I boarded the bus to Hyderabad where I could transfer to the train to Punjab. Fat raindrops slapped the windshield, but the expected downpour never occurred. During the ride, I watched a dozen crows on a radio tower fight like politicians for the top rung. In a field a woman carried a wrapped load on her head, moving gracefully in her flowing cotton veil. She was like a tall yellow and orange bird. On the outskirts of Hyderabad, two white egrets waded at the edge of a cesspool in front of a bleached-out mosque. An immaculate swan swam in an open toilet of garbage.
The noisy city sped by me on that sweltering day. Police appeared everywhere, some shouldered Kalashnikovs, others had simple revolvers in their belts. Horns from the motorized rickshaws blared. I felt lonely, remembering busy Clifton, thinking of home. Was it Yusuf I missed or the protection his love implied, the refuge where I longed to rest my head?
I confess that phantoms of my middle-class upbringing inhabit my psyche whenever I travel. I did not want to interact with the tea vendors, shouting, “Chai, chai!” I did not want the dry palms of lost women cupping mine, calling “Baji, Baji,” pleading for a coin or two. I was disgusted by my own elitism, yet at the same time, I retreated into it.
As a woman traveling alone, I was given the preferred aisle seat, of course, rather than the window seat that was always open and dusty. The porter placed my valise overhead, while I tucked my book bag, food basket, and purse under my seat. Sitting alone, directly across from me was a sleeping young woman in a pale green silken shalwar kameez embroidered with gold. Her skin shone as her head rested on her own shoulder.
Then I noticed a bright red spot on her sleeve and a line of dried blood smeared across her wrist.
My heart sank.
Over the years I had heard the stories of burst stoves and other “accidents.” I had seen the slit wrists, the scarred faces, unmarked graves. After all, I worked in Sindh, where two women are burned to death every day. I recalled the day years earlier when three students had rushed into my classroom, in the same way Shams had done to tell me about Bilqis.
“Baji, you must come right away,” they said.
I followed them into a neighborhood of mud huts and an open sewer line. There, lying in the gutter, was the body of a woman. It was impossible to know how long it had been there. The dark flesh was swollen with wastewater and death. Insects swarmed around her eyes and belly. Her dupatta barely covered her face.
“Does anyone know this woman?” I called out to the people on the street.
No one responded.
“Has anyone called the police?”
Silence. The neighborhood women covered their noses with the edges of their dupattas. The men looked at their feet.
“It was an honor killing,” an old man said finally. He leaned on his cane. “The police are not involved.”
No family. No police. It looked like God, too, had abandoned this poor woman, I thought. I did not know what to do.
“Will someone take her body for burial?” I asked. “For the love of Allah?”
Two men with gray beards and a donkey cart stepped up.
“Five rupees,” the tall one said.
“Three,” I replied, and they nodded.
The men slogged barefoot into the sewage, one grabbing the ankles, the other grabbing the wrists. Her thin, stiff body was soaked and heavy; the once-colorful dress was now brown. They tossed the body into the back of the cart.
“Where is the cemetery?” I asked the neighbors.
“Not the cemetery, Madam,” the driver said. “The mullahs have declared her kari—black. She cannot be buried in holy ground. Just follow us.”
The two men mounted the front of the cart. The gray donkey inched down the road, and the neighbors formed a small procession.
I began to recite prayers with the students, when suddenly the cart stopped. We had not gone thirty meters from where the body had been found.
“Here,” the old man said. “We will bury her here. On the side of the road.”
The men began to break up the ground with some sticks. Two boys brought shovels. The women watched in silence, listening to the sound of metal piercing earth.
I could see that the schoolgirls were frightened.
“To bury her along the side of the road! It is treating her like an animal,” one of the girls whispered.
The old man had heard her.
“We will flatten the ground over her body and walk on her forever,” he said. Then he directed the boys to drop the body into the pit. The boys began to toss in big rocks from a distance, one at a time. Some were making a game of it. Others aimed intentionally, as if stoning the body again.
What could this woman have done to deserve this? I wondered. Whatever had struck her down still electrified the atmosphere.
The women did not stay to watch the burial, and I sent the schoolgirls away. But for myself, I felt compelled to stand there to the end, to be a witness to this horror that I did not completely understand. When it was finished, the roadside looked as it had before, except that dirt had been disturbed, as if sewer workers had just finished their job.
“To Allah we are born, and to Allah we shall return,” I prayed aloud.
“There,” the old man said, spitting on the ground behind him. He turned to me with his palm extended. “Three rupees, Madam.”
After Bilqis’ death, all my senses were keen, unmitigated by thoughts or reason. The blood on the wrist of the woman sitting across from me on the train was a taste my mouth recognized. I asked God, Why have you placed another broken woman in front of me? Life’s hardships were accumulating; a wave of nausea rolled through my body and I gagged.
I wanted to move to another seat, but I did not. It was quiet where I was, and moving to another seat would change nothing. I looked out the window into the darkness as lambent light diffused throughout the valley and the train penetrated the tunnel of evening. If Abbu were here, I thought, he would say something noble like, “We are living in a time when rulers are butchers, and the spirit has left us the way eagles disappear in a drought. We must take care of each other.” To me, my father’s words seemed like cotton candy on a paper cone. What was the use of repairing endless broken bodies and torn hearts? I thought that a person who would spend a lifetime trying to fix such wrongs must be a fool.
Suddenly, all of the fluorescent ceiling lights blinked on. The harshness jarred me and woke the sleeping woman.
“Assalam aleikum,” I said. Peace be with you.
“Walaikum salaam.” And to you, also, the woman replied, tugging the sleeve to cover her cut wrist.
I unwrapped the food I had brought with me. I offered her sea bass cooked in onions and tomatoes and a small disc of chapati, flatbread I had spiced with coriander. She accepted gladly. Around us women were passing dishes of Sindhi cuisine and cups of cold chai. A small Kholi woman in soiled clothing leaned across the aisle. She handed me cooked dodo flour and garlic-mint chutney. I gave her a sweet pancake spread with lentils, mung dal.
Flies swarmed as the compartment filled with strong aromas—garlic, hot peppers, fennel, turmeric, saffron, onions—and we swatted at them half-heartedly. It was not long before the agitation caused by the long train ride was soothed by the fullness of our bellies. Children curled up, two to a seat, and fell asleep. When women ventured to the toilet from time to time, they watched one another’s children. The train swayed; “tuctuc—tuctuc—tuctuc,” it said. Someone switched off the lights, and the horn of the locomotive cried into the night.
I learned that the woman across from me was named Khanum Wazir, and she was traveling to Rakhni with her husband, who had taken a seat in the men’s first-class compartment. At first, after she awakened from her nap, Khanum was tense, but with all the eating and chatting, she relaxed. Her hair had fallen loose from its clips during the ride and had become messy like a little girl’s. Her skin was the color of roti, lightly toasted bread, and her eyes were large and inky. She had a classic nose—strong and straight like
royalty—with a ruby stud in her left nostril. When she smiled, her eyes crinkled easily, as if she were suppressing a laugh.
“We were in Hyderabad for a funeral,” Khanum said. “And you?” Her question seemed more courteous than curious.
“Going to Lahore to see my family. My brother has been studying in London, but now he is home on holiday. I am excited to see him. It has been a long time.”
“And what has kept you away from your family?”
It was an intrusive, personal question, the kind of oblique inquiry I heard often. The real question was where is your husband? I explained my work as a teacher-trainer.
“How lucky you are,” she said, “to be a teacher. My husband will not let me work. Actually, he won’t let me do anything at all.” When I told her about Faisah’s legal aid work, Khanum leaned forward and whispered, “Maybe your sister can help me.”
I knew then that she was about to tell me about the blood on her wrist. And, by this time, I was ready to listen. Food, and time, and the rocking of the train were fortifying.
“I am from Sibi in Balochistan. Married for just six weeks. My uncle sold me to my husband for a herd of cattle and a small plot of land. Now I live in my husband’s house in Rakhni.” She fell silent, and I waited. A trace of her soul stared out from the back of her eyes as she whispered. “This old man never leaves me alone. He makes me do things I do not want to do. It is worse than it was with my uncle.” She stopped and sucked on her teeth before she continued her grievances. “I am trapped in the house all day,” she said. She spoke as if her words were backing up in her mouth and she had to spit them out, or choke. Then she looked me in the eye and spoke slowly, deliberately, so I would not misunderstand her meaning. “I will no longer get down on my knees for that man,” she said, and I believed I heard a promise she was making to herself. She turned over both of her wrists to show me the proof of her intention, scars of self-destruction I had noticed earlier.
“Can you help me get away?” she pleaded. “I cannot survive this. I am not surviving. I just happen to be alive.”
Then something amazing happened.
“Yes. I will,” I said. “I will.”
And, unlike the broken promises I had made to myself to go to the police about the murder of Bilqis, I knew this was a promise I would keep.
Khanum gestured to the back of the train, and we moved to vacant seats as far from the others as we could get.
“My address,” she said, handing me a piece of paper. “When you can do it, come to Rakhni. When you get to our district, hire a taxi and tell the driver to take you to this house. Come any day, except Friday. Come between one and three o’clock. I will be ready. You will see.”
Her eyes shone, revealing something opening up inside of her, powerfully, naturally, the way leaves unfold in spring.
“Are you sure you will do it?” she kept asking.
Each time I would nod, yes. I felt the same power spreading throughout my body.
“Are you sure?” she asked again.
“With Allah as my witness,” I swore. “I do not know when, but, yes, I will come some day and help you to get away. Soon. I promise.”
At first light the train passed into Punjab, where the greening riverbanks reminded me that prosperity and plenty still existed. As the locomotive snaked its way along the valley floor, it seemed as if the fading moon were sliding from one side of the train to the other. By midmorning the train pulled into the Multan station. Through the window I watched Khanum step onto the platform and trail behind her husband and the porter. Soon they were swallowed up by a bevy of cab drivers and their automobiles.
Through open windows at the station I purchased oranges and paratha for breakfast and cotton dhurries as gifts for my sisters and Amir. I sunk a thumb into the vertex of the fruit and peeled it open. Cooking oil from the parathas greased my fingers as I made my plan. I would take Khanum to another part of Pakistan where her husband could not find her. But where? And how to do it without harm coming to either of us? I popped an orange section into my mouth and sucked its sweetness.
Entering Lahore has always been a thrill for me—to be at the crossroads of South and Central Asia, roads a thousand years old. I knew my father would be at the rail station, standing back from the crowds that swarmed. He raised his hand to get my attention, but he need not have signaled. I recognized that soldier’s posture he maintains under all circumstances. I had not seen Abbu for many months. He was past sixty, and thinner than usual. The skin around his eyes was loose and freckled, and his entire beard was the color of ashes. I felt my heart hesitate at the fact of his aging, as if it were stopping to consider whether or not it could ever go on without him.
He kissed the top of my head.
“Ujala,” he said. “My daughter made of light.” His teeth gleamed. “Bless the train that brought you home to us.”
“Still the infidel, Abbu?” I teased him. “You worship too many gods already—but, really, the Pakistan Railway?” He laughed, but I could see anxiety in his puffy, electric eyes.
“God brought you back to us just when we need you most,” he said as he drove the Toyota out of traffic and into the countryside. The fine leaves of kikar trees shaded both sides of the highway, and the light of the oncoming evening cast long shadows. “I have failed your mother,” he said with resignation in his voice. “I’ve not been able to find even one husband for any of her daughters. Now it is time for Meena to get married. I’m not getting any younger, Uji, and neither is Meena. I tried to get Faisah to help me, but she said it was not her cup of tea—.” His voice hardened. “Uji, you must do it,” he said. “After all, you are the mother of this family now.”
“It will not be difficult to find a willing man,” I said, squeezing his hand. Abbu’s eyes moved from the road, to my face, and back to the road. His back and arms remained tense throughout the drive.
Old men rode bicycles with cloth bundles of mustard plants tied to their backs. Schoolgirls in gold shalwar kameezes and maroon cardigans carried baskets for collecting guavas. Strings of colored lights illuminated the stencils on the commercial truck ahead of us. Metallic red and gold Arabic script exclaimed, “Allahu akbar!” God is great!
Our family was living where we live now—fifty miles west of Lahore on the edge of the temple grounds in the Sikh quarter of Nankana Sahib, birthplace of Guru Nanak. When Abbu left Clifton years before, he joined dozens of Sikh families who had returned there to reclaim their founder’s temple that had been destroyed during the Partition.
That house is also a long way from Clifton. No more family compound with verandahs and wide gates. Instead we have a one-story, U-shaped mud-brick structure with a small interior courtyard. The front door is directly on the road. Inside, an open sitting and dining area is backed by a kitchen and bath. A tiny shrine room adjoins the sitting area. Abbu’s bedroom and Amir’s room are in the east wing—the men’s quarter—and the women’s quarter, with one large bedroom, is on the west. The courtyard faces a field of sunflowers and a patch of cauliflower and tomatoes. Jacaranda and ivy geraniums drape from window boxes.
In front of the house a row of multicolored hollyhocks struggled through the cracks between the house and the road. I saw Amir walking toward me, smiling. He had grown into a long and lean man, like Abbu, and even from inside the car I could see the light in his eyes.
“You look so much like Abbu now,” I said, stepping out of the Toyota and moving toward Amir. Abbu stayed with the car to check some wires under the hood.
“Oh, I’m much prettier than Abbu, don’t you agree?” teased Amir.
I had to laugh. Indeed he was pretty.
“Don’t be so vain, my boy,” I said.
“And I’m richer than Abbu.”
“Now you’re bragging,” I said. While Abbu had been deepening into the spiritual plane, Amir was moving quickly into the material. In London he had become an entrepreneur while still an engineering student.
“Well, I am preside
nt of PakBrains, Unlimited,” he said, “the first mobile computer repair service on the West End.” It was hard for me to know how to respond to Amir—so proud was he of himself and his bank accounts.
“Good, maybe you can come back and start a business here. Employ some of the locals.”
My Sisters Made of Light Page 3