Not a Fairytale (15 page)

1 tsp powdered elachi

1 cup water

1 cup sugar

5 ml rose water

½ cup ground almonds

Mix the powdered milk and cream in a food processor until it resembles fine bread crumbs. Add the icing sugar and elachi to the mixture and stir well. Boil the sugar, water and rose syrup until it thickens. Remove from heat and stir into the powdered milk mixture. Add the ground almonds, and mix again. Pour into a square serving dish and refrigerate for 3 hours or until set. Cut into squares. You could decorate these with slivered, tinted almonds. A heavenly sweet that should be shared only with true dessert lovers.

S
ALENA IS COOKING LUNCH
,
VEGETABLE CURRY FOR
Z
UHRA
and chicken curry for everyone else. Zuhra has promised to make a trifle. Salena smiles, imagining the excessively polite way her sister will offer Zain a bowl of the dessert. Zuhra will tell him it’s good for him, filled with nuts; brain food. He’ll smile his thanks, oblivious to the insult, and Zuhra will exchange looks with Salena and wink. Salena remembers a time when a young Zuhra spent weeks in front of the mirror teaching herself to wink, and long hours practising snapping her thumb and middle finger together until she heard the satisfying click. Now her sister is all grown up, already in her second year at university.

Salena pulls on yellow kitchen gloves, then places the whole headless chicken on the draining board and expertly opens its body with a single sharp slice of the knife, exposing its entrails. Each time she cleans a chicken she feels like a pathologist working on the body of a baby, examining the fragile soft tissue and yielding bone. But today she won’t think about Makeen. She scoops out the fowl’s innards, removes the fatty skin that the boys won’t eat, chops the remains into portions, rinses the blood off the flesh and adds it to the simmering pot.

She removes her gloves, throws them in the sink and then washes her hands with dishwashing liquid and steaming water. Her left palm tingles for a brief moment and she holds it up to the gleaming tap and notices a new incision. She can’t remember making that cut. She looks at the tiny crusty scars on her hand that no one has ever noticed except Zuhra. She’s told her sister it’s a type of eczema that doesn’t respond to treatment. She can’t explain to Zuhra that a hunger inside of her compels her some days to make nicks in her palms. Would Zuhra believe she doesn’t feel the pain, but that the sight of the blood confirms she is not dead? Of course Zuhra would want to know why Salena does this to herself, and Salena cannot answer that question.

The vegetable curry – brinjal, butternut, broccoli, green peppers, mushrooms, carrots and two fat red chillies – is ready, and she garnishes it with heaps of dhania the way Zuhra likes it, remembers to add curry leaves to the cooking chicken and stirs the bubbling rice. The boys run into the kitchen, shouting their joy; her mother and sister have arrived and she smiles back at them, wondering if there will be enough leftovers for supper or if she should bake a loaf of brown bread for a light evening meal.

It wasn’t the kiss that woke me. It was simple coincidence that he arrived at the same time the spell splintered, a century later. That’s why the thorns proved trifling, as immaterial as shadows; that’s why they parted for him.

He thinks he’s special. He thinks he rescued me from a dreamless slumber. Actually, I had a vivid dream life: serialised dreams that couldn’t compare to his dull reality (What colour scheme should we have at the nuptials? A chocolate cake or a traditional fruit one?). He is not the man of my dreams. He refuses to understand that I would rather have one of the princes who were pierced to death by the thorns; a rotting corpse would be preferable to him.

He wears a smug smile when he tells people: “I woke her up, it was my kiss that did it!” I tell him I would have preferred an electric toothbrush and a cinnamon cappuccino. He thinks I’m joking. He seems to think I should be grateful. He acts as though I am a fridge, closed and dark, only lighting up when he opens the door.

He thinks I long for sleep because it is familiar. He says I will learn to crave him the way he does me. But I would rather sleep than listen to him recount for the millionth time how those thorns parted for him. So I snooze before breakfast, have a siesta after lunch, a catnap during dinner and the whole forty winks when he practises his lovemaking act on me. Dull, dull, dull. With him around, sleep is my choicest lover.

He brings me neat white oval pills and says, “Take these, they’ll help you stay awake.” I pretend to swallow while secreting them under the exquisitely embroidered pillow which has been my best friend for ten decades. He has no idea who I am. Sleep is infinitely more seductive than watching him, night after excruciatingly tedious night, examining his reflection for imperfections. He is blind to his biggest deficiency, incarcerated in his head. He thinks he’s Prince Charming (who, incidentally, has to be Muslim – he’s married to Snow White, Sleeping Beauty and Cinderella). I suggest to him that he’s not my true love. He dismisses my thoughts with a wave of his manicured nails and chooses our garments for the wedding.

I doze through most of the reception, waking up in time for the toast. I hand him the golden goblet with its powdered surprise. I have prepared it with the same care I take to ready my body for sleep each night. He smiles at me before he gulps the liquid. I stretch my lips in response.

Then he places the back of his hand on his forehead in a poignant display of femininity before he collapses in a swoon. I hear the satisfying thunk his head makes on the inflexible floor. The idiot. He never understood that he was a mere boy, while I am a woman who’s lived for a hundred and sixteen years.

S
ALENA IS UP IN THE DARK HOURS OF THE MORNING
, before the birds start their relentless singing. She gets breakfast ready, packs school bags, checks homework again; she particularly enjoys geometry, with its precise angles and calming theorems.

Salena obsesses about her children’s homework. They don’t understand that while mommy is helping them, she is teaching herself. She lives in dread of her boys discovering that she never went to high school. Often she feels shaky, discussing things with her sons that she has learnt about in their own textbooks only the night before, while they lay sleeping.

Geometry, trigonometry, history and science, she absorbs like a sponge, spending the better part of her day studying, reading, researching.

At night, when Zain has sex with her, she closes her eyes and rereads pages from textbooks as they float across the back of her eyelids. If she has been studying biology, she imagines herself as a giant praying mantis chomping off Zain’s head to speed up the ejaculation procedure. She walks away, her eggs fertilised, the now useless Zain still moving his body rhythmically while she chews his head to a pulp. Sometimes she is the queen bee, mating high in the sky. Zain’s penis breaks off inside her, his drone’s job done, and he falls from the sky to the ground, dead.

When Muhammad finishes Standard Six, she is proud and horrified to think that on paper he is more educated than her. The boys come home from school with As for history essays and gold stars for compositions, homework she has assisted with, and Salena feels validated. But she cannot imagine enrolling herself in night school; she is filled with both shame and lethargy.

Salena does all the household chores, cooking, cleaning, laundering, polishing. By 10 am the house is spotlessly clean, lunch has been made and the supper planned, perhaps even cooked, if Zain is having guests over. She spends the rest of the morning doing research for her son’s homework projects.

One Monday Salena finds Muhammad’s recorder lying on his bed. Without a thought, she slips it between her lips. The tinny, whistling sound makes her smile. An hour later, she has figured out how to play “Hot Cross Buns” by following the photographic instructions in his music textbook.

During the course of the term, on the days when Muhammad does not have recorder lessons, Salena teaches herself to play more tunes, and learns how to pinch out the
E
# with her thumb so that it doesn’t sound blurred or squeaky.

After a few weeks, Salena starts making up her own short pieces of music. Listening to the purity of the notes, she feels the air in her lungs being expelled, moving forward as sweet, delicate notes.

On the morning of Raqim’s thirteenth birthday, she sends him off to school with a home-baked chocolate cake and comes back to clean out Makeen’s room, to throw away the toys that have been waiting for his return for a decade.

Hot Cross Buns for the Recorder

S
ALENA IS SITTING IN THE MIDDLE SEAT
, between her two boys, her feet resting on a soft blue overnight bag. They are on their way to England to attend Zuhra’s wedding. She can’t believe her baby sister is old enough to be getting married. She can’t imagine the man Zuhra has chosen to marry. She can’t imagine Zuhra married.

Zuhra has told her that the nikah will be at Aunty Anjum’s house instead of a mosque, as she wants to be present during the ceremony. Salena thinks of her own wedding conducted in a mosque between her father and Zain and the male witnesses. Perhaps Zain never married her; perhaps he’s been married to her father all these years.

An hour into the flight Raqim, sitting on her left, is still fidgeting. He pulls down the food tray in front of him and then snaps it shut forcefully several times until the man in the seat ahead turns around to glare at him. He opens and closes his seatbelt a few dozen times, with loud metallic clicks. Then he tilts his chair into a reclining position before moving it upright forcefully, once, twice, thrice. When he attempts to do it a fourth time Salena puts a restraining hand on him and offers him a banana which he accepts, unpeels and pushes into his mouth in a single motion. It is hard to believe that he is a fifteen-year-old human. He is as edgy as Peanut Butter on the way to the vet.

On her right, Muhammad is absorbed in a book on inventions,
From Abacus to Zip
. She offers him a pear, he smiles, thanks her, examines it from several perspectives for blemishes, wipes it on the front of his green
T
-shirt and then nips gently at the yellow skin, as though afraid of hurting the fruit. He settles deeper into his seat with a soft sigh and goes back to his book.

Raqim has discovered the button that brings flight attendants to his side. First water, then Coke, then milk. Eventually Salena intervenes with a look of silent distress that forces him to settle down and read his book: a graphic novel about a wild horse living on the prairies of North America.

Salena moves her seat back and relaxes, finally. She is glad that neither Zain, who says he has to work, nor her mother, who is recovering from a minor operation, is attending the wedding. She is free from their restrictions and demands. She imagines this is how birds in flight must feel.

There was once a second son, Luke, who despaired of his position in the centre of a trio of boys. He felt constricted as son number two; he did not have the status of his firstborn brother, Adam, nor was he the spoilt darling of the family like his baby brother Joel. He was aware that his despondency was called middle-child syndrome, but this did not make him feel any better. When Adam left to study in a far-off land, Luke wished it was his younger brother who was leaving. He was jealous of the way their mother looked at Joel with tender eyes, while he seemed to be transparent.

One day a terrible accident befell the baby brother and he died. Luke, who had yearned for his brother’s absence, was guilty and grief-stricken; months later he still mourned his brother and watched helplessly his mother’s slow decline into depression at the absence of her precious baby.

A year after his brother’s death he told his mother he was leaving home to seek his fortune. She seemed not to hear him, but at his departure she gave him some food and the half-grown kitten that had been born to the family cat some months before. It was a brown tabby, covered in black satiny swirls, with a perfect M marked on its forehead as though drawn by a master calligrapher.