Mama had taught us the opening lines of the first sura of the Qur’an to say to ourselves as our plane took off, and I had been practicing it at night in preparation for this journey. As I heard the first rumbles of the jets, I held Mama’s hand, shutting my eyes tight. I repeated:
La ill ah ha ill lil lah, Mohamedur Rasul-illah
In the name of Allah, the merciful and compassionate God.
Praise belongs to God, the Lord of the worlds,
He the merciful, the compassionate,
He, the ruler of the day of judgment
Thee we serve and Thee we ask for help
Guide us in the right path,
The path of those Thou hast blessed
Not of those Thou art wroth with; nor of those who err.
Sixteen hours later, we arrived in Pakistan in the hazy light of dawn. The crew burst open the doors of our 747 to receive those heady scents of arrival: jasmine flowers, gasoline, burning trash, and cow dung. The heat, even at this early hour, seeped into the cabin almost instantly. On subsequent trips I would come to think of these first sensations of touching down in Pakistan as one united feeling, the pungent smell of difference, the awareness that I had entered a new world, one with a separate set of laws. Nana handed us kurtas to change into, tucking our Western clothes into her carry-on luggage, and our transformation from half-Pakistani American children to half-American Pakistani children was complete.
Outside the airport, I held Cassim’s hand to lead him through the throng of child beggars, many our age or younger. As our uncles supervised the loading of our luggage into a minivan, a little girl about my size looked at me through the glass window that separated us, tapping her hand against the glass. I had been told that we were not supposed to give children money, because it went right back into the pockets of the brokers who ran the begging operation. Instead, we were instructed to give to people we knew, or to donate to a local charity before we left the country. But I had in my miniature purse the Pakistani rupees I had collected from my parents’ dressing table, and my hand itched to give them to the girl. Furtively, I rolled down my window and slipped her a few coins, trying to do so unnoticed by Mama and Nana in the front seat. When I watched the girl run away and hide behind another car to count the money, I thought suddenly of my classroom back home, the clean lines and order of my school hallways. I thought about how on my trips to Pakistan I had seen and experienced things that my classmates never had, things that they would barely understand or appreciate. This realization gave me a feeling of separation. I thought to myself, “Since half of me is from here, from Karachi, does this mean half of me is not from there, from Chestnut Hill?” After we drove out of the airport, I watched the city skid by my window and felt dizzy with the rush of images: huts, scooters, billboards, Technicolor trucks. This moment—the flash of white cotton as the girl disappeared, colliding with the image of my third-grade classroom—stays with me, even now, a shard of mirror under my feet, refracting light between the years that separate me and that day.
When we reached Siddiqi House, I had the same thought that I did every time we entered the driveway: This is Mama’s house, from when she was a little girl like me. The house was impossibly tall, a soft yellow, with “Siddiqi House” emblazoned across the top and “1948,” the year my grandfather built it, inscribed on the gate. When we passed through its front doors, Mama ceased to be just our mother and became so many other things— older sister, younger sister, superstar, foreign-returned, rebel, and entertainer. It seemed at these times as if Mama were really on loan to us in America, a kind of special vacation from her real home, in Pakistan. Once inside Siddiqi House, Nana slipped into the fabric of the place and seemed to disappear within it; whereas in our house in Chestnut Hill she had authority, here she was one quiet part of a large dysfunctional unit.
I tried desperately to stay awake. I wanted to see my cousins, whom I hadn’t seen in the two years since I was last here. They must be so tall now, I thought. But I couldn’t seem to stay up. Before I could protest, Mama and Nana were tucking Cassim and me into low cots, windows hung with dark cloth, jet lag settling on us like a heavy weight we couldn’t bring ourselves to lift.
I woke up at five the next morning, startled by the call to prayer and disoriented. I ran to the edge of the room and looked out the window, staring at two large sand-colored dogs wrestling in the garden. I’m in Siddiqi House, I reminded myself. We are ten and a half hours ahead of home, in a place with different rules. The dogs belonged to Farida Khala, my mother’s half sister. Her babies, she called them, because she didn’t have any of her own. “Bechari,” people said under their breath about Farida Khala, “poor thing.” I recall a thick sadness to her that I didn’t understand; I remember that the rolls of her stomach smelled like talc and sour milk. Her older husband, Uncle Hameed, spent the afternoons worrying a well-worn path between the television set and his prayer mat on the veranda. Last time we were here, when Cassim was three and I was six, Farida Khala took care of my brother the whole time, carrying him everywhere on her hip. This delighted Mama and Nana, who were happy to have free hands. Two days before we were due to leave, Farida Khala asked my mother to leave Cassim behind. “You’re young,” I heard her say in the sitting room while Uncle Hameed napped nearby. “You can have another child. I can’t.”
Through the curtain that separated our beds, I heard my mother and father talking all that night: “It’s the custom if one sister can’t have a child,” she explained, “but I can’t do it.” I heard my mother crying, telling my father, over and over, “I can’t bear to leave him.”
I don’t remember the words my father used to comfort her. I imagine now that he might have told her that we were going home the next day, home to Boston. Perhaps Mama comforted herself with the idea that she was leaving one home, its customs suddenly, cruelly unfamiliar to her, for another one, where her children and her mother and her husband were hers alone. But this is the invention of adulthood.
THE COMING DAYS were a rush of unfamiliar aunts and uncles, kissing strange cheeks, trying to remember to say “As-salaam aleikum” (God be with you) when we greeted someone new, and “Walaikum asalaam” (and also with you) when the person greeted us back.
We went to see Mama’s childhood tailor, Master Sahib. His shop was on the other side of town, a closet-sized room down a winding alleyway hung with brightly colored plastic buckets. My mother presented me to him—a tiny, white-haired man dressed in white cotton with a measuring tape hung loosely around his neck—pushing me in front of her to show me off.
“As-salaam aleikum, Master Sahib,” I said.
He threw his hands in the air and exclaimed, “Mashallah!” and I saw tears welling up in his eyes.
“Why is he crying, Mama?” I asked.
“Master Sahib has made all of my clothes all my life, from when I was small like you. Now he’ll make yours, too.”
She told me that Master Sahib was one of the people my grandfather helped to bring from India during Partition. The tailor, the cooks, the drivers, the wedding photographer, the jeweler—in the course of a week it seemed that everyone we met had some kind of connection to my grandfather.
“Did your father have a lot of friends?” I asked Mama.
“My father,” she said, grandly, “was friends with everyone in Karachi.”
BARI AMMA AND CHOTI AMMA were my other two grandmothers, my grandfather’s elder wives. Bari Amma, my grandfather’s first wife, spent all day in a tiny dark room, with a white dupatta on her head, praying. She was a tiny, bowed creature, the strands of her white hair pulled tight into a bun, and her pointed beak of a nose holding up a pair of wire-rimmed spectacles. She seemed perpetually disgusted with the commotion of Siddiqi House and preferred to spend her remaining days in the solemn cool of her private chambers. “Nonsense,” I heard her muttering under her breath while we watched television. “All nonsense.”
For years later, whenever I saw a picture of Gandhi, I thought to myself,
He looks like Bari Amma. Mama told me that Bari Amma was the first lady doctor in all of Gujarat, and that the prince of Jamnagar had arranged her marriage to my grandfather; the prince had thought that Grandfather should have an educated wife. Bari Amma had two sons, Waris and Salik. Her elder son ran my grandfather’s English-language bookstore, Campbell and Company,and her second son was settled in England. Bari Amma knew the entire Qur’an by heart and could recite it from start to finish. The only thing I ever saw her do other than pray was make small cloth pouches out of silk scraps, where she kept jewelry or anise seeds. I was fascinated by the pouches, and wanted desperately to bring them back to give to my third-grade class. Some afternoons, I wandered throughout Siddiqi House until I reached her room, where I would peek inside and see her sitting on her knees, her eyes closed, her hands counting a set of small prayer beads. One afternoon, I slipped and fell as I was watching her and tore the cloth of my pajama pants on a nail.
“Who’s there?” she called out.
“Only me, Bari Amma,” I replied, feeling apologetic.
“Is that you, Sadia?”
“Yes.”
“Come here, child,” she said, and I tiptoed into the dark space.
“Is there something you are looking for?” she asked me.
I told her that I was hoping she might have some extra silk pouches that I could take back with me to America. She considered this for a moment.
“How many?” she asked.
I was tentative. “I was thinking . . . ten?”
“I will give you two,” she said judiciously, and opened up a cupboard with a long key carried on a chain around her neck. I looked up at her shelves and saw rows and rows of books, mostly English books. She busied herself in her cupboard and fished out two bright pouches, one a brilliant purple and the other a dusky pink.
“You are like your mother,” she said, shaking her head and handing me the pouches.
“Thank you, Bari Amma,” I stammered and ran out.
Choti Amma, my grandfather’s second wife, had three children settled in Pakistan: Irfan, Farida, and Sadik. She spent all day in her son Irfan’s apartment, gossiping with her son’s wife, Zaitoon, and supervising the cooks. Choti Amma was as talkative as Bari Amma was quiet, and as round as Bari Amma was thin. Choti Amma always smelled like the kitchen, a mixture of cumin and cooking grease. She spoke in a shrill voice, which became high-pitched when she was upset about something. She went out of her way to make me English porridge every morning, thinking that this might be something that a Western child would like. It was delicious, but unlike any breakfast I had had at home; this was covered in a layer of dark, sweet treacle. When I entered the kitchen, she would present it to me silently, and when I finished the whole bowl and returned it to her, she would place her hand on my head. “Acchi beti,” she said—“good girl.” I never saw her read a book, or leave Siddiqi House. I thought of Bari Amma and Choti Amma as a pair of opposites, and wondered where my grandmother fit into the equation. The story went that when my grandfather’s mother learned that her son had married a Gujarati lady doctor at the suggestion of the prince, she was furious, reminding him that in fact he had been engaged to Choti Amma since he was a child. She demanded that he return home to Ajmer and arranged for a wedding between Choti Amma and Ali. That’s how my grandfather came to have two wives. The first was a professional arrangement, the second a familial obligation. Nana, I was always told, he married for love.
WHITE SHEETS WERE laid out on the floor of Siddiqi House. The ladies of our family sat and decorated twenty-one trays with red cellophane and ribbons to hold the twenty-one brightly colored silk salwar suits of the bride’s trousseau. Two of my older cousins, Saima and Farah, were already at work, and they cleared a space for me to sit next to them. Only a year apart in age, they seemed to me almost like twins. I liked to be near them, with their soft, lilting voices and their skin smelling of sandalwood soap. I could never decide which one was my favorite. They teased me about one of my earliest trips to Pakistan, for Saima’s wedding, when I was three years old and sat obediently at her feet during her mehndi ceremony, watching my aunts circle her head three times with shiny silver rupees and drop them in her lap, to be distributed to the poor at the end of the evening. As I watched the coins gather, I began to think what good gifts they would make for the ten other members of my nursery school class. Unable to resist the temptation, I began to slip each one silently into my pajamas. At the end of the evening, no one could figure out where the money had gone. I dutifully made a show of searching high and low for the rupees, squeezing underneath chairs and skirts, never letting on that I had stolen them. When Farah stooped to pick me up at the end of the ceremony, she could tell that I was unusually heavy and chuckled to find the coins in my pants.
“You had them all along!” they remembered, teasing me. “Some day, Sadu, you will have your own mehndi, and your own nikaah. You will be a beautiful bride.”
I tried to imagine getting married in Pakistan, what I would wear, what my groom would look like. I had an equally strong image of myself in a white dress, getting married in America. The two pictures competed for attention in my mind’s eye.
A lady came to the house to apply henna paste to our hands and feet for decoration. I could sit still through only one hand’s worth of decoration without squirming, which made Saima Apa and Farah Apa laugh.
“Is Auntie Shehzadi getting henna put on her hands?” I asked Farah. I was intensely curious about my uncle’s bride. Since she was not yet a member of our family, she did her preparations at her home, not ours. She and Uncle Salman were not allowed to see each other until the night of their marriage. Mama told me that Shehzadi was in the period of Manjah, during which she was to wear only yellow clothing and spend time with her sisters, cousins, and female friends, enjoying her last few days in her parents’ home. Each day, they smoothed her body with a mixture of chickpea flour and sandalwood paste to make her skin glow, and at night, they sang songs. Mama said that by wearing yellow Shehzadi could avoid the evil eye that might fall on her otherwise. When she emerged on her wedding night in bright colors, the contrast would be stunning.
“Oh yes, she’ll be having a very ornate design on her hands and feet,” Farah told me. “You’ll see when we go for her mehndi ceremony.”
I bothered Mama about Shehzadi until she agreed to take me to her house to meet her. While Mama sat with the Nawab family and had tea, I waited impatiently in the hallway for Shehzadi to come downstairs. I heard her parents tell Mama that she was studying for her final exams. She wanted to finish her degree before she left for America.
Shehzadi was smaller than I expected. In her yellow cotton salwar kameez she looked more like a girl than an aunt, but she had the confidence of an aunt. She took me to the backyard, and we stood there looking at one another.
“You wanted to meet me?” she asked me gently, and I felt instantly embarrassed.
“You are coming to live with us, in America,” I said, stating the obvious.
“Yes,” she said, nodding.
“I can show you around, show you how things work. I can take you shopping and show you what we eat.”
“Thank you,” she said, smiling. “That would be nice.”
“Do you like horses?” I asked.
“I don’t know much about them, but, yes, I like them.”
“Uncle Salman loves horses.”
“Yes.”
THE NIGHT OF the nikaah ceremony, I was allowed to wear my mother’s jewelry from when she was my age, a necklace made of amethysts and small diamonds that her father had made for her when she stood first in school. Nana kept it in the bank for safekeeping, along with her other jewelry. Master Sahib made me a pale pink outfit with tiny purple brocade, and matching pale pink skinny churidar pants and dupatta shawl. Cassim was dressed in a tiny, formal white silk shervani suit and a miniature white silk turban, matching the one on Uncle Salman’s head. The wedding was held in a large multicolored tent in t
he backyard of Siddiqi House, and hundreds of people gathered to attend the ceremony. Guests entered the front driveway through a tunnel of well-wishers throwing rose petals. A crowd of children and families from the nearby slum collected in a ring around the crowd, jostling for a vantage point. The hijras were here, too, eunuchs dressed elaborately as women. Periodically they began to dance and sing, hinting at the full performance they would like to give. The hijras stared at me, and I tried in vain not to stare back. My uncle Waris handed out coins, thanking them for their blessings and asking them to disperse. Behind Siddiqi House the wedding feast was being prepared, as well as food to feed the crowd that had assembled to watch the festivities through the fence.
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