by Asra Nomani
Esther and Lucy scolded this elderly friend of their father’s. “Love isn’t a place,” they exclaimed.
I admired the way my cousin-sisters stayed true to their convictions. Trying to be polite, trying to absorb, trying to decipher, I seemed to get so distracted from my core beliefs. I turned to Rashida Khala and asked her how she dealt with the bukwas, or garbage, outside that makes us go pagal, or crazy. She told me the story about going to the crowded bazaar in an old part of Lucknow called Chowk. A relative complained afterward that she hadn’t even noticed her as she had passed by.
“I just look forward,” Khala said. I wondered if I could ever be so focused.
CHAPTER 12
The Village
KHALA DESCENDED with regal grace and threw an order over her shoulder to those remaining at Jahingarabad Palace from the household: “Be good.”
She carried a small black leather bag as her only luggage. We climbed into a big white Ambassador car with a skinny driver named Ayub behind the steering wheel. Lucy, Esther, and Khala were my escorts for my first pilgrimage to our ancestral home in our village, Jaigahan. Esther and Lucy had spent their early years in the village, waddling into the fields with a Hindu gardener, Hardu Ram. During our adventures from the Himalayas to the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, I’d learned that I could be the master of my own destiny, even in this land so foreign to me. I looked forward now, and restrained myself from casting sideways glances to see what others were doing. That way I could create a reality different from the first oppressive trip I’d made to India. I saw the modern-day divide between Hindus and Muslims, the pursuit of real spiritualism versus spiritual opportunism, and the raw strength of women who ran households. Now, it was time to make a symbolic journey to my home in India. It was my maternal ancestral home, Latif Manzil, where I hoped to walk upon the land from which I came and know the ancestors whose voices rang within me.
It was early morning as we traversed a railroad crossing with the morning rush hour of bicycle traffic spinning past the eucalyptus trees that lined the highway. Khala wouldn’t let me drive. I sat up front by the window with Khala’s servant Anis between the driver and me. Khala sat in the back behind me, beside the window. Lucy and Esther shared the backseat with her. Khala said that Iftikhar Mamoo stopped going to Latif Manzil because of sadma, Urdu for “sadness.”
Red Mahindra tractors, something like the Caterpillar tractors in America, passed us by. Khala wore glasses with a cream dupatta over her head. We rode behind a lorry that asked, “Horn palese,” with the sort of incorrect spelling that was a common source of amusement in India.
Women here sat sidesaddle on bike racks as lanky men pedaled easily. Watching the spokes on the wheels turn slowly, I lost myself in the rhythm of village life. A woman in a bright yellow sari sat leisurely behind a man as he edged her past a gas station with a Bharat Petroleum sign. It was joked that women rode on the back of bikes and motorcycles as if they were sitting delicately on their living room sofas. We passed a woman doubled over with a bag on her back. Workers put grass over tar to fill potholes. Rows of bricks lay adjacent to road. A scarecrow stood in front of a bungalow. There were tongas, carts drawn by horses, just as my father had told me traveled on these roads. The signs were all in Hindi. I spotted a faded photo of the Hindu god Shiva on a wall.
Thatched roofs sat on bamboo legs. A sign for Nerolac Paints hung not far from a canopy of mango trees. Men’s shirts billowed behind them as they pedaled in the cool air. A woman in a bright orange sari leaned on a stick, watching goats.
Dirty green Mahindra jeeps passed us with their window flaps bound close but their doors open. A man ran to make sure his goat didn’t amble out in front of our blaring Ambassador. Rain snapped and crackled on our windshield. We passed a “Colgate Super Shakti” sign painted on the side of a brick building. We passed yet another sign declaring, “P.C.O. S.T.D.,” the signage in front of stores with phones for the public. Men fished in a place called a thalab, throwing their netting into the water.
All of a sudden, our right bumper met a Mahindra tractor. It was a little after 11 A.M. We’d been on the road less than three hours, and already we were disabled. The driver pulled over to survey the damage. The hood could easily scrape and puncture the front right tire. The driver’s side door wouldn’t shut. I climbed out. I helped the driver and Anis move the car forward and backward, trying to jostle parts into place. Men stared. I didn’t care. The driver slid into the mud.
The driver’s side door wouldn’t stay shut, so I whipped my sheer green dupatta from over my shoulders and handed it to Anis to tie the door closed. “Another entry in our 101 uses for a dupatta,” I told Esther and Lucy. The dupatta was a symbol of modesty, but to us it had also become a practical accessory, wiping up spills and now securing our safety. Back on the road, we passed a pastel green vista around us with mossy waters at road’s edge, wild purple flowers in the water. We took a left at a garbage dump and barreled over a road flooded with rain, past the New Shahganj Medecal Stor with its misspelling and over more flooded waters. I didn’t know it, but Shahganj was the closest urban center to our village, a small town of maybe a thousand residents and a crowded bazaar along both sides of the main road. Schoolchildren ambled by with books under their arms. Outside town, I looked out at fishermen sitting on the edge of small pools of water with bamboo rods. We passed Eastern Montessori School.
We had entered a Muslim enclave of India with 786, the Arabic numerals I used to write on the top of my childhood exams, stenciled onto the window of one of the many Mahindra jeeps that bounced by us. When we reached a smaller city called Khetasarai, we passed an ikka, a horse-drawn cart, filled with Muslim women in black burqas. We drove by a band of young Muslim girls in school uniforms of blue kameezes, white shalwars, and white dupattas. A safety pin secured the dupatta in the back.
Simple village life flowed around us. A herd of pigs with testicles bouncing below their haunches grunted by our car. On road’s edge, a child screamed, kicking his legs into the cool air. A girl walked through the village with a walker, next to a paraplegic boy spinning the wheel on a homemade wheelchair made from bicycle parts. We made a left at a bright fruit cart with red apples hanging on a string of red thread. We stopped beyond the cart to buy Esther’s and Lucy’s staple of fruits. A man with a mouthful of tobacco confirmed Khala’s directions to the village. Water dripped from the tits of pigs emerging out of a muddy watering hole. A water buffalo chased another water buffalo.
“Look, they’re playing tag!” I imagined.
Our car rattled, giving us little reassurance we’d actually make it the short leg remaining to the village. I was excited, but I didn’t know what to anticipate. We took a right after a vegetable cart at a faded Union Bank of India sign. More purple flowers floated in a pond. We braked for a baby water buffalo and took an important right turn at a pile of rocks.
Through a narrow alley tucked between ancient-looking houses, we drove in front of our home called Latif Manzil. It was like a white phoenix rising from the rice paddy fields. I was in awe.
I felt as if I was in a magical place. It was beyond my wildest imagination. My mother played here. She ran through the doors. She climbed these stairs. It was a place where a lychee tree grew in the courtyard. She’d told of the jinn that lived in a storage space upstairs. I wanted to befriend this one who had haunted my mother for so long in her childhood. One of my mother’s uncles, her father’s sister’s husband, used to tell her and the other children at Latif Manzil that they could see jinns if they put kajal, the black kohl of eyeliners, on their thumb. She tried but never saw a jinn.
Two boys worked a water pump in the courtyard so the driver and Anis could wash their hands. These first cousins held each other’s hands and loved each other like brothers. Here was where my Khala had lived in her girlhood when her father and his three brothers created this home.
Our first night, Khala awakened and fidgeted with the mosquito coil. Her body was a silhouette
of her white dupatta and white flowered shalwar kameez, all in cotton.
As I lay on my charpai, my woven bed, beside her, it was as if the walls talked to me.
The incarnations of so many lives stirred through me. The lives of my ancestors. The lives of my parents. The lives I’d lived within this one junam, or birth, that was mine. Not just the stuff of my memory coursed through me but also the memory of others. Tales told by deep eyes that stared back at me from black-and-white photos so old they stuck to the glass of picture frames. The psychic memory of a mother’s lullaby. The karma of past lives—my own, my ancestors’, and others’—paying me a visit. We inherit not only the color of our eyes and the color of our skin from our ancestors but also their legacy. To know our atman, our true self, we have to know these people whose breath echoes within us. I had learned so much, but I still didn’t know how I fit into the legacy of Ansari women.
The tales began for me with the voice of a wife whose husband was not supposed to die so young. She was my mother’s mother. I called her nani.
Her name was Zohra, Arabic for Venus, the Roman goddess of love and beauty. She was the teenage daughter of a landowner when her marriage was arranged to a svelte, handsome, and gentle man from the same village of Padghodia where she grew up in District Azamgarh in Uttar Pradesh. She wasn’t supposed to go to her husband’s house until she grew a little older.
Then cholera swept through Padghodia, seizing the lives of her young sisters. To save the young bride’s life, she was sent to her husband’s second home in the neighboring village of Jaigahan. Her husband became a well-respected lawyer, rising in the political circles of District Azamgarh. The British still ruled India. There was still a system of zamindars, or landowners, who owned the country’s vast rural farmlands. His family was one of those zamindars with acres of fertile land of wheat and rice.
Her husband’s name was Abdul Ali Ansari, my nana.
He was one of four brothers whose names began with Abdul. Their father was Abdul Latif. He was my per nana, my maternal great-grandfather. Latif is one of the ninety-nine names of God in Arabic, meaning “the exceedingly benevolent,” protecting for suffering. He would treat his sons with great congeniality, referring to them as ap, the respectful way of saying “you” in Urdu.
My per nana had a vision to build a house in the village where his four sons’ families could live as extended families under one roof. And so Latif Manzil rose from the earth. The villagers knew of it simply as the kothi, the “big house.” Architecturally, it was designed as a haveli, a grand house, in the finest tradition of homes designed by Hindu Rajput kings and Muslim Mogul emperors. Latif Manzil and the Jaigahan culture were testimonies to the harems that spread in India with the conquests of invading Moguls. They had nothing to do with the Western concept of harems—sultans in palaces with their concubines, slaves, eunuchs, and countless wives in billowing silks. These were vestiges of domestic harems, an Arabic word that meant the seclusion of women behind boundaries. My dear friend Vasia had introduced me to a Muslim scholar in Morocco, Fatima Mernissi, when I visited her in Rabat one winter. It was Ramadan, and we had dinner together. The scholar said she wasn’t fast. “Too much work to do,” she said. She was a Muslim woman to whom I could relate. And the life she chronicled of the domestic harem into which she had been born was the same as the one my mother was born into. She, like my mother, had to break the hudud, the boundaries, that traditional Islam imposed upon women. It was the hudud of our culture that also settled like a noose around my neck. In India, the domestic harem translated into purdah or zenana. This was how my nani lived, behind a boundary that kept her from her husband’s side even in death, and this was the rule into which my mother was born. But it was a boundary that Esther, Lucy, and I didn’t accept.
The crickets and frogs of Jaigahan inspired my mother’s eldest brother, Iftikhar, to pen the Sufi poetry he would one day read on the BBC. The family often returned to Padghodia. One day, Nani gathered with Nana and their children for a rare photo in the doorway of their home caked with the smooth mix of mud and cow dung. She looked down like the demure woman of India that she was raised to be. Nana told his children, “Hasi mazaaq ke saath rahoe.” It meant: “Live with fun and laughter.”
It was a pure and innocent image of a family before its world turned upside down. Nana came home one afternoon just as he did on so many afternoons. He ate his afternoon meal like usual. Then he fell sick.
Nani stayed by his side but then slipped out of the room like a ghost whenever men would come to visit him, bowing to the rules of her religion and custom to do purdah and not show her face to men who weren’t relatives. He died after one of those times when she left his side. She lived with this quiet regret.
Nani also lived with a family secret. The doctor said her husband died of a heart attack. Descendants would say he died after coming home with a stomachache. Iftikhar Mamoo once confided to my mother that the cook told Nani a different story, that someone, jealous of Nana, told the cook to poison the food. The cook didn’t know for whom it was intended. He did as he was told. And Nani lost her husband.
For years, his daughters remembered the kajal he always kept in his pocket to line the eyes of his children in black to ward off nazar, the evil eye. It was as if he died with kajal in his pocket, for it seemed that the evil eye lingered upon his widow and her children.
The family mostly left the village. We were fortunate in one regard to have a descendant living at Latif Manzil, protecting it. He was Zaki, a pocked-faced man who acted like the lord of Latif Manzil. Lucy, Esther, and I soon start calling him Bluebeard because he exuded so much terror, even in the company of his wife and younger son. He hadn’t committed the horrible deeds of the mythical Bluebeard, but he ruled his grand home in the same way.
“Ammmma!”
My mother’s voice and footsteps echoed on the stone steps that led upstairs to where I sat on Latif Manzil’s top floor.
She was a young girl and had skipped school again, as she was prone to do. She was calling out to her mother who was downstairs, tending one of her children or cooking or doing one of the many things a woman running a household in the village does. My mother raced up and down these stairs all day long, playing with the chamar children of the village, born of a Hindu caste considered untouchables because their parents cleaned the toilets and cesspools.
But today Nani couldn’t answer. Nani had tried to keep her family together but hadn’t succeeded. She sometimes wondered why she hadn’t died in the cholera epidemic along with her sisters. But Nani didn’t weep about her lot in life. That wasn’t her way. She was a model of sabr, an Urdu word of Arabic origin that meant more than the “patience” it usually described. It was wisdom. Compassion. Steadfastness.
My mother’s shouts filled the village air. The day had turned into darkness. She had been piled onto an ikka, a horse-drawn cart. She saw only darkness and more darkness. Her mother was sending her to live with another relative where she could get a proper education. All she wanted was her mother.
She was taken, instead, eastward to Bombay, now Mumbai. She refused to live with a relative she didn’t like. She was then sent to a hill station called Panchgani. A British officer had tried to convert Panchgani into a European health resort decades before. It was now home to some of India’s finest boarding schools. She lived in a sweeping house, Buena Vista, where two older married cousins shepherded the education of their younger cousins.
One day at school, the nuns handed out Cadbury chocolate and roasted rice treats called liee ke ladoo, sweets that looked like today’s Rice Krispies treats only they were white. It was 1947. India had just won independence from the British, and my mother was lined up in a hallway at her convent school, collecting her treats. The country was liberated. A new Muslim nation called Pakistan was carved out of India’s northernmost region. Murder, rape, and pillage followed the migration of Hindus to India from Pakistan and Muslims to Pakistan from India. It mattered little to th
is girl. Her heart hadn’t yet been liberated. Every night, she sat on a rocking chair and wept for her mother who still lived in the village.
“Amma!” the cries continued when she returned to the village. There, she didn’t cry. But she asked her mother, “Why did you leave me?”
She grew into a young woman with a face as smooth as porcelain. Her eyes were a deep pool of brown light. Her cheekbones were high and her face narrow. She had a soft voice that called to her best friend with the lilt of birds. At each other’s urging the two of them ripped off the black burqas that cloaked them on the way to their girls’ college, Nirmala Niketan Home Economics College.
“We’re not going to wear our burqas!” they yelled to each other.
It was the servant who told on them. He told her elder cousins that she and her friend took off their burqas when they got on campus. For this infraction, they pulled her from school. It was time, anyway, that she got married.
Her eldest sister, Rashida, and another sister, Shahida, had found a prospective groom at a wedding. What the two sisters liked about him the most was the way he bounced around the wedding, snapping photographs with boundless energy. His name was Zafar.
Khala told me more about our family. A snake bit her dadi. The wife of her father’s eldest brother, her bari ammi, made a masjid, a mosque, in front of our village home in Jaigahan with the money she received as her wedding gift. A relative tore the masjid down and replaced it with a new construction, thinking he had done a great thing, not realizing he had dismantled family history. One night, Khala told me, she dreamed long ago of seeing a tree with an orange hanging from it. The orange fell into the water. She was pregnant and lost her baby that night. She said she felt sad at coming to Latif Manzil. “There are many regrets that surface here,” she said.