Madras on Rainy Days: A Novel (34 page)

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Authors: Samina Ali

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“Tell her why you’ve come,” my uncle urged him from behind, his head just reaching my husband’s shoulders.
Sameer continued to gaze at me without a word, though his mouth fell open in that manner it had in the hallway of our hotel. Without knowing it, he was blocking the way into my room.
Abu Uncle squeezed in next to him and the two filled the entire space. He said, “You have tested your husband’s patience, Layla. He now demands that you return with him.”
I felt the pressure of footsteps behind me and turned to find Taqi Mamu and his wife. Ameera Auntie was standing a foot behind my uncle, hands cupped before her, eyes teared up. There was nothing she could do for me.
I tried to slip into her room, as I’d done that day so long ago, but Taqi Mamu stuck his foot inside and prevented me from fully shutting the door. “Not here, not again,” he repeated, shaking his head. His thick hair was slick with grease, and I realized he had not once visited Nafiza in the hospital.
He said, “You are my sister’s daughter, Layla, so you are my daughter, too, a child I was never blessed with. I am telling you for your own good. What you know of life is very little. So it is our duty, as your elders, to protect you, to make sure you don’t make irreversible mistakes. Now, please,” he said, kissing the air twice in the way he used to when I was a child, Henna and I fighting over some small thing, “make up with your husband and go home. There is already enough suffering and loss in this house.”
Suffering and loss, indeed. “You all know about Amme’s divorce, don’t you?” I asked, then turned to Abu Uncle. “That blind
alim
said it. The Muslim community here is small, everyone knows what’s happening with everyone else. No one talks about it, but we all know each other’s secrets. So here you two are, brother and brother-in-law, two men who could have done something, yet you let my mother suffer alone all these years. Without a single protest, you let my father do whatever he wanted to her, to
us.
And now you want me to submit to the same existence. He is
incapable
of making me his wife—you know that,
all
of you!” I gazed at my aunt, silently pleading with her, and she finally stepped forward and patted her husband’s arm, urging him to think through what he was doing—a young girl’s life was at stake—but he jerked away from her.
“He is in love with Naveed!” I yelled.
“I demand that you return with me right now!” Sameer suddenly shouted, spit flying from his mouth. “I am your husband and you will do as I say.”
I stared at him in disbelief. He
would
do anything to keep me as his. I said, “You who do not believe in Old City values, what is this now? How dare you, when we both know the truth? Husband who is no real husband,” I said, repeating what Nafiza had so aptly observed.
“I will take no more of this!” Abu Uncle cried, as though I had insulted him. He lurched forward and grabbed me, throwing me over his shoulder and taking me to his car. I beat at his back and kicked the air, screaming out in Urdu, in English. Then I glimpsed Ameera Auntie trying to come to me, skinny arms reaching out, yelling something, but Taqi Mamu held her in place. Sameer was trailing behind with my suitcase, fingers pressed to his forehead, eyes averted, as though he was the one being forced against his will.
They left his motorcycle there, and the three of us squeezed into Abu Uncle’s car, me in the middle of the two men, a homecoming very different from the one when I’d arrived at my husband’s home in full bridal regalia. But there they were again, wedding lights on the house, this time dressing up the squat structure across from Sameer’s. The Muslim son being forced into marriage with a distant cousin, no one able to recognize his chosen love.
The lights to Sameer’s house were on, Zeba and Ibrahim sitting erectly on the
takat,
awaiting my return. Sameer dragged me past them and into the room, then slammed the door shut and bolted it. Then he pressed his back against the wood and slid down, elbows on his knees, hands covering his face. I sat on the bed. I’d thought I’d never see this place again.
“As soon as I get a chance, I’m leaving,” I said. “You can’t make me stay here, with you—why would you even want that?” Then I said, “I really loved you. You let me love you. How could you?”
He crawled over to me on his hands and knees and buried his face in my lap, arms cinching around my hips, squeezing me. “Oh God,”
he whispered, as though not able to believe himself what had just happened, what he had been able to pull off. “Oh God.”
 
 
FRIDAY MORNING. DAWN azan. Just under the imam’s call, the pattering of rain.
I’d lost track of how much time had passed since I’d come back to Hyderabad, my husband’s house. Each new day slowly leaking into the next. Things I had not noticed—the essentials of America that were not essentials here—suddenly became apparent, wildly missed: a telephone, a car, even a bicycle. The life I had considered so constricted now seemed so free.
He had taken up a chair in the
divan
to monitor the door and prevent me from leaving, in the same way I’d stopped him from going out of our hotel room. His father and brother at work and school, unavailable to me. His mother in the kitchen, shooing me out, not wanting to listen, still following her son’s mandates.
Now I cornered her in the prayer room, just as she and Feroz were beginning to recite the Qur’an, their eleven-year-old custom that I was about to break. I took my usual spot beside her and wrapped my hair in a
duppatta.
She didn’t glance at me, but up at the Arabic plaques, and I knew her silent prayer: strength to face what she must have known I had come to say. No one had knocked on my door that morning.
Mother and son had the Qur’an open to a surah much farther along in the book, but when I joined them, Zeba paged back to the chapter on Joseph, remembering where she and I had left off. Without any urgings, I began to recite:
When she heard of their intrigue, she invited the city women to a banquet at her house. To each she gave a knife, and ordered Joseph to present himself before them. When they saw him, they were amazed at his beauty and cut their hands, exclaiming: “Allah preserve us! This is no mortal, but a gracious angel.”
“This is the man,” she said, “on whose account you reproached
me. I sought to seduce him, but he was unyielding. If he declines to do my bidding, he shall be thrown in prison and held in scorn.”
Despite the evidence they had seen, the Egyptians thought it right to jail him.
When she had come to the end of the Urdu translation, her voice trembling, stumbling over words, I placed a hand on hers to stop her from going on. She told Feroz to leave the room.
I said, “You didn’t invite anyone to the
walima
dinner until the very day; then you invited more than a thousand guests when you had only invited a hundred to the
nik’kah.
The announcement you were making was about your son, not about the union. You’ve known all along about Sameer.”
She kept her eyes on the book before us, and a finger traced the Arabic letters, one flowing into the next.
“You call me your daughter,” I went on. “Yet you’ve ruined my life.”
Her lips curled into themselves and the deep lines appeared at the edges, along the broad cheekbones. “He has been misled … by this
friend
of his. No man would choose to be with another man when he has a woman available to him. I have told you. You must make your demands clear to him, as his wife. You have the power in you to bring him back to the straight path”.
“He does not love me, Zeba Auntie. I have watched him this past month. He has tried to be my husband, he has even wanted it, but it is not in him. Please, let me go. I’ll return to America alone, you needn’t worry anymore about him coming. He’ll stay here with you, your guidance,
your
demands.”
She shook her head. “A wife stays with her husband … no matter what.”
No matter what. So this was what she had meant that day when Amme had visited. As a woman, I had but one option: to spend my life with my husband, untouched, uncomplaining. These were Old City ethics. Die for not being a virgin, die for marrying the wrong kind of man. Pagan rituals of sacrifice, Sameer was right.
“Islam prohibits what you are doing,” I said. “Even my
nik’kah
to him has automatically become void. He is unrelated to me now, to sleep in his bed is a sin, against me and against you for forcing me—
imprisoning
me. How can you sit here and pray!”
She raised her chin as she had that day Sameer had thrown his prayer cap at her feet, then stormed out of the house. My sin, she seemed to be saying, not hers, now that she’d passed on her duties to me.
“You told me you are afraid of what he’ll do once he gets to the U.S.,” I said, approaching her now through her fears, her imaginings of America. “You are right to be afraid. He’ll have more freedom to behave like this. Devils, demons, people have no control over themselves. Even Amme brings me to an
alim
each time I return. People do whatever they like there, men and women both, there is no shame. If Sameer cannot stop himself here, imagine what he’ll do in America, where there are no taboos, no limits.”
She continued following the Arabic letters with her finger, as though reading some invisible guidelines. “It is better that he goes to the U.S. Here, if he stays and you are not with him, everyone will know. He is handsome, he is strong, he is young, what reason would a wife have to leave such a man? They will scorn him, scorn me and my family. We will be ostracized, hated. I have to think of Feroz, his wedding—who will marry him if they hear of this? Shall I have lost both my sons? No, you take him to America. He is dead to me.” She closed the book and stared up at the plaques again, her eyes dry of tears, this a worn grief. “Islam says that when a man mounts another man, the throne of Allah shakes. Imagine the tremblings of a mother’s heart. I have cursed him, cursed my own son. That day I was told of his motorcycle accident, I rejoiced. I prayed a
shukran namaz,”
a prayer of thanksgiving, “before I went to the hospital. I was prepared
that
day to see his dead face. It was Allah’s punishment. He was coming back from that park, from doing what he does there, when he got into that accident. I thought Allah had finally answered my prayers.” She turned down her lips in regret and her heavy chest rose in a deep sigh, the black
duppatta
quivering. “But he was still alive. Why should I fix that
leg? Let him walk with a limp. Let him be ashamed of it, ashamed of himself. He should always know he is not a complete man.”
 
 
TWO MORNINGS LATER, Ibrahim’s voice drew me out of bed. I found him sitting alone at the breakfast table, reading the newspaper. Zeba was in the kitchen, humming as she slowly prepared the elaborate breakfast she made on Sundays. Feroz was studying in the
divan,
his books scattered across the bamboo table I had sat around with my husband and his lover as we planned a trip to Golconda, not aware of the real reason behind Sameer’s open kisses. What a show, Naveed had said when he’d found us stumbling through the door, snatching at each other’s clothes, when the two of them, Naveed and Sameer, were the true performers. Made him into a fool, my husband had accused me when he had done that very thing to me.
“I was hoping you would come, Beta,” Ibrahim now said.
I sat in the chair beside him, and he folded the paper and set it on the table, the reading glasses placed on top, next to his ulcer medicine and the honey Zeba fed him each day.
“The elections have suddenly been moved up,” he said. “This isn’t a good sign. I am afraid of trouble, riots. Allah
ka shukar
, you and Sameer returned early from Madras. Now that you are here, I do not think it is wise for you two to go about together. Stay in the house. A young couple,” he paused, his eyes drifting away, his fingers tapping the table, “a young couple is always a good target for these gangs. They symbolize hope to a community; killing them is like putting out a can dle flame.”
So he was aware of the calamities happening outside, but not of the ones under his very roof. How was that possible when even the youngest son of the house, the one who was not yet married, was sitting in the
divan,
where he’d never studied before, just so he could watch over me while his older brother slept?
“I did not mean to frighten you, Beta,” he said, examining my face. He began scratching his arm, and I noticed brown spots had appeared
there, matching the ones across his scalp and forehead. “Listen to this,” he said and tried on a smile to console me as he picked up the paper again. He adjusted his glasses over his eyes. “This election season there will be 122 different candidates,” he read, then lowered his head to stare at me above the lenses. “And your husband is under the impression that this country can offer him no choices!”
Yes, always choices here about who would represent us, politician, god, ancestor, parent, even Henna sliding on Sameer’s wedding ring for me, but no choice in how we could represent ourselves. That, in the end, was the lie Sameer was escaping by fleeing to the U.S.
“Papa,” I said, “do you remember telling me that we shouldn’t get ahead while hurting others?”

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