‘You’d risk the wrath of God for me?’
‘Need you ask that?’
She grumbled about silly kafirs, but I could tell by her tone she was pleased. She generally was in those days, the fatigue and depression that had enveloped her when she brought Adil back seemed to be lifting. She smiled and talked like she used to sometimes, not very often yet, but it was the first sign that my mother wasn’t lost to me, just temporarily displaced, knocked out of her standard orbit by the trauma of childbirth. Some evenings, when Abba was home in time for us all to eat together she would wobble to the dining table and sit in her old place, still not putting Adil down but tucking into the food with her free hand. Nasreen would put the food and water jug on the table and retire to the kitchen, as she had been instructed to. Ammi was more tolerant of the girl but it was obvious she would have much preferred her not being around. Then again, that was probably why Nasreen had become so capable of doing all the work, she knew the slightest mistake would give ammunition to the twin cannons trained on her whenever they were in the same room, and being busy with work all the time kept her out of their sights. There was something wrong between the two of them, some storm brewing, but I couldn’t for the life of me figure out what it was.
When Ammi began to let me help her with Adil, she wouldn’t let Nasreen touch him, I lost interest in everything else. He was so small, so warm, and so needy, the moment I touched him all my resentment vanished. I began eating, sleeping and dreaming babies. What with Ammi getting better, and Abba happy, and someone else worrying about the menu, plus Adil, I was as content as I had ever been. There was no room for improvement in my life. When the crash came, it totally blindsided me.
PYASI ANKHAIN
BACK OF RICKSHAW
~
That night I was woken by the sound of the night watchman’s whistle shrieking over and over again. That was the signal for thief, murderer, robber, etc. I knew that and I bolted upright, hissing ‘Nasreen’ into the darkness, wanting to share the excitement. But there was no answer and I knew she must be helping Abba again. Maybe he could take us both outside into the road so we could see what was happening? I swung my legs over and onto the floor and padded out, not turning on any lights because I didn’t want to wake Ammi. But she was already awake.
I saw her as I got closer to the kitchen door. She was standing petrified in the doorway, her back to me. There was something about the line of her shoulders, a rigidity, a tension that frightened me. Her arms hung by her sides, I was seeing her without Adil attached after weeks, was that what was wrong? Had something happened to Adil? I slid closer, till I was standing next to her and looked up at her face but she didn’t seem to see me. Her eyes were fixed ahead of her on something in the kitchen. Her nostrils flared slightly and I knew she was breathing. For a second I thought she had been frozen, rendered immobile by some witches’ spell. I followed her gaze, trying to see through her eyes.
Headlights from a passing car, a police car perhaps, played across the back of the kitchen wall and made things leap out at us. In one corner, the fridge and the water cooler on the stool. In another, the sink and drying board with the dishes still on it. Ammi would be furious with Nasreen in the morning, she had told her lizards crept across plates at night and everything should be put into the cabinets. In the third, the glass-fronted sideboard that held all the crockery, the plastic, the steel, the china. In the last corner of the room, propped against the marble top table on which dough was kneaded, sweets prepared and dishes cooled before serving were Nasreen and Abba.
BURGER FAMILY
LOCAL LINGO FOR NUCLEAR FAMILY
~
They were entwined like creeper and wall, like worms burrowing into each other, oblivious to the swathe of light that drenched them, but they heard Ammi shriek when I slipped my hand into hers. I had done it out of sympathy because I had seen through her eyes and knew that there was something wrong with this picture, but I scared her. She hadn’t known I was there. Nasreen and Abba hadn’t known she was there. Now we were all present and accounted for, except for Adil. Then we heard him cry out, a high-pitched, inarticulate wail as if he felt part of him missing.
Ammi hesitated for a second, unable to tear her eyes from the couple by the table, straightening their clothes, both unable to meet her gaze. Then she turned and headed for her room, dragging me with her. She locked the door behind her and took me to bed with her and Adil, one on either side. She stroked my hair with a faraway look in her eyes and ignored the timid knock on the door, the rattle of the handle turning, the soft whisper of ‘Jahan, Jahan’. Eventually, I fell asleep.
Without thought I fell back into the blackness.
JEETAYGA BHAI JEETAYGA,
KOI NA KOI TO JEETAYGA
SLOGAN CHANTED BY AUDIENCE DURING LAST
WORLD CUP MATCH IN PAKISTAN
~
I was no longer in intensive care. I had been shifted while I wallowed in my memories to some other room. A private room in a private ward by the looks of it. There was another bed on my right but it was empty.
My mother was by my bedside, her lips moving as she bent over my right hand, holding it tight with one of her own as the other caressed her prayer beads. They had let her back in then? But not without supervision, a male nurse leaned against the wall right behind her, primed for another attack on the hapless patient. Let her be, I wanted to tell him, if she really wanted to kill me she would have done it years ago. It was a struggle even to mentally string my words together though. This time I had had to thrash hard to break the scum on the pool of my consciousness and emerge into the here and now. And there was a pixilated quality to my vision, as if someone had drawn a strip of gauze over my eyes. The clarity of my earlier sight was gone. Was the end near? Could these be my final hours before darkness pulled me under for good? It seemed only fitting I should spend them with my mother.
She saw me in. She would see me out. There was no one else. Nothing else to show for my life. Father gone. Brother, well, brother twit. Close yes, but still a twit, didn’t want to spend my last hours listening to Farah-inspired tripe. Mamu and Mumani, there wasn’t a lot to say there. Strong, deep feelings but few words, perhaps the most typical Pakistani relationship of all. And that was it, that was all I had accomplished, relationships that were handed to me from the moment of my birth. Family. Obligation. Duty. I had accomplished no lasting others. The few friends I had met along the road were just that, friends. Nothing sacred. Nothing meaningful, just mutual recognition of social, verbal compatibility extended into a shield against loneliness.
My best friend, dead in the prime of her life. Suicide. An early exit from a battle she felt she couldn’t win. I had outlasted her by several years, but natural selection might just win in the end. Cull the weak. Keep the strong. Strong enough to earn, commute, persist, survive, but too unmoved by the search for happiness to venture in any real sense beyond the bonds of family.
It wasn’t going to happen anyway because happiness was a busy entity. It had places to go, other people to see, you had to reach out and grab it as it swerved past, not wave amiably, secure in the false knowledge that your turn would come. It wouldn’t. We lived in a city. We should have known that.
All of us, Ammi, Abba, Kulsoom, Omar, myself, we should have read the writing on the wall. Not the bits about ‘Qazi is coming’, and ‘it’s very hard to find a virgin’, or ‘Death to America’ or ‘Every sister has a bhai, Altaf Bhai’, or ‘Life Sux’. The other bits. The bigger bits. The bits that dominated; the empty spaces. The growing distance between words and people, friends and lovers. Poverty. Disease. War. Hunger. Pain. Loneliness. They were winning. We were wrong to believe because they couldn’t touch us, they couldn’t control us. We’d all made a colossal mistake. For all our lives spent in a human warren we had existed in a near total alienation from each other. We had lived in concrete shells, as removed from the rest of the world as the most isolated village. Work. Home. Work. Friends. Home. Work.
I felt a sigh building, a shudder in the place my spine should be. Was it the death rattle? Would I really die with my mother, leave without even a word, a nudge, a wink to the only person who had given me peace, however fleeting, my entire adult life? Saad, I thought, I wish I had had time to tell you to get the red car.
This time I let go myself and dived back under, not waiting to be pulled. Whatever subconscious crap I had to wade through before reaching the finish line, I was ready. This waiting was killing me.
VOTE 4 BOOK
ELECTION CAMPAIGN SLOGAN FOR INDEPENDENT CANDIDATE.
~
The morning after we discovered Nasreen ‘helping’ Abba in the kitchen, our lives changed. Ammi opened the door in the morning to find a silent house empty of outsiders, containing only her belongings, her rooms, and one shamefaced husband sitting on the floor outside. She didn’t say a word to him, just walked by with Adil in her arms and me in her trail and went into the kitchen, where she began making breakfast. Abba followed us in and lurked, finally plucking up the courage to speak.
‘Aren’t you at least going to talk to me?’
‘Not now, hand me that pan,’ she sounded quite normal.
‘Here, let me do that,’ he tried to take over.
‘Oh no, no. You mustn’t. It’s my work after all, so I should do it.’
He kept silent.
‘Can’t go shirking my wifely duties. That would just be wrong. Marry the man, bear his children, raise his children, keep him happy. That’s the deal, isn’t it? Cook his food, clean his house, iron his clothes, it’s all part of the package. Don’t want anyone saying I didn’t keep my end of the bargain.’
Why did she sound so cheerful?
‘Jahan,’ he tried again but couldn’t seem to get past her name, as if it was stuck in his throat like a half-chewed chicken neck.
‘Don’t you have to get ready? Aren’t you going to work? Isn’t work important? Shouldn’t you do it well so you can take care of us all?’
He went. They didn’t say another word to each other. Not for a long time. They didn’t say much to me either. Or Adil. Of course, it made little difference to his life, but to me it was like living in a vacuum. No one would speak. If I spoke no one would reply. Or if they did, they were always monosyllabic. Abba took to coming home as late as possible and sleeping on the sofa. Once I asked him if he wanted to come and sleep on my floor like Nasreen used to do and he burst into tears. Frightened, I ran for Ammi but she only came to the door and looked at him before pulling me back in with her and getting me to help her change Adil. I was doing that more and more, helping with Adil, and she was sinking into a languid torpor.
She stopped cleaning all the time and a fine layer of dust settled over everything. When I got bored with writing my name on all the dust-covered surfaces in the house, I took a duster and cleaned them all. No one noticed. I began to do it every day. Ammi said ‘thank you’ brusquely once and never picked up a duster again. She began to avoid cooking again. One meal would be stretched into three till I got sick of eating the same thing three times in a row and taught myself how to make some simple food. I began adding to the evening meal she cooked. Again there was no acknowledgement.
I was also doing my schoolwork, hoping they cared how I did even if they weren’t showing it at that point in time. The maasi who came in to sweep and mop the kitchen and wash clothes (outside work only), no other woman had entered the house proper since Nasreen left, was coaxed by Abba into ironing and washing the dishes as well.
‘You have so much to do already,’ he said when I objected, saying I wanted to do it, ‘till Ammi gets better, focus on your schoolwork.’
‘Yes Ayesha,’ Ammi joined in, her first words in hours, ‘focus on your schoolwork. It’s very important because if you’re well educated, bad things will never happen to you.’
The next week Adil fell sick. The paediatrician said he was weak and thin and wasn’t getting enough nourishment. Adil was put on formula as well as Ammi’s milk. He guzzled umpteen bottles a day and grew as soft as a frog’s underbelly. Ammi didn’t seem to notice, she’d button him into clothes that were now a size too small. Details seemed beyond her comprehension, as did conversation. Adil took to crying as he lay in her arms, she was a study in limpness, he was bored and cranky, I began taking him out of her arms and putting him on a mat close by, playing with him in between homework and mad dashes to the kitchen. Abba made an SOS call one day, and Chotay Mamu appeared to broach the subject of getting a new maid with Ammi.
‘Jahan Apa …,’ Mamu cleared his throat to get her attention but she wouldn’t even look at him. She was staring at Adil on the rug, chuckling and kicking his legs as I dangled a paper bird on a string above him.
‘Apa,’ Mamu still got zero response so he barged right into it, ‘for Ayesha’s sake you should get another maid, the girl’s schoolwork is suffering.’
‘It doesn’t matter,’ she said lazily, her eyes still on Adil.
‘What doesn’t matter?’
‘Her schoolwork.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘What is she going to do with her education when she grows up?’ Ammi’s tone was so casual, so unconcerned, it seemed she was talking about the difference between cauliflower and cabbage. The words themselves were strange, hard to understand, falling as they did from the lips of one who said education was the best present you could give a girl, far better than jewellery or clothes at any rate.
‘Now Apa, I don’t want to debate this with you,’ Mamu knew he couldn’t even if he wanted to. She had always been the articulate one, he the bumbling fool to her rapier wit, at least that’s the way it had been before, ‘you are not yourself. I know you don’t mean it.’
She didn’t bother replying this time.
‘You and Ayesha need some help right now so maybe a daytime maid, just someone to help around the house and with the baby till Aslam comes home. I can arrange one if you agree.’
‘What does it matter whether I agree or disagree?’
‘Fine. I’ll arrange one then.’
‘Why don’t you ask my husband to arrange one? He did last time, you know. Very capable girl. Took very good care of all of us.’
There was an awkward silence. Mamu started staring at the bird too. Did he know?
‘What was her name?’ Ammi mused aloud, ‘Do you know her name Najam?’
Mamu mumbled a ‘no’ and began shuffling his feet. If he had been lying on his back on the rug, he and Adil would have made quite a pair.
‘What was her name Ayesha?’
‘Nasreen, Ammi, her name was Nasreen.’
‘What an ordinary name,’ Ammi didn’t say anything for the rest of the day, just lay on the sofa. She might have been crying, but it was hard to tell with Ammi, she had become one of those stealth weepers, tears would trundle down the concourse of her cheeks without sound.
Mamu left shortly afterwards. I waited next to her till Abba got home and I could get him to watch Adil before running to my room. I had wanted to go to the bathroom for hours, but it didn’t feel right to leave Ammi.
KABHI HUM KHOOBSURAT THAY, KITABON
MAIN BASI KHUSBOO KAI MANIND
LYRICS OF GHAZAL BY AHMED SHAMIM
~
Two days later we had a new maid and I got some time to breathe. Bua was old, practically a crone from a fairytale, but she seemed to know what she was doing. She did the cooking for the day in the early morning so she was free to spend the rest of the time looking after Adil and tending to Ammi, who seemed to have become a docile, three-year-old child. She changed when fresh clothes were laid out for her, ate when food was put in front of her, I began to wonder how she took a bath. Did Bua bathe her? I didn’t know, because Bua began to shoo me out of the house whenever I had some free time.
‘Go,’ she would practically push me out the door, ‘be a child.’
‘But I want to stay with Ammi.’
‘There’ll be time enough for that later
! Why do you want to be a grandmother at your age? Go and play with other children.’
I went reluctantly but soon I was fully re-assimilated into the group of kids I used to play with, and after a while the outside world again became more seductive than the inside.
Once there was some distance between Ammi and I, I began to realize how different she was from other mothers. She had always been different, true, but it had been a good kind of different, prettier, taller, smarter, funnier, braver. Now she was nothing at all, a dead battery. She could animate nothing, not even herself. What was happening to my mother?
I asked Abba more than once when she was going to get better, what was wrong with her in the first place, etc., but he didn’t know either. I asked Mamu during one of his increasingly frequent visits and he just hemmed and hawed, but he insisted Abba accompany him to the gate that night. The next day Abba came home early, Mamu stayed with Adil and I, and Ammi was taken to the doctor.
When they got home Ammi was crying. Her eyes were red and swollen like she had been crying for a while. She hobbled into her room and immediately lay down on the bed. Mamu put Adil next to her but she turned away from him. Abba rushed to prepare another bottle for the now squalling baby, and Mamu told me gently but firmly that it was time for me to go to bed. I went, but didn’t sleep. I left my door slightly ajar, and later when both Ammi and Adil had fallen silent, and Abba and Mamu whispered to each other outside her door, I was listening.
‘What did the doctor say?’
‘He said she was fine.’
‘Fine? She can hardly walk.’
‘He examined her thoroughly and he said physically there was nothing wrong with her. She was healthier than most women, in fact.’
‘But there’s obviously something wrong with her!’
‘I told him what she was like at home but he said there was no medical reason for it. He asked me if we were having any problems of any sort that would make her upset.’
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