Amal Unbound

by Aisha Saeed

  Nasreen had smiled when I brought her tea upon my return. Nabila admired my intricate orange henna designs, and Fatima hugged me and didn’t let go until she extracted a promise of a lesson as soon as our work was done.

  It was strange to step into this house and not feel terrified. To see people who welcomed me back. It wasn’t long ago I was completely alone here.

  I pressed Nasreen Baji’s clothing that night and hung them in her armoire while she reclined on her bed and listened to me describe the wedding. She asked me about the tent and the decorations, and the type of jewels in Shabnum’s wedding necklace. As I described the velvet wedding dress in full detail, and the satchels of dates and almonds the groom’s family passed out for each guest, it almost felt like I was gossiping with a friend. “The purse she carried was so tiny that it looked like a small fan, but it was big enough to hold all the gift envelopes,” I told her. “My sister Seema joked it had to have invisible layers hidden within to keep it expanding.”

  “Was my sister there?” she asked.

  “Yes. And I saw your niece Sana. She danced with my friends at the wedding.”

  “Last time I saw Sana, she couldn’t crawl—now she’s dancing?”

  “Crawl?” I asked. “But she’s Seema’s age. You haven’t seen her in . . .”

  “Eleven years,” she said. “Time gets away from you.”

  “But it’s your family!” I bit my tongue. I shouldn’t have said anything, but how could she find time to go to Lahore for shopping trips and not have time to see her family who lived just ten minutes away?

  “I want to see them,” she said quietly. “Used to go once a week when I first got married. But after a while, Khan Sahib thought it was best his wife not mingle with villagers, and I agreed. But he takes care of them. Makes sure they want for nothing . . .”

  Nasreen Baji had a bedroom that was practically the size of my house and the finest food and clothing. But she couldn’t see the people she wanted to see the most.

  Her cage was nicer than mine, but it was still a cage.

  I cleared my throat. “I brought something for you.” I went into my room and returned with a box.

  “What’s this?” She smiled.

  “Laddus. I thought you might like them.”

  “They look homemade!”

  “My neighbor Fozia made it. Shaukat’s wife.” It felt strange saying Fozia’s name in this estate, remembering how frightened she had looked.

  “I haven’t had a homemade laddu since I was a child.”

  “She’s known for her sweets. Her daughter is one of my best friends.”

  Nasreen Baji lifted a yellow confection from the box and took a bite. She closed her eyes.

  “Do you like it?”

  She fell silent for a few seconds. “It tastes like home,” she said.

  A knock on the bedroom door interrupted us. Jawad Sahib stepped inside.

  “He keeps calling me!” he said. He waved his phone at Nasreen Baji. “Five missed calls while I’m in the shower.”

  “Jawad,” Nasreen Baji sighed.

  “You’d think I have nothing else to do but cater to his demands!”

  “Well, if you helped him with the center, he wouldn’t call so much,” Nasreen Baji said. “He needs you. This literacy center is going to get him more votes for the next election, but only if people attend it.”

  “Why is that my problem? I have more than enough of my own things to deal with! And I have better things to do than force people to attend a ridiculous center.”

  “Jawad, if a journalist comes snooping and finds no one there, it could hurt your father’s election campaign. And that affects all of us. The school can sit empty after the election for all it matters. If we don’t get at least one person there by next week, the teacher said he’s going to leave.”

  Jawad Sahib exhaled loudly, and then his eyes settled on mine.

  “What about her?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “She can go to the center.” He laughed at her astonished expression. “It’s not such a far-fetched idea,” he said. “We’ll send her once a week. The center will officially have a student, and the teacher will have something to do. Problem solved.”

  “Jawad, it’s a literacy center for adults.”

  “Better her than no one at all.”

  Me? Attend a literacy center? That meant I could see a teacher again. Maybe they could show me how to write the poem I had wanted to write months earlier. Maybe they had books I could borrow. I studied Nasreen Baji, not daring to hope, but then—

  “Fine,” she said. “Until we can get some actual other people to start going, she can attend.”

  Chapter 37

  Ghulam dropped me off at the curb of the school. The bright yellow building with the green door was so different from the gray and brick structures I was accustomed to. I liked its color. It was the color of hope.

  The interior smelled of fresh paint; soft overhead lights lent warmth to the space. A girl with two braids tied with ribbons sat at a desk in a reception area with a patchwork sofa and a coffee table scattered with magazines.

  “Here for class?” the girl asked. She twirled a pencil between her fingers. She looked familiar—perhaps our paths had crossed at the market or she was the relative of a neighbor or a friend. Everyone here seemed to be connected in some way.

  “Yes. My name is Amal.”

  “Oh, right. We’re expecting you.” She stood up and led me down the hall to a classroom, where a young man greeted me.

  “Ah, our first student!” he said. “My name is Asif. I’ll be your teacher.”

  “It’s a big classroom,” I said, looking around a large room that held a few wooden tables and chairs.

  “Well, hopefully it won’t seem so empty once we get more students,” he said.

  “The way you talk,” I said. “It’s unusual.”

  “My accent.” He laughed. “I went to college in the United States; I guess some sort of accent stuck. My wife teases me about it, but I thought she was joking until now.”

  “Sorry to mention it,” I said, flustered. “It’s not bad. I like it.”

  “Thanks.” He smiled and pushed the notebook toward me. “So today, we’re doing a diagnostic exam. It tells me what you know and what we can work on. Don’t worry about getting it all right—we use this to plan your lessons.”

  I opened the notebook and picked up the freshly sharpened pencil. It smelled like math tests and poetry and all the dreams I once took for granted.

  Then I looked at the first page.

  “This is the alphabet,” I said.

  “Very good! And by month’s end, you will know it all! Go ahead and read out loud for me each one you know and circle the ones you don’t.”

  Of course it was the alphabet. I got so excited to be in a learning center and meet a teacher again that I forgot this was a place to teach people how to read. I wasn’t here to learn. I was window dressing in case someone came by.

  “Don’t worry about getting it wrong,” he encouraged. “Mistakes happen. If you knew everything, there’d be no point in being here.”

  “That’s the thing,” I said. “I know all my letters.”

  “Well, that’s what the diagnostic is for. If you know your letters, we can move on to connecting them. And then we can start on books. By the end of this program, you won’t just know your letters; you’ll be reading whole books.”

  He picked up a basket of books and set them on the table. Pictures of kittens and puppies smiled up at me. I looked at the one on top. It was the story of the cat that raised mice. The same story I read to Safa and Rabia not long ago.

  “The last book I finished was Benazir Bhutto’s biography,” I said.

  “Bhutto’s biography?” His smile faded. “I don’t understand. If you can
read, why did they send you here?”

  The silence stretched between us. When he spoke again, his words were flat.

  “Let me guess. The man who paid for this center is running for office?”

  I nodded.

  “So this was a publicity stunt, and you’re here in case a journalist shows up and reports on an empty building?”

  If I said yes, would he tell Jawad Sahib?

  “This isn’t the first time,” he sighed before I had a chance to reply. “Well, whatever the reason, there are plenty of people here who need this center. I spent the morning taping flyers on nearly every door in this and the other neighboring villages. It just takes one person to get the community to warm up.”

  “They won’t come.”

  “Why wouldn’t they?” He looked startled. “It’s all right. You can tell me,” he said, noticing my worried expression. “Why wouldn’t they come?”

  “I won’t get in trouble?” I asked.

  “You won’t. I promise. Please tell me.”

  “Because everyone is scared of Jawad Sahib. They’re scared to come into his center.”

  “But this isn’t his center,” he said. “His family sponsored the building and helped pay for the startup costs, but everything else—my salary, the materials, the books—it’s all funded by the Ministry of Education.”

  “The people here don’t care who paid for what. The Khan family’s name is attached to it and that’s all they need to know.”

  “Well, that’s just great.” He pulled up his laptop. He opened a bright white screen with a small box and typed. Words transformed with the touch of his fingers on the keyboard.

  “Is that an email?”

  He turned to look at me.

  “I wasn’t reading it.” I blushed. “It’s just . . . I’ve seen people do that before on television. Nasreen Baji does it, too.”

  “Yes.” He turned back to the screen. “I’m letting the people back at headquarters know what the situation is. See what we can do.”

  “How much faster is it to send a message this way than through the postal service?”

  He laughed, but when he saw my expression, he cleared his throat. “It’s definitely faster than the postal service. Want to pull up a chair? I can show you how it works.”

  When I sat next to him, he explained how people had email addresses just like they had home addresses. You could send messages from your own email address to other people with email addresses, and whatever you wrote came to the other person in a matter of seconds. It was like a telephone for words.

  “That must make life so much easier,” I said.

  “Yes.” He paused and studied me. “Want me to show you some more about computers?”

  “Really?”

  “Sure,” he said. “We have an hour. May as well teach someone something.” He pulled up a blank page with colored squares lining the side. “Ignore the English letters—I’m just showing you how to use the mouse to click and drag. The basics.” He clicked on a pink square. Then he clicked on the white space and drew a pink circle. He clicked on a black square and dotted two eyes. With the green he dotted a nose. With the blue, a smile.

  “See?” he said. “Easy. Now copy me.”

  “Drawing a face?” I laughed.

  “A computer is simple once you get the hang of it, but you have to get the basics down,” he said. “It may seem silly to draw a picture, but it’s the simple things that pave the road for the rest of it.”

  The rest of the hour vanished as I copied his drawings. We tried more complicated shapes. I learned to click. To drag. To drop.

  “I might be able to find some reading or math software for you next time you come,” he said.

  “Thank you so much.” I glanced back at the basket. “Would it be okay if I borrowed a book?”

  “One of those?” He laughed. “I think you’ll find those a little dull if you’ve been reading Iqbal.”

  “Not for me,” I said. “For Fatima—she’s a child who works at the estate. I’m teaching her to read.”

  “A fellow teacher.” He smiled and handed me a book. “Of course.”

  A fellow teacher—me? I almost laughed, but he was right. I might not have had my own classroom, but I was teaching Fatima. So I was a teacher.

  I walked out of the center with a smile on my face. I had forgotten how my mind buzzed after a lesson. I’d forgotten how each answer my teachers gave led to ten new questions. I’d forgotten how alive it all made me feel.

  My new teacher had given me a reason to dream again.

  Chapter 38

  I have a surprise for you,” I told Fatima the next evening.

  I had left Nasreen Baji watching television in the living room and slipped into the kitchen, where Fatima was putting the leftovers from the evening meal in the fridge.

  “Surprise?” Fatima squinted at me.

  I pulled out the book from behind my back.

  “A book?” Her eyes widened. “Could I read it?”

  “Well, maybe some of the words!” I said. “Want to read together? We can see which ones you can try to sound out.”

  Fatima hurried over to me as I turned to the first page. I read her the story of a lion and a mouse. The lion saved the mouse, and as the story continued, the mouse saved the lion in return. I watched her mouth form some of the words in disbelief. Sure, the words were simple, but it was happening. Fatima was learning to read.

  “Fatima! You’re doing it! See how many words you knew?”

  Fatima beamed.

  The doorbell chimed. I shut the book and glanced at the clock. It was just after dinner. People never came at this hour.

  Fatima and I stepped out of the kitchen and walked down the hallway to the foyer. We saw Bilal hurrying to the front door. He looked out the window. His hand tightened on the doorknob before opening it. I knew before he opened it. It was the police again.

  Nasreen Baji strode toward the door as the two officers stepped into the foyer. They were different from the ones who came last time.

  “I apologize for disrupting you at this late hour,” the bearded officer said. “We need to speak with Jawad Sahib. It’s an urgent matter, and we are unable to reach him by phone.”

  “He’s not home,” Nasreen Baji replied.

  “Where might he be?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “His own mother doesn’t know where he is,” the other officer muttered.

  “Excuse me?” She raised her voice. “Do you think we enjoy these regular intrusions? Khan Sahib will not be amused when he finds out how late at night you came to harass his wife.”

  “I apologize for Usman,” the bearded officer interjected. He handed her a card. “It’s just that it’s important we speak to him.”

  “I will relay the message.”

  Her face remained stony until they walked out of the foyer.

  “They’ve never done that before,” she exclaimed once they were gone. “They would never dare.” She looked at the card. “What on earth is going on?”

  She picked up her phone.

  “I need to make some calls,” she said to me. “Go look and see if anything needs to be done in the kitchen.”

  She headed up the stairs to her bedroom.

  “Can you read the book to me again?” Fatima tugged at my kamiz.

  “Tomorrow.”

  “One last time? Please?”

  We slipped back into the kitchen. She listened, not moving a muscle as I read to her again.

  When I finished, Fatima leaned up and kissed my cheek. “Thank you,” she said.

  I knew learning to read wouldn’t change the fact that Fatima was trapped here like I was, cleaning floors, dusting baseboards, and peeling potatoes. But at least by teaching her to read, I gave her a window to see worlds beyond ours
and a chance to imagine leaving the walls of this estate and to feel free, even if it was only for a little while.

  Chapter 39

  Asif was already sitting at the desk at the literacy center, typing on his laptop, when I walked into his classroom. His eyebrows were knit in concentration. He nodded when he saw me. I sat down across from him and pushed the book I’d borrowed across the table to him.

  “Thank you for lending me the book,” I told him.

  “How did she like it?” he asked.

  “She loved it! She made me read it so many times this morning, I think she’s memorized the story.”

  “That’s great.” He smiled. “I have some easier ones you can take for her today. She might even be able to read those all the way through on her own, based on the letters and sounds she knows. And good news! I found some great software that teaches math and reading. I’ve ordered it for the center, and it should be here in time for our next session.”

  “Really? Thank you so much!”

  “While we wait for it to come in, I thought you could practice how to take a multiple-choice online test. I found a few basic reading passages. They’re a little silly, but they’ll do the job while we wait for the software.”

  He pushed the laptop toward me and pulled his chair next to me.

  A giggle escaped when I saw the screen. An elephant, a dog, a cat, and a mouse grinned at me on-screen.

  “I warned you.” Asif laughed.

  I clicked on the green arrow. It opened a new page with the story.

  The elephant chases the dog.

  The dog chases the cat.

  The cat chases the mouse.

  The mouse chases the ant.

  The ant chases the elephant,

  and around and around they go.

  “Okay, now that that’s done”—he rolled his eyes—“let’s go to the multiple-choice part. Click the prompt below. It will open a smaller screen with the questions.”

  I stared at the screen.

  “Amal? Something wrong?”

  “It’s cruel.”

  “What do you mean?”