by Ali Sethi
My mother thought about it.
“Frankly,” said Karim, “I prefer it this way.” And he laughed and went on looking at her.
I stood up.
“What’s the matter?” said my mother.
But I was running.
“Zaki, wait!”
I ran past the church and down and then up and up the winding streets, higher and higher, until, at last, I reached the door and was past it.
“Are you okay?” said Louise.
“Where is your mother?” said Astrid.
I was kneeling, panting.
“Zaki!” She had come in after me.
“Are you all right?” said Louise, concerned now. She stood up from her chair at the patio table and reached out a hand.
I thrust it aside.
“Zaki!” said my mother.
I went into the house and up the stairs.
She came up after me.
“How dare you behave like that,” she said, and slammed the door behind her. “She is so kind to you, and you were so rude to her just now.”
“Then why doesn’t she find her own little children? Why does she have to be kind to me?”
“Because she can’t have any! Do you understand that? Can you for once understand? It’s not always about you, you know? Other people have lives, other people have feelings.”
“Then give me away!” And I collapsed on the bed with my fists, and was crying. “Why don’t you just give me away!”
She stayed standing near the door. “Don’t say that,” she said.
“I just want to go home now.” And the words, expressing so desperate a need, were clear in the sobs.
“We will,” she said, and sat beside me on the bed, her hand on my head.
It was our last day in Spain and we were going to see the Alhambra castle.
“Take a lot of water,” said Astrid. “You will get thirsty after all the climbing.”
The castle was located at the top of a hill. And we had to climb that hill; we were carrying a picnic basket and swapped it as we went up. It was hot and bright, and the other climbers had come prepared in shorts and cotton T-shirts.
My mother was wearing a shalwar kameez.
I said, “I’ll take the basket.”
She said, “Thanks, Zaki. You’re so good.”
And we went up with effortful strides, our arms dangling like those of our primate ancestors.
At the top of the hill we had to wait in a queue. And, after paying for our tickets, we were allowed to go inside: the view was suddenly grand, a view of towering arches reflected in a long, still pool of green water. The tourists ahead of us were walking slowly, stunned by the altered atmosphere. There was a fountain with identical stone animals standing underneath it, and beehive-like formations that hung from the surrounding arches. My mother led me by the hand into a hall, where the ceiling was white and intricately carved with calligraphy, like thousands of snakes engaged in a celebratory dance. “Look,” she said, cutting with her splayed palm an arc in demonstration, “this is what Muslim culture used to be about: art, music, architecture. It used to be progressive.” And she made a small fist as she said the word.
“So what happened?” I said.
“To what?” she said.
“To the Muslims. What happened to them after all this?”
We were sitting in the palace café, which was for tourists to eat in and hadn’t been a part of the original design. We had ordered Cokes and were planning to consume them quietly with our picnic lunch, which my mother had hidden under the table.
“I don’t know,” she said, looking around at the roaming tourists, who were mostly white. “I suppose they forgot where they came from. They forgot their history, their culture. It happens to people sometimes. They forget.”
Lahore Airport was the same. The conveyor belt took its time to start and then, having started, stopped. There was confusion.
A young porter in the gray porters’ uniform made a show of indignation and went in behind an unmanned door. After some minutes he returned, and stood confidently beside his assignee, an old white-haired man in an off-white suit. The conveyor belt started up again. And the porter kept his look of indignation, not willing to overlook the lapse in the machine’s function, aware of his victory in getting it started and aware too that his demand for a tip was now unassailable.
“Oho!” cried another porter, who was hurrying through the stranded crowd toward the bend in the moving belt. But the suitcase he lifted was not the one. He abandoned it and stood back, undaunted by failure or embarrassment.
He dusted his shoulders, first the right and then the left.
The man he had displaced said something from behind his back.
It was ignored.
Our suitcase appeared and I caught it; we had no trolley and wouldn’t need one—the suitcase had wheels and rolled. We rolled it across to customs, where it was stopped and opened and searched for illegal items, and then we rolled it out into the crowded haphazardness of International Arrivals.
My mother saw Naseem and extended an arm in a sideways embrace.
Naseem returned the embrace and took the suitcase by the handle, and led the way across the cracked airport floor. The night outside was suddenly cold, the sky blurred with smog.
“It’s winter already,” said my mother.
We walked past the line of waiting taxi drivers, past two beggars settled against a pillar on the floor, an old man in a turban and an old woman, both thin and wrinkled and sitting on their haunches under the cover of a single shawl. Watching us go past, watching the people behind us go past, they were waiting for someone to stop.
“All is well?” said my mother. She was walking behind Naseem, following through the spaces between parked cars and buses.
Naseem was walking briskly now, and far ahead of us.
We reached the car, which was parked toward the end of the last row. Barkat emerged from the front and lifted the suitcase with Naseem and dumped it into the trunk.
We sat at the back, Naseem beside Barkat in the seat ahead, and the car started.
My mother said our holiday had been enjoyable.
Naseem said nothing.
Barkat stopped the car to pay for the parking.
“What’s happened?” said my mother.
Naseem was quiet for a moment, a moment in which the car passed through the checkpost and the airport gates and went out into the white-lit street. And then she spoke, but it was gravelly and splintered; she coughed, rolled down her window and spat out the phlegm, then rolled it up again. She said, “The girl is gone. Her mother came and took her. We tried to stop her but we couldn’t.”
“Sit,” said Daadi.
She was walking up and down her room.
Naseem said she was taking the suitcase to my mother’s room.
“Go,” said Daadi.
Naseem left the room and closed the door behind her.
My mother sat on the sofa and said, “Will someone tell me what has happened?” Her fists were pressed into her knees.
Daadi said Chhoti had arrived four days ago. She had sat with Daadi in her room, asked for a glass of cold water and drunk it slowly, pausing to consider her sips. Then she had gone into her daughter’s room. Daadi hadn’t suspected, and so she stayed where she was and didn’t follow through the door. But then she heard the sounds, the thudding and the shrieks and then the crash—the lamp had tumbled and fallen—and when they opened the door they found Chhoti standing above her daughter with a shoe in her hand, bringing it down again and again.
Tell me, she said, tell me what you did.
The girl was screaming and sobbing.
Where did you take yourself? To whose house have you been? Is this what you give me? Tell me now.
Daadi tried to pull them apart.
She has soiled me, said Chhoti, she has soiled me soiled me soiled me.
It was known to the women of the village. The boy’s mother had brought it to them
. The girl, she said, had tried to seduce the boy. But the boy was not ready, and it was an unsuitable match, one they couldn’t consider after knowing the ways in which the affair had been conducted.
Chhoti’s sisters-in-law had been to see her at her house. They said they had heard disturbing things.
One bad egg ruins the batch.
We have our own children to think of.
This kind of thing is not tolerated in our family.
The girl must be brought back to where she belongs, brought back before her father is informed and acts in ways that are beyond your control.
And they said, We are concerned, for she is our child after all.
“Tell me!” cried Chhoti. “Tell me what you did!”
“We tried to stop her,” said Daadi. “She was someone else. She was made of stone.”
Chhoti beat the girl and took her in the car. And there had been no word from her after that.
“I always said,” said Daadi. “I always said send the girl away, send her back. But no, I was told, let her live, let her breathe, she is only a child. It was interference. She was not yours or mine to raise.”
My mother took me by the arm and went into her room. She didn’t switch on the lights.
“You knew?”
I was looking at her face.
“Answer me!”
“Don’t interfere,” I said.
“What did you say?”
“You like interfering in my business?”
“How dare you talk to me like that?”
“What happened to democracy? What happened to art music architecture? What happened to progressive?”
“How dare you?”
“Face it,” I said. “You’re nothing but a half-baked liberal.”
Her face was blank. Then her mouth twisted, and she raised her hand and struck my face with a force that swung her shoulder.
TWO
13
The difficulties of adolescence are the first of their kind. There is nothing like them in the chanciness of childhood, just as there is nothing, no resonance or meaning, in the sayings of those who have crossed the waters and speak now exhortingly as from the shore. Words are vacant, adrift, waiting for contact with life, for moments that will come to cause the unmistakable throb of recognition.
At home there was no recourse to hollow wisdoms. There was only the loss, and it took the place of life, of habitual arrivals and departures and of sounds from behind doors that now stayed shut. My mother woke late and slept early. On some days she didn’t go to work; she stayed in bed and read, or watched TV and used the telephone. At night the only light in her room came from the bedside lamp, next to which she kept the packet of pills, small pink ones with a dose-maker’s line running clearly across the middle. She had bought them without a prescription to ease the nights, and arrived at her own conclusions.
Daadi allowed the days to pass, allowed them to wash away some of what had happened, and then picked up the phone and dialed Chhoti’s number in Barampur. She asked after her as if nothing had changed. Chhoti was not dramatic, and gave an unremarkable account of things. Daadi mentioned the remaining days of the school term and the fees that had to be paid, and Chhoti said she would speak to the administration herself.
“And the things?” said Daadi. “The clothes and the things in the room . . .”
Chhoti said to pack them in boxes. She would collect them on the weekend.
Late on Friday afternoon the car came to the house. And the driver was alone. He stood by the open trunk and counted the cardboard boxes, and watched as they were loaded one by one.
Naseem was asked to clear the room. The bed was draped, the posters torn from the walls and rolled up and secured with rubber bands. The clothes had gone already; the picture frames and cosmetics and the few discovered magazines were packed into boxes and stowed away.
The lights were switched off.
And the door was locked.
“What’s done is done,” said Daadi. “No point dwelling on it now.”
But it was impossible to not dwell, to resist the pull of what had not been witnessed and survived only in the telling of others. Every version led to fresh imaginings. And to imagine was to enter alone, witnessing without witnesses, with some of the pain and none of the consolations allowed by actual experience.
I went driving with Isa and Moosa in their car. They were excited because they had tickets to a cricket match in Gaddafi Stadium. They struggled in the queue outside and struggled inside to reach the seats in the upper enclosure, and the whole match went by, the floodlights and the cheering and the tooting of horns in the crowded vastness, and again there was only the night, my bedroom and the shadows on its ceiling.
One afternoon Naseem went down the lane to Mrs. Zaidi’s house and returned with a thin, harassed-looking boy, who was made to wait in a chair by the gate. She came inside and said, “An old friend has come to see you.”
But Mazri had come only out of obligation, and was too old now to play video games in arcades and to run after kites on roofs. He was awkward too, dressed in a loose gray shalwar kameez that was too big for his body, even after the sleeves had been rolled up and the shalwar hitched up at the ankles; his feet were in rubber sandals that extended well past the heels and flapped when he walked. He had little of interest to report: he was working now at a bicycle repair shop in Canal Park, fixing chains and pumping air into tires; he had lost the old bicycle years ago (it was stolen from outside the arcade while Mazri was playing video games inside); he had not yet bought another, though he intended to—he had his eye on a Sohrab Eagle that had come into the workshop and needed only a little bit of work, it wouldn’t cost him if he repaired it himself, and he had spoken to the workshop owner and the man was not opposed.
We sat in chairs by the gate and talked for some minutes. We agreed to meet again, perhaps at the workshop, perhaps even later in the week, and exchanged details about timing and location. Then we parted and I saw Mazri out of the gate, knowing already that the plan was canceled.
Daadi said, “You must make friends. This is no way to behave. Children your age are running around and doing every kind of thing, and look at you.”
Exams at school were left unattempted, the papers rolled up and compressed into balls and settled like decorations on the desk. Equations and unwanted sentences appeared instead on the sheets of drawing paper handed out in art class, the numbers and letters all carefully sculpted and shaded appropriately with darknesses. The art teacher snatched the sheet and took it to the blackboard and held it up for all to see. The class tittered and applauded.
One day, in the indoor gymnasium, the boys of the junior classes were learning to swim in a large inflated pool and a smashing sound sent them screaming and splashing; a window had burst—a stone had burst it. The boys went to stand by the supervisor and hugged their little bodies, naked and dripping, suddenly vulnerable and screaming with certainty. The incensed supervisor went outside to see and found the culprit standing at the site of the crime with his hands inside his pockets.
“Mrs. Shirazi,” said the headmistress. She removed her glasses and sighed and brought a pressing fingertip to her temple. It stretched one eye felinely. “I’m afraid this is getting out of hand. Homework we can handle. Active misbehavior we cannot. You should take him to a child psychologist; it shouldn’t be a problem in this day and age.”
“Child psychologist,” said my mother in the car. “She should take herself to a child psychologist.” After a gathering pause she said, “This school is no good, Zaki. I’ve felt it for a while, and now I know it. You’re just not going back there. We’ll find another school for you. There’s no shortage of schools here. Child psychologist.” And she gave a humorless laugh and shook her head, her eyes wide and alert and unaccepting.
It was agreed that Wilson Academy was the first choice.
“Most impressive,” said Suri boastfully, for she had been to the campus once. “They have grounds and g
rounds wherever you look. They have stables for ponies, houses for teachers. Oh, they have everything, everything.” She looked away and dispelled the temptation with her hands.
Hukmi said, “Uff vaisay . . .” and smiled longingly.
But the brochure made no promises, and consisted of only two glossy pages, the first with a faded image of an old clock behind the text, which gave a summary of the school’s history, its aims and objectives and the requirements for admission; and the second page provided a list of affiliated universities in Britain and America and Canada. A phone number and a fax number were given at the back for inquiries. There was no mention of stables or ponies.
“We’ll just have to go and find out,” said my mother.
The next morning she called up the admissions office and was told that the school was closed to visitors. It was open only in the summer, in the two-week window between admission tests and the announcement of results.
“We’ll wait,” said my mother. “You can stay in this school until then.”
The wait was long and daunting. A tutor was hired and came to the house in the evening for lessons in math and Urdu. My mother preferred to teach English herself; she divided the lessons according to the admissions criteria and anticipated the exam questions, which were unknown but fell broadly into the categories of spelling, grammar, vocabulary and composition. And, as the months passed and the efforts continued, a picture of Wilson Academy was assembled from what was generally known: the founding of the school in the nineteenth century by a British administrator, who had modeled it after the prestigious boarding schools of England; its passage into the hands of Irish missionaries, who ran it in the war years as if it were a circus, with public canings and whippings and colorful prize ceremonies; and then finally at Independence the school’s transfer to a local administration, which had since overseen an illustrious roster of cricketers and gymnasts and lawyers and industrialists and diplomats and civil servants. Other aspects were recalled distantly: Uncle Saaji had played tennis with a group of Wilsonians in his youth and remembered them all by name. “A fun bunch,” he noted nostalgically. “But they had discipline. Oh yes, they had discipline.”