by Ali, Samina
I turned to Asma Kala and found her staring at her feet again, one foot roughly rubbing the other as though trying to wipe something away. She looked up at me and shot me another smile.
I shouldn’t have said it, but I did. “I don’t agree with you. If he had loved her, he would have stayed. He must have known there would not be enough time to get help. He fled. He let her die alone.”
“We shouldn’t have come here,” the mother cried, rising. She glared at Abu Uncle. “We have enough grief of our own. Why must we listen like criminals to crimes they think we’ve committed.” She turned and spoke down at her husband’s head. “We’ve done nothing wrong, I tell you, nothing!”
Her husband sat hunched, hands in his lap, head bowed.
She swiveled about and tried to meet Asma Kala’s eyes, fists on her thick waist. “What daughter does not suffer, huh, what daughter! The girl was merely performing her duties, doing nothing more than what I did myself, nothing more than what you do even with all your servants. A wife, a daughter, must obey, it is all she can do, all that is open to her. If you do not believe this, why did you allow your husband to take Layla back to her in-laws? Why is she still there with that … that man?”
Asma Kala looked up at me, and the long stretch of light spread across her face. She had been crying for some time and her eyes were swollen and dark, her cheeks sunken, the body shrinking in on itself. The pause between life and death. The landscape of Amme’s existence.
When tears began running down my aunt’s face, I stood, not wanting to give her any more grief, and walked out into the remaining dregs of light.
IN THE SHADOWS of the neem tree, I found Roshan and Raga-be standing face to face, so engrossed in conversation that they did not see me until I was upon them. Then they turned in unison and stared at me with such surprise it could have been me who had died, then returned. When I joined them, Raga-be passed a hand over my cheeks and kissed the fingers that had touched me.
Then she opened her mouth to speak, but Roshan quickly said, “They buried her in the same cemetery as your grandfather. He took her in when she was three or four. This was the only family she knew.”
So the divisions we drew in life finally erased themselves in death. I stepped forward to embrace her, but she moved back, her body going stiff.
“They wouldn’t let me come to the funeral, Roshan. I would have been there.”
She stared at something just beyond me, saying, “She came to me last night in a dream. It was at the same hour Henna was dying.” Her lower lip curled up and slid into her mouth. She breathed slowly for a moment before she could go on. “She sat at the edge of my bed, crying. Just by my feet. She wouldn’t say anything. I kept calling to her. ‘Amma Amma.’ Finally, she got up and left.”
VOICES SPRANG FROM the side yard, and we receded farther into the shadows to stand next to the hefty trunk. When our bodies had changed, confining Henna and me to this house, we would climb up this tree and stare out over the boundary wall, dreaming.
Asma Kala now appeared around the bend of the house. She was walking Hanif’s parents to the front gate. Her sari had been wrapped in a clumsy manner so that, in front, the bottom edge rose above her ankles, while, in back, the fabric fell so low it dragged behind her on the dirt, wiping away her footprints.
Hanif’s mother was nodding to something Asma Kala was saying, but when she caught sight of me, she jerked back as though I’d struck her. Her husband followed her gaze and stared at me with flat eyes. Then he took his wife’s arm and led her outside. Not even a car or moped waiting to take them home.
“I have to see Asma memsa’ab,” Roshan whispered, using the title from when she was still a servant, as though wishing to push back time. She broke free of us and walked in a steady line across the courtyard, her hands splayed before her to catch her if she collapsed.
My aunt was shutting the gate and did not see her coming. When she had locked it, she stepped toward Henna’s room then stopped. I thought it was for Roshan, but then she leaned over the coconut tree and placed a hand high on the trunk, her skin the color of bark. Her legs gave out from under her. Just as she buckled, Roshan held her up from behind. She dug her face into Asma Kala’s neck, sobbing. My aunt reached back with her free hand and patted Roshan’s head as she used to Henna’s. Like that, with Roshan still leaning on her, my kala bent forward and vomited clear liquid into the base of the tree. When she straightened, Roshan straightened with her, a child on piggyback, then my aunt bent forward once more. Finally, she spit and kicked dirt over her waste.
AFTER THEY HAD disappeared, a motorcycle’s moan filled the air, and I headed toward the front gate, ready to go.
Raga-be stopped me. “The boy come already. I send he away. I say the child stay here tonight, the child must be with she family. He say he come tomorrow to burial. He get you there.”
“I don’t think they want me to stay, Raga. I’m only causing them more strain.” Then I said, “Poor Nafiza, I had her thrown out, did you know? That’s the memory of me she died with.”
Her hunched form bent even more, and she startled me by letting out a loud laugh. “Me jadu work for you, hahn! You come to me, you tell me make so others believe you no touch before. Only touch by you husband. The world believe this. This power of me jadu.” She shifted closer to me, her hot breath on my face. “This time, I bring you husband to you. Make him proper husband. I come to you tonight, hahn, Bitea?”
So, this was the real reason she had arranged for me to stay.
“No, thank you, Raga-be,” I said, and she stepped back in surprise, her kohl-lined eyes like small circles on her face.
“What you say, Bitea! You trap-trap! What else help you? Nothing but magic!”
“I don’t think your jadu will work on me,” I said, then repeated what she had first told me when I’d asked her to perform the jadu. “I’m not fully Indian.”
“No Indian! What you is if you no Indian, child! This grief talking, no me girl!”
Perhaps it was the grief. But at the moment it seemed that the only way to do away with borders was to start with the ones that had been etched in skin, splitting me.
ON THE NINTH of Muhar’ram, we buried Henna.
Taqi Mamu and Abu Uncle were among the men who carried her body on a wooden litter. Without a pause in their step, the men passed an end from one shoulder to the next. But when the cemetery came into view, Taqi Mamu handed his corner to someone else and stepped aside, and the small procession went on without him. After a ways, I turned to see him stick his arms out as he fell to the ground. Without picking himself up, he crawled to the edge of the road and sat staring ahead, his jaw moving as though chewing on something. People passed on foot or cycle or car and did not seem to notice him. Abu Uncle never once gave up his end of the litter.
She was shrouded in a white sheet. Her body had been cleansed for the final time, washing away the sins of this world. The women had cleansed Henna’s daughter as well, washing her of her mother’s waters as they would have done to commence her life. Then they enclosed her in Henna’s arms. The one burial sheet was wound around the two of them, so that they were flesh to flesh. Pressed into one. The shroud, a new skin. Why was there no comfort in their joint departure?
When the procession entered the cemetery, the men went ahead to the burial site, while the women stayed back by the entrance. A tall, wrought-iron gate was the only thing separating the life rumbling by outside from the silence of the dead within. For now, we were enveloped in this silence, grateful for it. And grateful, too, that the entire Old City was in black. As we were in black. It was as though the whole of India was mourning these deaths.
Near the grave site, a police officer uncuffed Hanif’s hands and he stepped forward. He was tall with wavy hair, and that was all, from this distance, that I could make of him. Abu Uncle handed him a shovel. For a moment, Hanif set his forehead on its handle, unable to raise dirt. But then the police officer elbowed him, and Hanif lifted his head an
d went forward. He dug the shovel into the ground, then placed a foot on it and dug even deeper. He pushed the earth aside. Only then did Abu Uncle step forward himself, and one by one, other men joined in, including Hanif’s father. I had been told that once they were done, Hanif’s soiled hands would be cuffed once more and he’d be taken away. His mother had not come.
The women had to stand apart while the body was being buried, and from where I was with Ameera Auntie and Asma Kala, Roshan and her daughter, we could only make out the dim figures of the men, their arms rising and falling as they dug at the earth, then pitched it aside. As the sun rose to the center of the sky, they deepened into the ground, losing ankles, calves, knees, thighs. Then they threw out the shovels, and hands from above grasped hands from below, helping them out.
The men surrounded Henna’s body and lowered it into the hole, and I tried not to blink, tried not to miss anything of this final sight of my sister. This white angel of sorrow among us black shrouded souls. Then she was gone. The rise of her belly, the rise that was the child buried with her, the last thing to glimpse this wretched earth.
Once more, the men picked up their tools and created a mound I knew would flatten over time, becoming like all the others. The new dead joining the old. Somewhere next to her lay Nafiza’s body, the cold dirt not yet warmed about it.
At last, the men set aside their shovels, and we stood, the men over her grave, the women by the gates, and, together, we uttered a final prayer.
There was nothing left to do for her.
ASMA KALA ASKED that I join her in visiting Henna’s grave. From there, she wanted me to go to the durga and say our private prayers. I had gotten my period that morning, almost a month after the D & C, my body leaking blood as a rite of ancient cleansing, and though this made me impure in the eyes of Allah to be near the fresh grave, to enter any holy shrine, how could I refuse?
So I took my kala’s small hand in mine, the skin dry, the nails bitten short, the lifelines intersecting my own, and we walked together, leaving the others behind. Roshan thought it wise to keep her young daughter from sorrow that was not yet her own. And Ameera Auntie, who in grieving had worsened her diabetes, was now too weak to tra verse this stretch of land, this path from the living to the dead.
We walked hand in hand, like mother and daughter, passing other graves, both old and fresh, small and large, the tombstones even with the land, and I whispered, “Salaam, salaam, salaam,” peace, onto each one I passed. After a short distance, my kala let go of my hand and we went on like that, with her before me, steady and firm, and me trailing behind. The path was so narrow, the graves coming just to the edge, that I was scared to stumble and fall, so I carefully placed my feet where hers had left an imprint.
When we came to the far side of the graveyard, I saw Hanif was already gone and the rest of the men made the excuse of returning their shovels and picks and left us alone. Abu Uncle squatted under the shade of a nearby tree, his black-and-white checkered shirt smudged brown with earth. Taqi Mamu walked off alone and smoked, and when he was done, he looked about confused before he slid the butt into a pocket.
Asma Kala crouched next to Henna’s grave and stared at it for some time. In a few days, she and Abu Uncle would have to return to place the cement marker with Henna’s name and dates. But for now, my aunt simply passed her hand over the dirt, caressing her child through a mound of earth. Back and forth, back and forth, pebbles rolling away.
“Why did you have to be so insistent on going out?” she asked. Then she said, “We spoiled you too much.” After that, she was quiet, her eyes measuring the length and width of the grave, as though ensuring that Henna was comfortable inside, not too squeezed in with her daughter. Then her hand closed on the dirt and clenched it, bringing it up to her face. She kissed it. Then opened her mouth and shoved the dirt inside and swallowed it. Then shoved and swallowed some more. Behind us, Abu Uncle began to cry. I looked away.
Next to my aunt’s feet lay Nana’s grave, and I stared at it, silently informing him that this was what was left of his hopes for the future. Just these three empty lives, my two uncles and aunt, then Ameera Auntie, Amme and me, three more. And I, the sole heir of their collective sorrow. I, their only hope. Then my eyes fell upon a miniature grave to the left of Nana’s, just between him and Henna. It was a mere foot long, and above it, a small slab of cement. On it, swirls to the left. ABBAS. My brother. Amme’s lost son. No dates inscribed for one who had died before living an age long enough to record. Dying at birth. Slipping from the nurse’s clumsy hands and falling. Smacking his too soft newborn head on the stone floor. And the cry for life became a startled hiccup and nothing more. For three days he bled from the nose, mouth and ears. He bled the same blood that flowed through me now. Accident or kismet? A child born only to die, and now he had found a playmate.
My legs buckled and I slouched next to Asma Kala, finally crying, finally touching sorrow.
WE WENT TO the shrine that Henna had visited the day she was murdered, when she had brought her flowers and prayers of thanksgiving for her husband’s safe return, her family’s long-awaited reunion. Allah rewarded patience, that was what was promised in the Qur’an, over and over, so though I had intended to go in and pray for her, I found I could not. I stayed outside the small one-room structure, listening to the family pray for peace—peace within themselves, peace without—and I told God that I disagreed with life. Like that, bit by bit, just as I had been bound by this existence, I was now breaking away. It was not enough anymore, blind faith.
Sameer found me awaiting my family in Abu Uncle’s car, just outside the durga. He pulled up beside the passenger door. his gaze faltering, ashamed. He didn’t get off the bike. We rode home without a word, lost to those we passed and to each other.
When we were upon the crossroads, he suddenly yelled, “There’s the jail-khanna,” pointing it out as though I’d not seen it a hundred times in a hundred different passings. It was no more than a square block, the faded cement boundary wall painted over brightly by this season’s slogans. Passionate words that would be painted over themselves with the lusty faces of next season’s film stars. And still Henna would not be returned.
Sameer stuck out an arm and the cycle swerved. “Wave to Hanif. Wave!” he cried, trying to sound sarcastic or untouched, but I could hear the pain in his voice.
A car jerked around us, and the front passenger thrust out his head and cursed Sameer. He was wearing a shiny orange shirt so I knew he was Hindu, just as he could tell from our black clothes, my chador, that we were Muslim. Sameer stuck his pinkie in his mouth and smacked it back out, a gesture of insult I did not know how to translate. We tailed the car around the curve of the chow-rasta, and just as I was growing nervous Sameer might lead us to danger, the car took the first right and zipped away. The struggle so quickly forgotten.
We continued straight until we reached the top of the hill that would drop us down into the colony. There, he pulled to the side and stopped. He didn’t show me the tree under which he had taken cover, nor did I ask him to point it out. We sat in the last bright rays of the dying sun. Ahead, rambling down the slope were a few goats, a vegetable seller grasping his cart as it rolled ever more quickly before him, a tho-bun with a dirty laundry bundle on top of her head, her hips swaying side to side. At this time of day, on the ninth of Ganesh, there should have been more of a crowd, cheering and celebration. This was some sort of self-imposed curfew, news of Henna’s death, as all such deaths, reaching the entire neighborhood. What was it that kept people away, the guilt that they could have prevented it? Or the fear that her ghost was lingering about, ready to enter any body that passed?
“Enter me,” I whispered as Sameer whisked down the hill. I raised my arms over my head and closed my eyes, telling myself the air against my skin was really the pressure of Henna’s ghost pushing inside. But even as I did, I knew it wasn’t so. The borders of skin were as firm as the borders on any map.
Halfway down, Same
er switched off the engine and we coasted the rest of the way. I could now hear drums beating around us, and as we passed a dirt road, I saw a lorry carrying an enormous Ganesh. Four or five men in festive colored shirts sat in the back with their god. They were clapping and singing to him. We rolled on.
“Where did she die?”
He turned an ear to me. “Could have been anywhere along this stretch. I was too far to know.” Whether or not he said that to protect me, I could not tell, and I began to examine the road, searching for signs of blood, of a torn sari or chador, of dried milk. I found nothing. Then I became so frightened that I would find something that I closed my eyes and pretended to be her.
It is dark and she is gliding. Her one arm wrapped around her husband’s waist, the other resting on her stomach, on her baby. They are moving so quickly that hot air rises from under the wheels and she has the sensation, over and over, of her sandals flying off. So she curves her toes down to keep them in place. Ahead, there is darkness. Then figures emerging from it, coming into form in the frail light of the scooter. One, two, three, four. She sees only four. A group of friends. Just boys out having fun. Nothing to worry about, not anymore. Her husband has returned. She is having his baby. Together, they will create a future. Then the first strike of the rifle’s handle against her shin. At first, she is confused. Perhaps a stick on the road, a stick they have run over has flipped in the air and struck her. But then she feels it again, now against her shoulder, now her back, her neck, her crotch. She instinctively covers her belly. The bike is swerving. They fall. She falls. He rises and leaves. She watches him go. The men’s motorcycle lights are pointing at her, they have encircled her and beyond that, all is darkness.