by Ali, Samina
“We didn’t get a good education,” she said, “but your mother and I didn’t care. We were attending school to admire our teachers. They were all so young, just out of school themselves. Teaching in our village was their first post. They’d come only for two or three months, until they could get a transfer. Then we would be left with no teacher for two to three months, and finally someone would show up again and all the kids in the village would be rounded up.” She lowered her eyes in modesty, though the wide smile remained visible behind her hand. “We fell in love with every teacher. It’s all she and I talked about, marrying one, leaving the village. We would stroll home through the woods inventing our lives.” She shook her head and grunted. “Now our lives have come to an end. At this age, the only dreaming left to do is for the children, their futures. That is the limitation of being human. No matter what, we have to be able to envision our lives continuing. in some form. Otherwise …” she turned and gazed at my face, the tears that were running freely.
“Your mother was much younger than you when this happened to her. The workers suddenly rose up against your nana and looted his manzil, then burned everything, including the saris because the fabric was lined with gold and silver. I was told they made balls of gold and carried them off to wherever they went. Her family had been warned, too. One of your nana’s friends told them to flee. Another friend had already been shot with a rifle. And, of course, they shot and killed your nana’s dog. But your nana was too proud. He wouldn’t go. He’s lucky they didn’t kill the whole family.” She rested her head against the curves of the peacock’s wings, and the overhead light splashed across her sweaty face, baring the lines on the broad cheekbones, the corners of her mouth.
“WE’RE SAFE.”
“What?”
“We’re safe. No one is coming to the house.”
“How do you know?”
“I had a dream.”
“You were sleeping? There, like that, you fell asleep!”
“I was running down the street when two women in chadors stopped me. They had luminous eyes. They asked me why I was crying. I told them my house was about to be overtaken, and I was out searching for my son. Was he dead? They put a hand on my shoulder to calm me. They said, ‘Don’t worry, Amma, your family is safe. No one will destroy your home. You are sheltered, even those outside. Allah has provided your well-being.’”
I closed my eyes, relieved to be safe, even in dream.
“I don’t want my son to die,” she whispered, then covered herself again and hid her face behind the green fabric. Her shoulders shook in sobs. “Ya Allah, what you have shown me tonight! Forgive me, forgive me, and let me hold my son to my breasts again.”
I slid over and we clung to each other, crying, and, for a moment, I felt like I was holding my own mother in the way I had always wanted, all that had come between us erased, if only for now.
Together, through the open shutter, we watched the early morning light overtake the darkness, and we heard the crackle of a distant loudspeaker being turned on.
“Allah ho Akbar.”
It was as though I was hearing the first words God had ever created. The first words uttered by mankind.
THE MEN KNOCKED at well past eight, each returning to his home and waiting like a stranger to be let in. We unlocked the bedroom door, the divan door, the front door, making our way out of the house in the same way we had made our way in, as anxious as intruders. The metal locks echoed in the empty rooms. Zeba slid each key into her blouse, pushing it deep inside the bra, as though to ensure we would never use it again.
The two men stood in the sunlight, clothes crumpled, faces worn, arms limp. They were each holding a weapon, a knife, a wooden cane. They threw them in the courtyard, just outside the front door, before filing in. They sat at the dining table and took turns in the bathroom to clean up. Last night’s dinner lay before them, flies buzzing over it, close to their faces. One landed on Ibrahim’s lips, but he didn’t brush it away. It crawled about until I batted at it. Zeba and I quickly cleared the table.
Then the obligatory making of breakfast no one wanted, Zeba allowing me back into the kitchen. Milk boiled for chai. Finally, Feroz went to the prayer room and fell on the floor, on his stomach, weeping, falling asleep.
SAMEER CAME HOME after the second call to prayer, and the family celebrated quietly, the joy for our own survival muted on this eighth day of mourning. The drumming had resumed and pounded all around the house, hemming us in.
At the sound of his motorbike, the neighbors had wandered over, all, like us, still wearing the green clothes from yesterday. Seeing them, Ibrahim asked Sameer to remain in the courtyard. He explained to him that, yesterday, we had stood together like this, listening to a stranger tell us about our deaths, so now we would listen to his son tell us what had kept us alive.
My husband looked weak and haggard. His face dark from stubble, his hair standing up, the weaker leg shaking, barely holding him straight. There was mud on his boots. But without protest, he jerked the motorbike onto its stand and sat on it, long legs thrown in one direction, hands on his lap. He was trembling.
Zeba stood next to him, the length of her body against the length of his, perhaps to give him strength, and it appeared as though mother and son had become attached once more. She had brought out a plate of food and fed her son by hand, the rice and dal we had been unable to eat ourselves, without him.
I watched and listened from the doorway, half inside the empty house, half joining this odd little community. Once the gathering was quiet, without needing the urgings of anyone, he simply began his story. So fluid it came out, so full of life and detail, this tragic tale of what had occurred mere blocks from our home, just minutes from when the gang would have most evidently fallen on us, that I knew he had told this story before, if only to himself a thousand times.
PERHAPS IT HAD been two or three in the morning when he had witnessed their terror. The end of life as these two young people had known it. He couldn’t be sure. He had not had the wherewithal to look at his watch.
He had not intended to be on the road so late. But earlier, while he was trying to leave the Old City, the back tire of his bike had blown. He couldn’t find a petrol pump nearby that was open to fix it. Not knowing what else to do, he screwed off the tire and carried it onto a bus to downtown. There, outside the Old City, the bazaars were lit and people strolled, talking and singing and laughing. He’d had no problem getting someone to mend it. Then, the long bus ride back to the abandoned cycle. By the time he’d gotten the tire back on, it was dark. He recalled using the frail light of a streetlamp to screw in the bolts.
Even at that hour, the Old City was alive, voices pumping out of loudspeakers, each surging with the sound of a different manjalis, a different dirge, each at a different movement, wailing or chest beating, the sorrow overflowing the moment and reaching back hundreds of years. So the silence of the colony chilled him even more. Where were the drums for Ganesh, calling forth this god of protection?
He turned off the engine and coasted to the side of the road to take shelter under the trees where he and I had once stood, together. He was at the top of the hill that dropped into the colony, and voices from below rose up to him. Screaming. A woman crying. Men laughing. The sound of flesh being beaten. Then a round light flickered. Coming his way up the hill. Not steady. But zigzagging. Out of control. He hid farther within the branches. A scooter moaned past. A man on it. Steering with one hand. The other folded against his chest. He was screaming. He was yelling out for help.
Sameer let go of his bike and moved forward. Then hesitated and stepped back into the shadows.
Down the hill, the woman had stopped crying. But the men were still laughing. He heard the breaking of glass. When he eased out of the branches once more, he saw headlights surrounding dim figures. They were rising and falling. Pushing at one another. Three bodies were on the ground, lying on top of each other, writhing.
What could he do? Aroun
d the three, others stood or sat on their haunches, heads thrown back now and then, an arm flung up to drink from a bottle. He closed his eyes and sat against the trunk. He would have to wait for this to be over.
A police jeep materialized over the crest of the hill and rolled past. Without sirens. He did not understand what was going on. Then he saw policemen leaping out. And the men on the street scurrying away, some into the woods. Except for one who remained on the ground, splayed in the middle of the road.
He grabbed his bike and began running with it, gripping the handlebars and running. He did not know where he was headed, just away from what he could not yet believe. Jeeps sped past him in the other direction. These with lights flashing and sirens wailing, at last announcing a guarding presence.
By one, he was spotted and caught. Held in jail overnight for questioning. He told them the truth. Told them what he had seen. Told them what he had just told us. And from them, the questions they asked, half serious, half dramatic—putting on a performance to show they were doing their duties—he gathered it was a young couple who was returning home from a late movie or outing. They were driving down the hill on a scooter when they passed the slow moving gang on motorbikes. They did not know to be invisible. So they were surrounded. Just like that. Rifle barrels were stuck inside the spokes of the scooter wheels. They toppled. Struggled. Somehow the man got to his scooter and rode to the jail-khanna for help. Screaming the entire way.
There had been eight members. All young men. All carrying weapons. Only two had gotten caught. And because the man on the scooter, the victim who had come to them for help, did not possess an ID to show them who he was, he was put in jail along with the others. For the police weren’t sure yet which side he was on.
Sameer ended there, and we remained silent, as though waiting for more. But what more could we bear to hear? Then the plump mother, who had again left her daughters at home, gasped. With a hand over her mouth, she gazed about the gathering until her eyes fell on me.
“Beti!” she cried, then pushed through the group, and I stepped down off the stoop and into the courtyard with them. She held me as though I were one of her own daughters, her breasts pushing into me. Then she pulled back and examined my face a long while, seeing me, seeing her own flesh.
After she released me, the woman from across the street, the one whose son would have to try to survive here with a Hindu wife, folded me into her arms, and in this way, one by one, we held each other close, pressing body to body, feeling our heat, smelling our sweat, patting each other as a way of reassuring ourselves that we were still here, still whole. Men with men. Women with women. Then, finally, husbands and wives.
Sameer walked up and pressed his forehead to mine, eyes pushed shut.
AFTER I HAD showered and lain down to rest, Sameer came into the room and woke me. Taqi Mamu had just been over. He hadn’t stayed long. He just wanted to make sure we were all safe. And he had brought a message. Something so terrible that Sameer begged my uncle to be the one who told me.
It was Henna who had been out there in the dark. Henna who had been raped. What Sameer had mistaken as two figures on top of a third had really been one man—then others—on top of Henna and her baby. Her pregnant body had been mutilated by the broken glass of a whiskey bottle.
It was Henna who had died.
DRUMS WERE BEATING in the distance. Sometimes growing louder, sometimes fainter, so that I thought one of the neighborhood Ganesh statues was being carried off, but then the beating would grow louder again.
Sameer and I were riding to Abu Uncle’s, and at the turn onto his street, just at the corner of the main road, an enormous tent had been erected. On the outside, the shiny skin was red and blue, while the inside was the pale hue of an almond. Crimson and gold streamers were tied together and hung to make the sign of the swastika, denoting good luck. At the center of the tent, elephant-headed Ganesh, tremendous and majestic, sat on an ornate brass podium. His skin was pink, his crown gold, his neck and hands thick. He was wearing layers of jeweled necklaces that reached his oversized stomach. Around his feet, gold anklets. He sat cross-legged, meditative, powerful. The god of protection. The remover of obstacles. Where had he been last night?
Large speakers set up around the stage were blaring Telugu songs and prayers. Small boys lingered about the base, dressed in glistening shirts, teeth glowing white against dark skin. When Sameer and I rode past, they stared at us, expressionless.
We turned onto Abu Uncle’s street, and the songs and prayers faded, along with those frightful faces. But as soon as he switched off the engine, I heard the distant drums, and thought of those boys’ features grown into men’s and wondered if this was what the murderers looked like. In that way, I realized that for some time to come, I would be looking into the faces of men, Hindu men, Indian men, men of all kinds, to catch a glimpse of what Henna had seen in her final moments. Six had gotten away!
“I can’t come in,” Sameer said. “I can’t face them. Please try to understand.”
When I didn’t answer, he wiggled the bike so I would hop off, and I went and stood at the side of the road, just before the gates to the house. How was I going to face them myself?
“I couldn’t have saved her,” he said. “Even if I had gone to Hanif when he was calling for help, what could I have done? They would have killed me, too. You know that, right?”
I stared at him, not answering.
He shut his eyes and raised his hands to his scalp, fingers bumping up against his helmet. “Jesus Christ, Layla, you’re right, I should have gone to help. I heard him shouting. All I had to do was step out from under that bloody tree. Show myself.” He whacked his helmet with fists. “I watched her die, baby. I did nothing to save your sister. I did nothing but protect myself. I am a coward, Layla, hate me, hate me for being a coward, nothing else!”
I shook my head. “Nafiza’s dead. Henna’s dead. What’s the use in hating?” Then I said, “I hate those men so much I feel nothing else. I’m overcome with hate. I can’t even feel sorrow. Sameer, I want to feel sorrow. I want to feel Henna.”
He grimaced, as though I was hoarding grief in some saintly way to keep from condemning him.
I said, “Not more than an hour, please. I can’t take being here myself.” Just as I was turning toward the gate, he lurched sideways at me and the motorcycle angled onto his weaker thigh. He grabbed my arms and shook me.
“Don’t you see how many lives I have ruined!”
We struggled and the motorcycle shifted back and forth between his legs. Then I jerked away, and he lost balance. As the bike was falling, he leapt off. It crashed to the ground. He began stomping on the back wheel with his thick boots. Three, five, seven, twelve times. He gave a final kick then unstrapped the helmet and whacked metal against metal. The bike trembled, as though alive. Then he threw the helmet, and it hit the spokes and rolled to the middle of the road. He didn’t pick it up. He marched to the boundary wall and crouched against it, hands in his hair, knees to his face. He was crying.
“I heard them, Layla. Don’t you see? The police interrogated them in the next cell. They were laughing. They weren’t terrified. They knew they wouldn’t be punished. One of them was the son of such and such minister. They were just passing time until the call came to release them.”
I picked up his helmet and stood before him, the weight of it in my hands. “Henna’s dead. Nothing will bring her back.”
He began tearing at his scalp. “I can’t stop hearing their voices. They’re echoing inside me. They were snickering at her body. They said her breasts were engorged, all juicy like mangoes—and just as sweet. Baby, they drank her milk!”
I dropped the helmet next to him. “It’s not possible. She hadn’t had the baby yet. Another three weeks.” Even as I said it, I knew it could happen. The production of milk with the production of new life. The mother’s milk not meant for such crimes.
“Fucking hell, this bloody country. Your parents were right to le
ave.”
I looked about at the houses that were as familiar to me as Henna’s. We had played together on this street. Marbles, kites, gilli-dandol. It was along this stretch she had taught me how to ride a bike. On the tar, we used her school chalk to draw those same designs we saw before the houses of our Hindu neighbors, diamonds broken into triangles, signs of luck and prosperity, fertility. Our play changing with the seasons. Then our bodies changed, and we were kept inside—hidden and safe from what? Now women were watching me from windows, curtains pulled back to reveal one eye, half lips, nose. I yanked off my chador. Let them see who I was.
“Jesus Christ, she was in the ninth month. The baby was whole when they sliced it out …”
I closed the gate on him.
INSIDE THE BOUNDARY wall, the house and its surroundings were quiet. I had expected crying, wailing, even screaming laments, so the silence shook me. The drums continued pounding in the distance, and I found myself growing to depend on the sound, the only thing reassuring me of my own continued existence. The world pulsed through me.
This was the city cottage Nana had moved into after Partition, when his manzil was overrun. He had divided it in half soon before dying, giving the front portion to Taqi Mamu and his wife, the back to Asma Kala and her husband. But after Ameera Auntie lost her fourth child here, the couple had shifted to another place nearby, thinking this land was bad luck. There, they lost four more. The last time I’d come here was when we’d picked up Henna for our excursion to Golconda. What had she told me then, hugging her pregnant belly as we stared off at the majestic tombs, that she feared disaster, Hanif’s arrival bringing some sort of end. Indeed, the heart knew when it was driving toward its own death.