Dinner is late. We are waiting for Khushwant and Pratab. Mr. Khan says, “We will wait for fifteen minutes more. If they don’t come, we’ll start eating.”
Hungry guests with growling stomachs, we nevertheless say, “Please don’t worry on our account . . . we are in no hurry.”
Conversation dwindles. The guest politely inquire after the health of those sitting next to them and the grades of their children. We hear the doorbell ring and Mr. Khan gets up from his chair saying, “I think they’ve come.”
Instead of dapper Sikhs, I see two huge and hirsute Indian fakirs. Their disheveled hair, parted at the center, bristles about their arms and shoulders and mingles with their spiky black beards. They are wearing white muslin kurtas over the white singlets and their broad shoulders and thick muscles show brown beneath the fine muslin. I can’t be sure from where I sit, but I think they have on loose cotton pajamas. They look indescribably fierce. It is an impression quickly formed, and I have barely glimpsed the visitors, when, abruptly, their knees appear to buckle and they fall forward.
Mr. Khan steps back hastily and bends over the prostate men. He says, “What’s all this? What’s all this?” The disconnected tone of his voice, and the underpinning of perplexity and fear gets us all to our feet. Moving in a bunch, displacing the chairs and small tables and crumpling the carpets, we crowd our end of the lobby.
The fakirs lie face down across the threshold, half outside the door and half in the passage, their hands flat on the floor as if they were about to do pushups. Their faces are entirely hidden by hair. Suddenly, their voices are moist and thick, they begin to cry, “Maajee! Maajee! Forgive us.” The blubbering, coming as it does from these fierce men, is unexpected, shocking; incongruous and melodramatic in this pragmatic and oil-rich corner of the Western world.
Sikander, in obvious confusion, looms over them, looking from one to the other. Then, squatting in front of them, he begins to stroke their pricky heads, making soothing noises as if he were cajoling children, “What’s this? Tch, tch. . . . Come on! Stand up!”
“Get out of the way.” An arm swings out in a threatening gesture and the fakir lifts his head. I see the pale, ash-smeared forehead, the large, thickly fringed brown eyes, the set curve of the wide, sensous mouth, and recognize Khushwant Singh. Next to him Pratab also raises his head. Sikander shuffles out of reach of Khushwant’s arm and moving to one side, his back to the wall, watches the Sikhs with an expression of incredulity. It is unreal. I think it has occurred to all of us it might be a prank, an elaborate joke. But their red eyes, and the passion distorting their faces, are not pretended.
“Who are these men?”
The voice is demanding, abrasive. I look over my shoulder, wondering which of the women has spoken so harshly. The sisters look agitated; their dusky faces are flushed.
“Throw them out. They’re badmashes! Goondas!”
Taken aback I realize the angry, fearful voice is Sikander’s mother’s.
Ammijee is standing behind me, barely visible among the agitated and excited sisters, and in her face I see more than just the traces of emotions I had looked for earlier. It is as if her features had been parodied in a hideous mask. They are all there: the bitterness, the horror, the hate: the incarnation of that tree of ugly possibilities seeded in my mind when Sikander, in a cold fury, imitating the cries of the street vendors his mother had described, said, “Zenana for sale! Zenana for sale!”
I grew up overhearing fragments of whispered conversations about the sadism and bestiality women were subjected to during the Partition: What happened to so and so—someone’s sister, daughter, sister-in-law—the women Mrs. Khan categorized the spoils of war. The fruits of victory in the unremitting chain of wars that is man’s relentless history. The vulnerability of mothers, daughters, granddaughters, and their metamorphosis into possessions; living objects on whose soft bodies victors and losers alike vent their wrath, enact fantastic vendettas, celebrate victory. All history, all these fears, all probabilities and injustices coalesce in Ammijee’s terrible face and impart a dimension of tragedy that alchemises the melodrama. The behavior of the Sikhs, so incongruous and flamboyant before, is now transcendentally essential, consequential, fitting.
The men on the floor have spotted Ammijee. “Maajee, forgive us: Forgive the wrongs of our fathers.”
A sister behind me says, “Oh my God!” There is a buzz of questions and comments. I feel she has voiced exactly my awe of the moment—the rare, luminous instant in which two men transcend their historic intransigence to tender apologies on behalf of their species. Again she says, “Oh God!” and I realize she is afraid that the cousins, propelled forward by small movements of their shoulders and elbows like crocodiles, are resurrecting a past that is best left in whatever recesses of the mind Ammijee has chosen to bury it.
“Don’t do this . . . please,” protests Sikander. “You’re our guests . . . !”
But the cousins, keeping their eyes on the floor say, “Bhai, let us be.”
The whispered comments of the guests intensify around me.
“What’s the matter?”
“They are begging her pardon . . .”
“Who are these men?”
“. . . for what the Sikhs did to her in the riots. . . .”
“Hai Ram. What do they want?”
“God knows what she’s been through; she never talks about it. . . .”
“With their hair opened like this they must remind her of the men who . . .”
“You can’t beat the Punjabis when it comes to drama,” says the supercilious Kashmiri. His wife, standing next to me, says, “The Sikhs have a screw loose in the head.” She rotates a stubby thumb on her temple as if she were tightening an imaginary screw.
I turn, frowning. The sisters are glaring at them: showering the backs of their heads with withering, hostile looks. And, in hushed tones of suitable gravity, Mrs. Khan says, “Ammijee, they are asking for your forgiveness. Forgive them.” Then, “She forgives you brothers!” says Mrs. Khan loudly, on her mother-in-law’s account. The other sisters repeat Mrs. Khan’s magnanimous gesture, and, with minor variations, also forgive Khushwant and Pratab on Ammijee’s behalf.
“Ammijee, come here.” Sikander sounds determined to put a stop to all this.
We shift, clearing a narrow passage for Ammijee, and Kishen’s mother darts out instead looking like an agitated chick in her puffed cotton sari. She is about to say something—and judging from her expression it has to be something indeterminate and conciliatory—when Kishen, firmly taking hold of her arm, hauls her back.
Seeing his mother has not moved, Sikander shouts, “Send Ammijee here. For God’s sake finish it now.”
Ammijee takes two or three staggering steps and stands a few paces before me. I suspect one of the sisters has nudged her forward. I cannot see Ammijee’s face, but the head beneath the gray chador jerks as if she were trying to remove a crick from her neck.
All at once, her voice, an altered, fragile, high-pitched treble that bears no resemblance to the fierce voice that had demanded, “Who are these men?” Ammijee screeches, “I will never forgive your fathers! Or your grandfathers! Get out, shaitans! Sons and grandsons of shaitans! Never, never, never!”
She becomes absolutely still, as if she would remain there forever, rooted, the quintessence of indictment.
They advance, wiping their noses on their sleeves, tearing at their snarled hair, pleading, “We will lie at your door to our last breath! We are not fit to show our faces.”
In a slow, deliberate gesture, Ammijee turns her face away and I observe her profile. Her eyes are clenched shut. The muscles in her cheeks and lower jaw are quivering in tiny, tight spasms as if charged by a current. No one dares say a word: It would be an intrusion. She has to contend with unearthed torments, private demons. The matter rests between her memories and the incarnation of the phantoms wriggling up to her.
The men reach out to touch the hem of her shalwar. Graspin
g her ankles, they lay their heads at her feet in the ancient gesture of surrender demanded of warriors.
“Leave me! Let go!” Ammijee shrieks, in her shaky, altered voice. She raises her arms and moves them as if she were pushing away invisible insects. But she looks exhausted and, her knees giving way, she squats before the men. She buries her face in the chador.
At last, with slight actions that suggest she is ready to face the world, Ammijee wipes her face in the chador and rearranges it on her untidy head. She tucks the edges behind her ears and slowly, in a movement that is almost tender, places her shaking hands on the shaggy heads of the men who hold her feet captive. “My sons, I forgave your fathers long ago,” she says in a flat, emotionless voice pitched so low that it takes some time for the words to register, “How else could I live?”
On my way home, hanging on to the red taillights of the cars on the Katy Freeway, my thoughts tumble through a chaos of words and images: And then the words churn madly, throwing up fragments of verse by the Bolivian poet, Pedro Shimose. The words throb in an endless, circular rhythm:
Defend yourself against me
against my father and the father of my father
still living in me
Against my force and shouting in schools and cathedrals
Against my camera, against my pencil
against my TV-spots.
Defend yourself against me,
please, woman,
defend yourself!
EXISTING AT THE CENTER, WATCHING FROM THE EDGES: MANDALAS
Roshni Rustomji
Born in Bombay (now Mumbai), Roshni Rustomji (1938– ) grew up in Karachi and was educated there at the Mama Parsi High School and the College of Home Economics. She graduated from the American University at Beirut and earned further degrees at Duke University, and the University of California at Berkeley.
Rustomji lives between the United States and Mexico and is a professor emerita from Sonoma State University, where she taught from 1973 to 1993. She has been an adjunct faculty member at the New College of California, San Francisco, since 1997 and was a visiting scholar at the Center for Latin American Studies at Stanford University from 1997 to 2005.
She has coedited the anthologies Blood into Ink: South Asian and Middle Eastern Women Write War (Westview, 1994), Living in America: Fiction and Poetry by South Asian American Writers (Westview, 1995), and (with Elenita Mandoza Strobel and Rajini Srikanth) Encounters: People of Asian Descent in the Americas (Rowman and Littlefield, 1999). She has also written a novel, The Braided Tongue (TSAR, 2003).
“Existing at the Center, Watching from the Edges: Mandalas” knits together the many cultures and countries in which Rustomji has lived to describe the war, prejudice, and violence that she has experienced across half a century. The memoir begins in Mexico, framed by the image of la llorona, the timeless weeping woman of Mexican lore and Rustomji’s own tears at the news of Benazir Bhutto’s assassination in Pakistan. Rustomji sets two of her entries against the horror of the twenty-first century’s savage new weapon—the suicide bomber. Other entries include Rustomji’s childhood memory of Partition in Karachi 1947, which becomes a metaphor for the conflicts that Rustomji has experienced during her many migrations. She cleverly interweaves the images of the anti-Vietnam protests and popular culture of that era with references to the battles of ancient Greece and India—and of the great discourses of Hindu philosophy in the sacred text and epic, the Mahabharata, between the God Krishna and the warrior Arjun, who reluctantly fights his kinsmen on the field of Kurukshetra. “Mandalas,” the word of Sanskrit origin in the title signifies both the universe and the quest for unity, while Rustomji’s friend, Mama Glafira, is an important maternal figure in Oaxaca, who embodies humanity and compassion. Rustomji says, “Mama Glafira is a very real person and this is the title that I and many others use for her. She is also known as madrina [Godmother] or Doña. She is a woman held in great respect and affection by many people in Oaxaca because of the care and support she gives to nearly everyone she knows.”
The USIS is the United States Information Service, the overseas version of the United States Information Agency that fostered cultural activities and cultural exchange, and was once very active in Karachi.
• • •
For the last fifteen years I have been writing down notes and sketches of some of the wars I have lived through and yes, often with a survivor’s guilt. Notes on the back of receipts, scraps of paper, note cards, letters, books, bookmarks, whatever has been at hand. I find it difficult to put them together in any formal, traditional format as I attempt to make some kind of sense of the unending wars I have watched and lived through. Wars that have taken the shape of an adult’s slap on a child’s face, of the red, orange, green, blue, and yellow flames engulfing the body of a monk or the body of a woman, of the stooped shoulders and traumatized eyes of a man or woman whose dignity has been broken through conquest and poverty, and of the corpses, the obscene slaughter of human beings and the earth in the name of God, truth, revenge, and justice. Seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and touching war, sometimes from the very center and sometimes from the sidelines, that leads to a pattern of war existence that seems terrifyingly close to that of walking within a mandala. It continues to be a journey without any detachment or insight that might lead to any kind of understanding, wisdom, and action against the very nature of war and toward the essence of peace. Wars remind me of age-old hauntings begging to be exorcized from the body of our planet.
OCTOBER 31, 2001
EL DÍA DE LOS MUERTOS. THE DAY OF THE DEAD
The two little girls sat beside me, laughing, as we made silly sentences out of words. They in English and I in Spanish. When we came to the words, ghosts and fantasmas, they became very serious. They asked me, “Tía, why does that ghost woman make awful noises and carry away children so that we can never see our families again?” One of their teachers had gone in for a multicultural Halloween. She had turned off the lights and told them the story of la llorona—the weeping woman who haunts so much of Mexico and the southwest of the United States, which was of course taken by force from Mexico, which was of course taken by force by the European conquistadors, which was of course taken by force by—and so on and so forth.
According to the accepted legend, la llorona wails as she wanders all over the countryside and through desolate places in towns, searching for naughty children she can take away. She cries and looks for children because she has, through pride and insanity, killed her own. I have heard men talk about how they, too, have encountered la llorona when staggering home from an evening of drinking. Some survived, others never reached home again. One of the men who had seen her told me, “Una guerra. Una mujer contra todos los hombres.” Why, I asked, was it a war? Why did he say that she was a woman against all men? Because, he said, one man dishonored a woman and made her so loca, so insane, that she killed the children she had had by him.
The summer after the Zapatista uprising, a Zapoteca selling shawls across from my mamacita’s house in Oaxaca stopped me. She asked me if I had heard the cry of la llorona the evening before. I told her that I had heard the woman who sold tamales crying out her wares late into the night throughout Colonia Jalatlaco, the colonia where the house is located. Her cry, “tamaaaaleees, tamaaalees” was so triste, full of sorrow and anxiety, that it reminded me of the laments of women all over the world as they try to sell what little they have, what little they can make in order to feed their children. The woman selling shawls told me her version of the la llorona legend. It is a version I have not yet encountered in any book.
According to the woman, it was the rich and powerful European lover of the beautiful Indian woman, she who was later called la llorona, who killed the two children she had borne him. He had done it to prove his love to his European novia. To prove that the two children and “that” woman were of no importance to him. As far as the storyteller was concerned, la llorona had never raised her hand against her children. W
hen I asked her about the version where la llorona killed her children rather than see them slowly starve to death, the woman shrugged and said, “It may have been a blessing. Have you ever seen a child slowly die of hunger?”
I tried to tell my two little companions this version of the story. They were still afraid. It did not matter who killed the children, the children were still dead. And la llorona was still searching for children to carry away to the land of ghosts, never to see their families again. One of the girls remembered a priest telling her about the children’s crusade, “many hundreds of years ago” and how brave those children were. The other little girl described the children soldiers she had seen on TV, “nearly as old as we are.” Before we continued to create more sentences, the two girls decided that no one had killed la llorona’s children. They had just run away and hidden so that they wouldn’t have to go and live in a war. “In wars,” said the older girl, “people are hungry. They die. By bombs, by being hungry.”
1947
I was moving toward my ninth year. One evening, the bells of the Hanuman Temple—at the end of the road, across the maidaan where the dust rose and blew toward all our houses in summer—stopped. Just like that. They stopped and I haven’t heard them since. A silence without a past, present, or future.
The next morning, the past and the future became the now. The “there” of the rumors of a savage war became the “here” of refugees. People, strangers, suddenly appeared, flooding the streets of Karachi. My mother said, “To count them as if they are numbers is wrong. Each one is a single person. Think, Roshni, think what each person must be feeling!” I saw tears in my beloved grandmother’s eyes as she spoke of orphans, children born of rape, women who would die of rape or be forced to live with the memory of violence and the reality of abandonment. I tried very hard to understand. Looking back after nearly fifty odd years, I don’t know what I understood. I did realize that now we were independent. The land had been divided and there was bloodshed.
And the World Changed Page 6