Where the Air is Sweet (9 page)

When Mumtaz woke in the nights sobbing, screaming for her mother, her grandmother took her in her arms and told her
that she was her mother now, that she would never leave her.

Six months after her parents left, a man came to visit Mumtaz. He said his name was Qurban. While he spoke, she scratched at a mosquito bite on her elbow, waiting for him to go away, waiting for him to leave her and visit with her uncles, as all the men who came to the house did. He didn’t leave. He bent down until his face looked directly into hers and smiled. “Do you like dolls?”

She nodded, her eyes wide.

From behind his back he produced a porcelain doll with black curls and blue eyes that opened and shut. Mumtaz snatched it from him and hugged it tightly.

He laughed.

Every month, Qurban came to the Nairobi suburb of Eastleigh to visit Mumtaz. When he came he would bring her a small gift, a ribbon or new pencils. Then he took her for walks and bought her sweets. She did not know what to call him, so she did not call him anything. If she wanted his attention, she gently tugged at his arm. Whenever they were out, people would assume she was his child and would laugh when she would correct them.

“Why do they think you are my father?” she asked him once.

“You look like me,” he answered.

After one year, Qurban’s visits became less frequent. After two years, they stopped.

Mumtaz was thirteen when her grandmother lay dying. For three days, she was so weak she couldn’t move or speak. On the fourth day, she looked at Mumtaz, who was sitting on the side of her bed, holding her hand, and spoke, her voice weak but clear: “I told them to go and leave you.”

Mumtaz felt each muscle in her body contract.

“I told Sarwar and Jameela if they could not love you properly, they had no right to you. I told them they were dead to me.”

“Why?” Mumtaz asked, her grip on her grandmother’s hand loosening. “They were my parents.”

Her grandmother shook her head. “They were your uncle and aunt. They took you in after your mother died. Your father was young and poor. How could he look after you? We thought this was best. Your mother died giving birth. My young daughter. My child.” She began to cry.

Mumtaz watched her grandmother weep as images of dead girls with braided pigtails flashed through her mind. “My father?”

“Qurban—do you remember him? Qurban is your father.”

Mumtaz was quiet, a flood of rage washing over her.

“Will you forgive me?”

Though she began to stroke her grandmother’s hand, though her lips formed the words and her throat made the sounds the dying woman longed to hear, Mumtaz did not forgive her.

The day after the funeral, Mumtaz stood with Qurban and his new wife at the cemetery. “We think it best that you finish your schooling before you come to Kasese to live with us,” Qurban said. “I’ve spoken to your uncles and they have agreed to pay your fees.”

Mumtaz did not turn to look at her father when he spoke. She kept her eyes on the patch of dark earth below which her grandmother lay, imagining stepping on it, imagining it giving way and pulling her in, so that she fell, so that she kept falling even after her lungs were sucked dry of air.

When forty days had passed, Mumtaz returned to boarding
school. Her school records were altered so that they reflected her new name, the surname of her biological father, rather than her biological mother. The change prompted looks, comments.
Daughter of a whore. Bastard girl.
And worse. The worst.
Daughter of nobody. Daughter of nothing.
Mumtaz said nothing to counter the attacks. She could think of nothing to refute them.

She spent her weekends in Eastleigh. The rooms she had shared with her grandmother were now taken over by her cousin and his new bride. Mumtaz slept on bedding on the floor of a narrow hallway. The wardrobe that contained her clothes was locked. When Mumtaz asked her aunt about her salwaar kameezes, her skirts, the woman held her hand over her chest. “I’m sorry. We didn’t know you were coming back. We gave them to the Africans who come begging on Fridays.”

Mumtaz, unable to hide her disappointment, let out a sigh.

“The house is full,” her aunt said sharply. “Isn’t it enough we are providing you with a home when your own father cannot do this?”

Her cousins began to regard her with pitying stares and whenever she came upon them they exchanged long, conspicuous glances with one another.

Mumtaz stopped going to her childhood home and remained at boarding school through weekends, holidays.

Six months after her grandmother’s funeral, Qurban arranged for Mumtaz to visit him. She rode the train to Kasese, where he met her in a car. After a perfunctory greeting, he drove in silence. She turned to look at him. The skin on his face was pulled tightly, either in deep concentration or irritation, she had no idea which. She looked away, out her window, at the hills that rolled and rolled, it seemed, until the end of the earth.

When they reached the house, Qurban left immediately for his shop. Khadija welcomed her with a tight embrace. She was newly pregnant and sprightly. She looked nothing like the dour-faced woman Mumtaz had met six months earlier.

“
Aa,
Taju,” she said, ushering her into the small house. Mumtaz could not recall how Khadija had addressed her when she was in Nairobi for the funeral. She could not recall hearing her stepmother’s voice until this moment.

That evening, Khadija asked Mumtaz to help her prepare dinner. Mumtaz explained that she did not know how.

Khadija looked startled. “Surprising that a motherless girl would be spoiled,” she said, and then quickly added, blushing, “I am your mother now. I will teach you. It is my duty to find you a husband, isn’t it? And no family will accept a daughter-in-law who can’t cook.”

“Why?” Mumtaz asked quietly.

Khadija stared at her for a moment, as though Mumtaz’s appearance had changed into something unrecognizable. “It is a wife’s duty. It is what makes a wife useful.”

Mumtaz sat down on a chair.

“No matter how beautiful you are,” Khadija said, “when you become a woman, you will have to earn your place in a home.” Khadija placed her hand on Mumtaz’s shoulder. “We’ll find you a good match. And you will cook well, speak well, make healthy children. You will be happy.”

Mumtaz would not visit Kasese again for another year. The timing was difficult with Khadija’s pregnancies, with Qurban’s struggling business.

The boarding school became her home. In the days, she walked with her eyes lowered. If anyone looked at her or spoke
to her, she did not know it, she did not hear. Girls who were once friends fell away. Boys, moving around in packs, avoided her.

In the nights, she pinched herself until she left small pink welts on her thighs, on her upper arms to assure herself that she was there, that she existed, that she was something.

When she finished school, Mumtaz moved to Fort Portal, where her father and stepmother and their young children were now living. Khadija continued giving her lessons in being a wife, training her to cook rice, roll chapatis and grind spices, and teaching her to sew and to knit and to crochet.

Mumtaz helped Khadija clean the house. She tended the garden. She did most of the cooking. Every day she walked up the hill to
jamat khana,
where she served as a volunteer.

Her father found her a job at Barclays Bank, where two times a week she sat with the manager and took notes while he spoke, while he leaned back in a chair and counted off on his short fingers what he needed to do that day. When she first began to work at the bank, she was trained as a teller. But she made too many mistakes counting money. She wanted to please; she wanted to be fast and dependable but she became confused, lost her place, lost count. She didn’t believe she had the right to slow down and take the time she needed. And so, the manager, a Hindu Punjabi with thinning oily hair and a protruding belly, took her aside and told her to help him. She took notes, ran small errands: passing handwritten missives to staff; arranging flowers on his desk. Often, he forgot she was in the office and left for hours. She tried to look busy, straightening papers, removing the dead flowers and replacing the water in the vase. Once, she purposely knocked over the vase so that she would be able to pass the time cleaning it. But the cleaning girl, a young
Mutoro wearing a scarf on her head, appeared seemingly from nowhere and wiped up the mess, her eyes lowered and her head bowed in shame, as if she had caused the spill. Mumtaz’s job was agonizing. It was torture. Each week, she handed the envelope with her pay to her father without once looking inside it.

Qurban made a living, but he did not make much more than that. Mumtaz was aware her presence only contributed to the family’s financial problems. One night, she heard Qurban and Khadija arguing. She heard Khadija say her name. But she could make out nothing else in their conversation. The next morning, she unravelled one of her cardigans and used the yarn to begin to knit sweaters for her little brothers.

Mumtaz found spaces for herself in her father’s house, in his life. She prepared meals the way her stepmother taught her, the way her father liked. She went to
jamat khana
each evening, walking with her brothers on either side of her, teaching them their prayers, reminding them to behave, wiping their noses and mending the rips in their clothes. In the nights, she curled into a bed with them. She kept herself useful, waiting for the day when she would be a wife, when she would be a mother, when she would have an unassailable place in a home, an unassailable place on this earth.

10

M
UMT?Z IS IN THE KITCHEN SLICING BRINJALS
with a dull knife when her stepmother, Khadija, shouts to her from the sitting room: “Taju! A young man in a fancy white car has just pulled into our driveway.”

Mumtaz hurries out of the kitchen and towards the window. Concealed by the lace curtains, she looks out, Khadija beside her. Jaafar is stepping out of his car, dressed in a khaki shirt and blue trousers.

“He must be here to see Malek’s parents,” Mumtaz says. Her heart is racing.

She does not tell Khadija that she spoke to him, that she approached him that day, the day her neighbour Malek disappeared. Mumtaz had never before approached a man. She had not intended to go to this man. But she was propelled out of Malek’s house, and he was there.

Weeks ago, though they were not friends, Malek had confided in Mumtaz about her secret boyfriend. Mumtaz knew Malek was being forced to meet Jaafar, son of Rajabali of
Mbarara, the acceptable Ismaili groom. But she did not know Malek was planning to run away. And then one day she was summoned next door to Malek’s house to make tea, to cook for the groups of people coming to offer their condolences, comforting the family as they mourned. But what were they mourning? It was too ridiculous to be a tragedy. A petulant and simple-minded girl running off with the pimply-faced and likely more simple-minded boy she is forbidden to love. Mumtaz knew Malek lived for such drama. And everyone was complying. What performances, Mumtaz thought. People speaking quietly, their mouths held in straight lines, walking around laboriously, an invisible weight on their shoulders, as though they were Muslims during
muharram,
nursing an insatiable grief.

Mumtaz couldn’t bear it. She walked out the door, past the men gathered in front of the house talking about God-knows-what, across the road and towards the river, where she often went to be alone. A young man was standing there, wearing a crisp silk shirt and pressed trousers. The smell of his cigarette and his cologne hit her like a slap and she stopped walking. She knew it must be him, the rejected groom. He was tall, each hair on his head slicked into place, his skin clear and slightly dark against the late-afternoon sun. He was staring unabashedly at her. All of a sudden, he shook his hand violently. Mumtaz stepped back and watched the stub of his cigarette fall to the grass. He quickly stamped on it and then looked back at her while rubbing his hand against his thigh, an awkward smile on his face. It was the first smile she had seen all day. She began laughing. Abruptly, she stopped and clamped her hands over her mouth, terrified that the grieving throng had heard her.

He cleared his throat.
“Ya Ali madad,”
he said, an inflection at the end, as though the standard Ismaili greeting were a question.

Confused, she dropped her hands from her mouth. He wants to know if I am an Ismaili, she quickly realized, raising an eyebrow. She kept him waiting for a few more moments, her eyes on his, then replied, at last giving him the confirmation he desired.
“Mowla Ali madad.”

He grinned, his eyes wide, his mouth wider, so that he looked mildly idiotic. She burst out laughing again and then quickly pressed her lips shut.

“I’m Jaafar,” he said, bowing slightly, to Mumtaz’s surprise. “And you are?”

Mumtaz cleared her throat.

“A relation of Malek’s?” he asked.

“No. I am her neighbour. My name is Mumtaz.”

“Are you Malek’s friend?”

“I don’t think so. I have been her confidante, sometimes.”

“Then you knew,” Jaafar said.

She shook her head. “Malek didn’t tell me about this.” She looked over at the house and then at Jaafar. “I’m sorry,” she said.

He waved his hand as though swatting a mosquito. “I didn’t want to marry Malek anyways,” he said.

“Why not? Did you see some defect in her?”

“I’ve never met her,” he said. “Does she have a defect?”

Mumtaz smiled. “Nothing that should scare away a prospective groom. Did you find her family unacceptable?”

“I have nothing against her family or any family. I object to marriage.”

“Really? Well, you’re a man,” Mumtaz said, folding her arms and looking at the river. “Women don’t have such luxuries.”

“This is a luxury?” he asked. “To never marry? You would want this?”

“It isn’t a question of want,” she said, turning to look at him. “It’s like air or water. A husband is a means to things I need to live. I have no choice. You do. This choice is a luxury.”