Madras on Rainy Days: A Novel

by Ali, Samina

  The women quibbled over who should go next, Amme or her younger sister, Asma Kala. Being the mother of the bride, by all rights, Amme should have blessed me now But she was busy putting on a show of her own, feigning fear and reluctance to let her little girl leave the protection of her home, to go and become a woman. Ameera Auntie finally took on her commanding tone and told her to hurry it up.

  My mother sat on the floor beside my feet, her hunched form so familiar to me that I could not believe I would no longer be seeing it. When Sameer threw me out, I would not dare return here. And, yet, if I took that airline ticket Dad had given me and returned to the U.S., where would I go? No money of my own, no college degree, and, most of all, no experience-no life ever lived—outside my mother’s home, not even that night with Nate.

  My mother stuffed my mouth with sweets, her touch rough and awkward; this a woman who had never fed me before. Just beyond her, against the far wall, I caught sight of Nafiza and Raga-be witnessing the rituals they could not be a part of. Both of the old servants were wearing yellow. Amme rose on her knees, laughing uncomfortably as she complained about the ancient customs. She was having the time of her life.

  After she draped me in a floral rope, she opened a velvet box and took out a gold necklace. She clipped it on me. Then she opened another box and clipped a ruby one over the gold. Again and again, more and more jewelry until my neck was weighed down in flowers and gold, her own bangles clinking gently. When she was done, rather than whisper her advice to me, she turned to the women and announced, “My only daughter. My only child since …” she stopped herself from saying his name, the son she’d borne, the one who’d died soon after birth. His death, her unwillingness to have another child, were the reasons, Amme believed, Dad had taken a second wife.

  She cleared her throat and said, “I’ve spent many years planning and preparing for this wedding. Nothing, absolutely nothing, shall go wrong!”

  “Inshal’lah !” they all shouted together, then they began clapping to the tune of the dol. Someone started singing in a high voice like Sabana’s, though I knew it was not her. Earlier, before the guests had arrived, she’d left the house with Dad and their two sons, not wanting or not being invited to take part.

  Amme’s sister finally came forth, her body so full and soft that others had to shuffle aside to make room. She seemed to have swallowed up the vivacity Ameera Auntie so desperately needed. Again, the same ritual with oils and sweetmeats, yet another floral necklace, bracelets, followed by more advice.

  In the revelry and singing, the servants’ children dancing in the background, she leaned into me, the scent of her hair reminding me of her daughter, Henna, and whispered, “Let him make all the moves … or he might suspect you’ve had experience.” She edged back to stare intently at me through the brocade, and I knew what she was saying. His letters had arrived at her home, the address I’d given to Nate not only because Henna was my best friend, but because Asma Kala’s husband, Abu Uncle, was the holder of our secrets.

  She set her hand on mine, over the veil, over the plastic bag, before pulling back into the group of women, a blur of yellow. Nafiza’s daughter, Roshan, sat before me, reading glasses too big for her thin face. She had been four when her mother began breast-feeding me. Later, she’d married a man who owned a chai shop, so she no longer was a servant and was welcome now to perform this ritual. To my nanny, we were like sisters, but it was her presence in this queue of women instead of Henna’s that told me my cousin-sister had not attended the ceremony. In fact, I’d not seen her since I’d arrived in Hyderabad. Asma Kala told me that Henna was having a difficult pregnancy and couldn’t get out of the house, but I believed that she was staying away because she knew about me. Knew what these women would still not see, even after the visit to the blind alim.

  And that was when it occurred to me. Deny it, deny Nate, deny what we’d done. Indeed, in the Old City, where women were never alone with men outside of marriage, what I had done a floor beneath my mother’s bedroom in Minneapolis was the very thing that was not possible.

  Roshan presented me with a sari as she whispered how my husband wouldn’t be able to resist me—two, three times a night he’d wake me—and I turned my face away Like that, one by one, each woman scooted up and blessed me, and when there was no one left, hands came together, gripping my arms and waist, standing me up. Someone shouted for the servants to hold a cloth before the musicians’ faces so the men wouldn’t see the bride as she was taken across the courtyard to the hammam, and though I thought I now knew what to do on the wedding night, the room still blurred yellow and my legs buckled. I fell hard on the stool. The women gasped and there was a moment in which I could hear nothing but my own slow breathing, the soft swish of saris, the sound of dol pressing into my skin.

  “She tripped on her duppatta,” someone finally muttered, yanking it from under my feet.

  There were exclamations to Allah, thanking him that it wasn’t anything like a stomach parasite that I’d gotten in the past, making me swoon. Then the women rolled my veil around their wrists, raising it high behind me as they led me to the hamnam. Someone had brought along the wooden stool and I was again seated on it. Hands came down and undressed me, then peeled off the plastic bags from over the dried henna. Turmeric was rubbed into my skin until the brown glinted gold. Then all the hair on my body was removed, making me appear to be what they all still believed I was, and what my husband was expecting, a girl.

  DAWN. THE SECOND day of my wedding. Sanchak, the ceremony in which the women of the groom’s family come to the bridal home, dressing her in the wedding clothes the groom’s mother has chosen. Then the women pull off the bride’s golden veil and throw on a crimson one of their own, and, in this way begin taking possession.

  Outside my window, in the courtyard, the lamb was baying along with the azan. Last night had been the first the creature had passed in peace, the commencement of my wedding somehow providing it solace. I had passed yet another sleepless night. I now rose and went into the salon, finally viewing the decorations I’d not been able to the night before from under the veil, flowers and gold and modesty keeping my head bowed. As usual, only the servants were awake, the azan their call to work.

  Amme’s old house was designed like most old homes in this part of the city: a central living space surrounded by bedrooms on three sides. The fourth side opened onto the verandah, which led into the courtyard, across from which stood the kitchen and hammam, and the servants’ quarters. Over the years, Dad had added two more floors in the exact design as the first, intending to banish Amme to one of the upper levels. But she had refused to give up the master bedroom and he had no rights left to order her. After all, twenty years before, it had been the room she had entered as a new bride, her sari and veil blazing red. At that time, newly graduated from medical school and possessing little money to lay down as mahr, Dad had vowed in the marriage contract to give Amme his father’s house if he ever divorced her. He probably never imagined it would come to that.

  Now the house looked the same as it had when Amme had stepped into it as a young bride, and then, ten years later, when Sabana had entered it as a bride herself. She and Dad consummated their marriage on a bed facing the one he had once lain on with Amme. For my wedding, the cotton door curtains to all five bedrooms had been replaced with ones made of golden raw silk. As a symbol of fertility, small coconuts wrapped in gold and red tissue paper hung from the center of every doorway—the one that led into the bridal room, into the room the two boys shared, into the master bedroom where Amme slept alone, and, finally, into the small room across from mine, next to the one used for prayer, in which Dad and Sabana now slept, shutting the door on everyone, on Amme. During the day, their room became the divan, the place where guests were seated.

  In the inner courtyard, the circular staircase leading up to the empty floors blinked colorful lights against the purple dawn. Above the takat, the black tarp that covered the Fiat each time we returned to t
he U.S. was suspended from the branches to shield the musicians who would soon arrive from the glare of the rising sun.

  The furniture had been cleared from the large main area, and the servants had laid down long white sheets, covering the tiles from edge to edge. In the place where Dad and I had sat early yesterday morning, there was now that low stool I’d again be seated on for tonight’s ceremony, this time surrounded by Sameer’s family

  Raga-be came up the verandah steps, a stick broom in her wrinkled arm. She was thin and fit, her eyes thickly lined with kajal, and it was only her slightly hunched back that gave away her age to be older than my nanny’s. It was her task to sweep the house each morning,.

  “Why you up so early, Bitea?” she asked me. One side of her mouth bulged from where she’d tucked tobacco. She placed the low stool against the wall and began sweeping the sheets of the rose petals.

  She was the reason I was up before anyone else, and I quickly approached the old woman. “Raga-be,” I began.

  At once, she glanced into the courtyard and turned away from me, bending over the broom even more, one arm slung across her lower back. The palm was painted red with henna. She didn’t stop sweeping.

  I stared across the courtyard. Only the cook, Munir, was stirring about in the kitchen. “I know how you’ve helped women on the farm,” I whispered to her back. “I know what you learned … to do when you were growing up on my grandfather’s land.” I was talking about the very thing Sabana feared, jadu, black magic.

  “Me no know what you say, Bitea,” she cried, louder than I wanted. The lamb jerked its head and bayed a final time as it nervously eyed us. “I no can help you!”

  I looked at Amme’s bedroom door. “You must know about the bleeding,” I persisted. “You’ve got to make it stop. I know you can. I’ve heard about the things you can do …”

  She turned and shook the stick broom at me and her eyes squinted into two lines of kohl. The inside of her mouth was filled with the red juice from the tobacco paan, and this forced her to tilt her head up as she spoke. “You no Indian,” she said. “Chance me jadu go backwards. Then you mama throw me out.” She stared at me awhile, willing me to go away, it seemed, but I stayed where I was, fighting an urge I’d never felt before. I wanted to grab that broom and shake it at her, maybe even whack her humped back until she understood my predicament, until she did what she was told.

  I kept my voice steady “I can deny everything,” I said, “but I cannot deny the bleeding. Raga-be, if he throws me out, where will I go? Amme’s right. I’ve got to make his home my home, it’s the only way …”

  “Shhaa, Bitea!” she cried as she gazed across the courtyard once more. Then her eyes locked onto mine before sliding back across the courtyard, and this time I followed her gaze. Just outside the kitchen door, almost hidden around the cement railing of the circular staircase, was my nanny, crouched on the ground, scrutinizing us with that same look she’d given me last night, suspicion, retraction. So this was what held the old woman’s tongue. Indeed, in trying to protect me, Nafiza would certainly tattle to Amme, just as she’d done in the past.

  “Me say again, Bitea. You no Indian. Me jadu no good for you.” She stretched her eyes wide, the brown irises capturing my full form, then the lids clamped down on it.

  I sighed and turned to go back to my room. Just then, I heard her whisper in what sounded like a strange hum, “No worry-worry Bitea. I come when it time. I come me-self.”

  LATER THAT MORNING, I woke to silence.

  I thought there must have been a fight between Amme and Dad, something so bad it had even stopped the musicians from taking up their instruments. I rose and rushed to the salon, only to find everyone eating, including the two old musicians on the takat facing away from the salon, tea cups and glasses of water set next to their instruments. It was already noon. How was it possible that I had slept seven hours, right through the morning pounding and screaming of the dol and shenai, that damn bleating of the lamb?

  Amme looked up from her plate and nodded at me without saying a word. One of the deep bamboo chairs had been brought out for her and set near the verandah. A plate of rice rested on her lap. Her small feet didn’t reach the floor. She pushed stray hair back from her dark-circled eyes as she called across the courtyard to Nafiza to bring me food. She appeared relieved that I was finally up.

  On the other side of the salon, a rectangular red cloth had been spread over the white sheets, a dastar-khan. Dad and his family sat around it to eat. Dad had his back resting against the wall, and every now and then, Sabana lifted a spoon and he leaned forward, extending his plate, and she served him. One time, as she was holding up the spoon, Dad and his eldest son, Farzad, brought their plates forward at the same time. Immediately Dad snatched back his plate and when Sabana insisted on attending to him first, he took the spoon from her hand and filled his son’s plate himself. The boy was ten, around the age I was when Dad remarried.

  “So the dul’han is awake!” Dad called, then chuckled as his light eyes flitted beyond me to Amme. Since the wedding began, he’d been having fun calling me the bride to tease my mother, not me, because he knew my wedding was a fulfillment of her dreams.

  Sabana glanced up at me and slowly took in the golden kurta-chooridar from last night’s ceremony After the women had bathed me by massaging my scalp and body with turmeric and oils, they had redressed me in my first wedding outfit and told me to wear it to sleep. Now that the wedding had started, there was never to be a moment when I was not to look like the bride.

  Sabana herself was dressed in a yellow shalwar-kameez, though she had not attended the ceremony. Her lipstick had stained her teeth red and was also smudged on her chin. The kurta creased across her growing stomach. Her pregnancy was two months behind Henna’s, five months ahead of my own. She now lifted a spoon and served Dad as she said, “All morning, your father has been stopping Nafiza from waking you, saying the bride needs her sleep. A father can spoil his children, but a husband will never spoil his wives. Look how I attend to your father, even in my pregnancy.”

  Was she telling me to emulate her actions, this woman who was sitting in my mother’s house? I held my tongue, for speaking aloud such things was what led to trouble, beatings.

  Dad pushed back against the wall while sucking the marrow from a bone. His lips and mustache glistened with the cooking oils as much as my own skin and hair glistened with the almond oil and perfumes. I had already become invisible to him, receding once more with Amme into his past life. His younger son, Ziad, curly haired like his mother. and with the same thin face, asked to be excused. He said he was tired of eating rice and curry. He wanted cereal. He wanted to go home. Sabana reminded him that they had come for my wedding. Ziad was four years younger than his brother. If my own brother had been alive, he would have been three years younger than me.

  Nafiza hobbled up the verandah steps with my plate of food. Just beyond her, in the courtyard, Ahmed was waving to get my attention. He was holding one of the floral ropes from last night’s ceremony. With exaggerated steps, he tiptoed over to the sleeping lamb and hung it around the creature’s neck. The animal didn’t start, as I thought it would. It simply opened one eye, and its moist nostrils curled back as it sniffed. It began eating the dried-up flowers. Ahmed roared and clapped his hands. I turned away

  Nafiza was glancing from the dastar-khan to Amme, wanting to know if she should seat me with Dad’s family. Amme shook her head and told her to take me to the kitchen, to feed me there as she used to when I was a little girl.

  HENNA FINALLY ARRIVED, two hours before the evening’s ceremony. While my aunts and uncles were being seated on the verandah, Amme ordering the servants to serve chai and cold sharbat, I grabbed her hand, bloated with pregnancy, unrecognizable to me, and rushed her to the roof. On the climb up the three flights, she had to halt several times and grip her belly with both hands, out of breath. The last time we’d come up here, soon after my engagement, we’d raced each other, windin
g around and around the circular staircase, she winning. She had always been more courageous than me, not cautious, as I was, about where she placed her step, of how she might fall. Though a year younger, she’d done everything first, walking, riding a bike, starting her menses, and now this, getting married, having a child. It was to Henna I went for advice, as Amme went to Abu Uncle. Like her father, Henna’s eyes were dark and deep-set, expressing the same mixture of kindness and understanding. The eyes promised redemption. So why was it that now, when I was finally alone with Henna, I could tell her nothing?

  We were standing next to the cement railing that encircled the flat roof, staring west across the Old City, toward Mecca. Perhaps it was the view that kept my mouth closed. For before us was an image no postcard would show, yet the one I carried with me, defining my experience of India. A tangle of white structures crammed one next to the other, the monotony broken only by a sudden shooting green of tall ashoka and coconut trees. And the green, too, of those small flags with the crescent moon strung one next to the other on twine to hang up and down the streets, like clothes drying in the wind.

  Surrounding the Old City was a six-mile-long stone wall. The last of its thirteen massive gates stood close behind Amme’s house, its top now visible to us over the trees. It was through this Dabir Pura Gate the Fiat thrust each time I went to and from the airport, each time Ahmed drove me to Henna’s house in Vijayanagar Colony, and, in two days, through which I would be taken to usher me to my husband’s home.

  I could not imagine a life in India that occurred outside these uneven stone walls and impressive double doors, where everything, including the day sliced neatly into five parts by the muezzin’s call, did not hold distinction: who you are, what you could amount to. There was no defying limits here. This was a Muslim neighborhood, where women did not leave the house unveiled, not even girls as young as six, their bodies yet indistinguishable from boys’; and where the center of men’s foreheads held a dark patch from the repeated bowing and resting of the face against the pressed dirt of the prayer sujda-ga. The largest mosque in India, Mecca Masjid, stood at the center of the Old City, its granite dome, in the distance, shimmering like glass in the setting sun, and near it, the four slender minarets of the Char Minar pointed to the four corners of the sky. These monuments had been built in the sixteenth century by the Muslim founders of Hyderabad, the Qutb Shahi kings, who had ruled the area for 170 years from Golconda Fort, ten kilometers west of the Old City The fort’s walls were so mighty that even when the great Mughal armies attacked, they found it impregnable. So, they besieged Golconda for eight months … until, finally, late one night, a traitor opened a door from inside, quietly, easily. And die enemy invaded.