“Things are not as simple as you make them sound!”
“Raising children from other marriages is nothing when you look at the universe as a whole … ”
“That is exactly what I mean! You spend your days doodling, talking about the size of the universe, yet you have not done one responsible thing in your life. Why are you even worried about the estate? Your brother carries your load while you go on stargazing excursions.”
“As the youngest I cannot deny I have been given certain privileges to enjoy my hobbies. But how do you know I will not do whatever is necessary to take care of my new family?”
“Your family? Vikram, you are too young to take on a whole family. Especially one that is borrowed. Leave apart that I am five years your elder!” Turning to the sewing machine, I slammed my hand hard against the manual wheel. “I am carrying the store merchant’s child.”
“Rubbish!”
I sucked in a deep breath of air. “The store merchant is so elated he has promised me back Nargis.”
“Only seconds ago you were talking about how viable your plan to run away was.”
“A woman belongs with the father of her children. I would be foolish to give that up.”
“You are talking a bunch of garbage now.”
I held onto the stool so I would be able to deliver my final sentence without slipping to the floor in a heap. “I never want to see you again, Vikram Khanna. I mean it.”
“You will regret this, Sukaina,” he said, his voice thick with emotion. He shoved the Many Moons of Saturn into his sack. Waves of fabric spilled out. He stood up, painfully tall in the cramped room, knocking over his cup of chai.
It was Mr. Khanna who came around next. “Mr. Khanna, did you receive my new sari design?” I asked, remembering Vikram’s face when I showed him the Many Moons of Saturn sari.
Mr. Khanna’s face merged into a complicated map of wrinkles as he strained to remember.
“Perhaps I did not give it to him,” I said quickly.
“Well, do not delay suspense. What is this new design? I hear Zubeida Begum is looking for a new sari gown for her next talkie.”
I imagined the fair-skinned beauty, finger waves pressed into dark locks, wearing my starry design as she sang a tune on screen. Hurriedly, I continued. “I am making a blue sari meant to replicate a bird in flight.”
“The great turaco.”
“Yes.”
“But you have already shown me that sari, Sukaina,” Mr. Khanna said testily. “Before I forget, let me show you what I have here. I myself cannot imagine what could be so important that Vikram would make an old man carry such a large item.”
Bending over with a grunt, Mr. Khanna undid the string circling a brown parcelled tube. A painting unrolled, like a paan leaf before it was filled with areca nuts and coconut shavings. The artistry was stunning, daring all that stared at it to join it in its lucid dream state. Mr. Khanna stood in the bare bones living room, looking as though he were holding an escape window leading into the night sky. A full moon that looked like a polished boiled egg, creamy and heavy, was slipping effortlessly into the dark navy blue cup meant to be an ocean.
“Does this mean something to you?”
“Bhai-Sahib,” I said, forcing out the formal title of Vikram’s name, “must have thought I could use some inspiration for new designs.”
“For once, Vikram is not wrong. I mean, how long have you been talking about that blue bird sari design, Sukaina? People need to see extraordinary things in Mr. Khanna’s Fashion and Sari Shoppe, or they will start buying those horrible saris sold out of baskets along with shelled peanuts.”
“What about introducing sleeveless blouses to our designs?”
“Completely sleeveless? Chi chi, Sukaina. Women in Uganda are not ready for that kind of change. Short-sleeved is one thing, but bare-armed sari tops are for harlots!”
“Devika Rani wore one in her last film.”
“Devika Rani is shameless enough to kiss a man on screen. You are using her for fashion inspiration now?” Last year Devika’s film was the first Indian talkie to use English dialogue. Her scandalous kiss scene was banned in Uganda, but there were bootlegged copies circulating amongst local film houses which men went to watch at late night showings.
“You were the one who said we needed to make some waves in the fashion industry, Mr. Khanna.”
“Waves, not tsunamis, Sukaina. A move like that could sink our little shop. Women like to watch actresses dress like that on screen. They hardly have the guts to pull off such looks themselves. Do not try and cheat me out of a fresh design by coming out with a quick fix sari blouse idea, Sukaina,” he said, scowling. “Namaste.”
The beautiful paint brushes and strokes used in Vikram’s painting was at once a magical breath of deep air blown into our grey, four walled shack house, sitting on the cusp of Mengo Hill.
“Where did this come from?” asked the store merchant later, through tea-soaked teeth.
“I bought it in the market.”
“Something so skilled was just casually being sold at the market?”
“There was a dozen or so just like it. I think they are just really well done copies.” I bent forward, unrolling the store merchant’s desert-coloured socks one by one.
He sat by the edge of bed in his browning undershirt, his belly sitting on his pants like a small cake. For a long time, he stared silently into the painting, which gave our windowless bedroom a portal to the evening sky. Then he said evenly, “Do not screw with me again, woman. This time you will be the one burned.”
A few nights later, Mr. Khanna’s Fashion and Sari Shoppe was devoured in flames. It was rumoured that Mr. Khanna had forgotten to extinguish the coals he kept burning in the small pit he used for heating the clothes iron. The fire had claimed no victims, but the store was destroyed. When I finally managed see it, my heart stopped just as it had when I was a child and Baba used to tell me war stories about Europeans fighting in Africa. Baba said Indian blood gushed like a river down the plains of Africa, dying Africa’s orange earth red, permanently. Half-horrified, I listened to stories about men with fountains of blood squirting where their noses should have been. The building looked equally violated.
The spice bazaar that stood next to the sari store had blackened walls as proof of the fire. Somehow, the stores on the second and third floor had no structural damage, despite the fact that their foundation pillars, which stood inside the sari shop, had been scorched to the size of a kebab skewer. The floors above the shop thus looked like they were floating in the sky. When the bottom was rebuilt and another owner took over Mr. Khanna’s Fashion and Sari Shoppe, people still referred to the corner as the “bazaar built on the clouds.”
I walked straight through the shattered front window, crunching pieces underfoot like stamped out cockroach shells. The shop’s walls were inked in various shades of black ash and soot. Underneath the frame of what was once a stool, sat a bundle of coloured pencils, sparkling like fine jewels. I reached down and clutched them, remembering Vikram’s fingers etching the first day I had met him. It was then that I saw the shadow of a tall man in the shop, far past the zone of safety, where it was obvious that the upper floors could collapse any second.
“Vikram!” I shouted, dropping the pencils.
“Vinod here,” he said, stopping me before I embraced him. He had a similar build to Vikram, but with a wider face. “You must be Sukaina. Baba told you to stay away from this building.”
“I had to see the damage for myself … ”
He began digging through black refuge. “Aha! Baba was right! This box is fire retardant.” He carefully extracted from the box a roll of cash, a pair of ancient sewing scissors, and a grainy photo of a young Mr. Khanna standing in front of the shop, a firm scowl planted on his face.
Pieces of rubble began to fall from the ceiling.
“Let us get out of here, sister!” he said, pulling me into the safety of the sun.
“Vikram?” I asked, staring at the hem of my sari, bordered in grime.
If Vinod had any suspicions about the two of us, he refused to address them. “That unreliable oaf has moved to America to study astronomy under some man named Hubble. Or is it Rubble? Hai Ram, save me from Vikram’s stupidity! It is surprising he came out here to help Baba in the first place. If you have not noticed, Vikram has always been lost in his own universe.”
When I did not say good-bye, Vinod stared at me with the annoyance one would give an ill-trained chai-boy who did not understand it was time to leave. “Baba had enough encouragement from you and Vikram, but now he must retire. He is too old to build a new store. Your correspondence with our family has officially ended. Here is your share of the money … ”
But I had already turned the corner.
***
WHEN I LOOKED AT Miriam, it felt like the last fifteen years had never taken place. Apart from her dark brown eyes, I was looking at a younger version of myself, running down the streets of Old Kampala. Grimacing at the memory, I clutched the saris around me like a prostitute in the slums of Uganda would hold her banknotes.
“Mama,” Miriam chided. “I cannot sit on the bed forever waiting for you to speak.”
I opened my mouth and then shut it. “I will sew you a blouse to go with this blue sari. You will look stunning, my sweet beta.”
Miriam nodded like I was a child and gathered her hair back from her face. She looked like Amma when she did this, except without the sad lines of defeat around her eyes. I suddenly felt weak and exhausted. I had thought of the past far too much today. I found myself undoing the master bed, pulling the thin sheet up around my neck without bothering to remove my day clothes.
“Mama, do you need anything?”
“A glass of pani, please.” The servants could be summoned for such a request, but today I wanted my daughter to serve me. I closed my eyes to sleep under the painting of the round biscuit moon dipping into a blue-black ocean, now housed in a tarnished gold frame.
When I awoke the next morning, I felt like the mishkaki on the barbeque from the street cart, pulverized and quartered into a million pieces. For tonight’s dinner I must send the servant to the outdoor butcher’s market to pick up a live chicken to make kuku paka, and make sure he only picks the freshly slaughtered adult sheep parts for the mutton biryani. I would make the coconut mandazi with my own hands. With mosquitos no longer a concern, I rose to open the shuttered balcony doors. The way that our mansion was built it received a full washing of morning sun. Perhaps that was why the flowers did so well on the balcony: the morning sun was mild enough to give them a lukewarm golden bath before it disappeared to the other side of the house to scald our palm trees. The balcony was too narrow for chairs, so I sat half inside, half outside, with only two of the iron wrought chair legs touching the outside terracotta tiles.
Deciding to make long sheer sleeves that would accentuate Miriam’s slender arms, I placed thread through the eye of the needle. I let my mind wander. Should I have married Vikram so many years ago? Would I have been wrong to replace my first husband, Salim’s, love with that of another? If we could see stars that had burnt out in the skies more than two hundred years ago, maybe there was another Vikram and me in existence right now, sitting in my old kitchen, falling in love with one another once more. Stitching darts on the blouse, I thought back to when I sewed frocks for Nargis. She would be old enough to have started her own family by now. Were her yellow eyes still as deep as the water in the Kilindini Harbour?
When the shadows covered me, I put down the blouse.
Atop the grand stairs, I looked out the tower-style window. A man with a beard was peering over our fence. Should I alert the watchman? But he was already gone. Today was the “Ladies Only” Sunday matinee. I must hurry and dress myself. The ladies arrived to the cinema house drenched in perfume and fineries. They coughed and cackled amongst one another, showing off their saris, fluffing them out until the usher led them to their seats. The cinema house was just a makeshift room with chairs, a projector, and a large screen. A window box opened up to a busy kitchen. The ladies liked to eat, and the samosas would be sold out before first intermission.
I decided to wear the Many Moons of Saturn sari. The original, given to Vikram, was never seen again. As with all remakes, my gown was less magical than the first — the hem was still unfinished in parts and the sequins fastened with large, grandmother-sized stitches. Nevertheless, when the driver stopped the rat-a-tat-tat of the Wolseley engine to rest at the curb, a hive of ladies gathered around the black lacquered saloon car to compliment me. The layers of indigo and bright pink bobbinet tulle shuffled noisily as I joined the queue. I adjusted the creases in the front just so, like a Chinese woman throwing open her paper fan — a formidable trick Mr. Khanna had taught me.
We were seated. The ladies’ laughter dimmed to a soft buzz. Mohammed Rafi’s ghazal song pulled tears to my eyes. The man working behind the projector loading the nitrate film reels had a beard that looked like it had been etched with a black marker used to mark light fabric with. Was he the same character hanging about the compound this morning? I squinted but I could only make out his silhouette. Even in black and white, the actress Nargis dazzled on screen. Curvaceous and chipper, she hopped from artificial tree to tree. In the back of my mind, another movie was playing out simultaneously — the movie of my life. I saw myself as clearly as I saw the actress on the scratchy screen, squatting down and rubbing coconut oil into my daughter Nargis’s hair. How odd it was that my long-lost daughter shared the same name as the actress on screen. Buttery soft lullabies wafted gently from the movie speakers, cutting in then out, blending in with my own memories of singing to my first child.
A deep rumbling echoed in the theatre room. Hoarse and grumbly, it was the same sound men made when they pushed their saloon cars out of mud ditches. Sharp pieces splintered through the air and ladies shrieked. My first thought was that a bomb had hit the building. World War II ended a few years ago, but the world had not slept soundly since. On screen, the actress’s high-pitched laughter peeled from her lips.
Sheer female hysteria left me trapped in the aisle. I was stuck in a hot mess of sweaty, vibrant saris. The ceiling had cracked and large particles were falling down on patrons like loose boulders from a Kenyan cliff. Reels of film were cascading from the balcony. In other places the reels had sparked and already caught fire, and the theatre was lit up like Diwali.
This could not be a bomb scare. I did not hear sirens, and there was no distinct explosion. The theatre had probably crumbled because the building foundations were weak. The Gujarati merchants were always taking shortcuts with their businesses. The store merchant himself refused to throw out black mushy bananas, selling them instead as baby food.
A lady behind me was screaming, her hair on fire. A man with a shaggy beard was rolling her on the floor like she was a stick used to flatten roti. I had seen this man all day. Was he a theatre worker? He waved frantically at me, pointing at the ceiling. Now that I looked closely, I saw that the man looked like Vikram. In the midst of all the chaos, I remembered my vanity. Did my lipstick look becoming when I yelled: “What do you want?” Were my eyes as Vikram remembered them, two spectacular moons hanging in the solar system?
The bearded man was yelling, but his mouth looked as hollow as my wedding ring. I glanced up to see what he was pointing at. A large piece of theatre equipment, what seemed to be a speaker, was coming down toward my head. I did not feel the strike. I only felt blackness, enveloping me like a thick blanket.
12
“HE IS GREAT,” I said, placing a creamy pera in my mouth. This week, we were covering desserts.
“Do you think they need more sugar, Maya?” My mom pointed to the tray of fudge milk confectionaries.
“You’re acting like we’re having guests over. These are just for us.”
“When we were kids, Mummy used to make the most delicious food … ”
“Oh, I’m sorry, Mom.”
My mom looked at me, yellow eyes on fire. “Your grandmother is a great cook. I am just trying to remember all the things she made when I was a kid. Then I can pass the recipes on to you.”
I nodded sympathetically. Since Nanima’s stroke, my mom had been more sentimental than usual. Everyone was stressed and worried, though it was a little easier now that Nanima was living at home with us, where we could look after her.
Following my mom’s lead, I imprinted the next batch of sweets with an old-fashioned button to give them decorative appeal.
“Anyways, you were saying? Why is this guy perfect?” My mom was trying so hard to act like everything was normal. I decided to play along.
“He’s tall, blondish, handsome, and has a good job. Why do none of the fairy tales mention the good job part? And he’s romantic, too.” Gujarati was starting to sound normal coming from my mouth. It had been years since I had spoken the language to any one person for so long, but I was picking it up alongside my mom’s fast-paced dialogue. I hated the sound of my Canadian accent cutting through the words like a lawnmower over grass, but my mom assured me that it was all the rage in India to have a “Western” accent.
“Ah, you young girls, what is your obsession with romance? Marriage is about picking the best life partner not the best Romeo. Will Romeo change diapers?”
“Didn’t you want romance when you were young?” After all, it was my mom who was more the Bollywood fan.
She shrugged, her back turned to me. “I don’t remember. Everything with your dad just worked out.”
“I can’t imagine you and Dad as two separate people. When did you merge into one?”
“Oh, it will happen for you, too.” She stamped designs onto the last of the desserts, which she had rolled out into miniature balls then flattened with her palm. “Your kids won’t be able to imagine their mother was once a single person with hopes and dreams of her own. You might not even remember those times yourself. Look at me.”
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