“Bibi,” Mai Jan called out to me as I headed in the direction of Ami’s room. Her voice had an urgency to it. “Don’t go in there.”
“And why not?” I said rudely. “Why don’t you mind your own business?”
Mai Jan wiped her nose with her pallu and sulked, tucking the cloth back around her waist. She was sweating profusely, her hair bunched in a damp, untidy coil on top of her head. The mole at the tip of her nose seemed gigantic today. She was looking at me blankly. I could tell she was fishing for a good reason.
“Woh ji, I just cleaned that area. It’s still wet,” she offered lamely.
“So what? I’ll be careful.” I got on my tiptoes and moved forward so as not to leave smudges.
“Choti Bibi, no.” Her mole mocked me but I refused to be distracted.
Ami’s door was half ajar, and I could hear a conversation within. Oh, Abu is home, too, I thought to myself. Maybe the discussion about pads would need to wait.
I glanced inside, opening my mouth to call out to Ami, and then stopped and swallowed hard. The man sitting on the bed with his back toward me wasn’t Abu. He was leaner and taller, not balding like Abu. A plume of thick white smoke emerged over his shirtless back and like a halo circled his head before disappearing into the whirling ceiling fan above. He turned around and smiled. Eyes glazed and eyebrows furrowed together, he had the satisfied look of a cat that had eaten its catch; it was Uncle Jalal, Abu’s chess buddy.
I heard the angry rustle of Ami’s nightgown as she came toward the door and wordlessly shut it in my face. The draft from it sailed into my heart. I stood frozen, unable to move.
“I told you not to go in there,” Mai Jan said from the other end of the room, a slight mirth in her voice at the treatment meted out to me by my own mother.
This is how a family unravels in a matter of minutes: through careless acts of meaningless alliance.
I often wondered if Abu knew about Ami’s relationship with Uncle Jalal. There was no threat of the laws of the land among the elite class, although such an alliance anywhere else in the country was punishable by law. I had seen Uncle Jalal a couple of times after that event but never again in a compromised setting. He would be on his way out when I arrived from school with my siblings, Zoha and Sian. My brother always sulked around him and moved away when Uncle Jalal wanted to tousle his hair, averting his droopy and bloodshot eyes. I was never sure what Ami saw in Uncle Jalal, notorious in society for his drinking and occasional drug habits. He wasn’t handsome; of course, I thought Abu was the best thing that had happened to mankind. I was a bit skewed in my analysis of my father.
The thing with Uncle Jalal, Ami told me years later, was never real or substantial to her. He was a necessary distraction she needed at the time.
When I was little and still thought the world of Ami, I would sneak into her room when she was taking a nap and pull out her sarees and try them on. My favorite was an orange organza saree with a red-sequined border. I remembered draping it around my waist and slipping on her high-heeled gold sandals on many restless afternoons. I enjoyed parading around the room like Ami and puckered my face at the mirror like I had seen her do when she applied lipstick. Later, I would fold the saree and stomp on it to get the poofiness out, watching as it deflated sadly before I put it back on the rack. Years later, I looked on in horror as she cut that saree to make a shirt that she then decided looked awful on her. I never saw it again.
Ami watched us closely when we left the house or accompanied her on her shopping expeditions and admonished us if we strayed too far. She said there were bad people around, people who carried you away and did unspeakable things to you if you were not careful or vigilant. She never answered me when I asked what those things were. In the society we lived in, knowledge comes from unspoken sources: snatches of news clippings, books no one expects us to discover, whispered grown-up conversations. Sex, I would say to myself when no one was around. It had a husky and penetrating sound to it. It made me feel unclean inside when I said it, but it also gave me a rush. It was the foreign literature that taught me the intricacies of sex and defined the unspoken, unwanted word called rape.
I could never understand what made people bad. Leaders, a childhood friend told me once, make society rotten and unsafe. Bad people were mostly poor, I learned later from overheard conversations. Middle-class folks were mostly okay. Many rich people were corrupt. We were an exception, Ami informed us, an unseen crown on our heads that rendered us superior. Uncle Jalal was an exception as well, Ami explained to me. We grew up with stereotypes fed into our brains, dictating the way we operated in our daily lives. When I walked in the market with Ami, I always eyed poor men with grimy clothing suspiciously, certain they would reach out to cup my breast or touch my behind. I walked with a crooked elbow jutting out to shield my body, my purse.
Eventually, I discovered, it is our own who harm us the most.
What can I say about the mother who abandoned us four times over a period of two decades? Abu had checked out long ago from his marriage. I saw it in his eyes, in the smiles that he did not give to his wife, in the questions that he did not answer for her. Instead, the air filled quickly with thick hurtful breathing when they were together, the unanswered questions conveying more than words could: bitterness, disappointments, and a drawn-out sadness. Like a dismal cloak, those emotions landed on us. I tried to gather most of it toward me, wishing to spare my siblings the worst.
“Your mother never learned to love. It took me years to understand that,” Abu said to me years later. “Even on the day of our wedding, I had a sinking feeling that I had captured a koyal bird in a cage, bound her in a relationship that her heart had not accepted. She was born to be a free spirit. You cannot assign roles to such a person.”
Abu had accepted that fact and moved on. I never did, not until I lost Faizan and understood what a free spirit really meant. Not until I met another mother who nurtured my wounded soul and allowed me to forgive myself. Forgive Ami. Forgive the world.
FOUR
May 1993
Ami’s backless choli was an instant hit at Sabeen and Sarfaraz Khans’ wedding anniversary party the year I turned eighteen. She was back in our lives for a short while and I watched Abu painstakingly try to cater to her every mood in an effort to get her to stay.
Ami emerged from her room, the pallu of her black crushed silk saree draped around her body. As soon as she turned, Abu frowned in disapproval at the exposed skin but said nothing. I felt a bit ridiculous in my own sage green low-necked salwar kameez with beaded edges that Ami had insisted I wear. I kept my exposed cleavage covered with the dark long-trimmed dupatta. We all knew why I was invited. Parties were a great place to arrange matches. While the singles roamed around, adults fitted them like puzzles and decided the course of their lives. It disgusted me. I was too independent-minded to succumb to such matches, or so I believed then. It was useless to argue with Ami; if things didn’t go her way, she pouted for days. I had agreed to wear lipstick at Ami’s persistence. After repeated strokes, almost bruising my lips with the plum-colored lipstick, she then proceeded to powder my cheeks when I decided I was done.
“That’s enough, Ami.” I eased out of the chair. I knew Abu didn’t care much for makeup.
Ami shrugged and examined her own reflection in the mirror. She fluffed her hair and smiled in satisfaction.
The Khans’ mansion was filled to the brim with the elite of society: glittering and heavily made-up women wearing dazzling jewelry, sporting the latest fashions, trying out fancy English accents when they had not yet perfected the grammar, while men huddled together in circles, comparing sales figures, watches and cars. An ever-growing mass of unrelated and indifferent uncles and aunts, titles imposed on them by society, approached me at intervals to peck me on my cheek. I looked around for Abu and found him sitting on a couch at the end of the hall. Earlier he had been in an animated discussion with some of his friends about politics, a subject he could discuss for ho
urs on end. There was a general uneasiness among the public since the new prime minister had been ousted within months of coming to power. That year had been a political disaster for Pakistan. Both the prime minister and the president resigned from their offices citing serious differences. Even the central and provincial assemblies were dissolved. Abu had great faith in the interim Prime Minister, Moin Qureshi, and was impressed by his determination to check the plague of corruption that had been growing in the governing bodies. Abu’s hope of such a person taking over the country and turning it around was futile; Qureshi’s tenure lasted only 90 days.
“Politics today has gone to the dogs, Tehsin Saheb,” Uncle Athar was telling Abu, taking a slow drag off the cigar in his hand. He was a pediatric surgeon at the hospital where Abu worked. “The governing bodies have wiped the country clean. Totally absorbed in their own personal gain. How can a nation grow in such a climate?”
“The whole country is rooted in bureaucracy,” Abu observed, shaking his head. “Until that’s taken care of, our progress is questionable. You can’t even get a simple identity card without bribing someone.”
“I waited twenty months to get a new phone line,” offered Uncle Zahoor, a mutual friend whose profession I could never remember. “Twenty months, can you believe it? Even a baby is born quicker.”
“Can’t match that even if you count from the actual conception,” Uncle Waqar interjected. He had thick, tightly permed hair that made him look like a hedgehog. “You might have better luck in that time period, Zahoor. Maybe you could end up with a son that you always wanted.”
The men guffawed at that comment, and Uncle Zahoor looked mildly offended. He had four daughters and each year tried his luck at having a son and failed. So far his wife had been pregnant four of the five years they had been married.
I started to lose interest in the discussion and looked around. The single young women at the party looked like they were straight off the runway and paid to parade at the party. Like moths, they flocked together with no room for expansion and eyed me with disdain. Suddenly my 4,000-rupees suit lost its class. I had not seen many eligible bachelors that night, and I didn’t see the sense of being dragged to a party where the primary purpose of my attendance was not being fulfilled. The only young men I saw were already with women or pretended to be.
“Are Saheb, corruption breeds corruption,” said Uncle Waqar, “What can the public do when they can’t even get basic necessities? It is simple. Without bribing, you will be in a hell hole and who wants to be there?”
“Did you look at the list Qureshi published of the defaulters of tax and bank loans?” Abu responded. “They say Rana and Jabbar are on it, too.”
The men in the group exchanged uneasy looks.
“He’s trying to expose the scams of the old governments,” Abu continued. “I am not surprised that there are many affluent people on that list. Some that we even see here at this gathering today.”
At that, a few disentangled themselves from the group and walked away to seek other, more uplifting conversations, far removed from actual reality. A handful of others simply slipped away.
“I think his idea of making the State Bank of Pakistan an autonomous body will go a long way,” Abu said to Uncle Athar, his only audience by then, who nodded and was relieved when his wife called out to him. He hurriedly excused himself and left Abu’s side.
Meanwhile, Ami flitted around from one group to another like
a winged creature, creating a stir wherever she moved, oblivious to Abu’s incisive conversation. Men ogled her choli, swooned over her, and even made suggestive jokes in groups. She seemed to enjoy it all until a hand swung her around and planted a kiss on her cheek in the ways of high-society—Uncle Jalal. Fantastic, I thought, and rolled my eyes. I sat down beside Abu, and he smiled at me, setting down his Coke on the side
table—the womanlike contours of the bottle making it seem like a woman abandoned.
“Having fun?” he asked.
“Oh, is that what this is supposed to be?” I feigned surprise, and he laughed, hugging me close. That was the exact response he was looking for. I glanced briefly at Ami, now working the floor escorted by Uncle Jalal, who had his hand on her bare back. Every so often I saw that hand travel a little too low, and she seemed not to mind. I was surprised by how well they fitted together. They were both social butterflies, eager to be admired, thriving on attention. Abu probably just dampened Ami’s style with his political talk.
“Come, let me show you something,” Abu said after awhile, following my gaze and briefly looking at Ami and her beau. I wished his embarrassment was a tangible stain that I could scrub away. He stood up, taking my hand. I followed him to the Khans’ library and almost forgot to breathe. It was no less than a museum of books. Two corners of the large ballroom-sized room were filled with bookshelves up to the ceiling, sections devoted to various subjects, even a music library at the far corner with headsets and a large collection of old records. There were three large mahogany tables with leather-backed chairs around each and a giant spinning globe in the very center of the room on an ivory bureau, an intricately hand-spun Afghan rug underneath. But the thing that caught my eye was a woodcut engraving on the adjacent wall. I inched in closer. It was an interesting composition of a city being trampled by a devil.
“It’s New York,” Abu commented, taking off his glasses and scratching behind his ear. “See the signature? It was created by Albert Abramovitz, the greatest engraver of all times.”
There were more details below the artist’s signature.
Mefisto, New York. 1932.
“Virtually all of the work Abramovitz created was socially and politically oriented,” Abu explained.
I was mesmerized by the composition and its subtle details. There he was, Satan in a loincloth with a menacing expression on his face, crouching on a tall building and balancing his other foot on a smaller one. He had an arm raised in the air, watching, waiting to strike. I felt a chill run down my spine. The scene was of night, a clueless, unaware city lit up for its final destruction. Somehow I couldn’t pull myself away.
Abu motioned me to follow as he walked over to a bureau and bent down to open the last drawer in a familiar manner. I realized with an ache that that room had probably been his refuge at many Khan parties when Ami was busy charming the crowd. Abu drew out a scroll map and laid it out on one of the tables, his forehead lined in concentration.
We stood with our heads bowed low over the map of the world in front of us. My eyes went over to the West, scanning it for New York. What had motivated Abramovitz to do a rendering of a city’s destruction? I couldn’t shake the thought. Abu’s words brought me back to our side of the world.
“This is where your grandfather was born.” He pointed to a tiny speck north of Karachi. “Khairpur.”
The two ends of the map rolled down on both sides of the table and curled up. We studied the map, totally absorbed. “See how Pakistan looks,” Abu pointed out. “Like a mango squeezed of its pulp, misshaped and misproportioned. Elongated and lost. Our poor country.”
I peered closely and couldn’t help agreeing. The marked lines defining the contours of the land looked like a piece of gum stretched in one direction to its maximum length. Pakistan was a shy, squirming bride next to India, which spread its corners all around, looking for opportunities to advance, captivate and mesmerize. Bangladesh, a teardrop of India, was caught in years of natural disasters, as if paying for the price of some transgression almost in a karmic way. It wasn’t apparent looking at history what it was paying for, but someone knew.
We heard a laugh; it sounded like the tinkling of ice cubes in a glass. Ami’s voice. We both looked up. Ami and Uncle Jalal had wandered inside the library, not knowing we were there. Uncle Jalal had his arms around her and had pushed her against the wall. He looked like he was about to kiss her.
“Hello, Jalal.” Abu’s voice thundered inside the library with choked-back anger. “Amazing how
you stand out wherever you go, isn’t it?”
Ami jumped and slipped out of Uncle Jalal’s embrace.
“Did it occur to you that you might have gone too far?” Abu’s question seemed to be directed toward both of them.
Uncle Jalal rested his elbow on the wall and turned around with a smile, not bothering to answer. It was almost as if he was unperturbed by Abu’s presence. Could it be too much alcohol in his system?
“How are you, Tehsin? Arissa?” he acknowledged. “Reading as usual, I see.”
Abu didn’t reply and turned to Ami instead. She looked at him scared, tongue-tied. There was a deadly look on Abu’s face, and it seemed that it took all of his willpower not to physically harm her.
“Arissa and I are going home,” he said to her, his Adam’s apple bobbing up and down, his tone definitive. I was certain Ami knew that she had pushed his very last button, and there was no turning back. “Seems like you are enjoying this party, so I won’t inconvenience you. I am certain Jalal would be happy to drop you home.”
With that Abu turned and escorted me out, his hand firmly holding my forearm. There was a tiny bruise on my arm when I sat down beside him in the car. We didn’t talk the entire ride back, but I knew that that night would radically change our lives. I concentrated on the graffiti I saw along the way, starkly eerie in the dark, blocking out the apprehension for our future. DEATH TO NONBELIEVERS, one read. JIYE BHUTTO, read another. The final one, on a brick wall in the area we had nicknamed Khuda Ki Basti, or the village of God, where teeming masses of squatted and illegal dwellings sat right before we turned the lane into our picturesque neighborhood, admonished DO NOT URINATE. Below it ran a mocking tell-tale trail left by a brave soul.
“Your mother has left.”
The unnerving words echoed across the dining room and like a leech drained the surroundings of all air. The ear-piercing silence that followed became an incessant buzzing that wouldn’t go away. Like a bone, the joke we were laughing at minutes earlier got caught in our throats. Zoha’s hand, which had just lifted a spoon to bring it to her mouth, came to halt midair, and I saw her lower lip tremble. It could only mean one thing. I curled my fingers over her arm and gently but firmly guided the spoon into her mouth. She began to chew her cornflakes slowly as tears ran down her cheeks. Sian, 14 at the time, laid his spoon on the table on the side of his plate, wiped his face clean with a napkin, and escaped to his room without a word.
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