And the World Changed

by Muneeza Shamsie

  “I am sorry that your father suffered as a result of telling Wafadar’s story,” the merchant said quietly, “and I would like to help in any way that I can.”

  The dog was awake now and lifted his head, then rose to his noble feet and ambled over to his master.

  Immediately the merchant took a fine piece of meat from his jeweled plate and fed it to Wafadar. The dog picked up the offering and looked at his owner with love in his eyes, and Samira saw his love reflected in the eyes of the merchant. Quietly, she looked on as the merchant stroked and fondled his dog and the dog rested his long, graceful muzzle on the merchant’s knee.

  “I would like to help you,” said the merchant, “because I admire your effort. You combine wisdom and courage with a soft heart and single-minded dedication. I didn’t know women like you existed.”

  “Perhaps,” murmured Samira, “They are not often given the chance.”

  But the merchant was too preoccupied with his next thought to hear her. “Come and stay with me in my humble home,” he said, “and let us discuss your next step.” He looked at Wafadar. “And you, old friend, would you be willing to go on another journey for your master’s sake?”

  Wafadar licked his master’s hand and stood up, suddenly playful.

  “He agrees,” smiled the merchant. “He agrees to accompany Samira to Constantinople to plead her father’s case. You have lived up to your name, Samira—a true friend and companion. In my country poets write of a little white dove called Samira who proved her friendship by traveling far and wide to repay a human who once saved her life. It strikes me that you have done the same.” That night, in the halls of the merchant’s manor, Samira fell in love and when the merchant proposed marriage, she accepted.

  “But only on condition that you agree to come and live in Constantinople,” she said.

  The merchant agreed and the next day they embarked on the return journey, which this time was far more comfortable than Samira had imagined possible.

  On her return, Samira’s first visit was to her father.

  “I am back, Father, and I have with me the dog with the collar of twelve rubies and the man who owns him. What will the Emperor say to that?”

  The old Wazir fell on his daughter’s neck and wept with gratitude for her safe return.

  “My days were hell and my night hellfire while you were away,” he confessed. “I imagined that you had been attacked by every evil and besieged by every conceivable misfortune. I felt sure I would never see you again. I would have thanked God a million times every moment of the day for the rest of my life, even if you had returned alone and without the means to free me.”

  “Shame, Father,” laughed Samira. “You have very little faith in your daughter.”

  Then Samira sought an audience with the Emperor and requested permission to bring a companion. The audience was granted and Samira and the merchant told Azad Bakht the whole story. He described how Samira had left home dressed as a man to redeem her father’s honor.

  “And now that you know the facts, Your Majesty, we beg a reprieve for Samira’s father, the Grand Wazir.”

  “I have never heard such an incredible story!” exclaimed Azad Bakht. “And I thank God that I did not harm my Wazir or put him to death.”

  The Emperor immediately ordered the release of the Wazir, and in the presence of his family and his courtiers, he begged his forgiveness.

  “And all this,” concluded the Emperor, “has been achieved through the efforts of a devoted daughter.”

  “A daughter,” thought Samira alone in her chamber that night, smoothing her soft fabrics to her skin, inhaling the perfumed atmosphere of her room, slipping between the silk of her bedclothes, “who is very happy to be a woman now that she has shown what womankind can achieve.”

  EXCELLENT THINGS IN WOMEN

  Sara Suleri Goodyear

  Sara Suleri Goodyear (1953– ) is an academic, critic, and writer. She grew up in Lahore and earned degrees there from Kinnaird College and Punjab University, and a doctorate from Indiana University in the United States.

  Suleri Goodyear is currently a professor of English at Yale University, the founding editor of The Yale Journal of Criticism, and on the editorial board of The Yale Review and Transition. She is the author of the critical work, The Rhetoric of English India (University of Chicago Press, 1992), and two much-acclaimed creative memoirs, Meatless Days (University of Chicago Press, 1989) and Boys Will Be Boys (University of Chicago Press, 2003). Together with her friend, Azra Raza, an oncologist in New York, she has translated into English a collection of ghazals by the great Urdu poet Mirza Asadullah Khan Ghalib, Epistomologies of Elegance (Oxford University Press, forthcoming).

  Suleri Goodyear originally wrote “Excellent Things in Women” as an essay that won a Pushcart Prize in 1987. The story became the first chapter of her creative memoir, Meatless Days (published under the name Sara Suleri). Suleri Goodyear contemplates the women in her family, and the differences not only among them, but between them and the women she knows in the United States. She makes the point that women in Pakistan think of themselves not as members of a group that may or may not exhibit solidarity, but define themselves according to the role and rank that they occupy within a home. Dadi, Suleri Goodyear’s widowed grandmother, is the family matriarch. She continues to find ways to assert her will, even when thwarted—and she knows how to strike back—yet she is hardly the mean-spirited, harsh mother-in-law of both Eastern and Western stereotypes. Suleri Goodyear’s vivid portrayals of her are juxtaposed with the portrait of Suleri Goodyear’s Welsh-born mother, who quietly finds her way as an insightful daughter-in-law with the rare ability to skilfully blend East and West within the household.

  • • •

  Leaving Pakistan was, of course, tantamount to giving up the company of women. I can tell this only to someone like Anita, in all the faith that she will understand, as we go perambulating through the grimness of New Haven and feed on the pleasures of our conversational way. Dale, who lives in Boston, would also understand. She will one day write a book about the stern and secretive life of breastfeeding and is partial to fantasies that culminate in an abundance of resolution. And Fawzi, with a grimace of recognition, knows because she knows the impulse to forget.

  To a stranger or an acquaintance, however, some vesitigial remoteness obliges me to explain that my reference is to a place where the concept of woman was not really part of an available vocabulary: We were too busy for that, just living, and conducting precise negotiations with what it meant to be a sister or a child or a wife or a mother or a servant. By this point admittedly I am damned by my own discourse, and doubly damned when I add, yes, once in a while, we naturally thought of ourselves as women, but only in some perfunctory biological way that we happened on perchance. Or else it was a hugely practical joke, we thought, hidden somewhere among our clothes. But formulating that definition is about as impossible as attempting to locate the luminous qualities of an Islamic landscape, which can on occasion generate such aesthetically pleasing moments of life. My audience is lost, and angry to be lost, and both of us must find some token of exchange for this failed conversation. I try to lay the subject down and change its clothes, but before I know it, it has sprinted off evilly in the direction of ocular evidence. It goads me into saying, with the defiance of a plea, “You did not deal with Dadi.”

  Dadi, my father’s mother, was born in Meerut toward the end of the last century. She was married at sixteen and widowed in her thirties, and by her latter decades could never exactly recall how many children she had borne. When India was partitioned, in August of 1947, she moved her thin pure Urdu into the Punjab of Pakistan and waited for the return of her eldest son, my father. He had gone careening off to a place called Inglestan, or England, fired by one of the several enthusiasms made available by the proliferating talk of independence. Dadi was peeved. She had long since dispensed with any loyalties larger than the pitiless give-and-take of people who are forced to li
ve together in the same place, and she resented independence for the distances it made. She was not among those who, on the fourteenth of August, unfurled flags and festivities against the backdrop of people running and cities burning. About that era she would only say, looking up sour and cryptic over the edge of her Quran, “And I was also burned.” She was, but that came years later.

  By the time I knew her, Dadi with her flair for drama had allowed life to sit so heavily upon her back that her spine wilted and froze into a perfect curve, and so it was in the posture of a shrimp that she went scuttling through the day. She either scuttled or did not: It all depended on the nature of her fight with the Devil. There were days when she so hated him that all she could do was stretch herself out straight and tiny on her bed, uttering most awful imprecation. Sometimes, to my mother’s great distress, Dadi could berate Satan in full eloquence only after she had clambered on top of the dining-room table and lain there like a little molding centerpiece. Satan was to blame: He had after all made her older son linger long enough in Inglestan to give up his rightful wife, a cousin, and take up instead with a white-legged woman. Satan had stolen away her only daughter Ayesha when Ayesha lay in childbirth. And he’d sent her youngest son to Swaziland, or Switzerland; her thin hand waved away such sophistries of name.

  God she loved, and she understood him better than anyone. Her favorite days were those when she could circumnavigate both the gardener and my father, all in the solemn service of her God. With a pilfered knife, she’d wheedle her way to the nearest sapling in the garden, some sprightly poplar or a newly planted eucalyptus. She’d squat, she’d hack it down, and then she’d peel its bark away until she had a walking stick, all white and virgin and her own. It drove my father into tears of rage. He must have bought her a dozen walking sticks, one for each of our trips to the mountains, but it was like assembling a row of briar pipes for one who will not smoke: Dadi had different aims. Armed with implements of her own creation, she would creep down the driveway unperceived to stop cars and people on the street and give them all the gossip that she had on God.

  Food, too, could move her to intensities. Her eyesight always took a sharp turn for the worse over meals—she could point hazily at a perfectly ordinary potato and murmur with Adamic reverence “What is it, what is it called?” With some shortness of manner one of us would describe and catalog the items on the table. “Alu ka bhartha,” Dadi repeated with wonderment and joy; “Yes, Saira Begum, you can put some here.” “Not too much,” she’d add pleadingly. For ritual had it that the more she demurred, the more she expected her plate to be piled with an amplitude her own politeness would never allow. The ritual happened three times a day.

  We pondered it but never quite determined whether food or God constituted her most profound delight. Obvious problems, however, occurred whenever the two converged. One such occasion was the Muslim festival called Eid—not the one that ends the month of fasting, but the second Eid, which celebrates the seductions of the Abraham story in a remarkably literal way. In Pakistan, at least, people buy sheeps or goats beforehand and fatten them up for weeks with delectables. Then, on the appointed day, the animals are chopped, in place of sons, and neighbors graciously exchange silver trays heaped with raw and quivering meat. Following Eid prayers the men come home, and the animal is killed, and shortly thereafter rush out of the kitchen steaming plates of grilled lung and liver, of a freshness quite superlative.

  It was a freshness to which my Welsh mother did not immediately take. She observed the custom but discerned in it a conundrum that allowed no ready solution. Liberal to an extravagant degree on thoughts abstract, she found herself to be remarkably squeamish about particular things. Chopping up animals for God was one. She could not locate the metaphor and was uneasy when obeisance played such a truant to the metaphoric realm. My father the writer quite agreed: He was so civilized in those days.

  Dadi didn’t agree. She pined for choppable things. Once she made the mistake of buying a baby goat and bringing him home months in advance of Eid. She wanted to guarantee the texture of his festive flesh by a daily feeding of tender peas and clarified butter. Ifat, Shahid, and I greeted a goat into the family with boisterous rapture, and, soon after, he ravished us completely when we found him at the washingline nonchalantly eating Shahid’s pajamas. Of course there was no argument: The little goat was our delight, and even Dadi knew there was no killing him. He became my brother’s and my sister’s and my first pet, and he grew huge, a big and grinning thing.

  Years after, Dadi had her will. We were old enough, she must have thought, to set the house sprawling, abstracted, into a multitude of secrets. This was true, but still we all noticed one another’s secretive ways. When, the day before Eid, our Dadi disappeared, my brothers and sisters and I just shook our heads. We hid the fact from my father, who at this time of life had begun to equate petulance with extreme vociferation. So we went about our jobs and tried to be Islamic for a day. We waited to sight moons on the wrong occasion, and watched the food come into lavishment. Dried dates change shape when they are soaked in milk, and carrots rich and strange turn magically sweet when deftly covered with green nutty shavings and smatterings of silver. Dusk was sweet as we sat out, the day’s work done, in an evening garden. Lahore spread like peace around us. My father spoke, and when Papa talked, it was of Pakistan. But we were glad, then, at being audience to that familiar conversation, till his voice looked up, and failed. There was Dadi making her return, and she was prodigal. Like a question mark interested only in its own conclusions, her body crawled through the gates. Our guests were spellbound, then they looked away. Dadi, moving in her eerie crab formations, ignored the hangman’s rope she firmly held as behind her in the gloaming minced, hugely affable, a goat.

  That goat was still smiling the following day when Dadi’s victory brought the butcher, who came and went just as he should on Eid. The goat was killed and cooked: A scrawny beast that required much cooking and never melted into succulence, he winked and glistened on our plates as we sat eating him on Eid. Dadi ate, that is: Papa had taken his mortification to some distant corner of the house; Ifat refused to chew on hemp; Tillat and Irfan gulped their baby sobs over such a slaughter. “Honestly,” said Mamma, “honestly.” For Dadi had successfully cut through tissues of festivity just as the butcher slit the goat, but there was something else that she was eating with that meat. I saw it in her concentration; I know that she was making God talk to her as to Abraham and was showing him what she could do—for him—to sons. God didn’t dare, and she ate on alone.

  Of those middle years it is hard to say whether Dadi was literally left alone or whether her bodily presence always emanated a quality of being apart and absorbed. In the winter I see her alone, painstakingly dragging her straw mat out to the courtyard at the back of the house and following the rich course of the afternoon sun. With her would go her Quran, a metal basin in which she could wash her hands, and her ridiculously heavy spouted waterpot, that was made of brass. None of us, according to Dadi, were quite pure enough to transport these particular items, but the rest of her paraphernalia we were allowed to carry out. There were baskets of her writing and sewing materials and her bottle of pungent and Dadi-like bitter oils, with which she’d coat the papery skin that held her brittle bones. And in the summer, when the night created an illusion of possible coolness and everyone held their breath while waiting for a thin and intermittent breeze, Dadi would be on the roof, alone. Her summer bed was a wooden frame latticed with a sweet-smelling rope, much aerated at its foot. She’d lie there all night until the wild monsoons would wake the lightest and the soundest sleeper into a rapturous welcome of rain.

  In Pakistan, of course, there is no spring but only a rapid elision from winter into summer, which is analogous to the absence of a recognizable loneliness from the behavior of that climate. In a similar fashion it was hard to distinguish between Dadi with people and Dadi alone: She was merely impossibly unable to remain unnoticed. In the win
ter, when she was not writing or reading, she would sew for her delight tiny and magical reticules out of old silks and fragments she had saved, palm-sized cloth bags that would unravel into the precision of secret and more secret pockets. But none such pockets did she ever need to hide, since something of Dadi always remained intact, however much we sought to open her. Her discourse, for example, was impervious to penetration, so that when one or two of us remonstrated with her in a single hour, she never bothered to distinguish her replies. Instead she would pronounce generically and prophetically, “The world takes on a single face.” “Must you, Dadi . . .” I’d begin, to be halted then by her great complaint: “The world takes on a single face.”

  It did. And often it was a countenance of some delight, for Dadi also loved the accidental jostle with things belligerent. As she went perambulating through the house, suddenly she’d hear Shahid, her first grandson, telling me or one of my sisters we were vile, we were disgusting women. And Dadi, who never addressed any one of us girls without first conferring the title of lady—so we were “Teellatt Begum,” “Nuzhat Begum,” “Iffatt Begum,” “Saira Begum”—would halt in reprimand and tell her grandson never to call her granddaughters women. “What else shall I call them, men?” Shahid yelled. “Men!” said Dadi. “Men! There is more goodness in a woman’s little finger than in the benighted mind of a man.” “Hear, hear, Dadi! Hanh, hanh, Dadi!” my sisters cried. “For men,” said Dadi, shaking the name off her fingertips like some unwanted water, “live as though they were unsuckled things.” “And heaven,” she grimly added, “is the thing Muhummad says (peace be upon him) lies beneath the feet of women!” “But he was a man,” Shahid still would rage, if he weren’t laughing, as all of us were laughing, while Dadi sat among us as a belle or a May queen.