, and to my right was a curved staircase that led to the second floor. She stopped in the middle of one of the square stones and squeezed the sides of her feet together. Her hair was parted down the center and braided into two loops. Around her neck was a thin gold necklace. I expected a small pendant to read Allah, but there was nothing on it at all, just a thin gold line that might have been a stray strand of hair.
“Amma says you are to wait here while Bhabha finishes his prayers. She says she is happy you are visiting because we have not had visitors for many months, not since she changed the house numbers to confuse the demons.” She leaned toward us, her small feet remaining squeezed together, and whispered, “But the demons are inside.” She tapped her head before fleeing into one of the inner rooms.
 
 
HE WAS YOUNGER than I had expected. Not much beyond his early thirties, though with his heavy beard it was hard to tell for sure.
He did not invite us inside the house, nor to the room on the second floor, from where he had just emerged. He kept us standing in the stone foyer, while he sat on the bottom step, his long kurta draped over
his knees, legs pulled in to his wide chest. From deep in the house, I could hear Sadia, sometimes screaming, sometimes laughing, and the mother singing the same tune over and over.
“What kind of help have you come seeking?” he asked, digging his fingers around inside his beard.
Sameer glanced at me. I shook my head. I had never been the one to reveal myself to an
alim.
After a moment, Sameer stepped closer to Zakir and stooped down to him, then rose up again. Finally, he said, “We are having trouble with intimacy. No matter how much I want, I cannot get close to my wife. A wall,” he said, his hands rising to show this, but then they clasped together, unable to explain. “What I am saying, Zakir
sa’ab
, is that I need your help. You must show us a way through this … difficult situation.”
So there it was, our problems confessed without apology, and without all the hesitation and reluctance, the back and forth I was so used to. The abruptness embarrassed me further, and I stared at Sameer’s boots as I waited for the
alim’s
response. Certainly he would now want to know my part in all this, what I had done to push my husband away—
repelled
.
But Zakir remained silent, and, after a while, I glanced over at him and, without intending to, met his gaze. He didn’t avert his eyes. There was something about the way he watched me that I found very familiar, not my husband’s hypnotic, penetrating stare, but something I had been desperate to see for some time now. A look of tenderness that had drawn me to Nate, making me single him out. I covered my face with the veil.
Still, he kept his eyes on mine as he turned his palms up and began reciting prayers in Arabic, ones I had not heard before. When they came to an end, he took in a deep breath as though to begin others, but merely sighed and shook his head, his lips turned down over some regret. “I am sorry you two have come all this way, but this is not a case …” He stopped and turned to Sameer. “My powers are of no use; I think you know this.”
Sameer was quiet a moment. Finally, his head dropped and a hand rose up to massage his forehead, as though to smooth out the deep lines. “Let us go, Layla,” he said.
I stepped toward the
alim
, staring into his eyes as intently as I had into Nate’s. “You must help us, please, this is our honeymoon.” Then I remembered the money Amme had handed me at the clinic, some of which I had brought along, and added, “I will give you whatever you want.”
 
 
HE CAME TO our hotel room that night, arriving exactly when he said he would. Outside, the mild showers had turned into another torrential downpour, though he came into the room completely dry, not even carrying an umbrella. For all I knew, he could have been in the lobby for hours, waiting for this instant.
Just as I, up here, had been waiting for his arrival with an impatience I used to feel with Nate, wondering why it took him so long to follow me, onto the bus, into my room. When I was finally sure he would come, I had dressed for him, choosing what I wore with as much care as I did tonight for Zakir. What was it I was feeling, this strange collapse of time? Stepping back into my past, indeed, right into the very night I had for so long been driving away. The time had come for me to face my demon, drive
him
away.
Zakir showed up entirely clean-shaven, the skin on his face radiant, and I hid a smile behind my
duppatta.
So he, too, had done some primping for this meeting. Now he looked even younger than I had originally thought, perhaps only in his late twenties.
Without glancing at me, he set the green bag he was carrying onto the round table and asked where I had last seen the demon. I was sitting on the bed, facing his back, the nape of his neck, and I wanted nothing more than to see those eyes, that tenderness.
“I think you may have misunderstood, Zakir
sa’ab.
” Sameer said, using his most formal Urdu. He kept himself by the balcony door, blowing smoke out into the wet night, and I could not help but think
he was keeping as far from the
alim
as possible, perhaps wondering how he’d let me convince him of this in the first place. “The demon Layla sees,” he went on, “is one of the mind—perhaps even of her own making, her imagination. He visits her only in dreams.”
Zakir turned to him and crossed his arms over his chest. The collar of his loose kurta ran down the center of his chest and it opened slightly to expose dark hair. Hair on Nate’s chest, too, which I’d run my fingers through, memorizing him, our first and last night together. The
alim
said, “Demons don’t appear out of nowhere, do they, Sameer Bhai?”
Sameer’s gaze faltered, and he flicked the cigarette out the balcony door. Just the pounding of rain, no thunder at all. “No, they don’t,” he finally said, the lamppost behind him shedding a sickly yellow light that reminded me of Nafiza, the jaundice that was rising up her flesh.
I said, “I went to a lady doctor before we came to Madras. I thought that would make the dreams go away, but …” I stopped and shook my head, lips turned down in defeat. “When he came into this room, it was from that door.” I gestured to the one behind Zakir, which led to the hallway.
He went and placed both palms on the wood and moved them in tight circles, the breeze from the cool night gently stirring the bottoms of his long kurta. I watched him feel the entire door, crouching low then reaching up beyond the door frame. He knocked on the wood, then placed an ear against it, listening, grunting, as though hearing some strange tale. Then he turned and stared at Sameer’s boots. “
Djinns
,” he said. “They reveal everything.”
Sameer stuffed his hands into his trouser pockets and shook the fabric loose, and I knew he was trying to hide his weak thigh, feeling exposed. I stood and went to him, then dug his hands out and folded them into mine.
“Baby, I’m not sure about this,” he whispered in English. “I’m a rational man, and this is …”
“The dreams started that same night,” I said, then added what I thought would make sense to him, a reasonable way to look at this.
“I’ve read that when some experience really shakes the body, it yearns to go back and make sense of the event. If I can begin to accept that night as part of who I am, even here, then maybe …”
The
alim
interrupted, raising his voice over mine. “If you do not have any objections, Layla, I am going to ask your husband to leave the room.” He paused before adding, “And I need your permission, too, Sameer Bhai. Without it, I cannot touch your wife.”
“What!” Sameer stared at him, incredulous, and I passed a thumb over his forehead, easing the lines.
“It’s okay,” I reassured him. “I’ve done this a thousand times.”
Indeed, a thousand times, and with each new
alim
came a new ritual. Only one thing remained constant: faith in its power to mend the body.
 
 
ONCE THE DOOR was shut, he changed entirely, gazing into my eyes so fiercely that I had to turn away. I suddenly became uncomfortable with my body, not knowing what to do with it, and I went and sat on the bed again.
As he walked toward me, his kurta swayed in the salty breeze coming in from the balcony door, the long slits pushed back to give away the lines of his firm thighs filling the pajamas. The fabric was the color of his skin, so that I felt I was seeing the whole flesh of him. He surprised me by sitting next to me, the mattress curving under us, and I didn’t move away. He was turned toward me, examining my face, slowly taking it in, and I let him.
“So you have gone to a lady doctor, and yet your husband has not touched you?”
“Yes.”
“And the dreams began …”
“Two months ago.” I glanced at the sliding glass door. “They have grown stronger. The other night, he even spoke to me.”
“The demon spoke to you?” He sounded surprised. “What did he say?”
“That my husband won’t ever touch me. My mother says that when a demon takes a liking to a woman, he won’t let another man near her. Is this true?”
“We shall soon find out,” he said, cocking his head to stare at me full in the face. The overhead light splashed across his nose to cast his features in shadow I filled them in. The hair in back was just long enough to pass a hand through and have the fingers become immersed, lost to me. There was already gray in it. “Tell me, Layla, how much do you know about your new husband?”
“On the wedding night, we vowed not to bring up the past. You see, I have done things I now regret, things that would push … any man away.”
“I’m sorry. I did not mean to hurt you.”
“I did not mean to hurt my husband. I want to make it better, I want … this demon to go away.” I looked into his eyes. “I thought the
djinns
told you everything.”
He laughed. “Do you really believe you are possessed, Layla?”
I felt the pressure of his body next to mine and turned to examine his wrist, the width of it, the tan skin tanned further by the sun, the dark hair. It was the wrist I loved the most. Then the hand. The fingers so able to manipulate, to caress or slap, to express emotion. “I can convince myself of anything.”
He did not seem surprised this time by what he’d heard. He simply watched me, quietly, before saying, “I don’t encounter these sorts of cases very often. But every now and then … such a pity. Always so much anguish on the wife’s face. The pain and the confusion are always the same. Women are quick to blame themselves. It’s because they don’t know better. All their lives they’ve been protected. Were you protected, Layla?”
No one had ever asked me this before, not even him. “I was guarded. My movements restricted. Is that what you mean by protection?”
He sighed, letting out one long breath, letting out the life in him. I inhaled it, and we sat for a while, inhaling, exhaling, breathing in
each other. I was about to say his name when the
alim
rose and rounded the bed to the top. He patted the pillow.
“Will you lie here for me?”
I glanced at the pillow then his hand on it. I crawled up the mattress and lay on my back on top of the covers, one hand over the other on my stomach. He went to the table and began rummaging in his bag. I was curious to know what he might take out, but he only removed three candles and three sticks of incense. “Three is an Islamic number,” he said. “So are five, seven, and eleven.” Then he went around the room, lighting the candles as he did. He placed one on the dresser, and when he saw it reflecting an image of itself in the mirror, he removed it, heated the end once more, and now set it at a corner. He placed another on the floor by the balcony, then closed the door and because it was dark outside, the glass captured what was inside, some of what I knew and some of what I didn’t. The diminishing moon was hidden behind clouds, the night as dark as that on a new moon. He drew the shade over the lamppost’s light.
Then he returned to the bed with the third candle, shielding the frail flame with a protective palm, and placed it on the night stand next to me. Bending down, he reached inside the lampshade and clicked off the light. Everything was obscured, and I could smell his bitter sweat.
He stood over me and spoke. “To re-create when he comes to you. As I told your husband, demons do not pop up out of nowhere. We must root them out.” He struck a match. A trembling hand lit a stick of incense. He used jasmine. “I need for you to lift up your kurta.”

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