by Sorayya Khan
“He’s probably a neighbor’s servant, because I’ve seen him there before,” she said.
Dread washed over me as I remembered it was Friday, and the full impact of her words registered. That very moment, not a few hundred yards away, Sadiq was lying underneath a tree on 87th Street in order to spy on Anne Simon. The thought was excruciating. I hardly heard myself as I asked, “Did he say anything?”
“Oh, no. People here just look at me funny,” Anne Simon explained.
“Well, you are blonde and more funny-looking than usual today!” Lizzy teased.
Lizzy and her mother exchanged a few more sentences before Anne Simon left to take a shower. I tried to focus on Lizzy so she wouldn’t notice anything, but it was impossible. Having given up waiting for the Rice Krispie Treats to set, Lizzy ran a knife along the pan.
“Wait a minute, Liya! You didn’t take offense to what my mom said, did you?” Lizzy asked.
“What?”
“You know, when she said she liked your country, except that people looked at her weird.”
“No,” I said, but I didn’t say anything more, and very quickly it was awkward between us again.
“Are you OK?” Lizzy finally asked, her voice low, although we were the only ones in the room.
I nodded my head vigorously, but it was hard to speak.
“Oh my God!” Lizzy finally stammered. “He wasn’t there this morning, was he?”
“No!” I almost shouted, wishing she hadn’t brought up the man at the bus stop, but finding my voice again. I looked for him whenever I left the house, whether it was a school day or not, and earlier, when my mother had backed out of the driveway, was no exception. He hadn’t been there.
“I still think you should tell your mom or dad about him. Did you?”
“No.”
Lizzy said that the next time we made Rice Krispie Treats, we would add M&M’S. I considered the possibility a waste of the special chocolate candies, but I kept that to myself. After a bit, I admitted that the encounter with the man had been scary.
“What if he’d touched you?” Lizzy asked.
“Yuck!” we cried in unison, wrinkling our noses and scrunching up our faces in disgust.
I wondered if the two of us, together, could keep the man—or anything worse that might yet happen—safely at bay.
In May, during the last month of the school year, Lizzy told me her mother was pregnant. She said she’d wanted to tell me much earlier, but her mother made her promise she wouldn’t. Anne Simon was a nurse, but she was superstitious and concerned that if the news were publicized, something might go wrong with her pregnancy. Lizzy rolled her eyes at this, and we burst into laughter. “She’s pregnant!” we exclaimed through uncontrollable giggles, as if this fact were hysterical on its own.
I’d noticed Anne Simon was different. Her chest and stomach were ample curves, her face was fuller and pressed into a smile, but the possibility of pregnancy hadn’t occurred to me. Mothers became pregnant? While obvious, the prospect was unsettling. It made me imagine my own mother swollen with a baby, and I wondered what Amir, so many years older than me, had thought when she was carrying me. I sympathized with Lizzy. The thought of your own mother growing a huge belly was repugnant, and this was saying nothing about the unacknowledged reality of conception. A diagram detailing the process was taped to the blackboard in our health class that year, and now my best friend’s mother was walking proof of the end result.
I couldn’t tell Lizzy what I really thought. The transformation of Anne Simon on 87th Street was not so different from the transformation of Sadiq in my home. Both of them were fundamentally changing. The contradiction, that one human being was expanding while the other was fading away, was obvious. While Sadiq disappeared, shaved his hair and eyebrows, Anne Simon grew breasts and a belly. Anne Simon was making a new life, even though she’d run away from what was left of another life on a dark night only a year earlier. Anne Simon wasn’t suffering and Sadiq was. It wasn’t fair.
The very day that Lizzy shared the news, I told my mother.
“Really? She’s expecting?” my mother said. “Doesn’t she already have three children?”
“Is there a limit to how many she should have?” I was surprised at my defensiveness.
“Of course not,” she said, ignoring my rudeness. “I was just saying . . . When is the baby due?”
“August.”
“August? She’s been expecting all this time and you didn’t know until now?”
“I guess not. I didn’t think of it much. She looked like she was getting fat, that’s all,” I replied, wishing my mother said pregnant, like everyone else, rather than expecting, which didn’t sound like proper English.
“You do have a bit of growing up to do, don’t you?” she chuckled. “When in August?”
“I don’t know. The beginning maybe?” I didn’t know why I withheld the date.
“It’s good news for Anne Simon,” my mother said. “She’s been through a terrible time, and the baby will be a happy distraction for her.”
“Sadiq doesn’t have anything to distract him. Maybe he could visit his family in Lahore more often.”
When my mother raised her eyebrows, I knew she was noting my loyalty to Sadiq. She’d told me once I was the most loyal of her children and that when I grew up I needed to be careful other people didn’t take advantage of me.
“Maybe you could talk to Daddy. We could give Sadiq another train ticket to Lahore. Or maybe he would go by bus? He might feel better if he could get away for some time. And he could stay with his family longer.” It was suddenly important to engineer a scheme for Sadiq to leave Islamabad, if only for a while. I was terrified he was spending every Friday afternoon on the corner of Anne Simon’s street. Did he already know she was pregnant?
“It’s not always possible to fix things,” my mother cautioned, unaware of my primary concern. “Sadiq might never feel better, my darling. But I’ll talk to Daddy. It’s worth a try.”
My mother kept her word, but some days later, when my father gave him another train ticket and strongly suggested he return home to his wife for a break, Sadiq refused. He slapped his palm over the train ticket without looking at it and slid it the length of the kitchen counter back to my father before leaving the room.
“That man!” my father complained after Sadiq had gone. “I have half a mind to fire him.”
“No, you don’t,” my mother replied. “You just don’t like it when people don’t do what you want them to.”
“You could have been more gentle, asked instead of commanded,” I offered.
“What do you know?” my father snapped, losing patience with us, as was his habit since the prime minister’s hanging. “You people think you know everything. Besides, he works for me!”
“And I thought he worked for me!” my mother tried to joke, but he pretended not to hear her.
My father flicked open the afternoon newspaper in one deliberate stroke and hid behind the same old news: The general decreed this and the general decreed that. All anyone ever hoped when picking up the paper was that General Zia had run out of things to decree, but that hadn’t happened yet. I conjured up the sight of my father holding a newspaper strewn with white empty columns, the way it had been in the days following the coup. Because journalists like Uncle Imtiaz eventually figured out what the censors would and wouldn’t allow, my father’s head was buried in newsprint that covered every inch of the paper and bled on his fingers. I wished he’d been staring into empty pages so I could have laughed out loud at him, even if I agreed that he, not my mother, was Sadiq’s principal employer.
But searching for humor didn’t lighten the moment. My parents were angry, Sadiq was sad, and Anne Simon was pregnant. As for me, I had a sneaking suspicion nothing good would come of any of this. I tugged on my ponytail, sucking on the insides of my cheeks until I could feel the imprint of my braces, and left the room as if it were just another day.
What
choice was there, anyway?
FOURTEEN
June 1979
I’d been rude to my mother—with something I had no memory of saying—and so she forbade me to spend the afternoon with Lizzy. As a result, I was stuck at home enduring one of her more creative punishments: organizing a year’s worth of magazines in chronological order. Had she been reasonable, she would have admitted the enterprise was silly, but as it stood, she retired with a book to her bedroom and left me to the tiresome task.
I found the glossy postcard wedged in the bottom of the copper magazine tub. It featured an artist’s rendition of Islamabad’s Shah Faisal Mosque, a spaceship-like building under construction, complete with minarets as tall as the Margalla Hills. Written in March of the previous year and addressed to Yunis at my grandfather’s house in Lahore, it had never been sent. I assumed it had become separated from a pile of outgoing mail placed on the neighboring table and had never made it to the post office.
Between Sadiq’s lessons and my speculation, I was able to piece together most of his cramped message:
After Hanif’s death, Sadiq expected the Margalla Hills to crumble. Day after day, he awoke with surprise to find the hills still standing. Every morning the sky was blue, and all day long it screamed in his head. God Almighty had nerve, and as magnificent as it was, His world remained unchanged. Perhaps this was the miracle that was God, but Sadiq could have done without it. Insha’Allah, I’ll see you soon, Sadiq had written in the end.
By the time I finished, my mouth was paper dry and I couldn’t breathe. Although I was alone in the room, I felt caught in the act of intruding. In the seconds it took to read the postcard, I’d traveled to the most private places in Sadiq’s mind and learned things I had no business knowing. I was ashamed of what I’d done and regretted I could not take back my actions. I quickly tucked the postcard inside the pages of the nearest magazine and hid it at the bottom of a stack of The Economist magazines.
And yet Sadiq’s message fascinated me. I couldn’t imagine sharing that much of myself with my brother or even my sister. And the depth of what Sadiq conveyed was stunning; who would have thought that our servant had such powerful thoughts? That he recorded them? That he was angry with God? That there was a relationship between grief and the hills across the street? I had nothing as painful or personal to share with anybody. Perhaps this was the secret that separated children from adults.
The next time Sadiq spoke to me, I saw crumbling mountains and screaming blue and could not answer him.
“Aliya?”
“Not now,” I answered dismissively.
My mother caught me walking away. I didn’t doubt her when she said that unless I apologized immediately, she would impose punishments that would occupy me for a week. “Yes, Mama,” I said and controlled my tone.
My grandfather was in Islamabad again, this time for a cataract operation, and he took to treating Sadiq like his personal servant. He wanted his shoes polished every day, regardless of whether it was necessary. He insisted his shalwar kameez be starched and pressed, and if this had been done the day before, he hung the suit on a curtain rod for inspection in the morning before dressing. He drank only boiling hot tea, and on the first day of his visit, when Sadiq presented him with tea that did not meet this standard, he refused to drink it.
“You don’t drink lukewarm tea. Why should I?” my grandfather demanded in his usual whisper.
By the time Sadiq returned to pour freshly brewed tea in a teacup he’d boiled in water and removed with tongs, Amir Shah had changed his mind.
“Pani,” he instructed Sadiq, ignoring the steaming tea placed in front of him. When my grandfather began to interfere with the way the household was run, my mother tried speaking with him, but it made no difference. He said Sadiq had become a lazy, useless good-for-nothing because my father had allowed it. Hard work was the only remedy for grieving and furthermore, Sadiq did not keep the house clean enough.
We were astounded by my grandfather’s newfound appreciation for cleanliness, and Amir and Lehla, too, would not have believed it. In Lahore, the three of us had always fought over who would sleep on his living room sofa, farthest from the black ants that ruled his home. But suddenly, during this latest visit to our home, my grandfather’s cleanliness standards had become tyrannical. He may have lost his hearing, suffered damage to his vocal cords, and been struck half-blind with cataracts, but there was nothing wrong with his ability to issue commands.
On the day my grandfather had his second cataract operation, we returned from the hospital just as Sadiq was putting down the telephone receiver.
“How is Jamila?” my father inquired, guessing he’d been speaking to his wife.
“I don’t know,” Sadiq said, and the vacant look in his eyes worried me.
“What do you mean?”
“She wasn’t home.”
“Out this late? Where was she? Is everything all right?”
Sadiq studied my father as if his question, Is everything all right? did not make sense.
“A birthday party,” Sadiq said, and I knew it was a lie.
“Listen, now that my father is here with us, why don’t you send Jamila and the children to Yunis? He can help look after them.” It was an old suggestion. Despite Sadiq’s visits to Lahore, my mother could never reconcile herself with separating Sadiq from his family. Over the years, there had been long discussions about various possibilities, among them a scenario in which Jamila and the children lived in my grandfather’s house.
“She won’t do it.”
“I’ll send Yunis to check on her when I’m in Lahore tomorrow,” my father told him.
“No need,” Sadiq protested.
“It’s my need,” my father said, rejecting Sadiq’s thought. “I want to make sure she’s fine.”
Beginning the next day, every time my father went to Lahore, sometimes as often as five times a week, Yunis dutifully rode his bicycle the few miles to Jamila’s home to confirm that she and the children were fine. The next weekend, my father learned from Yunis that Sadiq and Jamila had stopped speaking to each other. When my father pried and asked why, Sadiq simply confirmed that they were no longer speaking.
“How on earth is this possible?” my father complained to my mother.
“I’m not sure,” my mother said.
“The parents have lost a child. Shouldn’t they be supporting each other?”
“It’s the distance. Maybe you should send Sadiq back to Lahore.”
“And what if they don’t speak to each other once he gets there?”
I kept it to myself, but I could explain what had gone wrong between Sadiq and Jamila. After all this time, the pain and sorrow recorded in an unsent postcard had burned a hole between them.
The next morning, Sadiq did not come to work. My father took a bottle of aspirin and went to check on him. When he returned, he said Sadiq had caught his thumb in a car door and lost his nail.
“Should we take him to the doctor?” my mother asked.
“Let me . . .”
“You treat the man like a baby,” my grandfather whispered indignantly. “The more you spoil Sadiq, the longer he’ll take to recover. You’re the first VIP to deliver aspirin to a servant’s room.” My grandfather coughed, the consecutive sentences taxing his perpetually dry throat.
“Let’s get you some water,” my father said, in order not to contradict his father.
“He takes advantage of you,” my grandfather insisted.
My mother could not contain herself. “It’s not possible for a person with no power to take advantage of a person with all the power. He’s the servant, for God’s sake.”
“So? By now, you should understand that they are the exploiting class!” my grandfather guffawed.
My mother stared at my grandfather in disbelief, speechless only for a second before she was reduced to saying, “That’s ridiculous!”
“Dada abba,” I said weakly. My grandfather didn’t hear me, so I took hi
s hand. “Let’s sit in the sun,” I said, and he allowed me to lead him to the upstairs veranda.
My mother wasn’t good at keeping secrets. She finally told my father that we’d seen Sadiq at the corner of 87th Street several weeks earlier. They called me into their bedroom and made me sit on the rocking chair.
My father looked at me sternly and said, “I understand that you know Anne Simon was the driver?”
“The driver?” I said with dread, trying to buy time.
“You know she does. We just talked about this!” my mother complained.
“Please answer me,” my father said.
“Yes, I know.”
“How did you find out?”
“From people at school,” I lied easily.
“Did Sadiq see you on Anne Simon’s street?”
I tried to remember. “I don’t think so.”
“Think?!” my father said, suddenly raising his voice and looking at my mother. “No one is doing any thinking here. If Sadiq is caught on her street, he could be thrown in jail. We’re responsible for him. A servant . . . my God, my servant! What will people say? Stalking a woman . . . an American! Why didn’t you tell me?” My father was more worried about his job than Sadiq.
“He’s not stalking her,” my mother said.
“How do you know?”
“He’s here most of the time!” my mother exclaimed.
“Most of the time. Who knows about the rest of the time?”
His question hung between us until my mother gave up and said, “You’re right,” and my father calmed down.
I expected my father to fire Sadiq. Instead, he forbade him from ever returning to 87th Street. If he was ever caught there again, he would lose his job. There would be no second chances. On Fridays, Sadiq would accompany my father to Jumma prayers. Afterward they would return together to the house. Sadiq had Friday afternoons off, but he could not leave the premises unless he was in the company of someone such as my father.