The Writing on My Forehead: A Novel

by Nafisa Haji

  The Writing on My Forehead

  Nafisa Haji

  For Mummy and Daddy, Majee and Bapajee,

  Nanima and Nana, Khalajan, Mariyah Khala,

  Auntie Mamma, Ma, Big Nanima, Mamma,

  Banoo Khala, Habiba Khala, Phupijan, and Bibi—

  whose stories helped me to understand what was

  For Ali,

  my hero in the story of what is

  And for Khalil,

  my window into the story of what will be

  The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ, Moves on: nor all your Piety nor Wit Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line, Nor all your Tears wash out a Word of it.

  —RUBAIYAT OF OMAR KHAYYAM,

  translated by Edward Fitzgerald

  Contents

  Epigraph

  One

  I CLOSE MY EYES and imagine the touch of my…

  Two

  NO. NO! I will not come to the wedding. Not…

  Three

  IN THE FACE of my rather traumatic, tantrum-filled railing against…

  Four

  I WAS ABLE TO spend only one afternoon at Big…

  Five

  MOST OF THE rest of my stay in Karachi centered…

  Six

  RAZIA NANI AND I left Karachi—the image of Belle and…

  Seven

  WE DIDN’T TALK at all on the way back to…

  Eight

  I CAME HOME FROM that summer in Karachi and London—head…

  Nine

  WHEN I STARTED high school in the fall, a month…

  Ten

  ALL OF MUMMY’S family came to celebrate Ameena’s wedding, except…

  Eleven

  FOR THREE YEARS after Ameena was married, I was the…

  Twelve

  AFTER LONDON, EVERY moment with my parents on that trip…

  Thirteen

  BEFORE I BEGIN,” Majid Khan said, addressing an eager audience…

  Fourteen

  MY BRIEF AFFAIR with Majid Khan, the defining relationship of…

  Fifteen

  SOME LONG MONTHS after my return home, months when Mummy…

  Sixteen

  DADDY’S DEPARTURE FROM Karachi was so sudden that I was…

  Seventeen

  DESPERATELY, I TRIED, in those first few hours after the…

  Eighteen

  I DON’T KNOW WHAT kind of string-pulling my uncle had…

  Nineteen

  AMEENA WAS DEAD. I had not reached her in time.

  Twenty

  I AM BACK IN bed, having tried and failed to…

  Twenty-One

  I SPEND THE NEXT few hours in a frenzy of…

  Twenty-Two

  OUR CONFERENCE TIME is over and we are seen to…

  Twenty-Three

  SHUJA PUTS SAKINA to bed as I hover in the…

  Twenty-four

  SHUJA IS LONG gone—leaving me to wrestle with a bad…

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  ONE

  I CLOSE MY EYES and imagine the touch of my mother’s hand on my forehead, smoothing away the residue of childhood nightmares. Her finger moves across my forehead, tracing letters and words of prayer that I never understood, never wanted to understand, her mouth whispering in nearly silent accompaniment. Now, waking from the nightmare that has become routine—bathed in sweat, breathing hard, resigned to the sleeplessness that will follow—I remember her soothing touch and appreciate it with an intensity that I never felt when she was alive.

  I shake my head to dispel the longing. The world has changed around us, and, because of all that has happened, I know it is my time to give comfort and not to receive it—not that I have yet proven equal to the task. Shoving myself out of bed, I make the quiet nightly journey across the hall. I pause in the doorway of my sister’s childhood room. Her daughter, Sakina, is asleep—a little lump, rising and falling slightly with each even breath, curled up in the corner of Ameena’s old bed, apparently at ease with the night and its quiet in a way I have not been for a very long time.

  Every night, I have the same nightmare.

  I search through a crowd of people on an endless expanse of green lawn, pushing past bow-tied waiters in white uniforms who carry trays piled high with biscuits, sandwiches, and tea. There are tables draped in white linen, chairs occupied by aunties and uncles. Beyond the garden, there is a pavilion trimmed in teak, furnished with cane-backed chairs where the pale, white ghosts of British officers and their wives, the founders of this place, whose names are still etched on plaques at the front entrance, congregate to laugh at the antics of the natives, swirling their gin and scotch, clinking their glasses.

  My search is urgent, every moment that passes means loss. And death. I know I am dreaming. But the knowledge doesn’t alleviate the urgency. If I find Ameena in time, then everything will be all right. As I approach the edge of the crowd, I see what I did not see before—that the endlessness is merely an illusion. There are high walls surrounding the lawn. From beyond them, I hear a roar of sound, which drowns out the clinking of glasses, the laughter and chatter of the people around me. Over the walls, which seem to be shrinking, getting lower so that what is outside is starting to become visible, I see crowds of angry people, clouds of dust and debris that hover over a city of ruins. In the distance, I see twin plumes of smoke rising up out of the chaos.

  I turn away from the fearsome sight and see her. She stands alone, at the other edge of the crowd. A path clears. I run. Before I can reach her, I am distracted by voices behind me, calling my name. I stop and turn to see whose they are. There is an old woman urging me to hurry. Another old woman, my grandmother, who shakes her head sadly. An old man dressed like Gandhi, battered and bruised, throws his shoulders back and shouts something I cannot hear, raising his fist in protest. There is another white woman, different from those officers’ wives in the pavilion, dancing by herself to a tune I cannot hear, her arms encircling an imaginary partner. These are all familiar characters from stories I know, stories I have lived my life by.

  I turn my back on all of them because Ameena is still there, alone, at the edge of the crowd. She is wearing red, the color she wore at her wedding, her head draped by the long dupatta of her outfit. I begin to run when I see her, shouting a warning she does not hear. From somewhere behind me, a gun is shot. Ameena falls to the ground, the red of her blood darkening the red of her clothing. I scream, but I make no sound.

  There is someone beside me. A child. She was with me all the time, running through the crowd, trying to save her mother. I turn to face her and see her arms outstretched. I lift my own to meet hers and find I am holding something in my hand. She sees it, too, and recoils. I look down and understand why. I was wrong. The shot did not come from behind me. It came from the gun in my hand.

  There are no secrets here—I know exactly what the dream means. It is what I should do that I cannot resolve. I approach the bed and stare down at Sakina for a moment. Her face is hidden, turned away from mine. Her arms are wrapped tightly around a little doll that used to be Ameena’s. I wrap mine around myself and marvel at how easily she has staked her claim. On Ameena’s room. On Ameena’s toys. I remember battles fought with my sister in trying to do the same. Battles and skirmishes, which always ended with a story from our mother. But that was long ago—in the days when I was young enough to want whatever Ameena had. In the days before I began to roll my eyes at our mother’s stories. As I turn to leave the room, my eyes fall on a jewelry box on the dresser. And the memory of one of those battles is so clear that I can feel Am
eena’s arms around me, now, as her daughter sleeps in the room where the skirmish took place.

  Ameena’s grip around me was so tight that I had to struggle to free one hand. But I did, reaching up immediately to grab a clump of hair and pull for all I was worth. She shrieked, but not as loudly as the howling I had commenced upon losing hold of Ameena’s jewelry box, which she had found me playing with in her room. Her hair was her Achilles’ heel, long and straight, easy to grab and hold on to. Also a target, perhaps, because I was jealous of it. My own, my mother kept boyishly short—because I was a wild creature, she said, and it was too much trouble for her to try and keep it tame.

  “Let go, Saira! Ow!” Ameena tried to regain control of my wayward hand, but it was no use. In any case, we both heard the angry stomp of our referee in the hallway, coming to break up the fight.

  “Bas! Junglee girls—I will not have this wild-beast behavior in my house!” Mummy had pulled us apart already. “What has gotten into you, Ameena? To fight like a shameless creature?” Mummy didn’t ask me the same question. Because she had long ago decided that I was just that—a besharam creature, brazen by nature. Unlike Ameena, who could be chided in this way because she was not.

  “Saira was in my room without my permission! She took my jewelry box—” Ameena retrieved the item from the floor where it had fallen during our dispute.

  “I was just playing with it!”

  “You have your own, Saira.”

  “But—it’s—”

  “She broke it!”

  “Not on purpose!”

  “She broke it and now she wants to break mine!”

  “The ballerina came off of mine.” I was crying. The ballerina had been important. “There’s no dancing now.”

  “Oof-ho! Junglee girl. Always breaking things, jumping here and there like a monkey.”

  “I wanted her to dance faster. I didn’t mean to break it.”

  “That’s what being junglee is. Doing things without thinking, without meaning to, breaking things because you’re not careful.”

  I didn’t think that was fair. Though it was true that nothing of mine seemed to last as long as Ameena’s. But it wasn’t fair that Ameena would get away with her half of the fight. “Ameena hit me. She grabbed the box out of my hand and hit me. And then she pushed me and grabbed me and hurt my arms.”

  “Ameena!” The shock in my mother’s voice was enough to make Ameena lower her head in shame. Mummy nodded, satisfied with Ameena’s show of remorse. Genuine remorse. Not the kind I trotted out on occasion. Then Mummy turned back to me. “And you, Saira, you didn’t pull her hair? I saw when I came in the room, both of you rolling around on the floor, pushing and hitting. Haven’t I told you what happened to my cousin Laila? When she and her brother were fighting, pushing and pulling each other, over a pencil? Her brother poked her in the eye with that cursed pencil. Not because he meant to, Saira. Junglee boy, he always was. Poor Laila!” Mummy shuddered. “She lost her eye. No one would marry her when she grew up. And her brother had to take care of his poor, unfortunate, unmarried sister for the rest of his life. Even now, she lives with him, instead of having a husband and a home and children of her own. You see? You see what happens when children fight like animals?”

  Ameena lowered her head, again, in shame. I felt my own eyes widen in gruesome fascination. “So—she had no eye, Mummy? Was there a hole? Did she have to wear a patch? Like a pirate? What about a glass eye? Why didn’t she get a glass eye? Sammy Davis Jr. has a glass eye! And Colombo. Daddy told me. That’s why they look like this—” I scrunched and squinted one eye in an attempt to show her. “This wouldn’t be so bad. See? See, Mummy?”

  My mother shook her head in disgust. She looked at Ameena, who shook her head, too. They laughed.

  “Shameless creature! What will I do with you? Is there nothing you are afraid of?”

  I didn’t laugh with them. Not then.

  Now, I smile as I take a seat on the floor across from the bed where Sakina is sleeping, the first genuine smile I have managed in weeks, though the muscles required to achieve the expression have been well exercised by the failed attempts at strained, cheerful assurance that I offer her by day. I get the joke now. The one my mother and sister had laughed at. That I had missed the point, the moral of the story: that fighting with your sibling can lead to serious injury, including the loss of important body parts, and, worse, marital eligibility—the last a primary theme in most of Mummy’s stories.

  Sakina sighs and mumbles something indistinct. I wait for a few moments of silence to settle. Carefully, I rise up from the floor, finding Sakina’s discarded clothes there, which she has kicked off and across the room. I pick them up, holding up the T-shirt, the shorts. When I was nine, three years older than Sakina is now, I was no longer allowed to wear shorts.

  At nine, Mummy believed, shorts and dresses and skirts that ended above the knee were no longer appropriate forms of attire for girls—her girls, anyway. The day before I turned nine, as Mummy sorted through my closet and dresser, tossing shorts into a pile that she would later give to Goodwill, she told me about a childhood friend of hers who had nearly died of snakebite back in India, because she was wandering heedlessly through the garden in a dress that was way too short when a cobra, which had escaped from a snake charmer’s basket, struck her on the thigh. I was not too young then to question the logic of that moral: beware of snakes when scantily clad. I remember asking Mummy why boys weren’t subject to the same rules, whether she considered them to be immune to snakebite or somehow less attractive to snakes.

  I fold away Sakina’s clothes and notice how small they are in size. She is six years old. Too young to bear the burden of what she has witnessed. I exit the room that is now hers, as quietly as I entered. Wandering through the house, I think of India—so very far away from the Los Angeles suburb where Ameena and I grew up. Mother India, where both Mummy and Daddy were born, was the source of all of Mummy’s improbable fables. Stories that always ended with a twist—of fateful, karmic proportions.

  Mummy’s was an extremely comforting worldview—to believe that bad things happened to bad people. Or, at least, to not-so-good people who made bad choices. It gave the world an ordered sort of logic, where roles were clearly defined and duty and obligation comprised the script. It was a logic wholly convincing to my sister.

  Yet, from the beginning, I resisted. I focused instead on tangents—on pirates and glass eyes. Later, I was much too preoccupied by the whats, wheres, whos, and whys of the plots, stopping Mummy often to interrupt, focusing always on what she considered to be the unimportant details.

  But it was the details that mattered most to me—those devilish details that caused Mummy’s stories to spill over and out of the boxes that she had constructed for them. In eighth grade, I asked permission to go to the prom.

  “No dancing! We don’t dance, men and women together, Saira. It’s wrong. It leads to other things that are wrong.”

  “But, Mummy—”

  “No! No buts. I know what can happen, believe me.” Mummy paused—a long, calculating pause. “I knew a man once, who loved to dance, who shamed himself and his family because of it.” Mummy gave the pot on the stove a final stir, banging the spoon on the edge of it before lowering the heat, putting the lid on, and sitting down at the kitchen table, indicating with her hand that I should do the same. “It was a monumental scandal! And it all happened because of that man’s love of ballroom dancing.”

  “What was the man’s name?”

  “He—his name is not important, Saira. Who cares what his name was?” Mummy stopped to frown at me for a moment. “You would not know him anyway.” She paused again, still frowning. Then she resumed her story. “He was well-to-do, head of his family’s trading business in Bombay, a respectable leader in the community. His family had come a long way from its very modest beginnings, when luxuries were unheard of and it had taken careful budgeting to maintain the appearance of respectability that made the
keeping of at least one servant necessary. And all of the credit for this advancement belonged to him. Though, to hear him talk, one might never know this. He was the eldest brother in a family of four sons, and, because his father had died young, when this man was only seventeen, he had shouldered responsibility for the younger ones. None of them could complain about the job their brother had done. All that was his, all that he had gained, was theirs as well.”

  “What did his father die of?”

  “Blood cancer.”

  “Blood cancer? What’s that?”

  Another frown. “Leukemia, which we used to call blood cancer. But that has nothing to do with the story! Really, Saira, I cannot tell you anything when you constantly interrupt in this way.”

  “Sorry.” But I wasn’t really. Just curious.

  “Yes. Well. His reputation in the community was unparalleled. Everyone knew him as a gentleman. And they were right. A more thoughtful, generous, and upstanding man would be hard to find among the business leaders of Bombay. Everyone knew that he was the man to see during hard times, and many, many people came to him when they were down on their luck. He never said no. All anyone had to do was ask. He often said that this was the secret to his success—a firm belief that all of his wealth was just an amanat, a trust, given to him and his family by Allah but which belonged, really, to his fellow man. That it was his duty to share it with those less favored by God.”