I’m pretty deep into my applications. I’ve sent off Harvard and Stanford. I’m working on the others. I don’t suppose I should ask you how yours are going. You’re making a big mistake, Tania. This is not just about the next four years, you know, it’s the rest of your life. Besides, with everything going on, don’t you dream of escaping?
Love,
Tanya
October 20, 1992
Bombay
Dear Tanya,
Don’t you get it? For me escaping will be to not go to college in America!
I’m getting scared man. Things are still bad at school. It’s been two weeks now. I thought they’d get bored. But they’re just getting meaner. I wasn’t invited to Soumya’s birthday party or Shaival’s weekend thing at Marvae. But the meanest thing was I had gone to Cellars with my cousin from Delhi and when we got there everyone from school was there. And they just ignored me. Looked right through me as if I didn’t exist. I wanted to cry so badly but I wasn’t going to give them the satisfaction. Besides once you show weakness it’s over. Permanently. So I just grabbed my cousin’s hand and we danced and danced and danced and danced. But every song, every move, I was watching them. I was waiting for them to come to me. But although they looked at me many many times and I know they were wondering who my cousin was, not a single one of them did.
I’ve grown up with these people. I’m in every picture of every birthday party Soumya has had since she was born. Until the day of her party, I thought she was going to call me. I had imagined how it would be, she would call me in whispers and say I can’t talk but obvers you must come ya. And I’d laugh to show no hard feelings and say that I had another party to go to but happy birthday and I’d stop by for some cake.
I got into a fight with Nusrat today because she got all preachy and was like oh these are not real friends. When I told her she didn’t understand, she got super huffy and wrote in her notebook that she understands a lot more because she can’t speak because all she can do is listen. She’s so sensitive man.
Anyway, I had meant to call you but it got super late and I’m damn scared your dad will pick up the phone. He sounds British man. I’ll call you tomorrow. Maybe I’ll have better news on how things are at school tomorrow.
Love,
T
October 31, 1992
Karachi
Dear Tania,
A boy was killed. Can you believe it? A boy was kidnapped and then killed. The family was putting together the ransom but time had run out and the boy was killed.
He was seventeen years old. His name was Shahid. He had a stammer and he played inter-school squash. He went to St. Mary’s School for Boys. He played against Navi last year.
My mother tore the article out in the newspaper and went and banged loudly on my father’s door. She stood there in a crumpled nightie with egg stains on the front, greasy hair, trembling lip, eyes red from crying, banging on her husband’s door to be heard.
My father wasn’t home.
The funeral is tomorrow. The flag flew at half mast in our school today and when I looked around at the different classes all lined up, they seem to have shrunk. Far fewer boys than there used to be. Quite a few of the students were crying. Some of the teachers were crying too. Even the men.
He was seventeen years old. Apparently he was quite the bad boy. Used to do a lot of drugs. He was also applying to go to college in America. Did decently in the SATs—1320. That’s 100 more than what Ali got. But Ali is an artistic genius. He doesn’t do well on tests.
Navi called today to ask me to send him his cricket bat and soccer cleats. He has found some kind of sports club there. I thought it would feel really good to hear his voice but when I heard it I only felt vastly irritated. I wanted to tell him that there was an update: that Mom had made up her mind, that Chhoti Bibi had passed her exam, that my father was spending more time at home. But I could tell him nothing except that his old squash rival had been killed.
In Assembly today, someone asked loudly how come they don’t kidnap girls. It was a Class 8 boy. No one answered him.
Love,
Tanya
November 7, 1992
Bombay
Dear Tania,
Holy crap man. They killed a kid? I mean I know you weren’t making all this up but I never thought it would actually happen. That’s insane. Good thing your brother has been sent away. Nusrat looked up Murree in the Atlas. It looks far. Of course you miss him.
Anyway, so I have no happy news to cheer you up. Things are really bad. My mom is worse than mad that I don’t want to go to college in America. She’s like SAD.
She thinks I don’t respect her because I don’t want to go to her college and I don’t want to follow her path. It’s not like that. I can’t help that I’m made differently. Sammy wants her path. But you know what I realized? She wants me to want her path.
And that made me think. Did Sammy know that? Is that why he is following her path? And how come I don’t want to? And what about my dad? Does it make him feel bad that it’s all about my mom? He’s never once said anything about wanting us to be accountants.
My family is so weird Tanya. All the talking, all the shouting and yet there’s so much stuff that’s underneath that is never said. Are we all constantly trying to be something else to please someone? And for what?
I wanted my mother to hug me. I was crying and I wanted her to put her arms around me and say it’s okay. But she just stood there, leaning against the window. She asked me to leave. I didn’t go. She took the car keys and left the house.
Nusrat came and found me and took me to the servant’s room which is a balcony to hang wet clothes. She hugged me, she held me, she kissed me. I stayed there for a long time after she left, wrapped in my mom’s gold and yellow sari that I pulled down from the clothesline. I wanted to take that wet sari to bed with me, I wanted to wrap it around myself and sleep in it but I didn’t because I knew it would make my mom mad.
Nusrat hasn’t come all week. There are like a lot of disruptions going on in the city so I guess that’s why. Morchas and naka bandis every day. A morcha is when there are lots of people out on the road looking angry and chanting stuff together. A naka bandi is when they stop all the cars on the road. It makes the traffic like insane. The trains have been running late and the teachers have all be coming late to school and leaving early.
Is this what your life is like? Not having people to talk to in school? Not having anyone call you when you get home? Not having someone to call at eleven o’clock at night and go get ice cream with? I’m sorry man. I didn’t know.
I still don’t know what’s going to happen. Is my mom going to allow me to stay in Bombay? Or is she going to pretend like I never said anything and just make me apply anyway? I can totally see that. I can see her coming into my room (without knocking) with another application to another college she hadn’t thought of before. And it will be like I had never said anything.
I miss Nusrat. Maybe she will come tomorrow.
Love,
Tania
November 15, 1992
Karachi
Dear Tania,
CHHOTI BIBI FAILED. By 20 marks. She got 55 in the Social Sciences, 60 in Urdu, 30 in English and 12 in Math. TWELVE. Who gets 12 in Math? Is that even a number that is possible to get in an exam? Out of 100?
And believe it or not, she is furious at me for going and getting the marks. She tried to grab it from me but luckily for her, I was able to prevent it. It’s locked in my drawer. What is wrong with her? 12 in Math? 30 in English? My face was burning.
And instead of apologising, instead of feeling bad, she’s angry with me? She’s asking me how I have the right to pick up her marksheet for her? Who didn’t even know that the word marksheet existed until a few months ago? Forget about gratitude, she’s mad. She’s mad.
I was so upset when I saw it, Tania. I really thought she was going to pass (and that I could put it on my remaining applications. This is the so
le reason why I haven’t sent out my Harvard application yet.) I was going to go buy samosas and kachoris and jalebis and mithai to celebrate. I was going to take her shopping in a mall. I had asked my mother for money for it. My mother had smiled at me and kissed my head. It was one of her ‘I’m leaving and I love it’ days.
Anyway, now Chhoti Bibi is acting like I’ve committed a huge crime. Yes, please forgive me for trying to help you, for trying to give you a better life. It was a terrible, selfish thing to do. I even went to her room to try to talk to her. She was lying on the bed crying. There was nowhere to sit. So I just stood at the door and asked her when she was going to apologise to me. She ignored me. I asked her again, more loudly.
She bounced up on the bed and began to scream in Punjabi and Urdu. I didn’t understand all of it but the gist of it was that she had done it all for me and that she had never liked school and she hated studying and she hated exams and I had betrayed her and now she would have to run away and then how would Mohammed go to an English-medium school?
‘Why do you have to run away?’
‘Because they will now come and catch me.’
‘Who?’
She pointed at the window. Outside, the garden was quiet and empty.
The police, she whispered and her face crumpling like a child’s, she started crying into her hands.
Something about the way she cried, lustily, with such abandon, reminded me of you, Tania. I thought, when Tania cries, she cries like that. It made me want to comfort Chhoti Bibi.
It took some time to untangle the mess but I finally got to the bottom of her fear of the police. It turns out that the family of her husband-for-a-day had threatened police action when she bit the boy and left him. Chhoti Bibi’s family had rubbed this in when she had refused to go back, building up a picture of a police force whose priorities, among dealing with riots and murders and highway robberies is to find Chhoti Bibi and put her in jail.
But why would they want you? I asked her.
She looked through the fingers of her hands in surprise. Why would they not?
She also has a tangled understanding of universities, of the government—of authority, in general, I suppose. It took a lot of patient explanations to convince her that the police is not the paramount authority in the country and that they have nothing to do with universities and schools or anything else really. I’m not sure she fully understood or believes me but at least, by virtue of swearing on the Koran that the police does not know her exam scores, I was able to assure her that the police was not coming to get her because she had failed her exams.
She wiped her eyes and began to make dinner. She got me a stool to sit on while she began to make the dough for rotis.
I don’t ever want to live with a man, she said firmly. My father used to beat my mother before he died and then after he died, his brother and his mother beat my mother. My mother was married into this family when she was fourteen years old and has lived with them ever since. She doesn’t even know where her own family is anymore.
When I was getting married, my mother went to the mosque and prayed for me to have a husband like her father. My grandfather was a very good man. He never beat my grandmother and he worked very hard and he provided for every single of their nine children. He used to go to the fair every spring and bring back new clothes and toys and fresh, hot jalebis for everyone and he used to love all his children equally, even the girls. He built them a separate toilet with his own hands so they wouldn’t have to walk to the fields in winter.
‘What if the man you had married was going to be like your grandfather?’
She spat scornfully into the dustbin and pummelled the dough furiously. ‘He was the bully of the village,’ she said. ‘Everyone hated him. We had to go the long way round to get water because he would sit with his idiot friends to say horrible things to us and try to touch us as if we went the short way.’
I pictured him as Hamza, the big bully of my school. I could easily picture Hamza doing all of that.
‘Also,’ said Chhoti Bibi, ‘his family is in a lot of debt. God knows what would have happened if I had stayed with him. They would have definitely taken my jewellery and sold it.’
‘Where is your jewellery now?’ I asked.
‘My mother took it.’
‘So you don’t have it anyway.’
She looked at me in surprise. ‘My mother can have my jewellery.’
Every time I think I understand Chhoti Bibi, she eludes my grasp.
‘Baji, do you know how to make rotis?’
I shook my head.
‘Then come and learn. You will need to make rotis one day.’
More because I didn’t want to go back to my room, more because I liked sitting there with her in the cheerfully lit kitchen with dusk falling outside and a cat meowing somewhere and the blue flame of the stove twinkling, I agreed.
She taught me how to measure the size of the ball and she taught me how to flatten it gently before rolling it flat. She taught me how to dust it lightly, very lightly with flour so that they wouldn’t stick. She taught me her secret trick of dipping her little finger in a bowl of oil and rubbing it lightly into the roti before setting it on the tava. She was so happy to teach me, her face glowed with sweat and focus. I realised suddenly that she does have intelligent eyes and somehow in the dimmer light of my room, sitting at my desk while she sat on the floor, dreaming out of the window every time she thought I wasn’t looking, I hadn’t noticed the quality of her eyes.
She told me that the boy she had been married to had been a real dunce in school. ‘Worse than me,’ she said, taking a mangled piece of dough from me and rolling it again into a ball. Then she added half proudly, half shyly, ‘I was actually not half bad in school.’
‘Then why didn’t you study here with me?’
‘Because I don’t want your life!’ It came out in a burst with flecks of saliva dotting her mouth. Standing under a fluorescent tube light, she was lit against the darkness of the night sky behind her like a picture of a Hindu goddess I had once seen, glowing in the dark.
She hung her head. ‘I want to be Bibi.’
I could only look at her, silent.
She grinned and said, ‘Happier. Bibi but happier.’
She made me put my lumpy rotis on the tava. She made me flatten them and smoothen them and flip them over on a low flame.
‘Bibi has so much money. She has bought two houses and now, do you know, she makes more in rent from those two houses than she makes here in your house?’
I didn’t know.
‘Once Bibi retires, I will take over her job. And then I will go get Mohammed from the village. My mother won’t mind. She is tired of children.’ Chhoti Bibi deftly rescued my slowly burning roti and dropped it on the counter where she had spread a red napkin faded to pink. I remembered that napkin from when I had been in kindergarten. My mother used to wrap it around my tiffin box in which she used to always put grapes, no matter the season. I used to love sitting alone at Break, away from teachers and girls, break open the starched, ironed napkin and expose the luscious green grapes. Grapes were my favourite.
‘Besides,’ said Chhoti Bibi, ‘Mohammed loves me the most in the world. He calls me Chhoti Ammi.’
I burnt my finger on the tava. Chhoti Bibi grabbed it and dunked it roughly into a screw of salt in her hand. I felt the burn numb my finger, the damp warmth of her palm enveloping it.
‘I will send Mohammed to an English-medium school,’ she said seriously. ‘He will have to pass his exams. I will hire tutors.’
Suddenly I felt alone, sitting there on the stool, watching Chhoti Bibi go through the rotis I’d made, discarding, refashioning, selecting, discarding. She turned on the water in the sink and dropped the hot tawa in there, humming tunelessly and frowning as the steam enveloped her. She did not notice when I got up to leave.
I got up and went away to listen at my mother’s door as usual. There was an old jazz record she was playing, som
ething she found in one of her manic episodes of ‘packing’. She had taken to filling up a glass of whisky with lemon and honey and sipping it through the day.
How stupid I was, Tania. I really thought I was helping Chhoti Bibi. But the whole time she had just been indulging me. She knows exactly what she wants and has always known it, always been confident in it. She was born into a Chhoti Bibi shaped hole in the world and she fills it every day. Do you know what it takes for a seventeen-year-old Pakistani girl to say with such confidence, I don’t ever want to marry a man?
How brave she is. How brave Navi is, uprooting his life to go live in my grandmother’s house without complaining. All he wants are soccer cleats. How brave is Ali, coming into and out of the everyday world as he pleases, as he wants, never worrying about his future, never worrying about being kidnapped, never worrying about being loved. How brave are you, telling your mother that you don’t want to live her dream for you. How brave is Nusrat with her intelligence and self-possession and her burning. How brave are you Tania, to keep going to school in spite of everything. How brave to continue to plot and to plan, resolute in your vision that you will one day regain your throne.
I’m not brave. I’m not brave, Tania. I’m my mother’s daughter. We are not brave.
Love,
Tanya
November 22, 1992
Bombay
Dear Tanya,
Dude, you are so intense man. What’s with this brave stuff? Is it because I said you weren’t brave? I was kidding man. Come on. Snap out of it. And pick up the phone when I call. No one picks up at your house anymore. I swear I was kidding. I mean I know I’m brave but you are too. I mean look at you all ready to leave everything and go off to America. That’s brave! I can’t do that!
You like won’t BELIEVE what happened. Like WON’T BELIEVE it. I can’t believe it.
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