That afternoon, after an early lunch, the family gathered in a circle on the white sheet. In its middle lay a cotton sack always kept with the Qurans in a special cabinet. To begin, my grandfather emptied a small pile of dried nuts from the bag into the circle. There were exactly one hundred, I knew, used to keep count of the incantations we were to perform in a specific order that afternoon. Smoothed with the cares and questions of earlier supplicants, they were shiny and hard. They passed through our fingers with our murmured prayers, Arabic verses written out on a square piece of parchment brown with age, but referred to only by the children, as all the grownups knew them by heart.
At the start of each round, my grandfather would say aloud, for all to hear and follow, the verse we were to repeat. Zaid and I copied him in our best mimicry of adulthood. Each time we grabbed a handful of nuts, intoning the verse in our heads and letting the nuts fall into the growing pile, which signified the verses already read. As the afternoon wore on, our stores of solemnity dwindled, and we each tried to grab more nuts than the other, teetering on the edge of giddiness.
As evening approached the prayers were nearly complete, our family having gone through each of the twenty-one verses, which had to be repeated one hundred times for health and help and intercession against misfortune, known and unknown. The shadows lengthened and the dusk call to prayers began to echo and stretch in each direction of our neighborhood. The men and my brother left to pray at the mosque. My mother, grandmother, Aunt Amina, and I stayed home and aligned ourselves in the direction of Mecca on the white sheet itself. When we were done, and the sheet and rug gathered up, came the best moment of the evening. With a single match my grandmother lit every one of the sixteen lamps in the tray; their tiny lights sixteen points of hope that the prayers we had completed would be answered.
JANUARY 1987
On the last Saturday of January 1987, I awoke to the thwacking of the fish seller’s knife hitting the round slice of tree trunk that he used as a chopping board. He was at the front gate, dividing a fish who must have breathed its last in the early hours of that morning. My brother was already awake and downstairs, there for the show. He loved fish, eating up not only the fish itself but also all that came before: my grandmother’s expert pressing of the gills; the haggling over price and freshness; the laying out of the selection from the smelly bamboo bags slung over the back of the fisherman’s bicycle. From the time he could walk he had been the guardian of the purchased fish. My grandmother would make the selection, agree on a price, and then retreat indoors. My brother would then take over, standing as sentinel, to insure the fish that was now ours was properly scaled and gutted, with no pieces we had paid for snuck back into the bamboo basket. Karachi was full of cheating fish sellers; his was an important task.
In the unrelenting logic of twinhood, I hated fish with the same fervor with which he loved it. The smell, the slimy wetness that passed from mouth to throat, the feathery bones were for me a collection of revulsions, and the arrival of the fish seller a sure sign of the fish curry that would appear at the table to everyone else’s delight and my despair. This was going to be a day of much pretending—of hiding pieces of fish skin under my green beans in the hope that my father, who could not tolerate food aversions, would leave the table before I did, or of feigning a stomachache, which if successful could procure a complete absence from the table.
I knew the last trick would probably not work; I had tried it too many times before. I needed some new deception. Perhaps a deal with my brother—a quick passing of fish to his plate while my father was looking elsewhere, taking a sip of water or staring down at his own plate. I plotted through the morning, avoiding the fishy kitchen altogether. To justify myself, I performed a great many hated chores, pulling sheets straight, smoothing bed covers, dusting the tops of tables and the undersides of books, even ironing our uniforms for school, which would begin a week later: modeling the diligence of a dutiful daughter.
Noon arrived and then one o’clock and the meal laid out on the table held no surprises: two bowls of tomato curry with turmeric-tinged fish bobbing in it and two plates of rice. A small bowl of green beans cooked with tomatoes and onions sat in the middle, my hope against the dominance of fish. Bottles of chilled water stood, as they always did, at each end of the table. My mother plated a last minute salad, circles of cucumber and slices of lemon sprinkled with salt and pepper.
I was ready for the challenge, but no one cared about my ability to consume fish that day. My father, usually at the table within minutes of my mother’s call, did not appear until the end of the meal. And there was another absence. Aunt Amina’s empty chair had been returned to the formal dining table where it belonged. I ate the rice and the green beans and let the fish go untouched and uneaten in the middle of the plate. When my father shuffled into the kitchen, I was already done, carrying my plate to the sink before washing my hands.
A lucky escapee, I scurried from the kitchen into my grandmother’s bedroom as my father sat down to eat. The daybed that had been Aunt Amina’s sleeping place, where she had sat and laid and slept and wept for the past two months, had been made up. On the bureau, where her glasses and comb and purse had been, a collection of porcelain knickknacks—a basket of flowers, a cherub-faced doll, and a rosy-lipped porcelain baby with a pink bow that I was not allowed to touch—had reappeared. Aunt Amina was gone, having left as silently and suddenly as she had appeared.
CHAPTER 2
Birth of a Nation
JULY 1947
My eighteen-year-old grandmother Surrayya labored at home, sweltering in an inner room and surrounded by a cluster of women. As she counted down the months to this moment, amid the restive pangs of a British Empire pregnant with Pakistan, she had asked for just one thing: that she be taken to the hospital when her time came. Now that time was here, and the women of her husband’s family, his sister and aunts, stood there doing nothing: dabbing their faces with the ends of their cotton saris awaiting a stray bit of breeze. But her agony was only one part of the drama of the crowded house. Toddlers waddled among the adults’ legs, hawkers screamed at doors, and women gave birth.
Surrayya knew this, and knew what was to come, before the baby, before the army of busybodies, before the month of fasting set to begin before the week was out. She knew it was Friday, a special day in her father-in-law’s house, where such special days outnumbered ordinary ones by two or three every week. Her father-in-law, Zainullah Saifuddin, was an elder, his home a community kitchen where several times a week the doors were thrown open to all those who wished to pray with him and share a simple meal. Men ate in one room at the front of the house, and women and children filled all the others. Marrying into this meant mastering the maneuvers of public service, the cooking of large meals, the offering up of space, a bed, a chair, a room to the unexpected guest or the supplicant stranger.
Days after Surrayya’s marriage to Said, she had discovered what this meant. In the room where they slept, a makeshift partition of curtain and trunk separated them from two sleeping aunts. There were no closed doors, there was no space that belonged to a single person. The lock on the chest containing her trousseau was the only thing that announced some separation. On days when there were too many guests, Said slept in the front reception room with the men of the household, she with the many women in one of the inner rooms, rising with them before dawn to prepare tea for twenty or thirty, to help feed the babies, and to make the tiffin lunch Said would take with him to work at the British Telegraph Office. Like a train station moving passengers in and out, the unceasing hum of the household engulfed her from those early hours to deep in the night, when the dishes from the final meal were washed, the babies laid to sleep, and the women reunited with husbands finally returning to the inner rooms of the house.
Her labor was not the first to happen in the house, even in the scant months that she had lived there since her marriage. Not long ago she had seen another ripe daughter-in-law give birth in the very
room where she lay now. It had been her fourth child, and like a favorite story whose end is awaited but known, her labor was pulled into the humming vortex of the household. The mother to be, despite the discomforts of her condition, had helped with breakfast, neatly preparing her husband’s afternoon tiffin before finally retiring to the business of childbirth. When the final moments came, she was surrounded not by one or two helpful women but by a crowd of aunts, cousins of cousins, and friends of neighbors cracking jokes and chewing fennel seeds, happy to have an impending birth grant them an escape from their own kitchens and courtyards. The baby, a little girl, had arrived sometime in the midst of all this, a small punctuation mark somewhere in the middle of the party.
The public nature of Saira’s childbirth cast a fear into Surrayya, her trepidation growing right alongside her belly. Hence her campaign to Said, her husband, to be taken to Jamsetjee JeeJeebhoy (J. J.) Hospital, the imposing sandstone building at the far edge of the world she knew, where her brothers’ wives had given birth, where things were quiet and clean, and where the stern nurses imposed some order on the hordes of relatives. There would be no smell of garlic and turmeric and fish woven into the threads of the sheet under her body, no tea-stale breath of well-wishers to cover up with her cologne-doused handkerchief. Her sister could be with her and her own mother, not the gossips that would otherwise wend their way into this house. Said had agreed, promising in his usual good-natured way. He was eager to please her but had a weak resolve that she knew could easily be deflected by the demands of others. She did not know if he would really come, if she would really be taken to the hospital.
The tradition of delivering babies at home was not all that kept my grandmother from the hospital. Most of her youth had been spent in a Bombay boiling with riots as Hindus and Muslims succumbed to the fever of claiming their own piece of India. Weddings and funerals and schooldays and workdays were at the mercy of frequent curfews. The best of intentions also were at their mercy. It was the women who knew what to do when the curfews silenced the street. The side doors and back alleys, which were their domain, became the lifelines of communities like the one around the Jama Masjid where my grandparents lived. The excess stores of lentils in one home could be added to the stored sack of rice in another; the old woman who never used the powdered milk allotted on her ration card gave it to the young mother to sate the appetites of her three small children. Male entry into this domain was tentative. It required care, loud announcements of “Koi hay” (Is anyone there?) in exaggerated baritones, to insure that no unrelated, uncovered woman languished in the hallway or stood braiding her hair in a deep inner courtyard that was normally her domain. If mistakes were made, they were not mentioned, necessity loosening just a bit the grip of the tradition of sequestering women.
The sun had been baking the courtyard for hours when Said’s footsteps finally crossed it. There was no curfew that day, but the messenger boy had missed him at the British Telegraph Office; he had already left for Friday prayer at the mosque. The news came to him in a whisper, delivered by his father-in-law just as the imam was about to begin his sermon. Clad in the ironed gray pants and button-down short-sleeve shirt he had worn to work that morning, Said stood up, the sole standing figure among the hundreds of heads topped with white skullcaps. Weaving in and out through the rows, he threaded his way out of the mosque to his wife, the imam’s exhortations to remain stalwart in the fight for Pakistan ringing in his ears.
Emboldened by pain, Surrayya screamed when she saw him, removing for the first time the cologne-doused handkerchief she kept on her nose, her armor against the smells that had left her retching for months. A tonga, or horse carriage, was called; a motor taxi wouldn’t fit in the narrow alleyway that fronted the house. Surrayya, bundled in her chador, a round blob of black, was deposited in the back, all but her eyes covered. Under the chador, she still clutched her handkerchief against her nose, but now against the smell of the horse and the sweat of its driver in the July heat. A cloth bundle prepared long ago for just this journey was pushed in after her.
The carriage carried the little family-to-be down the street, breaking up the games of schoolkids returning home and attracting the stares of women peeping through alcoves, before it made a turn and could no longer be seen. In its wake, hundreds of men poured out from the mosque, the Jama Masjid, into the streets and alleyways outside my great-grandfather Zainullah Saifuddin’s house. It was the last Friday before the beginning of Ramzan, or Ramadan, the Muslim month of fasting. It was to be a historic Ramzan, everyone said, one promising transformation, heralding the birth of a whole new country. That evening men from the mosque and their wives and children poured into the house. Like all other Fridays they gathered there for prayer and a meal, a ritual my great-grandfather insisted had taken place before Pakistan and would continue thereafter.
My father, Abdullah, was born one month before Partition, in a still united India. On July 18, 1947, four days after his birth and while my grandmother was still at J. J. Hospital in Bombay, the British Parliament signed the Indian Independence Act of 1947, which divided India and gave birth to two separate nations. It was the middle of the night in Bombay when the BBC reported the news, the street outside the hospital erupting into a chaos of firecrackers and shouts and slogans. The women inside were a mix of Hindu and Muslim, tended to by Catholic nuns in a hospital that had been built by a Zoroastrian businessman and was still run by the British.
It was a dose of history almost too big to swallow for a teenage mother, not least because everything around her seemed still the same. Inside the maternity ward, the ceiling fans turned the humid air and uniformed nurses and orderlies skimmed in and out of rooms and between beds. Each bed was separated from the others by a white curtain, drawn at night or when the patient requested privacy. It was a happy place, not plagued by the illness and dejection of other wards where patients lay recovering from disease or dangled near death. Nursing her new baby in this hopeful setting, Surrayya thought the birth of a new country could only be a good thing.
But if the maternity ward of J. J. Hospital was a place of general rejoicing, of looking to the future, a mere two floors down the hospital halls echoed with the gasps and wails of death and finality. For three days after my father’s birth, the city of Bombay witnessed off its shores the worst maritime disaster in the city’s history. At three o’clock on the overcast afternoon of July 17, long after most fishermen who went out to sea from Bombay Harbor had returned, their catch sold and packed for shipment into the country, a few near-drowned souls washed up, sputtering and gasping, on the Sassoon Docks. They bore with them terrible news.
The survivors had been on a passenger ship called The Ramdas along with six or seven hundred others, all bound for the port of Rewas north of Bombay. They had boarded the ship around six o’clock that morning. They carried with them their carefully preserved belongings, knotted bundles of cloth, stainless-steel tiffins of food, brown paper packages for relatives, toys for children. The Muslims on the ship were returning to villages in anticipation of the month of Ramzan, which was about to begin. The mood on the crowded ship was festive, families camping out on the deck on square sheets, migrant laborers eager for mother’s cooking, a respite from the frenzy of Bombay, its tramcars and smoke and insistent demands.
They had just sailed into the Arabian Sea, the buildings of the harbor disappearing into the horizon, leaving only the clear blue sky and a benevolent ocean breeze. Women loosened their dupattas and peered up from behind burkas, unpacking tiffins of breakfast, of crusty bread and spicy ground mutton, of potatoes folded into pastries and hot, sweet tea in carefully wrapped thermoses. Some had fried fish carefully wrapped in banana leaves or packets of rice and lentils. Children laughed and ran around the deck, unfazed by the dips and dives of the ship. Less stalwart others held bags around their mouths, returning to them the half-eaten breakfast consumed port side. On the upper deck a small coterie of wealthy businessmen sat on plush chairs sipping tea.
The wave that swept over the deck surprised everyone, dousing all and knocking over many on the port side of the ship. The remnants of picnics and cherished bundles washed across the deck among the ankles of fleeing passengers. The terror and chaos brought on by the tidal swell sealed the ship’s fate. Mothers grabbed babies and men pushed, moving in throngs to the still-dry starboard side of the ship, thinking they were running toward safety. But the frenzy was fatal. The rush of bodies tipped the ship into the sea, swallowing in an instant more than 627 lives, leaving only bits and pieces of wreckage floating where the vessel had been and the bobbing heads of a mere hundred who knew how to swim or who managed to clutch a bit of wreckage. A dead passenger’s watch found months later read 8:20 a.m., the time the wave had struck.
The captain of the ship, Sheikh Ahmed Ibrahim, survived. The fact that he was a Muslim was not lost on a country still setting its borders. “Gone are the days when captains stayed with their ship, sinking with the passengers who entrust their lives to them,” opined one newspaper. Another speculated that the ship’s chief engineer, a Christian from Goa with a decade of maritime experience, could just as well have saved himself but had chosen to go down with the ship that was his charge.
The implications were clear: on the troubled vessel that represented India on the eve of Partition, Muslims jumped ship, saving themselves without regard for others. As the wreckage representing the lives and dreams of so many washed ashore in the days that followed, many wondered whether India, like The Ramdas, was itself about to sink under the weight of a great tidal wave, creating, like the terror-stricken passengers on the ship, conditions for its own catastrophe.
The Upstairs Wife Page 3