The Writing on My Forehead: A Novel

by Nafisa Haji

  When my eyes opened, I heard the captain’s voice, more muffled than Razia Nani’s had been, announcing the beginning of our descent. Razia Nani, hand on chest, exclaimed at how time had flown—I don’t think any pun had been intended—and directed me back to the overhead bin to retrieve her hand luggage. She extracted an old blue-and-white-striped grocery bag—from Tesco, I think—stuffed full and as wrinkled and creased as the face she began to pat and primp with the creams and cosmetics that came out of it.

  Before long, we were on the ground. And welcomed, embraced, and folded into the sweaty armpits of loving relatives. For a few seconds, I felt lost among them, looking for Nanima before remembering that she was gone.

  Jamila Khala and Lubna Khala, my mother’s older and younger sisters, were there to receive me. Along with Zehra, the bride, whom I was surprised to see. She was beautiful, radiating happiness and health and hope. Her eyes were lined thickly with kohl, emphasizing the shine of their whites, her hair long—much longer than when I last saw her—straight and smooth, like Ameena’s.

  I hugged her, laughing a little as I asked, “What are you doing here? Isn’t the bride supposed to be locked up indoors for weeks before the wedding?”

  She laughed back, making a face as she nodded toward her mother, and said, “If Mum had her way I would be.”

  “Nonsense, Zehra.” Jamila Khala frowned up at her daughter with the same expression my mother so frequently frowned with at me, its effect greatly diminished by her being a half a head shorter than Zehra, four-inch heels notwithstanding. “Of course she had to come to the airport to receive you, Saira. You’ve flown all this way to attend your cousin’s wedding. We are only sorry that Ameena didn’t come with you. And your mother also, of course.” Jamila Khala pursed her lips, slightly, on these last words, running a hand through her short, perm-frizzed hair.

  “Where’s Big Nanima?” Hers was the other face I had looked for and missed.

  “She’s at my house,” Lubna Khala said, “waiting to see you. You have all your bags? Good. Say good-bye to Razia Nani and we’ll go.” She turned to her driver, an old, bearded man with red, hennaed hair, and pushed my luggage cart toward him, gesturing with an imperious wave of her hand, setting off clinks with her gold bangles, every red-tipped finger ablaze with the sparkle of diamonds and emeralds and rubies. “Driver, take these bags to the car! Chalo, chalo! Let’s get out of here as quickly as we can.”

  I turned to Razia Nani, who put her hand on my head, “Khudahafiz, Saira. We’ll meet soon. When the wedding functions begin, eh?” As she turned to walk away with her son and daughter-in-law, who had come to receive her at the airport, I heard her say, “Such a good girl she is. So respectful and well-mannered. Shabana has done well with her.”

  As Lubna Khala promised, Big Nanima was waiting for me at the house. Opening her arms wide, she folded me into flesh that felt less substantial to my arms, which were longer and stronger than the last time I had embraced her, two years before. She asked after my mother and father and Ameena. And then cried a little as she remembered her sister, my grandmother. I shed a few tears myself, sharing in the grief of my grandmother’s sister as I had not been able to with my own.

  “So,” Big Nanima said finally, wiping the corners of her eyes with the end of her sari. “Your mother didn’t come.”

  “No.” I was not sure what else I should say, self-conscious about the revelations I had received from Razia Nani on the plane.

  Big Nanima put her hand under my chin, telling me again how much I’d grown. “You are starting to bloom, eh, Saira? All of my sister’s grandchildren have blossomed into such beautiful young men and women.”

  “Your grandchildren, too, Adeeba Khala,” Jamila Khala chided Big Nanima. “Are we not your children also?”

  “That you are.” Big Nanima, whose eyes were still on me, asked, “Has your Jamila Khala told you about the foreign guests that are to be present at Zehra’s wedding? Did your mother tell you why she refused to attend?”

  I shook my head. “No.” My chin lifted a little, in defiance or resentment, I’m not sure which. “But Razia Nani told me.”

  Big Nanima clicked her tongue. “So you found out the truth from a stranger. Your mother should have told you before, warned you.”

  Jamila Khala spoke then, clicking her tongue between her teeth, too, her expression one of exasperation, “Oof! Shabana didn’t tell Saira because she is stubborn. For twenty years she has carried her anger upon her head, refusing to even discuss our father. Stubborn, she’s always been stubborn, since she was a lit—”

  Lubna Khala interrupted with another clink of her bangles, “None of us are happy that you’ve invited that woman and her children here. To Pakistan. Don’t blame Shabana! If I didn’t live here myself then I probably wouldn’t have come also!”

  “But why? What is the matter with all of you? You think it didn’t affect me? She was my mother, he was my father, too. And I was there when it happened! You think I have forgotten? Oof—tell me, what does it matter now? It’s all in the past. He’s dead, she’s dead. Both of them gone, what difference does it make now? Tara is Zehra’s best friend. They went to the same school, same college. How would it look? To invite her and not invite her sister and brother? And if I invited them, I had to invite their mother, too. Who knew she would have the cheek to actually come? And her children, don’t forget, are our sisters and brother, after all.”

  Lubna Khala had nothing to say to this. Neither did anyone else. Zehra, who looked as if she had been witness to this argument many times before, sighed, “I’m sorry I’ve caused so many problems for everyone.” She turned to me, “And I’m sorry that Shabana Khala isn’t going to be here. But Tara is my best friend and I don’t want to talk about this anymore.” She glanced at her watch. “I’m late for an appointment. I have a fitting for the wedding outfit. Saira, you’re going shopping with me and Mum tomorrow, so rest up, okay?” She came over to hug me and left, shouting, “Borrowing your car and driver again, Lubna Khala. ’Bye!” over her shoulder as she scurried down the hall, chappals flapping, past the servant who was carrying in my bags.

  Jamila Khala looked at her watch now, and exclaimed, “Oof! Look at the time! I have an appointment, also, with the jewelers. I’ll see you all later. Don’t forget about the shopping tomorrow, eh, Saira? We have to get you measured up for your clothes, too.” She hurried out the door, too, heels clicking comically fast, oofing and tsk-ing her way out of the house about how little time there was left to get everything done that needed doing.

  After Jamila Khala left, Lubna Khala left the room to supervise the servant’s delivery of my bags to the guest room.

  Big Nanima took a seat on the sofa in the lounge and beckoned me to her. “Come, come, beti. Tell me, what shall we call for to eat? Paans, bhel puri, bun kabab? Let’s call for a little bit of everything, eh? We’ll tell Lubna not to bother preparing anything for lunch and spread all of the food out on the table so you can choose.”

  I smiled. But my heart wasn’t in it, she could see.

  “What’s wrong, beti?”

  “I wish I could stay with you, Big Nanima.”

  “With me? What would you want to stay with an old lady for? When there’s a wedding in the house and all of the hungama that goes with it? Your place is here, with your aunts and your cousins, where you can practice all of the songs and dances you will perform for Zehra and her bridegroom. I will come every day myself, to watch you and clap and cheer.”

  Lubna Khala reentered the room and said, “Adeeba Khala, please! I’ve told you a hundred times—you must stay here for the wedding. You tell her, Saira. Tell Big Nanima. She’ll listen to you. Everyone knows you are her favorite.”

  “Stay here? I have my own place to look after, Lubna.”

  “Yes, yes. We know, Adeeba Khala, you have your own place. But there’s nothing to keep you from staying with us for a few days. You don’t have your students to use as an excuse, now, during the summer hol
idays.”

  “No. No students now. But Lubna, beti, I have my own routine and rhythm, which you know I am very particular about. And I am used to my own lumpy bed. Your house is too big, your mattresses too soft for me.” Big Nanima glanced up at me and laughed. “This one is swaying from side to side from exhaustion. Go, Saira. Go and wash up and rest a little. I’ll wake you up for lunch. Then we’ll eat and we’ll talk. Go now, beti, go.”

  I got up a little unsteadily and obeyed.

  BIG NANIMA KEPT her word and came every day. But, with one exception, I never got to spend any time with her alone. In this way and others, Karachi was a totally different place for me that summer than it had been on any of my previous visits. Staying at Lubna Khala’s house, which had become Wedding Central, had never been an option in the past. Now, finally, Lubna Khala had become the ruler of her own domain, in charge of her own domestic affairs, where before the title had belonged to her mother-in-law, who had also recently passed away. Lubna Khala’s house was a vast structure, laid with marble, trimmed in teak, each room humming with the boxed air-conditioning that so few in Karachi could afford. Very different from Big Nanima’s modest home.

  Even though I saw Big Nanima every day, I missed the dynamic that she and Nanima had combined to create. Instead of the gentle rhythm of their elderly company, I found myself to be part of a crowd of extended family—and lonely nonetheless. I missed my mother. I missed my father. And most of all, I missed Ameena. I missed being her younger sister. Letting her do the talking for me. The bossy, self-important advice she offered uninvited and that I normally resented—orders, really, that I flouted more often than not. I wished desperately that she, at least, had come with me. She was part of how I defined myself and I felt off-course without her.

  This was my first visit to Karachi as a “young adult.” By which I mean I had a regular period and breasts—a fact that affected my experience there far more than I would have expected. As soon as Razia Nani and I had gotten off the plane, I had noticed. How male the world around me was. I felt the eyes, men’s eyes, drilling holes into my clothes in an attempt to see what lay underneath them. I was wearing jeans that day—a mistake I realized and rectified from the moment I arrived at Lubna Khala’s house, thinking that the sight of a young woman in trousers was what was causing all of the fuss. But wearing shalwar kameez and a dupatta didn’t make much difference. At one point, on a shopping expedition with Jamila Khala and Zehra—we were looking for bangles to match the yellow outfit Zehra would wear at her mehndi ceremony—I started trying to outstare the men who lounged around the doorways of the stalls in the bazaar.

  “What are you doing, Saira?! Look down, for God’s sake!” Jamila Khala yelped when she noticed what I was doing. “You have to look down. It’s the only way to handle them. Look down, ignore them, pretend you don’t notice. Staring back only gives them a cheap thrill—as if you were inviting them to look more.”

  “But it’s so disgusting! Why do they stare? They make me feel so—so dirty!”

  “They stare because they’re men,” my diminutive aunt snorted with impatience, directed with equal force at me and the men around us. “If you don’t like it, use your dupatta to cover your head.”

  “What?” But I did as she suggested. “What’s that going to do?”

  “It gives them a message. That you’re a good girl, a modest girl. It won’t stop them from staring. But you’ll feel more comfortable, more protected.”

  But I didn’t. I felt fragile and painfully aware of my own femininity. Vulnerable. And resentful for being made to feel so.

  FOUR

  I WAS ABLE TO spend only one afternoon at Big Nanima’s house on that trip alone to Karachi. Everything was the same and I spent the first hour exploring it all, discovering things I must have seen before but, some at least, I had never noticed. All of the bookshelves, floor to ceiling, in the living room and bedrooms, stuffed with books. There were Jane Eyre and Pride and Prejudice—these I was familiar with from our last visit, when Big Nanima had given them to me to read for the month we had spent there—and hundreds of other books with which I was not yet acquainted. There was a globe on a stand in the corner of the living room. On a desk, next to it, there were stacks of paper, handwritten pages, in English and Urdu.

  “What’s this?”

  “Ah—you naughty child. You have discovered my secret.”

  “You—you’re writing something?”

  “Translating. Which is very different from writing.”

  “Translating what?”

  “Well—those pages, there”—she pointed to one of the stacks—“that is no secret. Only some Urdu poetry that I am translating into English. I have worked on two books already which have been published.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes. And that pile of papers—that is something new I have begun in my spare time. A television screenplay.”

  “TV?”

  “Yes. It’s a script for an Urdu drama. A serial adaptation of Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility. They have begun filming it already. Very exciting.”

  “You’re in show business!” I laughed.

  “Shhh! After all the negative things I have said about television, I am afraid I will be rightly accused of all kinds of hypocrisy when my role in the production is found out.”

  I went back to wandering around the room, taking a stand in front of some photographs, fading, on a table in the corner opposite the globe. Some needed no explanation. A series of them: Big Nanima, getting bigger in each successive photograph, standing beside groups of young women dressed in crisp white shalwar kameezes, pressed and starched to perfection—college students, hers. Others of a young woman with curly short hair, sari-clad, umbrella and pocketbook at hand, posing in front of Imperial fountains and statues and monuments.

  Of course I knew who these pictures were of. But I had no idea when they had been taken. I took one of these off one of the shelves and turned to the subject herself to ask, “Big Nanima, when are these from?”

  “London, beta. From when I went there to study.”

  “I didn’t know that you went to London to study.”

  “Hmm. Well, I did.”

  Something struck me as odd. I remembered Nanima’s conversation with Ameena. About how she had been married to a man she had never met, at the age of sixteen. I couldn’t reconcile that with the photographs of Big Nanima on the wall in front of me.

  “But Nanima was, like, a child bride, wasn’t she? I mean, why did she have to get married so young? While you were allowed to go to London to study?”

  Big Nanima knew me well enough to hear no accusation in my question. She smiled. “That’s a very good question. Something I would have asked myself, at your age. Something I ask myself, still, today.” Big Nanima sighed, took the picture frame from my hand, and sat down on the sofa, patting the cushion next to hers, inviting me to sit down with her.

  When I did, she continued, “It’s a good story, Saira—the answer to your question. In the beginning, you see, I thought I was the unlucky one. But time has a way of proving all of us wrong in the end. Every single one of us. Sit. Listen, and I’ll tell you.” Big Nanima set the photograph down on the coffee table and reached for the food she had spread there earlier. She unwrapped one of the kabab rolls she had called for from down the street, scooping extra chutney on the side of my plate before handing it to me.

  Then, picking up the photograph, she ran the end of her dupatta over it, as if removing dust I could not see. “See how short my hair was in this picture? How I always hated it—so curly and unkempt! Since our days in Bombay, before Partition, I had longed to chop it off. But only when I was in London, far away from my mother, did I have the courage to finally do it. I was never very interested in such things—in my appearance and in what others thought of it. Though, truthfully, that is because I knew that the impression I made on others wasn’t a very favorable one. Only once do I remember spending any length of time in front of the mi
rror, which was little Zahida’s favorite place in the house!” Big Nanima laughed. “That day—I remember it so well! Important for me—because of what did not happen. And for Zahida—because of what did.

  “It was—when was it? Oh—1941, if I’m not mistaken. We were still living in Bombay. Yes, I remember standing at the mirror in the room I shared with your grandmother, smoothing my hands down over my kameez, hating myself for the sweaty palms that made the action necessary. I put my hands together, squeezing them, trying to suppress the nervousness that filled me up, ’til here.” Big Nanima pointed to her throat. “I looked in the mirror and saw myself the way his mother would see me, and his grandmother. A plain face. With skin that was—well, rather dark.” Big Nanima smiled gently at me, shaking her head ruefully. “And hair that is easier to laugh at now than it was then. I tried everything. Pigtails, a ponytail, braids, a bun. But nothing could tame that unruly mass.

  “It is one of the few times I remember resenting my father—for being so brutally honest regarding the situation about to unfold. I thought that perhaps Gray, the poet, was right, and ignorance, in this instance, would have been preferable to the folly of knowledge. That is, preferable to the painful awareness that my father’s words had caused. That everything hinged on the outcome of this meeting. That one of my flaws, for once, might actually become an asset.

  “The boy’s mother and grandmother were due to arrive at any moment. To meet and assess my worth as a potential wife for the boy they represented. A boy who had expressed the specific and very unusual desire to be wed to a ‘read and written’ girl. An English-speaking girl. ‘Beti,’ my father had said bluntly, ‘this might be your only chance. And finally, I hope, we will prove your mother wrong. That I was right to allow you to study.’

  “You see, I was already a little too old to be single. My parents were worried for me. There had been few enough inquiries made about me. And of those, I had suffered, in the way of comparison. Because my younger sister, Zahida—your Nanima—was startlingly beautiful. She had light brown hair, green eyes, and sharply symmetrical features. Zahida’s skin was translucent and luminous, and she was pale. With oh-so-beautiful, silky, straight hair that fell to her waist. She was also—well, not academically inclined.” Big Nanima looked up at me, a smile in her eyes. “Why lie? Your grandmother was only sixteen. And she was a stupid girl. I should know, as her occasional tutor, unkind as it is to say, to even think such a thing about one’s own sister. But, in the situation which I was about to face—when a suitable boy’s family came to call to size up the available girl in question—intelligence, or the lack of it, did not seem to count for much. Our parents had been fending off proposals for Zahida before she had even reached puberty.