Five minutes later it was all over. Or so the crowd thought as they watched two children bending over the limp victim of iron man’s torment, prone on the pavement, face down, twitching. Iron man was wiping the boat clean and preparing to move on. A little girl darted up to me and, skipping with anticipation, said, ‘The mothers are coming!’
The mothers? The mothers of whom? The mothers of what? Mine wasn’t the only head that turned when we heard a strangely familiar clicking sound.
My mother marched at the head of a column of women, holding a heeled shoe (not her own, heels would have elevated her beyond Abba’s reach) in one hand. Behind her came an assortment of women from the neighbourhood armed with saucepans, rolling pins and more shoes. The dissipating crowd congealed again. Iron man’s pack-up speed seemed to increase, but the women were upon him in no time. Two, a matron and Agnes, a Goan girl from down the road, whose sister had been on the front side with me, went to attend to the boy on the pavement. The others formed a circle around the now visibly nervous ride operator, Ammi being the only one inside with him.
‘Since you don’t speak the language of reason, we have decided to teach you.’
‘Leave me alone.’
‘So you can go and abuse other people’s children? We’re all mothers here, we don’t think you should go so easily. We don’t like anyone picking on our children.’
‘He’s not your son. What do you care?’
‘But you also scared my daughter. You ruined her new Eid clothes, and you stole her money.’
‘She gave it to me herself.’
‘Ashoo?’ my mother called back to me over her shoulder, ‘did you give him your money yourself?’
‘Yes, but he was supposed to give me change back and he didn’t.’ Fair was fair.
‘Give her back her money.’
‘Here, take it.’ He threw some coins on the ground.
‘Pick it up and hand it to her.’
‘She can pick it up herself. Or why don’t you? Someone like you should be used to bending over.’
Iron man had decided to make a stand, cement his masculinity.The now-silent audience had left him with no option.
‘You also need to apologize to the boy, and give him some Eidi while you’re at it. All you’ve earned today will be fine,’ Ammi continued.
‘I’m not going to do anything of the sort.’
‘I really think you should.’
‘I don’t care what you think. You and all these other bitches go get lost I’m leaving,’ he turned away.
Moving quickly, Ammi scooted past him and grabbed the frayed leather satchel he had been about to pick up.
‘Give it back!’ he grabbed for it. She dangled it over her head, then swung it around her body when he lunged for it. This cat and mouse game continued, until he snarled his frustration and grabbed her arm, twisting it to bring the satchel back into his reach. Ammi’s howl of pain might not have been entirely contrived, and she did have bruises afterwards where his fingers had dug into her skin, but I think she exaggerated for effect. And it worked.
I think it was Ammi’s shoe that struck him first, but after that it was pretty much first come first serve. When it was over, the man crawled on his hands and knees to pick up the coins and offer them to me in one trembling hand. I only took exact change. Then he apologized to once-brazen-now-sniffing boy, gave him lots of Eidi and was allowed to leave. Limping, bent, head-bowed as catcalls pursued him, it didn’t look like he would get very far before collapsing. The crowd finally dispersed, the women sweeping their children in tow as they headed home. The men were all laughing, grateful for the free holiday entertainment. It didn’t matter what had happened to whom or what was right or wrong, what was important was that there had been violence. And women. A man didn’t complain in the face of such munificence. The mind boggled.
‘Don’t think about it,’ Ammi stroked my hair as we walked home. ‘Men are different from us. Accept them as they are, learn to handle them, and be happy.’
Of course she never took her own advice.
DEKHTI ANKHON, SUNTAY KANON
STANDARD OPENING OF LONG RUNNING PAKISTANI GAME SHOW NEELAM GHAR
~
In the early years, my father loved my mother like the tide loves the shore; always drawn, never settling. That she charmed him was apparent even to the casual onlooker. He would buy her flowers on the street, gajras for her wrists, fresh roses for her hair. He would strut proudly by her side, stomach in, chest out, in a proprietary stride that would have looked funny on any other man but seemed appropriate on him.What he lacked in height he made up for in stature, in sheer intensity per-pound of weight. Broad-shouldered, square-jawed, hypnotic eyes and silky moustached, he made a striking escort for Ammi.
The trouble in paradise was that there weren’t enough hours in the day for work, child and wife. Things had to be prioritized, the family taken care of, and my mother didn’t always seem to understand this.
‘I had a lot of respect for your late father,’ Abba remarked to her after another ‘why can’t you come home earlier?’ exchanges at the dinner table, ‘but I wish he’d never taken you to work with him. It spoilt you.’
‘Leave my father out of this.’
‘It really has. One, he was a professor. Everyone in the education sector works shorter hours. It might be just as challenging, if not more, than other jobs,’ he added hastily as he caught the expression brewing on her face, ‘it’s just less time-intensive. That’s all I’m saying.’
‘No it’s not. Most of his time at home was spent preparing lectures and making papers.’
‘Yes, but he was home, wasn’t he? In the next room, at the table, in the bathroom. I can’t match that. I can’t take you with me, and my work can’t leave the office.’
‘Why don’t you do work that can then?’ Ammi was still pouting.
‘Jahan, we’ve been over this. It’s too late to change tracks, even if I wanted to.’
‘So you admit you don’t even want to!’
‘Why should I? I’m not ashamed of what I do. I help the city run smoothly. I think that’s something I can be proud of.’
‘Of course. God forbid people shouldn’t pay their motor vehicle taxes on time, where would the world be then?’
‘So Ayesha,’ Abba nudged me, ‘what do you think of your little sister?’
I giggled.
‘Leave her out of this,’ Ammi snapped.
‘She’s sitting right here.’
‘Children should stay out of adult conversations.’
‘Adults shouldn’t have certain conversations when children are around.’
‘Ayesha, go to your room!’
‘I’m still eating.’
‘Take your plate with you.’
‘Let her eat in peace.’
‘Don’t tell me how to run my house! I don’t interfere in your work, don’t you interfere in mine. This house is my office.’
‘This is my home too,’ Abba said gently.
‘And that’s unfair considering how much time you spend in it.’
I picked up my plate and went to my room.
‘Things will be better soon,’ I heard him say before I closed the door, ‘I won’t have to do so much grunt work when I get that promotion, and we’ll eat together every day.’ But we didn’t.
JANAM SAMJHA KARO
BACK OF RICKSHAW
~
My father liked to call himself a self-made man. He wasn’t born into a particularly ‘good’ family (not a Syed anywhere in the lineage) or very well educated, but rather had clambered up the ladder of social evolution through sheer hard work. The only son of illiterate peasants from Bihar, after finishing primary and middle school in a nearby village, he had moved to Hyderabad in his teens to try his luck in the big city. Working nights as a waiter in a hotel, he had managed to put himself through high school and then earned a Bachelor of Commerce from a public university. That’s where he had met Ammi. She was a year junior to him, the daugh
ter of one of his professors. Her father had been against the match from the start.
‘Why isn’t Nana smiling in any of his pictures?’ I had asked once as we looked through their old album.
‘Because your nana was always thinking of very serious things,’ Ammi had said primly.
‘Because your nana was a grump,’ Abba had added.
Ammi shot him a look, and he threw up his hands in mock-surrender, ‘Because thinking of serious things makes you look serious all the time.’
‘How come you’re always smiling then? Don’t you do serious things at work?’
‘Apparently not,’ he had grinned, ‘I’m really just a good-for-nothing, like your nana said I was.’
‘Why did he say that?’
‘He never said that,’ Ammi said fiercely, ‘He really liked your father. He said you were a good student.’
‘But not good enough for you, Jahan, I didn’t have the pedigree.’
‘What’s a pedigree?’
‘Breed.’
‘Like dogs have?’
‘Yes. Like dogs have.’
‘Mrs Arif said dogs were impure. Are you impure too?’
‘If only you knew!’
‘Aslam!’
‘Sorry, Jahan. No Ashoo, I’m as pure as they come.’
‘And Nana was a nice man?’
‘Nana was a great man.’
‘I wish I had met him.’
‘I wish you had too,’ Ammi said, was she crying? ‘But he’s with us in a sense now. This house is ours because of him.’
‘Did he give it to us?’
‘He sold his own house so we could buy this one,’ there was a resigned sadness in her tone, and Abba was looking more uncomfortable by the moment.
‘Where did he go then?’
‘He lived with your Baray Mamu for a while, then he went to meet his Maker.’
‘Did he ever live in this house?’
‘He never came to Pakistan.’
‘Why did you come then? I wouldn’t want to leave Abba,’ I went and put my arms around his neck.
Ammi was crying openly now. She got up and disappeared into the bathroom.
‘She didn’t want to leave hers either, little luddo,’ Abba pulled my ear, ‘she did it for me.’
‘Couldn’t you and Nana live in the same place so she didn’t have to choose? Other families all live together. Anjum from my class lives with her Nana, Nani and her Khalas and Mamus too.’
‘No we couldn’t.’
‘Did you fight? Anjum says sometimes they fight but everyone forgets about it in a day or so.’
‘No. But if we hadn’t come, we would never have had you and you would never have had us and the sun would probably never have come up again.’
‘Oh. You did do the right thing then.’
‘Thank you for approving.’
‘No problem.’
We went for a walk to buy ice cream for Ammi. She wouldn’t eat it at first, still sniffing into her handkerchief, but relented when we refused to eat ours as well. Then we raced to see who could finish first. I did. I won a lot of informal competitions with my parents. Except, naturally, the ones that really mattered.
*
Abba and Ammi seemed closer together in the weeks following the argument that wasn’t about Nana. She would slave away in the kitchen from early morning preparing his favourite South Indian dishes, leaving me to potter aimlessly, unsupervised, through the rest of the house. Tables, shelves, prohibited desk drawers, everything was fair game for my nimble fingers. I knew I wasn’t supposed to be searching through their personal space, that is why I said nothing about the pictures I found stashed in Abba’s desk, tucked between the back of the drawer and the table.
MERAY DADDY NAY LI HAI BIMA POLICY, LA KAY AMMI KO DI HAI BIMA POLICY
JINGLE OF INSURANCE COMPANY AD IN ‘90S.
~
There were four postcards, and one picture. The postcards featured Anglo-looking women in various stages of undress, above the name ‘Lucky Gentleman’s club’ and the line ‘You’re not dreaming!’ They weren’t bad looking, but my mother’s breasts were bigger.
The picture looked strangely familiar, a very fair woman with light eyes in a sleeveless dress that dangled fetchingly around her knees, smiling into the camera against the backdrop of the sea. The Arabian Sea? Our sea? Rifling through the postcards again, I realized why she looked familiar. She was the topless woman on two of the postcards. She was all dolled-up in the postcards, and looked younger and fresher in the photo, but that gap-toothed smile was distinct. Unique.
‘What are you doing?’ Ammi called out as she emerged from the kitchen.
Dropping the cards and picture back into the drawer and closing it as rapidly as I could without making a sound, I dropped to my stomach and peered under the desk.
‘Ayesha?’ Ammi’s sandalled feet stopped an inch from my nose. ‘What are you doing, you silly child? You’ll get your clothes dirty.’
‘Have you seen my new eraser, Ammi?’ I clambered to my feet and looked right into her eyes. ‘I was using it at the dining table when I was doing my homework earlier but now I can’t find it.’
‘It wasn’t under the desk?’
I shook my head and looked sad.
‘It’s probably somewhere in your room then. You’re always losing things and then finding them two minutes later. Come,’ she held out her hand, ‘I’ll help you look.’
We searched my room. Miraculously, my eraser was right where I had left it, in my pencil-box.
‘You have to learn to focus more, Ashoo,’ Ammi had said as she smoothed out an imaginary line on my bedspread. ‘Honestly, sometimes I think you can’t see things even when they’re right in front of you.’
‘Maybe I need glasses.’
‘Maybe,’ she eyed me appraisingly, ‘but they’ll spoil that pretty face of yours.’
‘I’m not as pretty as you are.’
‘Says who?’
‘Says lots of people.’
‘Ignore them, you’re much better looking than I am. You know why?’
‘Why?’ I knew what was coming.
‘Because you look like your father, and he’s the handsomest man in the world.’
She went back outside and settled into a chair to read her weekly rag, meaning I had no way of replacing the picture and cards exactly how I had found them. If I didn’t, Abba would know someone had been in his drawer. He would ask Ammi and she would say no, and that left only me.
Were they even his postcards, I wondered. Maybe they were one of the Mamus’. They were the only other men who were familiar enough with the house to know all the good hiding places. And some man must have hidden them. I was old enough to know men weren’t supposed to see women without their clothes on. Not even their daughters, after a certain age. I didn’t know if that was true of wives too, but I had certainly never seen Abba with Ammi without her shirt on.
Ammi moved restlessly through the house till Abba came home and I never got a chance to place the secret stash back in its hiding hole. Dinner was particularly good that night, but I just picked at my food. My appetite had deserted me at the thought of Abba finding out I had been rifling through his things. It wouldn’t have been so bad if I’d found a wind-up watch or a new ruler, something that could legitimately be mine one day, but those pictures were trouble.
Complaining of a stomach ache I went to my room and lay down on the bed. After some time, the laughter from the dining table creating an ominous contrast with my visions of eternal frostiness, my stomach really started aching. I began to feel sorry for myself. Sure I had been messing around with things I wasn’t supposed to, but where were my parents as their only child writhed in agony on her narrow, uncomfortable bed? What if I died from my stomach ache? I bet they’d feel really stupid then. The laughter stopped, then resumed again further off.
I got up and decided to go get myself a glass of water. Normally I would yell for Abba to get one for me, but I
didn’t want to disturb their cozy little party. When I opened the door, the dinner dishes were still strewn around the dining table. This was unusual, my mother kept a neat house. Ammi Abba were nowhere to be seen, the door to their bedroom was half-open. I peeked around the side.
Ammi sat before the three-quarter mirror on the brocade-covered stool that went with it. Her jet hair open, falling almost to her waist. Abba stood behind her, looking at her eyes twinkling at him in the mirror as he brushed her hair. They weren’t the brisk, business-like strokes that my hair was subjected to when being tamed by a parent, but gentle, languid ones. It’ll take him forever if he’s going to be that slow about it, I thought frowning, brushing her hair like that while I die of stomach ache.
I realized my mother was looking at me in the mirror.
‘Aslam,’ she raised her eyes to his again, ‘close the door, will you. There’s a draft in the room.’
I fled back to my room before he got to the door, feeling oddly guilty, like I had stumbled upon not one but two dangerous secrets in one day. I felt so nervous I forgot all about putting the postcards and photograph back in their place.
Abba came to my room later that night. I pretended to be asleep, keeping my eyes tightly shut despite the light spilling in from the open door. Abba used it to make his way around my room, straightening the clothes hung haphazardly from the back of the chair, arranging the books in a neat pile. He paused to admire my eraser collection, displayed proudly on a small table next to my desk. There were erasers of different shapes and sizes, squares, triangles, flowers, cars, trains, even a cricket bat. The fancy ones were never very effective, if God forbid you had to use one, but I liked to collect them anyway. My collection had flourished under my father’s patronage, and Chotay Mamu had contributed an eraser or two as well. Ammi only bought me a new eraser when I had done something she felt deserved a reward. The flower was from her. ‘Girly gifts for little girls,’ she had said, frowning at the airplane, ‘from someone who doesn’t want you to grow up to be an air hostess.’
Abba finally came and sat next to me on the bed.
‘I know you’re awake Ashoo.’
I squeezed my eyelids even more tightly shut.
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