‘Learned people told us.’
‘How did they know?’
‘They studied what He said and they decided what He would have said if He hadn’t been busy laying down the rules for more important things.’
‘These learned men …,’ I thought hard, this was confusing.
‘Yes?’
‘Do they wear pants?’
‘I don’t know. Probably not.’
‘But people listen to them anyway.’
‘Yes. Most people do.’
‘Then it doesn’t matter what Abba wears, does it?’
Ammi sighed, ‘Some would say, no it doesn’t.’
‘Then why was he upset that he had to wear shalwar kameez?’
‘Tell you what, why don’t you ask him when he gets home?’
‘I will,’ I nodded, disappointed. It was so hard to get a straight answer out of anyone in this house. If Adil could talk, I was sure he would lead me around in circles too.
But I never did ask Abba about the theory of panting, because when he came home he wasn’t alone. And when I saw the girl with him, all thoughts of pant vs. shalwar went right out of my head.
She was tall, as tall as Ammi, but all resemblance ended there. Where Ammi was fair and angular (or had been anyway), this girl was dark and curvaceous. A voluminous dupatta covered her head and was pulled across her body but it was still evident she had huge breasts. In fact, the tightly pulled dupatta that nipped in the waist as it passed behind her back seemed to emphasize rather than diminish their size. It was as if someone had kicked two footballs so hard in her direction they had been embedded in her chest. I was surprised she didn’t fall forwards, and that she didn’t have to lean back as she walked. But she didn’t. Trotting along behind Abba as he crossed the lounge to go into Ammi’s room, she seemed perfectly balanced. Maybe they were lighter than they looked? I was staring, and she gave me a knowing smirk as she went into Ammi’s room after my father.
‘Jahan,’ I heard him, heard the honeyed tone in his voice, ‘I have a surprise for you.’
There was a pause as Ammi drank in the surprise.
‘Who is this?’ her tone was neutral. Also familiar. Prelude to darkness, generally.
‘Well, since it’s been four days and you haven’t been able to find anyone I thought I would help you out by asking my colleagues to recommend someone.’
‘Your colleagues do a lot of hiring and firing in the domestic department, do they?’
‘That’s more their wives’ department, but I do have one co-worker who isn’t married, lives alone. He’s always had help to run his house, of course. Can’t be expected to do it himself now, can he, on top of the crazy hours we work.’
‘Of course not,’ the blandness would be followed by spicy flavour. I could feel it in the air.
‘So he brought her along today. Her sister works for him. He says she’s very good.’
‘I’m sure she is.’
‘She can cook, wash, clean, even iron! You won’t have to worry about a thing.’
‘Very thoughtful of you. How lucky I am to have such a considerate husband,’ now she sounded pleased, I had read her wrong. Generally when she went all quiet and polite it was a sign trouble was brewing, maybe Adil was doing strange things to her mind, erasing the Ammi I knew. I so wanted to bite down on his nose till he cried.
‘The best thing is …’
‘There’s more?’ Ammi cut in, ‘I don’t know if I can handle all the good news all at once.’
‘The best thing is she’s agreed to live in.’
‘Where will she live?’
‘Here, of course, Jahan. I just told you.’
‘Here where? We have no servant quarter.’
‘Let’s not do this servant master talk dear. I’ve told her we’ll treat her like a member of the family. It’ll make her want to work better. I mean, I don’t like to work if someone makes me feel inferior.’
‘It isn’t about inferior. It’s about limits.’
‘And we’ll have those, of course. You can set them.’
‘Where will she sleep then, since you’ve obviously given this a lot of thought.’
‘Ayesha’s room.’
I gasped in horror. My room? My palace? My wide-open space ruined by the addition of a mountain range with peaks and valleys?
‘On the floor, of course,’ Abba added, ‘I’ll give her a pillow and some bedding.’
‘Right.’
‘And …’
Ammi sighed, ‘And?’
‘She can start immediately. Tomorrow, rather, because today is already over. I’ll go and find her bedding and settle her in. You can talk to her about duty and stuff.’
‘Oh I will.’
Abba came out and disappeared in the direction of the small storage space where the trunks, heavy blanket and assorted junk were kept.
‘Abba!’ I tried to stop him, to register my protest at having to share my room, but he brushed me off.
‘Not now Ayesha,’ he whizzed by, ‘I’m doing important work for your mother.’
Hurt, I went into my mother’s room and clambered onto her bed to curl up around her feet. She moved one to give me more space. Taking it as an opening, I moved further up her body till the three of us, Adil, Ammi and myself, were a compact heap. A body and three heads. Across the room, the big breasts with a face looked at her feet and fidgeted uneasily. The silence dragged on.
‘What’s your name?’ Ammi finally spoke. Again, her voice was without inflection.
‘Nasreen,’ came the sullen reply. She wasn’t meeting Ammi’s level gaze.
‘Nasreen. How old are you?’
‘I don’t know. We don’t have these things where I come from.’
‘Where do you come from?’
‘Punjab.’
‘Punjab is a large place.’
She grinned, as if my mother had said something funny.
‘What’s the nearest big city?’
‘Faisalabad.’
‘Ah. When did you get to Karachi?’
‘Two, maybe three years.’
‘Have you worked before?’
‘Yes. In a big house.’
‘What did you do there?’
‘Swept. Mopped. Dusted.’
‘Why did you leave that job?’
Again, Nasreen’s feet began a little jig, ‘They weren’t paying enough.’
‘Can you cook?’
‘Yes.’
‘What can you cook?’ ‘Normal food. Like people eat at home.’
‘Iron?’
She nodded, but again her feet got unusually agitated. Ammi smiled gently.
‘We’ll have to teach you then.’
‘I can iron.’
‘We’ll see. Go sit outside the door till Sahib comes to show you where you’ll sleep. On the floor. Don’t touch anything! And close the door behind you.’
When she was gone, Ammi burst into tears. I didn’t know why. She wouldn’t be consoled. I could only wipe her tears and shush, shush like she used to do for me. A minute later, she stopped crying and smiled gamely at me.
‘Well Ayesha, it’s no longer just the three of us at home alone. Now you’ll have someone to play with, huh?’
I nodded, but I was doubtful. She seemed to me to be a little too big to play. Plus there was the problem of the breasts. Whatever she did, I couldn’t conceive of them not getting in the way.
‘Ayesha, you know I can’t move around much, at least not yet, so I need you to keep an eye on her for me. Watch her.’
‘All the time?’
‘When you can. If you see her stealing or burning clothes,’ she cleared her throat, ‘anything that’s wrong, you come straight and tell me. Now go make sure your father hasn’t locked himself in that old closet.The lock is tricky.’
He had locked himself in. And he hadn’t even banged on the door or called for help. When I let him out and he glanced in the direction of monster mammeries I understood why; he didn’t
want to look stupid in front of her.
DON’T JEALOUS!
BACK OF PICK UP
~
That first night, Nasreen and I didn’t get much sleep. She spread her bedding on the floor next to my table as I clambered into my single bed and pulled the coverlet up to my chin. Did she lie on the floor because there was no room in my bed or because she was our servant and that was her place? I didn’t know. I knew only that the thought of those two watermelons pressing into my back, my front, anywhere on my person, scared me. Ammi’s chest was home, warmth, comfort. Nasreen’s was alien, uncharted, dangerous, like a (large) bit of the outside world had invaded our house.
Nasreen was beginning to toss and turn, adjust her thin pillow, when Abba came in. He sometimes came in to wish me goodnight, but I had expected him to give it a miss since I wasn’t alone. Our goodnights were a private ritual, not even shared with Ammi, and certainly not to be shared by an alien with globular antennae on her chest. Come in he did, though, and settled onto the side of my bed as always, only one glance sideways betraying he was aware of the girl on the floor.
‘Your mother says you’re being a big help to her.’
‘I wish I was older.’
If I were old enough to cook and clean and not have to go to school, I could have made life easier for Ammi.
‘You will be soon. And you already do more than we could hope for. In fact, I hope you haven’t been wasting time pottering around the kitchen when you’re supposed to be doing your homework.’
Affronted, I sputtered out a reluctant no. How could he even ask me that? Sure I used to do my homework at the table with my mother, like a baby, but everyone knew I was handling it on my own now, like a big girl. Didn’t they? I had certainly pointed it out often enough. I said as much, and Abba beat a hasty retreat, leaning over for a perfunctory kiss before backing out of the door. He didn’t even observe the most important part of our bedtime ritual, the singing of the baldie song.
‘Ganju Patel?’ I whispered hopefully towards the light, but the door had already closed behind him, leaving me in the dark. The silence was broken by muffled sobbing. Nasreen was crying. I thought of whether I should try to comfort her but decided against it. It was her fault my father hadn’t been himself. When the sobs didn’t stop and I realized the sniffing might keep me up all night I wanted to yell ‘can’t you at least cry into your pillow?’ but didn’t. She would have to roll onto her stomach for that, and the watermelons of doom probably wouldn’t let her.
Besides, I didn’t like her.
DHOTI MEIN DO MOTI
BACK OF RICKSHAW
~
Days passed and we settled back into an almost pre-Adil routine. I left for school after the breakfast Nasreen had prepared for me and brushed my hair. I wouldn’t let her braid it though, that was Ammi’s ritual. I would be back by lunchtime and Nasreen would have food ready for me, kept warm on the stove, served directly onto my plate. It wasn’t very good food, certainly nothing like Ammi used to make, but it was palatable enough. And she was actually quite good at daal chawal, my favourite, and what with that and the end of the night crying, I was beginning to warm up to her. The next time she did burst into tears, after getting curt instructions from my mother on how to make suji ka halwa the way I liked it, I actually asked her what was wrong.
‘I miss my mother,’ she said simply, lifting her kameez to wipe her eyes and exposing a patch of taut, earth-brown stomach, ‘that’s all.’
If Ammi with the avowed wisdom of adulthood understood why Nasreen was sometimes red-eyed and sullen, she certainly gave no indication of it. I would have expected my mother to be warmer, kinder, more nurturing towards any child in the house, but maybe she just didn’t see Nasreen as a child. She was, after all, doing adult work. And if adulthood meant all the responsibility of an old person plus the insecurities of the young, I was half-glad I was still a child. I began to feel sorry for Nasreen, and when her workload increased by her having to work at night I was tempted to offer to help. Whatever Abba was getting her to help him with in the middle of the night, I was sure I could handle too.
It might have been a routine for them for days or even weeks, I had begun sleeping soundly again once Nasreen stopped crying after dark, but I wasn’t aware of it till an engine backfiring in the road outside jolted me awake one night.
‘Nasreen?’ I said into the dark, wondering if she had heard it too. Had it really been an engine, or was it a thief? The hathora monster?
It was winter, the stone floor collected the chill and when there was no reply to my whispers of ‘Nasreen’, at first I thought Nasreen had gone to get another blanket. I got up and went to the door, calling into the dark lounge.
‘Here, I am coming, don’t yell like that,’ came the reply, and I saw movement by the deep shadow that indicated the kitchen door. She loomed towards me in the dark.
‘What are you doing?’ I asked.
‘What are you doing?’ she fired back, ‘Why aren’t you asleep?’
‘I heard a loud noise. Did you hear it too?’
‘A loud noise?’ she was next to me now, and putting a hand on my shoulder guided me back into the room, ‘yes, I heard it too, that’s what I went to check.’
‘How did you move so quickly? I thought you must have gone for another blanket because it’s so cold.’
‘I had gone for another blanket, then I heard the noise so I went to the kitchen to check.’
There was a thud from outside the door, followed by a muffled curse.
‘Who’s that?’ I cried.
‘No one, no one, don’t worry,’ Nasreen said soothingly.
‘No, I heard it clearly, there’s someone outside. We have to tell my father,’ I was agitated, playground stories of home invasion circling my head like cautious vultures.
‘Don’t worry,’ she tried again, ‘it’s nothing.’
There was another thud. Fainter this time, but definitely there. I shot for the door but Nasreen grabbed me in the dark. Her grip was strong.
‘Let me go,’ I hissed.
‘Be quiet you silly girl. It’s nothing.’
‘There’s someone out there and we have to tell Abba.’
‘It is your father, Ayesha, you don’t have to worry about burglars.’
‘What would my father be doing up at night?’
‘He was working on something.’
‘Did you see him when you went for the blanket?’
‘Yes. That’s why I went to the kitchen, to make him some tea to help him.’
‘I thought you went to check on the noise?’
‘It all happened together.’
‘Oh,’ this was getting very confusing, ‘what was he working on?’
‘I don’t know. Papers.’
‘Ah, office work,’ I nodded sagely. Office work I understood. Numbers. Papers. Staring. Irritation.
‘Yes, office work. He wasn’t finished so I made him some tea.’
‘Yes, sometimes he feels sleepy but he has to work so he drinks lots of tea to keep him awake.’
‘Exactly. But you mustn’t tell your mother.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because she would worry about him staying up so late. She’d be scared he’s working so hard.’
She would be, too.
‘Okay,’ the agreement was made, ‘just promise me you’ll take care of him if he needs anything.’
‘I will,’ she smiled. Her teeth glowed in the moonlight from the open window.
LARAKA TAYYARA
BACK OF RICKSHAW
~
The next night I woke up again, conscious only that something was amiss.
‘Nasreen?’ but there was no answer. I called into the corridor again and she appeared after a minute, pulling me into the room again.
‘What?’
‘What are you doing?’
‘I’m helping your father.’
‘Can I have some tea too?’
Sometimes I would
have a little. Ammi said it was never too early to drink tea.
‘I’ll have to make it,’ she grumbled.’
‘Aren’t you making it for Abba?’
‘No.’
‘Then how are you helping him?’
‘I’m holding papers. He has to arrange them in a certain order and I’m helping him keep track.’
‘I can help too then.’
‘No you can’t.’
‘Why not? I can even count, you can’t.’
‘It’s not by number.’
‘Then what is it by?’
‘Ayesha Bibi, he said to tell you to please go back to sleep and let us work in peace. He doesn’t have time for your demands right now.’
I got back into bed and turned my back to her. The door closed. She didn’t appear on the other side to lie down. That night I was the one sniffing, but when she got back she couldn’t have known because I was asleep by then.
The late night work meetings continued to happen about thrice a week, possibly more often, but I had gone back to sleeping through most nights after Abba rebuffed my attempts to help him by proxy. Delivered through Nasreen, it seemed an even bigger betrayal. Her over me. I was chilly to him during the day as well, when I saw him, but he didn’t seem to notice. Ammi was getting visibly stronger, thanks mainly to Nasreen’s help, and in the evenings Abba would flutter around her like a particularly determined mosquito. No amount of swatting, and there was some, would drive him away.
‘Uff, what is wrong with you?’ I heard Ammi cry out in exasperation one evening. There was a nip in the air, and Abba had swaddled her and Adil in so many blankets they looked like a two-headed talking quilt.
‘You should be warm.’
‘There’s warm and there’s hot. And I’m feeling hot. Can you please at least remove this horse blanket?’
‘It’s not a horse blanket, it’s an army issue, guaranteed comfort even on the battlefield.’
‘Yes, well this isn’t a battlefield and we’re not soldiers and Adil here is never going to be one either, so please remove it before we melt and you have to pour us into a glass and keep it on a shelf.’
‘It would be the highest shelf in the house.’
‘Higher even than the Quran?’
‘Maybe right next to it, perhaps even a quarter centimetre higher.’
Tunnel Vision Page 21