by Ali, Samina
Nafiza bathed me as before, singing that song she had long ago invented about a girl who would one day find her way home. It was about me, of course, recounting how, at nearly a year old, I had walked out of the family compound and gotten lost. My mother, who had been packing suitcases for our move to the U.S.—tropical clothes, rice and ghee, betel nut leaves, what do you bring to a country you’ve never been to?—hadn’t noticed or, if she had, had thought Nafiza was attending to me. My nanny assumed I was with my mother. By the time the family went out to search, I was nowhere in the neighborhood. It wasn’t until the next day that someone brought me to the police station. Amme said Dad was so relieved to have me back, he threw a party for four hundred people—as large as my wedding. I have no memory of any of it.
Now I said, “But Nafiza-una, haven’t I found my way home?”
She raised her voice over mine, singing even louder, the exertion causing her to cough so deeply that she had to stoop behind me, a hand resting heavily on my back for support. I reached over my shoulder and patted it, but she drew away, still angry I was sure, about what I’d done with Raga-be. I finished bathing myself while she fetched a towel.
When I came into the bedroom with it around me, I was surprised to find my mother-in-law She was standing at the foot of the bed, and the sunlight falling through the open window revealed the deep lines across her forehead and under her eyes, around her lips. Tears were running down her wide cheekbones, which she didn’t wipe away. The black veil was still wrapped about her, making me feel exposed.
“Islam says that heaven lies at the mother’s feet,” Zeba said. “To please her is to enter heaven. Today, Layla … Beti … you have earned your place in heaven.” She stepped forward and wrapped me in her arms, the black cloth swooping about like ravens’ wings. She smelled of sweat and cooking spices, the jasmine oil she must have applied to her hair. When she pulled back and saw my confused face, her lips curved into a tight smile, three crescents on either side of her mouth. It was the strongest expression of happiness I had seen on her. “This morning, Sameer gave me the cloth. You are a virtuous wife, Layla. Your steps into this house have blessed us all.” She kissed my forehead, as she had at the sanchak ceremony, and this time, I was left with the softness of her lips and not the scratchy feel of the brocade. “Dress her in green,” she ordered Nafiza, not taking her eyes off me. “I want to see my daughter in green all day, not only at the walima. Allah ka shukar, this is not just a show.”
After she had gone, I dressed as she’d asked, choosing a green of raw henna, then sat on the stool before the mirror. Nafiza stood behind me, plaiting my hair.
She said, “You papa, he once believe you feet bless him.”
I gazed at her through the tall mirror, but she kept her focus on my hair. She had it parted into three sections and was winding each tightly around the other as she blended in the strand of white jasmine Zeba had sent Sameer’s brother, Feroz, to get. My husband had still not returned from wherever he’d gone.
I said, “My going to Raga-be for help is no different from Amme taking me to all those alims. Nafiza, there’s no reason for you …”
“The boy, he touch you?” she asked, speaking over me.
I took in the face that was as familiar to me as my mother’s, the hardened skin across the cheeks and forehead, the thin lips as dark as the rest of her. No matter that she had helped raise me here, how much could the old servant really understand about me and my life?
“Throw out the marigolds,” I said. “I’m getting a headache. Maybe there’s a maid who can help you.” There was no maid, I knew, this was a modest household.
“Throw out flowers. Throw out bloody rags. Everything stink,” she said, slowly adding, “Stink, too, the white cloth the boy give his mama. Same stink as rags.”
I ignored her.
“Boy who touch he wife no leave house in hurry-hurry,” she went on. “Sun still meeting ground, not in sky yet, and he gone. Why he keep wife he running from? She what use to him?” She shook her head. “Bloody cloth is jadu he use to fool people. Make them believe what no there. Child, you tell he mama …”
“Tell his mother, tell my mother—Nafiza, you tell me, what good will it do?” Before she could answer, I added, “You yourself went to Raga-be before you got married, tucking away some secret. So you know there are times when not everything should be revealed.”
She yanked a section of hair, tearing the thread stringing together the flowers. White petals fell into my lap and on the floor. She pulled a bobby pin from her gray bun and, squeezing a few stems onto it, pushed it through my braid. Her eyes, small pinholes in her face, closed even more. A drawing in of her presence.
“Better you tell he mama the truth,” she repeated.
“One night means nothing, Nafiza. I won’t tell anyone. Giving him away is giving myself away. Don’t you see that?”
“You no tell she what no concern her. Only tell she about she child. He no do what he say he do.” She sighed, and I could feel the heavy weight of her breasts against me. “No telling what the boy up to. Better you protect you-self.”
Protect myself from Sameer? He was the one protecting me. And hadn’t she, my nanny, offered the same thing only three days before?
“Nafiza, if you really want to protect me, don’t tell his mother, don’t make me return to that house. There is no home there for me, there is only my father. He will kill me, if not for this, then for something else; one day he will end up killing me.”
She pursed her lips, hands going still. Then she suddenly looked up at me, yellow teeth revealing themselves through a smile, a thought having crossed her mind. “This Allah’s work, no jadu,” she said. “You no see, child, if you go home now, he no kill you. The boy say he touch you, but he no touch you. You return now, you save you-self. Only when boy touch you and return you he-self will you papa …” she stopped, unable to utter what we both knew he would do to me, Nafiza’s second daughter.
Finally she said, “Me old woman, Layla-bebe. Me no know how to read and write, me no go to foreign schools like you. All life, I spend in you mama’s house. I grow up there, I marry there, and, one day, I die there, like me husband die there. Me girl, Roshan, I give her same-same milk I give you. No difference in milk. No difference in love. Now me girl giving milk to her girl. But you no making milk, you making blood. What you think become of me when I see this?”
I bowed my head in shame. I hadn’t thought about her.
She pulled on my braid, forcing me to raise my head again. She said, “But I still standing beside you,” and pinched my kurta. “Take this off. I get different clothes. Me girl return home in honor.”
“No, Nafiza, I can’t. You see …” I slid my fingertips across the drawer in which he’d found those letters. “It’s too late. Sameer already knows about me. And by jadu or by God, he’s keeping me on as his wife. Just like you, he still accepts me. But he’s my husband, Nafiza, he needs some time to get over this. It’s why he couldn’t touch me last night.”
She turned down her dark lips and grunted. She hadn’t been expecting that. But nor had I when it happened. Some hidden powers at work, indeed.
Then Nafiza said, “Maybe he fooling you? Using what you do to hide he-self.” But she no longer seemed as sure of what she knew
I plucked the jasmine from my lap and slid them into my braid. My hand was turned sideways, and in the mirror, I could see the reflection of my palm, the leaf drawn red, already beginning to fade.
“I have to go greet my new family,” I said, rising, and though I wanted to call Zeba “Mother,” I couldn’t, and instead said, “Zeba Auntie must be waiting.”
She lumbered to the bed, pounding on the leg that gave her pain, and began snapping off the floral ropes. As usual, she was dressed in one of Amme’s old saris, the ghost of my mother hovering about. She spoke through a sigh, “One night he no touch you, you say you no care so I no care. One night, maybe it mean no-thing. But Layla-bebe,” she said, loo
king up at me, her face fully open and drawing me in as palpably as a caress, so I knew what she said was not a threat but a gesture of maternal love, “if one night become two and three and four and five, if one night go on like this, I speak to he mama me-self. I tell she the truth.” Her hand closed on a marigold, crushing it.
“That’s fine, Nafiza,” I said, not believing it would come to that.
THE LAST OF the five wedding days, walima.
Over a thousand guests were invited to the dinner Sameer’s parents hosted to proudly announce he had consummated the marriage. The wedding hall, which had sweltered with four hundred people the previous night of the nik’kah—forcing the manager to set up standing fans as tall as a man every ten or so feet—now became unbearable, the air stinking of sweat and skin, betel nut and spices, flowers and bad breath. All the fans were turned on high but did little to stir the dead air.
Sameer and I sat on a square-shaped dais, ropes of white jasmine and red roses hanging down three sides of a maroon canopy Through the side free of flowers, we gazed out at the wedding guests, perched on those high-backed chairs his family had ordered for the wedding. It was true, he could not properly fold his broken-and-not-properly-healed right leg to sit cross-legged on a velvet masnat, as was tradition.
But not much was traditional about this night, nor, I was learning, about my husband. Rather than wear the heavy silver sherwani with the Nehru-cut collar, he had chosen a blue Armani suit Amme had sent over on one of those gift trays. And below, in place of the colorful silk sandals, he had on the thick-soled black boots I had seen him in the first time we’d met, then each of the three times we went out with Nafiza-una, the ones with the corrective heels. Beside him, I was the glorious image of the virtuous wife: wrapped in the six-foot-long silver threaded green sari, my ears and fingers and neck gleaming with emeralds, bangles clinking up to my elbows, ankles heavy with gold chains, only the silver ring missing from my one toe. Despite the heat, I still wore the floral garland his mother had draped each of us in to commence the event, though he had immediately removed his and cast it by his feet.
Before us, the brightly lit wedding hall was jammed from end to end with tables of assorted sizes. In the courtyard, a large tent had been hitched and more tables arranged. Still, some guests ate standing up. His family, my family, went about greeting people, giving up their tables for other guests. It had been decided, upon gauging the crowd, that the immediate family members would eat after the event, including the bride and groom. After all, the celebratory feeding of others was the only ritual of the walima, no application of oils and turmeric, sweetening of the mouth. Our marriage was now official.
As guests finished their meals, they came up to congratulate us in colorful clumps, and Sameer rose and shook hands with the men, accepting their good wishes, while I lowered my head even farther in modesty, accepting clumsy pats on my head, fingers brushing against my cheek, further smudging the makeup the heat had already creased across my face. After a while, though, the salutations began to be accompanied by the rumor that had been seeping through the gathering, whispered from guest to guest, and now boldly raised by the men to the new groom: the evening seemed hastily put together, they complained, not enough tables, not enough chairs, perhaps not even enough food to go around. Most of the guests had been invited that very day by Feroz, who had rushed to various houses in the Old City and Vijayanagar Colony on his bicycle to announce the walima would indeed be hosted, the bride had been accepted. The men asked my husband if he and his family had assumed there would not be a successful union, the bride being American.
If Sameer had seemed impatient before with this ceremony, tapping the silver ring against the chair’s arm, hurriedly greeting and getting each guest off the stage, now, having to defend my honor again and again to the hundreds who came up in small knots of color and curiosity, titillation, appeared to have defeated him. By the time the last of the guests bounded onto the dais to greet us before leaving, he didn’t stand to greet them. He simply nodded, the hand with the silver toe ring massaging his forehead, the three deep lines that had emerged across it. And when the wedding photographer tried to take a final photo, he turned his face away. We didn’t speak.
When the guests had gone, two long tables were pushed next to each other, the tall fans shifted to surround us. The high-backed chairs were moved to the center of one table, the women of Sameer’s family sitting to my right, the men to Sameer’s left. The man who had danced to the brass wedding band, the one Sameer had explained to me late last night was one of his closest friends, Naveed, was not among them.
At the other table, my family. Sabana was busy fussing over her boys, loading up their plates with biriyani and chicken tikka, lamb kabobs, and yogurt, while Dad was laughing, his head thrown back at some remark. Over the head of his younger son, his light-colored eyes were fixed on Ameera Auntie, and she was smiling shyly at him, her mouth partly covered by her sari-pallow. Her thin cheeks were flushed in a way I’d never seen before, Dad’s presence the cause of the healthy glow the disease had taken away. My two uncles were bent over their plates, eating rapidly—it was now close to midnight. Just beyond them, my mother was embracing her sister, Asma Kala, both their faces flushed with joy, the matching green of their saris seeming to roll the two women into one, and I glimpsed how they must have looked as children, and then imagined how Henna and I would appear years from now, when the child she was now carrying was getting married. My cousin was fanning herself with a napkin, a hand resting on her expanding belly. She caught my eye and smiled.
How was it possible that I was not among my family and the dramas I had grown to know and accept? This, my physical separation, more than if Sameer had actually consummated the marriage, made my union with my husband ever more believable. It was true, I now belonged to him.
I touched his thigh under the table. “Where’s your friend Naveed?” I asked, hoping to take his mind off the evening’s lies, the walima’s grand announcement of a chaste coupling, then his own repeated one to the late-invited wedding guests—“Of course my wife is virtuous,” he had said again and again, a mantra I knew he himself wanted to believe. “My mother’s caution is not a sign that we ever doubted Layla.”
He now shrugged, sweat running in lines down his temples, glistening on his neck. He had taken the jacket off and rolled up the sleeves of his shirt, exposing wide wrists and tanned arms. I could not imagine how hot his feet must have been inside the leather boots.
“Maybe he came and went,” he said. “It’s hard to remember with so many people.” Then he gave me that look from last night, the one that said I’d made him into a fool, and rather than seeing him on that high-backed chair, I saw him on the round stool, my light-colored kurta stretched taut between his fists. He squeezed my hand against his weaker thigh, speaking as he had to the scandalized guests, through tight lips, “Once more, Mum’s prudence has shamed me.”
Amme came over just then and, standing behind Sameer and me, twirled a few hundred rupees over our heads, once, twice, seven times, the gesture Raga-be had made with the rooster’s blood. She was doing away with evil spirits and the envious eye. When she was done, she handed the notes to me, saying to give the money to those who were less fortunate than us, the homeless.
Despite my new husband’s anguished face, as I watched my mother take her seat at my family’s table, I knew I could never go back to that.
DAWN IN VIJAYANAGAR Colony broke much quieter than dawn in the Old City. There, loudspeakers mounted on each corner mosque ushered in the new day, one azan starting seconds before or after another, sometimes even minutes later, when fajr namaz at a different masjid might have already concluded. Hearing so many calls to prayer, each wave of adulation lapping over the other, was discomfiting, a cacophony, a chaos overhead that matched the chaos of life below. It seemed as though the imams were sparring in the skies, one raising his voice, the other matching then raising his own, inviting followers to worship in that particular
mosque.
That first Friday in Vijayanagar Colony, I woke just before dawn, my body grown accustomed to these morning arousals as it had grown accustomed to the new clock and calendar, morning in America, night in India, July there, Ze’qad here. We had gotten married on the fourth of July, and it had not occurred to me until weeks later, when we were at the American Consulate in Madras, that the fireworks flaring over the wedding hall could have been an echo of the displays erupting across the U.S.
Overhead, three taps on a loudspeaker, a gentle clearing of the throat, then the gradual ascent of a single voice, unfamiliar to me from the Old City ones I’d come to recognize. From start to finish, his voice alone, so that I could follow the cadence in the Arabic and feel the words delicately beckoning the faithful out of bed, “Allah is great.” “There is no god but God,” “Time has come for good deeds,” “Time has come for prayer.”
When it ended, there was a soft rap at the bedroom door. Sameer was still sleeping, his back to me, so far at the edge of the bed that his face was pressed into the thick mosquito netting. I rose, wrapping a duppatta around my head as I had learned from Zeba to do even in the house, and opened it. It was the younger brother, Feroz, dressed in the loose pajama-kameez he wore to bed. The kameez had three tiny gold buttons, which were undone, the fabric flapping back to expose the edge of a scar on his chest, knotted and darker than the rest of him, a familiar sight in the Old City. Men had scars that ran the length of their backs or across their shoulders or were centered, like this, just above a breast. They had been inflicted by self-flagellation during the month of mourning to express deep love for Allah and our saints. It was a bravery I respected, though couldn’t fathom. From Feroz’s scar, I knew he’d sliced his flesh with a razor blade.