Madras on Rainy Days: A Novel

by Ali, Samina

  Our number was called.

  WE WERE ARGUING as we got off the elevator to the second floor of the hotel, so we didn’t see that tall figure in the burkha right away. He was denying believing in Old City values—a man’s value over a woman’s—claiming that such archaic beliefs were part of what he was emigrating from. Still, he remained single-minded about leaving Madras that very day.

  He saw her before I did and his words halted in midsentence, his dark eyes squinting in that way of his, trying to perceive what was not readily visible. Down the narrow hallway, she was hovering against our room’s door, a black ghost against white walls, looking like the demon emerging from my dreams. Our steps slowed at the same time.

  “Who is that?” Sameer muttered. His fingers closed around my wrist and he drew me behind him. A simple gesture—was this what Zakir had meant when he’d asked if I’d ever been protected, or was this a motion of love?

  “She was on the train,” I said, but he didn’t hear me. He was digging out our room key while asking her who she was looking for.

  She didn’t answer. She didn’t stir. Below the hem of her burkha, gray slacks, brown leather sandals. But what did that mean when I, myself, was in jeans?

  We stopped a few feet from her, Sameer still gripping my hand. “That’s our room,” he told her in formal Urdu, being respectful. He pointed to the door with the sheaf of immigration papers we’d just turned in, copied for him on his request—he wouldn’t take the chance of anything getting misplaced. “The person you’re looking for is not here,” he said, now trying to communicate in English. “I’m sorry, but …”

  She began unhooking her burkha, up the side slit, then around her face. “How could you go to the Consulate today?” she asked, but it was not a woman’s voice at all. “After Saturday night, after what happened between us, I thought you would stay here with me. I thought you understood this was not some game, some time-pass. I thought you loved me.”

  Nate’s words to me, written in those letters, over and over, and now, finally, spoken out loud, but by someone else, and to my husband. That hollow echo of pain, that stunned disbelief, that tangled betrayal. A lover’s heart, not silenced by limits we imposed, convention, taboo, denial. Indeed. love was prayer, rising out of the body, what did it matter in which direction you bowed?

  He had come here to say as much, followed us on our honeymoon even after my husband had ordered his friend—lover—not to, using that same tone of authority, of finality, he’d used with me earlier, at the Consulate: my place to give orders, your place not to ask why.

  He let the burkha drop to the floor, a black pool around his brown feet. Hair on his toes. Sameer’s head fell low, as though watching the fabric’s descent, his mouth agape, no sound at all—no mandates left to give—just a quick breath, out, out, out, no air going in.

  His turn now to speak, to make visible what Sameer would not see, what the rest of us refused to see, the blue hollows under his eyes expressing an anguish that was familiar to me, an age-long suffering, abandonment. Tears had welled up. “How can you continue to go on with this? Before, yes, you could deny, to me, to yourself. Believe what everyone else says: men do not love men, not here, not in India, not in Islam. Oh, what shame, even Allah forbids our sinful bodies to be buried into this earth, though he formed us of that same dirt. Outcasts, hijras, our own parents will cast us out, say we are dead to them, to the world. People are so scared of us they scare us into being like them. Marry, have kids, do what is expected of you and not what you want …” he stopped, his lips moist, tears running down his face, but his voice was steady, “ … and not what you know you are meant to do. They tell us we do not exist, and we believe them—believed them. Now you know, Sameer—at least that was what I was thinking—already you have had your chance … with her. On your honeymoon, it was me you found, me you returned to, me you love. After a month away from each other, was the lovemaking not better than before? How can you now deny what this means? How can you still go to America, go on with this other life, this betrayal?” He stepped toward my husband. “See, I have taken off the burkha. I am not scared anymore. Do not hate me, yaar, for doing this—is this not what you said, that I had come to Madras to ruin your life? Ruin your life! Yaar, I have come here to save you!”

  Sameer continued to stare at his own boots, mouth wide open, head shaking. His tongue was wriggling about, useless. He was unrecognizable to me, my husband, more foreign than even I realized.

  I pried my hand from his and backed into the room’s door, out from between the two friends, the two lovers, the real couple. Bewilderment, anger, jealousy. What was I to feel when I had never prepared myself to be involved in such a predicament? Abandonment, yes, divorce, American-style. And even those Old City values, second wife, third wife, fourth wife. I had married a Muslim man, there were certain rights that belonged to him, things against which I could only pray. But how could I have prepared for this: the friend he had run into, the friend he had not known was here, was the one he had then made love to—yes, made love, communication, another language, another script—made love to him, Naveed—not a friend, but a beloved—while I had waited for him, my new husband, the one to whom I had confessed my sins, asking forgiveness, begging acceptance, fulfillment, that first night of our honeymoon. And this: letters copied from magazines not because he did not know what to write to an American woman, but because he did not know how to make love, even on paper, communicate love, to any woman, least of all his own future wife. In one instant, the walls of my world that had taken centuries to construct came crumbling down, my real loss of innocence.

  “Look at me, yaar, please, look at me like you used to, as you did the other night. Let me see your eyes, your love. Do you not understand, now that she knows, now that someone else knows about us, about our love, you are free! There is no going back.”

  Going to America to escape lies, he had told me, vowing not to be like my father, when in fact, just like him, my husband had been faithful to nothing but a lie.

  “Oh my God,” I whispered, “oh my God.”

  Sameer glanced up at me, blinking, his fierce gaze gone flat. He fumbled with the room key, gave up, turned toward his friend, lover.

  “Hello, Naveed,” he said, reaching out to shake his hand, as he had that day we’d gone to Golconda, in greeting, in good-bye.

  I grabbed the keys from him and locked myself into the room. He began knocking on the door, begging me to open it. He was screaming my name. I sat on the bed and watched the wood shudder, knowing it would give way under pressure. Amme was screaming on the other side of the locked door, calling me her ill-fated daughter, calling me a whore for not wanting to marry the one she had chosen for me to love, make love to. Then she was the one locked inside the room, refusing to come out, days leaking into weeks, into a month, the same wail, the same anguish, the same word: whore, this time, Sabana, the one who had taken her husband, her life, my life, though my mother went on believing she could save me, and in the pattern of the wood, some evil peering out at me, the face of my demon, so painlessly had he risen out from my sleeping body, as my soul would, when I died, snake through the shaft of my jugular vein. The beckoning smile, the light-colored eyes. So it was my father.

  Love, why did we all confuse that emotion for what this really was, a desperate loneliness, a greed for human touch.

  The door burst open and he strode in, papers gripped in a hand, folding into themselves, the bellman in red by his side, Naveed coming to rest against the door frame.

  Two deeds. Hers to draw up the contract and slide it under the door, his to sign it.

  She had sold me to him, to the man who would never love me.

  My - Ka

  I WENT TO Taqi Mamu’s in search of Nafiza, the one who, like me, had been raised in a family in which she’d never belong.

  I had left my husband in Madras with his lover and taken the Char Minar Express back to Hyderabad, traveling alone as I never thought I would in India,
hidden and safe under my chador, being reminded, against my will, of the first time I saw Naveed in the burkha, at that remote village outside Madras, searching through the crowd, looking—though I wasn’t aware at that time—for my own husband. Demons rooting us out, it didn’t matter where you took refuge, in what scriptures, in whose arms.

  Without my husband, without everything I had grown to know, it didn’t seem possible that the outside world could look exactly the same, but it did, the same emerald rice paddies, the same grazing water buffaloes, the same farm workers, though, in truth, it was now mysterious, withholding. I was beginning to understand that for all I saw, there was something I was blind to, for all revealed, there was something concealed, shadow and light, demons and Allah, though not even that simple. If I had undertaken this journey believing I was cleansed, ready to consummate love, I was returning with a better comprehension of love than I had even bargained for; a carnal knowledge like a seed implanted in my womb. In the end, my husband had taken my innocence in a way Nate never had, nor Sameer himself could have if he had simply had sex with me, performing his duties as my husband.

  When the taxi pulled up at my uncle’s house, I found it strangely quiet. I knew Ameera Auntie was off teaching but had expected to find Taqi Mamu, who, since Nana had died, had not left the house but to fight the government over that ancestral piece of land (now tourist spot) that I had never seen, nor that he, I was sure, had much memory of. Even if he had been awarded the land’s worth, to whom would he have passed on such an inheritance? He and Ameera Auntie had been unable to conceive, and there were no sons in this house to carry on the nawabi bloodline, only Henna and me, women brought up knowing we would be sold and looking forward to it.

  Down the side yard, I could see the cement structure of the servants’ quarters, the corrugated roof sending off a stiff glare under the hot sun. I had come back up to Hyderabad so quickly, I had beaten the rising monsoons. The door to my nanny’s room was shut, the outside bolt drawn, so I knew she wasn’t there. Though certainly, with Amme back in the U.S., Nafiza would have resumed working for ury uncle, the two always home together, better companions than Taqi Mamu and his own wife.

  I went to the front door, which was kept open during the day. Deep within the house, wood creaked, chappals skidded on the tile floor. From the verandah steps, I watched my uncle combing back his thick hair with a hand as he approached, walking with slow, sleepy steps down the long hallway. I waited for him, suddenly unsure of what to say. How could you speak of something that didn’t exist?

  If he was surprised to see me, returned to his house from my honeymoon, returned without my husband, he didn’t show it. He simply ordered the driver to set my suitcase in the guest room, the one I used each time I visited and which they had reserved for a baby that never came.

  When the driver had passed into the house, my uncle stepped more fully into the door frame, his thick figure filling it. He didn’t ask me in.

  “Nafiza is not here, Beta,” he said. “She’s not working anymore. She’s sick. In hospital. You’ll have to see her there.”

  A NURSE AT the hospital had to ask two others before she could inform me that my nanny was in the general ward. Then she quickly left, hands full of green glass bottles and shiny steel trays shaped like kidneys, and I had to stop a doctor to ask how to get there. At first, he walked right past me, as though I hadn’t spoken at all. Invisible. I would take no more of such an existence, and I yelled out to him in English, complaining of the hospital’s inefficiency, and he paused a moment before returning. It was the American woman they saw here.

  We spoke in English, and I noted that he had an English accent.

  “How is this patient related to you?” he asked, his arms full of files. He was on his rounds.

  I wanted to tell him that Nafiza was my mother. I had in fact called her “Amme” until my family had emigrated to the U.S., as a child not knowing any better or not seeing any difference. At what age did the divisions we saw around us begin to draw themselves inside?

  “She’s my ayah,” I said, too ashamed of myself to call her mother. College fees, private schools, BMW, an almari full of jewelry, two airline tickets back to America, that was how Dad had paid for me; I should have known better than to think devotion came with duties.

  The doctor took me in with a quick glance, the tight jeans and crumpled T-shirt I’d worn to the Consulate, mapping a future with my husband; then losing him. I must have looked as raw as his patients, scars on the body that no medicine of his could heal.

  I thought he would simply tell me where to find Nafiza, but he surprised me by telling me about her case, right there, in the middle of the cement hallway with its stink of Dettol and murmuring of other doctors and patients. I had thought such intimacies required another sort of ritual, the discreet, indifferent walls of some office.

  “She has hepatitis,” he said, “the type that leads to liver failure. Death.” He raised his thick brows, lines forming across his forehead like Sameer’s, and I wondered if I would forever see my husband’s face in other men’s. “Such a disease is sometimes caused by . . promiscuous behavior. What do you think of that?”

  I could sense his condemnation of her and of her kind, his insinuation that such activities could only be committed by a shameless woman, a whore. What would he think of the knowledge of love I now carried inside? “She’s a widow, Doctor, with a grown daughter, who has a young daughter of her own. If she has this disease, her own husband must have given it to her. As I recall, he, too, died suddenly of liver failure. But the doctor, at that time, said it was from his drinking. Tell me, is it common practice here to hide things that might save a woman’s life?”

  IN THE GENERAL ward, hospital beds were lined up one alongside the other, wall to wall. On the far side, sunlight fell through tall, rectangular windows and cast a healthy glow on some of the patients. Every bed was occupied, a few with small groups huddled about. I didn’t know how I would find her.

  I was heading toward one of the patients by the window, a lone woman sitting up in bed, when I heard my name being called. It was a man’s voice, coming from behind me, and I thought it must have been the doctor again, wanting to tell me something more I didn’t want to hear. But then I saw Nafiza’s son-in-law, Sammy, waving to me from a dark corner of the room. Roshan was sitting on an aluminum fold-out chair beside him, their sleeping daughter in her arms.

  I made my way through the narrow aisle toward them, trying to see beyond Sammy to Nafiza’s face. She had told me, that day I’d thrown her out, that I should come to her when I could see right again, and the jadu of Sameer’s pretty-pretty face no longer beguiled me. Though, in truth, I had beguiled myself. As Amme said, jadu’s powers were not confined by the borders of a country, but by the borders of our own flesh. You had to believe in the power of something for it to take hold of you.

  When I was upon the couple, Sammy salaamed me deeply, and Roshan stood with some effort to embrace me, her sleeping daughter squeezed between us. As she held me close, she whispered how happy our mother would be to see me. But even as she was saying it, over her shoulder, I could see my nanny. Her eyes were closed, her skin flushed yellow. One of her hands was set across her bloated belly, and it was only from its slight motion that I knew she was still breathing.

  Here she was, my mother, already in a place beyond my reach.

  “THE DOCTOR SAYS she’ll be fine. Irkan, ba, everyone gets it.” It was Sammy, speaking to me with a nervous laugh and a dismissive wave of his hand.

  I wasn’t sure if he said this because he had been misled by the doctor, or if he was trying to mislead me in an attempt to console. I didn’t tell them I already knew it was not jaundice. Jaundice was merely a symptom of her hepatitis.

  I looked about for a chair. Sammy slid me his, then stood at Nafiza’s feet, hands gripping each other behind his slim back. He was much darker than Roshan, nearly black, the whites of his eyes startling, bloodshot. He had been a Christian when
the two had first met, converting to Islam out of his love for her, only to later fall in love with Allah and become a true believer. Roshan had taught him how to pray, as Ameera Auntie had once taught her.

  When I sat, I found myself at eye level with Nafiza’s distended belly, covered up in a white blanket and two white sheets, though the air was stifling, and I thought of Henna. For there it was, looking exactly the same, the way our bodies carried life and death.

  “How long has she been here?” I asked.

  They both turned down their lips and shrugged.

  Sammy said, “In the hospital, time stands still, ba,” though I knew if Nafiza woke right then, she would disagree. Her body now winding down.

  “We can track it by your mother,” Roshan said. “The day before she left for the U.S.” The day after my D & C. Two days after I’d cast her out of the house. For so many years, I had been afraid that some single act of mine would kill my mother, as Dad had ended her life, and now I felt I had done just that.

  “This is my fault,” I said, my eyes tearing up. “I thought she was spoiling it for me. I hurt her, I rejected her for …”

  Roshan quickly shook her head. But then she said, “Your mother is a generous woman. It’s the reason Sabana’s jadu does not effect her. She receives so many blessings.” Holding her daughter’s head to her chest, she bent and picked up her purse. She handed it to me. Inside, there were the reading glasses Ameera Auntie had passed on to Roshan and a bundle of rupees. The staples had been pulled apart to extract notes, but I knew if they were all there, it would equal what Amme had given me. More money would be spent on Nafiza’s death than had ever been spent on her life.