by Ali, Samina
Sameer’s mother, Zeba, stepped in last. The gold of her sari matched the gold of my wedding dress, and over it, she wore a black duppatta that covered her head and shoulders. Amme and she greeted each other, my mother’s flashy sari and jewels glowing more brightly than the wedding lights. Zeba’s only jewelry consisted of red glass bangles that encircled one wrist. Renter and landowner, childhood friends, and now this, fellow mothers-in-law A strange formality erected itself between the two women, as palpable as the dhan dhinak dhin of the dol, and it took three clumsy attempts before they were able to embrace.
The lights switched back on. Amme led Zeba over to me and asked her to sit down. As my mother-in-law took her place before the short stool, Sameer’s relatives encircled me, while my mother and aunts moved back against the walls to watch the celebrations from afar. That was how I glimpsed what it could be like for me in my new family: I might actually belong.
Before she began the ceremony, Zeba raised her palms and the women became silent, as we had earlier at the sound of the azan. Someone stopped the musicians and Zeba led everyone in prayer. Unlike Amme, who closed her eyes whenever she recited, Zeba’s gaze, through my wedding veil, remained so focused on my face that I was reminded of her son, and it was I who closed my eyes, silently making a prayer of my own, the show of mercy I wanted finally taking form. The form of my husband: let him not cast me out.
The prayers completed, Zeba gently fed me ladu to sweeten my mouth, and the women shouted, “Alhum-du-illah.” The musicians were asked not to play during the ceremony, and the women themselves remained quiet, attentive to Zeba, quickly handing her what she needed. With strong, steady movements, my mother-in-law performed the long ritual of applying oils and perfumes, draping me in flowers. Then she adorned me with the traditional Hyderabadi Muslim jewels: a pearl and emerald necklace of seven strands that hung to my navel, a matching pearl choker as wide as my wrist, diamond and pearl earrings so heavy I feared they would tear my lobes, ruby and emerald rings for each finger, silver ones for my toes, gold bracelets that clinked with each movement of the wrist, a pearl strand to cover the center of my hair part, and, finally, a nose loop ring as wide as my cheek, which Zeba had had the jeweler, specifically for me, mold into a clip-on. My mother-in-law’s touch remained confident throughout, and with each additional motion of her hand, each jewel and oil that went on, I began to believe in this process of renewal. A girl transforming into a woman, a daughter into a wife, it was magical.
When she had made me into the image of a perfect bride, she leaned into me, as the women of my family had the previous night when they’d whispered their secrets.
Zeba said, “I have come here tonight not wearing any jewels, for I no longer have need for them. I have passed everything my mother-in-law gave to me on to you. You are now my only jewel, the jewel of my family.”
She kissed my forehead through the veil, then asked Henna to join my family against the wall. Two women from Sameer’s family rose and came to either side of me. Together, they lifted my yellow brocade veil and, in its place, Zeba draped a red one, pulling it down to my feet, claiming this new bride as her own.
HENNA SLOWLY UNWOUND her sari, letting it fall to the floor around her feet, a pool of shimmering gold. She slid open the slit of the thick mosquito netting and slipped inside, crawling up the bed to nestle next to me. She was wearing just her petticoat and tight sari-blouse, and her bare belly thrust into the curve of my lower back. The room was dark. The overhead fan lifeless on this cool night that promised monsoons. The dowry bed was pushed into a corner, beneath two windows, the shutters flung open to a view of the inner courtyard. The only sound came from the lamb munching on fallen guava leaves as it satisfied itself before the slaughter. The swollen moon filled a window frame. Its silver light reminded me of the walima sari, and I thought of how, in just under a week, the desperation I’d felt in wanting to cancel the wedding had become a desperation in wanting it to succeed.
Henna began unhooking the back of my wedding top. Her fingers glided inside and pushed the fabric aside as she made her way up to my breast. She passed a hand under my bra and cupped me, her body curling into itself, as much over the belly as possible, her nose poking into the back of my neck. When she spoke, I felt her breath tease my skin.
“I want to know what he felt when he touched me,” she whispered.
I placed my hand over hers and squeezed it to let her feel the contours of my flesh, those parts I’d been told to keep hidden from all men but my husband. What had I been thinking to allow Nate to slip inside? Different worlds, and in each I was a different woman, unrecognizable even to myself. I was like the two faces of the moon, new and full, one always veiled behind the other.
And now, finally, I could feel the other woman in me stirring awake, alive to where she was, taking form inside her wedding dress. It was Zeba’s steady touch that had called her forth. A daughter’s only home is with her husband, that was what was believed here. And tonight, as I wore the jewels Zeba had once worn herself, I understood how that could be possible.
I squeezed into Henna even more as I asked her to tell me about her wedding night.
She drew her hand out from under mine and slid it down the long stretch of my body She found my wrist and encircled it with her thumb and pinkie, then held my palm up to the moonlight. Fingertips stroked the mehndi designs from base to tips, slowly spreading the fingers open.
“My husband took a long time to find his initials … but I think he took his time on purpose. I remember his fingers gliding down my palm. Just that light touch…” she imitated the caress, and I thought of Nate. Not of the first time I had held his hand, but of the first time I had uttered his name. Out of respect, a woman here did not use a man’s name, so it was this small gesture, his allowing me to say his name, his expecting it, and my doing so, in public, in the quiet of my bed, calling, whispering, sighing his name, that had made him a part of me long before he had slid inside.
“Are you scared?” she asked.
I closed my hand over hers and pressed it to my own swollen belly. “It was his letters,” I said. “For a whole year, it’s all he wrote about. The different ways in which he would … pornographic!”
She surprised me by laughing and tugged me close. A cramp shot through my stomach and I ignored it, as I was learning to do. “You’ve grown up in America, Layla, how could you not know such things! He’s a man. You’re the first woman he’s had access to. What do you think is on his mind! A whole year? It’s probably the only thing he’s been thinking about for a whole ten years. Oh, Layla,” she muttered as she buried her nose in my hair, still giggling. “Layla, Layla, do not be in the darkness, as your name suggests.”
She was right, of course, and though I felt foolish before her for my reaction, I could not deny how his words, his descriptions, had caused me to draw away, repelled. It was how I had felt the past two mornings when I had entered the salon and found the door to Dad’s room still shut, the image of what he and Sabana were doing inside floating up in me, forcing my eyes closed. I wanted nothing more to do with him.
“There are better ways to seduce a woman,” I said, turning over. She spread her long hair over the velvet pillow, the rich strands glistening in the moonlight. She was beautiful, Henna, having the sort of beauty I didn’t possess. She was fair with glinting black eyes, lips that were the bruised red of a pomegranate. Growing up, I had always longed to be like her, and eventually it became a longing to be her, or, at least, be one with her. How could her husband have given her up? But that was territory I knew better than to explore, having never asked it even of my own mother. The only life left to us now, to dream about, as we used to when we were children, was my own. And, soon, even that might be over.
I rested my head on her chest. Above the rise of her breasts, her baby, now seven months along. I wrapped an arm over it, secretly claiming it as my own. She was carrying our child, the one I must not bear.
“Tell me about him,” sh
e said, referring to Nate. “In what way was he better?”
Better? I did not know Sameer well enough to say one man was better. It had been his gaze, steady and gentle, that stirred something awake inside—not a different self, as Zeba had done, but a feeling. I had to try on love, just once with the man I chose, before …
But that life was already over. In two nights, when the moon was full, on the fifteenth day of the Islamic month of Shaw’wal, the day the Qur’an and the astrologer had determined would be auspicious, I would begin a different phase of my life.
“You tell me about Sameer,” I said. “Remind me how I felt for him,” but even as I spoke, the image of my fiance fluttered before my eyes. His dark gaze, piercing and unsettling, calling up that dull tug of attraction. He had a gap between his front two teeth and his tongue wiggled in and out of it, teasing. “Oh dear God,” I cried, hiding my face in Henna’s soft shoulder. “I pray I haven’t made a mistake.”
Henna stroked my hair before raising my face to her own. And there they were, those eyes, offering me redemption. Yet what could I confess, which life of mine, which choice, was in error?
“Layla,” she whispered, her voice scared in a way I’d never heard. What stray thought had caused her courage to seep out? “Did you go too far with him, Layla? This bleeding … will your husband …”
“No,” I said, staring at the shadows under her eyes. If, like Amme, she had carried her burden alone, so, too, could I. Perhaps this was part of becoming a woman.
She pressed her palm against mine, the mehndi lines telling a different tale than the ones that foretold our lives. She wanted the truth.
“No,” I said again. “No.”
AFTER HENNA HAD fallen asleep, I slowly pulled away from her and wrapped the long duppatta around me to hide my exposed back, the hooks undone.
I was going out in search of Raga-be. It was past midnight and I thought the house was asleep, but when I opened the bedroom door, the wood creaking, the coconuts swaying over my head, I saw Acme standing by the courtyard faucet. She was barefoot, her sari hitched up to her calves, her body lit bright in the moonlight. She was performing wazu. Her prayers for me were never recited during the day or in public, as Zeba’s had been tonight, but in a private audience with God. Night salat was so appreciated by Allah, it was said, that he rewarded one night prayer as equal to praying a thousand years. The five prayers that punctuated each day could be uttered in five minutes. Night salat was so extensive, she would be reciting till dawn.
I hid behind the door curtain and watched as she passed her small hands under the sink, splashing the moonlight. Right hand. Left hand. God’s hand, the devil’s hand, they said. But in reality, just fragile, wrinkled hands that had, at one time, carried me. Now she passed water over her face, the part down the center of her head, and finally up her bare feet, each gesture, each motion cleansing her spirit of the waste of this world so she could stand pure before Allah. There was something about watching my mother like this, when she felt alone and unobserved except by God, that made her seem like an angel to me, and me like the real earthly waste she had to shed in order to return to her ethereal splendor.
DUSK. THE THIRD day of my wedding, mehndi.
I was lying alone in my wedding bed, the wooden shutters pulled open, the widening moon suspended in the window frame. Time was running out.
The women of my family had already left for Sameer’s house, Ameera Auntie stuffing the musicians and their instruments into her Ambassador. This was the groom’s ceremony And just as the women from his family had come to Amme’s house the previous night, bearing my wedding clothes, adorning me, so, tonight, did the women of my family journey to his home with silver trays displaying our gifts: jeans and corduroys, polo T-shirts and button-downs, an electric shaver and three cans of Gillette shaving cream, a leather wallet and a bottle of Ralph Lauren cologne, and finally, the gold wedding band, which Henna, representing me, would slip onto his finger.
Earlier, my aunts and cousins had once more gathered here to straighten each other’s sari pleats, weave flowers through each other’s braids, and come up with ideas on how to tease the groom. Unlike the ceremony his family had conducted, quiet and sober, my family intended to perform with full gaiety The women had dug up old memories of his family and spun them into jokes, even as they invented clever ways to exaggerate my virtues. Henna was advised again and again to resist sliding on the wedding ring too quickly All this was customary, a tussle, a play, meant to prove to the groom that his bride was worthy of him. Tomorrow night, games aside, he would find out for himself.
Dad’s figure now crossed over the ripening moon, so dark against its luminescence that he could have been the demon risen from my dreams, the form without a face, mute. He called out to Munir to feed the lamb, not to fatten it up even more, but in hopes of quieting the creature. Munir was already gone. Dinner tonight would be served at Sameer’s house, and our cook had seized the opportunity to take an early leave. Dad threw the animal three guavas that Ahmed had picked from the tree as he crossed the courtyard and slipped out the front gate, whistling. He was taking the motorcycle to his mother-in-law’s house, and I thought how unfair it was that I had acted no differently from him, yet I would be the one punished. Arranged in marriage to one person, choosing another to love. What he did, by Old City laws, was natural for a man, even expected. Islam itself sanctioned four wives, just as it had sanctioned divorce. So easy for a man to release himself: talak, talak, talak, the one word pronounced thrice to undo an entire existence.
It was local custom that prevented Dad from fully abandoning us, and whatever deed Amme had made him sign after their divorce. A girl here went from her father’s house to her husband’s, from the protection of one man to the protection of another. A girl raised without a father, without a man’s name shielding her reputation, might as well be illegitimate, might as well be a whore—the very thing I had become, according to those local customs, by sleeping with Nate. And the very thing Amme had tried to prevent by staying on with Dad even after their divorce.
Talak, talak, talak, each word punched out, as distinct as the heart’s beating on an EKG. That year, he had returned from his two-week vacation to Hyderabad with two deeds: one he enacted to end Amme’s life, one he signed to give her this house. Her tomb. She locked herself into the bedroom of her suburban house, one floor above mine, and mourned for a month. Ten days short of the forty Islam designates to grieve a death. For she hadn’t fully died, nor had he fully died to her. Instead, a different arrangement had been made, one never pronounced aloud, never revealed to me, the daughter, as the divorce itself was never disclosed. This deed was written up by Amme and slid under the locked door, and only when he signed it did the door open.
Amme had emerged silent and dried up, yet it was the high-pitched wail I’d heard for a month, drifting down the vents, seeping through the walls and ceiling, that went on echoing inside me, becoming the loam of my loam, bone and flesh. The noise of a dying woman. Though it had been ten years, the sound was still as familiar to me as my own voice, and, like my voice, I heard that howl both within and without. The crying lamb, the long notes of the shenai, the breeze now tussling the guava leaves all sprang from the residue of that shriek.
Nafiza hobbled into the room, humming a song she had invented long ago about a girl who would one day find her way home. She sat at the edge of my bed, behind me, caressing my hair. A fruit bat flew across the surface of the moon, as black as my name.
“Henna’s at Sameer’s house right now,” I said. “She even gets to see my future home before I do.”
“You love she too much, child,” Nafiza said, and I knew what she meant. My nanny didn’t like Henna and me sleeping in the same bed, touching. A few years ago, Nafiza had gone to Amme and complained, asking my mother to keep us separated. Amme had simply laughed and accused the old woman of having a dirty mind, then referred to something my nanny had done on the farm when the two had been young women, and
my nanny never brought it up again. Still, I could see the disapproval like a shadow across her face, her small eyes drawing closed, pulling in her presence.
“You said you would protect me, Nafiza, as you used to when I was a little girl. What will you do if he doesn’t want me as his wife?” But even as I asked it, I knew there was nothing she could do. A woman, a servant, what power had she?
“When you mama come home tonight, we tell she about the gora boy She no understand the bleeding. You mama only see Sameer. She only see you wedding.”
Yes, tell my mother about Nate, just as Nafiza had told her about Henna. The dirty mind, the polluted body, and she, my mother, the angel splashing moonlight, what could even she do? When my father beat me, she stayed in the other room, attentive to the sound of wounded flesh. When I was four, hiding in the laundry basket, his heavy leather shoes shaking the ground beneath me, she had simply told him that if he continued searching, he would be late for his shift at the hospital. It was only because of work that he’d left, the one time I’d gotten away from him.
In truth, Amme couldn’t stop him. She was not even allowed to utter his name, so how could she dare utter a word against his?