Madras on Rainy Days: A Novel

by Ali, Samina

  I gave him a smile. Yes, I remembered the song, though I did not remember singing it with him more than once. I must have been four then. We were in the U.S., in the first home my parents owned, a small two-bedroom rambler in south Minneapolis. We were sitting on the floor, Dad with his back against the sofa, long legs stretched before him. He was bouncing me on his lap as we sang together, my young voice rising to such a pitch it was really a scream. He had thrown his head back then, too, laughing. Then something happened—did Amme announce that I had again wet my bed, did a neighbor’s son come over and ask if I could play?—and I was no longer on his lap but inside the dirty laundry basket, clothes piled on top, hiding me. The song’s beat was now a fist’s beat against walls and doors as he searched the house. It was the one time I had gotten away from him.

  “Where were you hiding?” he now asked. “The first day of your wedding, and the dul’han herself is gone!”

  “I wasn’t hiding,” I said. “I was on the roof. Someone’s strung green flags up and down the alley. I don’t remember that from previous years. They’ve even been tied to our house.” Then I said, “The flag has a crescent moon on it, a star shining within its belly … like it’s pregnant.”

  “Poverty makes people religious,” he said, his gleeful eyes already wandering off to the inner courtyard. I couldn’t tell if he was taking in his two young sons or, through the kitchen’s latticework window, his second wife. Though it had been nearly ten years since the two had married, his light eyes still grew fiery when he looked at her. She was now in the middle of her third pregnancy

  The two boys, the older half my age, stood in the harsh sun in T-shirts and jeans, barefoot, using long sticks to poke the tender flesh of the lamb. The poor thing had wound its way around and around the thin trunk until it could do nothing but lay its head against the wood. It bayed.

  Dad had arrived with his family two days ago, the same day we’d visited the blind alim. When we’d come back to the house, we’d found two fat taxis rolling away from the front boundary gate, one used to transport the family, the other the lamb Dad had bought on the way home from the airport. As the taxis drove off, I could see the animal’s pale prints on the back windshield, where the scared creature must have kicked. The sacrifice was Dad’s way of celebrating my wedding—though I would have preferred that he simply come by himself, without the animal, without his family

  “Ar’re, leave it be!” Dad shouted to his sons, though he was still grinning, and I knew he didn’t mean it. The boys continued to lunge and poke. The lamb jerked. Sabana sang a Hindi song as she cooked her family’s breakfast, her voice high and off-tune. She told people she had been a great Hindi film actress, though, in truth, she’d been nothing more than a nameless face in the few movies she’d briefly appeared in. Maybe it was to be the leading lady that she’d cajoled Dad into divorcing Amme. For that was what he’d done, the reason my mother had locked herself in her room and cried for a month. He hadn’t simply taken on a second wife, something Amme had been raised to prepare for, a man’s right here by Old City laws, but he had done the unthinkable and abandoned her.

  He now turned back to me, his slender fingers diving into his thick, wavy hair, arm hung in midair as he scrutinized me. He had long fingers and graceful wrists, hands molded for exactly what he did, heart surgery. It was hard to believe that the very hands that had signed the divorce deeds, that beat me, saved lives every day.

  “I was searching for you because I have a gift,” he said, calling out to Amme to bring it. She was in the bedroom, the one she had to share with Sabana, her own dowry furniture shifted to one side to fit that of the new wife’s. Though he had divorced Amme, Dad continued to support us. In the U.S., we had separate houses; here, where men kept multiple families, where men did not divorce their wives, he kept us in the same place. No one in the Old City, not neighbors, not relatives, knew of the divorce.

  Amme shuffled out with a thick envelope. She was wearing a cream-colored sari printed with blossoming pink roses and the festive pattern matched her own mood. She’d been in the bedroom all morning with my nanny, Nafiza, the two women giggling as they assembled the dowry onto silver trays: saris and jewels for me; jeans and corduroys, button-down oxfords for Sameer.

  “Tell Nafiza to make me chai,” Dad said as he took the envelope. He massaged his head. “This heat is giving me a headache.”

  “You know your wife won’t let any of my servants into the kitchen,” Amme said. Sabana was terrified that Amme would have them mix black magic herbs into Dad’s food that would turn his affections back to us. It was the reason Sabana did all his cooking. “Besides, I need Nafiza to help me with the dowry If you want chai, get up and tell your wife to make it. Look how much she cares for you—cooking even in this heat!” She grunted, then strolled back to her room as she stared across the courtyard at the kitchen. Already her eyes had lost some of their gaiety. Since their divorce, Amme spoke to Dad with an irreverence she could never have shown if he had remained her husband. But that was the point, to never let him forget what he’d done. If he had kept her as his wife—even a cowife—she would have happily taken his request as an order and gone to stand next to Sabana, boiling the tea herself, two women jostling for one man’s attention, for his one pleasure. It was the life Amme would have preferred.

  “Aie, no one’s happy,” Dad said as he tossed the envelope onto my lap. “No matter what I do, no one’s happy.” He winked at me, trying to enlist me to take his side.

  I opened the envelope and found two airline tickets for the U.S., one with my name, another with Sameer’s. They expired in six months.

  Dad crossed his other leg, a hand running down the front pleat to straighten it. Pale ankles peeked out. Shoelaces dragged on the tile floor. “I remember when I first got the call to go to the U.S.,” he said, staring at something just beyond me. His mustache twitched. “You’d just been born. I told your mother, ‘See how lucky my daughter is. Her footsteps into this house have blessed us.’ I was so pleased, I took you both to Madras to get my visa.” He nodded and his eyes closed briefly before they locked on me again. There was something other than tenderness in them now, another emotion I was more used to seeing, a hard resolve.

  “Return as soon as you can,” he ordered, “as soon as your husband gets his visa. You know how your mother’s life is: she’ll be alone there in that big house. You and Sameer can take an entire floor to yourselves, have all the privacy you need. No need to venture out. How would you pay for an apartment anyway? He’ll come there, expecting to find a job. but no one will honor his degree. He’ll have to take engineering classes over again, just as I had to take my medical exams. He’ll have no job, other than one at McDonald’s or as a taxi driver. He won’t be able to support you. Live in the house, continue to take care of your mother. Don’t forget all the sacrifices she’s made for you. Remember, you’re responsible for her.”

  I stared out into the courtyard. The two boys had gone into the alley to play with the local kids. July the season for kites; I remembered that from my childhood here as well as I remembered singing that song with Dad in the U.S.

  Sabana’s shadow passed through the kitchen door and I saw the moment I had gone from being the lucky girl to the ill-fated daughter. Amme’s sacrifices, the reason she had stayed on with Dad after he had cast her away, erasing her own future, was so she could give me the one thing she no longer possessed, a husband.

  “Did Amme tell you about his leg?” I asked.

  He shrugged as he rose from his chair. He was done with what he had to say

  He stuck a hand into a pocket, the shape of a fist. “The boy confessed,” he said. “When your Abu Uncle went to his house, the boy didn’t hide it. He confessed. That shows courage.” Then he stared down at me and I watched him take in my round nose, the full lips, features he’d passed on to me as he’d later passed on responsibility for my mother. I knew what he was thinking, had even heard him remark on it once to his Bollywood wife. H
e thought I was ugly.

  “Be grateful to have him, Layla. No one can detect the limp. You know how it is here when it comes to tying a marriage. The boy’s degree, the girl’s beauty. Nothing else matters.”

  Nothing? What about the one thing he would not name? Without a father, without a proper home, a girl could never think to enter a new one.

  SOON AFTER BREAKFAST, the house began to transform, and I realized it didn’t matter how much I had prepared myself, going over and over the upcoming events in my mind, for when it was actually happening, my body was still left shocked.

  The green flags that someone had strung along the ground-floor balcony had been removed and, in their place, wedding lights went up. Strings of colorful lights now hung from each of the three floors, from the chandni I had been standing on this morning, gazing across at what seemed an unchanging city, and they twisted through the guava and coconut branches as women here wove floral strings through their hair. Two young women from the local beauty shop had come to the house and painted my hands and feet with intricate designs of henna. Then they’d put sugar water on top to keep the raw henna in place. The longer it stayed on, the deeper the red would be, and the more auspicious my marriage. Inside the delicate leaf painted on my right palm, within the fragile lines, Sameer’s initials. That, too, was auspicious, his name seeping into blood and skin, becoming part of me. It was tradition here for the groom to search for his initials on the wedding night, a silly ritual perhaps intended to provide a natural way for the young couple to touch each other when they had never touched before.

  Wedding musicians had arrived just as the sun was going down and were set up in the courtyard, not too far from the crying lamb. The cracked wood of the old takat they’d been seated on had been covered by a red masnat, its gold embroidery shaping into the pointy guava leaves shading the two men. Under the shenai’s plaintive call and the steady beat of the dol, I could hear the dull thud of pots and pans as the servants cooked the evening meal. Tonight, for the first wedding ceremony mun-jay, the women of my family would begin to prepare me to meet my new husband.

  Already it was nearing time for them to arrive, so Amme had sent me to my room. Only when all the guests had gathered and the salon had been fully decorated would I be presented, splendid in my first wedding outfit, its sheer duppatta pulled down over my face, reaching my knees. Nafiza had dressed me moments earlier, covering my hands in pink plastic bags, cinched at the wrists by rubber bands to keep the henna from staining the fabric. Then she’d seated me at the center of my dowry bed, the headboard carved into the shape of a peacock’s lean neck, the face turned sideways, beak parted in a silent cry. The footboard was the creature’s regal tail feathers. She herself had taken a place on the stone floor, sewing the velvet pillowcases that matched the maroon velvet of the bedcover. On the morning of my wedding day, all the bedroom furniture would be moved to Sameer’s house: the Godrej almari stuffed with the saris and jewels I was to wear in my new home; the dresser with the tall mirror now veiled by a sequined cloth to prevent me from seeing my reflection until the wedding night, when I was fully his bride; and, of course, this majestic bridal bed on which he would discover how I was unfit to be his wife.

  “He fooled me with those black boots,” I now said to my nanny through the thick mosquito netting. The bedroom’s door and windows were closed to keep anyone from glimpsing me, and it softened the dol’s beating so that it could have been the surging of my own pulse. “Don’t you remember, Nafiza-una, on each of those three dates you and I went on with him, he wore those thick-soled boots. They must be corrective.”

  She didn’t look up from her sewing. She had spread a cloth underneath the pillow covers to protect them from soiling, but not underneath her own sari. She was barefoot, as she always was around the house, the pads of her feet thickly encrusted with dirt, as dark as her small eyes. Her hair was pulled up in its usual bun, and under the glare of the overhead light, I could see where she’d applied henna to her hair, asking the beauty shop women for a dab to cover her gray. Her hands were steady as she pushed and pulled the needle, though I had been the one with the sharp eye to thread it.

  My nanny had come to work for my maternal grandfather when she was about four, a child who’d been born to villagers on Nana’s land in distant Miryalgurda. During Partition, when the servants and villagers had risen up against my nana, using the chaotic time to claim his haveli, his land, as their own, she had been one of three servants to remain loyal to the family, fleeing with them to Nana’s city cottage in Vijayanagar Colony She was a year or two older than Amme and remembered no family of her own other than ours. After I’d been born, she had been the one to nurse me.

  She now said, “You no married and already you sick of you husband. What happen, child? After you engagement, we go with him to Public Gardens and you let him hold you hand. I no stop you. I see you happy. Happy with him. He has pretty-pretty face, you tell me you-self. You ask me if he face more pretty than you, that maybe he no love you for this.” She paused before repeating, “Tell me, child, what turn you against him?”

  “No one wears boots in this heat,” I said. “I should have known he was hiding something.”

  She stared at me, the skin on her cheeks dry and hardened, the dark lips parted to expose teeth stained red from betel nut. It was the same look she gave me whenever my cousin Henna slept in my bed. It seemed to say she knew what I was up to even as she asked it. An assertion and retraction. For that was our relationship. After all, the woman who had breast-fed me, who continued to bathe and dress me, and would do so even after I was married, was also the one who, as a servant, could not question my behavior.

  Outside now, I could hear Amme greeting my aunts, laughter, the hum of excited conversation.

  Nafiza said, “I raise you as me own, child. I no see difference between you and me daughter, Roshan. I know you no worry about you husband. I know you worry about you-self. The boy no hiding leg. You know about he leg. He tell you uncle he-self. But what you tell you husband when he find you blood? Who you go to when he throw you out?”

  I didn’t answer, for there was no answer to give. In all I had gone over in my mind, again and again, it was the one question I hadn’t been able to confront. If he threw me out, it would mean that he had found me unsuitable. And an unsuitable wife here, by Old City laws, was a whore, so by those same laws, her father had the right to kill her. The man who had begun beating me at two, how far would he be driven to punish me now?

  Nafiza clucked, muttering how she had not meant to frighten me. She tore the thread between her brittle front teeth, then rose, a hand resting on the new dresser to help her up. One of her legs was always giving her trouble, and she began pounding on it as she walked stiffly over to me, unable to fully bend the knee. She was short, my nanny, not fully five feet, but there was something about her face, her stature, that made her seem formidable. She parted the heavy mosquito netting, dark eyes narrowing onto my face. An opening of her presence. “I protect you, child, as I do when you little girl, running from you daddy …”

  Amme pulled back the golden door curtain, the coconut hanging from the top of the door frame trembling, a sign of fertility. The dol’s beat grew intense, taking on a different rhythm inside me. From laughter, my mother’s face had grown the deep red of the rubies she was wearing.

  “Chalu,” she said, extending an arm to me, rings on every finger. “It’s time for the bride to show herself.”

  THE WOMEN CHEERED as I emerged and gathered about me, hands clasping my arms, resting steadily on my back, guiding me to the center of the salon. From under the brocade veil, my head lowered in modesty, I could only make out thin and dark bare feet, toes glinting with silver toe rings like my own. I was seated on a low stool, its wood painted the same crimson red as the canopy hanging above. The women giggled and whispered to each other as they sat cross-legged on the white sheets that had been spread across the tile floor. They encircled me. Their voices were carried
away by the long notes of the shenai.

  We were all dressed in yellow. The Hyderabadi Muslim wedding lasts five days, each ceremony bearing its own ritual along with its own color. The first three days are the gold that promises fortune and fertility the wedding nik’kah is the blood red of union, and the walima dinner that is given only upon a successful coupling is the green of Islam, of submission.

  Silver trays were shuffled about and finally settled at my feet. They were loaded down with flowers strung into lush necklaces and bracelets, sweetmeats covered in thin sheets of edible silver, engraved bowls filled with turmeric and rosewater, a short flask of jasmine itar, almond oil, and even this, a bottle of hair removal cream.

  My mother’s sister-in-law, the matriarch, crouched before me first, her thin midriff covered entirely by her sari-pallow. Slender hands made frail by diabetes thrust past my veil and inside the layers of my silk kurta and up the bottoms of my chooridar to rub my skin with oils and perfumes. She fed me sweet ladu, rolled the floral bracelets over the pink plastic covering my hands, draped me in a floral rope. Finally, she leaned over and whispered into my ear.

  “I’ll tell you what I tell all my biology students,” she said, though her voice did not hold its usual authority. Along with teaching girls at the local high school, Ameera Auntie had taught me to read and write Urdu. “Help him out so he knows what to do. You know your body better than him. These Indian boys come to marriage as inexperienced as you.” Then she withdrew, kissing my cheek through the veil, her skin smelling of the mothballs she placed in the almari between her clothes. The dol took up a steady beat.