Hijabistan

by Sabyn Javeri

  ‘I’ll be home soon, Ami,’ he said and hung up.

  ‘Sorry,’ he said sheepishly, for by now, a few men with shovels had entered the pebbly lane. He parked his bike and they made their way through the workmen digging up the already dug-up road.

  ‘This city is constantly being dug up,’ Shahid said as he led her towards the green, leafy gardens of Frere Hall.

  Shumaila scowled some more and said, ‘I wouldn’t mind if they actually fixed it, but they just dig up roads and leave them like that. The whole city looks like a colony of giant molehills, with streams of ants swarming around it.’

  Shahid smiled at the image but said nothing. He knew these conversations only made her more irate, and that somehow the mismanagement of the city would eventually become the fault of his mother and sister, who seemed to be responsible for most of Shumaila’s troubles in the world.

  Away from the smoke and exhaust, and under the green shade of the former church, Shumaila’s mood lifted and she reached for his hand. Out of habit, he glanced around for pesky policemen who preferred troubling couples to controlling crime. Seeing no one around, he squeezed her hand back. His mobile rang again. This time it was a request from his younger sister to buy milk and eggs on his way home.

  ‘Can’t you turn it off?’ Shumaila asked, the irritation rising in her voice.

  He laughed and said, ‘You want them to send out a search party?’

  ‘Just tell them you are with me.’

  Shahid looked as if she had told him to go jump in a well.

  ‘How long will we hide? I mean how can your family be so … so …’ Shumaila was about to say inconsiderate when she thought better of it and turned away.

  ‘Shumaila, listen, I know …’ Shahid’s voice trailed off as his phone rang again.

  Without glancing at the screen, he shouted, ‘What the hell now?’

  A smiling Shumaila watched as Shahid’s defiant expression changed into an apologetic one.

  ‘Sir,’ he mumbled, ‘Sorry, sir, I thought … yes, yes, sir. Jee, sir, I…’

  He looked up at her with pleading eyes and whispered, ‘Five minutes?’ Then, without waiting for an answer, he turned away and started taking notes.

  As soon as he hung up, he stuffed his notepad into his shirt pocket and grabbed her hand. He held it close to her heart. The weather was hot and there were very few people about. The couple moved closer. They didn’t need words as their hands pawed each other hungrily. The roar of a motorcycle made them jump apart and they looked up just in time to see a man approaching on foot.

  ‘Coffee, tea, sir?’ the man asked.

  ‘Nahin,’ Shahid said, but the man refused to go away. They knew there was no restaurant here and this was just a ploy to harass couples. Not wanting to waste precious time arguing with the man, Shahid pulled out a fifty-rupee note and waved him away. But it was too late. The man had seen his wallet and now refused to leave them alone.

  ‘Let’s go,’ Shahid said, getting up abruptly and motioning her to follow him.

  The man began whistling and singing lewd songs as she got up and dusted the back of her abaya. Shumaila glared at him.

  ‘Don’t engage,’ Shahid said, grabbing her hand and pulling her away. The sun was setting and he thought it better to leave. They made their way back to the alley where they had parked. But it wasn’t their day. The sky darkened and a crunching noise on the gravelly road made their steps falter. A police patrol had turned into the lane.

  As the white-and-blue police pickup truck slowly and ominously made its way towards them, Shahid’s heart sank. He realized the guy harassing them must have been an informer.

  ‘Where to, Romeo?’ A portly policeman emerged from the beat-up mobile and grabbed Shahid by the shoulder.

  ‘Let go,’ he said, although every instinct told him not to.

  ‘Oye, ankhen dikhata hai? I’ll put you in the lock-up and see how much you raise your voice then.’

  ‘The police in Karachi has no crime to fight that you are always patrolling parks?’ Shumaila asked.

  ‘Madam seems very experienced,’ the policeman sniggered, and a hot fever of colour burst onto Shahid’s face.

  ‘Chalo,’ he said to Shumaila, getting on the bike.

  ‘Oye, wait, oye,’ the policeman said, snatching his helmet away. ‘Where do you think you are going? Tell me your addresses and your parents’ phone numbers.’

  The couple exchanged a brief look.

  ‘I said—’

  ‘Flat number 1300, Cage Building, Cantt,’ Shahid said with a sudden impatience.

  Slightly irked at getting the information so easily, the man barked, ‘And the laadeez’ address?’

  ‘Same.’

  For a second, the pot-bellied policeman looked confused. He narrowed his beady little eyes at them and then, as if some sort of enlightenment had dawned upon him, asked, ‘Cousins?’

  ‘No,’ Shahid said with as much patience as he could muster up.

  ‘Don’t act smart with me,’ the policeman leaned right into him. ‘If you care so much about her reputation, why bring her here?’

  ‘Because she is my wife,’ Shahid shouted at him.

  ‘Wife?’ Now it was the policemen’s turn to exchange looks.

  The one with the protruding belly gave himself a good scratch before roughly shoving Shahid in the chest, ‘Acha, so show me your nikahnama,’ he said, to which Shumaila quickly pulled out a copy which had their NICs stapled across it.

  The man snatched it while staring at her with so much loathing that she had to look away.

  He spat as he turned the document over in his hands, trying to match the names on the NIC with the form. Convinced there was no loophole to dive into, he waved the document over their heads and shouted, ‘Oye, then why are you acting like lovers if you are married?’

  The couple considered the irony of the man’s words and decided to stay silent.

  The trimmer one of the two policemen now stepped up: ‘What are you wasting our time for, then? Why go to a park if you are married? Go home and do what you want to do!’

  ‘We can’t,’ Shumaila said, turning her face away as if disgraced by the weight of her own words.

  The policemen twirled their moustaches and turned expectantly towards the boy: ‘Why? Why can’t you go home?’

  A loud exhale followed before Shahid said, ‘Sir, because our lives are like the broken flyover.’

  ‘Hain jee?’ The pot-bellied policeman scratched his bald head again and said, ‘What flyover?’

  ‘The half-constructed, half-demolished one.’

  Their confusion had now reached pitiful heights, so the boy explained, ‘You see, they built it without thinking, then tried to demolish it without thinking. Our parents got us married because I had got a job, but they never thought about where we would live. First they couldn’t wait to get us married, now they constantly try to keep us apart.’

  The policeman and his subordinate stared at them blankly, still unable to comprehend what the problem was.

  ‘Jee,’ Shumaila added, ‘like the flyover, our parents rushed us into marriage but didn’t think what marriage meant. They never realized that there was no space for us in the house. They never thought about privacy, intimacy …’ her voice trailed off. Clearing her throat, she continued, ‘We come here because we have no place to sit and talk. We are interrupted all the time. At night, we share a room with his younger sisters.’

  Shahid dropped his head and said, ‘We never even get a chance to talk alone in our two-bedroom flat, let alone…’

  As if on cue, his phone rang. It was his sister asking him not to forget the eggs and milk.

  When he hung up, he did not think it was worth his while completing his sentence.

  ‘Chalo,’ he said to Shumaila. ‘Hurry.’

  ‘Yes,’ she nodded bitterly, ‘the eggs and milk can’t be kept waiting.’

  The policemen let them go with a sense of paternal understanding.

&nb
sp; ‘Eggs and milk,’ the beleaguered couple heard the men tut-tut as they roared past and joined the sea of motorbikes, rickshaws and cars jostling along on Karachi’s half-dug-up and half-constructed roads.

  In just a few minutes, they were indistinguishable in the swarm of similar couples on narrow bikes, all disappearing into a cloud of cement and dust in this broken city.

  The Full Stop

  Assia put down the Judy Blume novel she had been reading on the pillow next to her. Poking the neatly folded sheets at the end of the bed, she kicked her legs up in the air and stretched the bedsheet over herself. Pulling it over her head, she stuck two fingers into her vagina and then held them up to her nostrils to examine. Her hand smelt strange and unfamiliar. A wave of pain ran through her body and she doubled over.

  ‘Ami,’ she cried. But no one came.

  Feeling almost nauseated with the sharp jabs of pain that had begun to pierce through her abdomen, she dragged herself to the bathroom. When she got up to flush, her head almost reeled. It had happened. The thing she had read about in books, heard older cousins discuss discreetly, had finally happened to her. Assia felt almost proud of her body.

  ‘Ami,’ she ran to the kitchen where her mother stood stirring a pot over a blazing stove.

  ‘Ji, beta?’ she responded. Before Assia could reply, Ami pointed towards the carrots. ‘Scrape them quickly. It’s nearly time for your father to come home.’

  Assia ignored her. ‘Ami, I got my periods.’

  Without looking up, her mother turned off the stove and turned towards her. ‘Where?’ she asked, instead of the ‘when’ Assia had expected. She grabbed her arm with an urgency Assia could not understand and began to drag her out of the kitchen.

  ‘I was on the bed, reading…’

  Her mother marched her off to the bedroom before she could even complete her sentence. Once there, her mother stripped the bed sheets while telling Assia to take out clean clothes and an old underwear from her cupboard. With robotic efficiency, her mother dumped the sheets and her clothes into the washing machine as she instructed Assia to stay in the bathroom. About five minutes later, her Ami came in with a pad, some cotton and gauze. She instructed Assia to use the pad at first and then, when it got full, to replace it with cotton wool wrapped in gauze. She taught her how to secure it in her underwear.

  ‘Now don’t throw it out if it’s only half full,’ she instructed.

  Assia could only blink in response, for she could not imagine the thought of more than a few red dots leaking from her body.

  As if reading her thoughts, her mother paused in the middle of wrapping gauze and rubbed her arms. ‘Happens,’ she murmured.

  ‘Okay,’ she said, getting up. ‘Now don’t pray or touch the Quran in this condition. Don’t bathe the first few days. And Assia,’ she looked at her sternly, ‘beta, keep yourself clean and keep the house clean. I don’t want to be wiping spots off the furniture. It will be very embarrassing.’

  Slowly, as her mother hurried back to the kitchen, Assia felt a sense of shame creep in; as if she had spilled a drink in front of guests, or she had seen something she wasn’t meant to. She walked with slow, hesitant steps back to her bed, the bare mattress staring up at her as if to complain. Not knowing what to do, she spread a couple of newspapers on the bed before covering it with a bed sheet. The papers crunched as she sat down, echoing her discomfort. She ran a hand over the book she had been reading, wondering why the experience of her first period was so different from that of the heroines in her English novels.

  Where is the celebration, the big talk, the ‘you are a woman now’ chat?

  Perhaps that stuff was all made up, she mused. A passing thought, as she stared at the fair-skinned girl in a dress on the cover of her book, nagged her: these books are set elsewhere, it seemed to say. These books don’t tell your story.

  She dismissed it, for she loved Judy Blume. And didn’t the blurb say the stories she wrote were universal?

  The doorbell rang before she could ponder any further. She jumped up, making the newspapers crackle beneath her, as if reminding her to be careful. She dashed across the hall, then slowed her run into a brisk walk as she neared the door. Opening the door with a flourish, she was about to shout, ‘Salaam Alaiqum, Abu’, but stopped when she saw the solemn look on his face. Her father stood in the doorway in his white medical coat, his head cocked to one side as he spoke on his cellphone.

  ‘Yes, give her 5ml of paracetamol. Yes, yes, you can call me in an hour if the fever doesn’t break. Ji, okay.

  No problem.’

  He walked past her, nodding at her salaam. Assia watched her father as he placed his briefcase on the table and, for the hundredth time, thought how she would much rather be like him and save lives than like her mother, slogging away in the kitchen at all hours. A thin veil of resentment seemed to mask her face as she thought of her mother and her lack of enthusiasm at her big moment. She’s probably never read a book in her life, Assia decided with some contempt.

  Without thinking, she marched up to her father and said, ‘Abba, I have some news.’

  ‘Ji, beta,’ her father beamed. ‘Did you get first prize in the art competition?’

  ‘No, Abba, but something tremendous happened today. I got my first period.’ She waited, secure in the knowledge that her father would explain everything to her in medical terms, for he understood the importance of the momentous thing that had taken place today. In the books, this was a life-transforming event. What should she expect from her body, she wondered as she stared expectantly at him. Wasn’t this the boundary that separated girls from women? Wasn’t she officially a grown-up now? She stared eagerly up at him, wanting to remember this moment forever. And she did.

  Her father seemed to have frozen, his colour a shade darker. His eyes darted from side to side, though his body was still. Finally, after a few seconds, he carried on as if nothing had been said. He cleaned his glasses and turned on the TV, flipping to his favourite talk show host. Then, when she continued to hover over him, he raised the volume. When she still didn’t leave, he shouted for his wife. Her mother appeared, face red from the heat of the stove, hands smelling of spices and garlic. Assia looked contemptuously at her. But then she saw him nod towards her and in that momentary wordless exchange, her father’s face seemed to transmit a deep sense of embarrassment. Wordlessly, her mother tucked Assia’s elbow into the crook of her arm.

  ‘Chalo,’ she whispered, gently nudging her out. A confused Assia looked back over her shoulder as her mother draped a dupatta over her and pulled her into the kitchen.

  ‘Come and help me cook.’

  Yanking the dupatta off, Assia marched out of the kitchen, only to stop when she saw her father’s face. A deep pop of colour seemed to rise from his collar to his cheeks, as if something had exploded in his shirt. His neck seemed to have sunk into his shoulders and he seemed to her, suddenly, older.

  She watched her father’s face grow more and more distant and she realized that her story would not turn out like that of her American young adult novels. In her story, menstruation was a thing to be hushed, veiled and concealed – not celebrated. It was the moment when honour was replaced by shame, friendship with humiliation, and love by fear. For girls in her part of the world, pads were concealed in brown paper bags like counterfeits, films on the subject were banned, and the denial of a natural state was encouraged. They were called impure, napak and unclean. This was not something to be discussed … not now, not ever. And so, in that one moment as she saw her father turn away from her and her mother in denial, Assia found clarity. She knew now why it was called the period. Because, like a full stop, this moment in a girl’s life put an end to all conversations.

  Period.

  The Girl Who Split in Two

  I draw a line. Straight down the middle of the photo. Between her eyes, down her nose, across her mouth, dividing her chin into neat halves. I tear along the line. Tear her in two. I put the right away. I hold onto t
he left.

  I am going to hold it all day.

  I can’t tear it. I can’t frame it. I do what I always do when I don’t know what to do. I close my eyes and bury it, deep inside my mouth. I chew slowly, neatly, firmly. But when I open my eyes, she is still there. Except she isn’t. Not physically. I find myself thinking that the Old Me, the one that exists only in my past, will never leave me alone.

  Time to go. Yallah.

  The rusty old van cranks up the mountainous terrain of Palmyra. I imagine the supplies of ammunition inside sliding from one end of the seats to the other like cans of beans rattling down a hill. It was the same bus that had brought me here. From Luton. But that was another life, another me. I soon forget as people rush out of their tents to greet it. The bus is like a bird of hope – it makes you forget your surroundings, if only for a second.

  This time it’s not bringing people, but supplies. The residents scramble towards it, holding out their hands like beggars. It stands there, majestic in its rusty old body, guns sticking out of the broken windowpanes, sacks of flour sending up clouds of white dust as they unload them along with boxes of grenades. It seems surreal. Like a child’s drawing where all sorts of things are jumbled up – nappies next to bombs, and bullets next to bananas.

  This is a joke.

  The driver unloads a cargo full of the latest arms, and the crowd steps back. That is not what the hopeful want. They are waiting for everyday luxuries like shampoo, soap, toilet paper, sanitary napkins, toothpaste. The Old Me reminds me that these things were not luxuries back home, but necessities. I tell her to be quiet. I’m afraid that someone would hear her.

  I don’t want to draw attention. Soon, the van would return and those in need of things not supplied on this trip will be allowed to come on board.

  The Old Me is already there, waiting.

  The driver honks three times. ‘Bus will leave soon. Only twenty people. Minimum luggage. No breakables.’

  I think of all the things that can break.