by Ali, Samina
No one was in the front part of the house, and I thought the grief must have sent them all to Taqi Mamu’s. But as I was about to walk there, I glimpsed the door curtain to Henna’s room blowing in the breeze, as though waving to me, inviting me in. I walked slowly down the side yard, keeping an eye on the door, hoping to find my family, hoping they weren’t there.
The door was open, and though no voices came from inside, I caught sight of Asma Kala’s feet just below the swaying curtain. They were scratching at each other. I hesitated and stopped at the clothesline. Black fabric hung like flags of defeat. Among polyester pants and cotton saris, I found a sari-blouse I knew would fit me. It hung wrinkled and dry, the short sleeves reaching for the earth. They could have been wings. And the thing itself a dead and hung crow. I swallowed it in one hand and snatched it off, placing it next to my nose. Nothing but the smell of soap and sun. Angry, I pulled off all the items, clenching them against me, then holding them away. Like that, I brought them into Henna’s room. An offering like no other. My final surrender.
Inside, the space was dark, the windows shut against the dying sun. The only sunlight that came in was a long strip that tumbled onto the floor each time the curtain blew back. Then it crept away, as though it had made a mistake by coming here. An air cooler was turned on in one corner and blew stale, warm air. The water inside had evaporated and not been refilled. The machine droned.
Abu Uncle sat on his daughter’s bed, one leg pulled up, the other bent under him. He was wearing the white T-shirt and loose pajamas I knew he slept in, unable to dress for this day and what it had ushered in, the end of his life. His head was bowed, and I saw he was examining the pattern of the bedsheet, following the design with a finger, then making swirls and loops beyond it. He pulled the finger back and slid it over again. Then again. The third time I realized he was not following any pattern. The third time, I recognized the Urdu script. He was writing Henna’s name, over and over. Writing her name with skin.
I turned away, toward Asma Kala, who was sitting far from him, on a chair next to the door. She was staring at her feet, slipping them in and out of her chappals, the kind her father had never let her wear, the toes rubbing at the heels. Even though my shadow fell across her, covering the whole of her being in darkness, she did not notice. Not knowing what to do or say—not even knowing how to address her without breaking down myself—I tried to slip back outside. My sandals skidded on the tile floor, and both she and Abu Uncle glanced up and raised their brows at me in greeting, in their usual way. Asma Kala even gave me a small smile.
“I brought in the clothes,” I said, setting them next to her. Someone had moved all the chairs from the house into this small room and arranged them in a line against the wall, facing the bed.
“These are Hanif’s parents.” She raised her chin to point at the end of the row.
I was startled to find the old couple sitting quietly next to each other. They had chosen to be in the corner, under two closed shutters and next to the bathroom door, their bodies receding into darkness. Six chairs sat empty between them and Asma Kala. All of us were dressed in black but Abu Uncle. No matter the sorrows of the world, today I was mourning Henna.
I salaamed them and sat by Asma Kala, the pile of clothes between us. No one spoke. Like my aunt, I focused on my feet, not wanting to see how the room had been redecorated in preparation for the returning groom, the family’s new life. Finally, I glanced at the old couple. The woman had draped her sari-pallow loosely over her head. She had a thin nose and dark circles under her eyes, not from this grief but from years of bad living. The father’s features were more coarse. His cheeks pockmarked, the eyes deep set and moist. Every few minutes he leaned forward and coughed, his brows arching, his feet swinging under the chair.
I was meeting them for the first time, their faces alien to me, yet the two that had combined to make the one Henna loved, then the one that had formed inside her.
The light of a community had been blown out.
“IS HE STILL in jail?” My voice cracked, and I thought no one had heard it over the air cooler’s barren wail, so I leaned forward and gazed down at the old couple.
“He is, Beta,” his mother answered, her tone high, barely controlled. When she spoke, she leaned forward as well and peeked over her husband, down the long line of chairs at me. I stared at her feet, unable to take in her face. Her nails were orange from faded henna, the big toes glinting with silver toe rings. “What are we to do? Just now. before we came here, we stopped by with his ID card, but the police took it without releasing him. They wouldn’t even let us visit him. How badly is my son beaten? I don’t know. Are they allowing him to see a doctor? I don’t know. Hai Allah, why did he ever come back from Saudi? He was better off there. Here, he was living in sin—I’m telling you, it’s why he’s being punished. They were together, Beta, during Muhar’ram! This man …” She shook a finger at Abu Uncle before scooting back in her chair.
My uncle spoke with his head bowed, still writing on the bedsheet. “They were so happy to finally be together, they didn’t come out of this room for days; yesterday was the first time, and only because Henna wanted to bring flowers to the durga,” Imams’ shrine. “Her prayers had been fulfilled. They were safe in my house. The whole time, I had the servants place their food on trays and set them outside the locked door. My daughter was finally happy—what else mattered?”
The mother was startled and pressed her lips together. After a moment she leaned forward and spoke to me again. “He has a foreign card, Beta. From Saudi. So though he was born and raised here, they claim he’s not an Indian national. They say he is a foreigner to his own country. And because he’s a foreigner—maybe even a Muslim fanatic! —maybe he had cause to stir up all the trouble! Maybe this was the real reason he came back to India, using his wife’s delivery as a ruse. These people are crazy! We’ve lived and died here for generations and still we are not allowed to consider it our home. Then, when we leave and try to make a better existence elsewhere, still we are persecuted. What do they want? Do they want us all to die?”
“That’s exactly what they want,” her husband finally said. “And they want to kill us themselves. Ar’re, just today, as we were leaving the Chow-Rasta Jail-khanna, I looked up and saw an election slogan painted on the boundary wall. It read, ‘Vote for me and I’ll drive all the Muslims into the Indian Ocean.’ My son inside for being beaten. his young bride raped and murdered, and I look up to see this. Tho-ba! It all makes sense to me now.” He nodded at Abu Uncle, but my uncle had his head thrown up against the wall, gazing at the ceiling fan. Then his eyes rolled to the side and his jaw tightened, and I knew he was seeing something of hers. I didn’t look. Hanif’s father leaned forward and coughed.
Chappals scraped the ground outside the door. Taqi Mamu walked in. He glanced about the dark room then down the row of chairs at each of us, his eyes flat, not taking anything in. His hair was parted down the side, pushed back with a hand. It was greasier than when I’d seen him last, so I could not tell if he had oiled it or just hadn’t bothered to bathe since all this had begun. A personal rite of mourning. He was half dressed, as though the news of Henna’s death had caught him in an act that then felt too inconsequential to finish. He wore a button-down shirt over white pajamas. The string-tie hung between his legs.
“Why don’t they just take Ganesh and drown him in the lake?” he asked the room. “For days, I’ve been hearing these drums. It’s like they’re sitting on my head and beating, reminding me what they’ve done to my child. For Allah’s sake, when are they going to lift Ganesh?” When no one answered, he muttered, “I told my father we should go to Pakistan. ‘India is my home,’ he kept saying, ‘India is my home!’ What home? Even after they’ve stolen his home he says this is his home. Thoo!” He turned and spat, disgusted with us all. Then he bowed his head and announced, “I’ve taken the money. Just now, I phoned. I told them, two lakh, three lakh, whatever they want to give me for my land, I
’ll take it. No more fighting,” he mumbled, backing out of the room.
“Poor Taqi,” Asma Kala said, once he’d gone. “He’s been pacing like that all day.”
“He was very close to Henna?” the mother asked.
“She was a daughter to all of us. Taqi’s wife never had kids. She became pregnant eight times and each time …” She turned down her lips and shook her head.
The mother clucked. “Some women just don’t have children in their fate.”
“She has severe diabetes,” Asma Kala explained. “And his blood and hers don’t mix. It was during a time when doctors couldn’t do much.”
I understood she was telling the mother that fate had nothing to do with it. It was a matter of physicality.
But the mother didn’t understand. She clasped her hands, saying, “Oh, the poor woman. First no children, then diabetes. Hai Allah, you give us each our burdens. Let us not forget that during such times.” She began reciting a prayer under her breath.
“Was the baby a boy or a girl?” I asked.
No one answered, and in the silence, the air cooler blew stale air at our faces.
Asma Kala began fingering the blouse I had taken from the clothesline. She opened her mouth, then closed it, then opened it again. “A girl,” she managed to say.
I looked up at the wall to see what Abu Uncle had spotted. It was nothing more than a calendar. Not even a personal one with the name of her school or anything she might have had ties to, not even her bank. It was just a generic calendar she must have had one of the servants pick up from the corner store. But on it, under this month’s heading, she had crossed out, in bold black ink, the days as they had passed before Hanif’s arrival. Though now, looking at it like this, reading it backward, reading what we had not seen before, made it a countdown to her death.
I caught my breath and turned toward the parents. “How is it that your son was so lucky to have lived? They had motorcycles. They could have chased him. They even had rifles …”
“Shush now. Let’s not talk of these things,” Asma Kala said, sounding like Amme. “What has happened has happened. Kismet …”
“No, not kismet,” I said. “God is not telling us to behave in these ways, to live like this, we are! Saying we are saving ourselves by killing each other …”
“You want my son dead!” the mother cried. “Isn’t what has happened bad enough? Do you wish to be like one of those who tried to kill him?”
Her husband patted her thigh. “She’s just a child,” he said, trying to console her. Then he turned in my direction and stared at the space a few inches from my face, respectful that we were not related, not anymore, so he could not meet my eyes. He spoke in a calm voice. “Beta, we do not know much more than you about what happened last night, so we cannot tell you if Hanif left her because he truly believed he could bring help and save her. As my wife explained, the police would not give us any information, and we were not allowed to see our son. In fact, when we came here to pay our respects, we learned more about the happenings from your uncle than we knew ourselves. It seems your own husband was there. He is better informed than the rest of us. You should pose your questions to him.”
“He did not come forth himself …” the mother began, but her husband squeezed her arm, strangling her voice.
I sat back and, through the chair, felt the strength of the wall. Last night, leaning up against it like this, I understood for the first time it was not impenetrable.
I now took in the redecorated room, the bright colored rugs over the tiled floor, a wooden crib next to her bed, the door that led to the main area of the house locked, a new almari (for him?) pushed before it, making this their private space.
I spoke to this room, “How was she mutilated? What did they do with the broken bottle? What did they do to her baby?”
“Hai Allah!” the mother cried, as though the violation had been made against her, the privacy of her body, so that, at first, I thought it was Asma Kala who had shrieked. “Can no one make her stop!”
“Why don’t you go outside?” Asma Kala suggested. She crumpled Henna’s blouse in one hand and hid it in the folds of her sari. “Go find your uncle. He is very torn up. First Natiza, now this … this …” She spread open her palms.
AS I WAS standing to leave, Abu Uncle began tapping his chest with his three middle fingers. He looked up at me, his eyes glistening with tears. He said, “I had a heart attack. Did you know?”
Of course I did. His heart had stumbled when his daughter was returned home.
He said, “In my forties and already death …” he caught himself, reminded of Henna. Eighteen, the age in the U.S. when you become an adult and begin to figure out who you are, as an individual. By eighteen, my cousin had grown, gotten married, gotten pregnant, then died, all because of who she was. “Do you know why I had a heart attack?” he asked me.
I sat back down. He straightened and sat cross-legged. “You think it is because of Henna, I know. And this trip her husband made, Henna told others it was to reconcile. My daughter respected her in-laws so much, she did not tell even you, her own sister, the truth.”
“Hai Allah, he’s starting with this again.” The mother turned to her husband. “Aji, are you going to listen to this again?”
Abu Uncle spoke over her. “It’s our fault. I take the blame. We taught her how to be a proper woman, your kala and I. We taught her to be humble and obedient, respectful of her new family, attending to her husband. Do not voice disagreements. Do not talk back. Do not think …” his voice broke and his face crumpled into itself. He breathed in slowly and whispered, “Do not think of yourself.” Old City ethics, rules governing each woman’s life, ways to submit not to Allah, but to man. If my uncle had taught his daughter this, he had taught her how to survive, here; there was no need for him to feel ashamed. “When Hanif was gone,” he said, “she did not once come home to visit. She stayed with his family to let us know she had accepted her new role. How were we to know what was happening? We thought they had no cause to make her unhappy.”
“Aji, are you listening? Are you not going to stop him?”
“Not today, Kosar, not today.”
The mother grunted and turned her face to the wall.
“After the two got married, Hanif did not want to go to Saudi. He wanted to get a job here and stay with his bride. A cousin of his even offered him a job in the bank. He could have become a bank manager. Ar’re, what better news than this? But these two began protesting. The house is too small. There is not enough room. So I offered up my home. So big, so many rooms. How could your kala and I fill it? It was hers. All of this belonged to Henna. Your kala and I said we would occupy only one room, become like visitors waiting for our stay to end.” He closed his eyes and knocked the back of his head against the wall, once, twice, five times.
“These two wouldn’t let him. They wanted him to go and send rials home. We can’t make a good living here, so beg money from our Muslim brothers. After two years, they wanted him to get a different contract for a different company, then another one. Like this, they expected the two to live out the rest of their lives. A few years, we thought, your kala and I, was sufficient to save enough to buy a house and car, make a good life here. We did not know he would have to stay there for good. Ar’re, even these Muslim brothers of ours, these Saudi sheiks, think of us like servants, no better than the Hindu fanatics do here. Our own countrymen may be telling us to get out, but our own brothers are telling us we can’t live among them, no citizenship is given, no visas to the workers’ families, so the men must go there alone, sharing rooms with other men, their quarters partitioned off from the locals as though we are contaminated because we come from India, the husband not in peace, the wife not in peace. Ar’re, why must the boy be forced to sell himself like this?” He stared at me with those deep-set eyes that could have been Henna’s, that promise of redemption erased.
“One day he sent a letter to me. He said, ‘Go see what my parents
are doing to your daughter. Bring her back to your home. You have my permission.’ Only because he wrote to ask for my help did we go.” He patted his chest. “What my eyes saw I could never have imagined!”
The mother let out a grunt and shuffled in her chair.
“All her dowry gone. Sold! The car. The refrigerator. The water heater. The dishes. Even the almari in which she stored her clothes. Everything is gone. What these nawabs did not tell us, these purana jageer-dars,” old landowners, “was that this man here, the one who is sitting now with his head lowered in shame, but only when it is too late and my daughter is already dead—gone with the rest of her possessions—is that he has a problem with his eyes. He is unable to see himself. He is still living as his forefathers used to live. Betting on horses. Going hunting. Playing cards. He entertains. He drinks alcohol. He is part of clubs. And because no one in his family has needed to work, he himself refuses. Ar’re, the ancestral house was put up on mortgage and was about to be taken away, and still he would not take a job. Instead, they think up a plan to get their son married. Rather than use some of Henna’s dowry to pay for the walima dinner, they paid off the house. By now, any man would bow and thank Allah for saving him from public shame. But, still, he does not stop. And this shameless woman, she keeps giving him my daughter’s things to sell. The furniture. The pots and pans made of copper. Things that were passed down to your kala, then to Henna. And when there was nothing left, she began asking for my daughter’s gold bracelets, her anklets, her necklaces, all her jewels taken. One by one.”
“Aji, say something to him! Why must I listen to this?”
“And my daughter! Without protest, giving up her rights to this man. Her father-in-law! Not even her husband. Ar’re, the day we arrive, we find her cleaning the floors and cooking because they have no money to hire a servant. And she’s looking like one herself! No clean sari. No jewels. And these two sitting around her like the landowners they once were, when they no longer possess a thing! Not even the house! It all belonged to Henna. Paid for with her inheritance. Still she is wordless. When she sees your kala and me, she does not complain. It is only when she runs to throw up, and I ask if she is sick that I am told by these two that my daughter is pregnant.” He clucked. “It is seeing her like this …” he stopped and thumped his chest. “The strain of seeing her gave me a heart attack. I have always been weak when it comes to that child. I brought her back. Yes, this father brought his daughter home. She did not come herself. She was not thrown out! These two were enjoying their comfort, believing I had given them my daughter to be a servant.” He sighed and looked at the calendar again. “I do not blame him for leaving her to find help. The boy had no choice. Even when she was hurting at his own home, he called for my help.” He paused, then his lips began moving as he said more, but nothing came out.