by Ali Sethi
“You bring pictures?” said Benny.
I told him they were with me and went into my room.
Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
It was the first line of the first book I read in a course called “Reading the Russians.” Every lecture lasted an hour, and took place in a deep, wood-smelling room on the second floor of the English department building. The one-page syllabus was heavy with names: Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Gorky, Chekhov, Turgenev, Pasternak and also Nabokov, who was a favorite with the lecturer—a flamboyant young man who wore dark turtlenecks to class and posed passionate questions that were answered gradually by squeezing invisible udders that appeared to hang before him in the air. I made friends in his class, two Croats who introduced me to the larger community of international students. I ate lunch with them in the dining hall, studied with them in the library and accompanied them on the weekends to the jazz bars in Cambridge and Somerville. They were adventurous and cynical, warm and disdainful, and talked about their classes, world events and the weather with a rapidly developing vocabulary that was culled carefully from their readings. Their clothes came from obscure and alluring parts of the world. Many of them were smokers.
On weekends I ventured into the Greater Boston area on my own. I went into the pricey shops on Newbury Street and fingered the merchandise, then went to sit by the pond in Boston Commons, which was ablaze and crackling with autumn. I learned to time my journeys on the Red Line in accordance with the five-minute interval between each of its stops: the cello-playing mad-man at Porter; the chiming bells at the Kendall stop, designed by MIT students; and then the flash of sun as the train swept over the shattered shimmer of the Charles. Once I took a sunny tour of Harvard Square with a gang of Japanese tourists who were determined to photograph everything they passed. Our tour guide was a Harvard student. He told funny stories about the college and its history; he pointed to the rooms we passed and told stories about their former residents. At Eliot House he pointed to a room on the second floor and said it had been the room of Benazir Bhutto, the former prime minister of Pakistan. And he looked at me while imparting this information, as though he expected me to know what had followed.
I spent my weeknights in the local bookshop. It had two floors, with new books on the first floor and bargains and remainders in the basement. I couldn’t afford to buy the books (I had just bought a mobile phone) and sat cross-legged on the carpeted floor of the basement, searching the earmarked pages for inscriptions made by intimate strangers. Once a month the bookshop hosted a talk by a visiting author, and a flock of people, mostly graduate students, settled eagerly into the plastic chairs with their pens and notepads.
One evening I was passing the bookshop, saw a poster in the window and stopped to confirm that it was him.
It was a still from an old Indian film, and his form was lifted from the original context and planted weightlessly on a white background. His fists were up like a boxer’s, his eyes were bloodshot and his mouth was twisted in a grimace. He was wearing his white vest. The poster didn’t give his name. It said:THE POSTCOLONIAL PREDICAMENT: A DISCUSSION
The discussion had started. I opened the door and went to stand behind the people in the last row. They were listening to the lecturer, a small woman obscured by the podium, only her face visible above the wood, a firm, ironic face, the eyes darting and watchful, the hair short and white. Her words were strange and difficult, and she delivered them with emphatic carving motions of her hand, dividing the air into fissures and fractures, ruptures, currents, layers. I listened to her for a while. Then she lost me, and I slipped out.
My mother called in the mornings. It was night for her, and the long-distance call was cheaper. She caught me on the way to class, or eating breakfast in the dining hall, and our conversations were brief. She called to check if I was fine, to ask if I needed anything. I told her I was fine and needed nothing. I had started working part-time at the Faculty Club and my wages were enough.
The call was unexpected because it came late on a Friday night. I was in a room, not mine, and hurried out into the hallway with my shirt only half on. The effect of the wine had started; I buttoned the buttons in confusion, and the phone fell from my hand. I knelt to grab it. “Yes?” I said.
She said, “Where are you, Zaki?”
“What’s wrong?” I said, and settled on the floor against a closed door. A girl hurried up the stairs and gave a vaguely disapproving look.
My mother said she had been in Barampur.
“Why were you in Barampur?”
She began to cry, and I knew that she had been crying earlier too, now was only a resumption.
I held my head and waited for her to speak.
19
Daadi was in her room when the phone rang. It was late morning. She folded her newspaper, set it aside and walked over to the mantelpiece.
It was a woman’s voice. And it was unfamiliar. She said she wanted to speak to the mistress of the house.
“Yes,” said Daadi.
The woman said she was calling from Barampur. There had been an accident, a case of mismanagement at the hospital, some nurses hadn’t checked the medical records.
“Whose records?”
Chhoti’s. She had fainted last night, and they took her to the nearest hospital and left her there in the emergency ward. But the nurses had put her on a glucose drip without checking her medical records, and had kept her there all night.
Daadi said, “Where is she?”
The voice said it had called for that reason. It said that a funeral was being held in a few hours, and that if they wanted to bathe the body they ought to leave for Barampur right away.
“What are you saying?” said Daadi.
She held on to the phone. Then she put it down and walked out of her room. She went into the driveway, past the lawn, past the gate, all the way out to the lane. She stood there, waiting for someone to come. When no one came, she turned back.
She went into Barkat’s room and said, “My sister has died. I must go to Barampur for the funeral.”
She didn’t cry in the car. Barkat drove it energetically, and my mother sat next to Daadi in the back. Daadi gave directions, the turnings on that road that she recalled, past the rusting shantytowns, where the shrill sirens of buses had converged, and then past the vast empty stretches of land, things she recalled from a journey she had made many years before. She didn’t cry.
It was afternoon when they arrived. Men were sitting on charpais in the courtyard, and Uncle Fazal was standing at the entrance to the house. He was wearing a black shalwar kameez. His hair was white. He embraced the men who came toward him and ushered the women into a doorway. There was a murmur around him, the murmur of greetings and condolences, and the darting around of dry eyes.
“Where is my sister?”
Uncle Fazal gestured to the doorway. He said nothing else. He stood there for some moments and then saw that a black car had come in through the open gate. He went away.
The body was laid out on a charpai in the drawing room, which had been cleared of other furniture. Around the charpai sat a mob of wailing women. They howled and beat their chests and recited lines:A princess has died.
A queen has died.
They were professional mourners, and had been hired to grieve.
The three sisters-in-law were sitting on a white sofa that was stained with grease. They appeared to preside over the mourning and didn’t stand up for Daadi when she entered.
Another woman was going in and out of the room, and from her manner and appearance they could tell she was the new wife. She was a girl. She was showing the empty places that remained on the white sheets that had been spread out to cover the floor. She wore a flowing, robe-like outfit, and even with the obscuring folds they could tell that she was going to have a child.
Daadi stood over the body. It was draped in a white shroud. The face was exposed. The eyes were closed, but a sliver showed
in each eye, and it was a sliver of light.
She saw that it was a reflected light.
She stooped, removed the wads of cotton very carefully from the nostrils and took the face in her hands. “Wake up,” she said, and patted the face. “Chhoti, wake up.”
The wailing had stopped. The mourners were looking around for signs. The new wife wove her way through the seated bodies and tried to take Daadi by the shoulders.
Daadi didn’t let her. “Wake up, Chhoti. Chhoti, wake up.”
The new wife went away.
My mother took Daadi’s arm, and two unknown women came forward and succeeded in leading her away.
Daadi was crying but her eyes were closed.
The mourning started up again. The room filled with howls and with the thudding of hands on chests, the shuffle of cloth and the footsteps of people who were still coming in and going out.
They didn’t recognize her at first. She sat beside the body with her forehead pressed into the leg of the charpai, a silent mourner in a room full of sounds. Her feet were bare.
“Samar!” cried my mother.
But she didn’t look up.
They had to bury the body before dusk. Four male relatives were required to carry the janaza to the graveyard. They were the husband of the deceased and his nephews. They lifted the janaza on their shoulders and carried it out of the house, past the mourners, and then out into the street, reciting the kalima shahadat as they went.
The body shuddered with their steps.
The women watched from windows and doorways and stayed in the house.
By night the mourning had stopped. The professional mourners had been sent outside and were sitting on their haunches in the courtyard. They had been fed, and were waiting to be paid. A servant brought them tea in steel cups. Their voices were heard inside, the low voices in which they spoke to one another and mourned other things.
Inside, the men and women were sitting in separate rooms. Daadi was slumped behind the door in the women’s room and was no longer crying. Her eyes moved along the walls of the room, and she seemed to want to say things. But she said nothing and only moved her eyes.
The women came and went. The new wife was giving instructions to a tired maidservant who was visible only when she carried the tray of pastries back into the room. The sisters-in-law were watching her.
And the other girl was not in the room.
They were not asked to stay the night. They had done what was required of them and were expected to leave. The tired maidservant showed them out.
“The girl,” said my mother. “Where is she?”
Daadi was held between the maidservant and my mother, and was lurching.
The maidservant pointed to a door they were passing and said, “She is inside.”
“Petrol,” said Barkat in the car. He was pointing to the needle, which was in the red.
My mother told him to stop at a station on the way.
They left the house, the lights still on inside, some cars still parked outside. On their way out they passed a family who was now heading back to their car. They were not recognized, and the looks were searching but brief.
The PSO station came after the first tollbooth. Barkat took the money from my mother and got out of the car to monitor the infusion. Daadi and my mother were alone in the back. Daadi had her face turned to her window. The silence ended when Barkat returned to his seat and revived the engine. He took the receipt from a boy in a gray PSO uniform and a green cap, and held it out for Daadi to put in her bag.
“I’ll take it,” said my mother.
The road was empty. The occasional lorry came and went at a swaying speed, its lights dimmed. Otherwise the view was dark and unmediated. They drove for some minutes, their windows rolled up. At the first curb my mother told Barkat to reverse the car. “Turn it around,” she said. “We have to go back.”
“What have you left?” said Daadi. Her voice was dry and emerged in a croak.
“We have to go back,” said my mother. “Turn it around.”
The car turned at the curb.
They were sitting in the drawing room, Uncle Fazal, his wife, his three sisters and their sons. They stopped talking when my mother came in. They had parted with their last guests, and the mood of reception was still in the room.
Uncle Fazal placed his palms on his knees.
My mother said, “We have come back to take the girl.”
Uncle Fazal continued to look at her and moved his palms back and forth along his knees.
My mother said, “Where is she? Where have you kept her?”
One of the sisters said, “The girl is ours. She was taken away once and it was against our wishes.”
Another sister said, “We have learned from our mistake.”
“Where is she?” said my mother.
And the third sister said, “If you think we will part with our children you are mistaken.”
“I have raised her,” said Daadi.
She was in the room, and was standing by herself in the darkened doorway.
One of the women laughed and said, “But who will feed her? Who will clothe her? Who has paid for her all these years? We have. Our brother has.”
Another sister said, “They think they can take what is ours.”
But Daadi said, “I will feed her.” And then she said, “I will pay for her. I will clothe her. I will take what is mine. I don’t want what is yours. I want what is mine.”
My mother said, “We will do a court case. We will send the police here and have this house raided.”
The women were looking at Uncle Fazal.
My mother said, “We will put it in every newspaper in the country.” Daadi said, “Allah has taken from us. Now He will give.”
One of the women said, “Don’t come here when it all runs out, because we will not be giving.”
Her brother said nothing.
Daadi said, “Where is the girl?”
And my mother said, “Come with me.”
They went out of the room and through the hallway, which was emptied now of voices, and to the door they had passed earlier in the night. And they opened that door and went in.
It was a small room, bare, unlike the room in which she had grown up. The floor was tiled and uncarpeted. The thick curtains were drawn. A small brass lamp was kept alive on a table by the bed. She was sitting on the bed, wearing the same black clothes she had worn in the day, her arms folded around her knees, which were drawn up and pressed into her chest. Below the bed, next to her sandals, was an opened suitcase; and it showed the clothes she had folded and kept inside as though, on the basis of what she recalled, she had led herself to believe that they would come.
20
News from home makes you aware that the flow of memory has stopped. A life you no longer live is a life you no longer know. But you rely on memory to inhabit, however falsely, what now lies outside your experience; and every homecoming involves the puncture of memory’s airy bubble.
News came in e-mails from my mother. They had headings and indentations, and contained mildly musical paragraphs that were marked by a novice-like formality of tone.
My Dear Zaki,
How wonderful to hear from you! Samar sits beside me as I write this, so this is, in all seriousness, a joint enterprise. Let me therefore begin anew.
We are well. The house is alive again, and it is almost strange to hear sounds in the morning, sounds at night, though of course it does not begin to make up for your absence. We miss you so.
Naseem is back. Mrs. Zaidi was unhappy but Daadi spoke to her on the phone. Naseem has applied to Hajj branch of the Zakat Ministry and wants to perform the pilgrimage. It is difficult to get but I have asked Nargis to intervene. She knows the man at the Zakat Ministry, and he has said he will see what he can do. I have prepared Naseem’s application forms and will post them tomorrow from the office.
Samar has joined the office! Isn’t that wonderful? She is working on the features p
ages, and her first article will appear next week. It is a review of a fashion show. I will send you a clipping as soon as the issue is out.
That is all for now. We will write later.
But first you must write with your news.
Lots and lots of love
I didn’t go home for the winter holidays. The ticket was expensive and I didn’t want to ask my mother for the money. It was a two-week recess anyway, so it made sense to take the Greyhound bus to New York. We went in a group of eight people, and slept three to a bed in a tiny sublet in the East Village. (The owner had gone on holiday to the Caribbean.) I took pictures with my new camera and sent them as attachments to my mother from the Internet café downstairs. And she wrote back with more news.
My Dear Zaki,
Barkat was retired today. He was in need of a cataract operation and I sent him to the people who run the trust for the blind. The operation was successful. But they have said he should not drive. So today Daadi gave him his salary and saw him off. He will live now with his son in his village.
Samar will not consider the possibility of marriage. I have told her to look around, to keep her eyes open at least. I have asked her if she would like me to look. And she keeps saying her Amitabh will come for her, as if he’s going to appear on some white horse out of the blue!