Years later, the flat eluded her still. When Nana finally convinced the Mehtas to move out, just two years before her own death, she did so with the dream of fixing up the apartment—finally—and having a place of her own again. She had new wiring, air-conditioning, and curtains put in, and installed Bibi, the widow of her late brother-in-law and the last member of Nana’s generation of Siddiqi women, to stay there as a kind of caretaker. Bibi needed a place to stay, and Nana thought of her as a kind of place-holder, until she could make the trip herself. While moving between her children’s homes in Europe and the United States, Nana began to frequent outlet sales and collect towel sets, picture frames, and other miscellaneous household items to bring back to Karachi. She would describe the details of her purchases and home improvements to me on the phone in detail, and I would listen with curiosity from graduate school in California. At the time, I could not understand why she was doing it.
“But Nana, what’s the use of fixing it up now?”
“It’s mine, too,” she would say quietly. “It was my husband’s house.”
When it came time to vacate the apartment in anticipation of Nana’s arrival, Bibi was reluctant to let go of the flat. After Nana had spent so many years in the United States, Bibi couldn’t understand why she would want to return to Karachi now, and accused her of ill treatment. Months passed, and the disagreement persisted. Nana died without seeing the apartment complete.
I SPEND THE NEXT HOUR photographing the house from all angles, trying to understand its shape and presence. I cover the house from both sides, standing on the lawns, on balconies looking up and looking down. I imagine the stories I have heard and play them out for myself, imagining where they took place—there the gate my mother walked through when she came home from convent school, there the driveway where Uncle Salman entered on a white horse for his wedding. But my camera can’t capture these invisible moments. The house, through my viewfinder, seems both too big to convey and too ordinary for what it really is.
“You there, what are you doing?”
The jagged voice comes from an upstairs window, and I look up to see my aunt Zaitoon, a small woman with a fearsome presence whom I have always found intimidating. She is the one I am supposed to visit second, according to family hierarchy, but I see that that is impossible now.
“As-salaam aleikum, Zaitoon Auntie,” I call out. “It’s Sadia.”
“Kaun hai?” she calls. Who is it?
“Sadia,” I say, “Samina ki beti.” Samina’s daughter.
“Accha,” she says, I see. She retreats inside the window.
I walk upstairs and knock on her door. Zaitoon comes to the door and cracks it open just wide enough to wedge herself in the doorjamb, but not wide enough for me to come inside. I am reminded of my childhood impression of Zaitoon. Her thinning hair and the unfortunate placement of a large mole on her cheek have always reminded me of a witch.
“As-salaam aleikum, Zaitoon Auntie,” I repeat. “It’s Sadia.” But she doesn’t move.
Zaitoon was married to my mother’s half brother Irfan. When she was a child, her father was the manager of my grandfather’s agricultural lands outside of Karachi, and she played with the Siddiqi children when they were all young. My mother remembers her as a small, scrawny kid, neither bright nor pretty, and most of the family were surprised when Choti Amma arrangedfor her to marry her son Irfan. He died young, and left her with a respectable inheritance. Zaitoon was now left to manage Siddiqi House, and in recent years she has seemed determined to move most of her immediate family into the house. When my mother’s half sister Farida died without a will, Zaitoon was the next of kin, and she now had two of the six flats of Siddiqi House in her name. She began to inquire discreetly about buying out other members of the family. If the property was ever to be sold, she stood to gain the most.
“I didn’t recognize you,” she says, and I smile, expecting to be asked inside. “I heard that you were in Karachi.” She does not ask the customary questions about my parents’ health.
“How are your sons, Auntie?” I ask.
There was a time when her sons and Cassim and I played together for hours in the garden, when we were all friends. I haven’t seen them in years, and know only scattered rumors about their whereabouts.
“They are fine,” she says.
It seems that I am not going to be offered tea, and so I shift my attention to the purpose of my visit.
“Do you have the key to my grandmother’s flat?” I ask. “My mother wanted me to look in on it.”
“There’s nothing there.”
“I know, but I’d just like to see it. . . .”
“Don’t bother.”
“I’d just like to take a look, if I could. Do you have the key?”
Zaitoon closes the door and goes back inside. She returns a few minutes later with an old-fashioned long metal key, which she hands over reluctantly to me.
“I don’t know anything about it,” she says as I am walking up the stairs. “I wasn’t the one in charge.”
When I reach the door of the flat, I extend my hands to feel the embossed letters of my grandmother’s name. I turn the key, trying to budge the difficult lock. After several tries, it opens with a soft click.
Later, I will ask myself what I’d expected to find, and I will admit that I had irrationally hoped for a semblance of home, of Nana’s presence, as if somehow the boxes of pink dish towels and discount soap sets that I’d found in her Miami bedroom after she died could have made their way here. I am not prepared for what I see when I walk inside: an empty, desolate space crusted with a thick layer of pigeon droppings. Gone are the air-conditioning units she’d had installed. In their place are gaping holes, the new wiring she had so proudly described to me on the phone ripped out. It looks as if someone took a hammer to the walls and pulled the cords out with his or her bare hands. A few scattered curtain rings lie on the floor, and I wonder which house those curtains now hang in.
Nana’s flat has the same dimensions as the other flats of Siddiqi House— it’s grand and airy, with tall ceilings, fireplaces with marble mantels, and French doors on either side of the main living room that open onto a long, cool veranda. I remember Nana describing the indoor gardens she’d planned to grow.
I walk through the wide-open space in disbelief. No wonder Zaitoon was reluctant for me to see the apartment.
Nana’s flat has been emptied of all its furniture, with the exception of two dark Art Deco-style pieces too heavy to move—a tall armoire and a low table with drawers. I feel a pointed sting of recognition, the same feeling I had in the original Rahat Villa in Bombay. This is the other half of her furniture set—the pieces that came by ship to Karachi after Partition. I feel the same impulse to lay my hands on them; after all these years, in both places, these blocks of wood are like anchors.
Who did this? I wonder, feeling a sharp rise of anger. Why would someone steal curtains and air-conditioning units? Why would someone rip wires out of the wall?
ON THE PHONE THAT EVENING, Mama sounds resigned.
“This is an old story,” she tells me. “Probably it was no one person but a series of people, and people who work for those people. Everyone knows that none of Nana’s children are coming back to live there, and so they think, why not help themselves?”
“Aren’t you angry?” I ask her, trying to keep my resentment in check.
“I’m sad. I’m glad that my mother and father are not here to see this.”
THE NEXT DAY, I return to Siddiqi House to visit Bibi, my great-aunt, who is now in her mid-seventies. When Bibi opens the door, I smile and introduce myself, embracing her and kissing her on both cheeks. Even now, it’s clear that Bibi was once a beautiful woman. She still keeps her hair long and brown, and when she is fresh from her bath, like now, her braid hangs down her back like a girl’s.
“Beti! Beti!” she says, smiling broadly and clasping me to her chest. I am more than a foot taller than she, and so I stoop down, acc
epting her warm hug.
She ushers me inside and insists that I stay for lunch. From what I can tell, she says that she wishes she had known I was coming, because she would have prepared something special for me. What is my favorite dish?
I tell her brokenly that I like everything, sab kuchh, but she insists on my naming a specific dish.
“Murghi,” I say finally, figuring that chicken is a safe choice.
She tells me enthusiastically that in that case I must return to her home to eat chicken curry. I tell her not to go to any trouble, but privately I feel delighted at being fussed over like a beloved grandchild. It reminds me intensely of Nana, of what she would do.
Bibi is now living as a kind of caretaker for Uncle Salik and Auntie Sheynaz’s flat, which they visit once or twice a year from their permanent residence in London. Bibi has, at one time or another, lived in almost all of the Siddiqi House flats. She is the very definition of a grateful beneficiary of the extended family structure, and she has learned, over the years, how to make this system of favors and complex hierarchies work to her advantage.
I want to ask Bibi about Nana’s flat. It was she who lived there once the renovations were complete two years ago; she must know more than anyone. But my Urdu can only get me so far. Apart from the topics of food and weather, my language skills are almost useless.
As Bibi bustles between the dining room and the kitchen, retrieving dishes and heating up leftovers, I follow after her, trying to offer my help. There is so much that I wish I could ask her.
Why was Nana so uncomfortable with Bibi? I wonder. “Never trust a milkman’s daughter,” I can hear Nana say—the only unkind words I ever heard her utter. That night, I call Mama and ask her about it.
“There’s a long history there,” she says, and then she tells me a story that I have never heard before.
“I was seven years old, and I had a nightmare. I don’t remember what it was, just this terrible sense of dread. And I ran into my mother’s room to find her—she and my father slept in separate rooms then. And I found her sitting at her vanity table; it had a long, narrow mirror in the middle and two sets of drawers on either side, where she used to keep her medicines. And she was sobbing uncontrollably, and in her hand she was holding an open bottle. I remember that it was dark blue glass and it had a label on it with a skull and crossbones. I learned later that it was tincture of iodine, standard in first aid, fatal if it was swallowed. And I ran as fast as I could to the room where my father was sleeping, and I woke him up and made him come to my mother’s room, with me. He took her in his arms and he said, ‘What have you done? What have you done?’ over and over again; he was sure that she had swallowed it. And she looked at him and she said: ‘I have done nothing. The bottle was empty.’”
“What made Nana so unhappy?”
“I think I was too young to understand it then, but it made me aware that there was some way that my father made my mother very sad, something more than the fact that she had to share him with other wives and childen. Later, when I was about twelve, I came into Bibi’s room and found her ironing my father’s undergarments. He used to wear white undergarments, made of pure white cotton, and he was the only person in the house who wore them. I got very angry. I grabbed a pair of his shorts and I stormed into my mother’s room, where she was alone. ‘This is your job!’ I said, flinging them at her. ‘Why do you let Bibi do what you should do?’”
“What did Nana say?” I ask.
“She looked at me and said, ‘Don’t you think I want to?’ and I understood for the first time that my father was not faithful to my mother, whom I know he loved. ‘How can you stand it?’ I remember I asked her. She told me that she would retreat inside herself and imagine that she was standing on the balcony in Rahat Villa, looking at the ocean. When I learned that, I think I understood something about my mother. In order to exist in that house, she had to pretend she was somewhere else.”
Mama lets out a long sigh, like air being released from a balloon, as if she has not thought about this in a long time. “Go to the bank tomorrow for me, if you can,” she says. “Ask for Tariq Ali; say that you’re my daughter and you’re there to close your grandmother’s account. Call me tomorrow night and let me know how it goes.”
IN RETROSPECT, it seems logical that Nana’s bank account was closed, emptied, more than a year before my visit. Tariq Ali, her account manager, looks apologetic, but he does not seem concerned. I hold my grandmother’s old-fashioned long check register in my hand. In it, she calculated each month what her expected earnings would be from the rental of her flat, and I have guarded it carefully in India, always remembering to carry it in my handbag, not to check it in my luggage. It is now a meaningless document. Standing in the bank, watching Tariq Ali’s mustache move up and down as he speaks, I have the absurd sensation that I am in a tunnel; I can see him speaking, but I cannot understand what he is saying. I try to concentrate. The milky tea in front of me, almost orange, is growing a thick skin from the powerful fan pulsing above me. I hear Tariq Ali claiming that my grandmother authorized the action herself.
“See here, her signature.” He points to an unfamiliar scrawl on documentsthat I can’t read and don’t understand. “I have known your family a long time,” he says calmly. I watch the brittle shoulder pads of his jacket buckle and fold as he shrugs. “It was a long-standing account,” he says, “and then it was closed. Nothing to be done, really.”
I walk outside into the hot, bright sun of the early afternoon and feel myself welling up. The money seems unimportant. But the knowledge that Nana has been stolen from, time and time again, upsets me deeply. I feel foolish, thinking that I was going to go to the bank and rescue my inheritance, withdraw Nana’s money, and return it proudly to my mother. How silly of me to think that someone hadn’t thought to retrieve it already.
I call Mama, waking her up.
“Mama, Nana’s money is gone.”
“Gone?” she says, sleepily. “What do you mean, gone?”
“The banker said that someone, a family member, closed the account more than a year ago.”
There’s silence on the other end of the line.
“More than a year ago. Are you there, Mama?”
“Closed the account . . .” she repeats, trying to find meaning in the words.
“Emptied. They emptied the account.”
“Do you know what that money was for? She asked me to make a piece of jewelry for each of her grandchildren, for each of their weddings. I was supposed to design them and have them made in Karachi. That’s what that money was meant for.”
The Girl From Foreign: A Memoir Page 29