She was pleased. He had looked for her.
He swallowed the saliva in the back of his throat, adjusted his glasses, and rested his eyes again on her face. He said, “When I saw Bilal, he told me you were living with garbage-pickers somewhere outside of Hyderabad.”
“Not exactly,” Ujala said, “but close. We set up schools for the garbage-picking children there.” She hesitated, wondering why he had stopped looking for her. “So, was it the children, the trip to Hyderabad, or was it the smell of garbage that kept you away?”
“I don’t know, Uji. Maybe it was all three. I got a call from my editor, a new assignment, and I just stopped looking. I thought you would be married by now.” Yusuf thought he saw her squirm, and he changed the subject.
“So Hyderabad is where you worked?”
“No,” she said. But she was not squirming. “I lived in interior Sindh—Matli—for most of the time. Then I was in the Northwest Frontier, in Chitral. But now I am determined to stay close to home.”
“Pretty independent, huh?”
She nodded. “I have learned to do without anyone’s help. I enjoy the support of my family and friends, and . . .” She hesitated, shaking her head. “But Yusuf, my body has begun to ache for children. I feel they are wanting to be born.” The words spilled out of her mouth, and she was relieved. She wanted Yusuf to know what she was thinking. Life is too short to hide the cards in this game, she thought. If it frightens him, so be it.
But he was not frightened. Her mention of the urgings of her body excited him, and drew him close to her. He asked, “And why have you never married, Uji?”
“I made a promise to my mother, to God, to be a teacher. That has been my commitment, and it is like a marriage vow. And I’ve had no mother to arrange a marriage for me.” She looked at her hands in her lap. She did not want to be misunderstood. “Maybe I have just seen too much unhappiness between men and women.”
Ujala hoped Yusuf would talk about himself, but he did not. He was waiting for her to answer his question. This time she was the one to move the conversation away.
“I’m not sure how much more time we have,” she said at last, feeling disappointed and nervous.
“But you haven’t asked me why I never married,” Yusuf said. His tone had a challenge in it. She pressed her lips together. They felt as if they belonged to someone else.
“Tell me,” she said.
“I almost married twice,” he began. “One woman was an American friend of my sister. Another was a Pakistani I met in New York. But each time it came to setting a wedding date, I could not go through with it. Then I became afraid to visit Karachi because my mother might have arranged something for me with the daughter of one of her friends. Maybe I’m not the marrying kind. Maybe I’m an emotional coward. Maybe I just never could forget you.”
“Time’s up,” the guard said. They both eyed her in shock. Her look told them she had been listening in. But Ujala no longer cared. She had not realized how much she had longed for this conversation.
“Oh, I brought you something,” he said. He reached into his pack and handed her a twig from a lemon tree. It had two tiny lemon knobs attached.
She held it in her hand. “My mother always said that lemons . . .”
“ . . . are oranges God created for those whose sweetness is a lie,” said Yusuf, completing her thought. “I never forgot. It is why I sent you an orange. You will have to decide if this new fruit is delicious or tart, the truth or a lie.”As the guard moved in their direction, Yusuf’s arm swept his papers off the table and onto the floor.
“Tsk! I am so clumsy,” he said, bending down to pick up his things.
“I met an old friend of yours,” Rahima Mai said later that evening. She and Ujala were working late on the budget for the head office. “Yusuf Salman.”
Ujala put her hands to her reddening face.
“So, he is the one!” Rahima Mai smiled. “The husband-to-be that got away?”
“Yes, Madam.”
“Nice,” Rahima Mai said. “Very nice.” In fact, she was not so sure Yusuf was nice enough. Who knows what this young man is after? she thought. Time will tell.
Ujala was unruffled. So what if Rahima Mai knows who Yusuf is? she thought. In prison she was becoming free of the need to outsmart, stay a step ahead, be clever. In a way it pleased her that Rahima Mai was meeting the characters in her story. Ujala sniffed the air.
“Masala,” she said.
“And I brought channa and saag paneer,” said Rahima Mai. “Get yourself a plate.” Rahima Mai unwrapped the cotton cloth she had tied around the two pots and began to stir the vegetables.
“Shukriah, Baji.” Ujala said thank you and accepted a small plate. For the first time she risked using a familiar term, Baji—respected elder sister, and Rahima Mai allowed it. They were sharing work, stories, meals—just like a family.
They sat in plastic chairs in a comfortable silence, tearing the chapati into bite-sized pieces. Ujala served milk tea, wondering what Rahima Mai would ask next. She did not want the question to be about Yusuf, so she continued her story without waiting to be asked.
* * *
A surprise was waiting for me after I left Khanum on the train and returned to Matli. While I was away, a former student, Taslima Rashad, had arrived at the school by bus from Jacobabad with her two young sons. I had not seen Taslima in many years, but she was a student I remembered well—a high-spirited beauty whose antics would send the other girls into fits of giggling.
Taslima had always been smooth-skinned and immaculate, but now her face was pockmarked and her dupatta was wrinkled, and the cloth’s sunflower print had faded. She looked worried. Several years before, she had married a bad-tempered cousin. In a fit of anger, while she was pregnant, he had kicked her down the stairs. Three times Taslima had left him and returned to her mother’s home with the children. But the third time, just when she was wanting out from under her mother’s control and was preparing to return again to Rashad, he called and told her not to come back.
“He said he did not want me as his wife anymore,” Taslima said. She spoke very fast. “He wanted a divorce, which made me happy. But our mothers, who are sisters, could not bear the shame of a divorce in the family. So we remained married and I lived with my parents. I was so lost and lonely. I could not return to him and I could not marry another. I was trapped.”
Taslima tucked a strand of hair behind her ear.
“And the children?” I asked.
“My boys are suffering, too—nervous, not sleeping well. In Jacobabad they went back and forth between Rashad and me. He tells them to spy on me, then after they do, they feel they have to lie to me about it, which they do, but they end up telling me the truth, which they later admit to their father, and then he punishes them for telling me the truth. They are caught in the cross fire.”
She wrung her hands like an old woman.
“I know I can be honest with you, Baji,” she said. “After a time, I fell in love with a boy I have known since childhood—Ayman. He wants to marry me, but now my parents tell me that if I try to get a divorce so that I can marry Ayman, they will kill me. And they mean it.” She searched my eyes to see if I believed her. “They have already threatened Ayman, and he has gone into hiding.”
I was nervous about this Ayman. I wondered if he was hiding nearby.
“Baji, your sister is a lawyer. Perhaps she would help me?”
“I will ask her. But, Taslima, where is Ayman hiding?” Taslima had a pained expression on her face.
“I am sorry, Baji, but I cannot say. He told me to tell no one.”
Faisah arranged for a lawyer in Hyderabad to meet Taslima the following Wednesday. After the meeting I met her at the bus station. Her two-year-old was sleeping on her shoulder. His arm tugged on her dupatta, exposing her long hair. She sat in the back of the car and spread the boy out across my lap like a doll. His eyes closed when she lay him down.
“Everything is going to be f
ine,” she whispered. “Jina Awan is a knowledgeable lawyer and caring, too. She did not try to talk me into reconciling with Rashad, or moving back to Jacobabad. She said the courts there would have jurisdiction, and that I might have to go back there for the hearing.”
Her eyes were dry and her voice rose.
“But I refuse to go back. It is too dangerous . . . I will have my life!”
She spoke as if she were having an argument with someone who was not there.
“Does Jina think Rashad will contest the divorce?”
“No. He wants the divorce. But the family is another matter. The grandmothers—they will want the boys, and they will want to shame me.”
Taslima stroked Muzamal’s damp forehead. She smiled for the first time since she had been in Matli. “But Jina called and arranged a settlement. I won’t have to go back to Jacobabad. My mother will bring papers to Jina’s office so I can sign them to make it official. And Jina has called a police official in Jacobabad who will review the papers to assure her that Rashad has already signed them. He told her that my family just wants me to be happy.”
Taslima asked me to accompany her to Hyderabad. I was curious to meet the famous Jina Awan, and I was not disappointed. Dressed in a business-like tan shalwar kameez and white linen jacket, she had pleated her dupatta neatly and draped it over one shoulder. Her hair was long, dark, and straight, parted in the middle and pulled loosely into a knot at the nape of her neck. She had a streak of gray hair on one side of her head and wore large, square glasses. Her face was lovely without makeup, and her dark eyes lit up when I mentioned my sister, Faisah.
“That Faisah! What a lawyer!” Jina stood up dramatically. “I wish we had a thousand like her. A strong feminist—fundamentally committed.” I imagined that I was getting a glimpse of Jina’s courtroom style. “And I want to hear more about your literacy project in Matli,” she said. She smiled as she lit a cigarette and exhaled out the corner of her mouth, directing the smoke away from us. “We can talk about it over dinner. Eh? A few colleagues will join us at my house later. I insist you stay with me.”
Taslima’s mother was late, and we were irritated and disappointed. Jina stood at her massive desk, flipping through her calendar book while she puffed on a Dunhill. Suddenly the door opened and a woman stood in the doorway. A bearded man appeared behind her, following the woman inside.
Taslima recognized them. She stepped backward toward the sofa. Fear was written on her face. Jina had seen it, too. It was Taslima’s mother.
“This man, what is he doing here?” Jina demanded. “How did he get past the guards?” When Jina stood up, her chair spun on its wheels.
I began to panic. I felt as if my heart and my lungs were racing each other.
“My helper,” Taslima’s mother said. “I need assistance since I can’t walk.”
In the low, insistent tone of a person used to exerting authority, Jina instructed the woman—“Tell him to get out.”
The woman did nothing.
Jina shouted, “Tell him to wait outside!” She buzzed her security guard again and again. We could hear the useless, distant hum.
“Assalam aleikum,” the man said to Taslima, who was cowering on the sofa. He drew a pistol from his waistcoat and stood in front of her, taking aim with both hands. I did not move. I did not want to draw his fire. I wanted to disappear. In one unending second he squeezed the trigger and fired a bullet into Taslima’s head. Then he stood there frozen, as if memorizing what he had done. Taslima lay twisted across the sofa, her head resting on a pillow embroidered with shards of mirrors. Her dupatta was pierced. A bloodless hole. On the other side of her head, pints and pints of blood began to pool on the upholstery.
“Yaqub!” Jina yelled to her security man. The name hung in the air like a cloud of gun smoke. We could hear scuffling and shouting outside the door, but no one dared open it. As Jina moved toward him, the gunman turned and fired again. Taslima’s mother screamed, the door opened, and the woman disappeared through it imperceptibly. Two uniformed guards burst in with pistols drawn, and in the second they spent assessing the situation, the gunman found his next target.
“No!” I pleaded, but he grabbed me close, choking me with the crook of his arm while he backed away. The guards froze—eyes wide, hands at the ready. I heard rushing in the hall.
“Stand aside,” Yaqub yelled to the guards. “Lower your weapons!”
The gunman pulled me into the hallway and down the back stairs. His muscles were like thick wire cables binding me.
“Leave me alone!” I said. “For the love of Allah, let me go!”
“Quiet!” he barked.
Then I heard Jina shouting, “Call an ambulance. Someone has been shot.”
Jina was alive! All of my hope collected on that one fact. Jina was alive! If Jina could survive, I could survive. The gunman pulled me underneath the staircase and held the gun barrel to my head. He was squeezing the back of my neck with his left hand and gripping the pistol with his right.
At that moment my mind flashed on the day in my childhood when Ammi had shown me the proper way to wring out a cloth.
“Not from the middle!” I could hear Ammi say. “Do it this way.”
Ammi carried to the sink the sopping dishcloth I had been using to wipe the table. It dripped across the concrete floor. She put the tip ends into her fists and twisted and shortened the cloth at the same time. A flood of water was released with a flushing sound. Then she twisted and shortened the cloth again until her fists were almost touching, and it seemed a quart poured forth. Then Ammi gave me her happiest grin and did it one more time until the dishcloth would have cried out for mercy if it could have. She handed the knotted mess to me and I shook out a waterless, fresh cloth.
Recalling Ammi’s victorious face, something inside of me rose up, like a fish arcs through a pool of calm. I gathered the tips of my dupatta bit by bit. The gunman and I could hear footsteps on the floor above us. As my dupatta slipped from my shoulders, I wrapped it twice around my fists. The moment he relaxed his grip to look around the corner, I bellowed like a cow in labor. In a flash I flipped the cloth over my head and wrapped it around his neck as if I were wringing steel. I shortened and twisted the dupatta and twisted and shortened it, and then wound it around his neck one more time. My fists pounded together, and my teeth sawed into to the bone of his wrist. He dropped the gun just as the policeman turned the corner and grabbed him.
I felt dizzy, elated, and more than pleased to leave the man on the floor with a pile of policemen stomping on him. What the police did not see was his pistol, the one that had probed my neck. I picked it up and ran back up the stairs to Jina’s office, just in time to see the porters carrying Taslima’s body away.
That evening forty people from the Human Rights Alliance crowded into Jina’s house. Her wounded arm was in a sling. Men and women surrounded a large table, writing press releases and discussing strategies. They used their mobile phones to organize a protest march that would go from the hospital, where Taslima’s body lay, to the provincial headquarters.
“You call the bar associations! I’ll call the trade unionists! Asma can call the students!”
They pasted enlarged photographs of Taslima onto placards, assigned platform speakers, and practiced sound bites for the media. “Justice for Taslima! End police collaboration with honor crimes.”
“We’ll follow up with a petition to the provincial prosecutor,” said Jina.
“Quick! Look at the television!” someone shouted and everyone crowded around.
“The parents of the deceased admitted their part in hiring the assassin,” the newscaster was reporting. “And the arrested man confirmed it.” A film clip showed the battered old man as he was put inside the police van. He shouted to the camera: “It is a father’s right to kill his daughter if she disgraces his honor.” The camera closed in on his twisted face. “The father was too sick to come to Hyderabad himself. As a believer, it was my duty.”
&nb
sp; “Oh, God!” said Jina. “The public will agree with him. The mullahs will back him, too. We have to send out a countermessage!” The possibility of suffering an honor crime is a seed sleeping inside every Pakistani, at whatever station.
They returned to their task, inspired by its importance, and by their own importance.
In Jacobabad, Taslima’s husband enlisted his sons as his allies, taking them to his press conference to hear the Chamber of Commerce statement that the killing of their mother was justified by her disobedience.
My Sisters Made of Light Page 7