by Ali, Samina
“He is in love with Naveed!” I yelled.
“I demand that you return with me right now!” Sameer suddenly shouted, spit flying from his mouth. “I am your husband and you will do as I say.”
I stared at him in disbelief. He would do anything to keep me as his. I said, “You who do not believe in Old City values, what is this now? How dare you, when we both know the truth? Husband who is no real husband,” I said, repeating what Nafiza had so aptly observed.
“I will take no more of this!” Abu Uncle cried, as though I had insulted him. He lurched forward and grabbed me, throwing me over his shoulder and taking me to his car. I beat at his back and kicked the air, screaming out in Urdu, in English. Then I glimpsed Ameera Auntie trying to come to me, skinny arms reaching out, yelling something, but Taqi Mamu held her in place. Sameer was trailing behind with my suitcase, fingers pressed to his forehead, eyes averted, as though he was the one being forced against his will.
They left his motorcycle there, and the three of us squeezed into Abu Uncle’s car, me in the middle of the two men, a homecoming very different from the one when I’d arrived at my husband’s home in full bridal regalia. But there they were again, wedding lights on the house, this time dressing up the squat structure across from Sameer’s. The Muslim son being forced into marriage with a distant cousin, no one able to recognize his chosen love.
The lights to Sameer’s house were on, Zeba and Ibrahim sitting erectly on the takat, awaiting my return. Sameer dragged me past them and into the room, then slammed the door shut and bolted it. Then he pressed his back against the wood and slid down, elbows on his knees, hands covering his face. I sat on the bed. I’d thought I’d never see this place again.
“As soon as I get a chance, I’m leaving,” I said. “You can’t make me stay here, with you—why would you even want that?” Then I said, “I really loved you. You let me love you. How could you?”
He crawled over to me on his hands and knees and buried his face in my lap, arms cinching around my hips, squeezing me. “Oh God,” he whispered, as though not able to believe himself what had just happened, what he had been able to pull off. “Oh God.”
FRIDAY MORNING. DAWN azan. Just under the imam’s call, the pattering of rain.
I’d lost track of how much time had passed since I’d come back to Hyderabad, my husband’s house. Each new day slowly leaking into the next. Things I had not noticed—the essentials of America that were not essentials here—suddenly became apparent, wildly missed: a telephone, a car, even a bicycle. The life I had considered so constricted now seemed so free.
He had taken up a chair in the divan to monitor the door and prevent me from leaving, in the same way I’d stopped him from going out of our hotel room. His father and brother at work and school, unavailable to me. His mother in the kitchen, shooing me out, not wanting to listen, still following her son’s mandates.
Now I cornered her in the prayer room, just as she and Feroz were beginning to recite the Qur’an, their eleven-year-old custom that I was about to break. I took my usual spot beside her and wrapped my hair in a duppatta. She didn’t glance at me, but up at the Arabic plaques, and I knew her silent prayer: strength to face what she must have known I had come to say. No one had knocked on my door that morning.
Mother and son had the Qur’an open to a surah much farther along in the book, but when I joined them, Zeba paged back to the chapter on Joseph, remembering where she and I had left off. Without any urgings, I began to recite:
When she heard of their intrigue, she invited the city women to a banquet at her house. To each she gave a knife, and ordered Joseph to present himself before them. When they saw him, they were amazed at his beauty and cut their hands, exclaiming: “Allah preserve us! This is no mortal, but a gracious angel.”
“This is the man,” she said, “on whose account you reproached me. I sought to seduce him, but he was unyielding. If he declines to do my bidding, he shall be thrown in prison and held in scorn.”
Despite the evidence they had seen, the Egyptians thought it right to jail him.
When she had come to the end of the Urdu translation, her voice trembling, stumbling over words, I placed a hand on hers to stop her from going on. She told Feroz to leave the room.
I said, “You didn’t invite anyone to the walima dinner until the very day; then you invited more than a thousand guests when you had only invited a hundred to the nik’kah. The announcement you were making was about your son, not about the union. You’ve known all along about Sameer.”
She kept her eyes on the book before us, and a finger traced the Arabic letters, one flowing into the next.
“You call me your daughter,” I went on. “Yet you’ve ruined my life.”
Her lips curled into themselves and the deep lines appeared at the edges, along the broad cheekbones. “He has been misled … by this friend of his. No man would choose to be with another man when he has a woman available to him. I have told you. You must make your demands clear to him, as his wife. You have the power in you to bring him back to the straight path”.
“He does not love me, Zeba Auntie. I have watched him this past month. He has tried to be my husband, he has even wanted it, but it is not in him. Please, let me go. I’ll return to America alone, you needn’t worry anymore about him coming. He’ll stay here with you, your guidance, your demands.”
She shook her head. “A wife stays with her husband … no matter what.”
No matter what. So this was what she had meant that day when Amme had visited. As a woman, I had but one option: to spend my life with my husband, untouched, uncomplaining. These were Old City ethics. Die for not being a virgin, die for marrying the wrong kind of man. Pagan rituals of sacrifice, Sameer was right.
“Islam prohibits what you are doing,” I said. “Even my nik’kah to him has automatically become void. He is unrelated to me now, to sleep in his bed is a sin, against me and against you for forcing me—imprisoning me. How can you sit here and pray!”
She raised her chin as she had that day Sameer had thrown his prayer cap at her feet, then stormed out of the house. My sin, she seemed to be saying, not hers, now that she’d passed on her duties to me.
“You told me you are afraid of what he’ll do once he gets to the U.S.,” I said, approaching her now through her fears, her imaginings of America. “You are right to be afraid. He’ll have more freedom to behave like this. Devils, demons, people have no control over themselves. Even Amme brings me to an alim each time I return. People do whatever they like there, men and women both, there is no shame. If Sameer cannot stop himself here, imagine what he’ll do in America, where there are no taboos, no limits.”
She continued following the Arabic letters with her finger, as though reading some invisible guidelines. “It is better that he goes to the U.S. Here, if he stays and you are not with him, everyone will know. He is handsome, he is strong, he is young, what reason would a wife have to leave such a man? They will scorn him, scorn me and my family. We will be ostracized, hated. I have to think of Feroz, his wedding—who will marry him if they hear of this? Shall I have lost both my sons? No, you take him to America. He is dead to me.” She closed the book and stared up at the plaques again, her eyes dry of tears, this a worn grief. “Islam says that when a man mounts another man, the throne of Allah shakes. Imagine the tremblings of a mother’s heart. I have cursed him, cursed my own son. That day I was told of his motorcycle accident, I rejoiced. I prayed a shukran namaz,” a prayer of thanksgiving, “before I went to the hospital. I was prepared that day to see his dead face. It was Allah’s punishment. He was coming back from that park, from doing what he does there, when he got into that accident. I thought Allah had finally answered my prayers.” She turned down her lips in regret and her heavy chest rose in a deep sigh, the black duppatta quivering. “But he was still alive. Why should I fix that leg? Let him walk with a limp. Let him be ashamed of it, ashamed of himself. He should always know he is not a complete man.
”
TWO MORNINGS LATER, Ibrahim’s voice drew me out of bed. I found him sitting alone at the breakfast table, reading the newspaper. Zeba was in the kitchen, humming as she slowly prepared the elaborate breakfast she made on Sundays. Feroz was studying in the divan, his books scattered across the bamboo table I had sat around with my husband and his lover as we planned a trip to Golconda, not aware of the real reason behind Sameer’s open kisses. What a show, Naveed had said when he’d found us stumbling through the door, snatching at each other’s clothes, when the two of them, Naveed and Sameer, were the true performers. Made him into a fool, my husband had accused me when he had done that very thing to me.
“I was hoping you would come, Beta,” Ibrahim now said.
I sat in the chair beside him, and he folded the paper and set it on the table, the reading glasses placed on top, next to his ulcer medicine and the honey Zeba fed him each day.
“The elections have suddenly been moved up,” he said. “This isn’t a good sign. I am afraid of trouble, riots. Allah ka shukar, you and Sameer returned early from Madras. Now that you are here, I do not think it is wise for you two to go about together. Stay in the house. A young couple,” he paused, his eyes drifting away, his fingers tapping the table, “a young couple is always a good target for these gangs. They symbolize hope to a community; killing them is like putting out a can dle flame.”
So he was aware of the calamities happening outside, but not of the ones under his very roof. How was that possible when even the youngest son of the house, the one who was not yet married, was sitting in the divan, where he’d never studied before, just so he could watch over me while his older brother slept?
“I did not mean to frighten you, Beta,” he said, examining my face. He began scratching his arm, and I noticed brown spots had appeared there, matching the ones across his scalp and forehead. “Listen to this,” he said and tried on a smile to console me as he picked up the paper again. He adjusted his glasses over his eyes. “This election season there will be 122 different candidates,” he read, then lowered his head to stare at me above the lenses. “And your husband is under the impression that this country can offer him no choices!”
Yes, always choices here about who would represent us, politician, god, ancestor, parent, even Henna sliding on Sameer’s wedding ring for me, but no choice in how we could represent ourselves. That, in the end, was the lie Sameer was escaping by fleeing to the U.S.
“Papa,” I said, “do you remember telling me that we shouldn’t get ahead while hurting others?”
“Yes, of course, Beta, that is a general rule of proper ethics, something I would never forget.” He flattened the newspaper onto the table and turned to me. “Tell me, what is wrong, Beta, what has happened?”
I hesitated, not knowing how to tell him. Finally, I said, “Do you know why Nafiza isn’t here anymore? Why Sameer and I came home early from Madras?”
“Because your ayah is sick, because she is now in hospital.” He squinted at me, his forehead creasing, and I realized the faint spots there had darkened. “Is there something more? What is it, Beta, what have you come to tell me? I am your father, please do not hesitate. I will do whatever I can to help you.”
My turn now to tap the table with my fingertips as I figured out how to say the unimaginable. “I think Sameer is coming to America seeking more than just employment. What I mean is, I think what he really wants is freedom, the kind he can’t get here.” He was still staring at me from above the lenses, his scalp looking so tender. Sameer’s hope to send home money so his father could retire. I sighed. “Papa, your son has tried to will himself to love me, but he can’t. He is …” gay, what did that word mean here, a different culture, a different context, words that did not translate, “ … he is not attracted to me not to any women at all.” The words were coming out slowly, each a beat in what felt like a dying heart. “I discovered this on the honeymoon. His friend Naveed followed us. They love each other. It is why I came back. I did not know Nafiza was ill.”
So there it was, a confession like none I had made Before. I felt the weight of some dense form sliding out of me and spreading onto the floor by my feet, then rising to erect itself between us. A wall like the kind Sameer had described. For the second time in my life, I had lost my father.
“I want to go from here,” I said, stopping myself from calling him Papa. “If not for my sake, could you not help me in memory of your dead sister, the one I remind you of?”
He moved back into his chair, head tilted up, and blinked at the ceiling, hardly breathing, his slumped chest frail below the sheer kurta. After a long time, he shook his head, as though freeing himself from thoughts, images that did not belong—do not let what is happening outside sink into your flesh, he had advised me. He set his glasses down even as he picked up the paper, unable to see the announcement of doom.
“My son,” he whispered, his voice breaking, anguished. “My son,” he repeated, before clearing his throat. He turned away from me and said, “As his wife, you must warn my son of what I have just told you. No one leaves the house.”
JUST AS SAMEER had taken to sitting in the divan, preventing me from leaving the house, I now took to sleeping at the corner of the bed, turned away from him.
No words now between us, not during the day when I kept away from him, shut up inside the bedroom or prayer room, and not at night, when we were alone together, the door and window closed and bolted, his parents and brother right outside, the peacock’s face turned away from the spectacle.
He slept close behind me, his form stretched out a wrist’s-width from mine, the mattress dipping under his weight, making me feel like I was tumbling toward him, the heat of his flesh. I pretended he wasn’t there.
Then, one night, I woke to him pressing into me, his hardness against my soft thighs, my buttocks, only the sheer cloth of my shalwar between us, the demon who no longer appeared in my dreams now materializing into my husband, and I thought of how many times I had taken him into my mouth, the same part of him that dug into Naveed’s flesh.
I shoved aside the netting and stumbled into the bathroom, retching.
THE FOLLOWING MORNING, while he was bathing, I snuck out of the bedroom and slowly made my way into the divan. I thought Ibrahim and Feroz had already left for the day, though I could hear Zeba’s voice coming from the prayer room, where Feroz slept on the floor at night. Without a sound, I crossed the courtyard and slid open the metal lock on the front gates. It creaked, giving me away. Everything in this house against me.
Feroz’s face flattened against the iron bars of his window, then his slanted eyes turned up even farther in surprise. He began shouting, “Mummy, she’s leaving. Bhabhi is leaving the house!” There was scurrying inside.
But it was too late, I was already out, running down the ashokalined street I had strolled with my husband. On the road intersecting this one, an auto-rickshaw puttered past and I screamed for the driver to halt, but he didn’t hear me. Then my duppatta got caught in a neighbor’s gate and I thrust it off and raced past the lamppost Sameer had stood near, casting stones, and was reaching the end of the block when Feroz grabbed my arm from behind and yanked me. I stumbled and fell onto the stone sidewalk, and I picked up a handful of rocks and threw them at him. He blocked his face with his hands, twisting away his shoulders, but as soon as I was standing, he had me by the elbows and began tugging me back to the house.
“You are making a spectacle of yourself, Bhabhi,” he said, his voice calm, condescending in that way it was when he corrected my Arabic. “People are going to think my brother’s wife is mad.”
All down the street, women had gathered at the front gates, watching, even those two young girls with their thick braids, the older one who wanted to marry Sameer. I called out for help. One by one, each slid inside again, vanishing. Zeba caught up to us, and she and Feroz dragged me back down the dead-end road and shoved me into the bedroom, then shut the door and locked it from outside.
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nbsp; Sameer was standing by his trunk, a towel wrapped around his waist, his clean chest still damp. He came over to me and slid his fingers around my neck, his thumb with my silver toe ring gliding across my lips. “You’re mine,” he said softly, a lover’s voice like I’d not heard from him before, “and I’m going to do everything I can to keep you.”
DAYS LEAKING INTO nights into days. Arbitrary time.
Then, one afternoon, Zeba did not sit at her usual place on the takat, against her hand-embroidered pillows, preparing the evening meal. Instead, she spread a silk sari across the colorful Pakistani rug and stood over it, ironing. It was the same red sari she’d worn on my wedding day, her head and chest covered by the black duppatta. The boy across the street was getting married tonight.
She did not ask me to dress, and that was how I knew I was not invited. She understood I’d make another scene, try once more to escape, adding to the chaos of this forced wedding, to the groom’s own agitation. It was better for all that I stay in the house with my husband, and I wondered what excuse she would make for my absence.
By nightfall, I could hear the clamor of guests, cars pulling into the dead-end road, parking in the abandoned lot. The dol began beating a tune familiar to me, from my own wedding days, the sound like a quickened heart, anticipation, fear and dread, the announcement of emerging life. I did not know who to pity more, the boy being forced to become a bridegroom or the bride who would never be loved.