The Upstairs Wife

by Rafia Zakaria

  At the home of Surrayya’s father-in-law, The Ramdas catastrophe had invaded the rhythm of the household. His small house was just a stone’s throw from the mosque, which became the center of mourning for those Muslim families who had suffered losses. Families came up from the villages of Parel and Gurgaon to claim bodies and arrange funerals, sleeping in whatever unoccupied corner they could find. Many others came to Bombay searching for sisters and brothers who had never arrived. As bodies continued to wash ashore, funeral prayers rippled from the mosque through the neighborhood. With the disaster arrived the monsoon, making the digging of graves in Bombay’s single Muslim graveyard particularly arduous. The symbolism of the wet, muddy ground of Bombay refusing the remains of those the sea had already claimed was duly noted.

  My grandparents’ relatives had left their villages and settled around the Jama Masjid in Bombay more than a hundred years prior to that summer of 1947. Many of their neighbors had arrived later, and mourned relatives who had perished in the disaster. Catastrophe and change both hung over the community, whose members had drawn close through decades of pooled tears and shared mirth, of marriages and illnesses. But that July of 1947 the meals of Ramzan, eaten at dusk, were just as they always were: the tables laden with large slices of watermelon and spicy samosas and canisters of chilled milk sweetened with rosewater. As they bit down on the sweet dates with which they always broke their fast, Bombay’s Muslims asked themselves the question that echoed all over the subcontinent . . . Should they stay or should they go?

  My grandparents chose to stay, bolstered by the assurances of others in their community who balked at the prospect of becoming refugees in a land they had fought for, but that remained unpredictable and even mysterious. Pakistan was a gamble whose success remained uncertain. Holding their cards close to their chests, they must have balked at the headlines that September, as trains spilling over with bloodied bodies crept across the newly made borders, as mobs coursed through Calcutta and Lahore burning Hindu shops and Muslims shops, a cycle of massacres repeated again and again. In less empathetic moments, they may have wondered if the exodus would make their own city, with its millions jammed in tenement houses and apartments, a bit less crowded, a bit more comfortable.

  The conundrum of Muslims all over India was the same. Most had lived for centuries, not simply decades, in communities throughout the country. In the feverish years before Partition, the politics of the All India Muslim League and the fervid passion of the campaign for Pakistan had held many in its thrall. Bombay had itself become caught up in rallies and riots and bred many of the leaders that led the movement. Few had considered that some of those Indian Muslims now clamoring for a new country would remain in India after Pakistan was created.

  The Kokani community of Bombay, to which my grandparents belonged, was no different. In the registers of the Jama mosque that stood at the center of their community, they could trace their ancestry all the way back to medieval times when Arab traders arrived on the coasts of Goa, not far from Bombay. Pakistan was the dream they had nurtured for the past couple of decades, but the Muslims from the Kokan and Malabar coasts were the oldest Muslim communities in all of India. They had always been Muslim alongside Hindus, Christians, Sikhs, and many others; what would it mean to be Muslim in Pakistan? Everyone had ideas: anecdotes about Pakistan carted back from eager visitors who ventured back and forth over the new border.

  It was in this atmosphere of expectation and consternation that my father spent his first years. Said had rented the second floor of a row house in Bombay that had been built by the British to house their growing cadre of Indian civil servants. Like India itself, the row house had been sectioned off into bits and pieces. It did not matter much, as the rooms all housed relatives or relatives of relatives who emerged like nesting dolls from corners and crevices and backrooms and cellars. After a week of convalescence at the hospital, Surrayya had returned to her own father’s house, where she was assisted in the care of her first baby by her mother and still unmarried younger sister. In the daily visits the twenty-two-year-old Said made to his teenage wife, over the tea and biscuits served to him with appropriate deference, his mother-in-law cajoled him into considering for himself and her daughter and their newborn son the possibility of a home of their own. It could be just a few rooms, and as a matter of fact she knew of some that were just a stone’s throw away from the mosque, close to his father’s home but with just a bit more room for the many more sons her daughter would soon bear.

  Perhaps Surrayya’s plan for independence would have gathered some opposition if there had been another woman wielding her shadow of influence over Said, but such was not the case. Said’s own mother, the traditional competitor for a man’s affections, had died years ago, leaving him to be raised by an assortment of caring aunts and concerned cousins. A few years before his own marriage to Surrayya, his widowed father had married again, bringing into the family a much younger wife. Now a mother herself, Mehrunissa Begum was too overwhelmed with the care of her own brood to be concerned about a stepdaughter-in-law’s machinations to break from the conjoined lives of the main house and set up a home of her own. So for Surrayya, Partition and motherhood brought a sort of emancipation. With everyone in her father-in-law’s house haunted by the lingering tears of families severed by far more than a few blocks, there was little scrutiny of the small severance she demanded for her own family. They were, after all, staying in India, in Bombay, in the same neighborhood, and by the same mosque.

  A narrow stairwell led to their portion of the row house. They had four rooms in all, none of which were ever allotted purposes definite enough to not be changed in minutes and according to the need of the hour: a makeshift workshop for sewing, a guestroom for visitors overflowing from the main house, an impromptu nursery school for six or seven toddlers, or any other assorted occupation that fell into the household. The front room bore three large windows that looked down into the busy alley into which my grandmother could lower a basket tied to a rope, drawing up tomatoes or onions or fresh fish still reeking of the sea. The other two rooms had pallets that could be laid out for sleep and chairs and two large steel wardrobes that bore the family’s belongings. Meals were taken in the front room, where the hot plate was on a table that rose only four or five inches from the ground.

  My grandmother always spoke with pride of this first kitchen, which she stocked, as she always reminded us, with “British goods”—Earl Grey tea, shortbread biscuits, Nescafé coffee. In those times of ration cards, Said’s job with the British Telegraph Service—which had been renamed the Indian Telegraph Service—still insured that he could shop for provisions at the store for company employees. In a land the British had ruled for more than two hundred years, these acts of export consumption conferred quite a bit of status. Every can of coffee, every tin of biscuits was kept long after the contents had been consumed. They stood at attention, looking down on the family and their guests from the top shelves of cupboards: brightly painted Cadbury candy boxes and red tins of Ovaltine holding rice and lentils and garam masala long after the chocolate was gone.

  Perhaps they did not know it, but it was not the chocolate or the cookies or the job that made them most British. The fact that they lived there, husband and wife and child, without a bolstering clan, without a mother- and father-in-law whose age and health dominated the rhythms of the day was the most Western aspect of their lives. The nuclear family was virtually unknown in India then, and even if it had happened partly by accident, it was unusual. Surrayya’s memories of her early marriage weren’t marred by the lack of privacy; by others’ demands dictating whether fish or chicken would be cooked, when tea had to be prepared for breakfast, and if an outing to a park or a visit to the doctor could be accommodated between mealtimes and teatimes and the visits of older relatives. Perhaps my grandmother did not realize it then, but the most British thing about her kitchen was that it was exclusively and uncontestably her domain.

  NOVEMBER 1950r />
  With the new set of rooms came freedom and privacy and more children. With the drama of Partition dulled a bit by the realities that followed revolution, and the mystery of childbirth already unraveled, Amina’s November birth was almost routine. And because a son had already been born and now toddled happily up and down the steps of the house, there were fewer expectations and demands on the new mother and father by the extended family.

  Said had been promoted at work, and he was doing well enough to take his wife to the movies one or two times a month, a luxury and liberty few of his forebears would have been able to afford or even imagine. He greeted the birth of his first daughter with elation. The desire for sons left many fathers sulking and angry outside maternity wards, licking the wounds of their victimization by fate: a daughter was a net loss that would have to be fed and clothed only to add to the bounty of some other household. This daughter and the two that would follow all reminded him of his sister Safia. She had died not as an infant but as a young woman about to be wed, the gold embroidery on her red wedding sari nearly complete. When his own daughter was born almost eight years later he wished to name her after his sister, but Surrayya, afraid of the tragedy this could inflict on her young daughter, persuaded him otherwise. The newborn, dark eyed and high cheekboned like her mother, was named Amina instead.

  JUNE 1955–JANUARY 1958

  Every other Sunday Surrayya and Said bundled up their children and set out for the movies. Independence and the departure of the last British troops from the subcontinent had unleashed a wild torrent of creativity. Poets, songwriters, actors, and filmmakers milled in and out of Bombay’s crowded, steamy streets, dreaming of their own face staring down from the poster in the cinema house, their song blaring from the radio, their words pouring out from the lips of famous stars. Surrayya rejoiced that she was lucky enough to be married to a man who would take her to the movies, something her own mother had never been able to do and that many of the other married women in the building, several her own age, were never allowed to do. Her favorite actress was Nimmi, the seemingly demure actress who had risen to stardom with a movie called Barsat.

  Surrayya looked just like Nimmi, her friends told her, emphasizing the similar curve of their hairlines, the tilt of their chins, the wistfulness of their dark, liquid eyes. And so in the tedium of ordinary afternoons, as she put the rice to boil, ground the red chilies to a paste, soaked the lentils, and nursed her third daughter, she imagined herself playing a part in a movie, a visitor in her life from some other land with other rules. Perhaps like Soni, Nimmi’s character in the blockbuster movie Uran Khatola (Flying Carriage), she was the princess of a land ruled only by women, where women chose their own husbands and men could do nothing but follow their behest.

  While a women-ruled island was indeed a fantasy, the beckoning of other lands was quite real. Even as they prospered, with a growing family and Said an emerging leader in the community, they could not stop thinking of those who had chosen differently. Over the years, more and more families from the Kokani community in Bombay had taken the ship to Karachi, settling in another city by the sea: one just for Muslims.

  In the first months after Partition, when ghastly stories filtered in—of carnage, of life in refugee tents in a dusty and desolate Karachi—it was easy enough to insist that staying had been the correct choice. Pakistan at Partition, a bumbling country saddled with the leftovers of the British Empire, could be shifted to the periphery of their focus, its magnetism stanched by the rhythm of the known, by the hooting, hollering sounds of the Bombay they loved, and by the closeness of dear ones lulling them to sleep every night.

  Choice can be deceptive, especially when it tarnishes reality with the promise of a magical new world. Maybe a vision of Karachi where houses were bigger and roads were broader and everything was cheaper began to haunt them. Or perhaps it was the consciousness of a receding reality, a way of life that could be replicated but not retained in the same way, with so many disappearing into the new land, so many drawn away. The massive excision of India’s Muslims at Partition was by the mid-fifties a trickle, but the cumulative departures left gaps all over the community. The steady flow not only drew from it but returned to it stories of wealth and prosperity and hope, set against the darkness and nagging, knotty suspicion that the emerging India would not love them back.

  In the winter of 1958, my great-grandfather, Zainullah Saifuddin, passed away peacefully in his sleep. With his death, a way of life that had seemed etched in stone revealed its fragility. The work to provide the deep silver pots of lentils and rice that had seemed to appear so effortlessly, the open doors that welcomed refugees and guests alike, the ethic that all belonged to all had to be shared by all awaited an embrace by a new generation. What had required the minimal effort of attendance now required the arduous exertion of organization and maintenance.

  On a Thursday a few months after his father’s death, Said opened up the powder-blue double doors of the men’s reception room of his father’s house to find four of the most elderly men from the Kokani Muslim community standing outside. It was the time of day between Maghrib and Isha, the prayers of dusk and darkness, and he had just stopped there to check on his stepmother and half brother before he returned to eat with his wife and children. Between their short-trimmed white beards and the crotched white caps on their heads their eyes betrayed a glassy, lingering disbelief of those unsure of the altered world they saw before them.

  Khaliluddin, his late father’s cousin and the tallest of the four, spoke first, his hesitant words unfurling the frown that had gathered on his head. “We know this is a difficult time for your family,” he began, the hoarse words falling from his mouth. His companions, men who had been present when Said had been named and when as a boy of four he had first started accompanying his own father to the mosque. Those had been the concerns of a different age, when future generations of children and grandchildren could be expected to fill the empty ranks and rosters of those who worshiped at the Jama Masjid.

  The men who came to see my grandfather that day were the appointed elders of the community—the mushavirs, or caretakers, of the Jama Masjid, which dated back to 1778 when it was founded by a Kokani Muslim merchant. For more than one hundred fifty years, as the land around the mosque developed from open fields redolent with coconut palms to a crowded, urban neighborhood in the heart of the city, Kokani Muslims had cared for the mosque, expanding the building as the community grew. On that day they had come to ask Said, then thirty-three, to be a mushavir of the mosque, the highest honor the community could confer on one of its own.

  I can see their plaintive faces now in the proudly sparse room, their elbows and backs resting on the low, long cushions against the wall, the framed picture of Mecca and the dark square of the Kaaba staring out from the wall above them. They had come to his father’ s house to connect him to the legacy they believed was in peril, the history of a community that had germinated and grown and flourished around the mosque built for them so long ago. Perhaps they sensed the symptoms of a man succumbing to the allure of Pakistan. They tried to keep him, to enclose him in the mantle of honor and leadership and duty and responsibility that they wore themselves and that had kept them in India, even after Pakistan was born. Perhaps even then, as the call for Isha prayers rang out in the alleys and into the homes around the mosque, they knew that it might be too late. As he took their leave, clasping their wrinkled hands in his, and lowered his gaze in farewell, my grandfather did not say yes; only, very respectfully and quietly, that he would confer with his wife. It was the first time the honor offered had not been accepted in an instant.

  CHAPTER 3

  The Scent of Other Cities

  MAY 1961

  The voyage to Pakistan was dotted with hardships. The ship had eighteen bathrooms: six for first-class passengers, another eight for second-class passengers, and the remaining four for the anonymous deck dwellers. This meant, for the deck dwellers, that there was a ratio of a hu
ndred people to a single toilet. By the time the horn sounded announcing the ship’s arrival at Karachi Port, Surrayya and her daughters had not been able to use the facilities for nearly twelve hours. They squirmed with discomfort as they carried their belongings, which had been stuffed into bags now near bursting. They clambered up the ship’s exit ramps, pushing forward along with the rest of the human cargo, all smelling of distress and eagerness, all convinced that some prize would be bestowed upon those clever enough to set foot on the solid ground ahead of the others.

  But the land was uninformed about the momentous nature of these arrivals from India. A May sandstorm descended on Karachi soon after the ship had docked at Keamari Harbor, inserting itself between the immigrants and the city of their dreams. Its winds rose red and sharp and hot from the Iranian deserts to the west and blew sand all over the city they had so longed to see.

  But the sand could not mask the smell, and it was the smell that led them to the row of lavatories standing all in a row, the doors painted green and the handles painted white in the colors of Pakistan. It was their first stop in Pakistan, it was their first relief. Just as in Bombay, the toilets were holes in the ground but the pits had been dug deep. The toilets had four walls and no ceilings, and the open sky allowed for the gentle mingling of sea salt, the stench of drying fish, and the suffocating sand from the storm. In this delightful mix of smells, Surrayya, Amina, then each of Amina’s sisters took their turns in the toilets. Their relief was the first glory of the homeland, and it was short-lived.