by Sabyn Javeri
When the rickshaw surprisingly stopped at a red light, a little boy selling newspapers flashed one in our face. ‘Breaking news! Benazir’s murderer spotted. Killer framed in full close-up. Breaking news, breaking news!’
I eagerly reached out for a copy, leaving Halima to haggle the price of the paper. I turned it over, searching frantically for a name, for a face; but all I saw was the silhouette of a nameless man, circled loosely. This blurry, hazy shadow was the killer. I let out a laugh, unsettling not only Ami Jan and Halima but also the rickshaw driver, who’d been driving with his head turned around to catch a glimpse of the paper.
‘What does it say? Who killed her?’ they chorused.
‘This nameless blob,’ I answered. As two heads bent over the page and one leaned over the divide, I pointed to the dark shadow of a man pulling a pistol so close to the back of Benazir’s head, that if she had turned around at that instant, she would have bumped right into him.
The rest of the journey passed in silence. When we reached home, Halima’s haggling was half-hearted and she let Ami Jan pay the full fare with lacklustre grumbling as she dragged herself inside. ‘So expensive everything has become these days,’ she mumbled. ‘Prices are touching the sky.’
‘Nothing is cheap in this country,’ said the rickshaw driver, depositing the money into the folds of his shalwar.
‘Except human life,’ added the gardener, squatting by the gate. ’They’ll kill you for a mobile phone down where I live.’
As I got out of the rickshaw, the driver asked me for the paper. ‘Since you have read it,’ he added. I was hesitant to part with it, finding some perverse comfort in having a real person associated with the politician’s sudden death. Life is precious, it made me think. Uncertain and short.
Before I could respond, he grabbed it out of my hand, lingering for a second on my fingers. Gripping my wrist firmly, Ami Jan pulled me away from him.
‘As if the first attempt on her life hadn’t been enough,’ we heard him mutter as he scanned the paper. ‘And what good was her death to us? Complete shutdown for three whole days! Where is a day-wager to go? My four children and two wives starved for the three days I couldn’t get any customers. All because of this Madam Democracy.’
The gardener came over and asked to see the paper. Satisfied, he nodded and said, ‘What can you do, bhai? Women are impulsive creatures.’
‘You are right, bhai,’ said the rickshaw driver, revving up the motor, ‘Women only listen to their hearts.’
That evening, the three of us sat in my childhood bedroom, underneath a still ceiling fan, waiting for the power to be restored. Ami Jan sat on the bed while I sat cross-legged on the cold marble floor as Halima oiled and braided my long hair.
‘How dry your scalp is,’ she lamented as she poured what felt like half the bottle onto my head. ‘Do you remember how I used to massage oil into your head during your exams? Barely a childhood you had, with your nose always buried in a book,’ Halima chatted as she rubbed oil into my scalp.
‘Yes, how hard my daughter would study,’ Ami Jan replied. She peeled an orange and passed it to me after rubbing it with salt and black pepper. ‘From morning till noon, she would rock back and forth, repeating her lessons.’
‘But what use? It’s not like she has to go out and work,’ Halima nodded dismissively.
Halima didn’t know it, but she had just voiced something that had been bothering me since the day I got married. Many lonely nights when I saw my husband immersed in his work, I comforted myself with a magazine or a television rerun, trying to push away the thought that I too could have had a profession.
‘An educated girl has better prospects of a proposal from a good family,’ Ami Jan replied. ‘See what a good man her husband is. She is lucky to be married to him.’
She stressed upon the last few words and I knew what Ami Jan was trying to tell me.
Another slice of orange was passed to me.
I remained silent.
Halima, as usual, did not know when to stop. ‘But you are also educated, no, Begum Sahiba? And look at the husband you landed. Full of bad habits he was.’
I could tell she had gone too far, for Ami Jan put away the plate in her hands and turned her whole body towards her.
‘It is the good fortune of a girl to have a caring, faithful husband,’ she said. ‘Not everyone,’ she continued, waving her index finger at Halima, ‘can be as lucky, but God has been kind to us. Perhaps in return for my pain, He has spared my daughter. Truly, it is a blessing to have a husband who is loyal.’
I knew the words would cut Ami Jan like ice, but
I couldn’t help myself as I said, ‘And what if the wife is unfaithful?’
Ami Jan didn’t talk to me for the rest of the afternoon. When we finally encountered each other in the bedroom, she was getting ready to say her prayers. I placed my hand on her arm. ‘How long will you turn away from the truth, Ami Jan. How long?’
‘Zara,’ she replied, ‘you didn’t learn anything from my troubles, did you? All the pain I suffered, the betrayals, the humiliation…’
‘But it was your decision to suffer. You chose to stay. Perhaps you did it because you wanted me to hate my father. Yes, you wanted me to hate him. You did, didn’t you?’
Slowly, she raised her eyes to meet mine. ‘I never wanted you to hate him, Zara. But I did want you to understand the meaning of loyalty.’
In the fading light, as Ami Jan sat on her prayer mat, framed against the window, she seemed only half the woman I used to know. I hardly recognized her, but then I hardly knew myself these days. All I knew was that I was no longer the Zara who grew up on a steady diet of fear. Fear Allah. He is watching you. Fear the society – people will talk. Keep your mouth shut – even the walls have ears.
‘I want to leave my husband,’ I said, silencing the voices in my head.?
Hearing this, she folded one corner of her mat and came close to me. ‘Zara, my child, your home is with him. You are lucky to have a husband who looks after you. He is caring, loyal, doesn’t drink, doesn’t smoke, doesn’t beat you … On what grounds do you want to leave him? Just like that? You got bored? Huh? That’s it? Look at me. You cannot leave him. What will people say?’
‘Stop, Ami Jan. Why don’t you try to understand? I cannot live your life. I want to leave him. I want to be free. I am not the same person I was before I left Karachi. Please, I don’t want to go back to my husband. I have changed—’
‘You can’t leave, my child,’ she cut in. There was finality to her words as she opened the Quran.
‘Ami Jan,’ I tried again, ‘I have felt something you never will. There is a world out there. Much larger. There is more to life than being a wife or a mother. I want to … I want to live life on my own terms. Ami Jan … please…’
And then I stopped. Tears were rolling down my cheeks.
‘Don’t do it, Zara,’ she said. ‘Don’t break your marriage.’
Maybe, I thought as I looked into her eyes and nodded my head, my heart really was sick.
Now, as Ami Jan took a deep breath, it seemed as if she had inflated.
Towering over me, she began reciting, ‘Qul auzu bin rabil nas … Say, I seek refuge in the Lord of all mankind; From the evil of that which whispers evil in the heart and slinks away…’
She was mouthing the prayer to dispel spirits. I bowed my head the way I used to when I was younger. For a moment, I felt the distance between us bridging. But then she turned and went back to her prayer mat. She was gone. Back to Him.
I watched her raise her palms to her shoulders and then fold them across her chest, touch her knees with her fingertips and then fall into prostration. She seemed to be falling and rising like a clockwork toy timed to perfection. Her lips kept moving all this while. Prayer after prayer. Praise after praise for a God who was never satiated.
Finally, she rested. Folding her legs beneath her, she raised her palms and begged His forgiveness. ‘Tobah Astaghfar,’ she
chanted, sitting in an upright posture. ‘Forgive my sins,’ she repeated thirty-three times on each finger. ‘Forgive me, Ya Allah, Tobah Astaghfar, God is great, Allah ho Akbar, The Merciful, All Knowing and Forgiving …’ her words making the sinking feeling in my stomach rise up like waves in my throat.
I knew then I would never be able to leave. My life would turn out just like my mother’s. A wave of bile rose up my throat as I turned to her and said, ‘Okay.’
SIX MONTHS EARLIER
The day before I left London, I went to see Aidan at his home. Number 17 was a stoic black door in a nondescript brick building in a narrow dark alley. Bland and unobtrusive, almost as if it did not want to be found.
It was a small room in a small flat share. Everything was neatly packed away. A suitcase stood in the far corner as if ready to leave. Only a sweater flung over the chair gave any sign of habitation.
‘So this is where you live?’ I asked.?
‘For the time being,’ he answered.?
I nodded as if I understood, although I didn’t. I couldn’t imagine sharing a house with people who were not family. Ignoring the uneasiness, I asked him how his day had been, although what I really wanted to ask was if he’d keep in touch. I searched for answers in his eyes. Will I see you again? How can you let me go? Ask me not to go. Tell me not to go. Will you ask me not to go? Will you? Won’t you? But eyes are not always easy to read.
We sat talking about a poem of his that had been shortlisted for a prize. He offered me tea. I declined. Silence followed as we stared awkwardly around the bare room. When it began to sink in that this is where it all ended, all I wanted to do was leave it all behind and just say goodbye.
‘I have to go now,’ I said when we had talked about everything other than what really mattered.
‘Why so soon?’ he asked.
‘Why so soon?’ and not ‘Why do you have to go?’
I noted.
‘I have to say my prayers,’ I said, unsure whether staying would help get an answer out of him.
‘Say your prayers here.’?
‘Here?’
‘Yeah. Here. Women don’t need to go to a mosque, right?’?
‘Right,’ I repeated, wondering if he needed time to find the right words or wanted one last fuck. The last thought hurt so much, I felt like a thief who repents in the middle of a theft. What was I doing here, in this strange room with a stranger who lived in a house full of strangers? What had I become? I felt metal flood my mouth and all the tenderness I used to feel around Aidan began to feel like a self-imposed lie. In the harsh light of day,
I felt cheap. An adultress, betraying her husband and child who had done nothing to deserve this. Though the windows were shut, I felt my senses flooded by the scent of jasmine. Jasmine that came loose on my unfaithful father’s bed when he came home late, the fragrance clinging to his body long after the golden goblet had been drained and the women were no longer there.
I dropped to my knees in shame. Spreading my shawl on his faded beige carpet, I began to pray without performing an ablution. I raised my palms to my shoulders, facing them outwards, I chanted ‘Allah ho Akbar’ three times. I folded my arms across my chest and recited the Surah Fatiha. I rose in ruku, kneeled and bowed in prostration, then dropped again, rising to my knee, chanting, praying, hoping. I don’t know when it was that I began to cry and when Aidan took me in his arms. Together we rose, together we fell, our knees bumping, lacking any grace as we said the afternoon namaz. I chanted in Arabic and he whispered back, ‘I love you.’
I kept my gaze fixed straight ahead as I continued praying through his kisses. ‘Stay with me.’ I kept chanting the Arabic verses as he took my clothes off, kneading my breasts and pressing his nose into my neck.
I remember watching a spider crawl on the wall, a ladybug nestled in the folds of a jacket that hung on a peg as a thousand unseeing eyes looked back. I remember that my cheeks felt warm against his. ‘Tobah Astaghfar,’ I had chanted like Ami Jan. ‘Tobah Astaghfar,’ I had said as we kneeled on all fours. ‘Forgive me, God,’ I had whispered when we stopped.
Before I left, I had traced my fingers across his closed lids.
‘I will be back, I promise.’
I didn’t know then, it would be the last time I saw him.
* * *
An edited version of this story was first published in Writers on Writing, 2013.
The Hijab and Her
Nasira was busy looking up scholarships to US grad schools when the annoying professor called out a question. ‘Post-colonialism.’ The fat American instructor pointed to the title on the PowerPoint slide and said with a nasal twang, ‘Now, how many of you are familiar with your own history?’ He peered over his reading glasses and Nasira felt his eyes rest on her. And more specifically on her headscarf. She knew she had no reason to believe she was being singled out, but by some strange instinct felt as if the professor were mocking her. And more specifically, her headscarf.
Nasira felt her neck stiffen and the muscles between her shoulder blades tense as the man glanced around the room. ‘Nasira,’ he called out. She looked up from her screen, almost relieved that the wait was over, but at the same time annoyed that he seemed to think she spoke for all Pakistani girls her age. And more specifically for her headscarf.
‘We were colonized by the British, yes, I know that, Professor,’ she mumbled, her scarf rustling as she nodded. ‘We all know that.’
‘Ah,’ the fat professor said, as if catching a thief red-handed. ‘But that’s not what I am asking. I am asking, who are you? Where do you come from? And how does that shape the choices you make in your life?’
Nasira let out a long, slow breath as she settled down comfortably for a long sonorous lecture on how South Asian Muslims were confused people who had been Arabicized to their fingernails. Without realizing, she tugged at her headscarf and together, the scarf and her, settled down for a comfortable open-eyed snooze.
The whirring sound of the air conditioning was soothing, and the professor’s voice like white noise. She listened to him drone on, at times marvelling at her own ability to zone out.
‘Now, you people often say “the partition of Pakistan and India” but really, it was just the partition of India,’ he said triumphantly. ‘You were all Indians just seventy years ago!’
‘But, sir,’ a thin, shrill voice shook her out of her stupor. She turned around to see Zia – the only other Pakistani boy in their class, and one who felt more than anyone else the need to prove his patriotism – raise his hand.
‘But, sir, officially we call it Independence Day.
14 August is Independence Day, not Partition Day, sir.’
Not one to be called out, Nasira turned back to see the indignant professor turn a slight shade of pink as he cleared his throat to counter-argue, ‘Ahh, but independence from what? How many of your parents and grandparents think it was independence from the British? Oh no, my dear friend, the rhetoric goes that an Islamic nation was carved out of an infidel one. And it is this rhetoric that I want you to question.’
Satisfied that there was no further argument coming from Zia, he went on, ‘You see, boys and girls, I taught in Pakistan for three years and I can tell you this …’ he paused for effect and cast a slow glance around the room, resting slightly longer on Nasira, or so she felt, ‘there are some people there who actually believe that Pakistan was marked out the day Mohammed bin Qasim set foot in Sindh!’
He chuckled at his own sorry joke, making Nasira steam with agitation. The skin around her temples felt tight and she leaned forward, ‘But, sir, doesn’t that just absolve colonialism of all blame? I mean, the Brits are the ones who started the whole Hindu–Muslim divide. How come there was no conflict before that? For centuries, Hindus and Muslims lived in harmony and then as soon as the White man came and started his divide and rule policy, India split in two, and then three.’
Nasira was conscious that her hijab made a bigger statement than her words. A voice
in her head said, You’re hardly the most credible person in the classroom to be accusing the White man, and so she paused.
Picking up on that slight hesitation, the professor leapt at her. ‘And what do you think of the Mughals and Mongols who plundered the subcontinent before the western colonizers, Miss…’
She knew he knew her name well, and was only pretending to forget to make her feel small and unimportant. He waited, expecting her to say it. So she didn’t. She sat there tight-lipped, her hijab feeling itchy and tight around her scalp.
By now, interest had perked up in the classroom. Other students were beginning to look away from their screens and towards her. Some of them stopped texting and put down their phones. A few even had faint smiles, as if settling down to witness a wrestling match.
Nasira took a deep breath. The professor touched his glasses. The two looked as if they were ready to battle each other. The rest of the class leaned forward.
But Nasira had had enough. Her humiliation was complete. And so she pulled out a gun and shot him. In her imagination.
Ha, she thought with a silent laugh. If only she could. In reality, the only thing she could shoot him was a dirty look. And so she swallowed, looked away, and pretended to examine her fingernails. The rhetoric was not new. Neither was it old. History had been moulded in other parts of the world too, but what annoyed her about her American professor in this large American college where she was an exchange student from Pakistan was that they continued to mould history till it was no longer recognizable. One only had to look around at the Wild West theme parks, the cowboys-and-Indians stories, the revering of Columbus as the discoverer, to know that this place had its own way of telling a story. History is always told by the victor … now where had she read that?