Tanya Tania (20 page)

If I could go back, I would undo everything. And I would start by asking you straight out, no doubts, no hesitations, just a straight question—Tania, do you love me?

Tania, did you love me?

Love,

Tanya

September 11, 1992

Karachi

Dear Tania,

It finally happened last night.

It's seven in the morning and I'm waiting for Salman Bhai to come drive Navi and me to school. The sun has come up and is shining through the gulmohur tree outside my window, throwing dancing shadows on my bed. The gardener is watering the plants and downstairs I can hear a low buzz from the kitchen where Bibi is telling Chhoti Bibi what to cook for lunch. There's a mad bird in the trees calling out its avian magnum opus as if it must, as if it has to, as if it will die if it doesn't. I can see the maid in the house next door, down on her haunches, wiping the floor with a wet cloth. Wet swathes of red floor form concentric circles around her feet. Any minute now Salim Bhai will be here, walking up the slope to our house with a faded backpack that used to be ours, with its tiny Mickey Mouse sticker in the corner that he has not seen or has decided to keep.

I don't want to go to school today.

You know what I'm going to tell you. You must know. I've known it was going to happen to us from the minute I found out about Musti's brother. And now Musti is going to a boarding school in England with hot water only on weekends and poor, darling, stupid Musti, a fish out of water, a Karachi boy out of Pakistan.

For us it came in the middle of the night which is different from the times it came for Musti (in the morning), for Azim (in the evening) and the boy who was killed (noon). Why was he killed? I must look into it. Put together a file to present to my disbelieving father.

But why did they come to us in the middle of the night? I've been thinking about that. Does that mean they are scared to show us who they are? Does that mean that they are people we know?

A stentorian banging on the door at 3:30 in the morning. I leaped out of dreams and bed, knowing.

I tried my mother's door on my way down but it was locked. For once, I didn't want to open it.

My father came down the stairs at the same time I did, tying around himself a very old robe I remember from America. A memory of throwing up on it once when I had been sick. Do you think it still smells? I remember my mother telling me once that child vomit is the worst smell in the world. Isn't it funny that throughout the whole thing, I never stood close enough to my father to smell his dressing gown?

Chhoti Bibi and Bibi in the living room, holding hands. Bibi looking scared and for the first time, old. Hair almost all white now and very little of it left. Wrinkles I had never seen before lit by the blazing of all the lights downstairs. Our living room never this bright and suddenly quite shabby. Walls with damp patches, a hole in the wall above the sideboard where once there had been a beautiful tricone lantern twisted together with bronze grape leaves. Chhoti Bibi composed, clear-eyed. Standing back from opening the door only because Bibi was holding both her hands.

And through it all, a wild, desperate smashing of a fist on the front door. Beneath it, between the hard thuds, the sound of someone weeping.

My father opened the door and our nightwatchman fell in, stumbling into my father's arms. The entire front of his uniform was bloody. I heard an intake of breath behind me. Navi stood on the landing of the stairs, wearing only his underwear, his body alight in goosebumps, his arms hugging himself so hard that his fingers may have clasped behind his back.

I still don't know what he's thinking. Even now. What do you think he's thinking, Tania? What is my twin brother thinking?

It took ages to calm the watchman. I saw a side of my father I hadn't seen before. He led him to a chair and made him sit down, pushing him down physically when the watchman wanted to stay in my father's arms. He pulled up a stool and began to clean what I saw were cuts on his face. Under the lights, we saw that his uniform was soaked in blood and incongruously, there were feathers all over it.

The whole time the watchman cried and blubbered, nose running, eyes running, unchecked. He curled up like a child, shrinking from my father's touch, his hands covering his face as if he was being beaten.

They came in the dark and broke the lights outside the watchman's hut. They threw in a half-killed hen that flailed around the windowless shed, pecking at the watchman, I don't know why because no one, not even a hen could have been scared of this man.

Why did the hen do that? Did it think it was the watchman who had injured it? Maybe it was just looking for companionship before death. I've been thinking about this. What do you think, Tania?

Then the men came back (he couldn't tell us how many) and cut off the hen's neck. They gave the watchman a piece of paper wrapped around a stone with string.

The watchman took out the stone. It looked so ordinary, Tania. Cheap school notebook paper lined with double green lines, splotches of blood and brown string.

My father knocked the stone out of the watchman's hand and made Chhoti Bibi go and get surgical gloves from the table. He put them on carefully, calmly, all of it so calm as if this happens every day.

It was just a single sheet of paper. It had my brother's weekly schedule on it, by the hour, by the day. The mornings he leaves early for squash, the days he goes to the club for cheese pakodas and hard-boiled eggs after school and tennis. The days he is in school until late at night, playing football and then going to the houses of friends whose addresses are also written out neatly with phone numbers.

That's it. Nothing else.

Tell me Tania, was the hen scared?

My father picked up the phone.

‘Papa, we can't go to the police.'

He looked at me with a frown on his face. As if he couldn't remember exactly where I came from. I felt an inclination to introduce myself. Hello, I am Tanya, your daughter. Please don't call the police because they will kill your son, my brother.

‘Of course we have to go to the police.'

‘You can't go to the police!' With a loud smash, Chhoti Bibi put down the tray of teacups she was carrying and grabbed my father's arm. I think he was stunned into silence.

‘You can't go to the police,' she said again, shaking his arm for emphasis. ‘They killed that other boy who went to that other school.'

‘Not because they called the police!' said Navi looking up from his silent, intense contemplation of the watchman who had, as if in a cartoon, fallen asleep and was snoring lightly. ‘Because his dad wasn't giving money to the party.'

Chhoti Bibi looked distraught. She has an inexplicable but terrifying fear of the police that I've never fully understood. She stood there with braids erupting from all over her head, each tied neatly in her trademark fluorescent pink ribbon, her chest heaving, looking from my father to my brother as they spoke in English, trying desperately to understand. In that moment I loved Chhoti Bibi so much it physically hurt. Who was this many-winged girl who had come into my family and decided to love us?

But now, in the light of day, I'm not so sure it's love. She went to sleep afterwards. Listen to her now, singing tunelessly along with her beloved radio. If that's love, it has a very short memory.

My father and Navi were discussing the logistics of how the threat could have been dropped off. None of the other threats had been dropped off in this way, in the middle of the night, with a dead hen. Some had been posted, some had come with a street boy, paid to walk up and ring the doorbell or hand it over to the watchman like a hand-delivered wedding invitation. Others received phone calls. Why hadn't we received a phone call, my father asked Navi?

‘Our phone has been disconnected for two weeks now,' I said.

My father looked at me. Again that faintly puzzled expression.

‘We haven't paid the bill. I asked you for the money and you said you'd take care of it.'

A look of annoyance flitted on my father's face, making him look for a brief moment, like Navi when, as children, I would find him in a game of hide-n-seek.

‘Ours is different because we are different and you know why.'

My father and Navi both looked like I had scalded them.

‘I said we are never going to talk about that.' My father's voice was low and angry.

‘We've received a kidnapping threat. I'm talking about it.'

I don't know the full details but many years ago, we had received another threat. It said something bad about my father marrying a kafir, a non-believer and how he would be punished for it. The funny thing is my father is not a believer himself, not in the Muslim way of things. He is Parsi. But whoever sent the note didn't know that. The police had told my parents that we would have to be extra vigilant, especially during bad times.

‘It's not a kidnapping threat,' said Navi. ‘It just has my schedule on it.'

‘Don't be stupid!' My father and I said together.

There was the sound of a door closing upstairs. My mother had come out of her room and stood holding the railing of the stairs, looking impossibly frail. I wanted to go to her and shepherd her back to her room but I felt so tired. I couldn't get up from the step where I was sitting. I couldn't stop what was going to happen. I couldn't save her or him.

I admit now that I didn't even want to try.

‘What has happened?' said my mother, coming down the stairs slowly, holding the railing with both her hands. I saw the silhouette of her legs as she stepped past me. Long, thin and white, they trembled.

She looked from my father to Navi and asked again, ‘What has happened?'

My father hid his hand with the note behind his back. Why did he do that? Did he have some idea of saving her from it?

‘What is that?'

No one answered her.

She found her way to a sofa, holding on to things. I felt as if I had left my body and was circling above. Her impossible thinness, the teeter of her legs, the way her hands looked like claws as they gripped the edges of things. My father standing hunched by the window, his eyes trapped and angry. Navi, sullen and unsure. Neither of them seeing how frail she had become. Both of them obstinately stuck in their own worlds, obstinately blind.

My mother tried to get up again to take the piece of paper from my father. I couldn't stand it anymore, I took it from my father and shoved it into her hands.

She looked at it, her thin eyebrows merging, her forehead stapling, her mouth slowly opening and forming an O. Her hands started to tremble. Then they started to shake. Then the paper fell out of her hands and we could see her eyes, filling with tears, her hands shaking so hard, she put them under her thighs where they made them hop softly.

‘What is this?'

‘It's nothing, Lisa.'

‘It's not nothing!' Again I didn't speak alone, this time the words came out of Navi and me, in the same time, each word and space at the same time.

‘It will blow over,' said my father. ‘It's a prank. We'll call the police and they will find the jokers.'

I was willing Navi to look at me but he was sitting on the floor, his head between his hands.

‘Jamshed.' My mother said finally. My father's name sounded rusty in her mouth. ‘Jamshed, we have to go.'

‘Go to the police?' He looked at her hopefully as if he was working a tricky fuse and any moment the lights would come on.

‘No Jamshed. Go home.'

If I had to find a single moment when my family stopped being a family, it would be that moment. Although if you asked me when that moment started, I wouldn't be able to tell you. Had it started when they met? When they moved to Pakistan? When he started the hospital? When she started getting sad? When they stopped paying attention to us?

Why did they stop paying attention to us?

One day I will ask my mother what my father was like when she met him. Had he been charming? Had he been attentive? Had he been interested?

From then on, the conversational was eerily close to my fantasies of moving back to America.

My father said: leave Pakistan, how foolish, how unheard of, how can anyone ever leave pristine Pakistan especially with his hospital now in it?

My mother said: stay in Pakistan with this threat on the life of their son, how could he suggest that, did it not matter, did nothing matter other than his bloody hospital that she hated with a passion and hoped would burn down?

My father said: she didn't support him, had never supported him, had never wanted to move here, had never fully moved here, if only she would make an effort things would be better.

My mother said: He didn't love anyone, had never loved anyone, not even Navi and she had always thought that at least he had loved Navi. (She didn't look at me when she said that. Neither did my father. I felt Navi's gaze on me but I couldn't look up. I felt ashamed.)