Yet, every summer break, once she completed marking the undergraduate history papers, Munira found her way back to Hyderabad, to the house where in the middle of dinner, suddenly, shockingly, her husband had a heart attack. She was scheduled to join him in another week; a teacher’s strike had postponed exams. Though she rushed to Hyderabad, the family could not wait; they went ahead with the burial, presenting her with a garlanded photograph later.
She took back the photograph and the plate in which he was supposed to have had his last meal, embraced his mother at the airport, promising to return, not knowing that it wasn’t really expected of her at all. So every May when she called them with her arrival date and flight time, they sent Shambu to receive her and planned sightseeing tours to Golconda, Shamirpet Lake and Chowmahalla Palace, hoping the overeager driver would compensate for their detached hospitality. Munira didn’t really mind. As long as in the evenings, she could sit in the kitchen, memorizing the walls Salim had known, inhaling the aromas that had wafted around him, she really didn’t mind.
And now Shambu was walking towards her holding cups of chai and pink candyfloss.
She took the chai and raised her eyebrows at the florescent sugar.
“Shambu, this is for children.”
“I’ll eat it.”
This was supposed to be endearing, he thought. A grown man in sensible shoes with a sticky, sweet, pink moustache. In his mind, the image was cute but she wasn’t smiling. First the banana and now this candy; maybe she thought he was weird with food.
“We should be like children sometimes, you know,” he explained to redeem himself.
“Why are children always supposed to be sweet and innocent? They can be cruel too.”
Shambu probably knew more about this than her, what with the two adolescents whom he ferried to All Saints High School every day, but he didn’t say anything. Once, they had spent the ride home digging their heels into his backrest, pushing to see if he would object. He hadn’t said a word. Another time, just after he had cleaned the car and dropped them to school, he found the backseat littered with peanut skins, all arranged to make a smiley face.
But still he said, “They laugh. At least they laugh. Maybe that is worth all the trouble they cause.”
He wouldn’t have dared this kind of familiarity with the rest of the family but he reasoned that since Munira hardly seemed to register him, he couldn’t really offend her. In the house, he sat on the floor or stood on the veranda if he was offered tea. With her, he could dare to plonk on the same wooden bench, his buttocks at the same level as hers, even daringly close to hers.
A few hours earlier, driving out of Himayat Sagar, they had completed the itinerary for the day. But the trip had been shorter than expected and he did not want to her return to the cold house and their curious stares. Hence this strange detour to the zoo. He lied about the exotic animals so passionately, that eventually she gave in and they stood behind a line of schoolgirls to buy tickets.
He often told himself not to think of the quietly bold woman, the educated, petite, pixie-like widow who was left in his care once a year. After all, he had served the woman’s husband. Shambu had been much younger then, a mere errand boy, but the family had paid for his driving lessons and he soon took over his aging father’s place at the wheel of the Honda Civic. Now Shambu had a bride-to-be waiting in Lucknow; they were to be married in December after which she would join him as nanny for the child that the youngest daughter-in-law was expecting.
And yet, on the hard bench of the zoo, Shambu found his gaze drawn towards Munira’s eyelashes. The way she constantly adjusted her headscarf, the way her loneliness spread around her like an aura, like a shield, refusing to allow anyone access. Would she ever move on? But then she’d never return, would she?
He shook away these conflicting thoughts and focused on the tea. It was very hot.
“It’s very hot, no?”
She nodded and said, “Yes” and gently blew on the tea before taking a tentative sip.
The sun emerged softly from behind a cloud and lit up the bench. Munira looked so beautiful then, her cheekbones highlighted, her earlobes translucent, her earrings glinting, that Shambu had to look away. Though he had witnessed her serene, easy dignity in the face of tragedy, he felt protective towards her. Like her detached wisdom would enable her to negotiate with the world but somehow she needed him to save her from herself.
Of course, they were all daydreams. He had a girl waiting for him, then maybe a couple of children. They might even move into the quarters that were being constructed at the back of the house. All the pieces of the equation were arranged in perfect harmony, yet Shambu, restless Shambu, starry-eyed Shambu, prying, inflamed Shambu, enchanted, impatient Shambu was determined to shake them.
“You don’t want children?”
She looked away. “No”
“You know, you could marry again.”
The stench of the birdcages wafted up to them. She shook her head.
“Then I wouldn’t be able to come again.”
“Here? India? Of course you could.”
“Not India. To the house, that kitchen, that veranda.”
Shambu looked up and saw her staring intently at his face. She looked away. Maybe she had just been looking through him. She seemed to do that often.
“They are nice people,” he said, not willing to offer any specifics.
“I should have come here with him. Let the exams be.”
“We all do what we can.” Shambu did not really want to discuss Salim.
“Yes, and now I’m doing the only thing that I can do,” she said, too casually to be casual.
Sambhu was suddenly impatient to leave. “So you have enough photographs now?” He indicated her camera bag.
“Only of monkeys! I don’t need a zoo to find those!”
He did not return her smile. “There are other places I could take you too.”
A few feet away, a baby lifted her frock and squatted while her mother watched. A trail of urine snaked slowly towards them.
“How about my village? I could show you the pond beside which I would sit like that.” He pointed towards the little girl and immediately regretted it. It sounded coarse even to his own ears; certainly not a topic that a professor would want to discuss.
But Munira was smirking and then giggling and then opened her mouth in full-throated laughter.
“Eeesh! Shambu! Eeesh!” Her body shook as she brought one hand up to cover her mouth.
Shambu’s eyes sparkled in delighted surprise. He reached out to take her cup, worried that she would scald her thigh with the hot tea. She held out it towards him. But when the tips of his fingers reached for her knuckles, she stopped laughing.
Slowly, they walked back towards the car. The schoolgirls were now at the tiger’s cage, their fingers pointing, voices squealing and plaits shaking animatedly as the tiger obliged with languid strolls.
They strolled along and the girls’ yelps were replaced by a hush. The tingling of their fingers was still fresh. A silence descended upon them and in the quietness Shambu offered, “We are all in our own cage also, aren’t we?”
She nodded. “Sometimes you can break out of a cage and you think you are free. But you are just in a larger cage. There’s one more door to open. And one more and one more.”
He wasn’t sure he understood but said cheerily. “At least I can open this door for you” as he held open the passenger door.
The next day, after she was given salwar kameez material and Hyderabadi spices to take back, after she had hugged the family and vehemently denied the need for anyone to accompany her, after Shambu had unloaded her luggage at the airport, he offered her an apology wrapped in newspaper. A diary.
“This is Salim babu’s. When he was so small.” Shambu put his hand beside his waist to denote the child Salim’s height. “I once found it while cleaning the loft.”
Munira passed her fingers over the childish scrawls, over the car
icature of a woman with an exceptionally large bindi, over a poem about a robot. For a minute she did not speak.
“Thank you,” her voice came out hoarse and she cleared her throat. “Thank you.”
Later, as Shambu drove back in an oppressively empty car, Munira converted her currency and passed through the security scanners, clutching the book close to her. For this time, this was enough. She would wrap Salim’s words around her, his simple, alive scribbles, his forgotten, resurrected doodles, to be preserved with cloves and naphthalene balls, to be recalled on rainy evenings, to celebrate with the fragrance of the champa tree outside her window, to be stretched and pulled so they may suffice another twelve months.
∞
ABOUT PERVIN SAKET
Pervin Saket writes poetry, short fiction and screenplays. She is the author of a children's series 'Adventures @ Miscellaneous Shelf Four' and of a collection of poetry ‘A Tinge of Turmeric’. Her work has been featured in 'Breaking the Bow', 'Page Forty Seven', 'Kalkion', 'Kritya', 'Perspectives', 'Katha', 'Sampad', and ‘Ripples’, among others. Pervin conducts writing workshops for children at the British Council and also works with teachers to integrate stories within classrooms.
Pervin engages with stories that are subversive, allegorical or give voice to those silenced by history. She is particularly drawn towards the politics that underlie what is personal and private. ‘Twelve Months’ was written to explore a quiet love stretching across volatile borders, hoping to eventually transcend the boundaries we draw around ourselves.
***
What Kind of Book…
…do you read late at night, undisturbed and from cover to cover? An Indireads’ novella, of course!
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An Unlikely Romeo
M M GEORGE
Romeo. What kind of a name was that? When he had first walked into her little shop and offered her his services as cleaner, deliveryman, general dogsbody, anything, she had asked him his name.
‘Romeo,’ he had said unblinkingly, just looking at her with that passive brown gaze.
She had quelled a smirk at the sheer audacity of the name. Romeo? And this small, brown-skinned man, looking patiently at her with his ancient eyes? A more unlikely Romeo it would have been hard to find, she had thought as she handed him the mop.
But now, as she strived to shorten her stride to keep two paces behind him, the name irritated her. She couldn’t have said why, but the irritation persisted all the way to where they were going.
***
Nafisa had come to the UK as a young bride of seventeen. She and her family in Pakistan had been overwhelmed by her good luck at having been chosen by a vilayati family for their son. Simply put, she was plain looking. Her parents had despaired of ever getting her married. It was only when she reached London that she learnt that it was her cooking skills that had earned her the ‘Missus’ tag. And she was made to work hard to hold on to it.
Mazhar’s family ran a takeaway shop and they desperately needed a cook, a cheap one. UK immigration rules did not permit them to import a cheap cook from Pakistan, so they brought Nafisa instead. Nafisa cooked from morning till evening and then worked late into the night, cleaning up. For years.
Nafisa hardly ever saw Mazhar. He did the deliveries for the takeaway. She stayed in the kitchen. She knew his smell though, from the rough, awkward nightly couplings that left her sore and hurting. When he was arrested and then put away for delivering more than just biryani to his clients, she was not really troubled. All she thought was that she could now, perhaps, enjoy a few hours of untroubled sleep. Till the day Mazhar’s father summoned her and told her to pack her things.
“Get out!” he said, tersely. She had been divorced, he told her. By then, other daughters-in-law had arrived, the wives of Mazhar’s brothers. She had become dispensable, a burden, just another mouth to feed.
She wept a bit and then mused, it could only get better. After all, thanks to her marriage, she had acquired a British passport. She looked at the gold bangles on her wrists. She could buy a ticket to go back to her parents in Pakistan. But she shrugged off the thought. She would no longer be welcome there. She decided instead to set up her own shop. She pawned her bangles and rented a small poky little shop in an alley set off from the main road, as far across the city from her ex-sasuraal as she could possibly manage. There was just enough space at the back for her to put in a narrow sofa that could double up as her bed at night, provided the local Council did not catch on. The day her shop opened, Nafisa sent up a silent prayer to Allah.
That was when Romeo walked into her life.
Slowly, the shop had built up a reputation. At first, it was mainly local people who wanted a cheap dinner. Then Nafisa found that people were coming back for the food she cooked. Her biryani and haleem were very popular. Romeo was soon spending most of his evening on the rickety cycle he had acquired, she did not dare ask him from where.
He seldom spoke. But Nafisa could feel his eyes follow her as she bustled around the tiny shop. And she knew when the gaze changed from curiosity, the simple need to focus on another person, to something deeper. She would be flattered, she told herself, if only he weren’t such a non-descript little man. But flattered she was, even if she didn’t admit it. It had been years since a man had looked appreciatively at her. In fact, Romeo was probably the only man who had looked appreciatively at her. She had never been good-looking and the years had added ballast to her figure.
One night, Nafisa closed the shop and sat on the sofa in the rear, poring over her accounts. She found numbers difficult, but once you open a shop, you have to do the accounts.
There was the sound of a scuffle outside, loud hammering on the shutter of her shop. Alarmed, she got up and opened the window to the side. There were two men. And Romeo. Wrestling with each other. Till Romeo picked up a piece of brick and aimed it at one of them. The man gave a yelp of pain and raised his face. Nafisa drew her breath in sharply. It was Masood, one of her erstwhile brothers-in-law. Romeo picked up another brick, but the two men decided they had had enough.
“Hindustani ka bistar garam karti hai, saali haraamzaadi!” Masood flung at her silhouette in the window as he and his companion fled. “She is flourishing on our money and whoring with an Indian!”
Nafisa put up the shutter and let Romeo in. “How did you get here?” she asked him.
He pointed to the doorway of her shop. “I sleep there,” he said. And sure enough, she saw a well-worn blanket that had been kicked aside in the scuffle. “I’ve seen them here before. It’s not safe. For you.”
“You sleep out in the cold to protect me?” she asked incredulously, but he had already moved outside and was pulling down the shutter.
Nafisa sat on the sofa, thinking deep into the night. Masood had called her a Hindustani’s whore. Did he mean Romeo was an Indian? Romeo had never given any indication of being an Indian. She shuddered. Could he be a Hindu? The thought made her queasy. He had to be a Hindu. She had never seen him perform namaaz. But if he was a Hindu…she shuddered again as all the stories she had heard about Hindus flooded her mind. She gazed towards the closed shutter. It held no answers for her.
Romeo hardly ever spoke. Not a word. Not when she handed him his money. Not when she handed him his meals in one of the battered aluminium thals that she kept for her personal use. She supposed he spoke when he delivered the food. But she seldom heard his voice.
Till one day, he came running into the shop, terror streaking his face, pulverising it into a grotesque mask. “Please help me,” he begged. “They’re coming for me.”
Nafisa turned around from the kadhai, where she was stirring a dal makhni, to ask, “Who?” But he had already slipped behind the curtained area to the rear of the shop. There was a door to the back, and he slipped out of there. She heard the door settle back into its frame with a slight thud.
No one came in after Romeo. But he did not appear for a couple of days after that. Nafisa had t
o refuse all delivery orders.
Then one day, he slunk back, dirty and begrimed from wherever he’d been holed up. Nafisa studied him for a moment, then handed him a towel and pointed towards the small bathroom in the curtained off area.
When he came out, she sat him down on a chair. “What?” she asked him.
He hung his head. “I’m a kachcha,” he whispered. “I have no right to be in this country.”
Nafisa did not say anything. The day took on its usual hues, like countless days before it, before Romeo had run away. In the evening, when he had washed the aluminium thal, she asked him, “Will you marry me?”
He looked up at her in disbelief.
***
And that’s where they were headed. To the register office. To be married. To legalize his existence in the UK. Only Nafisa could not shake off the irritation that gripped her. She should have thought a bit more about this crazy idea. Was she actually going to marry a man called Romeo? An Indian at that? She was still trying to measure her pace to his. He might be a half-inch taller than her, she conceded, but he was not brisk. And this was adding to her infuriation now.
At the register office, she looked at the form she was to sign. The form he had already signed. She scrawled her name on it, then looked at his signature. It was neat and well formed. Her eyes widened as she took in the name he had printed below his signature. “Abdul Rasheed?” She looked at him in amazement. But the registrar was already congratulating them and she had to bite her lip.
Back in the shop, where she had taken the morning off in honour of the occasion, she looked at him. “Abdul Rasheed?” she asked.
Love Across Borders Page 7