Mehendi Tides

by Siobhan Malany

  “You knew,” Kate said accusingly. “You knew!”

  The red light flashed across Krishna’s face so only the tip of her nose and her round lips were illuminated.

  “That is in the past,” Krishna snapped. “She has gotten over it.”

  “How does one exactly get over it?” Kate asked, horrified.

  The words left an acrimonious taste on her tongue.

  “Nothing good would come out of revealing the truth. It’s better to forgive and forget.”

  Have faith.

  “It’s a heavy secret,” Kate whispered. “Close friends like us shouldn’t have secrets.”

  “Everyone has secrets.”

  “I don’t,” Kate dismissed.

  “Yes you do,” Krishna shot back. “You have been in love with Tariq, and you won’t openly admit it! Nasreen told me about Eid. Is that why you hitchhiked to Texas?”

  “I didn’t hitchhike,” Kate defended. “I went with Neil.”

  “Whom you broke up with! Oh, c’mon, we could tell,” Krishna barked.

  “I had a crush on Tariq a long time ago. We were teenagers. I just needed a break and didn’t have a lot of money to spend, and Neil was driving so I figured why not?”

  In the sublevel bathroom with creaking pipes, Kate suddenly felt cloistered by the faces and scenes of India—the women in mid-laugh, the children in mid-run, and the staring eyes of the man next to the bull cart. Then she spied another photo in the series…of a woman.

  “Who is she?” Kate asked, changing the subject away from talking about Neil and Tariq.

  A young Indian woman with thick eyebrows and lashes and wide, effervescent eyes looked passionately at the camera.

  “She’s a friend.” Krishna’s tone was short.

  “Okay. So can you elaborate a little?” Kate pried.

  “Her name is Raji. She works at a photography store on Harper Street. I bought the Nikon FG camera to take to India, and I was testing it out. She was my model. We were at a park near the shop. She is always happy,” Krishna explained as if it were difficult to imagine someone so happy. “Nothing ever seems to cloud her eyes.”

  “She has bright eyes,” Kate agreed, still studying the photo of the woman.

  “Anyway, we have been hanging out a bit and we have become close…friends.”

  The acid smell from the fixer was starting to sting Kate’s eyes. She watched Krishna admire the photo and the essence of the woman in it.

  “You never mentioned her,” Kate said, confused.

  Krishna shrugged. “She is a new friend.”

  “What’s your secret, Krish? You said everyone has secrets. So what is yours?”

  Krishna remained silent.

  “You can’t tell me?”

  Krishna shook her head. “Not now.”

  “These are beautiful pictures, Krish. They really are.”

  Krishna seemed to be lost in thought.

  “Thanks for showing me. I have to run,” Kate said before pushing the bathroom door open.

  The light flooded in. Krishna recoiled, blocking her eyes with her forearm.

  Chapter 16

  Bombing of Bohri Bazaar

  Karachi 1987

  Sameer was ill. His fever rose steadily for several days. The flight to Karachi was postponed. Nanima and Laila nursed Sameer, exchanging the cool, wet cloth on his glistening pink brow and making sure he took the antimalarial pills the doctor in Banjara Hills had prescribed.

  “He will make a full recovery but cannot travel until he is stronger,” the doctor told them.

  Karachi, Kate could imagine, would be quite different from Hyderabad. There, she and Nasreen would be more defined by societal codes of behavior and consumed by the formalities of a Muslim wedding. For now, Sameer’s illness meant for Kate more time in Hyderabad and more time to spend with Tariq.

  She was happy to escape with the cousins and visit several historic places that dotted both sides of the Musi River and defined the once princely state of Hyderabad. They visited the Charminar monument and its four fluted minarets that served as a gateway to the old city, several palaces and public gardens, and the massive façade of the College of Arts building at Osmania University, a symbol of Indian renaissance. In between the tourist stops, they sauntered through Saify Stores and the congested tobacco- and fish-smelling Begum Bazaar.

  At night, the cousins lounged on the balcony of the Banjara Hills hotel where Kate discovered Indian ice cream. The mango flavor was divine! The fresh sweetness rejuvenated her tongue from the heavy South Indian spices. The evening breeze was cooler, and Kate wore a salwar kameez she borrowed from Yasmine. She enjoyed the camaraderie and gazed across the main road toward Nanima’s house and the construction site where soon an even more opulent hotel, the rival Royal Taj, threatened to block the view.

  “THIS HILL IS famous,” Tariq announced one afternoon as he stood atop a hill that hovered over the Hussain Sagar Lake.

  He wore jeans and cowboy boots and gazed at the open span of rocky land.

  “It is called Naubat Pahad,” he explained. “This is my favorite place to come and sit. You can see everything from here—the beauty and the ugliness of Hyderabad, the temples, parks, and monuments, and the old railway station in this direction,” he said, pointing in the distance. “And in this direction, you can see the flooded plains and the shacks along the hillside.”

  The wind blew across the land and through Tariq’s hair. Yasmine and Nasreen clasped their dupattas as the material flapped wildly in the wind and across their faces.

  “Hyderabad is changing,” Tariq continued. “There will be businesses, high-rises, luxury apartments with courtyards, and terrace cafés someday.”

  He spread his arm wide as if he had the power to transform the landscape.

  Kate imagined him standing on a peak somewhere in Nepal

  Yasmine smiled. “You dream, my cousin. I hope you are right.”

  “We will not have to go to America for jobs. You will see.”

  Kate knew she had only had a glimpse of India and of a city pulsing with history, on the verge of either exploding into modernism or imploding into self-destruction, swallowed up by aimless overpopulation.

  In her journal, Kate wrote feverishly about the majestic temples, the rusted corrugated shacks, and bulbous domes that hovered over a sea of burlap-tented bazaars. She wrote about the man who sold guavas on the corner, the shop owners at Sheela’s Brass store, and her sari purchase at the fancy cloth store. She wrote about their mud-stomping adventure through the countryside, into the dark depths of the tombs, and to the terraces of the fort overlooking the rubble courtyard. She wrote about Tariq.

  Maybe she would return to sit on the black stone of Mecca Masjid as the legend told, and she would return to a vibrant and thriving city of the future, and he would still be there waiting for her.

  IN THE DANK, echoing airport corridor, Kate perched herself on one of the suitcases and waited. She kept an eye on Nasreen and Laila among the congestion. Extended families huddled together in masses, making it difficult to determine which line belonged to which attendant. She pressed her arm over her lower stomach, feeling the outline of her passport beneath her blouse. Sameer too sat on one of the suitcases, sweating profusely from his malaria-weakened state and from having dragged the heavy bags across the urine-smelling airport terminal.

  Their flight to Karachi was in the middle of the night. They stood in line after line.

  India moved on its own schedule.

  “Traveling from India to Pakistan is more complicated than flying from America to India,” Nasreen remarked.

  Kate thought of the cousins Yasmine, Azra, Hari, Max, and especially Tariq. They had arrived at Nanima’s to help her and Nasreen pack. She would see them in Karachi in two weeks and already looked forward to their companionship again. Rahim and Anees would arrive then as well, one cousin preparing to be married and the other preparing to be formally engaged. Anees’s preoccupation with family and betro
thal responsibilities, including frequently visiting his fiancé’s and her family, was a relief to Kate. The less time Anees was around Nasreen the better, she thought.

  “Come on, Kate,” Nasreen urged. “We have to get our tickets approved, and then we can leave.”

  “Approved?” Kate asked, confused.

  “I can’t explain. Just come.”

  Kate moved from the suitcase and fought the sickening feeling rising in her stomach from heat and exhaustion.

  Four hours later, their tickets finally approved, they boarded the plane for the forty-five-minute flight to Bombay.

  The Bombay airport was a world of its own and seemed a far different place to Kate than it had two weeks earlier when Sameer had met her in the echoing terminal after a grueling trip from Chicago to escort her to Hyderabad. There were more lines, but things moved faster and they had first-class tickets.

  “Only six bucks more for first class,” Sameer explained.

  His face was still pale as he struggled to stay alert.

  On their way to the gate, they passed an entire waiting area filled with men in blinding white robes waiting to board a plane to Saudi Arabia. Kate knew the men in white thawbs were engaging in a once-in-a-lifetime pilgrimage to Mecca.

  “At some time in their life, a Muslim must make the trip on their own earnings,” Nasreen told her.

  Kate thought of her father. She could hear his voice tell her he would pay for her trip to India and Pakistan. His face was filled with awe and weighted by a parent’s burden of unpredictable politics and uncontrollable events in granting permission to a child to travel overseas alone.

  This was her pilgrimage.

  She thought of the children on the streets who hovered around the fruit stands, ran around the reflection ponds chasing pigeons, pulled themselves along on scooters, or begged for rupees in the bazaars. They could only hope for a pilgrimage as they listened to the distant calls of the minarets to unite them in faith.

  Once on board the flight to Karachi, the first-class seats offered some comfort. An Arab with a wide girth waddled as he made his way down the aisle toward Kate. His walking cane tapped her ankle as he moved past her seat. His wives clad in black burkas followed him, some carrying sleeping babies and others hustling young boys dressed in white robes like their father. Through the slit in the burka, one of the woman’s eyes, fierce and powerful, met Kate’s. The woman’s fury and intensity felt like a spear through her chest. Kate felt the breeze from the women’s burkas wash over her as they passed.

  It was four in the morning when they finally reached Karachi.

  “We will be up until morning during the wedding ceremonies,” Nasreen said, grinning. “Get used to the time,” she teased.

  She followed Nasreen through the sliding doors pushing one of the carts piled with luggage. The sweltering heat pummeled Kate like she had walked into a wall. Signs waved in front of her, some with people’s names, items to buy, or places to go written on them.

  “Taxi! Taxi? Ma’am?”

  A man was suddenly in her face.

  “No!” she yelled aggressively in her panic to keep sight of the others.

  Suddenly, smiling faces encircled her. Nasreen, Sameer, Laila, and Nanima exchanged embraces with family members. Someone picked up Sana in a bear hug. Bangles clashed with bangles as the women reunited. The men slapped Sameer on the back.

  The welcoming clan was dressed for a party. Pressed saris and shirts, painted lips, and bright eyes before dawn. Kate was passed from relative to relative in the dizzying introduction. Nasreen shouted out names above the excited voices and airport congestion. More cousins, more aunts and uncles…

  IN KARACHI, THE days were long and scorching hot. The intolerable heat encircled Kate’s throat until she choked and tried to spit, but her tongue felt clumsy inside her swollen cheeks. She was thankful for the air-conditioned home of Nasreen’s aunt, Mumanijan, and uncle, Mamujan, even though the air would shut off intermittently.

  On Wednesday, they planned to go to Bohri Bazaar. It was a dry, sweltering afternoon, and they spent a leisurely morning in the cooled home before the air-conditioning unit finally started to labor and whine.

  “Chelo. Chelo,” Nasreen’s uncle said with urgency, his forehead glistening with sweat as the temperature rose in the house.

  He shooed the women off their perch on the sofa and into the car. He drove the family to Bohri Bazaar for more wedding shopping. The day before, Kate had picked out an outfit for the wedding at the bazaar—a salmon taffeta with golden-threaded design—from a stall near the perimeter of the hustling tented city. They had meandered all day weaving through the stalls of cloth, jutti shoes, bangles, purses, perfumes, and dupattas. But there was still much to do before a crowd of relatives and friends would arrive for the weeks of ceremonies celebrating the union of Rahim and Haseena.

  Mamujan drove along Jinnah Road in thick traffic toward the congested city circle. They were a few miles away when suddenly the motorway buckled beneath them; the car launched forward and skidded to a stop.

  In the moment of shock, Kate heard a deep pounding. The sound ripped through the road, rattling the floor of the auto. She whipped around thinking a car had hit them from behind. But the car behind stopped at a safe distance.

  Another explosion erupted in the distance.

  Then she saw a trail of smoke rise toward the sky. Nasreen’s uncle spoke in panicked Urdu and spun the car around, weaving against the heavy traffic that was slowing to a gridlock. The sound of ambulances grew closer. The car braked hard causing Kate’s body to hit the seat in front. The pedestrian they had nearly hit slammed his hand against the hood of the car.

  “Bombs! Bombs!” he yelled at them through the windshield.

  In surrendered defense, Mamujan took his hands off the steering wheel. He stared in horror at the man. Mumanijan, sitting in the passenger seat, ripped her dupatta across her face and buried her head into her chest as if to become invisible.

  “What is happening?” she cried into her dupatta.

  A van maneuvered in front of them, and the driver thrust his head out the window frantically waving cars out of the way.

  “Blood! We have blood! Let us through!” the driver cried in Urdu.

  THE RADIO REPORTED two car bombs ripped through Bohri Bazaar resulting in a few casualties. By morning, the newspaper revealed a far different tragedy in the pictures of blackened ash and debris, collapsed stalls, and burned tents. The bombs ripped apart the main shopping center in Karachi, leaving nearly seventy dead.

  Kate recalled the day before when she had walked past the bangle stall, the spice and tea stall, and the juice stand where Sana had a drink of mango juice. Then she had strolled onto the main street where a man sold roasted nuts that he scooped into cones made of newspaper. She envisioned the juice man handing Sana a cup. She remembered the man and his son breaking for midday tea in the middle of their beaded necklace shop. And she imagined the old man who sold her the jutti shoes in a stall in the main row of tents.

  Gone. Ash.

  The Pakistani government declared three days of mourning following the attacks on black Wednesday. The shops were closed, buses and taxis were off duty, and men stayed home from work.

  Who was responsible? Kate didn’t know, and she didn’t ask for translation when the uncles spoke about it.

  In America, terrorist attacks that happened overseas were reported by international correspondents whose columns appeared in The New York Times, not felt from a couple miles away in a crowded shopping center. Kate was like many American teenagers, relatively unaware of Asian politics. All that was clear in the stillness of the days that followed the bombing of Bohri Bazaar was that her life might have been spared by the randomness of Pakistani power cycles.

  To pass the time during the days of mourning, the family watched an endless melodramatic Indian movie on a small television in the front room. Kate tried to follow the characters—the dashing hero, the pious wife, and the seduct
ive mistress. The actors moved from stage to stage, breaking into song and dance. The actresses’ perfect feet pounded to the clamor of drums, vibrating the tiny bells on their anklets, their arms layered with rattling bangles intertwined in sinuous fluid movements as their voices rose.

  After long hours, the tinny chimes and high-pitched homogenous sounds made Kate’s head ache. She sat on the couch and monitored the passing of time by the five daily calls to prayer and the five daily meals. Time lingered in the cracked, yellowed wallpaper with nothing to do but wait for the next spicy meal to be served. She could not get rid of the garam masala paste that coated her gums even after cleansing her palette with scoops of fennel seeds. The seeds only got stuck between her teeth.

  “Come on,” Nasreen coaxed in the afternoon on mourning day three as she headed for the back stairs. “Follow me.”

  “Where?” Kate asked.

  “To the terrace.”

  The air conditioning stopped working, and the house was growing uncomfortably warm. Kate perspired as they climbed the stairs. Nasreen punched open the door at the top, and the two walked out into the sizzling open air.

  The barrier around the terrace was so tall that Kate had to stand on her tiptoes to peer over the edge. She looked out at the yellow sandstone walls of adjacent homes, which resembled a maze of fortresses rather than a neighborhood. Unlike the many earthen ramshackle homes she saw in India, these homes had foundations, smoothed clay walls, high gates, and small pristine courtyards.

  Women were not hanging clothes or sweeping. Boys were not playing cricket on the small dusty lot two lanes over. The fruit wallah who rolled his cart filled with fresh mangos, guavas, and coconuts through the neighborhood calling out the items for sale in a rhythmic chant had not been heard for days.

  The neighborhood was still.

  “Don’t let anyone see you,” Nasreen hissed.

  “But there is no one.”

  “Shhh!” Nasreen placed a finger across her lips.